'I didn't find any,' Wohlmuth added quickly. 'I thought I ought to check, though.'
'Couldn't hurt.'
'You saw the stab wounds, right?'
'They'd have been hard to miss.'
'Right.' He hesitated. 'Well, they were all inflicted from the front.
Three stab wounds between the ribs and into the heart, and any one of them would have done it.'
'So?'
'What did he do, sodomize her and then roll her over and kill her?'
'Maybe.'
'How did you find her? Lying on her back?'
Havlicek frowned, summoning the memory. 'On her back,' he said. 'She'd slid down off the foot of the bed. Stabbed through the nightgown, and it covered her to her knees. Maybe that semen was from much earlier.'
'No way to tell.'
'Or later,' I suggested. They looked at me. 'Try it this way. She's on her back in bed and he stabs her.
Then he rolls her over onto her stomach, lifts her nightgown, and pulls her halfway off the bed so he can get at her better. He sodomizes and turns her over and pulls her nightgown down, and in the process she slides the rest of the way off the bed. Then he goes into the bathroom to wash up and rinses the knife while he's at it. That would account for the evident lack of struggle, wouldn't it. They don't offer a whole lot of resistance when they're already dead.'
'No,' Wohlmuth agreed. 'They don't insist on a whole lot of foreplay, either. I don't have any knowledge of the man you're talking about. Is that kind of behavior consistent with what you know about him? Because I don't think it's in conflict with the physical evidence.'
I thought of what he'd said to Elaine, about dead girls being as good as live ones if you got them early on. 'It's consistent,' I said.
'So you're talking about a monster.'
'Well, Jesus God,' Tom Havlicek said. 'It wasn't Saint Francis ofAssisi killed those kids.'
'James Leo Motley,' Havlicek said. 'Tell me about him.'
'You know about his priors and what he went away for. What else do you want to know?'
'How old is he?'
'Forty or forty-one. He was twenty-eight when I arrested him.'
'You got a photo of him?'
I shook my head. 'I could probably dig up a photo but it would be twelve years old.' I described Motley as I remember him, his height and build, his facial features, his haircut. 'But I don't know if he still looks like that. His face wouldn't have changed much, not with the kind of strong features he had. But he could have gained or lost weight in prison, and he might not still have the haircut. As far as that goes, he could have lost the hair. It's been a long time.'
'Some prisons will photograph a prisoner at the time of his release.'
'I don't know if that's policy at Dannemora or not. I'll have to find out.'
'That's where they had him? At Dannemora?'
'That's where he finished up. He started atAttica , but after a couple of years they transferred him.'
'Attica's where they had the riot, isn't it? But that would have been before his time. The years seem to go by faster and faster, don't they?'
We were having lunch at the Italian place he'd recommended the night before. The food was good enough but the decor had a determinedly ethnic feel to it, and it came off like a stage set from one of the Godfather movies. Tom had turned down the waitress's suggestion of wine or a cocktail. 'I'm not much of a drinker,' he said to me, 'but you go right ahead.'
I'd said it was a little early for me. Now he apologized for having stranded me after we'd left Wohlmuth.
'Hope you found things to keep you busy,' he said. I told him I'd had a chance to read the newspapers and walk around town a little.
'What I should have told you,' he said, 'is we've got the Pro Football Hall of Fame right off Seventy-seven inCanton . If you're any kind of a football fan, it's something you wouldn't want to miss.'
That got us onto football, and that carried us through to the coffee and cheesecake.Massillon , he said, was likeKansas during the Civil War, with brother against brother when it came to the Browns and the Bengals. And they both had good teams this year, and if Kosar stayed healthy both teams ought to make the playoffs, and that was about as much excitement as the town could be expected to handle. They'd never face each other in the Super Bowl, not with both of them being in the same conference, but it was conceivable that they'd be matched up for the conference championship, and wouldn't that be something?
'We were talking about a subway series this year,' I said. 'The Mets and the Yankees, but the Mets lost out in the playoffs and the Yankees were out of it completely.'
'I wish I had the time to follow baseball,' he said. 'But I just don't.
Football, I have about half my Sundays off, and I'm almost always free to watch the Monday night games.'
