Nighttime Is My Time

35

The body of Helen Whelan was discovered at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday afternoon in a wooded area in Washingtonville, a town about fifteen miles from Surrey Meadows. The discovery was made by a twelve-year-old boy who was cutting through the woods, taking a shortcut to his friend's home.

Sam got the message as he was finishing his interviews of the employees at the Glen-Ridge House. He called Jean in her room. She had gone upstairs to phone Mark Fleischman, Carter Stewart, and Jack Emerson, in the hope that one of them might have known Laura's plans. She had already seen Robby Brent in the lobby, and he had disclaimed any knowledge of where Laura might be.

"Jean, I have to go," Sam explained. "Have you reached anyone yet?"

"I talked to Carter. He's very concerned but has no idea where Laura might be. I told him that Gordon and I are having dinner, and he's going to join us. Maybe if we can make a list between us of the people Laura seemed to be spending time with, we might come up with something. Jack Emerson isn't home. I left word on his answering machine. Same with Mark Fleischman."

"That's about the best you can do for the moment," Sam said. "Our hands are legally tied. If no one has heard from her by tomorrow, I'll try to get a search warrant to go through her room and see if she left any indication of where she might have gone. Otherwise, sit tight."

"You will go over to the rectory in the morning?"

"Absolutely," Sam promised. He snapped closed his phone and hurried out to his car. There was no point in telling Jean that he was on his way to the crime scene where another woman who had disappeared had been found.

Helen Whelan had been struck with a blow on the back of her head and then had been stabbed repeatedly. "He probably hit her from behind with the same blunt weapon that he used on the dog," Cal Grey, the medical examiner, told Sam when he arrived at the crime scene. The body was in the process of being removed, and under floodlights investigators were combing the roped-off area for possible clues to the killer. "I can't be sure until I do the autopsy, but it looks to me as if the injury to her head might have knocked her out. The stab wounds happened after he got her here. One can only hope that she didn't know what was happening to her."

Sam watched as the slender body was lifted into a body bag. "Her clothes don't look disturbed."

"They're not. My guess is that whoever grabbed her brought her directly here and killed her. She still has the dog's leash around her wrist."

"Hold it a minute," Sam snapped to the attendant who was opening the stretcher. He squatted down and felt his feet sink into the muddy ground. "Let me have your flashlight, Cal."

"What do you see?"

"There's a smear of blood on the side of her slacks. I doubt she got it from the wounds in her chest and neck. My guess is that the killer was bleeding pretty heavily, probably from a dog bite." He straightened up. "Which means he may have needed to go to an emergency room. I'll get an alert out to all the hospitals in the area to report any dog bites they may have treated over the weekend or that may come up in the next few days. And make sure the lab runs tests on the blood. I'll meet you back at your place, Cal."

On the drive to the medical examiner's office, the waste of the life of Helen Whelan hit Sam with intensity, catching him in the pit of his stomach. It happened whenever he encountered this kind of violence. I want that guy, he thought, and I want to be the one who cuffs him. I hope to God that wherever that dog bit him, he's in misery right now.

That train of thought gave him another idea. Maybe he's too smart to go to an emergency room, but he'll still have to take care of that bite. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack, but it might be worth notifying all the pharmacies in the area to watch out for someone buying items such as peroxide and bandages and antibacterial ointments.

But if he's smart enough to avoid a hospital, he's probably smart enough to shop for stuff like that in one of the big drugstores where there's a long line at the cash register and no one is paying attention to what's in the basket except to scan it.

Still, it's worth a try, Sam decided grimly, remembering the smiling picture of Helen Whelan he had seen in her apartment. She was twenty years older than Karen Sommers had been, he thought, but she died the same way-savagely stabbed to death.

The mist that had come and gone all day had turned into a driving rain. Sam frowned as he switched on the windshield wipers. There couldn't be any connection between those cases, though, he thought. There hadn't been a similar stabbing in this area in twenty years. Karen had been in her home. Helen Whelan had been outside walking her dog. But, then again, was it possible that some maniac had been lying low all these years?

Anything was possible, Sam decided. Please let him have gotten careless, he thought. Let him have dropped something that would lead us to him. Hopefully we'll have his DNA. That must be his blood on the dog's whiskers and maybe also the smear on her slacks.

Arriving at the medical examiner's office, he pulled into the parking area, got out of his car, locked it, and went inside. It was going to be a long night and a longer day tomorrow. He had to see the pastor at St. Thomas and persuade him to open the records of baptisms that had taken place nearly twenty years ago. He had to get in touch with the families of the five women from Stonecroft who had died in the order in which they sat at the lunch table-he needed to know more about the details of their deaths. And he needed to find out what had happened to Laura Wilcox. If it weren't for the deaths of the other five from her class, I'd say she just took off with a guy, he thought. From what I understand she's pretty lively and has never been without a man for long if she can help it.

The medical examiner and the ambulance with Helen Whelan's body arrived seconds behind him. Half an hour later Sam was studying the effects that had been removed from the body. Her watch and a ring were her only jewelry. She had probably not been carrying a handbag because her house key and a handkerchief were in the pocket on the right side of her jacket.

Lying on the table next to the house key was one other object: a pewter owl a little over an inch long. Sam reached for the tweezers that the attendant had used in handling the keys and the owl, picked up the owl and examined it closely. The unwinking eyes, cold and wide, met his gaze.

"It was way down in the pocket of her slacks," the attendant explained. "I almost missed it."

Sam remembered there had been a pumpkin outside the door of Helen Whelan's garden apartment and a paper skeleton in a box in the hall that she must have been planning to hang up somewhere. "She was decorating for Halloween," he said. "This was probably part of the stuff she had. Bag everything, and I'll take it to the lab."

Forty minutes later, he was watching as the clothing of Helen Whelan was checked under a microscope for anything that might help identify her killer. Another attendant was examining the car keys for fingerprints.

"These are all hers," he commented, as with tweezers in his hand he reached for the owl. A moment later he said, "That's funny. There aren't any fingerprints on this thing, not even smudges. How do you figure that one? It didn't walk into her pocket. It had to have been put there by someone wearing gloves."

Sam thought for a minute. Had the killer left the owl deliberately? He was sure of it. "We're keeping this quiet," he snapped. Taking the tweezers from the attendant, he picked up the owl and stared at it. “You're going to lead me to this guy," he vowed. "I don't know how yet, but you will."