Prime Witness by Steve Martini Page A

don’t know. Scofield and his wife were divorced. He was a member of the faculty at the university, a scientist. Ornithology, I believe.” For the first time, she is looking at notes.
    I make a face, like this is Greek to me.
    “Study of birds,” she says.
    She approaches one of the tables, this one heaped with clothing. It might be anyone’s laundry, except for the large blotches of dried blood on the white shirt and trousers in one of the piles. These are sorted on separate areas of the table, ready for placement in large paper bags numbered and marked for identification, part of the budding chain of evidence.
    I notice that the buttons are all missing from the dress shirt. She tells me she cut these off at the crime scene and bagged them for evidence. They have gone down to latent prints, to be smoked in a chamber of heated super glue. It’s a long shot but maybe the killer got careless and touched one of the buttons without gloves.
    If the local politicos are worried about a botched crime scene, in Kay Sellig they have been smiled on by the gods of good fortune.
    Sellig tells me that the stains on the victims’ clothes were caused by gravity, blood flowing along the ground to the neatly folded articles of clothing placed around the bodies. There are no cuts or tears in any of these items, no evidence of any physical altercation.
    “The pattern is always the same,” she says. “The victims are always naked when killed.”
    They have found one other piece of evidence. At the first murder scene police believe the killer may have inadvertently left a large plastic trash bag, the kind used to line trash containers. It was found near the creek, probably carried by the wind. It was empty, but a hole had been poked in the bottom. Sellig thinks this may have been used by the killer to carry the stakes and cord, the implements of death. She thinks one of the stakes may be responsible for the hole.
    She has not had time to examine the stakes and the cord from the Scofield killings. The cord appears to be similar to that used in the other murders. The stakes are downstairs in latent prints.
    “Any evidence of sexual assault?” I ask.
    “Not that we can find,” she says. “Medical examiner found sperm in the vaginal vault of the Park girl, but whoever left it there was a secretor, and the blood type matches her boyfriend. Pubic combings turned up some foreign hair on the boy that matches the girl’s.” She pauses for a second to let the obvious settle on me.
    “Kids on the campus say the two were an item. We’re thinking the victims got it on together, maybe an hour or two before they were killed.”
    “How does he do couples?” I ask. “A little risky, isn’t it?”
    “He’s probably armed, he may have help, we’re not sure yet. The victims were all taken from deserted areas, abandoned parking lots late at night. In every case they were the last ones to leave some social function, or a workplace. The killings were done in remote areas, except for the last one. The last one, the Scofield thing, was gutsy,” she says. “He got a little close to the road.” She speculates that this may be part of his growing MO, an unmet desire for added chance. “But he was also lucky,” she tells me. “We’re looking for motorists who might have passed that spot late at night, people who might have seen something. So far we’ve come up with nothing.”
    She tells me that the profile experts, psychologists who make their life’s work the study of demented minds, have, despite the lack of any evidence of sexual assault, not ruled out the possibility that the crimes might be driven by a sexual psychosis.
    “Some of them think the metal tent stakes are phallic,” she says. “According to this theory, what he does with them may be his own sick form of intercourse.”
    They already have a psychological profile of the killer. There was a time when I would have given this all the credence of tarot cards. But I have become