rearview mirror. And he sure as hell didn’t murder Howard Roth. Marino was in Tampa when Roth was killed. The meeting will put an end to it.”
“He probably still thinks we believe it was an accident.” I’m not thinking about Marino but the person Burke should be looking for.
I’m thinking about the killer.
“Unless he’s been following us,” I add. “In that case, he might know what we do. If he’s cruising around, watching us.”
“I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“He’s not nervous,” Benton says. “This person is confident and never imagines he’s making mistakes. He never imagined you’d spray everything with chemicals, that you’d find blood he didn’t bother to clean up.”
“He couldn’t have cleaned it up,” I reply. “Not all of it.”
It wasn’t apparent to the unaided eye, a medium-velocity impact spatter I associate with blunt force. Varying sizes of elongated drops were on the left side of the recliner, on the brown vinyl armrest, and on the dark brown paneled wall left of where I believe Howard Roth’s head was when he was struck hard enough to lacerate his scalp and fracture his skull.
The bloodstain pattern that glowed violet for me told the heartless story of him asleep or passed out drunk in front of the TV when a murderer walked in a door that apparently was never locked. Roth was struck once in the back of the head with a malt liquor bottle that the killer placed inside a trash bag he closed with a twist tie.
Bloody streaks and swipes on dirty stained dark carpet and bloody drag marks soaked into the pile led from the living room to the basement door, and then blood was plainly visible where one would expect it to be if he were an accidental death. Drips and smears were on the six concrete steps leading to the basement, his unconscious body pushed down the stairs and then kicked and stomped where it landed. The killer made sure Roth wouldn’t survive and assumed no one would entertain the possibility he was a homicide, that it would never enter our minds.
“He did make some effort to disguise what he’s done,” Benton points out, as we pass the boathouse, the old Polaroid building again. “He could have just showed up late at night and shot him, stabbed him, strangled him, but that would have been obvious. He got some of it right but not the rest of it, because he’s unable to anticipate what normal people do.”
“He can’t imagine any of us caring.”
“That’s right. Someone empty, hollow. He’s probably seen him around here.”
Benton suspects the killer has noticed Roth in Cambridge, has been aware of him for months, observing the handyman wandering about looking for work and digging through trash cans and recycle bins, sometimes pushing a grocery cart. This killer is aware of everyone when he’s stalking his next victim, Benton says. He prowls, cruises, researches, observing patterns and calculating. He does dry runs, feeding his cruel fantasies.
But that doesn’t mean he knew who Howard Roth was by name. The killer forged a hundred-dollar check that he likely sent in the mail as he continued to pay Peggy Stanton’s bills long after she was dead. But that doesn’t mean he had a clue that the Howard Roth whose check he wrote was the homeless-looking man he saw rooting through the trash in Cambridge.
“What I’m sure of is he killed Roth when he did for a reason,” Benton says. “This was an expedient homicide devoid of emotion.”
“Stomping and kicking him seems rather emotional.”
“It wasn’t personal,” Benton replies. “He felt nothing.”
“It could be construed as angry. In most stomping cases, there’s rage,” I reply.
“He felt he needed to get it done. Like killing a bug. I’m wondering if he’d been to her house recently, if Roth had.” Benton’s looking down at his phone again. “Maybe wanting his money, and it was bad timing.”
“If the killer happened to be stealing Peggy Stanton’s mail when Roth appeared, that would be bad timing, couldn’t be worse timing.” My building is in sight. “But I wouldn’t expect him to do that during daylight.”
“We don’t know that Roth only went out during daylight. There are all-night markets all around where Peggy Stanton lived, a lot of them on Cambridge Street, a Shop Quik that’s open twenty-four-seven just around the corner from her,” Benton says. “He was going to go out no matter the hour if he ran out of beer, and he might have frequented her neighborhood because he wanted his money.”
“After dark on