Free The Strangler by William Landay Page B

briefly, a strobe flash: a woman thrashing, arms flailing—shrieking,
NO!
—her face, grimaced, teeth clenched—dark hair—a scream—furniture clattering.
    And then it was gone. He blinked away the memory of it. He had only the papers on his desk. And the clock ticking.

    “8/19/62…Lawrence…53 y.o…. supine on bed, R leg dangling, naked except for open blouse…3 ligatures on neck (2 stockings, 1 leg of brown leotard)…external vagina bruised, bloody…2 half-moon contusions below R nipple, 2 abrasions above and L of it…R thigh contused…raped…V a devout churchgoer…”
    “8/21/62…Columbia Rd., Dorchester…67…no forced entry to apt…. blood on floors in kitchen, hall…bra on bathroom floor…V found in bathtub, on her knees, face down in 6 inches water, feet over back of tub, butt up in air…underpants tugged down but no trauma to vagina or anus…blood on R of scalp…two stockings around neck…R hyoid bone fractured…pocketbook open…”

    The investigators had only Before and After. The living woman and the broken body. Not the moment of horror. Not the dying. The reality of murder had been excised, like an obscenity. But Michael’s imagination insistently re-created it. A woman thrashed before him. Her hands shoving—he felt it on his skin. Her scream vibrated his ear.

    “12/5/62…Huntington Ave…. 20, college student, Negro, engaged…wearing housecoat, menstrual harness, sanitary napkin…mouth gagged…no external injury to genitalia…no head trauma…no blood or menstrual discharge in vagina or rectum…strangulation by ligature…Salem cigarette in toilet…semen stain on rug near body…itinerant seen in stairwell…”
    “3/9/63…Lawrence…68, white…beaten, stabbed, strangled…cause of death: blunt force trauma…sperm in vagina: raped…body naked on floor, girdle pulled down to left foot…clothes still on, pulled over head…throat badly contused…head and surrounding floor covered with blood…knife or fork stuck in left breast to handle…”
    “5/7/63…Cambridge…26, nurse at Boston State Hospital, a mental facility…stabbed 17 times around left breast…2 parallel horizontal incisions on each side of throat…nude but no evid of rape or sex assault…no injuries to genitalia, no sperm in vagina, rectum or mouth…body supine on bed, hands tied behind her back with scarf…stockings and blouse around neck but no ligature marks…”
    “9/8/63…Salem…23…found on bed, lying on back, right arm under body, left leg dangling, torso covered with bedspread…bloodstain on bed under head…2 stockings tied around neck…panties on floor with lipstick stain above crotch (used as gag?)…sperm in V’s mouth…crumpled tissues on floor smeared with semen, lipstick…”
    “11/22/63…Grove St., West End…63…blood…blood covers entire head, face and ears…slight injuries to external genitalia…no sperm in vagina…manual and ligature strangulation…classical LP (Sibelius) still turning…tied spread-eagle to chair…posed, facing door…”

    Already Michael knew he did not have the stomach for this sort of work. He could not live with months of that shrieking woman in his mind’s eye. It had been a mistake to let Byron and Wamsley talk him into this.
    He slipped the photos of the last victim out of their envelope. The old woman in the West End, the Sibelius fan.
My God, what did you go through?
    Somewhere there was a murder book for Michael’s father, too. Buried in a file at BPD Homicide. No doubt it contained the same sort of photographs, of Joe Daley, Sr., lying dead. It was a scene Michael had imagined a thousand times. He had created for himself a still life, a formal composition of a few elements arranged in a painterly way: body, scally cap, pavement. But had he got it right? The body—had the old man sprawled, or curled, or crumpled? Michael pictured him lying stiff as a fallen tree, a carryover of the distinctive toy-soldier posture Joe Senior had