Free Dreams in the Key of Blue by John Philpin Page B

hinted that Stu Gilman was a fountain of knowledge. The head-bobbing Gilman was wired like an inner spring and lied about his whereabouts on the night of the murders.
    A human killing machine disguised himself as dirty laundry, broke out of his cage, and had ample time to play fall tourist in Maine.
    The state investigator assigned to the murders behaved like a snappish stockbroker unable to see beyond Markham & Markham, her favorite NASDAQ big mover.
    Karen Jasper was right about the bottom line. We had three dead students. We also shared the single objective of removing a killer from the streets.

TEN MINUTES AFTER LEAVING JAWORSKI TO DEAL WITH Karen Jasper, I walked into my borrowed Cape, slammed the door, and dropped the most recent package of photos and reports on the sofa. I had been away from the nuts and bolts of criminal investigation for nearly seven years. Maybe Jasper was right, and I was nothing more than a curiosity from a bygone era.
    “Bullshit,” I muttered. “I refuse to go quietly into the investigative night.”
    The crime scene photo display remained on my kitchen table. I popped the cap off a bottle of Shipyard and stared at the top photo, a kid barely out of her teens who could be sleeping. A cop’s latex-gloved hand pointed at a small black circle on her right temple. Susan Hamilton was in college, learning and having a good time, until someone walked in and put a bullet through her head.
    I looked down at my clenched fists, whitened knuckles. Tumult churned inside, a rumbling flood of anger that was essential if I were to absorb a killer’s mental circuitry into my own and prowl the world like a methodical hunter of humans.
    “Stanley Markham couldn’t find his way to Maine,” Isnarled at no one, shoving myself from the table and pacing the room. “She’s barking up the wrong tree.”
    Markham was a short, slender man, wiry, pale-complexioned, with soft-skinned hands that he babied. He washed his hands often, treated himself to an occasional manicure, and always wore leather gloves when he killed. My first impression of the man had been one of softness, gentleness. I wondered how he would cope with the sexual politics of prison.
    I remembered a cop’s comment after one of Markham’s preliminary court hearings: “Slap a wig and some lipstick on that guy and you’ve got a handsome woman. He’s bound for hard time.”
    As Jaworski observed, Markham was the right size for this crime. The height of the blood streaks on the wall beside the two beds, and the distance between the impressions left by two knuckles when the killer’s hand slipped, suggested a small man.
    When he had terrorized New England, Markham had required a strict set of stimuli before going into action. His behavior before, during, and after his excursions into the wild was well documented.
    The initial, discrete behavior was what his wife called “restlessness.” He would come home from his job as a desk clerk at a local motel and not be able to sit still. Markham said he was depressed.
    He always drank a couple of beers when he got home, and when he grew restless, he drank more. Sometimes he passed out. Other times he sat up all night staring at TV. When his wife asked about his behavior, he pleaded trouble at work or said he was annoyed with one of their neighbors.
    “We always had money problems,” Markham told me.
    Their money was tight, as it was for most young couples, even with both partners working, but the Markhams were not headed for bankruptcy.
    Dorothy Markham would tolerate her husband’s behavior for two or three days, then announce that she was going to her sister’s for the weekend. Stanley Markham would drop her there, but he never went inside. He hated Dorothy’s sister.
    “I’d take Dorothy over there on a Saturday morning,” Markham told me, “pick her up late Sunday. That gave me all the time I needed. No questions asked. I look back on it now, I got so calm, so relaxed. I’d bring Dorothy