Pop Goes the Weasel

McDonald’s container of fries was open on the couch.
    Dirty clothes covered the chairs: bike shorts, short-shorts, Karl Kani urban clothes. At least a dozen bottles of nail polish and remover, a couple of nail files, and cotton balls lay on the floor. There was a heavy, cloying smell of fruity perfume in the room.
    I went around the bed to look at the victims. Two very young women, both naked from the waist down. The Weasel had been here — I could feel it.
    The girls were lying one on top of the other, looking like lovers. They looked as if they were having sex on the floor.
    One girl wore a blue tank top, the other black lingerie. They both still wore “slides,” stacked bath sandals that are popular nowadays. Most of the Jane Does had been left naked, but unlike many of the others, these two would be fairly easy for us to identify.
    “No actual I.D. on either girl,” Sampson said, without looking up from his work.
    “One of them rents the apartment, though,” I told him.
    He nodded. “Probably pays cash. She’s in a cash business.”
    Sampson was wearing latex rubber gloves, and was bent down close to the two women.
    “The killer wore gloves,” Sampson said, still without looking up at me. “Don’t seem to be fingerprints anywhere. That’s what the techie says. First look-through. They both were shot, Alex. Single shot to the forehead.”
    I was still looking around the room, collecting information, letting the details of the murder scene flow over me. I noticed an array of hair products: Soft Sheen, Care Free Curl, styling gel, several wigs. On top of one of the wigs was a green army garrison cap with stripes, commonly called a cunt cap among military personnel because it’s said to be effective for picking up women, especially in the South. There was also a pager.
    The girls were young and pretty. They had skinny little legs, small, bony feet, silver toe rings that looked like they’d come from the same shop. Their discarded clothes amounted to insignificant little bundles on the bloodied hardwood floor.
    In one corner of the small room, there were vestiges of brief childhoods: a Lotto game, a stuffed blue bear that was threadbare and looked about as old as the girls themselves, a Barbie doll, a Ouija board.
    “Take a good look, Alex. It gets weirder and weirder. Our Weasel is starting to freak out.”
    I sighed and bent down to see what Sampson had discovered. The smaller, and perhaps the younger, of the two girls was lying on top. The girl underneath was on her back. Her glazed brown eyes stared straight up at a broken light fixture in the ceiling, as if she had seen something terrible up there.
    The girl on top had been positioned with her face — actually, her mouth — tilted down into the other girl’s crotch.
    “Killer played real cute games with them after they were dead,” Sampson said. “Move the one on top a little. Lift her head, Alex. You see it?”
    I saw it. A completely new m.o. for the Jane Does, at least the ones I knew about. The phrase “stuck on each other” ran through my mind. I wondered if that was the killer’s “message.” The girl on top was connected to the one underneath — by her tongue.
    Sampson sighed and said, “I think her tongue is stapled inside the other girl. I’m pretty sure that’s it, Alex. The Weasel stapled them together.”
    I looked at the two girls and shook my head. “I don’t think so. A staple, even a surgical one, would come apart on the tongue’s surface… . Krazy Glue adhesive would work, though.”

Chapter 30
    THE KILLER was working faster, so I had to do the same. The two dead girls didn’t remain Jane Does for very long. I had their names before the ten-o’clock news that night. I ignored the explicit orders of the chief of detectives and continued to work on the investigation.
    Early the next morning, Sampson and I met at Stamford, the high school that Tori Glover and Marion Cardinal had attended. The murdered girls were seventeen and fourteen years old.
    The memory of the homicide scene had left me with a queasy, sick feeling that wouldn’t go away. I kept thinking, Christine is right. Get out of this, do something else. It’s time .
    The principal at Stamford was a small, frail-looking, red-haired woman named Robin Schwartz. Her resource officer, Nathan Kemp, had gotten together some students who knew the victims, and had set aside a couple of classrooms for Sampson, Jerome Thurman, and me to use for interviews.