Evil Season by Michael Benson Page A

knocked on her door.
    Years later she remembered some of the police officer’s questions as “mystifying.” She explained that the article in Sarasota Magazine had been an excerpt from her book A History of Visual Art in Sarasota. She talked about Ben Stahl, explaining who he was. Corbino told Grant that many of Stahl’s paintings had been stolen in the late 1960s from the Museum of the Cross. Stahl died in 1987. She gave the investigator contact information for Stahl’s children. His son, she said, still sold his father’s paintings every once in a while.
    She was also asked by police about another magazine found at the scene, probably New Magazine, but not about the one that contained her article.
    Mrs. Corbino still didn’t know that her magazine article had been referenced by the killer when creating the crime scene. At no time did she get the impression that the policeman who questioned her had any idea who she was.
    After she learned of her unique role in the murder case, she wondered if the killer read the magazine that he’d used. Had he made a conscious decision to leave the magazine open to a particular page? If the killer spent some time in the gallery after Wishart was dead, perhaps he had time to do some reading. She felt guilt. She knew it wasn’t rational, but she couldn’t help it. It was because of that guilt that she decided to write about the murder, a story called “A Mecca for Murder,” which was eventually published in a literary magazine.
    â€œI tried to answer the unanswerable question of why? Why did it happen to her, and why did it happen here? It all seemed out of synch with the universe,” Corbino said.
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    For the rest of February and into March, Detectives Grant and Glover received copies from crime analyst Bruce Steinberg of all loitering, prowling, and burglary reports in Sarasota dating back three months before Wishart’s murder. They then checked out each one: Where was the guy now? Where was he when Wishart was killed? Since this was a transient crowd, many of these individuals didn’t have solid alibis. Police asked them for voluntary DNA samples.
    During spring 2004, Detective Sensei DelValle worked on possible leads found in Wishart’s address book, handwritten, and on her home and work computers. Nothing.
    Jack Carter’s investigation carried on throughout the summer of 2004. He used the victim’s financial records and personal effects as the basis of his investigation.
    It had been months and the investigation into Joyce Wishart’s past had yielded little. It was a frightening prospect for an investigator, but it was appearing more and more as if the answer did not lie with the victim. It seemed that this was a randomly selected victim killed by what may be a serial killer at the very start of his career.
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    If the rough surgery performed on the victim by the killer was an attempt to remove DNA, the effort was in vain—and the DNA end of the investigation continued full-speed ahead. One suspect who wouldn’t give a voluntary DNA samples had to be tricked. DNA material was confiscated from a cigarette butt and the top of a soda can.
    Meanwhile, the FDLE’s psychological experts carefully considered every known factor of the murder and came up with a general description of the man whom police were looking for. He was white, had a maturity level in the early thirties, was well groomed, was likely to have moved from job to job, lacked sincere relationships in his life, and—though he might be able to mask it in public—held a contempt for society.
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    Police were six months into the investigation, and had checked out more than four hundred leads without success, when it happened.
    The case broke.
    On July 26, 3:30 P.M. , Detective Glover received a phone call from a very excited analyst at the FDLE Lab. She was Suzanna R. Ulery, and she had great