Killing Justice

by Allison Brennan

  The poorly lit corridor where she’d been attacked was long and narrow—made for walking, not driving—connecting the alley with the street. The businesses here were all closed; only the bars were open past ten. The fog turned what little light we had into halos surrounding the lamps. The damp air would get thicker, making evidence collection next to impossible, if we waited much longer.

  The sign for The Sweet Tooth with its colorful lollipop logo against the gray employee entrance didn’t fit the scene beneath it: a young woman huddled under a scratchy wool blanket in the corner, shaking and trying to convince herself that none of this had happened. My older brother John and I used to harvest change from under the cushions of our couch—planted there, we knew, by Dad’s cop friends—and spend it at this same candy shop.

  Old Sacramento is best known as home of the Jazz Festival (called the Crime Festival for those of us who work overtime Memorial Day weekends). Old Sac boasted a real paddleboat that doesn’t run, and a steam train that does. When I was little, on Sundays after church, John and I explored every store, alley, and nook in the square half-mile that made up Old Sac while my dad hung out at the sports bar. Dad wasn’t a drinker, but he liked the crowd, which ran toward cops and cop groupies. He and his buddies from the beat would share war stories or just watch the game, mostly rooting for the Raiders or the ‘Niners, or in spring for the Giants. Sometimes he’d find a girlfriend, but that never lasted. Once I asked him why he never remarried after Mom died. He’d simply said, “I still love her.”

  I grew up on F Street, two blocks from where Dorothea Puente killed nearly a dozen people for their social security and disability checks—jogging distance from the crime scene where I now stood. The sports bar my dad had frequented closed more than a decade ago, but the back entrance was in this corridor, now leading employees into The Moon and Stars, a New Age gift shop.

  “Ashley.” I kept my voice firm, but quiet. She needed to believe that I was tough enough to protect her, but not threatening or chastising. Too many rape victims started their story with variations on it’s all my fault, even when they were brutally attacked. “I’m not going to leave you. The ambulance is on its way; you’re safe now.”

  Greg Keller was a crafty bastard who had two traits that had kept him out of prison: street smarts and connections. Being the son of a wealthy Sacramento family wasn’t the biggest problem in my case. Keller was also a high-ranking lawyer with the Attorney General’s Office—that was the major sticking point. Circumstantial evidence, of which I had plenty, wasn’t enough to give me the arrest warrant I desperately needed.

  I had proof that Keller attended the same political and charity fundraisers that his victims attended the night they were attacked. The events were at a variety of different venues, but all were either downtown or the adjoining Old Sac. The victims were all blond, under thirty, and had been at a bar immediately after the event. And, each victim had “lost” something of value at the bar—a cell phone, planner, file, silk scarf. My theory was that Keller found a way to palm the item and leave it on the bar when the bartender was busy or distracted. There was no guarantee the victim would return the same night, or that they would return alone, but the odds were in Keller’s favor that the majority of his targets would come back, and some of them would be alone. It had to be a game to him, the anticipation and waiting to see which of his prey would walk into his trap.

  My one positive ID of Keller had been tossed by the judge as prejudicial, and I couldn’t get a warrant without something rock solid. I’d already been warned by the powers that be that every “t” must be crossed and every “i” dotted before I locked Keller behind bars.

  I hoped this latest victim could turn the key.

  Ashley had a cut across her face, as did the other victims, a sick memento from her attacker. An excellent plastic surgeon could fix it and leave the cheek with little to no scarring, but it would take months—or longer—to heal. As if the pain he’d left her with wasn’t enough, she now had to look in the mirror every day and see his mark. Remember and live in fear, because that’s what her rapist wanted — her fear.

  Some serial rapists take mementoes—like the victim’s underwear or a lock of their hair—but I suspected Keller marked his victims so when he saw them in public, he could remember what he’d done to them. I wanted to cut the dick off the bastard.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Ashley repeated.

  “I know,” I lied.

  I’d faced rape victims before—on the streets, in the hospital, in the mirror. If I told her she was a fucking mess, she’d put up an impenetrable shield and deny it until Hell froze, giving me shit to work with to nail the devil who’d done this to her and four other women.

  What she needed was a long, hot shower followed by a long, hot soak in the bathtub with three bars of Irish Spring and a bottle of tequila—to clean and to forget.

  But it was my job to make sure she didn’t get that peace for the next few hours. It was my job to get her to the hospital. To make sure the rape kit went into evidence and nag the lab to process it. To take her statement and make her remember every awful minute of her trauma. She had to suffer so I could stop this prick. I didn’t like it, but it had to be done.

  Though Ashley was the fifth known victim of the River City Rapist, I suspected there were more who hadn’t come forward, who’d opted for the soap and tequila to kill the pain along with the evidence. But he was escalating, becoming more violent, as if a simple rape wasn’t enough to get his rocks off, he had to cut and demean his victims.

  “I know you were raped,” I said, breaking a million protocols. She hadn’t told anyone she was raped. I could see she was on the verge of denying it, and if she didn’t let me in, I wouldn’t have anything to work with.

  I squatted next to her. “Are you hurt?” Stupid question. Of course she was hurt, but I needed to know if she had any life threatening injuries.

  “He raped me,” she whispered.

  “I know.” I looked her over, but the way she was sitting all bunched in a ball, I couldn’t see any part of her body except her face. “Are you hurt anywhere other than your face?”

  She didn’t move to touch her cheek. “He said he wanted me to remember him,” she said in a monotone.

  My cell phone vibrated and I glanced at the caller ID, thinking it might be Sampson or his people who were canvassing the area.

  Dr. Gabriel Storm.

  I pocketed my phone, not needing the distraction (though very much wanting that particular distraction) and focused on Ashley.

  The officer said over the radio, “The ‘bus is here.”

  I told her, “The ambulance is here. I’ll go with you to the hospital.”

  Ashley shook her head. “I don’t want to go to the hospital. I just want to go home. Puh-please.”

  I squatted next to her, close but not touching. I wanted to give her a minute to know she was safe now. Quietly, I said, “Quick stop at the hospital, then I’ll take you home. Okay?”

  I needed something from Ashley—anything to shake at a judge to get a warrant for Greg Keller.

  “Ashley, did you see your attacker?”

  She shook her head. “Not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “A glance.”

  “What did you see in that glance?”

  “He was white.” Same description as the other victims, and too damn vague to help. White victims were more likely to be raped by a white offender. “Can you remember anything else? His voice? A tattoo? Something familiar about him?”

  I wanted to show her Greg Keller’s picture, but his lawyer would argue that I planted the image of Keller in her mind during a susceptible moment.

  I’d already done it once, with the third victim and got bitch-slapped by Keller’s asshole attorney, who successfully got the entire identification suppressed, and the judge rejected the line-up I had planned with Keller. The victims may not be able to identify his face, but he’d spoken to them. No line-up
without more evidence. There was a leak in the D.A.’s office, and the D.A. himself was pissed off, but could do nothing about it except tell me to get something solid and he’d get me the warrant any time of day or night. My lieutenant told me one more fuck up and I’d be off the case.

  I hadn’t done anything wrong—it was a grey area but I was within my rights. I’d figured out the rapist’s M.O. after the second victim and pulled the guest lists of the events they’d attended. There were over a dozen white men between twenty-five and forty—the basic profile of the rapist—and I’d printed all their pictures to show the two victims. But they hadn’t seen their rapist and couldn’t ID any of them. I had the pictures with me when called to the third attack crime scene; Keller happened to be on top and she ID’d him.

  I couldn’t lose this case. If I didn’t stop Greg Keller, other women would suffer. He was escalating, becoming more violent, targeting women more closely together. It had to stop, and it would stop at Ashley Young.

  I heard the gurney from the ambulance bumping down the stone alley. Finally.

  “Please don’t tell anyone,” Ashley pleaded. “My mom—she can’t know. My work—oh, God, they can’t know!” Ashley wasn’t crying, but her voice had that edge that told me she’d be hysterical if I screwed this up, and hysterical rape victims couldn’t give me what I needed to do my job.

  “Ashley,” I said, “I’m on your side. We’re here to help you.”

  The tears came. Quiet tears, dropping into her lap. She rocked herself.

  The EMT pushed the gurney next to me. A light drizzle began. So much for the rain holding off. “Keep the clothes, the blanket, everything,” I said.

  “I know the drill, Detective.”

  Ashley averted her head, a rumble of pain coming from her throat. “What’s your name?” I whispered to the EMT.

  “Adam Harper.”

  I squatted again in front of Ashley. “This is Adam. He’s not going to hurt you. He’s going to make sure you’re warm and safe. I’ll stay with you, okay?”

  She didn’t object when Adam shined a light into her eyes, but they had a wild feral look, like she was ready to bolt.

  “Look at me, Ashley. Any detail you can remember is important. Where were you before the attack?”

  She hesitated and seemed confused, then nodded slowly. “I was at Fat Annie’s with friends from work.” Fat Annie’s was a local bar and grill, about two blocks from this corridor.

  “What about earlier in the evening? After you left work?”

  “The Railroad Museum. We had an event there—I worked the door.”

  “What kind of event?” My pulse quickened. This was Keller’s exact profile.

  Adam tried to remove the blanket to examine her, but she whimpered and looked panicked.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “Let Adam—”

  She continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “We all walked back to the parking lot together, then I got in my car and couldn’t find my cell phone. I went back, and then this guy grabbed me and pulled me in here. He held me from behind. I wanted to scream, but he had a knife. He showed me, right in my face, and I froze. He said he’d cut my throat and I believed him.”

  The story was pouring out, and though it was disjointed, I knew it was the truth. I’d heard a similar tale far too many times. The lost cell phone. Retracing steps. The attack.

  “You said you got a look at him?”

  “And he ripped my sweater,” she said without answering my question. “And he had a knife. He c-c-cut off my bra and I thought someone would walk by. Someone would stop him—he pushed me down on my knees, he told me—told me I was a-a bitch in heat.” Tears continued rolling down her dirty face while the EMT put a loose bandage over the cut on her face.

  Adam said, “Let’s put her on the gurney and get her out of this garbage. Her pupils aren’t responding the way they should, she’s shocky.”

  His words cut through the rage burning within me. When I nailed Keller’s ass, I would make sure every convict in Folsom State Prison knew what he’d done and then he could be given the same treatment he dished out to his victims.

  We lifted her up and onto the gurney. She was still in a tight ball. Adam said, “Can you stretch out your legs for me Ashley?”

  “I saw him before,” she whispered to me. “I saw him at Annie’s, and thought I recognized him, but didn’t know why. Why would he hurt me like this?”

  She’d seen him. I had an eyewitness. I tried to restrain my excitement. As soon as she was stable and in the hospital, I’d show her photos. If she positively ID’d Greg Keller, and I could get both a search warrant and a DNA warrant. Victory and justice were within reach.

  I touched her face. “I’ll find him and put him in jail. I promise.”

  A streak of blood crossed her cheek where I had touched her. I looked down at my hands. The purple gloves I wore were wet. “Adam, she’s bleeding.”

  He removed the blanket even though Ashley cried out in protest.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Blood seeped from Ashley’s fingers, which clung tight around her waist.

  “Did he stab you?” I asked.

  She looked down as if just remembering she was injured. “It’s just a scrape. I’m fine. Really, please I want to go home.”

  She was anything but fine. I pulled her hands away and restrained them so the medic could do his job. Ashley screamed, “No! No!”

  “Ashley, I’m here. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you again.” I spoke to her soothingly, murmurs that weren’t really words, trying to get her to calm down. I wanted to give the cop who’d found her a tongue-lashing. Why hadn’t he seen this?

  “Detective,” Adam snapped. “Hold her down.”

  I did as the paramedic ordered, wincing at the pain and panic in the young woman’s eyes as Adam strapped her to the gurney, for her safety. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Let us help you. We need to get you to the hospital.”

  Wasn’t it as much my fault as the responding officer’s that Ashley’s injuries had gone unnoticed for so long? I could have inspected her body. I probably should have. It didn’t matter that she told me she was fine. I knew better than anyone that victims often lied about their injuries, especially at first when they were in shock, as a measure of protection while their brain processed what had happened to them.

  Was stopping Greg Keller more important to me than the victim’s well-being?

  I didn’t want to contemplate the person this case was turning me into. I’d been a cop for nine years, and a detective for three. I had investigated homicides and sex crimes. I had seen the worst that people could do to others, and until now, I had handled each case professionally.

  I knew why I took Keller’s continued freedom personally. It wasn’t just the fact that I’d been in Ashley Young’s shoes fifteen years ago; it wasn’t just that Keller was a brutal rapist who was a threat to women of Sacramento. It was because I knew he was guilty, and he knew I knew he was guilty, and I could do nothing to stop him.

  “Ready,” Adam said. “Help me push her out.”

  I did, glad that someone else had taken over at this point. Ashley was out of my hands, but her assault wasn’t.

  The EMT met us at the corner and took over from me. They wheeled her into the ambulance.

  I ordered the cop standing guard, “Secure the scene until the CSU gets here.” Then I ran toward my car to meet the ambulance at the hospital.

  II.

  The bustle of the shift change woke me. This wasn’t the first time I’d fallen asleep at my desk. I’d come to the station after Ashley went into surgery, frustrated that I couldn’t talk to her and worried about her injuries, which were far more extensive than we’d known when she was first found.

  I sat up and stretched, my shoulders and neck were stiff to the point of pain. I reached for my coffee mug, half filled with cold coffee, and fumbled in my top drawer for an aspirin bottle. I swallowed three pills chased with disgusting coffee before noti
cing that Joe Lin, my partner on the River City Rapist investigation, was sitting across from me.

  “You’ve been here all night,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “You heard?”

  He nodded once. “Why didn’t you call me in?”

  “You had the trial this morning; you need to be fresh to keep that bitch in prison.” He’s been the lead detective on a case last year involving a female pedophile—high profile because it was so rare. But if I looked into my motives for not calling Joe, I don’t know if they would have been that pure. Joe was a good detective, but he’d been pulling back on Keller. Not because Joe was corrupt, but because we had forty-nine unclosed cases that had hit our unit the first six weeks of this year alone—not including the cases we’d closed or were left over from last year.

  “I read the report you filed last night. Sounds like our guy. What did you fall asleep in the middle of doing?”

  “Viewing the footage from Fat Annie’s, the bar and grill our vic was at before the attack.” I restarted the DVD I’d gotten from the bar and watched from when Ashley first arrived, at 9:47 p.m. I didn’t remember when I had fallen asleep, so I fast-forwarded, keeping my eyes on the screen while Joe talked.

  “The D.A. promised to call me to the stand this morning. He hopes it doesn’t go until after lunch, so I’m all yours this afternoon.”

  “Harrumph,” I muttered. I didn’t have a lot of faith in the D.A.’s office right now. They were as intimidated by the prospect of indicting Greg Keller as half my department. Going after the Attorney General’s Ivy League pet lawyer made everyone squeamish.

  “What are your plans?”

  “I’m going to get a warrant.”

  “Warrant? For what?”

  “Keller’s car and clothing he wore last night. I’m working on getting the guest list from Ashley’s employer, but if I can find him on tape at Fat Annie’s, that’ll give us something to take to a judge. I can put him at the same place Ashley was before her attack—we have a shot.” I hoped.

  “But she didn’t identify her attacker, right?”