Special Operations

by W. E. B Griffin

  Detective Shapiro’s place of duty was a desk just inside the Northwest Detectives squad room, on the second floor of the Thirty-fifth Police District Building at North Broad and Champlost Streets.

  “Northwest Detectives, Shapiro,” Mort said, answering the telephone.

  “George Amay, Mort,” Amay said. “I went in on a Thirty-fifth District call for a naked lady on Forbidden Drive. It’s at least Criminal Attempt Rape, Kidnapping, et cetera et cetera.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In a phone booth on Northwestern. The victim’s been taken to Chestnut Hill Hospital. The Thirty-fifth Lieutenant and Sergeant are at the scene. And Highway. And a lot of other people.”

  “Go back to the scene, and see if you can keep Highway from destroying all the evidence,” Shapiro said. “I’ll send somebody over.”

  Detective Shapiro then consulted the wheel, which was actually a sheet of paper on which he had written the last names of all the detectives present for duty that night in the Northwest Detectives Division.

  Assignment of detectives to conduct investigations, called jobs, was on a rotational basis. As jobs came in, they were assigned to the names next on the list. Once assigned a job, a detective would not be assigned another one until all the other detectives on the wheel had been assigned a job, and his name came up again.

  The next name on the wheel was that of a detective Mort Shapiro privately thought of as Harry the Farter. Harry, aside from his astonishing flatulence, was a nice enough guy, but he was not too bright.

  What Amay had just called in was not the sort of job that should be assigned to detectives like Harry the Farter, if there was to be any real hope to catch the doer. The name below Harry the Farter’s on the wheel was that of Richard B. “Dick” Hemmings, who was, in Mort Shapiro’s judgment, a damned good cop.

  Shapiro opened the shallow drawer in the center of his desk, and took from it a report of a recovered stolen motor vehicle, which had come in several hours before, and which Detective Shapiro had “forgotten” to assign to a detective.

  When a stolen motor vehicle is recovered, or in this case, found deserted, a detective is assigned to go to the scene of the recovery to look for evidence that will assist in the prosecution of the thief, presuming he or she is ultimately apprehended. Since very few auto thefts are ever solved, investigation of a recovered stolen motor vehicle is one of those time-consuming futile exercises that drain limited manpower resources. It was, in other words, just the sort of job for Harry the Farter.

  “Harry!” Mort Shapiro called, and Harry the Farter, a rather stout young man in his early thirties, his shirt showing dark patches of sweat, walked across the squad room to his desk.

  “Jesus,” Harry the Farter said when he saw his job. “Another one?”

  Shapiro smiled sympathetically.

  “Shit!” Harry the Farter said, broke wind, and walked back across the squad room to his desk. When, in Shapiro’s judgment, Harry the Farter was sufficiently distracted, Shapiro got up and walked to the desk occupied by Detective Hemmings, who was typing out a report on an ancient manual typewriter. He laid a hand on his shoulder and motioned with his head for Hemmings to join him at the coffee machine.

  “Amay just called in,” Shapiro said after Hemmings had followed him to the small alcove holding the coffee machine. “We’ve got another rape, it looks like, on Forbidden Drive by the Bell’s Mill bridge over the Wissahickon.”

  Hemmings, a trim man of thirty-five, just starting to bald, pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows.

  “Amay said that he could use some help protecting the crime scene,” Shapiro said. “I just gave Harry a recovered stolen vehicle.”

  Hemmings nodded his understanding, then walked across the room to a row of file cabinets near Shapiro’s desk. He pulled one drawer open, reached inside, and came out with his revolver and ankle holster. He knelt and strapped the holster to his right ankle. Then he went to Shapiro’s desk, opened the center drawer, and took out a key to one of the Northwest Detectives unmarked cars, then left the squad room.

  Shapiro, first noting with annoyance but not surprise that Harry the Farter was still fucking around with things on his desk and had not yet left, entered the Lieutenant’s office, now occupied by the tour commander, Lieutenant Teddy Spanner.

  “Amay called in an attempted criminal rape, kidnapping, et cetera,” Shapiro said. “It looks as if our scumbag is at it again. I gave it to Hemmings.”

  “Where?” Spanner asked.

  “Forbidden Drive, by the bridge over the Wissahickon.”

  “Who’s next up on the Wheel?” Spanner said.

  “Edgar and Amay,” Shapiro said.

  “What’s Harry Peel doing?” Lieutenant Spanner asked.

  “I just sent him on a recovered stolen vehicle,” Shapiro said.

  Spanner met Shapiro’s eyes for a moment.

  “Well, send Edgar if he’s next up on the Wheel, over to help, and tell him to tell Amay to stay with it. Or, I will. I better go over there myself.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mort Shapiro said, and walked back across the squad room to his desk, where he sat down and waited for the next job to come in.

  Officer Bill Dohner used neither his siren nor his flashing lights on the trip to the Chestnut Hill Hospital Emergency Room. For one thing, it wasn’t far, and there wasn’t much traffic. More importantly, he thought that the girl was upset enough as it was without adding the scream of a siren and flashing lights to her trauma.

  “You just stay where you are, miss,” Dohner said. “I’ll get somebody to help us.”

  He got out of the car and walked quickly through the doors to the Emergency Room.

  There was a middle-aged, comfortable-looking nurse standing by the nurse’s station.

  “I’ve got an assaulted woman outside,” he said. “All she has on is a blanket.”

  The nurse didn’t even respond to him, but she immediately put down the clipboard she had been holding in her hands and walked quickly to a curtained cubicle, pushing the curtains aside and then pulling out a gurney. She started pushing it toward the doors. By the time she got there, she had a licensed practical nurse, an enormous red-haired woman, and a slight, almost delicate black man in a white physician’s jacket at her heels.

  “Any injuries that you saw?” the doctor asked Dohner, who shook his head. “No.”

  The LPN, moving with surprising speed for her bulk, was at the RPC before anyone else. She pulled the door open.

  “Can you get out of there without any help, honey?” she asked.

  Mary Elizabeth Flannery looked at her as if the woman had been speaking Turkish.

  The LPN leaned into the car and half pulled Mary Elizabeth Flannery from it, and then gently put her on the gurney. She spread a white sheet over her, and then, with a little difficulty, pulled Dohner’s blanket from under the sheet.

  “You’re going to be all right, now, dear,” the LPN said.

  Dohner took the blanket. The doctor leaned over Mary Elizabeth Flannery as the LPN started pushing the gurney into the Emergency Room. Dohner folded the blanket and put it on the front passenger-side floorboard. Then he picked up the microphone.

  “Fourteen Twenty-Three. I’m at Chestnut Hill Hospital with the victim.”

  “Fourteen Twenty-Three, a detective will meet you there.”

  “Fourteen Twenty-Three, okay,” Dohner said, and then walked into the Emergency Room.

  None of the people who had taken Mary Elizabeth Flannery from his car were in sight, but he heard sounds and detected movement inside the white curtained cubicle from which the nurse had taken the gurney. Dohner sat down in a chrome and plastic chair to wait for the detective, or for the hospital people to finish with the victim.

  The LPN came out first, rummaged quickly through a medical equipment cabinet, muttered under her breath when she couldn’t find what she was looking for, then went back into the cubicle. The nurse then came out, went to the same cabinet, swore, and t
hen reached for a telephone.

  Then she spotted a ward boy.

  “Go to supply and get a Johnson Rape Kit,” she ordered. “Get a half dozen of them, if you can.”

  She looked over at Dohner.

  “She hasn’t been injured,” she said. “Cut, or anything like that.”

  “I’d like to get her name and address,” Dohner said.

  “That’ll have to wait,” the nurse said.

  A minute or two later, the ward boy came running down the waxed corridor with an armful of small packages. He went to the curtained cubicle, handed one of the packages to someone inside, then put the rest in the medical equipment cabinet.

  Officer Dohner knew what the Johnson Rape Kit contained, and how it was used, and he felt a wave of mixed rage and compassion for Mary Elizabeth Flannery, who seemed to him to be a nice young woman, and was about to undergo an experience that would be almost as shocking and distasteful for her as what the scumbag had already done to her.

  The Johnson Rape Kit contained a number of sterile vials and swabs. Blood would be drawn from Mary Elizabeth Flannery into several of the vials. Tests for venereal disease and pregnancy would be made. The swabs would be used to take cultures from her throat, vagina, and anus, to determine the presence of semen and alien saliva, urine or blood.

  It would be uncomfortable for her, and humiliating, but it was necessary to successfully prosecute the sonofabitch who did this to her, presuming they could catch him.

  The “chain of evidence” would be carefully maintained. The assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case, presuming again that the police could catch the rapist, would have to be prepared to prove in court that the results of the probing of Mary Elizabeth Flannery’s bodily orfices had been in police custody from the moment the doctor handed them to Dohner (or a detective, if one had shown up by the time the doctor was finished with his tests) until he offered them as evidence in a courtroom.

  Detective Dick Hemmings arrived at the Chestnut Hill Hospital Emergency Room twenty minutes after Officer Bill Dohner had taken her there. He found Dohner sitting in a chair, filling out a Form 75–48, which is the initial Report of Investigation. It is a short form, providing only the bare bones of what has happened.

  Dohner nodded at Hemmings, who sat down beside him and waited until he had finished. Dohner handed the 75–48 to him. In a neat hand, he had written: “Compl. states a W/M broke into her apt, forced her to perform Involuntary Deviate Sex. Intercourse, urinated on her, tied her up, forced her into a van, & left her off at Bell’s Mill Road & Forbidden Dr.”

  “Jesus,” Hemmings said. “Where is she?”

  “In there with the doctor,” Dohner said, nodding toward the white curtained cubicle.

  “Hurt?”

  “No.”

  Dohner reached in his pocket and took out the cord he had cut from Mary Elizabeth Flannery’s wrists. “This is what he tied her up with.”

  Hemmings saw that Bill Dohner had not untied the knot in the cord.

  “Good job,” he said. “Make sure the knot doesn’t come untied. Give me a couple of minutes here to find out what we have, and then take the cord to Northwest and put it on a Property Receipt.”

  Dohner nodded. He held up a clear plastic bag, and dropped the cord in it.

  “I got this from one of the nurses,” he said.

  A Property Receipt—Philadelphia Police Department Form 75–3—is used to maintain the “chain of evidence.” As with the biologic samples to be taken from Mary Elizabeth Flannery’s body, it would be necessary, presuming the case got to court, for the assistant district attorney to prove that the cord allegedly used to tie the victim’s hands had never left police custody from the time Dohner had cut it from her wrists; that the chain of evidence had not been broken.

  Property Receipts are numbered sequentially. They are usually kept in the desk of the Operations Room Supervisor in each district. They must be signed for by the officer asking for one, and strict department policy insists that the information on the form must either be typewritten or printed in ink. Consequently, evidence is almost always held until the officer using a Property Receipt can find a typewriter.

  “Anything happen at the scene?” Dohner asked.

  “The Mobile Crime Lab got there when I was there,” Hemmings said. “Nobody that looks like the doer has shown up. How long did he have her there?”

  “I didn’t get hardly anything out of her,” Dohner said. “Just her name, and what this guy did to her. She’s pretty shook up.”

  Hemmings finished filling out the form, acknowledging receipt of one length of knotted cord used to tie up Mary Elizabeth Flannery, signed it, and handed the original to Dohner, who handed him the cord.

  “You might as well go, Bill,” Hemmings said. “I’ll take it from here.”

  “I hope you catch him,” Dohner said, standing up and giving his hand to Hemmings.

  Then he went outside and got in his car and started the engine and called Police Radio and reported that Fourteen Twenty-Three was back in service.

  Mary Elizabeth Flannery looked with frightened eyes at the stranger who had entered the curtained cubicle.

  “Miss Flannery, my name is Dick Hemmings, and I’m a detective. How are you doing?”

  She did not reply.

  “Is there anyone you would like me to call? Your parents, maybe? A friend?”

  “No!” Mary Elizabeth Flannery said, as if the idea horrified her.

  “I know what you’ve been going through,” Hemmings said.

  “No, you don’t!”

  “But the sooner we can learn something about the man who did this to you, the better,” Hemmings went on, gently. “Would it be all right if I asked you a couple of questions?”

  She eyed him suspiciously, but didn’t reply.

  “I need your address, first of all,” he said.

  “210 Henry Avenue,” she said. “Apartment C. They call it the Fernwood.”

  “That’s one of those garden apartments, isn’t it?” Hemmings asked, as a mental image of that area of Roxborough came to his mind.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “How do you think this man got into your apartment?” Hemmings asked.

  “How do I know?” she snapped.

  “Is there a fire escape? Were there open windows?”

  “There’s a back,” she said. “Little patios.”

  “You live on the ground floor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hear any noises, a window breaking, a door being forced, by any chance?”

  “The windows were open,” she said. “It’s been hot.”

  She thinks I’m stupid, but at least she’s talking.

  “When were you first aware that this man was in your apartment?”

  “When I saw him,” Mary Elizabeth Flannery snapped.

  “Where were you, what were you doing, when you first saw him?”

  “I was in my living room, watching television.”

  “And where was he, when you first saw him?”

  “Just standing there, in the door to my bedroom.” She grimaced.

  “Can you describe him?”

  “No.”

  “Not at all?”

  “He was wearing black overalls, coveralls, whatever they call them, and a mask. That’s all I could see.”

  “What kind of a mask?”

  “A mask, over his eyes.”

  “I mean, what color was the mask? Did you notice?”

  “It was a Lone Ranger mask,” she said. “The kind with a flap over the mouth.”

  “Black?”

  “Yes, black,” she said.

  The Lone Ranger, Hemmings thought, wore a mask that covered his eyes only, not with a flap over his mouth.

  “Did he have anything with him?”

  “He had a knife,” she said, impatiently, as if she expected Hemmings to know all these details.

  “What kind of knife?”

  “A butcher knife
.”

  “Was it your knife?”

  “No, it wasn’t my knife.”

  “Do you remember if the windows in your bedroom were open?” Hemmings asked.

  “I told you they were; it was hot.”

  “How big was the knife?” Hemmings asked, extending his index fingers as he spoke, and then moving his hands apart.

  “That big,” Mary Elizabeth Flannery said, when she thought his hands were as far apart as the knife had been large.

  “And it was a butcher knife, right?”

  “I told you that.”

  “I mean, it couldn’t have been a hunting knife, or a bayonet, or some other kind of a knife?”

  “I know a butcher knife when I see one.”

  “Miss Flannery, I’m on your side.”

  “Why do you let people like that run the streets, then?” she challenged.

  “We try not to,” Hemmings said, sincerely. “We try to catch them, and then to see that they’re put behind bars. But we need help to catch them.”

  There was no response to this.

  “What happened then, Miss Flannery?” Hemmings asked, gently.

  “I told the cop what that filthy bastard did to me.”

  “But I have to know, and in some detail, I’m afraid,” Hemmings said.

  “He threatened me with his knife, and made me…oh, Jesus!”

  “Can you tell me exactly what he said?”

  She snorted. “You want to know exactly what he said? I’ll tell you exactly what he said, he said ‘Very nice,’ that’s what he said.”

  “What kind of a voice did he have?”

  “What do you mean, what kind of a voice?”

  “Was it deep, or high pitched? Did he have any kind of an accent?”

  “He had a regular voice,” she said. “No accent.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Then…he came over to me, and cut my clothes.”

  “You were sitting where? In an armchair? On a couch?”

  “I was laying down on my couch.”

  “What part of your clothes did he cut? What were you wearing?”

  She flushed and turned her face away from him.