by Jenna Rae
There was one usable fingerprint, a partial, on the roof of Leslie Thorne’s car. Of course it had been run through every database, but there hadn’t been any hits. It might not even be his. He seemed too careful to leave a print. It could be some homeless guy or jogger or would-be car thief had touched the car at some point. But it was the only print on the car that wasn’t from Leslie or her boyfriend or her mom. The boyfriend had an alibi. The mom’s boyfriend had an alibi, and so did Leslie’s dad. Leslie’s ex had an alibi, as did the creepy guy who’d followed her around in high school and the sister’s ex-husband who’d been accused of sexual harassment by a co-worker some years before.
With no good witness information and no meaningful forensic evidence, victimology was all they had. They re-interviewed all of the surviving peeping and kidnapping victims and the families and friends of all the victims. They learned nothing of obvious significance. Del watched the victims for the inconsistencies in affect and tone and body language. She also watched them from inside her new perspective. She saw Lola in their hesitant voices, their shaking hands, their lowered gazes. She saw Lola in the shame and pain and guilt and uncertainty in their posture and words. She couldn’t help remembering when Christopher James had been stalking Lola, how he’d rendered her frightened and powerless and humiliated with a few sharp words and hard blows and unknown threats. Again she pushed away her thoughts, wanting to analyze the evidence without the taint of emotion.
“Okay,” Del said to Phan, consulting her notes, “the kidnapping victims are brunette, White, female, pretty. Middle or upper middle class, dressed fairly conservatively. Average weight except for Leslie, but she was wearing a bulky jacket. Average height, except for Leslie, but she was wearing platform shoes, could have looked taller. All three were high risk, likely to be taken out in the open, to be missed fairly quickly. All three were alone at night. Leslie was walking to her car, the other two were walking home. The first two were taken in the Mission and dumped in the Mission.” She pointed to a printed map. “Leslie was taken in the Mission and dumped by Golden Gate Park.”
“Right.” Phan spoke without notes. “No pattern in the days of the week. Nighttime. No defensive wounds on any of them. Let’s guess chloroform, until we get the forensics back, it’s not Special K, no roofie, none of the usual narcotics. So let’s say he’s using something that doesn’t show up, fine. Chloroform, you asked that doc about it. If he is using chloroform, why? It’s not exactly high tech. And how’s he getting it? Do you have to have a license to sell it, buy it? Who uses chloroform?”
“I did a little research for a case several years back,” Del put in. “It’s used for all kinds of things. He could be a painter, a dry cleaner, a mechanic, something medical. A chemist, a pharmacist. There are a lot of choices.”
“Can people make it themselves?”
“I don’t remember that, but I don’t know.” Del made a note to research this. “What’s the delivery system, old-timey, movie-style hankie? Or something more sophisticated? A respirator of some kind?”
“He works a regular job? I don’t know. Maybe he’s in the medical field?” Phan shook his head. He seemed as removed as Del felt. “Was Leslie’s death an accident, and if so, why? And did he give them all the same amount? Leslie weighed less than the others by almost thirty pounds. Maybe he gave her the same and she died because she’s littler.”
“Could be.” Del rubbed her stomach. “It seems too random, too unplanned. Maybe Leslie isn’t connected to the other two.”
“Any update on your profile?”
Del shook her head. “I’m not qualified as a profiler, you know that.”
“Still.” Phan smiled. “You have a picture of this guy. Boo Radley’s evil cousin, right?”
“You’ve seen the guy,” Del said. “Roll with me for a minute. Teager could have grabbed Leslie Thorne, drugged her, and been driving her around. Something happens, maybe there’s some interruption, maybe he thinks she’s dead or he realizes he messed up. He dumps her by the park, maybe while she’s still alive. He comes here to alibi himself. She could have been lying there dying for an hour before she was found.”
“Hmmn.” Phan frowned. “That’s a lot of maybes. You gotta consider the possibility it was someone else. Teager’s print doesn’t match the one on her car. He does have an alibi, and until we have a time of death, there’s no denying it. That print’s the only physical lead, we gotta go with it.”
“Sure. Though the print could have been left there days before. A jogger, a would-be car thief, anyone. I know it might not be Teager, but how many escalating creeps could one little area have at one time?”
“Leslie Thorne was a comparatively high-risk victim, as was the dump site. Out on the street by Golden Gate Park?”
“Even when it’s foggy, there’s always a chance someone could come along. And these three women aren’t invisible. They’re not hookers or homeless or runaways. They’re attractive, middle class, visible. When they don’t show up at home, someone starts worrying.”
“If she was still alive when Teager came in, her time of death could be during or even after he was in here filing a complaint.”
“Until now, activity has been all over the Mission but stayed pretty neatly within the neighborhood. Golden Gate Park is way outside that comfort zone. It’s strange. I get that it’s a good dumping ground because it’s so big, but he didn’t exactly hide the body. He put her where someone was sure to find her. And he left her over a mile from her car. Is he a different guy? Or is he getting more confident and therefore expanding his territory?”
Phan shook his head. “Was this an escalation to murder, or was it an accident? That’s the fundamental question, as I see it. If he’s escalating, we have a very different animal to cage.”
Del rubbed her stomach. “And if it was an accident, how did he respond to that? Did it excite or horrify him? He didn’t cover her face, but he didn’t pose her provocatively either.”
“We don’t know enough about this guy.” Phan ran his fingers through his surfer’s mane. “He’s smart or lucky or both.”
They eyed each other for a moment, and Del smacked the desk, groaning. “What was the weather when each of the victims was taken?”
“Ah, shit. Shit. Shit.” Phan started typing.
Del stood and paced. She couldn’t believe she’d missed it. “We are so damned fucking stupid. It was foggy every time, wasn’t it?”
“Maybe it’s a coincidence,” Phan muttered, banging on the keyboard. “It’s always foggy here in November.”
“No, I think this is actually something. It wasn’t regular foggy. Really, really foggy. Right? The other victims talked about it. How they couldn’t see, how it was hard to see anything. The students who found Leslie Thorne said they almost tripped over her. The guy is using fog as a cover.”
“Maybe, or maybe it’s a trigger and it’s coincidentally useful.” Phan sat back. “Right?”
“Either way, what do we do, put decoys out when it’s foggy? How foggy is foggy enough? You wanna put a bunch of brunettes out on overcast days?” Del grimaced when Phan nodded. “Oh, come on! How many? Huh? In the fog? We wouldn’t be able to see the decoys ourselves. And if he’s got a car, which seems likely, the territory is too large, especially now that he’s expanding. We’d need the whole fucking department in on it. It would be a logistical nightmare. And the Feds own it, remember? Hey!”
Her partner was already striding toward Captain Bradley’s office. Del had serious reservations about the plan she’d seen working in his mind. She trailed after Phan.
She listened as the captain directed the team he gathered to pull off Operation Foghead, as someone laughingly named it. Del vaguely remembered hearing about a radio station whose fans used that term. She noted Bradley’s excitement, the delight of the whole station at having something they could do. They slapped each other on the back, they joked about it, they got wound up like kids on Christmas morning. Del sat back and listened to their energetic b
rainstorming. They could borrow Vice officers, personnel from everywhere. Hell, they could put male cops in dresses if they ran short.
Del tried to suggest alternatives. She tried to slow the momentum of what seemed like a reckless plan. All she could picture was a bunch of wig-wearing young, testosterone-riddled cops wired for sound, armed to the teeth and wandering the Mission on the next foggy night.
It’s ridiculous. Dangerous. Monty Python meets the Keystone Kops. After her concerns were pointedly ignored, Del focused on minimizing the dangers inherent in the trap they were setting. Del looked at the officers around her. Everyone was pissed. Everyone wanted the bad guy. Now all they had to do was make sure nobody shot an innocent bystander or fellow officer. She had to hope the officers involved would remember their training. Playing decoy was far more dangerous than most officers understood. Del had long wondered if the downplaying of the danger was a result of some sexist dismissal of women’s contributions and experiences or a natural outgrowth of the job’s overwhelming dangers. She also wondered whether the operation’s risks and payoff would be increased or decreased by the distinct possibility of the Feds’ parallel operation. Because SFPD was obliged to share information and strategy with the Feds but could not expect the same courtesy in return, the Feds could do whatever they wanted. Sitting in the middle of the station, awash in doubt and uncertainty and surrounded by brother officers and the swirling storm of their excitement and relief at finally having something to do, Del felt entirely, painfully alone.
For twenty years she’d inhabited the role of an outsider in her law enforcement family. She’d learned not to let people bait her with sexist, homophobic taunts. She’d developed the thick skin necessary for surviving the clubby blue fraternity of each station, each division, each team. Her first decade with SFPD showed her the value of cultivating friends on the fringes. SFPD’s overt attempts to hire and promote a more reflective pool of officers arose from a federal mandate in place from the early 1970s until the end of the 1990s: the department was required to demonstrate due diligence in diversifying its force. Del and her fellow outsiders were hired under a cloud of resentment over the federal mandate and its fallout.
When, per Mac’s advice, she took her sergeant’s exam fifteen years back, she scored in the top ten percent of the hundreds of SFPD officers who took the written component and in the top five percent of those who completed the verbal component and interview. Scores were posted internally, and there was a lot of chatter about the patterns in the results. Some officers who’d scored well on the written exam found that their scores plummeted after the interview and verbal component. Other officers reflected the opposite trend: lower scores on the written exam and higher on the verbal test and interview. There was, some officers claimed, a scoring penalty for officers who didn’t fulfill one or more of the city’s mandated diversity requirements. The long-overdue implementation of mandated inclusiveness exposed the worst of the department’s old guard—bitter and clubby, the white boys in blue didn’t seem to want anybody new in their fraternity.
When Del was made sergeant she faced a wall of resentment and a general assumption that she hadn’t earned the promotion. She soon found that attempts to prove her right to wear the stripes only earned her more resentment and exclusion. At one point, Del heard herself referred to from around corners as “Sergeant Quota” because SFPD’s federal mandate required it to hire and promote a certain quota of female officers within a certain number of years. She struggled with how to respond to this disrespect. At first she tried to reason with her brother officers. Then she realized the futility of this. Occasionally she let herself get pulled into heated arguments with the mouthiest jerks on the force. Twice she allowed things to escalate into shoving matches that were quickly ended by quick-thinking officers and that could easily have curtailed her plodding rise through the ranks. At one point she felt herself tensing up every time someone looked at her crosswise and realized she had to make a change in how she responded to her detractors.
“Cool it, kid.” This had been the constant refrain from her first training officer, Jack Halloran, way back in her long-ago rookie year in the era of acid-washed jeans and regrettable mullets. Long after his retirement she still struggled to take his advice. As a kid she’d used her fists to deal with would-be bullies; as an adult she decided to use her wits. She focused on the worst offenders and monitored them surreptitiously. She tracked their behavior patterns and relationships with other officers. There were always power plays between clusters of friends, and she exploited those by quietly befriending the most discontented of the cronies. The leaders of the loudest groups of swaggerers were her easiest targets. She was careful to minimize her teasing, but she could make one joke over their vulnerabilities and weaknesses, and their buddies would run with the theme for days. She sharpened her wit on their failed marriages and sloppy investigative practices and burgeoning beer bellies. Mostly she kept her eyes and ears open and her big mouth shut, as her daddy used to say, and this served her well. She found that often the biggest talkers were the worst performers and would almost inevitably self-sabotage without any help from her.
She continued to forge alliances with other outsiders, creating a network of other undesirables who helped each other get their jobs done effectively without relying on the goodwill of the good old boys. Over time, the department came somewhat closer to reflecting the communities it policed, though the end of the federal mandate at the end of the last century slowed this progress.
Due as much to her maturing emotional self-control as her ongoing dedication to the development of her other professional skills, she eventually earned her promotion to Inspector, and she became still more adept at identifying who she could work with effectively and who would only ever see her as an interloper who’d taken a job away from a more deserving male officer. As the former increasingly outnumbered the latter, Del wondered if this resulted from a change in departmental culture or her ability to read people more quickly and effectively.
Now she sat listening to her brother officers enthusing about their awesome new plan to dress in drag and skulk around the neighborhood in the fog. Well aware that her misgivings were unwelcome intrusions on the planning party, Del offered some suggestions for minimizing potential problems. Then she gladly retreated to the bathroom. On the way she looked out one of the wide windows that looked onto Valencia Street and saw that for now the sky was reasonably clear. If her theory was on target, the women of the Mission were safe for this Friday night, from one bad guy at least.
She stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and wondered how clearly she saw herself. Was she completely blind to her own character? Maybe she was losing the ability to know herself because she spent so much time examining the world from other people’s perspectives. She often looked at things from a bad guy’s point of view, but she rarely wondered what it was like to stand in the victim’s place. Would doing so help her get out of her thinking rut? She tried to imagine herself as Leslie Thorne, nice young college student, heading home and looking forward to her evening routine, a sensible snack and extended study session.
Del could picture herself walking down the street and could even try to shrink down to Leslie Thorne’s diminutive stature, but she couldn’t forget she was armed and able to defend herself. Was she a coward, pushing away the vulnerability inherent in being a smaller, unarmed, untrained woman? If she walked down the sidewalk exactly as she was now, even wearing a dress and makeup, a bad guy would have to be blind to pick her as a victim. Del shook her head.
“What if he has some kind of vision impairment?” Del asked this of her mineral-spotted reflection. It was something to consider. Maybe the fog made his glasses spotty with mist. She’d have to ask somebody who wore glasses how much the fog messed with them.
“One last try. Okay. I’m a regular, average woman, coming home from work or a friend’s house. Say my car breaks down and my cell battery is dead. I decide to walk home and I’m scar
ed. It’s foggy and dark, and I’m not sure if I’m going the right way, because I can’t see anything. So I’m walking fast and then slowing down ’cause I’m not sure, I’m clutching a ten-pound purse.” Alone in the ladies’ room in the station, Del widened her eyes and hunched her shoulders. She stared at the mirror. “I’m looking around, and I’m taking little tiny steps in stupid high-heeled shoes that slow me down, and off I go.”
Her pantomime looked ridiculous in the mirror. She was like a cartoon character, hunched over and tiptoeing. I can’t do it, she thought, recalling the night she went to Lola’s house and tried to behave in a stereotypically feminine manner to entice Lola’s stalker into coming after her. Del could mimic the girly stuff, but she couldn’t stop being who she was. She’d been able to put herself in the shoes of a killer, a rapist, a robber, a kidnapper, and any number of other bad guys, but she couldn’t seem to really put herself in the place of a victim. She knew Lola thought it was hard for her, walking around in the larger world as an obviously butch lesbian. But for her money, walking around as herself was easy. From her point of view, being a girly girl seemed outrageously dangerous.
Didn’t they get frustrated, spending hard-earned money and precious time on hairstyles and makeup designed to titillate? Not that Del didn’t appreciate the efforts of the femmes of the world. She just wasn’t sure why they were willing to spend all their time and money on the work it required. Viewed through a hyper-sexualized lens, disrespected and demeaned on a sometimes daily basis, women like Lola, like Leslie Thorne, like half the population of the city, were constant targets. Poor women, lacking the insulation provided by money and social support, were often especially vulnerable to exploitation and disrespect. Del’s years as a patrol officer had been blanketed in exposure to the indignities to which the unprotected were subjected. She would be a different person, she thought, if she had to walk through the world unable to defend both herself and others.