When they reached the edge of the park, they stood on the sidewalk, Karen stamping her feet and rubbing her hands to- gether to ward off the cold, while Bob searched up and down the street for a cab.
“One’s bound to come along sooner or later,” he said reasonably.
Karen chuckled. “With a little luck, before we die of frostbite.” She was glad now for the warmth of the alcohol he had added to her root beer.
They waited fifteen minutes.
“Maybe we should walk down to Columbus Circle,” Karen suggested. “We might have a better chance there.”
“I have a better idea,” Bob said. “Why don’t we just walk across the park?”
It was an option she would never have considered, going into the park at night. There were a number of stories about how dangerous it had become.
“Look,” she said, “you’ve really been very nice, but I can’t ask you to go out of your way like that.”
“Sure you can. Where do your relatives live?”
“On East Seventy-sixth Street,” she told him. “Between Park and Lexington.”
“It happens that I’m staying with friends on Seventy-fourth and Third,” Bob said. “So you see, it’s hardly out of my way at all.”
“Well, in that case …” She was still a bit hesitant but then not all that anxious to have him walk off and leave her alone. Besides, she supposed this nice broad-shouldered man could protect her from just about any kind of hobgoblin they might encounter. “I guess it would be all right.”
They crossed into Central Park, following the pedestrian paths, Bob’s hand firmly on her elbow, steering her this way and that—to the right, to the left, over a little bridge, then to the right again, until the sights and sounds of the city were far behind them. It was dark and eerie here, and ominously quiet. No voices broke the silence, no moon shone down through the thick clouds to light their way. Spidery branches reached out for them like gnarled black fingers against the grim gray sky.
“I haven’t the faintest idea where we are,” Karen admitted after they had been twisting and turning from one path to another for some time.
“That’s okay,” he said. “I know the way.”
He directed her along as though he really did know where he was going and, because she didn’t exactly have much of a choice, Karen followed. She remembered him saying that he was from the West Coast and had been locked up at Harvard for the past year and a half.
“How do you know which way to go?” she asked.
“I came this way earlier,” he replied smoothly. “The people I’m staying with gave me directions.”
“Oh,” she murmured.
“Trust me,” he said with a smile in his voice.
They walked on, even as the path got narrower and the underbrush thicker.
“It’s so dark,” Karen observed, “I can’t even tell what direction we’re going in.”
“It’s easy,” he said. “Hear the water? That’s the lake. As long as that sound is to our right, we’re heading east.”
Karen listened intently but she couldn’t figure out from which side the faint slap-slap was coming, and she had a sudden wish that she had dropped bread crumbs in their wake.
“Are we heading for the Seventy-ninth Street Transverse?”
“No,” he told her. “I don’t know that way. But this way comes out right at Seventy-sixth Street.”
“I hope so,” Karen said. “My teeth are beginning to chatter.”
“Are you cold?” he asked. “Well, I can certainly take care of that.” He opened his heavy overcoat and pulled her inside, wrapping it around them both. “There, is this better?”
His unexpected body warmth did help, but he was holding her too close and too tight and it made her uncomfortable.
“That’s all right,” Karen told him. “We can’t have that much farther to go. I can make it.” She tried to move a step away from him but he wouldn’t release her. “I’m okay,” she assured him. “Honestly.”
“Don’t be silly,” he insisted, moving her along beside him. “What would your relatives say if I brought you home frozen solid?”
“Well…”
She was just about to concede the point when he added in a husky voice, “Besides, this feels nice.”
Karen stopped short. “Please,” she said politely yet firmly, “I appreciate your good intentions, but I really would feel more comfortable if you let me go now.”
“What if I don’t want to?” he teased, tightening his grip even more.
Despite the numbing cold, she felt a little spurt of apprehension sprint down her spine.
“Look, you’re a very nice person,” she replied, choosing her words with great care, “but I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. You see, I’m engaged to be married.”
Karen rarely lied to anyone, but she felt that, under the circumstances, this slight exaggeration of the truth was justifiable.
“If you’re so engaged,” he snapped, “why do you go around flaunting yourself in front of other men?”
“I wasn’t doing anything of the kind,” she retorted.
“Oh yes, you were. And I didn’t waste a whole evening for nothing.”
Before she could stop him, he had turned her to him and was kissing her, his tongue pushing its way into her mouth, his hand beginning to grope beneath her coat.
“Stop it,” she sputtered, trying to twist out of his grasp. But he was much too strong and held her easily.
“You can cut the act now,” he said, laughing.
“This isn’t any act,” she protested, struggling against him, “and you’re not very funny. Now let go of me this instant.”
Perhaps it was the amount of liquor he had consumed or maybe it was the stress of his law studies, she didn’t know, but something inside of him seemed to snap.
“Shut up,” he snarled and slapped her across the face with such force that she fell backward against a clump of brambly bushes. “What do you think you’re doing?” she cried, realizing, too late, that something had gone very, very wrong.
“I’m going to give you exactly what you’ve been asking for,” he said, tossing aside his heavy coat.
“I wasn’t asking for anything,” she insisted, scrambling to her feet. “I was having a good time at a party—just like everyone else.”
He laughed harshly. “Don’t you think I can recognize a come-on when I see it? That dress alone was all it took.”
“You’re crazy,” she shouted, before considering the effect her words might have, and turned for the path.
He reached out and grabbed her by the hair, yanking her back so hard that she lost her footing and fell against him. Then he pulled her right arm behind her back, twisting until, with excruciating pain, she felt it snap.
“Crazy? You think I’m crazy?” he snarled in her ear. “Well, you’re going to be crazy about me by the time I finish with you.”
Whirling her around, he knocked her to the ground with one swift punch in the stomach. Karen lay where she was, gasping for breath, unable to get up, as disbelief turned to fear. Even as she wondered what would come next, she felt the toe of his shoe slam into her rib cage. When she tried to roll aside, he caught her in the small of the back, and when she tried to wriggle in another direction, he kicked her in the abdomen. Wherever she turned, the polished loafer was waiting for her, smashing into her, over and over and over again.
“Please,” she whimpered.
“That’s right, beg,” he hissed. “Tell me how sorry you are you made me angry. Tell me how much you want me to do it to you.”
He straddled her then, threw open her coat and started to claw at her dress, the expensive satin shredding as though it were made of tissue paper. He reached for her bra, yanking it off with a skin-cutting snap. He ripped her garter belt in half, and the delicate silk panties her mother always insisted she wear came apart in his fingers.
She felt his hands sliding down her body, over her breasts, along her thighs, b
etween her legs—places not even Peter had yet been allowed to explore. And following his hands were his teeth, marking her skin in a gruesome trail of his own design.
When she thought she could take no more, he suddenly stopped. But it was only to fumble at the front of his trousers. Then, without further preparation, he shoved himself deep inside that most private part of her.
Karen screamed. She had never known pain like that before. It was as though she had been split in two by a red-hot knife, starting at her thighs and shooting up into her chest. Immediately, one hand closed over her mouth and the other clamped around her throat—cutting off her shriek, and her air.
“I didn’t say scream,” he snarled. “I said beg.”
But she couldn’t utter a word, she couldn’t move, she couldn’t even breathe. She couldn’t do anything but lie there as he stabbed at her, again and again and again. Tears streamed from her eyes and her lungs began to burn. She didn’t want to believe that such a thing could be happening to her, when she had always been so careful, but the agony she felt assured her that it was.
It was then she knew she was going to die, that he could not let her live, and she prayed it would be quick.
Soon enough, the world around her began to blur, her eyes fluttered. Sights and sounds seemed to fade and she felt herself rising, strangely weightless, higher and higher and higher still, until she was floating above the sinister gray clouds in a soothing white light, where everything was beautiful and no harm could reach her. She thought that being dead was not so bad, after all.
When she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was the sullen sky. He was gone—his hands no longer closing off her mouth and throat—and the cold had almost numbed her to the pain. She sucked in great gulps of icy air and wondered where the peculiar rasping sound she heard was coming from. She couldn’t believe she had survived and she was just beginning a silent prayer of thanks when his face loomed above her.
“Did you like that?” he crooned. “Come on, tell me how much. I bet you never had it so good before.”
Karen turned her head away.
He slammed her across the face with the back of his hand. “Tell me,” he barked.
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out except a throaty hiss.
He began to caress her roughly. With every ounce of strength she had left, she moaned and tried to move away, but he was there to stop her.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he sneered. “I’m not through with you yet. On the contrary, I’m just getting warmed up.”
Karen stared at him with revulsion, wondering how she could ever have thought him attractive.
“No more,” she managed to croak.
“The hell you say,” he laughed. “I have to make up for all those monkish months I spent learning the law, and right now you’re the only game around.”
With that, he shoved her over onto her stomach, pushed her legs apart, and forced himself into that place where such an invasion had heretofore been unthinkable.
The shriek that began in Karen’s throat died in a mouthful of dirt. As agonizing as the other had been, this was infinitely worse—a battering ram, tearing, plundering, punishing, destroying everything in its path.
For an unspeakable length of time, he rode her like a bull, stripping her of every last shred of dignity, working himself into a mindless frenzy until, with a final grunt, he exploded from the inside. So dazed was she that she hardly felt him withdraw, and could not have said whether it was seconds or minutes or even hours later.
Bodily fluids oozed out of every part of her, visible evidence of a life that was slipping away. She scarcely noticed when he rolled her onto her back.
“Now that was even better,” he said with obvious relish. “With a little practice, you could be quite good at this.”
Her only response was a raspy breath.
He reached down and pulled her head up by a handful of hair, causing her to wince in pain from a dozen different places.
“I bet I know how you want it next,” he purred in her ear. “Sure I do. In fact, I bet you love it that way just as much as I do. I bet you’re going to be real good at it, too, aren’t you?”
Her eyes were glazed, she could barely see him. She had no idea what he had in mind, but it didn’t matter—she knew she couldn’t stop him. He would do what he wanted and then he would be done and she would be dead, and that was all right She couldn’t imagine living after this, anyway.
He still had her by the hair and now she felt him tighten his grip. Before she quite understood what he meant to do, he had risen up on his knees and thrust himself deep into her mouth.
“Show me how good you are at this, bitch,” he cried hoarsely. “Show me how much you appreciate what I’m doing for you.”
Karen couldn’t help herself—she gagged and, as she did, her teeth reflexively snapped shut.
Bob squealed in rage and yanked himself free of her. “I’ll teach you to play games like that with me,” he howled and his right fist crashed into her face, shattering her jaw.
After that, Karen knew nothing.
two
Dr. Stanley Waschkowski was in the last year of his residency at Manhattan Hospital. A tall, gaunt man, with thinning brown hair, inquisitive dark eyes and a persistent five-o’clock shadow, he had the pallor of one who spends too much time indoors among the sick and dying. In four years, he had been exposed to almost every possible kind of illness and injury—one advantage of big-city training he would have missed in the small New Hampshire town he called home—and he prided himself on having achieved the emotional separation that a physician needed in order to survive.
“If you give up a piece of yourself to every patient you can’t help,” a doctor he greatly admired had once told him, “pretty soon you’ll have nothing left to give to those you can.”
Waschkowski had learned the value of that advice even before he completed his internship. So well, in fact, that he was now frequently referred to, behind his back, as the “Old Stone Man” by some of the younger residents. He didn’t mind. In fact, he was rather proud of the sobriquet, knowing what it had cost him to earn it.
But as he watched an emergency room nurse cut away what clothing remained on the brutalized young woman before him, anger filled his dark eyes, and the iron clamp that held his emotions in check slipped a notch.
“God, she’s hardly more than a child,” he murmured.
Waschkowski had two young daughters of his own. The thought of anything like this ever happening to one of them was enough to make him forget his Hippocratic oath.
“Okay, we have respiratory distress,” he told the intern who had summoned him. “Prep her for a tracheotomy.”
He looked down at the girl as she lay there, bruised and bloody, barely able to breathe, depending on him to help her. He set his jaw and began his grim work.
“Tell me what you can, as soon as you can, Doc,” the corpulent policeman who had accompanied the ambulance said. Despite his age and obvious experience, the officer looked a little green.
“Take a seat, Sergeant,” the doctor said. “Have a cup of coffee. This might take a while.”
An hour later, a weary Waschkowski emerged from the tiny cubicle with blood splattered on his white coat. “Do you have any ID on her?” he asked the policeman.
“Yeah,” the officer replied.
“Call,” the doctor said. “Get someone down here. We need a consent.”
Henry “Tug” McCluskey was less than six months from retirement. He had put in thirty tough years on the New York City police force, playing it straight and clean right down the line, which hadn’t always been easy. His living room wall was lined with commendations, his dress uniform was covered with medals, and his gold watch was waiting for him. In spite of that, he hadn’t been able to protect that poor girl.
From one end of Manhattan Island to the other, he had seen more than his share of gunshot wounds, stabbings, mutilations, strangulations and beatings,
but in thirty years he had never gotten used to it. Every one of those brutal crimes had taken its toll on him, but none had been as bad as the sight of Karen Kern’s broken, bleeding body lying there under a bush.
Sitting in the hospital emergency room on a cold Saturday morning three days before Christmas, he knew he would have traded his commendations, his medals, his gold watch and even his pension, come to that, for five minutes alone in a room with the bastard who had done that to her.
Tug had been raised to respect women, and in turn had taught his four sons to do the same. He was known around town as “the Gentleman Cop,” even by the hookers he used to roust over on Eighth Avenue. There was no doubt in his mind that, whatever this girl might have done to provoke such violence, she didn’t deserve what she had received.
The sergeant hefted his bulk out of his chair and shuffled to the bank of telephones along the far wall of the emergency room to do the part of his job that he disliked the most. Keeping his voice as calm and unemotional as he could, he suggested to the woman at the other end of the line that she get to the hospital as quickly as possible.
“No, ma’am,” he sighed. “I’m afraid I don’t have any of the details yet. But I’m sure the doctors will be able to tell you everything when you get here.”
Although he had to have the results of the medical examination for his report, Tug McCluskey didn’t need any know-it-all resident to tell him that Karen Kern had been raped and beaten half to death. But there was no point in telling the parents such a thing over the telephone. There would be time enough for them to hear that when they reached the hospital.
three
Leo and Beverly Kern paced the length of Manhattan Hospital’s third floor corridor—a spare little man with rimless spectacles and trousers pulled over his pajamas, and a buxom woman in bright-blue eye shadow and a full-length mink coat—passing each other wordlessly at the midpoint on their way to opposite ends.
Beverly’s high heels click-clacked against the stained gray linoleum, sounding sharply out of place in the subdued and sterile atmosphere. Not in all her forty-five years had there been a circumstance so dire that she could not first take the time to attend to her appearance. It was an edict that had been unchallenged in her family for generations—never to leave home without the appropriate outfit and clean underwear.
Guilt by Association Page 3