by Baxter Clare
Frank sat back and pulled her Ray Bans off, nibbling on one of the ear stems. This had a lot of similarities to their boy, but it might just be coincidental. Frank kept trolling through the photos. She stopped when she distinguished a thin line under Cassandra Nichols' breasts. Pulling the picture closer to her face, she focused on the strap mark from Nichols' bra. She must have been wearing it throughout the assault. When he raped her, the perp hadn't even displaced her bra. That was consistent with the rape profile Frank had compiled. All of the victims on her list had been raped while fully clothed, and the type of sexual molestation was exclusively anal intercourse.
Frank scrutinized the pictures even more closely. Nichols had bloody abrasions on her knees and thighs. Frank guessed she'd been on her stomach while she was being raped, and that the scratches came from being thrust against whatever surface she was lying on. Frank noted there were no abrasions on her upper thighs, which could have been protected by her skirt.
If she was right, the abrasions might have trapped particles of the surface she was raped on, indicating whether Nichols was raped indoors or outdoors, and on what type of ground. Asphalt? Dirt? Grass? Nothing in the coroner's report described more than the presence of the abrasions, nor was there any evidence from forensics. Frank found the property sheet and was pleased to see that Culver City had at least retained Nichols' clothing as evidence. She scrolled methodically through the investigator's notes and reports.
Nichols had never made it home from summer school that day. The last time her father had seen her he had handed his daughter a lunch bag. The case detective had felt it important to note that the lunch consisted of a bologna and cheese sandwich, chips, and an apple, which corresponded with the protocol notes on her stomach contents. That lunch sounded pretty good to Frank and she remembered she hadn't eaten all day except for two jelly donuts on her way in to work at 5:00 a.m.
She leaned back in her old chair, wondering if she'd found another connection to their perp. It seemed possible, but Frank had learned never to view anything as a certainty except for the fact that there would always be dead bodies. Her eye once again caught the picture of Cassandra Nichols splayed on the ground. This time Frank studied it with a prejudiced eye.
She'd been a beautiful little girl, a good girl, the notes indicated. No trouble. Her mother was dead; her father, still widowed, was a high school teacher. That he had packed his daughter a lunch indicated she was a cared-for little girl. Frank was far too familiar with the anguish of loss, yet she still couldn't imagine losing a child. Telling parents their children were dead was almost the hardest thing about being a homicide detective. Not being able to tell them who killed their son or daughter was the worst.
Who did this to you? she wondered, staring at a smiling, gap-toothed school photo.
That Nichols was black was inconsistent, but because their perp intermingled whites with Hispanics, it wasn't a gross anomaly in his choice of victims. And it was a similar MO in the right geographic area. Nichols had been dead for three months. She was a Frigidaire by homicide standards. To her father, she was still his baby. To her killer, if it was the same man, she was an ecstatic memory whose thrill had no doubt faded. Frank fingered the photo, considering the ramifications.
It was tempting to think they might have another link to their perp, but Frank was cautious about attributing this to him yet. And while she wanted the same man to be responsible for all the assaults and all the homicides, the possibility was daunting. If it was true, there was a very dangerous man out there who was able to rape and kill at will. He was smart, and no doubt getting smarter with each successful crime, his intensity level escalating. And it was Frank's job to apprehend him. The immensity of that caught up with her as she stared at Cassandra Nichols.
A rumbling in Frank's gut broke her concentration. Reluctantly, she put the photo away. She massaged her face for a moment, reorienting herself to the world beyond three-ring binders. She stuffed the last one into her briefcase and walked downstairs, out to the parking garage. Traffic on Figueroa was stop-and-go, and Frank let the chill air blow the cobwebs out of her brain.
It was warm and lively at the Alibi as she walked around the tables, dipping her head in rough greetings. Frank raised a hand, caught Deirdre's eye, and settled into one of the small booths. Deirdre delivered drinks to a nearby table, asking Frank over her shoulder, "Stout?"
"Double Dewar's, no ice."
Frank waited until the drink came before she opened the remaining murder book. She was beat, but she was almost through the daunting pile. Besides, under the tiredness she had to admit to curiosity. Sipping her drink, she held up a crime scene photograph, not wanting to lay it out for public display.
This girl was white, blonde/blue, a Jane Doe, fifteen to seventeen years old, and the picture made Frank put her drink down. The vie was lying on her side, eyes open to a concrete sidewalk. She was dressed in tattered blue jeans, a T-shirt, open wool shirt, worn Doc Marten-style shoes. The top of her pants was pulled down around her thighs and soaked with blood. A stick projected from between the cheeks of her ass. The lack of blood at the scene indicated she'd probably been dumped there.
Frank stared at the bloodied girl, the bruised face. She didn't bother with the rest of the photographs but quickly read the autopsy protocol. Cause of death, massive internal hemorrhage. Manner, rupture of internal organs by tree branch inserted through anus. The investigative reports confirmed the Doe had been dumped.
Cursing silently, Frank drained the Scotch. Black electricity was zinging through her. What if the rapes had never stopped? What if they'd turned into homicides instead?
Frantically, she pulled notes out of her briefcase and followed the progression of assaults. The first one on her list was in December, and they occurred on a regular basis after that—January, March, April, May, June—then the rapes ended. But Nichols was killed in August, this girl in September, Agoura in October, and Peterson just weeks ago. Like clockwork. The son of a bitch had never stopped, just progressed. She reviewed the assaults, fully aware of their escalating brutality. As his skills had increased, so had his satisfaction threshold. It made sense. With each subsequent attack the perp had raised his bar a little higher. Murder would be a logical, inevitable benchmark. Meaning there would be more and their horror would increase. And he was almost due.
"Need a refill?"
Frank jerked her head up at Deirdre.
"Geez, you look like you've seen a ghost."
"Yeah, maybe I have. How about another double. And something to go, uh, a BLT."
"Toasted?"
"What?"
"Do you want your bread toasted or not?"
Frank was so preoccupied she had trouble understanding the simple question.
"Yeah. Sure."
Frank felt in way over her head for the second time that night. When the sandwich came she jogged out of the Alibi and drove back to the brightly lit station. Taking the steps to the second floor three at a time, she once again pulled her Quantico books, the BLT slowly congealing in its styrofoam box.
After that night at Gil's, it was common for them to cruise the red light strips. The father would drive, they'd both look. When he found a hooker he liked, usually a young girl, the father would make her get in the car. The hookers hated that, but they were usually hungry enough to go for it. If one refused, they'd find another, then park in a secluded lot. The first couple of times the father had gone first, taking the girl in the ass. Then he'd jerked off while he watched his son with her. Soon he stopped fucking the whores and just got off on watching. The rougher his son was, the more he liked it. If the girl complained too much, the boy tightened his shirt around her throat until she shut up. Then he'd bang into her as hard as he wanted. It felt like flying.
10
When Noah walked into the squad room next morning, Frank was waiting impatiently for him at the coffee pot, eating last night's french fries and sandwich. Her hair was slicked back, dripping occasionally aga
inst her burgundy turtleneck, and Noah greeted, "Dudess. Another all-nighter?"
Frank tilted her head toward the office. Noah followed in the wake of her coffee steam.
"Close the door."
"Oh, a good one."
She indicated a city map she'd pinned to the wall above the couch.
"Red pins are rapes, green pins are homicides. I finally got to those murder books yesterday. Here. Take a look at this, too."
She handed him a copy of the report she'd made of the pertinent rape and murder cases.
"Wow."
"No shit."
"So you think he never went underground, just switched to murder."
"Yeah."
"But if it's the same perp, how do you explain this sudden switch from rape to sticks up the ass? Isn't that kinda drastic? I mean we didn't see anything like that with the assaults."
Frank shook her head excitedly, water falling off in fat drops. Her color was high and she was animated, not her regular laconic self.
"Easy. Let's start at the beginning. Look at the ages of these girls. Let's say he's never committed a rape before December, or at least not one he's planned out and thought about. He's out there trolling and wants someone easy. So he picks a little girl. The first one, Aguilar, was only ten. How hard can it be to handle a ten-year old? We know he's a big man. It would be easy to overpower her.
And a little girl's not threatening, you know? She's not street smart, she's not tough, she's an easy mark.
"So Aguilar goes down easy, and he does another little girl in January. That'd be Menendez. She's thirteen, right?"
Noah nodded at the paper in his hand.
"Okay, so she's easy too, and he's getting the hang of this thing. It's simple. He's feeling confident, feeling good. In March he does an eleven-year old. Then in April he graduates to a fourteen-year old, Troupe. That goes down easy too. He's a master now. For the rest of these rapes he stays consistent with fourteen to sixteen-year olds."
"But this Nichols girl is only twelve."
"You're right. But look where she lives...," Frank pointed to an area near a cluster of red pins, "...and where she's found."
She tapped a green pin just above the red ones, saying, "Two blocks from Baldwin Hills Elementary."
Frank pawed through an assortment of notes.
"Look at how he's alternating here," she said, indicating the red pins. "Girls one, two, and four are done at or around Culver City Park. Girls three, five, and six, at or around Kenneth Hahn. With six under his belt he must be feeling pretty confident, and he's smart, too. He must know he can't keep doing this in the same spots and not get caught. So on number seven he goes out of his territory and over to Crenshaw. Number eight is still about as equidistant as seven, but it's west, over at CC High. Do you see?"
Frank swirled her finger above the clustered pins.
"This is his home base. This is where he feels most comfortable. If he's never raped before, and we have no indication he has, he's not going to do it in an unfamiliar place. I'll lay even money he spends a lot of time at these parks, and that they're close to where he lives. This is his 'hood," Frank stressed.
"By the time he does Nichols, he has a long and successful string of rapes behind him. He's got to be feeling pretty good, pretty confident. So let's say he accidentally sees Nichols, he's got a perfect opportunity to take her, and he does. See, he's never taken anybody before, so he must feel very safe here. He's familiar with this 'hood and its rhythms."
Still tapping the cluster of pins, Frank stated adamantly, "I'm willing to bet my left tit that we'll find him somewhere in this area. He does Nichols because, again, she's an easy mark. A little girl. Easy to handle. It's his first abduction. He's excited. He can spend time with this one. We don't know exactly how much time, but from when she left school until seven that night. And where does he dump her? Behind a sandwich joint, a barber shop, and a trophy store, all closed by five. Someone from that area would know that the parking lot behind all those shops would be deserted by seven o'clock—around the time he dumped her."
Frank paused, but started again almost immediately as Noah began to speak.
"He might not even have meant to kill her. He could've gotten carried away, which is what I think happened."
She handed Noah the pictures of Cassandra Nichols.
"If you look carefully you can see the marks from her bra. Look at the lines there," she pointed. "I think he got a little panicky, didn't know what to do, messed her up a little to throw us off his track, make it look like a hundred other rapes, and dumped her. When I was looking at this picture I almost dismissed this as an unrelated case, because of the clothes, and the fact that she's black. But the marks from the bra tell us he never had her clothes off; she was dressed the whole time. We know he likes that."
"Yeah, but what about her being black? I mean that's pretty inconsistent with his pattern."
Noah was asking good questions. Frank had been up all night asking them too.
"Right again. But one, I don't think he was really trolling for Nichols. I think he happened upon her somehow, saw his opportunity, and took it. That would explain why he panicked. And two, I went through my notes from that residency I did at Quantico. A serial perp will usually have an ideal victim that fits his fantasies, but it's not unheard of to sacrifice ideal for opportunity. That could explain Nichols."
Still staring at her pictures, Noah said, "She's just a baby."
Frank didn't tell him she'd felt the same thing, continuing instead with her case.
"Nichols is young. He's back to practicing on little girls, but she goes down so smoothly, and he's confident from all his rapes, so his next girl is closer to his ideal."
Frank gave Noah the Jane Doe pictures.
"According to the coroner's report she's between sixteen and eighteen. But look at her—she's small. He's not IDing these girls.
He doesn't know how old she is, and she could easily be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Another thing. She was a runaway. Autopsy showed alcohol and crack in her system, grass, no food in her stomach, looked like it had been days since she'd eaten. She'd be another easy mark.
"Now, I'll bet with her he was totally prepared. He'd tasted blood with Nichols and he liked it, so he was prepared to waste this girl. When he was done with her. Remember, this is the first time he's had these girls for as long as he wants them. I think he killed Nichols accidentally, maybe while he was raping her. He used a belt on Nichols instead of a towel, which would be consistent with a lack of planning. Maybe he put more force on it than he realized, then poof, she's dead and he's kinda freaked.
"But with the Doe he's more careful. No belt marks. He's gone back to using a towel. He's playing with her. He's in his element. She has all her clothes on. He likes that. He's punching this girl around like a boxing bag. You can see in the coroner's pictures where a button and a seam on her jeans left marks on her flesh."
Frank's eyes were shining, her voice excited as she added, "This is one interesting boy, No. He's slamming these girls, but he's not getting off on degrading them, he's not making them sex slaves. He doesn't like anything except anal sex. He's not getting off on torturing them per se, though if some mother were doing this to me it'd go down in my book as torture. It's more like he's angry.
"Look at the way he's battering them," she said, jabbing a finger into one of the autopsy photos. "And only anal sex. He's not looking at these girls when he rapes them. He's barely touching them, but he's exerting his dominance in no uncertain terms. I'll bet that somebody's done this to him. He wants to hurt these girls like he's been hurt and he's running on pure rage while he's doing it. It's common for serialists to escalate the intensity of their attacks, like junkies needing progressively stronger hits to get high. With each assault this guy's fantasies get stronger and stronger. At this point, a rape without murder would probably be very unsatisfying for him."
"Which means he's going to get worse."
Frank nodded. H
er enthusiasm suddenly vanished, and she looked like what she was—a cop who'd been up for forty-eight hours, working on the hardest case of her career. She sounded weary when she spoke. "We're going to reinterview all the girls, the parents, the responding officers, Culver City homicide. It's going to be a pain in the ass, but at least we've got a track on this guy. I want to get composites done, plaster his mug all over town, go to the parks and see if anyone recognizes the composite."
"Does the captain know about this yet?"
"Nope. He's in Sacramento. He'll be back tomorrow." Noah chuckled. "I wanna be there when you tell him." Frank smiled tightly, unable to derive pleasure even from the thought of Fubar's jaw falling to his feet.
11
The phone rang. "Homicide. Franco." It was the assistant DA, and she unloaded. Within twenty-four hours, two of Frank's detectives had tried to steamroll her into taking three separate cases based on practically no cause and with equally little supporting evidence. She explained that this was L.A., not some Podunk backwater town, and she needed compelling evidence to get a criminal to trial. Priors and circumstance wouldn't do it.
Frank listened patiently. Pissing off Lydia McQueen was not a good idea. And she was right. If they didn't have solid evidence the detectives shouldn't have gone to her, but it was easy when they were carrying dozens of cases to show the ADA what they had and hope she'd go to bat with it. Frank spent almost half an hour trying to mollify The Queen and then had a talk with Gough about his case. She knew he was suffering from a big case of burnout. He was still a good cop—after all, he'd been doing it for so long—but he'd taken to cutting corners that were best left whole. Frank played on his loyalty to the squad, pointing out that long after he was gone the department was going to have to keep working with the DA's office, and that it would help his colleagues if he went by the book while he was still badged.
Back in her office, the light was blinking on her phone. Hodges, Homicide from the Culver City PD. She returned the call. He was antsy that she was poking around in their cases. She reassured him that she wasn't going behind his back, or being asked to get involved by higher-ups. All the while she was thinking what a paranoid mother he was.