A few minutes later Rebecca spotted a well-dressed young man exiting his home. She pulled to the curb and watched as he entered his car and drove away. Noting that his house lights went off a moment later, she jotted that address and marked it with a double asterisk.
Prey, sure.
By six-thirty she had spotted two more similar departures and was beginning to feel the excitement growing within her. How easy it was! If she’d been cruising around looking for prey, she’d already found three more candidates for a sunrise visit.
A moment later she turned onto a cul-de-sac just as a tall figure in a running suit emerged from a cluster of homes dead ahead. He was in the beam of her headlights for a split-second then dodged back into the shadows and disappeared.
It was one of those “police moments” and Rebecca knew it. She sent the car surging forward in pursuit without pausing to consider alternatives. There were, after all, no alternatives. She was in her personal car with no way to call for help, and she’d had the man in her headlights. Armed and dangerous, no doubt, ready and willing to kill a police officer or anyone else who got in his way…but there were no alternatives. Detective Storme was in hot pursuit of a suspect.
Chapter Six
The sun had risen by this time but only a grayish lightening from the dawn skies had penetrated the mist-shrouded hills above San Remo when Rebecca encountered her suspect. Visibility was not as good as in clear nighttime, but the headlights of her car provided a glowing cone of comfort as she swerved into the residential driveway from which the suspect had momentarily emerged. She hit her high beams as the car rocked to a halt, grotesquely illuminating the space between two homes, then stepped out cautiously with revolver drawn. Using the car door as a shield, she called out, “Police! Step forward into the light with your hands raised!”
But there was no response, and she had not really expected one. A gate in a cinder block wall stood open back there. The suspect undoubtedly had run out through the rear of the property and was probably in the next block already.
No way would she give chase on foot, without backup or even a way to communicate her situation to others. Rebecca went by the police book, and that book was very specific as to the proper procedures to be followed in such a situation.
So…she would resume the chase by car. Maybe she could pick him up again and at least ID his vehicle as and if he returned to one somewhere in the area. Of course, if he lived in the area….
Her heart was pounding as she flung herself into the car and shifted into reverse. But just then a woman appeared at the front door of the nearest house. She stumbled outside stark naked and bloodied, hands tied behind her back, and called out in a stricken voice, “Please help me!”
So that was the end of that chase.
The rotten bastard had already found his prey of the day and done his dirty deeds.
Worse yet, he’d evidently done it right under Rebecca’s nose.
This victim’s name was Vicki Porfino. She was 25, had three small children, and her husband had left the house just minutes before the man in the jogging suit invaded her bedroom. The victim was bleeding from numerous cuts and gashes upon her body and she was hemorrhaging from the vagina, so all of Rebecca’s thoughts and energies were now focused on this woman’s plight. She did her best to render first aid while awaiting response by the medics, and remained close as the victim was being stabilized for transport to the hospital, but the young mother was too weak and confused to speak coherently of what had happened to her. Physical evidence at the scene, however, suggested an M.O. that was almost identical to the previous case, even to the missing telephone cords.
The three children, all under the age of five, were unharmed but frightened. They had seen their mother as first Rebecca and then the medics worked over her, and they had been inconsolable from the moment she was whisked away by the ambulance. They could give no useful information as to the names of relatives or their father’s employment, nor could any of the neighbors, so Rebecca was stuck with the care and comfort of the children while awaiting the arrival of juvenile authorities. Meanwhile it had seemed that every patrolman on duty had responded to Rebecca’s initial call and the neighborhood was crawling with cops. The swing dicks, sans Sgt. Storme, arrived on the scene at a few minutes past seven and were still on hand, bleary-eyed and restless, when the day-shift detectives arrived an hour later.
Nobody mentioned her husband to Rebecca and she would not have thought of asking about him. As soon as she was relieved of the children she conducted her own cursory inspection of the crime scene then went straight to the hospital on the chance that she could get an early interview with the victim. That, as it turned out, was out of the question. Porfino had undergone an emergency hysterectomy to remove a ruptured uterus and was then hovering between life and death in the intensive care unit. The surgeon who had performed the procedure was in surgery with another patient and would not be available for questioning until the afternoon.
Porfino’s husband, who had been located and notified by the hospital staff, had arrived shortly ahead of Rebecca. It befell her to explain the situation to the dazed man and to elicit personal information, since she was then the only officer present. He responded mechanically to her questions, never once removing his gaze from the door to the ICU.
It was shortly past ten o’clock when Rebecca arrived at her office and began organizing her thoughts and notes into a coherent report of the morning’s activities. She had found herself becoming very depressed while at the hospital—a bit shaken, perhaps, by her own proximity to the scene while the crime was going down and the realization that it could have gone down unimpeded even if the area had been as flooded with cops before the fact as after. A feeling of helplessness, of impotence, maybe, had settled over her, and she had carried it all the way to her desk.
It had so preoccupied her that it was not until she’d dropped her things on her desk and begun toying with a report pad that she took note of the very strange atmosphere in place at the P.D. The usual bustle was totally absent—as were most of the people, it seemed. It was like dropping in on a Sunday morning, except that the quietness now had an almost ominous quality.
After a few minutes of frustration over the report she was trying to draw together in her mind, she dropped her pencil and went exploring, found a huddle of brass standing quietly outside the chief’s office. She caught a glimpse through the open doorway of Rafael Gutierrez, the new City Manager, and the legs only of another man seated at the chief’s desk. Her boss, Jack Morgan, was in the group outside the office. Rebecca caught his eye and sent him a silent question. He frowned and shook his head at her so she retreated immediately and returned to her desk.
More departmental politics, she supposed, and a hell of a time for it too. These people had better forget politics, she was thinking, get off their butts and start policing this town more efficiently if they didn’t want jungle law to take it over.
Then she realized with a start that the “legs only” she’d seen at the chief’s desk belonged to her husband.
So, she thought…it was coming down at last—the big shuffle. Too late though, probably—too late for Rebecca, too late for a marriage that had been slowly dying from too many small wounds, too much neglect, too little a priority in lives too busy.
She’d made no connection whatever, at that moment, between that solemn air outside the chief’s office and her husband’s failure to come home the night before. There was just too much already on the mind, too much to think about, too much to do. She tackled her report, found it tough going, kept looking up from her task to sample the official atmosphere around her, began growing vaguely troubled, wondering what the hell was wrong with her—realized suddenly that she was very concerned for her husband, worried even.
For gosh sake…!
Pete was a big boy!—a big bad cop who could take care of himself, who insisted on taking care of himself, even to the extent of firmly closing his wife off from any real em
otion, any kind of vulnerability.
To hell with him!
She went doggedly back to her task. Betty Draper, the chief’s secretary, walked past twice, both times with a sympathetic smile directed toward Rebecca. Her second pass was with a tray of refreshments from the lounge. Rebecca called after her, “How’s it going in there?”
Betty halted and took a step backward to position herself for eye contact as she replied with a reassuring smile, “It’s just routine, I guess. I’m sure it’ll be okay. It’s just, you know, a bit sensitive because he was a juvenile.”
She was moving again before Rebecca could even think of responding to that surprising information. What the hell was that about?
Then the pieces suddenly crashed together inside her head.
Pete was in trouble!—maybe serious trouble!
Rebecca was not aware at the moment that something very curious had just happened inside of her. She’d become a wife instead of a cop, and she was thinking like a wife. All else that had been clouding her thoughts all that morning was suddenly gone, vaporized, and her husband was her total concern.
But only for a moment.
Vicki Porfino died at 10:53 that morning.
Chapter Seven
Peter Storme was 36 years of age, stood an even six feet tall, weighed 185 pounds with very little body fat, and probably was as effective a police officer as any who’d worn the badge. He was not a “hot dog” or a “cowboy,” had never been the type who enjoy throwing their official weight around. He was, however, a very stubborn man and a very committed cop. If he bent the rules of police procedure a bit here and there, it was always out of that commitment and through an impatience, now and then, with plodding methodology.
Pete believed in the Constitution.
He believed in civil rights, too, for persons suspected of committing a crime. Nobody, though—nobody—possessed any citizen’s right to commit a crime nor any rights during the commission of that crime, and certainly not any right to respectful handling when caught in the act.
The meeting in the chief’s office was part of a Shooting Review. It was standard procedure, any time an officer fired his weapon—not usually with the city manager present, however, so his presence there strongly underscored the seriousness of the situation.
It was not a trial or hearing in the formal sense but very like a trial and it can be a shaky experience even when the officer knows that he has acted properly. The television newsmen had jumped on this incident, so perhaps the CM felt pressure to see that the very best light was placed on it.
His first order of the day was: “Nobody but the PIO talks to the press about this. ‘No comment’ is the only acceptable response from anyone else.”
Then he asked Pete the 64 dollar question: “When you fired, did you feel that your life was in danger?”
Storme shrugged and replied, “He was shooting at me from about twenty feet away. I had no cover.”
“But did you feel that your life was in danger?”
“What kind of question is that? Of course I knew I was in danger. There’s no time to intellectualize it when something like that is going down but every cop lives with that knowledge all the time. And sleeps with it, sometimes.”
The CM doggedly persisted, “Did you feel—”
“I felt, I felt!” Storme snapped. “You feel it all the time you’re on the streets! You just don’t know where it might be coming from. But when the shooting starts, you know damned well where it’s coming from. So you respond appropriately. That’s what the training is all about.”
“Some people,” said the CM in a soft voice, “are already suggesting that perhaps you did not respond appropriately, that maybe you panicked and shot that boy dead in his tracks without warning, that his shot was nothing but a dying reflex. In other words, you shot first and investigated later.”
“What’s to investigate?” Storme replied calmly. “I saw the thing going down. I saw the kid run out with a gun in his hand. I ordered him to drop it. Instead, he came down on me. So I went back to him as the only sane response. Three civilian eyewitnesses verify that in every detail.”
“The girl’s statement does not corroborate.”
Storme reminded him, “She’s charged with armed robbery. What’d you expect her to say?”
“She claims that the boy did not even see you, that she screamed a warning to him but too late, that you shot him as he was trying to surrender.”
“I saw her statement,” Storme muttered. “It’s pure bullshit. The kid did see me, he did hear me, and he was scared to death. I thought for sure he was going to surrender. But then she yelled from the car. I think she yelled at him to shoot. That’s what I think because he immediately opened fire on me.”
“You didn’t put that in your report,” the chief drawled. “Just that she screamed something from the car.”
“I was reporting the facts,” Storme replied.
“Could you,” the CM asked heavily, “have handled the situation any differently? Think about your answer very carefully and be aware of the fact that we could have a wrongful death suit on our hands. Could you have handled it differently?”
Storme glared at the CM for a moment then replied, “Sure I could. I could have just stood there like the other witnesses and let it go down. Could’ve gone home and made love to my wife. But that’s not what I’m sworn to do. I responded as any cop would. Even after that, though, sure…I still had an option. I could’ve let the kid empty his gun at me and hope that nothing connected and also that his accomplice would not run me down with the car. I could’ve died, too, couldn’t I.”
The chief softly declared, “Nobody is suggesting that, Pete.”
Storme replied, “No, I think this guy is doing just that,” indicating the CM. “Let’s look at this thing with real eyes. The kid was 17 years old, not 7. Juvenile or not, 17 year old boys have been frontline combat soldiers in every war ever fought. This one was waving a .357 Magnum, not a cap pistol. It was not a stand-off situation with both of us behind cover, so I had no opportunity to employ reason or persuasion. I challenged a criminal during the commission of an armed robbery and he fired on me. I fired back, and more than my own life was on the line there. 17 or 77, this was an armed robber with the will to shoot and he was endangering the community. I would be guilty of dereliction if I’d failed to respond to that threat. I am sorry that the boy is dead. I am not sorry that I did my duty as an officer.”
“That’s great,” murmured the CM. “So you were thinking of all that. I mean, all that was in your mind when you—”
“Hell no! Do you know how quick something like this goes down? What kind of a cop is—”
“But it was in the mind nonetheless. This is the way you regard your—your….”
Storme shot Chief Walsh a disgusted look as he responded to that. “Read the officer’s oath. I did what I was sworn to do.”
“Exactly!” the CM agreed, obviously satisfied with Storme’s firm stance. “We’ll all stick to that as the official line. The officer fired in self defense while in the performance of his sworn duty.”
Walsh added, to formally conclude the proceedings, “Shooting was justified. Matter’s closed.”
But the matter was not closed, of course. Not for Storme, not for San Remo. The dead boy’s parents were formally filing charges at that very moment.
Peter Storme himself would no doubt be filing charges of his own for the rest of his life. Regardless of how firm his official stance, the only “closed matter” in Storme’s mind at the moment was that boy’s life.
How does any fully human being ever really “justify” something like that?
But it went with the territory, Storme knew that too. It is what cops are paid to do.
And nobody ever said that they’re supposed to enjoy it.
Certainly he had not enjoyed it, not any part of it. He’d spent most of the night writing his report and going over and over the details with his superiors. The chief
had taken him out to breakfast at seven o’clock but his head had not yet touched a pillow. He was feeling a bit sick and groggy when the formal review concluded and he was excused.
Rebecca was waiting for him in the hall just outside. She was wearing the tenderest face he had seen on her in quite awhile. “Hey, you worried about me, kid?” he asked her.
She replied, “Of course not. Nothing to be worried about. Right?”
He said, “Well maybe so. I killed a juvenile last night.”
She said, “I heard.”
He put an arm about her and walked her toward her cubbyhole office. “That’s why I didn’t get home.”
“I figured that.”
“Uh huh. Guess I look like shit, huh. Up all night.”
She said, “So what’s new?”
He soberly reminded her, “It’s a cop’s life, Becky. What the hell?”
She replied quickly, “I know. Getting a taste of it myself. Another rape, same M.O. Except this time he almost killed her. It’s getting under my skin, Pete.”
“I was hoping you could take the day off. Guess not, huh?”
“Guess not,” she replied.
“That’s what I get for marrying a cop,” he said.
“Tell me about it.”
Rebecca’s telephone was ringing when they reached her office. She scooped it up, listened to a brief message, then turned to Pete as she hung up. “I have to go to the hospital,” she said. “Go take a shower and get in bed. I’ll try to be there by noon.”
He smiled as he replied, “Best offer I’ve had all week.”
It seemed to be the right time and the best of circumstances for the Stormes to get together in a better understanding of each other’s problems.
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