But it was not to be, this time.
Each, after all, was married to a cop. And things were very quickly becoming very tense in San Remo.
Chapter Eight
Rebecca had put the story together for herself while Pete was undergoing the inquisition in the chief’s office. The dispatcher’s log of the previous evening and the patrol reports told it all in cold hard facts. The boy’s name was Billy Costa. He had a record of juvenile offenses but nothing really serious, and he had never served time. The girl was Maria Sanchez. She was currently under the supervision of the juvenile court and had a long history of shoplifting offenses.
The trouble with cold hard facts, as Rebecca well knew, is that they always conceal the human element—the anguish of loved ones mourning their dead and the despair of the officer who is directly responsible for that anguish. A good cop is also a good human being who does not gloat over the kill. No death is taken lightly, and often it is hard to distinguish between the victims and the criminals. As in this case, the criminal is often his own victim.
Rebecca had not yet been directly involved in a shooting, but a veteran officer who was breaking her in during her first month on patrol had been forced to shoot a sixty year old man who had gone berserk and was terrorizing his neighborhood with an axe. That officer had wept over the corpse, had left the force a few months later, and was now making his living selling vacuums door to door after a long bout with alcoholism. So wasn’t that officer a victim too?
Rebecca understood also, however, that not every cop is a good cop. There are those in the ranks here and there who will use the gun at the slightest provocation and that was why the shooting review had become standard procedure in all modern police departments throughout the land. It was a necessary and proper routine, she knew that, but she also knew like every cop knew that they go into those things under an unspoken accusation and that it is their burden to justify the shooting.
That can be especially trying if one is already harboring emotional stress over the incident, as she knew that Pete was.
She was not so much “worried” as sympathetic, knowing also that her husband needed comforting and support whether he realized it or not. Apparently he had realized it, and she’d recognized his invitation to her as a plea for help.
But the telephone call had come from the hospital. Vicki Porfino had taken a sudden turn for the worse and was being returned to surgery. So Rebecca had plenty of reason to be divided emotionally as she responded to that call, leaving Pete to his own devices for another hour or so. She was under considerable stress herself, which is possibly why she reacted to an encounter with Charles Andrews as she did.
Andrews covered city hall and the crime beat for the San Remo Bulletin. He was also a “stringer” for one of the wire services and wrote occasional feature articles for larger newspapers. He was not one of Rebecca’s favorite people, for private as well as professional reasons. He had come to San Remo at about the time when she joined the department and his very first feature story in the area was an attack on female cops in general, Rebecca in particular, after she had allowed him to ride with her through an entire shift.
She had felt betrayed and abused by the highly biased and distorted view of female officers, and she’d told him about it in no uncertain language at the time. But he was a good looking guy and he could be charming when it served his purposes—she’d even been a bit turned on to the guy at first—and he’d just laughed it off. Turned out that Andrews held little respect for cops in general, male or female, and his stories usually had an anti-police slant.
So he had been a small thorn in the side for several years and she was not at all pleased to run into him outside the building as she was hurrying to her car. She slammed into him as she was rounding the corner to the parking area, and the collision would have knocked her off her feet if he had not grabbed her on the rebound and jerked her back into another but softer collision. He was a big man—six-one or two, lean but hard—and the collision had really jarred her. She pushed clear of that unpleasantly close encounter and growled angrily as she struggled to regain her composure.
Andrews seemed amused by it, and that made Rebecca even angrier. “Good thing you’re not a regular woman,” he said, grinning.
“I’m fine, and as regular as any woman,” she huffily assured him. “Good thing you’re not a regular man.”
The reporter chuckled as he jibed back, “Thank God I’m not, considering the standard that must be in your head. I still can’t believe it.”
“Can’t believe what?” Rebecca muttered as she straightened her jacket.
“That a beautiful and educated woman like you would marry one of these aborigines. Whatever must it be like for you?”
She snapped, “These aborigines are holding your freedoms firm for you, Mr. Libertarian.”
“Go tell that to Billy Costa’s family,” Andrews suggested heavily. “Maybe it will lighten their grief.”
Rebecca replied, “No, I think I’d rather tell it to Eileen Triesta. Maybe it will give her the courage to keep her store open after dark one more night.”
“Thanks for the quote. I’ll run it right alongside the one from Maria Sanchez: ‘Billy was trying to surrender when the cop gunned him down.’ Do you really think Triesta wanted that boy killed over a ninety dollar robbery attempt?”
“Do you really think my husband did?” she shot back angrily.
“Looks that way. His only concern obviously was to protect the ninety dollars. At any cost.”
“I see your brain is still kinked with twisted reasoning!” Rebecca spat. “The number of dollars has nothing to do with anything! How can the responding officer know anything about that? What do you think?—we stop and count the missing dollars before we decide on a proper response?”
Andrews seemed to be enjoying the exchange. He smiled serenely as he replied, “That changes nothing in the final result. Your cowboy-husband killed a 17 year old boy over ninety lousy dollars, that’s the bottom line.”
“Your bottom line, maybe, not mine! Ninety or ninety million makes no difference! Pete didn’t shoot that boy as punishment for stealing! What are you suggesting?—that we just fire all the cops and turn it back to jungle law and the survival of the meanest? We’re talking the preservation of civilization here, Mr. Liberty. Do you really want to live in a town without police protection in this day and age?”
“But who protects us against the police, eh?”
“The press, I suppose.”
“Damned right the press,” Andrews said, and sauntered on into the building.
Rebecca bit her tongue so hard it hurt. What a sap she was for arguing with a jerk like that! But she was thinking that she’d sure love to see the day when that son of a bitch had a savage at his throat and was yelling for a cop to rescue him.
Maybe she’d saunter over.
And maybe not.
The second victim of the sunrise rapist, Vicki Porfino, was dead when Rebecca reached the hospital.
The official cause of death would not be established until a post-mortem examination and formal finding by the coroner, but Rebecca was able to interview the attending physician and get the details of the victim’s internal injuries.
Some sort of blunt instrument had been inserted deeply into the vagina with such repeated force as to tear it loose from the cervix and rupture the uterus. There was trauma also to the urinary tract and other organs.
The surgeon had removed the entire uterus and “patched up” the other damages, but the post-surgical prognosis had been guarded at best, so it was no great surprise to the attending physician that Vicki Porfino had succumbed to her injuries.
“That woman was savaged,” he told Rebecca. “I’d like nothing better than to be called as an expert witness for the prosecution when you catch this guy.”
“You’ll have your day in court,” she assured him.
But this was wrong, the way she felt, and she knew it was wrong. A police officer
is not supposed to become emotionally involved in such matters. They were supposed to be cool and detached, interested only in ascertaining the facts and capable of presenting those facts in a coherent manner to a judge and jury.
That could be hard, sometimes.
It was going to be damned hard, this time.
Much harder than even Rebecca realized at that moment. Vicki Porfino was but the first to die at the hands of the sunrise rapist.
Chapter Nine
Peter Storme had not known it at the time but he had worked his final shift as a swing dick. Not that the shooting had loomed that important in the department’s politics but undoubtedly it had been a factor that helped to tip the shift controversy completely off center. The chief had sent Storme home shortly after the conclusion of the shooting review and ordered him to take the night off. Storme later learned that Walsh had huddled with the captains in an administrative session through most of that afternoon.
He learned also that the city manager and the city attorney had both expressed dismay over the number of hours the Swing Team had been clocking in recent months, inferring that the men were incapable of operating efficiently under such a staggering workload.
But it was actually the sunrise rapist who was chiefly responsible for the demise of the Swing Team, Storme would later decide. It was the reality of that rampage, not politics, that framed the chief’s decision to reorganize the department immediately.
That is getting a bit ahead of the story, though. The official reorganization occurred two days after the shooting review which occurred on a Wednesday morning. Storme had learned that Rebecca was out working the second rape when he returned from breakfasting with the chief at about eight o’clock that morning. He had discussed the case with the chief while they awaited the arrival of the city manager, and Walsh had asked Storme—rather archly—how he would feel about working with Rebecca on the case.
The CM arrived while Storme was thinking about that, and there’d been no further discussion of the matter at the time, so he’d really had no clear idea of what was in the chief’s mind as of that moment.
Then there had been that touching encounter with Rebecca outside the chief’s office. He had known in that instant that at least there were some embers remaining which perhaps could be fanned to warm their relationship, maybe even to save the marriage, but he’d been very cautious—too cautious, maybe—in trying to seize that moment and run with it.
Hell, he should have just told her, “I need you, kid. Come home with me and convince me that I did the only thing possible. Bring some tears to my eyes, dammit, and help me get over this awful feeling.”
But he couldn’t do that.
So he went home without her, showered and shaved, dug out an old NFL tape and tried to focus on last season’s Superbowl, fell asleep sprawled across the bed during the pre-game hype and awoke with a start nearly eight hours later. A sheet was draped across his lower body.
The TV and VCR had been turned off at some point. So Rebecca had been there, but obviously not for long.
In the kitchen he found a prepared salad, an oven-ready dinner for one, and a note. Rebecca would not be home until late. Pete should not wait up for her.
He learned later that she had gone out to interview a list of working couples who lived in the rape neighborhood and were accessible only during the evening hours, but she had not stated that in the note so he had no idea where she’d gone or why. He just felt terribly alone and at odds with himself, knew that he couldn’t hang around that quiet apartment all evening, so he dressed and went out too.
He went by the P.D. on the off-chance that he would catch Rebecca at her desk. Instead he caught both captains going over a tentative reorganization plan. He tried to walk away from that one but they wanted to talk about the swing workload so, as it happened, Storme spent most of his “evening off” at the P.D., after which the three went out for a bite to eat and ended up closing a bar at two a.m.
Rebecca was snug in bed when he returned home. There was a kiss on his pillow—a candy kiss—which was Rebecca’s subtle way of notifying him that she did not wish to be disturbed when he came to bed.
So he left the kiss where it was and bedded down on the living room couch and lay there wide awake for a couple of hours before drifting into a troubled sleep. Rebecca was up and gone again when he awakened at six.
The sunrise rapist struck again that morning while Storme was showering, shaving, and grabbing a quick breakfast. He hit another young mother just two blocks away from his first victim. The guy was on a tear for sure, three hits on three successive mornings, and becoming more unhinged each time. This time he bit off a nipple, carved an obscene message into the flesh of the victim’s abdomen, broke her nose and jaw, battered out all the front teeth and left her hogtied around a small chair and bleeding to death.
The victim’s three-year-old son tried to save her life and he was smart enough to realize that the telephone cords were missing so went next door and aroused a neighbor, but his mother was already beyond help.
Rebecca had been patrolling the general area and spotted the patrol car that had been dispatched to the scene. She followed, arrived with the responding officers, and was the first inside the victim’s home, first to discover the savaged young woman in the blood-spattered bedroom.
To describe the scene that Rebecca walked into is almost beyond the range of language. Words alone do not suffice to encompass the sights and odors and the lingering atmosphere of frantic struggle, suffering, and sheer horror which pervaded that room. The victim was unconscious and now beyond any perception of pain or terror but all of it was indelibly etched into the living atmosphere of the hellish scene and it struck Rebecca’s feminine sensitivities with physical force.
She was at once nauseated, compassionate, horrified, mad as hell. Her first reflex was the desire to turn and run—let the patrolmen handle it—and she tasted that strong reaction briefly before steeling herself and pushing beyond it, sternly quelling the nausea by sheer force of will and moved by compassion to the aid of the victim. She did what small things could be done to stanch the flow of blood and keep the victim’s breathing passages clear while the patrolmen radioed for medical help and began securing the crime scene, and she was fully in charge of herself if not the circumstances when the paramedics arrived and took over.
This time she rode inside the ambulance beside the victim, hoping for a fleeting moment of consciousness and perhaps a word or two while the medics continued heroic efforts to maintain that fragile lifeline, but all to no avail.
The official hospital emergency log recorded the victim, Kelly Baxter, as dead on arrival.
The bloodied and emotionally exhausted female detective phoned in a brief report and then allowed a friendly interne to make her comfortable in the physician’s lounge where she quietly wept for ten minutes while scrubbing the victim’s blood from her skin and hair. The clothing would simply have to go; she would never wear it again. She tried to call Peter at home, to ask him to bring her some fresh clothes and give her a ride to the P.D., but there was no answer to a full minute of rings, so she walked the four blocks to the civic center in bloodstained clothing, checked out a vehicle and went home.
She reached the apartment at a few minutes before eight o’clock, took a twenty minute combination shower and shampoo, put on her prettiest working dress and returned to the crime scene.
Pete was there, in the company of Jack Morgan and several other day-shift detectives. The coroner’s men were there, too, and a special forensics unit from the L.A. Sheriff’s Department.
Her eyes brushed Pete’s several times during that quiet, almost hushed investigation but neither spoke to the other, even though it appeared that Pete was actually in charge and running things.
Morgan came over to her as she stood silently surveying the bloodied bedroom from just inside the door and quietly ordered her to “see the lady at 722.”
That was the house next door, from which th
e call for help had originated.
So Rebecca went next door and talked to Joan Parker, the 26-year-old mother of two visibly concerned little girls who were trying their best to entertain the three-year-old from the house of horror.
Parker was intelligent, composed, coherent. But there was fear in the eyes and an unspoken dread in the voice as she quietly responded to Rebecca’s questions. She made tea and they sat at the kitchen table and sipped it as Rebecca jotted notes and probed for more and more detail, but the Parkers were new in the neighborhood and Joan had only a nodding acquaintance with this latest victim, had heard nothing unusual or disturbing that morning until the little boy from next door began banging on her door.
“Poor little thing,” she said. “He was shaking so hard I thought he was having convulsions until I saw the blood all over him. And he was screaming for his Mommy. I knew something terrible had happened then. And gosh, my husband had left for work just a half-hour earlier.”
“Did you investigate?”
“No. I wouldn’t take my girls over there, and I sure wouldn’t leave them here alone. I telephoned the police and they were here almost before I could hang up the phone, so I just…did what I could to calm the little boy. I don’t even know his name.” That last was said in an unbelieving whisper.
“His name is Jonathan,” Rebecca informed her. “His father has been notified and he should be here to pick him up pretty soon now.”
“I hope so,” the neighbor said worriedly. “I don’t know what to do for him.”
His mother is dead,” Rebecca said unemotionally.
“Oh God! Poor little thing!”
“You knew about the other incidents in this general area?”
“Oh yes, it was all over TV.”
“Worry you?”
“Sure it worried me. I must have got up and checked the doors and windows three or four times last night.” She shivered. “And it happened right next door!”
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