Renee acted surprised. “Oh, you want a report?”
Tower cast a baleful look at her.
Renee cocked an eyebrow back. “Careful, cowboy. You throw around looks like that and you will find yourself in a shootout.”
“I can take you,” Tower said.
“Not with that shoulder rig, you won’t.”
“Newsflash,” Tower said to her. “You don’t even carry a gun.”
Renee smiled mysteriously. “Not that you can see.”
Tower held up both palms. “I surrender.”
“Wise move.” Renee returned to her coffee, sipping and staring at the wall.
Tower waited patiently. Renee was, in his estimation, an odd duck at times. He wasn’t sure how the neurons in her brain fired exactly, but he was usually pleased with the result. All it seemed to take was some banter and a little patience.
“I don’t think it’s about rain for him,” Renee told him.
“How’s that again?”
“The Rainy Day Rapist,” Renee said. “I don’t think it fits. I think the rain is a coincidence.”
Tower shrugged. “Okay.”
“Though,” she added, “now that he has this name in the media, that may just change.”
“May?”
“Yes. It may. Then again, it may not. You never know, at least until there’s a more detailed profile of the suspect. And that’s something we really don’t have just yet.”
“That’s helpful,” Tower said. “Thank you, Nostradamus.”
Renee cocked her eyebrow again. “I’m just letting you know what I think. That’s because there isn’t much for me to say that I know.”
Tower walked wordlessly to the coffee pot. He grabbed a small white Styrofoam cup and filled it halfway.
“I thought you were coffeed out,” Renee said.
Tower turned back to her and did his best to cock an eyebrow. “I’m getting the feeling I’m going to need it.”
Renee chuckled. “Touche.”
Tower stepped over to her desk. “You’ve read the reports?”
Renee nodded. “MacLeod’s was especially good.”
“She’s a good troop.”
“She covered everything you could ask for. The one before that — Giovanni, I think — was pretty solid, too. That’s the good news.” Renee sipped her coffee and continued. “The bad news is that when I run his M.O. as a distinct, specific M.O., I get no hits.”
“So run the basic M.O. Blitz attack, and so forth.”
“That’s too general. I get a phone book of rapists.”
Tower sighed. “Same as the first rape, then.”
“Exactly. There’s really no difference in the M.O., other than the location. Even that’s similar.” Renee held up one hand, then the other. “Park, park.”
“Yeah,” Tower agreed. He sipped his coffee thoughtfully, then said, “Odds are it’s one of those guys that popped up when you got the phone book.”
“Maybe,” she conceded. “I’m running all of them to see who’s incarcerated, who’s out of state and who’s still a possible suspect. The problem is that while we have a distinct M.O. in both cases, the victims don’t really provide much information. Neither one saw him. He didn’t say much.”
“He said ‘whammo.’”
“Yes, he did.”
“That’s pretty unique.”
“Too unique.” Renee leaned forward and fished a computer printout from the stack of paperwork on her desk. “I ran that term through our system. I came up with zero exact hits. Here’s a list of close matches.”
Tower took the paper from her hand and scanned the list. There were seventeen entries.
“Most of those,” Renee explained, “aren’t used in anywhere near the same context.”
“Context how?”
Renee lifted a finger. “Not the same type of crime, for starters. There wasn’t a single use of anything similar to ‘whammo’ in any rapes. Same story with any assault by a male subject on a female victim. Also, even in the instances where some form of the phrase pops up in a couple of male-on-male assaults, the usage is completely different.”
“How different?” Tower asked.
Renee s closed her eyes for a moment. Then she said, “I think one guy said something about getting blindsided in a fight. He said that he was dealing with one issue and then wham! He was hit from behind.”
“That’s not even close.”
“Nope. My point exactly.”
Tower waved his Styrofoam cup at the computer. “I figured you could do better with all this.”
Renee sighed. “I’ve told you this before, John. It is better. We may have come up empty on the search, but we came up empty that much sooner.”
“Oh, great,” Tower said. “Because I hate to wait for disappointment.”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” Renee said calmly. “It doesn’t solve anything.”
“It isn’t supposed to,” Tower grumbled.
Renee reached into her stack of papers and removed a yellow sheet of legal paper. She extended it toward Tower. “Take a look at this.”
Tower reached out and took the paper. “What is it?”
“Questions.”
“I’ve already got plenty of those.”
“Still.”
Tower looked down at the legal sheet. Renee’s measured writing stood out against the yellow paper. She’d written three questions.
Why does he rape?
Who does he hate?
Is he evolving?
Tower looked up at her. “Are you serious?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“Because,” Tower answered, “how in the hell am I supposed to know the answer to these questions?”
“That’s the point.”
Tower stared at Renee. She stared calmly back. Tower took a sip of coffee and considered her words. After a full thirty seconds had passed, he shrugged, “You win. Explain this to me before my head explodes.”
Renee smiled graciously. “Your head won’t explode.”
“I can feel it pulsing already.”
Renee waved his words away. “Look, John. You’re a detective. You follow the clues, right?”
“Sure.”
“But in this case, you don’t have any witnesses. Not even the victims are truly witnesses to anything other than some bare facts.”
“Yeah.”
“Forensics hasn’t come through at all.”
“No. I think he was wearing a condom.”
Renee nodded. “And probably gloves and a hat.”
“Probably.”
“So the conventional clues are a dead-end.”
“So far, yeah.”
“Then it’s time to get unconventional.”
“Unconventional? How?”
Renee pointed at the paper in Tower’s hands. “You ask yourself those questions. You try to answer them.”
“With the puny evidence we have?”
Renee shrugged. “With the evidence. And with your own mind.”
Tower rolled his eyes. “You want me to profile him. Like those FBI guys.”
“Not exactly.”
“That’s exactly what it sounds like,” Tower said. “And that shit is just theory and voodoo.”
Renee stared at him with a flat expression, saying nothing.
After a minute, Tower began to squirm. “What?”
She shook her head slightly at him. “John, I don’t appreciate the attitude. I’m trying to help you here.”
“I realize that. But-”
“There is no but,” Renee cut him off. “And on top of that, I’m not asking you to dance with bloody chickens or something. I’m asking you to perform a little bit of a Victimology exercise, that’s all. Major Crimes does it all the time in homicide cases.”
Tower snorted. “Sure, in homicide it makes sense. Most people are killed by someone who knows them. But they can’t tell the detective who killed them. So if you get to know the victim, you have a better shot at figuring out who the killer is.”
“This is no different,” Renee insisted.
“A rape victim is different than a homicide victim. She’s still alive. If she knows her attacker, she can name him. This is a stranger rape. It is very different.”
“No, it’s not. You’re just looking at the suspect instead of the victim.”