“So sue them,” Meyer said.
“Prolly cost me a fortune,” Ollie said. “Anyway, Steve and me’ll still be here long after that fuckin’ show turns to cornflakes.”
“Cornflakes?”
“Yeah, in the can. The celluloid, the film. Long after it crumbles into cornflakes.”
“So is that why you came up here?” Meyer said. “To ask me...”
“No, that’s just somethin’ been botherin’ me a long time. The way ‘Hill Street Blues’ looks like us, Meyer. Even their fuckin’ imaginary city looks like this one, don’t it? I mean, shit, Meyer, we’re real cops, ain’t we?”
“I would say we’re real cops, yes,” Meyer said.
“So those guys are only make-believe, am I right or am I right? Using names that sound like real fuckin’ cops in a real fuckin’ city. It ain’t fair, Meyer.”
“Where is it written that it has to be fair?” Meyer said.
“Sometimes you sound like a fuckin’ rabbi, you know that?” Ollie said.
Meyer sighed heavily.
“Why did you come up here?” he asked. “If you don’t plan to sue...”
“I got a stiff hanging on a lamppost this morning. Found this at the scene,” Ollie said, and tossed a tape cassette onto Meyer’s desk.
From where Annie Rawles sat at her desk, she could see most of the lower part of the island that was Isola. The sky outside was blue and clear, causing the buildings towering into it to appear knife-edged. She wondered how much longer the good weather would last. This was already the twentieth of the month, usually a time when November’s imminent presence was at least suggested.
The Rape Squad’s offices were on the sixth floor of the new Headquarters Building downtown, a glass and steel structure that dominated the skyline and dwarfed the lower buildings that housed the city’s municipal, judicial, and financial institutions. Before the new building went up — God, she couldn’t remember how many years ago, and she wondered why everyone still referred to it as “new” — the Rape Squad had been based in one of the city’s oldest precincts, a ramshackle structure midtown, near the overhead ramp of the River Highway. Rape victims were reluctant to report the crime of rape to the police, anyway; they suspected, correctly in many cases, that the police would give them as difficult a time as the rapist had. One look at the decrepit old building on Decatur Street had dissuaded many a victim from entering to discuss the crime further with specialists trained to deal with it. The new Headquarters Building did much to calm such fears. It had the orderly, sterile look of a hospital, and it made victims feel they were telling their stories to medical people rather than to cops, who they felt — again correctly — belonged to a paramilitary organization. Annie was grateful for the new offices in the new building; they made her job easier.
So did the computer.
She had told Eileen Burke that she was running a computer cross-check in an attempt to discover whether the same man had serially raped more women than the three victims about whom they were already positive. She had also told her that they were working up a cross-check on the victims themselves, trying to zero in on any similarities that may have attracted the rapist to them.
For the first cross-check, she had asked the computer operator — a man improbably name Binky Bowles — to go back to the beginning of the year, even though the first of the already positive victims had reported the offense only last April, six months back. The files on every reported rape, anywhere in the city, were already in the computer. Binky had only to press the appropriate keys to retrieve the name of any woman reporting a second, third, fourth or even fifth occurrence after the original one. Much to Annie’s surprise, there had been thirteen serial rape victims this year.
The first of these was a woman named Lois Carmody, who’d reported the initial assault to the 112th Precinct in Majesta on March 7. Her name came up three more times, each time for the same precinct in Majesta. The most recent serial victim — a woman named Janet Reilly — had been raped for the second time only last week, four days after Mary Hollings had reported her rape to the 87th Precinct. Both of the Reilly rapes had been committed in Riverhead. Their man — if indeed the same man was responsible for the serial rapes of thirteen women — had been very busy. He had also chosen his victims seemingly at random in each of the five sections that made up the greater city; Annie ruled out location as a unifying factor.
Binky’s job got a bit more difficult after that.
Retrieving the files on each of the thirteen women, he isolated the descriptions they’d given of the man who’d assaulted them, and further broke down those descriptions as to race, age, height, weight, color of hair, color of eyes, visible scars or tattoos, and weapon used (if any) during the commission of the crime. Annie debated asking him to feed in descriptions of the clothing each assailant had been wearing, but decided this would be irrelevant. Clothing could easily change with the seasons; the earliest of the reported serial rapes went back to March. Binky asked the computer to spew out the victims’ names in the order of the dates on which each had reported the first rape. The breakdown that came from the dot-matrix printer looked like this:
Annie automatically eliminated any victim who had been serially raped by obviously different men — a black man and a white man, for example, or any two men of widely divergent descriptions — chalking these off as coincidental occurrences in a city populated with mad dogs. She was able to cull out four of the possible thirteen victims in this way, and held in abeyance a decision on Angela Ferrari, who’d been raped four times, but who’d described her last assailant as someone different from the others, whom she’d described identically. This left eight strong candidates and a relatively strong ninth.
Each of the nine women had described the multiple rapist as white. Each had reported that he had brown hair and blue eyes, no visible scars or tattoos, and had used a switchblade knife as a weapon.
Three of the women had said the rapist was five-feet ten-inches tall.
Four of them had said he was an even six feet tall.
Two had said he was six-feet two-inches tall.
The descriptions from the various women indicated that the rapist weighed somewhere between a hundred and eighty and two hundred pounds, with the majority — five women — saying he weighed a hundred and eighty.
As for his age, he had been variously described as twenty-eight by one of the women, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty by another, thirty by three of the women, thirty-two by two of them, and somewhere between thirty and thirty-five by the remaining two.
It seemed to Annie that she was reasonably safe in assuming their man was white, thirty years old, six feet tall, and weighing 180 pounds. There seemed no doubt that he had brown hair, blue eyes, and no visible scars or tattoos. There was also no doubt that he was carrying a switchblade knife — or that he had used it on at least one occasion, the third time he’d raped Blanca Diaz. She left Binky to the onerous task of checking through the computerized Known Rapist files, hoping he’d come up with a man or men who answered the composite description and whose M.O. included threats with a switchblade knife.
At her desk now, she went through the initial D.D. reports and subsequent profiles on the victims themselves, searching for any similarity or similarities that may have singled them out as victims. She prepared her notes on a scratch sheet, and then worked them up in the form of a chart, again listing the women’s names in order of first reported rape.