She trembled in fear, and in shame, and in helpless desperation, suffering his pounding below, sobbing now, repeatedly begging him to stop, afraid of screaming lest the knife pierce the flesh of her throat as surely as he himself was piercing her flesh below. And when he shuddered convulsively — the knife tip trembling against her throat — and then lay motionless upon her for several moments, she could only think It’s over, he’s done, and the shame washed over her again, the utter sense of degradation caused by his invasion, and she sobbed more scathingly. And realized in that instant that this was not a working cop here in a dark alley, her underwear torn, her legs spread, a stranger’s sperm inside her. No. This was a frightened victim, a helpless violated woman. And she closed her eyes against the rain and the tears and the pain.
“Now go get your abortion,” he said.
He rolled off her.
She wondered where her gun was. Her guns.
She heard him running out of the alley on the patter of the rain.
She lay there in pain, above and below, her eyes closed tight.
She lay there for a very long while.
Then she stumbled out of the alley, and found the nearest patrol box, and called in the crime.
And fainted as lightning flashed again, and did not hear the following boom of thunder.
12
Annie went out with a vengeance.
Knowing what had happened to Eileen the night before, visualizing her torn and bleeding in that rain-swept alley, she knew only that the son of a bitch had to be stopped, and she prayed to God that when she caught up with him she simply didn’t shoot him dead before asking his name. She did not know what had happened to Teddy Carella yesterday afternoon in Phillip Logan’s office; she did not, in fact, even know Steve Carella except as the Chinese-looking detective who’d been sitting at one of the desks the first time she’d walked into the 87th Precinct squadroom. But had she known either of them, had she known that Teddy had been submitted to her own baptism of fire yesterday, she would have considered it only a less severe manifestation of what had happened to Eileen.
The call from Sergeant Murchison had come at exactly ten minutes to eight, five minutes after a radio motor patrol car from the Eight-Seven responded and found Eileen lying unconscious on the sidewalk under the call box. Annie had listened silently while Murchison gave her the news. She thanked him, put on her raincoat, and went out into the street where the lightning and thunder were gone but the rain persisted. By the time she arrived at the hospital, twelve stitches had already been taken in Eileen’s cheek. The emergency room doctor reported that Eileen had been sedated and was now asleep; they planned to keep her overnight for observation because she’d been in a state of shock when they admitted her. He would not allow Annie to see her, even though she tried to pull rank. Annie went home, called A.I.M. on the off chance someone might be there — it was almost ten o’clock by then — got no answer, and then looked up the home number of Polly Floyd, the A.I.M. supervisor she’d spoken to on the phone yesterday. She got no answer. She kept trying until midnight. Still no answer. She tossed and turned all night long, waiting for morning.
Again there was no answer when she called the A.I.M. offices at 9:00 A.M. She tried again at 9:15 and once more at 9:30, and then she dialed Polly Floyd’s home number. The phone rang repeatedly. Annie counted a dozen rings and was about to hang up when Polly at last answered the phone. Annie told her that she wanted to come to the office. Polly said the office was closed on Saturdays. Annie told her to open it. Polly said that was impossible. Annie told her to open it and to have the entire staff assembled there by eleven o’clock. Polly said she had no intention of doing anything of the sort. Annie took a deep breath.
“Miss Floyd,” she said, “I have a police officer in the hospital who was brought in last night with a knife wound that required twelve stitches. I can go all the way downtown to ask a judge for a search warrant, but I’ve got to tell you, Miss Floyd, I’ll be mean as hell if I have to go through all that trouble. What I’m suggesting...”
“Is this some sort of coercion?” Polly said.
“Yes,” Annie answered.
“I’ll see if I can round up the staff for you.”
“Thank you,” Annie said, and hung up.
The A.I.M. offices were at 832 Hall Avenue, above a bookstore that was going out of business. The building was six stories high, and the A.I.M. offices were on the third floor. Annie arrived there at a little before eleven. The small reception area beyond the frosted glass door looked like something a down-at-the-heels private eye might have inhabited were it not for the posters on all four walls. The posters were blown-up photographs showing fetuses in various stages of development. Across the top of each photo were the words “Against Infant Murder,” lettered in red and designed to look like dripping blood. Polly Floyd herself resembled a fetus in an advanced stage of development, a tiny, pink-faced, pink-fisted lady with short blonde hair and a mouth that looked as if it had never been kissed and never wanted to be kissed. Well, maybe Annie was wrong on that score; the woman hadn’t answered her phone at midnight last night, and it had taken her forever to get to it at 9:30 this morning.
Polly Floyd was in high dudgeon when Annie walked in. She immediately began complaining about police states and honest citizens being subjected to—
“I’m sorry,” Annie said, not sounding sorry at all. “But, as I told you on the phone, this is a matter of some urgency.”
“What does your cop have to do with us?” Polly asked. “If someone got himself stabbed...”
“Herself,” Annie said.
“Even so, what...?”
“Where’s your staff?” Annie asked abruptly. They were standing alone in the small reception room with its pictures of fetuses. Polly still hadn’t taken off her coat. Undoubtedly, she expected a brief meeting.
“They’re waiting in my office,” she said.
“How many on the staff?”
“Four.”
“Including you?”
“In addition to me.”
“Any of them men?”
“One.”
“I want to see him,” Annie said.
Seeing him was the first thing she wanted to do.
She had called the hospital again a half-hour ago, before leaving her apartment, to check on Eileen’s condition, and to talk to her if possible. When Eileen answered the phone in her room, she sounded drowsy, but she told Annie she was feeling okay — considering. Her description of the man who’d attacked her jibed exactly with the description the previous victims had given: White, thirty-ish, six feet tall, 180 pounds. Brown hair, blue eyes, no visible scars or tattoos.
The man waiting in Polly Floyd’s office was a scrawny black man in his sixties, about five feet eight inches tall, with brown eyes behind tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and a fringe of white hair circling his otherwise bald head.
There were three other people waiting in the room, all of them women.
Annie asked them to sit down.
Polly stood just inside the door, annoyed by this invasion of A.I.M.’s offices, further annoyed by the easy takeover of her own private office.
Annie asked the gathered staff if any of them were familiar with any of the following names, and then read them off: Lois Carmody, Terry Cooper, Patricia Ryan, Vivienne Chabrun, Angela Ferrari, Cecily Bainbridge, Blanca Diaz, Mary Hollings, and Janet Reilly.