Fulton set his jaw. "Can it, guys! This is real, and this is big, and I want complete control of it all. I want every one of those case files squeezed until the juice comes out. There's a pattern here, and you're gonna find it. That's all!"
He turned and strode into his private office, slamming the door behind him.
The three detectives looked at one another, their expressions exhibiting mixed feelings of disbelief, annoyance, resignation-the standard cop expressions. But there was also the beginning of something else, a kind of fascination, the first faint scent of prey in the air. The King Cole Trio hated mysteries too.
THREE
"What did he do then?" asked Marlene Ciampi, trying to keep the weariness out of her voice as she moved through yet another rape interview. This victim-she glanced down at the name… Paula Rosenfeld-was shut down, reciting the facts of her recent violation as if she were reading off the periodic table. You got them like that; you also got the one who couldn't stop shaking, and the weepers, and the cursers. Those were just the ones who came in. Marlene suspected that the majority of the raped of New York were in another class entirely-the no-shows, the ones who turned off the memory, told no one, denied it happened, took a long bath and tried to get on with life.
Rosenfeld shrugged and said, "He didn't do anything. He got off me, pulled on his pants, and went out."
"He didn't say anything to you?" The woman thought for a moment. Marlene observed the signs of grief and stress ooze subtly onto her face. It was a pretty little face- short dark hair, small even features, big brown eyes that would have looked better without the dark circles beneath them. A good figure too, small and slim, not unlike Marlene's own, but muffled by a shapeless black sweater and jeans. After a while she cleared her throat and said, "Yes, he did say something. He smiled and waved and said, 'Well, be seeing you.'"
Marlene wrote it down in the appropriate space on her five-by-eight index card, the space for "vocalizations-post" Marlene had designed the card herself and had paid for the two rubber stamps that printed the categories on the front and the back of each card. The card was supposed to help you to set down in an orderly way all the information about a rape: about the victim, about the setting (place, time of day, phase of moon), about the rapist. There was a space marked "signatures." Marlene tapped her pencil on this spot and reread what she had written there.
"About the panty hose-you said he wrapped it around your neck. Did you think he was going to strangle you?"
The woman shook her head. "No, it wasn't like that. He had this big knife, you know? He didn't need anything else. No, he just draped it around my neck and sort of played with it while he… you know."
Marlene knew. She nodded, made a note, and looked up brightly. "Well, Ms. Rosenfeld, I'd like to thank you for coming in. We'll get in touch with you if we need you again, when we make an arrest."
The woman looked at her dully. "They're not even going to look for him, are they?"
"Who told you that?"
"Nobody. But I could just tell-the cops who interviewed me after-they thought it was, like, an argument on a date or something. It got out of hand, no big thing. They kept asking me if I was going to press charges."
Marlene sighed, leaned back in her chair, and stuck her pencil in her hair. "OK, look-from the point of view of the law and law enforcement, rape is an unusual crime because almost always the only witness is the victim. We can have evidence of the sex taking place, but whether it's rape or not is a question of belief. The state legislature changed the rape law last year, so you no longer need independent corroboration of the crime, but you do need evidence that force was used and consent not given.
"So the cops look for certain things-was it a stranger, was there breaking and entering, was there beating of the victim? Places-in a back alley is good, a parking garage, a park. Also they look at the social stuff. Cops like big differences in the ages. The eighteen-year-old and the grandmother, or the forty-year-old guy and the twelve-year-old girl.
"And, I'm sorry to say, they also like black on white, although that's a lot rarer than most people believe. In any case, they like a middle-class victim. What they definitely do not like is when it takes place in the woman's bedroom, and she let him in and she knew the guy. Like in your case, a guy she met in a bar."
"You don't believe me either!" the woman said in a small voice, accepting it.
"No!" Marlene nearly shouted, and the woman jumped. "I do believe you. But that's not what matters. What matters is do we have a case." She tapped her stack of five-by-eights. "That's what these cards are for. If he did it to you, he did it or will do it to other people, and probably in the same way. We establish there's a pattern, a serial thing, it gets the cops interested. They put more energy into it. Also, we have a pattern that makes it a lot easier to convict, and to get a decent sentence when we do.
"I know the system sucks, but it's the system. I've got to play in it the best I can. But believe me, I understand what you're going through…"
At this, the other woman's face, until then a frozen mask, twisted into a hostile grimace. "You do?" she spat. "Why? Did you get raped too?"
Marlene's stomach churned. She understood why many of the women she interviewed took out their rage on her. She was available, and the rapist wasn't, but it didn't make it feel any better.
She took a slow breath, folded her hands on her desk, looked Paula Rosenfeld straight in the eye, and said, "Actually, Ms. Rosenfeld, I believe I can sympathize with your situation. Not too long ago I was drugged and kidnapped by a bunch of crazed satanists, stripped naked and presented as a toy to a mentally defective child murderer, given the starring role in a variety of depraved rituals, during which I was masturbated upon by a substantial number of men and had various of my personal orifices penetrated by demonic instruments wielded by my charming hostess. So yes, I believe I can sympathize with your situation."
The other woman's eyes had gone wide and her jaw dropped. "Oh, my God! You're that one! It was on TV."
"Yes, dear, I'm that one-my fifteen minutes of fame."
Pause. Marlene waited for what she knew was coming. "You killed that guy."
Marlene nodded. "Yes, I did. He was going to shoot a couple of friends of mine, had shot one of them already, so I killed him."
"I'd like a shot at that bastard too," the woman said bitterly.
"Yes, you would. But it's no fun killing somebody. It doesn't take away the violation." Marlene gestured widely toward the four corners of her tiny office. "This. All of this, the courts, the system, is supposed to do all that for you. It doesn't, but we keep plugging anyway. What else can we do?"
Paula Rosenfeld, rape victim, had no answer to this question, and she wound up the interview and left shortly afterward.
Marlene lit a Marlboro and watched the smoke eddy up to the ceiling high above. The office was an architectural oddity, having been constructed out of a dog-leg end of a hall corridor on the sixth floor of the Criminal Courts Building. Its height was therefore nearly twice its other dimensions, so that Marlene worked in what was effectively the bottom of a narrow shaft.
Office space was scarce in this era of New York's perpetual losing battle against crime. The building at 100 Centre Street had been constructed in the late thirties, a period when the poor knew their place, organized crime exerted a kind of discipline on criminal activity, and the police were able to apply such deterrence and punishment as they thought necessary without having to bother the courts: a golden age and long gone.