He waves a hand. "Anyway. So . . . yeah. Here I was, new to the homicide bureau, and a new man. No longer thinking words like faggot or nig- ger. I was different, I was dedicated, life was good.
"Now jump forward five years. I was about three years past my peak and sliding down the other side fast. I'd started to drink; I was fucking around on my wife. I thought a lot about eating my gun. All because of those damn dead babies." His eyes grow haunted, haunted in a way I recognized. I'd seen that same look in the mirror. "Someone was killing babies. I'm talking toddlers or younger. Snatching them, strangling them, and tossing them out on the sidewalks or the streets. All it took was six of them and no suspects, and I was dying inside." He peers at me. "You know that feeling, I'll bet, doing what you do."
I nod.
"Imagine that it's six dead babies you're letting down. That you not only haven't caught the guy doing it, you don't even have any suspects. I was fucked."
Just a year ago, I'd have looked at Don Rawlings and would have to have suppressed a sneer. I would have considered him weak. Someone blaming the past for the present, using it as an excuse. I can't forgive him entirely for giving up, but I don't feel that need to sneer at this moment. Sometimes the weight of this job is just too much. What I feel now is not superiority but compassion.
"I can imagine," I say, looking at him. I think he sees that I mean it, and he continues his tale.
"I was already fucking up and not caring about it. I did anything I could to try and get those dead babies off my mind. Drinking, sex--anything. But they'd keep showing up in my dreams. Then I met Renee Parker."
A genuine smile, one belonging to a younger Don Rawlings, appears. "I ran into her when her boyfriend got killed. He was a small-time dealer, pissed off the wrong guy. She was a stripper who'd only just started shooting up. You see it all the time and learn to write it off real fast. But there was something different about Renee. There was someone home. Some life in there, right near the surface." He looks up. "I know what you're thinking. Cop, stripper, end of story. But it wasn't like that. Sure, she had a great body. But I didn't think of her like that. I saw her, and I thought maybe this was my chance to do something good. To make up for the babies.
"I got her story. Went to LA to act, ended up dancing topless to make ends meet. Met a scumbag, he said, 'Hey, try a little bit of this, you won't get hooked.' Nothing original there. But there was something original with her. This kind of desperation in her eyes. Like she was still hanging on to the edge of the cliff and hadn't fallen off it yet.
"I grabbed her and I slammed her into rehab. When I was off duty, I'd go see her. Hold her while she was puking. Talk to her. Encourage her. Sometimes we'd talk all night. And you know what? She was my first female friend." He looks at me. "You know what I mean? Think male-chauvinist stereotype. Women are for marrying or fucking. You understand?"
"I've known a few in my time," I say.
"Well, that was me. But this twenty-year-old girl, she became a friend. I didn't think about fucking her, and I didn't want to marry her. I just wanted her to be okay. That's all I wanted." He bites his lip. "You see, I was a good detective. I was never on the take; I usually caught the bad guy. I never hit a woman. I had rules, right and wrong. But I was never really a decent man. You understand the difference?"
"Sure."
"But what I was doing with Renee, it was decent. Selfless." He runs a hand through his hair. "She came through it and got out of rehab. I mean, really came through it. One of the ones who was going to make it. I lent her some money and she got her own apartment. She started working a job. A few months later, she even started night school. Taking drama classes. Said if she never made it as an actress, she could always be a waitress, but she wasn't ready to give up on her dream yet.
"We'd hang out every now and then. Go to a movie. Always as friends. I never wanted anything else. It was the first time it was more important to me to have a friend than a piece of ass. Best of all, the babies went away. I stopped drinking, made up with the wife."
He falls silent, and I know what's coming, can hear it like a phantom freight train. I already know the end to this story. Renee Parker, firecracker, saved from herself, gets murdered in a hideous fashion. What I didn't know until now is what that meant to the people around her. For Don Rawlings, it was a point where fate turned on a dime and began hurtling into the black. The point where the dead babies came back and never left.
"I got the call at four in the morning. Didn't know who it was until I got out there." His eyes look like ghosts in the fog. Lost and howling and doomed to wander. "He'd burned her good. The ME said she had almost five hundred separate cigarette burns on her. Five hundred!
None of them fatal." His hand trembles on the desk. "He'd tortured her and raped her. But the worst was what he did after. Cut her open, took out some of her organs, and dropped them next to her body. Just dropped them there on the concrete, to rot with her.
"It's hard to remember that feeling. How I felt when I saw her there. Maybe I just don't want to. What I do remember is one of the uniforms looking down at her and saying, 'Oh yeah, I know her. Stripper, used to work over in the Tenderloin. Great tits.' That was it for him, all the explanation he needed. He looked down at Renee, remembered her tits, and labeled her. Not a human being, or a bright girl who was turning her life around. Just a stripper." He traces a finger over an imperfection in the desk. "They had to pull me off him. Not that it mattered. Can you believe this--that little bastard went in and pulled the file, years later. Under profession, he whited out waitress and wrote in stripper/poss. prostitute. Even sent it in as a correction to VICAP."
I'm appalled. I suppose it shows on my face, because he looks at me and nods.
"Believe it." He sighs. "So anyway, I kept my past relationship with her quiet so I could stay as the primary on the case. I wanted to catch this guy. Had to catch him. But he was good. No prints, not a damn thing. We didn't have DNA back then, so"--he shrugs--"I went looking where you always do when you come up dry on the physical evidence."
"Who knew her, who'd been around her," I say.
"That's right. She was going to night school. Turns out she'd met a guy there. Been seeing him for a week or two. Good-looking kid named Peter Connolly. But right off, I knew something wasn't right with him. Something about the way he talked when I questioned him, like he was making fun of me. Getting away with something. On a hunch, I flashed his photo around at the strip joint she used to work at. Sure enough, people remembered him. The times they placed him there matched what Renee's schedule had been. Then it got better. Turns out Peter had a little drug problem. He'd attended rehab. Can you guess? At the same place and at the same time that Renee had been cleaning up. Now my antennae are way up. Once I found out he'd enrolled in college only a week after she had, I knew, I knew, he had to be my guy."
He falls silent and doesn't start speaking again.
"I can guess where this goes, Don," I say in a gentle voice. "No evidence, right? You couldn't connect him to the crime. Sure, he'd been at the strip club, rehab, and the college. But all of that could be explained away."
He nods. Bereft. "That's right. It was enough to get a warrant for his place, but nothing turned up. Not a damn thing. His past was clean."