Читать книгу Bachelor Cop - Carolyn McSparren - Страница 12

RANDY BROUGHT LATTES and a dozen chocolate doughnuts to his meeting with Dick O’Hara at the West Precinct.

O’Hara was a big man, solid but not fat. He had the basset-hound eyes of a man who had seen too much in his forty-plus years. He wore his sandy hair in a buzz cut, and even at ten in the morning his khaki slacks looked rumpled.

“I’ll accept help from the devil himself if it gets this guy off the street,” he said. “This is one creep I hope shoots it out with the TACT squad, although life without parole would make me happy.”

“We find him, you get the collar. No problem.”

O’Hara waved a hand. “Your team makes cases we don’t have time to work. The hell with jurisdiction.”

The two men settled down at O’Hara’s beat-up government-issue gray desk. Around them other detectives leaned on desks, chatting amiably, while another group surrounded the coffeepot. The room seemed almost tranquil this early.

O’Hara shoved a stack of folders and two loose-leaf binders to Randy. “You’re welcome to look through the evidence boxes, but these might bring you up to speed quicker.”

Randy set his cup down. “A hell of a bunch of notes for one rape case. What’s in these that didn’t make it into the electronic file?”

“The others.” O’Hara narrowed his eyes. “You’re saying you don’t know the guy has probably raped at least five more and killed three?”

Randy choked on his doughnut. “I only started working Dr. Norcross’s case officially a couple of hours ago. He’s a killer?”

“After he raped three victims a second time, he killed them.”

“He came back?” God, Streak! Did she know that she was still in danger from the same rapist? Randy ran his hand over his face. “Man, I feel like an idiot.”

“No reason to. You’re playing catch-up, and you were smart enough to start at the right place—me. Officially, we still have no forensic evidence to say the assaults are connected.”

“But you’re sure they’re connected?”

“Damn straight. Like he signed his name. You got time?”

“As much as it takes.”

O’Hara settled back in his chair and wolfed down another doughnut. The chair creaked under his weight. “I’d bet my pension he’s sexually assaulted more than the victims we know about. Report rate’s higher than twenty years ago, but women still take showers and hide what happened.”

“They still feel guilty.”

“Yeah, and the lawyers make ’em feel worse on the stand.” O’Hara swigged his coffee and chewed half of another doughnut. After he swallowed, he said, “You know as well as I do that most rapists don’t stop with one. You’d have connected the dots once you programmed the computer to kick out similar cases.”

“If I knew the proper parameters to enter.”

“Call me a short cut. The first one we know about was a lawyer. Six months later came a Realtor, then another four months after that the professor.”

“Dr. Norcross was raped two years ago. You’re saying he’s been out there over three years?”

“And not one suspect in all that time. You notice a pattern here?”

Randy nodded. “Professional women.”

“Take a look.” O’Hara pulled a set of photographs from the top file, turned them around and slid them across the desk.

Since they were taken after the assaults, the women looked like hell. Black eyes, split lips and cheeks, blood in their hair. Randy looked away from the shot of Helena. He wanted to roast the guy over an open pit and flay him alive.

“Well?” O’Hara asked.

“These women could be sisters.”

“Right. They’re all over medium height, slim, well-dressed, with dark hair, although the lawyer’s hair was short. She was six-one and no pushover. He didn’t hit her hard enough, so I guess he was still perfecting his technique. She fought hard until he knocked her out, but she didn’t draw blood, or if she did we didn’t find it. A DNA match to somebody in the system, and he’d already be in prison.”

“Could she give a description?”

O’Hara shrugged. “Shorter than she was, but that could mean six feet. Total body covering including face and head mask. Something slick. Possibly a wet suit. Stands to reason he’d wear latex gloves, as well. No eye color, no skin color. He could be purple for all we know.”

“What about the rest?”

“Here’s number four. A pediatrician.” O’Hara shoved two photos across the table. In the first, the woman looked as beat-up as the others. The second was a photo of her body.

Her head was a mess of blood and bone. Jack Samuels had once told him that if he ever reached a point where the sight of violent death didn’t move him, he should retire. Randy hadn’t reached that point yet.

“She’s the second one he came back to kill,” O’Hara said.

Randy gritted his teeth and kept his voice even as he asked, “Who was first?”

“His first victim, the lawyer. She was an assistant district attorney. Nobody connected the killing with this rapist until the second murder. It’s a miracle we put the pieces together. Different jurisdictions, different detectives.”

“I remember that case, but I didn’t know it was a serial.”

“Neither did we,” the detective said. “An ADA baby lawyer gets assaulted a second time and killed, everybody starts looking at the people she’s convicted, maybe out on parole or just released. Nobody fit. Then after the pediatrician was killed, we connected the original cases.”

“With no forensics? What made you believe they were connected?”

“Aside from the fact that the same women were raped a second time—statistically unlikely to be two different rapists—the blunt-force trauma looked as though it had been inflicted by the same instrument.”

“Could you identify the weapon?”

“Possibly the butt of a heavy pistol. Not certain, but the medical examiner thinks he’s right. Then number three showed up.”

“Why wasn’t this all over the news?”

O’Hara shrugged. “She was actually the sixth victim, the most recent. To the best of our knowledge, she hadn’t been previously raped. If she was, she never reported it.”

“Why connect her with the others?”

O’Hara slid a photo across the desk. It was a professional head shot.

Randy caught his breath. She looked enough like Streak to be her sister. “So he’s escalating? Raping and killing the first time?”

O’Hara shook his head. “We think it was an accident. We’re not sure she’s one of his, but she fits the profile. She was a stockbroker with heart arrhythmia, and her doctor put her on Coumadin.”

“Blood thinner.”

“Right. We think he stuns them or knocks them out so he can get them into his vehicle and leave the area. The initial blow caused a massive cerebral hemorrhage. She bled out before he could get her away.”

“Did he finish the assault?” Randy asked.

Again O’Hara shook his head. “No bruising in the vaginal vault commensurate with rape.”

“And since he wears a condom, no semen.”

“Probably pissed him off she wouldn’t feel what he had intended to do to her.”

“Poor guy. Bummer.”

“Yeah,” O’Hara said. “Breaks my heart.” He turned over another photo. “At first we thought victim number five, the one before the stockbroker, fell outside the pattern. She was older, for one thing. Over fifty, and a Germantown housewife. Then we found out that she was chairing the annual antique sale for one of the big charities.”

“Not necessarily a professional woman, but powerful.”

“Right. She’d also had some work done. She looked closer to thirty than fifty. So we believe he saw her somewhere without knowing anything about her.”

“Checked her out, and went for her anyway?” Randy asked.

“He seems to return to the ones that reported the rape to the police. No way to know for sure, since it’s impossible to prove a negative, but I’ve checked for any other killings in the last five years that fit the profile.”

“And?”

“Nothing. As far as we can tell, he started three years ago and comes back sooner or later to kill the ones that talked, but not necessarily in order. As if they’ve broken faith with him.”

“Does Str—Dr. Norcross know?” Randy asked.

O’Hara nodded. “They all know. Dr. Norcross and I talk every couple of weeks. She asked to be kept in the loop, and I’m glad to oblige. She’s careful. Doesn’t take unnecessary risks.”

Randy would have to protect her without getting caught at it. “Could be he only moved to the area a few years ago. Maybe he has a record somewhere else. Part of the problem with Ted Bundy was that the different locales didn’t piece all his crimes together. His crimes started in California and ended in Florida, with other states in between.”

The detective nodded again. “Like our guy, Bundy also attacked women who looked alike, so we searched for matches on the FBI database. Nothing stood out.”

“Are you protecting the others who talked?” Randy could only protect Streak, and she would probably freak out if she caught him following her.

“We don’t have the manpower, but we’ve alerted them to be extra careful, and we’re checking on them when we can.”

After the next class Randy would not only walk Streak to her car, he’d follow her until she was safely locked in her house.

“When do you alert the media that we have a murdering rapist?”

O’Hara sighed and shook his head. “Not until we have forensic evidence to connect them. The brass says anecdotal evidence and my personal gut feeling are not enough. They say he takes too much time between assaults. They say he’s probably left the area. They say they don’t want to start a panic. Every tall, dark, powerful woman in the Tri-State area would demand bodyguards.”

“They are wrong.”

“Tell me about it,” O’Hara said. “I know that, you know that, but what can we do? I can’t leak it. I value my pension. So should you.”

“Any woman who went public could be painting a target on her back.” Even Streak wouldn’t be that crazy. Not with two dependent children. “He can’t be driving around this area until he spots a likely prospect.”

“Could be. Planning appears to be part of the thrill for this guy. Appears to get off on stalking and fantasizing. Afterward, he goes back to his boring little life, sometimes for months, sometimes for years.”

“You send in for a profile from the FBI?”

O’Hara snorted. “Ever fill out one of those questionnaires? Hell, if we knew that much about the guy, we’d already have him in custody.”

“So you didn’t do it.”

“Sure we did. We got the usual report.” O’Hara’s voice turned singsong. “Twenty-five to forty. Possibly shorter than the women, although not necessarily. Works some kind of Joe job. May or may not be married and seem perfectly normal on the surface. Probably watches cop shows on TV and reads a lot of books about serial killers. He doesn’t fantasize that he’s actually on a date with these women. He knows they’d never give him a glance in real life, and it burns him up. He wants to punish them. He may interact with them in some way….”