Bachelor Cop

Mickey had resented the car, although she’d bought it used, with money she’d saved waitressing in the Grand Tetons as a grad student. “That car screams rich bitch,” he’d said. “Now, if you’d been driving my old Ford…”

She could fill in the rest. She’d been raped because she drove a used BMW.

She loved her car and nobody could force her to sell it. She wouldn’t sell the duplex, either. She’d kept the title in her name alone, just as she’d established her own credit from the first days of her marriage. Her parents had drummed into her head that a woman had to control her own money, because men died or divorced you. She hadn’t often said no to Mickey when they’d been married, but she’d held out on handling their finances. Good thing. Otherwise she and the children might be living under a bridge.

She noticed a squad car parked in the bushes beside the road. Thank heaven she hadn’t run the stoplight.

Her stomach tightened as she remembered the feel of Randy’s chest. Damn her hormones, anyway. The first sweaty male she touched, and boom, fireworks. She wriggled in her seat. It was a miracle she hadn’t tossed his skinny rear end all the way through the picture window between the workout room and the gym from sheer surprise.

Without warning, she saw that face in its black mask. She screamed and the car swerved. She righted it, put on her brakes, coasted into the Presbyterian Church’s deserted parking lot and cut off her lights.

And shook. The memories always hit her without warning, never left her time to prepare, to control her feelings. As long as he lived, he’d hold power over her.

She got her .38 out of the center console and set it on the seat beside her, then took a dozen deep breaths to keep from throwing up inside the car. She’d never get the stink out of the upholstery.

In her rearview mirror, she saw the lights of the squad car cruising closer. She prayed it wouldn’t stop. If the cops shone a flashlight inside and saw her gun, they might not give her time to reach for her carry permit before they dragged her out of the car. She willed them to drive by.

When they had turned the corner and disappeared, she started the engine and drove out of the parking lot, although she was still shaking. Her mouth felt dry, but her throat burned.

Later, as she pulled into her garage and lowered the door with the electric control, she giggled. She refused to allow herself a full-blown attack of hysterics. She’d made a new discovery. All she needed to quiet her raging hormones was a rip-snorting anxiety attack from the memory of the last time she’d been touched by a man.

EVEN WHEN HE WENT TO BED alone, Randy nearly always slept like a log. Not tonight, however. Staring up at the lights from the Memphis-Arkansas bridge reflected on the ceiling of his converted warehouse loft, he considered getting up and turning on his laptop to check the file that served as his little black book. He checked the lit dial of his bedside alarm clock. Past three o’clock.

He couldn’t call anybody at three in the morning. Besides, he was lonely and restless, not horny—or no more than usual, anyway.

Streak was screwing up his life. Randy usually knew within a couple of hours of meeting someone if he wanted to sleep with her. It had taken him longer to make up his mind about his student.

He definitely wanted her, but he doubted she was into sex with no strings attached. He couldn’t handle anything else.

A damaged woman with two kids, no less. An ex-husband who’d probably beat her. Somebody sure had. He wanted to hold her in his arms and assure her that so long as he was around, nobody would ever hurt her again. He wanted to heal her.

Yeah, but how long would he be around? And then what? Would she go back to being a victim?

He gave up on sleep. Climbing out of bed, he showered and dressed. Then he stopped by an all-night café for sausage biscuits and the largest cappuccino they made.

He walked into work at four in the morning, ground fresh beans and brewed the day’s first pot of coffee. Unlike most squad rooms, the Cold Cases facility had excellent coffee that all the other teams tried to steal. With only himself, Liz Slaughter, who’d be on maternity leave in another few months, Jack Samuels, close to retirement age, and Lieutenant Gavigan, they could afford designer beans and a top-of-the-line coffeemaker.

Added to his king-size cappuccino, the squad’s caffeine should keep Randy awake until his shift ended at four in the afternoon. He’d pulled plenty of twenty-four-hour shifts. Twelve was nothing.

Although he wasn’t actually supposed to use the department’s computers to check up on non-suspects, he knew the lieutenant wouldn’t say a word if he checked out Helena Norcross.

The police report was extensive. Two years earlier she’d been abducted from the faculty parking lot of Weyland, the small liberal arts college where she worked, was beaten, sexually assaulted, then dumped half-naked and semiconscious beside the road through the Old Forest in Overton Park. The report said her assailant was never identified. So he was still out there. Explained a lot.

Detective Dick O’Hara from the east precinct was the investigating officer. Randy would reach out to him to find out if there had been any further developments.

He scrolled down to the medical report from the rape crisis and trauma center. As he read about her injuries, he fought to keep his rage from choking him. He saw and heard much worse, but this was Streak, and that made it immediate and personal.

The assailant had struck her at the base of the skull. She’d had a bad concussion, but no skull fracture. Her right eye socket was cracked, but not displaced. Her jaw was badly bruised.

No wonder Streak was upset by his offhand remark about women and right crosses.

Three ribs on her left side and four on her right had been broken. One had punctured a lung. Her left collarbone was cracked. She’d been struck repeatedly, probably by fists. At some point both her wrists and ankles had been tied, and were raw, although they’d been free when she was found.

He scrolled down to O’Hara’s notes on his interviews with her. She swore she remembered nothing about the rape or beating. The blow to the head and jaw had apparently knocked her out for some time. She did say the man wore some kind of mask.

The forensic report was bleak.

No fibers from mask, ropes or carpet were found. Probably bound her with something like rubber-covered electrical wire. No extraneous hair. No DNA. That meant he’d worn gloves and used condoms. Possibly laid a new tarp on the floor of the vehicle he’d used to transport her.

Randy wished criminals didn’t pay so much attention to the CSI shows on television. Those guys had fancy laboratory facilities that produced immediate results. Maybe on Mars. In Tennessee most trace had to be shipped to the Nashville crime-scene lab, which was so backed up sometimes they couldn’t process evidence for months.

The Memphis crime-scene team suspected the rapist had shaved his body to avoid leaving so much as a pubic hair, and wore some kind of rubber or vinyl suit—maybe rain gear or a wet suit. He was too damned careful for this to be his first rape. So did O’Hara know of other rapes that might fit the same pattern? Were they actually dealing with a serial?

Unless Detective O’Hara had some new developments, Helena Norcross’s rape was a bona fide cold case. Lieutenant Gavigan hated rapists as much as he hated killers, so Randy should be able to look into it officially.

He poured himself a fresh cup of coffee in his oversize mug while he waited for the aging printer to crank out the report. Then he slipped it into a fresh manila folder and shoved it into the top drawer of his desk to give Gavigan at their morning meeting.

If Streak’s rapist was still out there, Randy wanted to hand her his head on a pike. Although that probably wasn’t nearly as romantic as red roses.

CHAPTER FIVE

RANDY LEANED BACK and propped his loafers on his desk.

Outside, traffic noises picked up. In another hour the February sun would rise, but he still had the squad room to himself. Since budget cuts, central precinct homicide detectives only worked days.

He was no stranger to interrogating rapists and convincing them he understood and sympathized. Although he didn’t. They thought it was about sex, the great god, orgasm. Actually, it was about dominance—assault with a deadly weapon. The rapist wanted to humiliate and destroy the victim’s humanity. He exerted total control. Even if his victim healed physically, she might never regain her sense of being in control of her life.

The fact that Streak had joined his class proved she was still fighting for her prerape sense of self. He would give her all the help he could.

He doubted his other class members had similar experiences, but you never knew. He glanced at the clock. Jack and Liz wouldn’t be in for a while yet. He had time to check out the other class members online.

Sarah Beth Armstrong, the first he checked, seemed like a nice old lady, but anybody could have a record.

When the screen lit up, he slammed his cup down so hard that coffee splashed on his desk. He grabbed a handful of tissues from Liz’s box and mopped it up before it could reach his keyboard. The desk had survived worse.

Sarah Beth had only a couple of speeding tickets, but when he followed the link, he found a homicide report. Eight years earlier her thirty-year-old daughter had been carjacked and killed by three nineteen-year-old gang-bangers. Sarah Beth, her husband, Oliver, and two children under eighteen were listed as next of kin. No husband listed for the daughter.

All three men were now serving life sentences without parole.

Sarah Beth seemed, what? Together? In his professional experience, the death of a child, particularly by violence, was the hardest kind of grief to survive. She’d had eight years, but that kind of pain and loss didn’t go away.

Next he checked Francine Bagby. Squeaky-clean, except for the 911 calls about noncustodial parents and drunks she’d already mentioned. He pitied anyone who went up against her with anything less than an antitank gun.

Nothing about Amanda Donovan, the lawyer, either. He recognized the name of her firm, however, as the biggest and toughest divorce firm in west Tennessee. No lack of material for nasty confrontations there.

Nothing on Ellen Latimer, aka Mrs. Claus.

Next he checked Lauren Torrance, the newlywed. Another surprise. In the previous year there had been three reports of loud arguments called in by neighbors. No signs of physical abuse, so no arrests.