Bachelor Cop

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.

Little Bunny was actually Gaylene O’Donnell Yates from Ittabena, Mississippi. Even though she was only five foot three, she’d won second runner-up for Miss Mississippi, and had married a plastic surgeon. The surgeon, Wilton Yates, had just won a malpractice suit over a boob job that had supposedly gone wrong. A disgruntled ex-patient was threat enough to send his wife to self-defense classes.

Her beautiful rack was probably silicone. Pity.

Finally, he pulled up Marcie Halpern. When she didn’t pop up, he entered variants of Marcie and found nothing, not even a speeding ticket.

His coffee was now tepid, so he added a dollop of hot from the carafe he had made, and drank it in a single pull. Even the women who didn’t show up in police reports probably had secrets they didn’t want revealed.

Randy had secrets, too. Without them, he wouldn’t have become a cop, and he’d be married with two-point-five children, a mortgage and a bass boat. He’d fall asleep on the couch after Thanksgiving dinner with the entire Railsback clan, instead of eating a tuna sandwich alone at his desk. He always volunteered for duty on holidays.

It was an excuse to avoid his family. He talked to his mother on the phone once a week or so, but never spoke to his father.

Maybe not all families were toxic, but his was right up there with Three Mile Island.

HELENA DROPPED Milo and Viola at the front door of their school on her way to her morning class. “Marcie will pick you up after day care. Tonight is my self-defense class. I’ll tuck you in when I get home.”

“Can we come with you?” Milo asked.

“Not tonight. Sorry.”

“Mo-o-om,” he whined. “I promise I’ll just lift the little weights.”

“I don’t want to go back,” Viola said. “Not never.”

“Then you go home with Marcie,” Milo snapped.

“Both of you go with Marcie.” She kissed them goodbye and watched Milo stalk up the stairs, while Vi bounced behind him. Helena had given up attempting to bribe him into waiting for his sister. He raced ahead to join his friends. Helena watched until both children disappeared inside the school.

She pulled out into the stream of cars that had disgorged their children. Traffic was sluggish, but she’d allowed extra time before her class. She turned on NPR, listened to five minutes of one disaster after another, then turned the radio off. They never seemed to report good news.

How could she keep her children safe, yet allow them enough freedom to grow? How could she teach them to avoid monsters without destroying their trust in decent people? How could she protect them from her own fears? Her panic attacks came less frequently and were shorter and less severe, but she still had them.

She forced herself to turn into Overton Park. This early she could drive the winding roads through the golf course and the Old Forest without meeting another car. Her sweaty palms slipped on the steering wheel, and she could feel the pulse thrumming in her throat. “You can do this,” she whispered.

In the two weeks since she’d begun to drive to work through the park, she hadn’t dared to turn from the main road into the Old Forest. She’d promised herself that today was the day. She would stop by the side of the road where she’d been found, maybe even get out and look at the spot. Demystify it. It was only a bunch of shrubbery.

February was its usual cold, dreary self, but she started the air-conditioning to dry the sweat between her shoulder blades. A moment later she switched it off. Her teeth were chattering.

She swung right onto the narrow forest road where the aged oaks and maples met overhead. Their leafless branches drooped over her car like threatening brown stalactites. Even in winter the lane was shadowy.

She inched along the road and studied the underbrush. It all looked so different. Was it here? Farther along? Behind her? On this curve? How could she not recognize the place she’d been dumped?

When a pickup drove into view around the curve behind her, she floored the BMW, barely braked at the stop sign onto the parkway and drove ten miles over the speed limit until she pulled into her allotted parking space at the college. Undoubtedly a commuter taking a shortcut, but she’d freaked. She hit the steering wheel hard enough to bruise the sides of her hands.

She turned off the ignition and took deep breaths to calm her heart rate. Her face in the rearview mirror looked as gray as though a vampire had sucked her dry.

The bastard had sucked her life dry. She would take it back. Milo felt he was in charge of keeping her safe. He’d seen her curled up on the floor of her closet. Vi was always wary, watching for signs of an imminent attack. Children should believe their mother was in control, invulnerable, there.

Sooner or later, the bastard would come to kill her. She felt it in her bones. Which was why she had to kill him first.

She lifted her chin and felt her pulse. No longer stroke territory. And, finally calm, she climbed from the car, picked up her briefcase and started up the stairs toward the liberal arts building.

She’d only downed a can of tomato juice as she left the house to take the children to school. Now her stomach rumbled in protest, so she detoured to the student union for a bagel and tea in the twenty minutes before class. Since juniors and seniors avoided early classes, she had the cafeteria to herself except for a couple of bleary-eyed freshmen.

She opened the bound notebook she used for her rape notes. At the top of a new page she wrote the same two points she’d written at the head of every page for the last six months. Find him. The police hadn’t managed in two years, with all their resources. What chance did she have?

She underlined the second item so hard the pen tore the paper.

Make him find you.

In the meantime, however, she had to try to teach thirty freshmen how to construct a five-paragraph essay, a task they should have perfected in junior high. Most of them acted as though she was teaching them ancient Greek.

She stopped in the faculty common room for another cup of tea to take with her to class. At this hour she was usually alone. This morning, though, Albert Barkley, full professor of American literature, sat in one of the worn blue club chairs by the window, reading the New York Times Sunday Book Review. He blinked at her over his glasses, then put the paper down and raised an eyebrow. “Something different about our Helen of Troy this morning. You must have launched another thousand ships.”

“Not even a kayak, Al,” she said as she poured her tea. He hated being called Al, which was why the faculty did it.

“There is something different about you. You seem, I don’t know, girded about the loins. Planning to go into battle?”

“Think of me as a female Daniel headed into the lions’ den,” she said as she emptied a packet of artificial sweetener into her Earl Gray. “One of these days maybe I won’t have to face English 101.”

“Only after I die and leave a full professorship open. Until then be grateful for your tenure and your paltry literature courses, and think of Idiot English 101 as sparing you hell after you die. You’ve already served your time.”

She walked upstairs to her classroom and thought that if Albert the Oblivious could recognize something different about her, she must actually be sending out different vibes. The self-defense course had been a first step in her plan to protect herself and kill the man she always thought of as “the bastard.” The second was to change her appearance. The third was to set herself up as a target.

“I will learn to use my softness against his hardness,” she whispered, and caught the startled expression on the face of a junior coming down the stairs toward her. That remark would be all over campus before lunchtime.

“IT’S A LEGITIMATE cold case,” Randy said. He’d made certain Lieutenant Gavigan and the others had read Detective O’Hara’s notes on Streak’s case before their morning meeting.

“No forensic evidence and no suspect,” Gavigan said. “Dead end. Gonna stay a dead end.”

Jack Samuels and Liz Slaughter sat in front of Gavigan’s desk. Randy rested a hip on the edge of the credenza.

“These guys don’t normally stop on their own, Lieut,” Randy said, and spread his hands. “I doubt this rape is an isolated incident. He’s either moved away, he’s dead or disabled, he’s in jail, or he’s raped others and will rape more.”

“Gotta be,” Jack said.

Liz had already assumed the pregnant woman’s position, with hands folded on her belly. “Can’t hurt to check it out. More cases equals more chances he slipped up, so we can catch him.”

“I get the feeling I’m being sandbagged here,” Gavigan said. “I’ll go this far. Randy, talk to O’Hara. After all this time new cases will have forced him to move your girlfriend’s assault to the back burner.”

“Not my girlfriend. I told you, she’s just a member of my class. If there’s anything she didn’t say during the original investigation, either because she chose not to or didn’t remember, I’m in the best place to tease it out of her memory. We agree on that?”

The other three nodded.

“I like Streak. I’d like to get this guy for her sake.”

“Streak?” Gavigan asked.

Randy explained.

“Prematurely gray hair?” Liz asked. “How come she doesn’t dye it?”

“I kind of like the streak in her hair, although I wish she’d fix herself up so she doesn’t look like a vagrant. And it’s white, not gray.”

“Bet you five bucks she didn’t look so frumpy before the assault,” Jack said. “It’s camouflage. She’s hiding, and blames herself. Why not? Everybody else probably blames her.” He shook his head.

“Assuming we reopen the crime as a cold case, what do you plan to do that the original detectives didn’t?” Gavigan asked.

“Same as always,” Randy said with a shrug. “Go over everything again from the beginning.” That meant revealing to Streak that he knew about her assault. She wouldn’t thank him for checking up on her. Might not thank him for reopening her case—and half-healed wounds—either.

“Long shot,” Gavigan said.

“All our cases are long shots,” Randy said. “Look how many we close.”

Liz and Samuels nodded.

“All right, talk to Detective O’Hara. He may already have info on similar assaults. And try not to step too hard on his toes, will you?”

“Thanks, Lieut,” Randy said.

“Now, how’s the Murchison killing coming?” Gavigan asked Liz.

An hour later, he closed the meeting.

As she passed Randy on her way to the ladies’ room, Liz said, “If you need somebody female to talk to this Streak, I’ll be happy to interview her.” She patted her belly. “Didn’t you say she has two kids? I can ask her advice about motherhood.”

“You meet her kids, you might be scared off motherhood.”

“Too late for that. Seriously, she might say things to me she’d be embarrassed to tell you.” Liz laid her hand on his arm. “We need to get this guy before he rapes somebody else. Anything I can do, let me know.”

“Ditto,” Samuels said from across the room. “I hate these guys.”

CHAPTER SIX

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.”