Ogrodnik Interior 2.0c (11 page)

“You OK?” he whispered.

“I’m fine,” she said quietly. “My muscles are sore, and I’ve got a few scrapes and bruises, but Rene over there says with a full night’s sleep, I’ll be as good as new,” she said tilting her head toward the paramedic.

“You don’t look OK. What about Frank?” asked Elliot as he looked at the beehive of police activity over by a car on the other side of the parking lot. He already knew the answer.

Rivka shook her head and buried it further into his shoulder; Elliot thought she was going to cry. “Frank’s dead,” she managed.

“What happened? “ he said in low, flat voice. This voice was Elliot’s defense mechanism when he needed to detach himself and think logically in times of stress.

“I don’t know. I found him in the car, and it looked like his neck was broken. Before I could even reach for my gun, a man tased me from behind.“

“Did you see him?” he asked in the same monotone voice.

“Yes, he talked to me. He wanted to introduce himself. He said his name was Ogrodnik. I think it was Kulas’s partner. ”

“Not now, Riv. We can go over this later. Have they taken your statement?“

“Not yet.”

“Are you up to it?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Rivka, let’s not tell them anything more than they need to know. You were assaulted and tased, and that was the end of it. You didn’t see who assaulted you. I don’t know whom to trust anymore.”

“I have no problem with that. I just want to get out of here and get back home.”

“Can you drive?”

“I’ll manage. See you back at my place?” she said more as a plea than a question.

“I’ll meet you there.”

Elliot decided he’d not tell the onsite officers that Frank was working for him. He had no stomach for an interview session at the moment.

Elliot entered the house without knocking and found Rivka sitting on the couch with a freshly brewed pot of tea. He approached her with concern. “You still look pretty shook up, Riv. Can you talk about it?”

Rivka started at the beginning and told him everything she could remember. She had to stop a couple of times but managed to tell the entire story in sequence.

After a moment, Elliot broke the silence. “I want to apologize for dragging you into this. This is not your fight,” he said quietly. 

“Elliot, this is my fight,” she shot back stressing the ‘is.' “There’s something else. He said something else,” Rivka squeaked out.

Elliot said nothing and just looked at her.

“He said, he said, 
‘if I’d had brought my torch, I’d be tempted to finish the job here and now
.'”

The significance of this was lost on Elliot. “Yeah, so… What does that mean?”

“The torch, Elliot! You remember the Stungun Killer. The Stungun Killer never left any evidence. He used a torch on his victims. He didn’t want to leave trace evidence behind, so he burned the hair from the victim’s pubic area after he raped and killed them. This information was never released to the public. The only thing we know about Stungun is that he used the same MO for all his killings and that he was an extremely large man. It fits. Frank was tased and his neck broken, just like the Stungun victims. Elliot, I think the big man is the Stungun Killer!“

“Anyone could have a torch, Riv. I don’t know if being a big man and mentioning a torch makes this guy the Stungun Killer,” he said with more than a little doubt in his voice.

“He called me Officer Goldstein, Elliot. The first thing he said to me was, ‘I’m glad we finally get to meet face to face. It’s been much too long.’

“Finally, get to meet? Much too long? We’ve only been working this case for four days now. Why would he say that if we’ve only been working the case for four days? Why would he know me as Officer Goldstein?”

Elliot watched the veins on Rivka’s neck distend as she was making her case and was worried.

“I don’t know, Riv. I don’t know.”

“I never told you what happened. I never told you about the Stungun case and why I left the force.”

“You’ve had a tough day. You have your reasons for doing what you did, and I don’t need to know them. “

Rivka ignored him, sat back on the couch and stared up at the ceiling.

“I walked the downtown beat for twelve years. I loved that job. I knew every business owner and vagrant from St Laurent to Atwater, and they knew me. I felt I’d found my calling,” Rivka said distantly.

“After eight or nine years, I’d paid my dues and started being noticed within the department as someone with a future. I guess I caught the eye of the Brass, and they got it into their heads that it would be good for the force if I were more visible, so they sent Captain Andrea Brebouef to recruit me. I was good in front of a camera; I was a woman and a Jew: a Triple Crown winner in their eyes. They wanted to make me the face of the force, the new police. That was all flattering, but I had no intention of being a poster child for the law enforcement. I wanted to serve and protect, not rub elbows with dignitaries and smile for photo ops. After I declined Captain Brebouef for a couple of years, they changed their tactics and offered me a spot in the high profile, major crimes division as a detective. Even though this was more appealing than being just a face, I was quite happy where I was. I told Brebouef politely that I wasn’t interested at this time. And that was the end of it; until the Stungun Killer.

“In February of 2012, a woman was found raped and murdered in the east end. She had been tased, raped, her neck was then broken and her body dumped in an alley about a kilometer east of Olympic stadium. The press reported it, but it was just another murder and didn’t attract much attention.” 

“I remember,” Elliot said quietly.

“Three days later, another body was discovered, this time, south of downtown, in the Pointe. Like the first, tased, raped, neck broken and dumped. When the press got hold of this one, they made the connection immediately and put it on the front page of every newspaper in the country. Nothing makes headlines like a serial killer. Different papers used different names for the killer, but the name that stuck was the Stungun Killer. It rolled off the tongue well and sold lots of papers. I took an interest in the story, as did every cop in the area, but my involvement was limited to being on the lookout for anything or anyone who caught my eye. The third victim was six days later. She was a seventeen-year-old student on her way home from a late class. The same MO. Tased, raped, killed and found in a dumpster at a construction site in Hampstead. The only difference was, she was my niece. I got the call at 10:30 p.m. From my captain. He knew we were related and gave me a heads-up before it hit the media. First thing I did was call my sister and then, on the way over to her house, I called Brebouef from the car. I was still shaking from the news and told Brebouef that I’d take the detective job on the condition that I was put on the Stungun Killer case. Usually, they’ll cite conflict of interest to have a cop investigate a relative’s death, but they were horny to get me, so they rationalized the situation by stating that I’d be an assisting detective and wouldn’t be responsible for any decisions. I’d do whatever got me closer to the case. The next day, I was reassigned.”

“Detective Serge Amyot led the investigation. He was one of the old boys. He’d been detecting for almost thirty years, came up through the system and was very successful. I thought he was stiff with me, but I stayed out of his way and watched. I got what I wanted, and the force got what they wanted. I didn’t do a lot of investigative work, mostly just sat in meetings and performed grunt work for the other detectives, but they did put me in front of the cameras every week to give updates. When there was a perceived break in the case, Amyot would deliver the status, but those were few and short-lived. For the most part, there was nothing to report, so Amyot paraded me in front of the press to deliver the bad news.”

“I get the feeling you didn’t like him,” Elliot asked when she paused.

“We’re getting to that,” she replied. “As you know, Stungun went on to kill nine women in total. There was never any trace evidence left behind. Every murder had the same MO. There was no pattern in the type of women; there was no pattern in the places where they were dumped and no discernible pattern in the places they were targeted. The only pattern was that the time between the victims grew progressively longer. The time between the 8
^th
 and 9
^th
 victims was almost eight weeks, by far the longest stretch between victims.” Rivka sipped her tea.

“And then he just stopped. The task force worked out scenarios for another three months, but there just wasn’t anything to go on. There was little evidence to start with and no new data coming in. The task force was trimmed from seventeen down to six and then, after another three months of unproductive discussion and theories with no new evidence, they disbanded the task force completely, and the case went into the unsolved bin. If there were another murder, we’d get together again, but unless new evidence came to light, the case was dead.” 

Rivka took another sip of tea before continuing. “The day we were disbanded, we all went down to the Pub St Paul for a final pint together. We knew it was coming, but it was still a sad day. Nobody ever wants to walk away from a case, especially one this important. Although I never warmed up to Detective Amyot, I found that I liked working with a couple of the other detectives. One beer turned to two and then wine with dinner, and four hours later, we were all feeling pretty good. The conversation turned back to Stungun, and I voiced an opinion that I never had during the investigation. As the murders started piling up, Amyot had us all concentrating on the pattern of the killings. He was convinced that there was either a connection in the places where the girls were picked up or between Stungun and the victims. This was a logical conclusion and the place where every seasoned detective would look. After a certain amount of time, I thought we should have looked elsewhere. I put my theory out there in front of my colleagues to see what they would say. The idle chatter had now stopped and Amyot, who was sitting diagonally across from me, asked me in a voice that I thought to be condescending, “Where would you have suggested we look?”

All eyes were on me now, and I wondered if I had made a mistake in voicing my opinion. “The first murder was the only one that was different. There was no torch used on the pubes. Maybe that meant the first murder wasn’t planned. It was an impulse. Maybe he slipped up on that murder, and we should have concentrated our efforts on that murder alone.”

The silence hung in the air for a minute until Serge cleared his throat and looked at his crew. “It’s bad enough they send me a woman to babysit during the biggest case of my career, but then when she gets here, I find out she’s a carpet munching Kike! She’s on the job for a year, and now she thinks we don’t know what we’re talking about. She thinks we pooched the investigation but never said anything about it at the time. No. She waits until the unit is shut down and then tells us how we fucked it up.

“I was completely stunned by what I just heard. My face was flushed in seconds, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I looked at the others around the table for support and saw only grins and nods.”

“And,” Amyot continued as he swung his gaze to me, “I don’t know how many blowjobs it took you to get moved up to detective, but I vow to you here and now that you will never, ever, work within my unit again.”

“It looked like that was something that had been on his chest for months, and he had finally gotten the chance to say it. He
leaned back in his chair looking
down his nose at me like I was a piece of dog shit he just wiped off his shoe.

“I stood up, picked up the half full pitcher of beer on the table and threw it in his face and said, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ The next day, I sent in my resignation.”

“Asshole,” replied Elliot. “It sounds as though you could have filed for harassment.”

“To what end? I saw how pervasive the old boy network is. If I’d have pressed charges, every cop in the city would have sided with him. It would have effectively been the end of my career anyway. Captain Brebouef met with me a couple of times pleading with me to stay and fight, but I’d had it.”

“Wow. Any regrets?”

“Only that the pitcher was half empty.”

"Did you keep a copy of the case file from the Stungun case?” asked Elliot.

“No, I didn’t bother because the actual data collected was so sparse. I looked at the murders so long and rehashed them in my brain so many times while lying in bed at night that I have it all memorized. I don’t have the list of people interviewed or what they said, but not one of the leads we came across panned out, so I don’t think they are material.”

“Okay, let’s start with what you know,” said Elliot as he looked around the room. “Do you have a chalkboard or something I can write on?”

“I have a whiteboard in the den. Will that do?” she asked.

“Perfect,” he replied as he moved toward the den while motioning Rivka to stay where she was.

“Can you list all nine murders, the name, and age of the victim, time and date found, location last seen or location they were expected to be and then the location where the body was discovered?” he said as he took up his position.

Rivka listed all the victims and relevant information on the whiteboard in a tabular fashion. Elliot could tell by the way she didn’t even have to stop and think about it as she was writing that the Stungun murders had been permanently etched into her brain. He also knew that, although she would always remember them, the only way to push them down off the surface of her consciousness was to get closure on the killings and solve the murders.

Once complete, Rivka stood back to take in the list. She had written it out exactly as she had dozens of times over the course of the investigation. Writing it out both excited and depressed her. Depressed her because in the two years she’d been off the case, she was finally at a point in her life where thoughts of the case didn’t intrude into every aspect of her daily life. Excited because this could be the break she’d been waiting for. Maybe she'd have another shot at the Stungun Killer.