Shield of Justice (5 page)

“Rebecca Frye, Doctor. I wonder if we could talk?”

Catherine glanced at her watch. She had an outpatient clinic to supervise in an hour. “I’m in-between right now. How about joining me in the cafeteria?”

“Fine.”

“It’s on the second floor.”

“I’ll find it,” Rebecca replied.

Catherine picked up a chef’s salad and seltzer and glanced around the cafeteria. She saw Rebecca Frye at once, looking slightly out of place in her gray jacket and black trousers amidst a sea of white coats. She made her way across the room to join her at a small table near the windows.

Rebecca watched the doctor approach, appreciating the fact that she did not wear a clinical lab coat but was dressed instead in a simple navy suit. Only the beeper clipped to the waistband of her trousers indicated she was a doctor. Rebecca tried not to notice her trim figure or the curve of her breasts under the softly tailored jacket. It wasn’t easy, because Catherine Rawlings was stunning. Finally, she looked away, studying her coffee cup and waiting until the other woman was seated before speaking. “I have a few more questions, Dr. Rawlings.”

“I gathered that, Detective Sergeant Frye,” Catherine commented dryly, studying the other woman’s face. She was glad to see that the circles under those clear blue eyes had faded slightly and that some of the tension had disappeared. She was also simply glad to see her.

“Is it true that you specialize in rape and incest cases?” Rebecca asked abruptly.

Catherine was a little taken aback, not with the directness of Rebecca’s approach—she expected that of the forthright detective—but with the rapidity with which she gathered information. Catherine had known that this, among other things, might come up. She just hadn’t expected it so soon. She answered steadily, “Not exactly
specialize
, but it is a particular interest of mine.”

“Don’t give me double talk, Doctor. I’m not the enemy,” Rebecca said quietly.

Catherine sighed and pushed aside her unwanted salad. She met Rebecca’s penetrating gaze. “Yes, it’s true that the majority of my private practice involves treating sexual abuse survivors.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this last night?”

Catherine looked genuinely surprised. “I didn’t think it was relevant.”

“You didn’t think it was
relevant
?” Rebecca asked incredulously. “We finally have a witness, we
hope
, to a brutal rape—a
series
of rapes we can’t get a single lead on—and our only witness suddenly has amnesia. You happen to be an expert in such crimes, and you didn’t think it was
relevant
.” Rebecca didn’t raise her voice, but her anger was evident.
God, save me from dealing with civilians!

“Detective Frye,” Catherine began in a reasonable tone, “I am not an expert on the
crimes
. I am an expert, if you will, on the
effects
of the crimes. That’s a very big difference.”

“And what about Janet Ryan? Is she a victim of the crime?”

“Don’t ask me questions you know I can’t answer,” Catherine said quietly, her eyes holding Rebecca’s. “Don’t make this a contest.”

Rebecca sighed slightly. “I have to try.”

Catherine leaned forward, her face intent. “Rebecca, I will do anything I possibly can to assist in this case, but I cannot, and I
will
not, disclose patient confidences. Please try to understand.”

“I do understand.” The use of her first name did not escape Rebecca Frye. She tried to ignore the quickening of her heartbeat, reminding herself she was in the middle of a hospital cafeteria and in the middle of an investigation. “I appreciate your desire to protect your patients, and I respect you for it. I’m just grasping at straws here. I can’t get a handle on this guy, and it’s driving me nuts.” That last was an uncharacteristic outburst. If she had personal feelings about a case, she rarely displayed them, not even to Jeff, and most certainly not to a subject she was in the process of interviewing.

As Catherine watched the torment play across Rebecca’s fine features, she felt every shred of the detective’s frustration and helplessness. “I’m seeing Janet at three this afternoon,” she confided, her voice quiet with compassion. “She requested that I take over from Phil Waters. Perhaps she’ll remember more—something I’ll be able to tell you.”

The concern was evident in the psychiatrist’s voice, and so was her obvious desire to do what she could to assist the investigation. For that, Rebecca met her gaze gratefully. And for an instant, her awareness of the people seated nearby and the sound of many voices echoing in the cavernous space faded, and she surrendered to the comfort offered in those green eyes. It felt like a caress, so tangible her heart pounded almost painfully. Seconds, minutes passed—she didn’t know. Flushing, she finally looked away and forced herself to remember why she was there, willing her pulse to still. When she spoke, her tone was cool and uninflected—a cop’s voice again. “I’d like a report either way.”

Acutely aware of the fleeting connection and the equally sudden distance between them, Catherine accepted Rebecca’s withdrawal reluctantly. She pushed her chair back, replying formally, “Of course. You can call me around six tonight. I should be done here by then.”

“Fine,” Rebecca replied, except it wasn’t. The psychiatrist’s effect on her was almost addictive. Her skin actually tingled just from the memory of the warmth in Catherine’s eyes. Impulsively, she added, “Why don’t I pick you up here? We can talk over dinner. And you won’t have to cook.”

Surprised, Catherine nodded with pleasure. She would like nothing better than to spend more time with this intriguing woman.

Rebecca caught up with Cruz midafternoon at the station house. He was staring at a computer screen, muttering under his breath, a half-eaten burrito forgotten by his right hand. The soda next to the crumpled fast food bag had sweated through the cardboard container and looked in danger of flooding the desktop any second. She looked over his shoulder and sighed when she saw the list of license plate numbers and drivers’ addresses scrolling down the page.

“Checking the summonses given out on the Drive yesterday?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he snarled. “Talk about long shots.”

“Has to be done,” she remarked, shaking her head in sympathetic agreement. “Remember Son of Sam. We’d look like morons if it turns out our perp parked his car somewhere, got a ticket while he was beating and raping a woman, and we never noticed.”

“There were twenty tickets written in that area in the two hours on either side of the time we figure it went down,” he said, pushing back in the swivel chair and then rubbing his face.

Rebecca whistled softly. “Busy place.”

“It’s the regatta,” Cruz remarked dispiritedly. “People end up parking anywhere to watch the boat races.”

“Well, commandeer some uniforms from traffic and have them cross-check these with the names and numbers on tickets given out on the days of the first two assaults. Give them a general rundown of the working profile—you know—eliminate all women, kids under eighteen, men over fifty. The usual. You and I can screen the rest and maybe get one of the eager beavers from patrol to run down any possibles for us.”

Cruz grinned up at her. “I suppose you were never one of them?” When Rebecca cocked a questioning eyebrow, he clarified, “Eager beaver, dying for the gold shield?”

“Yeah, maybe,” she said, her eyes shadowed for an instant. “Once.”

He studied her, surprised that after almost five years he still didn’t know what secrets she kept. He shrugged the thought away. It wasn’t his business what ghosts haunted her, not unless it affected the job, and it never did. Not anymore. “Want to go start a fire under the crime team people?”

Rebecca shook her head. “Later. Let’s walk the scene again first.”

He didn’t see what good that would do, but on the other hand, they didn’t have anything else to do except wait for a break from the lab. And Frye had an uncanny way of piecing the scene together and coming up with a lead for them to follow. He’d seen it before—that cop sense that let her see or feel or somehow sense what had gone down. She had the instinct, and he hoped somehow it would rub off on him.

“Right,” he said, as he scooped up the remains of his lunch and dumped it in the trash.

Twenty minutes later, they stood surveying the spot where the third assault had occurred. The site was a copse of trees that edged the riverbank, no different than a dozen other spots along River Drive. Thirty feet from the water’s edge, running parallel to the river for miles, was a narrow, unpaved path bordered by trees and water on one side and a thicket of low shrubs and grass on the other. The road, which followed both the river and the path, was easily fifty yards away. Although the park and its many trails were frequented day and night by bicyclists, runners, and dog-walkers, this section of the trail was poorly maintained and densely overgrown, which tended to discourage all but the most serious joggers. The isolated location was similar to that of the previous two rapes, a fact that helped them not at all.

The most recent victim—Darla Myers, age twenty-two, a business graduate student—had been found by a middle-aged man chasing his errant golden retriever. He’d almost stumbled over her in the brush just off the path, and it was probably a chance encounter that saved her life. Had she lain on the ground unconscious all night, or longer, she probably would have died.

“So,” Jeff Cruz said as they walked slowly under clear blue skies surveying the detritus left by the crime scene analysts the night before. Bits of yellow police tape, an occasional splatter of plaster of paris used to cast the few footprints left on the rocky ground after the rain, and one curled paper backing from a Polaroid print littered the area. “He pulls them off the trail, rapes them, and then beats them half to death. Then he waltzes away and nobody notices. Prick bastard.”

“Yeah, he is,” Rebecca said quietly, looking at the broken branches and trampled shrubbery in the spot where Darla Myers’s body had been found. “But I don’t think that’s quite how it goes down. He beats them first, into unconsciousness,
then
he rapes them. The first two didn’t fight back, remember—probably because they couldn’t.”

Cruz followed her gaze, looking at the obvious evidence of a struggle. “This one did.”

“Yeah,” Rebecca said softly, “
someone
did. And that’s a change.”

She walked a few feet off the trail; Jeff followed silently. She stood in the thickets, looking back up the path the way Darla Myers had probably come, judging from where her car had finally been found. She couldn’t see more than ten feet.

“It doesn’t quite work,” she said almost to herself. “Even if he was hidden back here, invisible, he would have had to step out into plain view to get close enough to subdue her—and the others. They should have had some warning, a chance to run or to scream—something.”

“Maybe he just looks innocent,” Jeff offered. “Or maybe he’s doing the Bundy thing. Pretending
he’s
injured and asking for help like Bundy did when he faked having a broken arm.”

“No weapon’s been found,” Rebecca countered. “The injuries sustained by the victims only indicate that some kind of blunt object was used. Damn. We need a witness. If Myers doesn’t wake up, then the only chance we have to learn what really happened here is if Janet Ryan really
was
here, and that she remembers what she saw.”
Soon, make it soon.

The details of the crime continued to elude her, and she knew in her heart that the key to finding the attacker was in the specifics of what he did. She forced herself to imagine it all in slow motion, like reviewing a movie frame by frame. She tried to distance herself from the mental images she constructed. If she allowed herself to hear the victims’ cries, feel their fear, experience their helplessness, her own anger and revulsion and pity would paralyze her. She would never be able to do her job, and she would never be able to help them. It was a lesson she had learned early in her career, and the emotional detachment came naturally to her now.

“Jeff,” she mused, “how about this? Our guy waits in the trees until a lone jogger comes along. He steps out and strikes her…a rock, or a club of some kind.”

“We didn’t find
any
kind of weapon,” Jeff pointed out.

“He must take it with him. I guess a guy with a baseball bat wouldn’t seem that unusual. Still, he needs to get to
his
car. Or maybe he has a bicycle. That would make it very easy for him to come and go.”

Cruz nodded, clearly frustrated. “God, though, you’d think someone would have seen something! It’s been in all the papers. No one has even come forward with a
bad
tip.”

“Yeah, it’s hard to believe that no one has seen or heard anything. But then, perhaps someone finally has.” She looked at her partner as they followed a progressively narrower path through the trees toward the water. “It keeps coming back to Janet Ryan. Did you get a report yet on the tissue under her fingernails?”

“Due later today,” Jeff replied, pushing aside the shrubs that leaned out over the water on the edge of the riverbank. There was a narrow strip of sand a few feet below them and then the bottom fell steeply away. He could make out the shapes of the boathouses a few hundred yards down the river. There was nothing unusual about the place.