RCC03 - Beneath a Weeping Sky

by Frank Zafiro

  Not last night, though. The streets were nearly bare all night. When she drove by the bars in her sector, she noticed some closing early for lack of customers, well before the required two o’clock. There weren’t many cars out and fewer pedestrians. Overall, she had the sense of a city that was nervous.

  It’s probably just me.

  Probably. She’d taken the rape report from Maureen Hite. She’d heard the radio news reports calling this guy the Rainy Day Rapist. She was probably just amplifying what she saw due to her own behind-the-scenes knowledge.

  Right?

  Or was it because she was nervous?

  Because of what happened.

  The thought came to her unbidden and unwelcome. Once it had sprung up in the early morning light, though, she took a hard look at it.

  Was that the reason?

  Katie unbuttoned her jeans and wriggled out of them, tossing the clumped denim into the laundry hamper in the corner of her room. She did the same with her shirt and underclothing, then pulled the long blue flannel pajama over the top of her head. As the warm material slid down her ribs and hips, a shudder went through her.

  Do I even want to think about this?

  Robotic, she pulled the shades closed on the bedroom window. The bedroom darkened. Natural light seeped around the corners of the window shades and splashed weakly against the wall. More light spilled in through the open bedroom door.

  Katie closed the door and slid beneath the covers of her bed. The initial coolness of the sheets gave way as her body warmed the bed. She resisted shivering, afraid that if she started, she might not stop.

  I thought I was over this.

  She knew that was a lie the moment she thought it, though. What happened to her wasn’t like the flu. She wasn’t going to “get over it” and “just move on.” She knew enough from the police training she’d received on the subject to know that was true.

  Still, everyone deals with the trauma differently. Some were devastated. Some survive. Some leave it behind. Some face it. Some embrace it.

  And some push it deep down, don’t they, Katie? But it doesn’t always want to stay down deep, does it? Not this, not the child on the bridge, not a dozen other things that you face but yet do not face.

  She closed her eyes tightly and exhaled.

  And just like she had always done when the pressure became too great, she let the images and emotions wash over her. She opened her mind and heart, spread her spiritual arms wide and accepted everything that came.

  All the ugliness followed quickly.

  Phil. That’d been his name. An upperclassman at Washington State University. They’d met at a party. Katie recalled the thrill of that first kiss with him. Such a naïve emotional reaction. Because next came the groping hands and the refusal to stop.

  Don’t be a goddamn tease.

  The back bedroom sanctuary had quickly become a prison. She couldn’t scream, couldn’t move. He’d slapped his palm over her mouth, mashing her lips into her teeth, almost like a grotesque antithesis of that first kiss just minutes before.

  Then what felt like cold steel being driven into her.

  You’ll do what I say, tease.

  How long had that gone on? How long did it take him? She imagined it was a thousand years of staring up at the textured ceiling in the dim light of that bedroom. And when he’d finished, the dead weight of his spent body disgusted her even further. She tried to wriggle out from beneath him. He didn’t resist, finally pushing himself up and buckling his pants.

  You liked it. Don’t forget that.

  Like she could ever forget what happened. How stripped and vulnerable she felt. How much courage she had to raise just to slink out of the house and run to a pay phone. Too afraid to even call the police, she’d dialed her mother’s number, praying the woman would be awake and not drunk.

  She had been awake, but Katie could hear the slur in her mother’s sleepy hello. It didn’t seem to matter, though, because she spilled out the entire story on the phone, rushing her words, using them to fight off the tears that wanted to return.

  And then her mother answered.

  Well, at least you weren’t a virgin.

  The words struck Katie like a sheet of freezing water. The threat of tears was immediately staved off. Without a word, she hung up the phone.

  After that, she never told anyone else.

  Not the police. Not a single friend. Not any of her lovers. None of her brothers and sisters in the badge.

  No one.

  Not ever.

  Her mother never mentioned the rape, either. At first, Katie thought that was because she didn’t know how to deal with it or what to say. She could understand that. But when her mother expressed only confusion at why Katie would change her college major from veterinary science to criminal justice, she realized that it wasn’t discomfort at all.

  Her mother had simply been too drunk to even remember the conversation.

  That left only two people in the world who knew the truth about what happened. She doubted that even Phil remembered it the way it really happened. His bashful glances her way over the next term told her that he was either too intoxicated to have a clear memory of the event or he wanted it to appear that way. She wondered what he told his friends about it and about her. She even wondered how he rationalized things in his own mind in order to deal with it.

  Or maybe it was easy for him. Who knew?

  Sometimes Katie thought the whole thing was her fault. If only she hadn’t gone to the party. Or had a few drinks. Or danced with him. Or kissed him. If she’d avoided any one of those things, then the rape would never have occurred.

  Other times, she wanted to scream out in frustration. She wanted to claw back at the images of him on top of her. She wanted to take back what he tore from her.

  Most of the time, she wanted it to have never happened. And that was how she dealt with it every day since it happened. She simply pretended it happened to someone else. After all, no one else knew about it and Katie MacLeod planned on keeping it that way forever. Even if it meant facing down these memories every so often, when it was too difficult to keep them tamped down inside anymore.

  Even if it meant passing through them again to take away their potency.

  Everyone deals with trauma differently, she knew. And sometimes even the same person deals with it differently at different times.

  Some people faced things head on, absorbed the pain and moved on.

  Some ran away.

  Katie took in a deep breath and let it out. Sweat dampened her entire body beneath the blanket, but she felt stronger.

  Because even though she sometimes hid, she didn’t ever run.

  As if on cue, the telephone at Katie’s bedside rang shrilly. She jumped at the sound, then realized she’d forgotten to turn off the ringer. She reached for the telephone, unsure until the phone was at her ear, if she would answer it or simply turn off the noise.

  “Hello?”

  Maybe it had been a desire for human company that drove her to answer the phone. Something to extract her from her memories. If that were true, she instantly regretted it when the voice at the other end of the connection came through.

  “Kay-die?”

  The slurred version of her name caused her to flash to her mother, but the voice was distinctly male.

  “Is thad yew, Kay-die?”

  Stef.

  “It’s me,” she answered, her voice tight. “What do you want?”

  “Oh, Kay-die,” he said, his voice dissolving into several teary grunts and huffs. “Oh.” He took another breath, then said, “Hola, chica.”

  Katie felt strangely cold. The natural response from the time they dated – hola, chico – never even threatened to come out. It was as if the pity and the anger that she had intermittently felt for Kopriva had called a truce. With the two emotions leaving the battlefield, all that remained was a strange emptiness.

  “What do you want, Stef?”

  “I jes’
wanna talk with you. I wanna –”

  “Stef, we have nothing to talk about,” she told him.

  “Nu-nu-nothing?” he stammered back in a surprised tone.

  “Nothing,” she repeated.

  “How can you say that to me?” he asked her, pain evident in his voice.

  Pity may have quit the field, but at that question, her anger reentered the fray. “How could you say the things you said to me? How could you be so selfish?”

  “I—I—”

  “You act like everything that happened last year only happened to you.” Her mind’s eye flashed to a picture of Amy Dugger that she had seen in the Dugger’s kitchen while she’d been assigned to wait with the family. Her jaw clenched. “Well, it didn’t. Those things happened to the rest of us, too.”

  “You didn’t kill anyone,” Kopriva answered back, his slur seeming to dissipate with those particular words. “I did.”

  “We all have our own ghosts, Stef. But you decided not to face yours. You decided to check out instead.” Katie shook her head. Now pity had heard the call of battle and reappeared on the field. “I can’t have you in my life. Not if you won’t face up to your demons. I can’t get dragged down into that.”

  “Whaddayou know?” Kopriva snarled. “Little Miss Perfect Princess. You don’t know shit!”

  An ironic laugh forced its way out of Katie’s mouth before she could stop it. “Oh, Stef. Like you know. You don’t know anything about me. Not really.”

  “I tell you what I know. I know that you don’t care about—”

  “Don’t call me anymore,” Katie interrupted, her voice hard. “If you do, I’ll get a no-contact order.”

  Kopriva stopped talking. Stung silence radiated through the telephone receiver toward her.

  “Goodbye, Stef,” she said, and hung up.

  She turned off the ringer and curled up into a ball under the blankets. She let the ghosts and demons wash over her until weariness finally pulled her into a sleep so deep that even those specters could not follow.

  EIGHT

  Thursday, April 18th

  0917 hours

  Day Shift

  Tower stood in the doorway of the crime analysis unit with a package of Hostess donuts in his hands. He waited until Renee looked up from her desk and spotted him there. Her expression remained momentarily angry. He raised the box of donuts and affected a contrite expression.

  Renee’s features softened slightly. She waved him into the office.

  Tower grinned.

  “Don’t smile at me, John,” she said. “The donuts get you in the door, but not off my shit list.”

  Tower’s grin widened.

  “I mean it, John.”

  “I know.”

  “You can’t just talk to me like I’m some idiot or something.”

  “I know.” He held out the donuts. “Peace?”

  Renee stared at him, as if gauging his sincerity. After a moment, she accepted the box from him. Then she held out her empty coffee mug. The words on the side read, Given enough coffee, I could rule the world.

  “Coffee’s over there,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tower said lightly, snapping a salute.

  Renee raised a single eyebrow. “You might want to lay off the smart alec shtick for a little while. I still haven’t decided if I forgive you.”

  Tower held up his empty hand in an open palm, mea culpa gesture and moved across the room. He filled her cup with the rich brew, along with a Styrofoam cup for himself.

  “You could’ve brought flowers,” Renee said.

  “Oh, yeah. That wouldn’t start rumors.”

  “What’d I say about the smart alec thing?”

  Tower brought her the cup of coffee he’d poured. “That was sarcasm. It’s different.”

  “It’s close enough.”

  Tower shrugged. “Probably. Anyway, you can’t eat flowers. You can eat donuts.”

  Renee didn’t answer. She eyed the box, then cracked the lid. “One won’t hurt.”

  Tower suppressed a laugh. If Renee wanted to eat twenty donuts, she probably could do so without gaining an ounce. She remained slender, despite spending her days behind a desk in a small office filled with snack food. It didn’t bother Tower, but he was pretty sure every woman in the department hated her for exactly that reason.

  Renee bit into the donut and chewed slowly. Then she sipped her coffee. “You should’ve gone to the bakery,” she said. “You got these at a convenience store, didn’t you?”

  “No,” Tower lied.

  Renee turned the box and read the code from the label. “The Circle K, huh?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  Renee smiled humorlessly. “I know everything. It’s my job.”

  Tower shrugged. “Can’t argue that. But a donut is a donut.”

  Renee lowered the box. Her eyebrow arched again. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.”

  She raised the half-eaten donut in the air. “This is barely a donut. Real donuts are things you buy at the bakery.” She raised her cup. “A real donut complements real coffee.” She lowered the cup. “You know, I’m only eating this because you’re trying to make up. Otherwise, I’d put them out for visitors.”

  “I know.”

  Renee took a bite and held the box out toward him.

  Tower waved off her offer. “Can’t feed the stereotype.”

  Renee swallowed. “But I can?”

  “You’re not the police. You only work for the police.”

  “The public doesn’t know the difference,” she said.

  “True,” Tower agreed. “But the public is mostly ignorant.”

  “I’ve developed a theory about that, by the way,” she said, breaking off another piece of donut and tossing it in her mouth.

  “About what? Why the public is ignorant?”

  “Uh-uh.” She chewed and swallowed and gave it another coffee chaser. “About cops and donuts. How the stereotype started.”

  Tower raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

  She gave him a slight smile and took the last bite of her donut, making him wait. When she’d finished chewing and tossing back another shot of coffee, she went on. “It’s simple, really. People forget that we haven’t always been this twenty-four hours, seven days a week society. The pace of life wasn’t always this fast. Take 7-11 stores for instance. Do you know where the name came from?”

  Tower did, but he shook his head no. He didn’t want to interrupt her.

  “Those were the store’s business hours. Seven in the morning until eleven at night. What was so novel about that, you ask? Well, everyone else except bars and taverns were strictly nine to five. Maybe eight to six. It was a big deal to be able to run to the store for milk at ten-thirty at night when the Safeway was closed.”

  She took another pull of coffee and waved her hand. “Of course, now there are tons of businesses open twenty-four hours a day. Not just convenience stores, but gas stations, restaurants and grocery stores. Everybody has twenty-four hour service.”

  “Not banks,” Tower said.

  “Not so. ATMs.” She shook her head. “No, John, we’ve seen a very radical shift in the last half-century. The era of convenience is firmly entrenched in our social structure.”

  “So cops eat donuts because it’s convenient?”

  She took another sip and rolled her eyes at him. “Are you purposefully being obtuse?”

  “Yes. But it’s not much of a stretch for me.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Do you want to hear my theory or not?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She leaned forward. “Back in the times before 7-11, when everyone closed down at a reasonable hour and went home, we still had cops out on the beat, right? Graveyard shift had to be unbearably long. By two or three in the morning, I’ll bet you that the officers out there thought they were the last people alive on earth. They’d welcome human contact. They’d be looking for it. So who was open at that time of n
ight?”

  “Bars?”

  “Yeah, all right, until two in the morning. If it were a weekend. But how long would a bartender want to stay after a long night? Not long. He’d be wanting to tally up the receipts and get home to bed. By two-thirty, even the bars were dark back then. But who comes to work about three, three-thirty in the morning?”

  Tower shrugged.

  She smiled. “The baker. The baker comes to work early and starts baking. He throws on a pot of coffee for himself and for his friend, the local cop. The cop swings by, has some fresh coffee, some conversation and a donut. The sugar and caffeine give him a boost through to the end of his shift. The baker doesn’t have to worry about getting robbed when he opens his shop. Both parties benefit from the arrangement.”

  “No doubt.”

  Renee leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “And that, detective, is how I believe the cop and the donut stereotype came to be.”

  Tower set down his Styrofoam cup on her desk and clapped. “Brilliant. And all these years, I just thought it was because donuts tasted good.”

  “That’s why you’re a detective and not an analyst.”

  Tower nodded, letting a more serious look seep into his face. “You’re right, actually. That’s why I’d like to talk to you about those questions you wrote last time I was here.”

  She held up a finger. “You’re forgetting something.”

  Tower sighed and hung his head. “The donuts aren’t enough?”

  “Do you have any experience with women at all, Detective Tower?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Apparently so,” Renee replied. “Because you know exactly what you need to do.”

  Tower looked up and met her eyes. “Yes, I do.” He took a deep breath and said in a sincere tone, “I’m sorry, Renee.”

  She paused, as if savoring his discomfort. Tower waited in silence until she finally gave him a quick nod. “Apology accepted.”

  “Thank you. Let’s get busy, then.”

  Renee poised her fingers over the keyboard. “Just speak the word, master.”

  Tower smiled. “Actually, I was thinking more about those questions you wrote down.”