Delman was in a rough neighborhood, Jamie’s captain argued when she tried to convince him it was Marchek’s MO. Delman hadn’t seen her attacker. There was no way to link it to Marchek.
Three weeks after the attack, Delman overdosed on heroin.
After that, there was another stretch of quiet. Captain Jules took this to mean Jamie was incorrect about Delman. Jamie disagreed. Marchek was reveling in his first attack after more than six years.
Then, three weeks ago, there was an attack on a patrol officer, Carla Gianni. Gianni had been walking through Dolores Park when she was attacked. No DNA, no prints, no good look at her attacker.
Gianni was only struck twice, which indicated the possibility of an attacker prone to less violence than Marchek. The ex-boyfriend was their prime suspect, but Jamie thought Marchek might be good for that attack. Unfortunately, there was no DNA evidence at the scene to prove her hunch.
Once again, the crime scene team turned up no DNA and no prints. Jamie brought him in after each attack. Each time, she’d had to let him go. No evidence and no witnesses.
She had brought Marchek in that very afternoon for questioning on an attempted rape in the police station parking lot that occurred at about four a.m. this morning. A traffic officer, Jill Muhta, had gotten away unharmed. Once again, Marchek had managed to avoid leaving evidence. Muhta was unable to ID him, so Jamie had no choice but to cut him loose.
Though targeting police officers was inherently risky, the police represented an attractive target for more violent, anger-motivated criminals. The police represented power, and for someone like Michael Marchek, a female police officer was the ultimate prize.
“Thanks, Shirley. What time do you have him leaving?”
“Bastard signed out at 7:58 p.m.”
While they were at that damn banquet. “Anyone see him leave?”
“A guard named Cash saw him leave the building. Walked out the front toward Bryant.”
“And after that?”
“Nothing. Cash was taking a smoke break. Said Marchek turned left on Bryant and that’s all he saw. You think he’s your guy?”
Jamie blew out her breath. “I do.”
Emily began crying again.
“You want me to send patrol to pick him up?”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Jamie ended the call and blinked hard. Emily Osbourne had been attacked at 8:19 p.m. The bastard had literally gotten out of jail and walked over to the department in search of a new victim.
That was on her. Jamie had gotten him riled up. She’d hoped to taunt him into saying something. Like many criminals who committed serial crimes, he wanted to boast. He was proud of his work. A perfectionist. The best way to rile a perfectionist was to tell him that he wasn’t perfect.
That was what she’d done.
Just hours earlier.
She used the failed attempted rape of Officer Muhta to provoke him. “I’d hate to think you’d lost your touch. Prison will do that, I hear.”
Marchek was not the explosive type. He held it in, but she knew he was angry. She’d done everything in her power to make him angry.
And then what?
She’d walked away.
Three hours later, they cut him loose. What was she thinking not having him followed? The department wouldn’t have sanctioned it, not without some evidence that he was behind Muhta’s attack—or the attack of the patrol officer in the park. Hell, the budget barely covered the resources to work the cases where they had evidence. There was no money to spend extra man-hours on the cases without it.
Marchek was Jamie’s responsibility. She should have followed him herself. But that was impossible. She had convicted rapists coming out on parole every month, some after only thirty days in prison. They might not be as violent as Michael Marchek, but they were violent and they were rapists. She couldn’t watch every one.
Damn, she wished she could.
Osbourne was attacked in the stairwell. Jamie’s stairwell. He’d come to Sex Crimes, her department. The only reason he had to come there was to find her.
He was looking for her and instead, she let him walk right up to another officer.
Christ. It should have been her on this table, not Emily.
How could she have been so stupid?
Chapter 5
Jamie Vail drew a slow breath to calm herself. This was not the time for self-recriminations or pity. This was Emily’s time. Turning her focus to the interview at hand, Jamie announced the time, date, day of the week, and location of the rape, for the recording. But she wrote nothing. Her job was to watch for anything the tape would miss. The attending nurse, Maxi Thomas, would record important details, including victim’s race and gender. More than ninety-nine percent of the cases they saw were female, but they’d had male victims too. It was no easier with them.
“For the purpose of the recording, I’m Jamie Vail. I’m an Inspector with the San Francisco Police Department’s Sexual Assault Unit.” She lowered her voice. “Have we contacted your family?”
Emily started to cry.
Maxi patted her shoulder ever so lightly. “We called her parents. They’re back in Connecticut. She has an aunt coming down from Stockton. We called her boyfriend, too, but didn’t reach him.”
Parents. Aunt. Boyfriend.
Emily was a daughter, a niece, and a girlfriend.
Jamie wondered how the boyfriend would handle it. She had seen a wide range of reactions, most of them bad. Husbands and boyfriends often displaced anger at the rapist onto themselves or the victim.
Some couldn’t deal with the idea that their partner had been with another man, as though the rape were some sort of infidelity.
Others lacked the ability to be patient while the victim recovered. Often, the victim didn’t want to be intimate for a long time.
It was an impossible scenario.
From Jamie’s experience, a rape either made a couple indestructible or it flat out ruined them.
Unfortunately, odds favored the latter.
“Thanks, Maxi.” Jamie focused on the victim. On Emily, she told herself. “I’m here to catch this bastard.”
Emily choked out a sob, her nose red from the tears that streamed down her face.
Jamie set a box of tissues between them. Pulling one out, she handed it to her. “For the record, will you state your full name?”
“Emily Kathleen Osbourne.”
She gave Emily another tissue, and paused. Felt the familiar tightness in her own chest. Watching the victim got tougher each time. It grew harder to hold onto her professionalism, to block out their pain and her own anger.
Over the years, the attacks, along with their brutal details and lasting repercussions, accumulated inside her. What used to feel like a short, quick stab in her early days of conducting these interviews was now a chronic pain.
Her guard, too, had been chipped away; the victim’s pain seeped into her more easily now than when she’d started. She wondered if the same were true of the rapists. How much time had she spent with men who did this to women? Did that time accumulate the same way? Was some of their evil seeping in as well?
Emily wiped her cheeks, tried to be brave.
Jamie nodded her encouragement.
“I’m ready,” Emily whispered.
Jamie wasn’t ready. But this wasn’t about her. She sucked a quick breath, then let it and her resistance fall away.
“I’m going to ask a lot of questions,” she told Emily. “This is all standard stuff. If you need more time, tell me. If you think of something else, interrupt me. Anything you can tell me will help. Okay?”
“Okay,” Emily squeaked, with a deep breath and a shudder.
The rape questionnaire included almost sixty questions. Jamie had memorized them years ago. Most victims begged to leave more than once before the interview was over. Jamie understood the desire. More than once, she’d wanted to tell them, “Yes, of course you can go.” And they could. They could stop at any time. But they didn’t. J
amie and Maxi helped them through it.
They’d been beaten, violated, shamed, and within hours of the attack—as soon as possible—Jamie’s job was to make them go through it all again, in as much detail as possible.
They were warriors, these women.
Maybe not before the attack, but they certainly were after.
When the answers took too long, Jamie waited. She offered water—once a mouth scraping was completed in case of semen or other evidence. But mostly, she stayed quiet and let the victim have her time. Ninety-nine out of every hundred spent it crying.
Jamie knew about that too. That’s what her twelve-year-old best friend had done. It had lasted for weeks.
Seeing the victims in these first moments, before the shock and pain had settled in, before the rape impacted the rest of their lives—their work, their family, their relationships—was probably the easiest job in the recovery process. A few weeks from now, the painful reality of what had happened would be deeper and more difficult.
She started with the easy questions. “Did you see your attacker?”
Doe eyes flashed as Emily shook her head. Her bottom lip trembled. “He wore a hood.”
“Did you see any part of him? Any skin?” Jamie pressed.
“A little part of his hand,” Emily whispered. “Up by his wrist. I saw his wrist.”
“Can you guess at his race?” Maxi asked.
Emily started to cry again. She sucked in a breath. “White. His skin was white.”
The first piece of something.
“Okay. That’s good, Emily, really good.”
A tear slid from Emily’s cheek onto the green hospital gown. Her clothes were already en route to the lab.
Jamie squeezed Emily’s shoulder, moving to the next question. “Were they white like mine?” Jamie put out her own hand and slowly twisted it up and down, so Emily could see both sides. “Or more olive, like Maxi’s?”
Emily looked at her own hand as though she’d never seen it before. “I only saw the wrist. It was white—like yours.”
“Okay. Good.” Jamie moved on. “Can you guess at how big he was? Height? Weight?” Jamie always said “he.” Guidelines said never assume, but Jamie had never had a female rapist.
Jamie moved quickly through questions on appearance, since Emily had seen only his hands. Still, she asked every one of the questions on the list.
Sometimes a question would lead to an image a victim didn’t think she had.
That was not the case here. Emily had not seen more than the little strip of wrist. A defense attorney would tear that apart. On the stand, Emily would be pressured about how certain she was that she’d seen his wrist. That it wasn’t a white T-shirt or bracelet or watch or—
No, it was not enough to go on.
“He bound you?”
Emily nodded.
Jamie knew he had used duct tape. Pieces of it were stuck to Emily’s forearms. It would have to be removed for evidence, but that could wait. “Anything else besides the tape?”
Jamie was never surprised by the extents these assholes went to—tape, plastic bindings, handcuffs. It wasn’t to prevent escape. Duct tape alone was enough for that. The overkill was all part of the fantasy.
“No other binding?”
Emily shook her head.
Jamie waited for a moment before moving on. From an earlier scene, evidence suggested her serial rapist had used some sort of restraint across the victim’s chest too. She didn’t want to plant ideas in Emily’s mind, but she wanted to ensure nothing was missed. “How about a strap across your middle? Anything like that?”
“No. He sat on me.”
“Can you show me where?” Jamie asked.
She touched a rib. “Here.”
Maxi prodded softly along Emily’s ribs until she located the most sensitive spot. The dark edges of a bruise were already forming on the skin. With Emily holding her gown up, head turned, Maxi photographed the bruises. Maxi marked the chart before retying Emily’s gown. She would have to be photographed again in a day or two when the bruises were fully formed, but neither Jamie nor Maxi mentioned that now.
Next, Jamie walked Emily through how the rape had occurred. Every question helped to create a map of the rapist’s MO. How did he attack? Con, blitz, or surprise? Was anything stolen?
Some of the best cases were the ones where the perp took a piece of jewelry, then gave it to a girlfriend. Or one time, to his mother. In that case, his mother had known it was too nice for her bum son to afford, so she’d called the cops. A bold move for the mother, but as she’d said, “If he’s stealing from someone else, what makes me think he won’t steal from me? Or worse.”
In Emily’s case, it was a blitz approach, which made sense, since she hadn’t seen him. Nothing stolen.
“Did he wear gloves when he touched you?”
Emily paused. “I saw his hand.”
“Without a glove?”
“I think—I thought so.” Then she shook her head. Tears fell faster. “Oh, God. Now, I’m not sure.”
“Emily, it’s okay. This is hard. It’s a lot to digest. Are we moving too fast?”
“No. No, it’s okay.”
“Let’s try for prints,” Jamie suggested.
They’d dust for prints on her skin. Maybe they’d get lucky.
How many times had she prayed for a break like that? Way too many.
Jamie gave Emily a short break, then continued her questions. Did he use a condom, did he talk, threaten, bribe? No condom, Emily didn’t think.
Shawna Delman had said the same, but they hadn’t gotten any DNA from Delman’s exam.
Jamie didn’t wonder if Osbourne’s would be the same. She knew it would.
The next part was the worst. “Can you tell me where he touched you?”
Emily choked on a sob.
“We’re going to walk through it slowly.”
Maxi pulled a fistful of sterile swabs from a drawer.
“Maxi’s going to take a swab from each place.” Jamie paused. “This is going to suck, Emily. It’s the worst part. We’ll do it as fast as we can, but we have to do it right. As soon as it’s over, I’ll buy you a soda, okay? You’re a Coke drinker, right? You said you hate Pepsi, right? You were teasing me, because I said I couldn’t tell the difference. You thought that was nuts, remember?”
Emily tried to smile but failed.
Jamie touched Emily’s arm again. She never touched her victims, but Emily was different. She was a colleague. The third one she’d interviewed inside of one week—the officer in Dolores Park, Jill Muhta, and now Emily.
It got worse every goddamn time. Marchek was escalating. Fast. Much faster than he had before they put him in prison last time.
Jamie stepped back. “Can you do this?”
Emily’s back straightened. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”
“Anywhere he came into contact with you—his hands, his skin, his penis.”
Tears streamed down Emily’s cheeks.
“I know this is tough. We’re almost done.”
“You know what they don’t ever tell you?” Emily said.
Jamie waited, her gut tight.
Emily wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “You get all that defensive training, you know? I wasn’t going to be a police officer, and I still got it. And I paid attention. I thought it was important.” She shivered, some memory stirring her.
Jamie winced, wished she could make this all go away.
“But, it didn’t help,” Emily whispered. “I didn’t do any of the things we learned. I couldn’t think. I shut down.” Tracks of tears striped her face. “I just lay there and let him do it.”
Jamie felt her own tears well and fought them back. “It’s not your fault, Emily. Whatever happens, you cannot blame yourself for this.” Jamie searched for something more to say but came up empty.
Emily straightened her back. “Let’s get this over with.”
Jamie stood. “You’re sure?”
Jamie slowly began the process. “Let’s start with his hands. You think he wasn’t wearing gloves, so where do you remember his hands?”
“He touched my—” She caught her lip in her teeth. “My neck. He grabbed it.”
Using clear tape on the skin, Maxi tried to lift prints off of her neck. The process took ten minutes and in the end, Maxi shook her head. No prints. They printed her hands, arms, and inner thighs with the same result.
“Okay, Emily. The last thing we have to do is talk about the sexual assault. Did he put his penis in your mouth?”
“No.” Emily cupped her face and started to sob. “Thank God, no.”
They’d already taken a vaginal swab, so the physical collection was done. “I think we’re ready for that Coke now.”
“I’ll go,” Maxi said.
“Thanks.” Jamie pulled money from her pocket and offered it to Maxi, but she waved it away.
“You want diet or regular?” Maxi asked gently.
“Regular,” Emily said.
“You?” she asked Jamie.
“Regular’s perfect.”
Maxi left, and Emily turned to Jamie. The tears had momentarily subsided when Emily said, “God, I wish I was regular again.”
Jamie exhaled, the knot in her gut heavier than ever. “Me, too, Emily. Me too.”
When Maxi returned, they drank their Cokes while Maxi photographed Emily using a highly sensitive film designed to pick up any marks that were emerging on the skin. Aside from the obvious injuries, Emily had a series of bruises that had yet to fully form and a jagged mark inside her thigh that Jamie suspected may have been caused by the knife during their struggle.
“We’re done with the physical evidence. I need to ask about anything he might have said.”
Emily’s mouth dropped open. “God, I almost forgot.” She paused and the weight of Emily’s stare felt like a physical burden.
The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set Page 3
