“She reminded me of my tenth grade teacher, Mrs. O’Halloran. Very nice lady.”
“I know the feeling,” Gio said. “Listen, can I get your names for the crime scene report?”
“Sure. I’m Terry. That’s Art.”
Gio took out his notebook. “Last names?”
The medic laughed. “Oh, sorry. Mine’s Wylie. His is Hoagland. We’re out of Station Three.”
Gio jotted the information down. “Thanks. Did you work on her?”
Terry shook his head. “No, it was mostly Art, at least until the ambulance got here.”
At the sound of his name, the tall, slender medic turned toward the two of them. “What’s that?”
“Just talking bad about you, boss,” Terry said.
“Like that’s anything new.”
Gio smiled lightly at the banter and turned to go.
“Officer?”
Gio stopped. “Yeah?”
Art stepped closer to him. “I’m no cop or anything, but there’s something I think you should know.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, I noticed something strange about her clothing.”
“Damaged?”
“No, not really. But when I first arrived, I noticed that her skirt was pushed up a little bit. I didn’t think anything of it, but then we ended up cutting it off while we were working on her. It was one of those long thick denim skirts and it was getting in the way. Anyway, when we pulled it aside, that’s when I saw that her undergarments were pulled down.”
“Pulled down?” Gio repeated.
Art nodded. “Yeah. About three quarters of the way down from the hip toward the knee.”
“Could that happen by accident?” Gio asked, though he figured he already knew the answer. “From her thrashing around in a fight or something?”
Art shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. This was too far down for anything like that. I think they were deliberately pulled down by her attacker.”
“Which means…”
“Which means this isn’t just an assault,” Art finished. “Yeah.”
“Way to go, Columbo.” Terry said. He looked up at the sky. “Is it raining?”
Gio didn’t bother giving him a disapproving look. He turned and trotted back to the crime scene, ducking underneath the tape. He heard Stone’s infuriated yell from the opposite side, but ignored it.
“Finch?” he asked the detective surveying the scene.
Finch looked up at him calmly. “What is it?”
“The medic over there said that when he got here, the victim’s underwear was pulled down almost to her knees.”
Gio expected some surprise, but got none. Instead, Finch merely pointed his pen at the ground. “That would explain the condom.”
Gio followed his gesture. An unopened condom lay on the ground in the midst of all the medic’s torn gauze wrappings.
“Holy shit,” he muttered.
Finch turned his head and called over his shoulder. “El-Tee!”
“What?” Crawford bellowed back.
“You better call Tower.”
And after that, the crime scene went quiet for a while.
1811 hours
Detective Tower stood outside of the sheet drawn between the patient’s bed and the rest of the emergency room. When the doctor exited the patient area, they dispensed with any pleasantries.
“Do you believe she was sexually assaulted, doctor?”
The doctor nodded. “I would say so. There’s some obvious vaginal trauma.”
“Any semen?”
“None that I could see. The swabs will tell the true story, though.”
Tower didn’t hold out much hope for that. Not if his hunch was right. “Is she still unconscious?”
The doctor nodded. “Yes. She was struck numerous times with a blunt object in the face and head.”
“Like a club?”
The doctor shrugged. “Could have been, but it looks more like a fist to me. We’re going to do a CAT scan on her to see what the extent of the injuries are.”
Tower shook the doctor's hand briefly and thanked him. The doctor gave him a short nod and walked away quickly to the next patient. Tower had learned long ago not to detain emergency room doctors for any longer than necessary. There was always another patient waiting.
Ridgeway appeared at his side. “She wake up?”
“No.”
Ridgeway shook his head gravely and said nothing.
“Mark, do me a favor?”
“Yep.”
“When the rape kit is ready, will you run that and all her clothes over to property?”
“Sure.”
“Not that it’ll speed things up, but mark the lab items as a rush, too.”
“You got it.”
Tower nodded his thanks and left the emergency room. As he walked to his car, he tossed things over in his mind. The engine rumbled to life and he headed for the station.
A flare of anger shot through his chest as he recalled Wendy Latah's swollen and bruised face. Her driver's license photo had shown an elegant older woman with delicate features. The slender woman in the hospital bed had resembled a badly pummeled boxer after a lopsided match.
Who would do such a thing?
Exactly my problem, Tower thought. Who?
He tried to consider alternatives to what seemed almost like a certainty to him. He forced himself to spend the time to look at it from another angle, even though, in his heart, he knew.
Maybe it was a student? He gave the thought a half-hearted analysis. Why would a student attack a teacher? Vengeance for a poor grade? Just plain cruelty?
Well, if by some strange confluence of events it actually was a student, that student’s identity would come out very shortly. It was obvious that Wendy Latah had put up a good fight. The empty canister of pepper mace found in the vehicle spoke to that. Even without the canister, there was no mistaking the lung-biting odor of cayenne pepper in the air. Whoever she sprayed looked like a pumpkin-head right now. A parent was going to notice that and get to the bottom of the story, either from the kid or from the news.
If it were a student.
Tower frowned. He knew it wasn’t. That condom seemed to scream the obvious at him.
This was the Rainy Day Rapist, not some vengeful student. And he had a feeling that no one was going to notice this pumpkin-head and call it in. Things were not going to be so easy. And why should it be? Nothing on this case had been yet.
He allowed himself a half-hearted hope that Diane in Forensics might be able to life a print from the unused condom. But the way his luck was rolling so far on this case, he didn’t invest a lot of emotional energy into that small hope.
Tower pulled into the station and parked.
He knew he had to go see Crawford. The Rainy Day Rapist was escalating. It was time to change the way he was doing things on this case.
2008 hours
Captain Michael Reott slid open his desk drawer. Reaching inside, he brought out a cigar box. Then he flipped open the box and pulled out one of his remaining four cigars.
Lieutenant Crawford watched him from his chair on the opposite side of the desk. “You’re not going to light that.”
Reott looked up at him. “Hell I’m not.”
Crawford allowed a slow smile to spread across his round face. “That’s what I like about you, Mike. No respect for authority.”
Reott bit off the butt-end of the cigar and spat it into the trashcan. Then he offered the box to Crawford.
Still smiling, Crawford took one.
“It isn’t about not respecting authority,” Reott said. “It’s about finishing out on my own terms.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that it doesn’t hurt a single soul if I want to smoke in my own office. I’ve been doing it since I made captain eleven years ago.”
“Well,” Crawford said, “there you have it. What’s a little thing like state and federal law to stand in the way of tradition?”
“Shut up,” Reott said, striking his silver Zippo lighter. “And open that window.”
Crawford twisted the latch and opened the window while Reott drew smoke from his cigar. The pungent smell of burning tobacco filled the room. When he’d finished, he handed the lighter across the desk to Crawford, who lit his own cigar.