Frank's painstaking attention to detail checked any intrusion of discord, and she was almost happy. An hour later she rolled south on the Harbor Freeway, whistling the "Flower Song" and looking forward to the Chiefs' game. By the time she got to the Alibi, Johnnie and Ike were already at a table in front of the large-screen TV. Lifting a hand toward Mel, she noticed Deirdre McCall filling in for Nancy and Johnnie already on at least his second beer. It wasn't even ten o'clock. She ordered coffee as Boy-red joined them, joking with the boys and excluding Frank from the banter. Around noon they started ordering pitchers, and Frank helped with a couple more as the Niners trounced the Panthers. After the late game she drove carefully home through the November dusk.
Frank made a chicken sandwich and took the arrest printout into the living room. Listening absently to the news, she scribbled notes in the margins, brushing crumbs away while she worked. A handful of records fit the time frame she was looking for, and three of the perps had priors for assault and/or rape. Between the rape victims, the murder books she'd yet to read, and this list of possible suspects, she had wiggled out a few more leads. Frank yawned widely. She and Noah could start on them in the morning. She hoped like hell they wouldn't fizzle on her.
But Frank's plans to follow up on the Agoura/Peterson leads got shelved, and she spent all the next day working a drowning with Diego. By six that evening, they had a suspect in the locker downtown. Frank celebrated, leaving the office in time to catch all of the Monday night game. She even managed another good night's sleep. Tuesday she was in meetings and at court, but late in the afternoon she finally was able to dig into the rec area murder books. They were cold cases, and Frank had borrowed them from the Culver City PD and LASD without anyone breathing down her neck to get them back. In fact, both agencies had been surprisingly cooperative.
She picked up the first binder and pulled out the pictures and the coroner's report. A handful of scene sketches corresponded to the photos, and Frank spread those in front of her. They were the next best thing to being on scene. She studied them, formulating her own ideas before she was prejudiced by the investigating detective's report.
Jane Doe, fifteen or sixteen years old, Hispanic. Her body was on its stomach in a ditch. She was missing footwear, pants, and underwear. She still had on a white bra and T-shirt, but they'd been pushed up around her collarbone. She showed bruises, too, but they seemed more evenly distributed around her body, especially around the arms and breasts where the perp had grabbed her. The coroner's report indicated anal as well as vaginal rape. She was asphyxiated, but manually. The bruising was obvious on her neck.
Frank closed the file. It was too inconsistent with the profile she was expecting. The same for the second report, a sixteen-year-old Korean girl who'd been found off the 405 near Huntley. The third case was Cassandra Nichols.
A twelve-year-old black girl. The first picture caught her spread-eagled near a dumpster in an empty parking lot. Pink skirt bunched up around her waist, underwear around her knees, blood stains and bruises on her legs. Her bra was pushed above tiny breasts.
Frank's first impression was that this case was also unrelated, but she kept circling around, making notes on a legal pad. The coroner's photos showed consistent bruising. Ligature marks around the neck indicated asphyxiation. Frank held one of the pictures up, squinting into it. It was a morgue shot emphasizing scattered posterior bruising. She searched it carefully, then restudied the photo of Nichols in the lot. Frank unconsciously stroked the empty spot on her ring finger.
The coroner's report told her that Nichols was found shortly after she'd died, roughly 7:00 p.m. The autopsy revealed anal assault and significant contusion of the dorsal region. Cause of death was asphyxiation; the manner was strangulation by ligature with an object similar to a leather belt. The internal exam discovered nothing unusual.
Frank sat back and pulled her Ray Bans off, nibbling on one of the ear stems. This had a lot of similarities to their boy, but it might just be coincidental. Frank kept trolling through the photos. She stopped when she distinguished a thin line under Cassandra Nichols' breasts. Pulling the picture closer to her face, she focused on the strap mark from Nichols' bra. She must have been wearing it throughout the assault. When he raped her, the perp hadn't even displaced her bra. That was consistent with the rape profile Frank had compiled. All of the victims on her list had been raped while fully clothed, and the type of sexual molestation was exclusively anal intercourse.
Frank scrutinized the pictures even more closely. Nichols had bloody abrasions on her knees and thighs. Frank guessed she'd been on her stomach while she was being raped, and that the scratches came from being thrust against whatever surface she was lying on. Frank noted there were no abrasions on her upper thighs, which could have been protected by her skirt.
If she was right, the abrasions might have trapped particles of the surface she was raped on, indicating whether Nichols was raped indoors or outdoors, and on what type of ground. Asphalt? Dirt? Grass? Nothing in the coroner's report described more than the presence of the abrasions, nor was there any evidence from forensics. Frank found the property sheet and was pleased to see that Culver City had at least retained Nichols' clothing as evidence. She scrolled methodically through the investigator's notes and reports.
Nichols had never made it home from summer school that day. The last time her father had seen her he had handed his daughter a lunch bag. The case detective had felt it important to note that the lunch consisted of a bologna and cheese sandwich, chips, and an apple, which corresponded with the protocol notes on her stomach contents. That lunch sounded pretty good to Frank and she remembered she hadn't eaten all day except for two jelly donuts on her way in to work at 5:00 a.m.
She leaned back in her old chair, wondering if she'd found another connection to their perp. It seemed possible, but Frank had learned never to view anything as a certainty except for the fact that there would always be dead bodies. Her eye once again caught the picture of Cassandra Nichols splayed on the ground. This time Frank studied it with a prejudiced eye.
She'd been a beautiful little girl, a good girl, the notes indicated. No trouble. Her mother was dead; her father, still widowed, was a high school teacher. That he had packed his daughter a lunch indicated she was a cared-for little girl. Frank was far too familiar with the anguish of loss, yet she still couldn't imagine losing a child. Telling parents their children were dead was almost the hardest thing about being a homicide detective. Not being able to tell them who killed their son or daughter was the worst.
Who did this to you? she wondered, staring at a smiling, gap-toothed school photo.
That Nichols was black was inconsistent, but because their perp intermingled whites with Hispanics, it wasn't a gross anomaly in his choice of victims. And it was a similar MO in the right geographic area. Nichols had been dead for three months. She was a Frigidaire by homicide standards. To her father, she was still his baby. To her killer, if it was the same man, she was an ecstatic memory whose thrill had no doubt faded. Frank fingered the photo, considering the ramifications.
It was tempting to think they might have another link to their perp, but Frank was cautious about attributing this to him yet. And while she wanted the same man to be responsible for all the assaults and all the homicides, the possibility was daunting. If it was true, there was a very dangerous man out there who was able to rape and kill at will. He was smart, and no doubt getting smarter with each successful crime, his intensity level escalating. And it was Frank's job to apprehend him. The immensity of that caught up with her as she stared at Cassandra Nichols.