As Dana Vaughn put it, “If there’s a vagina involved, we women get the case.”
“How long ago did the suspect leave here?” Dana asked the apartment manager.
“About fifteen minutes, I think,” the woman said. “She’s up in apartment thirty-three, waiting for you. Sharon Gillespie is her name. The poor woman!”
“Nobody saw a car?” Sheila said, entering through the walk-in security gate and following Dana.
The apartment manager shook her head, saying, “It’s the element that’s taking over. Arabs, Iranians, they’re everywhere around here.”
A fifteen-minute head start in this most traffic-clogged city in North America might as well have been fifteen hours. As far as the cops were concerned, the suspect was probably in a car and long gone.
Dana Vaughn said to Sheila, “How about you and your partner help Nate secure the crime scene. I’ll get a description out as soon as I can.”
Sheila nodded and said to the manager, “Has anybody else touched anything in her vehicle or exited through the fire exit door since it happened?”
The apartment manager shook her head, and Hollywood Nate said, “Good. Take us there and open the car gate. Some crime lab people will be arriving soon. I hope.”
“Like CSI?” the woman said.
Aaron fought the urge to heave a sigh but only said, “Don’t expect their kind of results, but we’ll do our best.”
Matthew Harwood, a fifty-year-old real-estate broker who was the roommate and lover of Sharon Gillespie, admitted Dana to apartment 33. He’d been crying with her and was wiping his eyes with his fingertips when Dana arrived. Sharon Gillespie was sitting in a kitchen chair, holding a cup of coffee in her trembling hands, her highlighted blonde hair damp, her face washed clean of makeup. A contusion on her left cheekbone was swollen and discolored.
Too late, Dana thought. She’d already bathed. Dana turned to Matthew Harwood and said, “I’ll talk to you later, sir, but do you mind if I talk to Ms. Gillespie alone? You might wait right outside with my partner. He’ll need some information.”
After Matthew Harwood was gone, Dana had a fleeting thought that this woman was not much older than she, and that made it more troubling. Dana said, “I know how… I have an idea how you’re feeling right now, but we’ll need to take you to the hospital to tend to your injuries and to get some evidence swabs. Is your underwear here or down where it happened?”
“He never made me remove my underwear,” Sharon Gillespie said. “It didn’t get that far. And this bruise on my face is my only injury. I’m not going to a hospital. I’m going to bed.”
“Okay, what do you mean, ‘It didn’t get that far’?”
“He held the weapon in front of my eyes. A box knife, like the nine-eleven hijackers used. He pushed me into the backseat of my SUV. He pushed my head down. He said he’d cut my eyes out if I didn’t…”
“Tell me the exact words that he said to you.”
“He said, ‘Suck my cock or I’ll cut your eyes out, you filthy slut.’ ”
“And then what happened?”
“What do you think happened? I did it.”
“I know this is very difficult,” Dana said. “But I have to know details. If we can collect any semen at all, we can get his DNA profile. His genetic fingerprint.”
“I know all that,” Sharon Gillespie said. “I’m not stupid. But he didn’t ejaculate. He didn’t even get hard. He got angry. Furious. He called me all kinds of things. ‘Whore, slut, pig, drunk, bitch.’ I don’t know what else.”
“Drunk?” Dana said, writing in her notebook. “Had you been drinking?”
“No, I’d just come from work.”
“Okay,” Dana said, “so there was no ejaculation?”
“No,” she said. “After a few minutes, he jerked me up by the hair and with that box knife in his fist punched me in the face and jumped out and ran toward the fire exit door.”
“Would you be able to recognize the man if you saw him again?”
“No. He was a Middle Eastern guy in his twenties. Close to six feet tall, wearing a light blue T-shirt and jeans. He had black, curly hair and he looked like the nine-eleven hijackers. With that same kind of box knife.”
“A box cutter,” Dana said. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” Sharon Gillespie said, “I’ve seen the guys at Home Depot cutting open boxes with those things.”
“Did he have a Middle Eastern accent?” Dana asked.
“No, he had no accent that I could make out. He didn’t say much. Only those filthy obscenities.”
“About calling you a drunk,” Dana said, “could he be someone who’d seen you at a bar or restaurant when you were having a few drinks? Maybe a busboy or waiter?”
“I go to a lot of restaurants in my business, but I never get drunk,” Sharon Gillespie said. “Now, please go out there and catch that god-damn Arab!” Then she started to weep.
After Dana put out a further description of the suspect to the RTO at Communications Division, she walked down to the parking garage. There she found the lazy night-watch detective “Compassionate Charlie” Gilford, a lanky, middle-aged veteran D2 notorious for his horrible taste in neckties and acerbic comments at crime scenes.
The detective said, “SID’s gonna have to crawl that SUV with a black light.”
“No, they aren’t,” Dana said. “There’s no semen in there.”
Charlie Gilford, who had a thing for well-preserved fortyish woman like Dana, said to her, “What, no dribble in the withdraw mode? You got the panties?”
“Nope,” Dana said, and before she could explain, Charlie Gilford said, “Those drawers and what was in them is a crime scene. Where are they?”
“He didn’t ejaculate,” Dana said, unsure which was more distasteful, his manner or his necktie.
“How can she be sure?” the detective said.
“Because his penis was in her mouth and it was flaccid,” Dana said. “That means it wasn’t hard.”
“I know what it means,” Charlie Gilford said, but Dana doubted it. Then he added, “How come the only sex maniac that leaves all the evidence where you can’t miss it is Bill Clinton?”
Dana Vaughn and Hollywood Nate didn’t immediately hear the further description of the apartment garage rapist when the Communications RTO broadcast her follow-up info. Since violent assailants often seem older or larger to their victims, Dana said to Nate, “He might not be that old, and he might not be that tall. And in fact, he might not be Middle Eastern. Just because the guy had a box cutter doesn’t mean he works for Osama bin Laden.”
“Might even be a Jew,” Nate said. “His description sounds like my cousin Morris.”
None of the Hollywood cops expected to find the guy on foot in the area, and of course they were right. Dana and Hollywood Nate cleared from their call, but before heading for the station, they immediately received another one.
At Nate’s insistence, Dana had to speed to this one. It was the kind of call that brought out black-and-whites from all over the division, not to mention gang cops, motor cops, and any other male officers who happened to be on the radio frequency. It was a “311 woman,” the penal code designation defining indecent exposure. The call sent 6-X-76 to a Laundromat on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Dana said en route to Hollywood Nate, “I know this is the most important call that you pathetically desperate males will roll on this month, but would you be terribly upset if I slowed down? My motto is ‘Drive to Arrive.’ ”
Three female customers waited outside on the sidewalk for the police before venturing back inside to retrieve their clothes from the coin-operated dryers. Dana parked the Ford Crown Vic in front of the Laundromat and took her time emerging, not wanting to get in the way of horny male coppers like Hollywood Nate, who might trample her.
The Asian woman who’d made the call said, “She’s still inside. She scared us to death when she took off all her clothes.”