When the van pulled alongside her and the driver beckoned her over, he had a kind of half smile, like he had gas. He looked like he was trying not to look nervous, which is exactly how you want your tricks to look. Too steely was scary. Too much to the point was a cop. Too twitchy meant he didn’t have enough of a bankroll or a hard-on, so you’d just be wasting your time and you might get smacked, to boot.
Looking in through the window, the van looked almost homey— staged, but homey. There was a Bible on the front console, a sleeping bag in the back. There were other bags and rope and odds and ends all over, all carefully stowed. There was even an audiocassette recorder down behind the front seats. The driver was clean and his belt buckle shined, although his stomach slopped over it, held tight by the too-tight shirt. His jeans were pressed and that shirt was dark—it was like his personal uniform. This was maybe an ex-military guy, or maybe private security. On second thought, maybe he was a cop or a cop-aspirant, but this was no sting—he didn’t want to bust her, he just wanted to get laid. He stated that he wanted sex and he would pay twenty dollars, no more.
Cops made sure you were the one to tell them what you’d do and how much it would cost—so, no, this was no cop.
Cathy McDonald had not heard a whole lot about the Riverside Prostitute Killer. The guy had been operating for years, a task force was pulling its collective hair out, and a German film company had even made a movie about it, based on the fiction that the killer really was a cop, but none of it had much to do with Cathy. See, Cathy was black, and the killer had only killed whites. A local newspaper had just pointed out that fact this week.