"The mayor expects me to catch the rapist," Wohl said, and paused.
"That's your first priority."
"Who am I supposed to use to do that? Those kids from Narcotics?" He saw a flash of annoyance, even anger, on Coughlin's face. "Sorry, Chief," he added quickly. "I didn't mean for that to sound the way it came out."
"The initial manning for ACT is forty cops, plus four each Corporals, Sergeants, and Lieutenants; a Captain, four Detectives, and of course, you," Coughlin said. "I already sent a teletype asking for volunteers to transfer in. You can pick whoever you want."
"And if nobody volunteers? Or if all the volunteers are guys one step ahead of being assigned to rubber gun squad or being sent to the farm in their districts?"
Coughlin chuckled. "Being sent to the farm" was the euphemism for alcoholic officers being sent off to dry out; the rubber gun squad was for officers whose peers did not think they could be safely entrusted with a real one.
"Then you can pick, within reason, anybody you want," Coughlin said. "Making this thing work is important to the mayor; therefore to Czernick and me. You're not going to give me trouble about this, Peter, are you?"
"No, of course not, Chief," Wohl said. "It just came out of the blue, and it's taking some getting used to."
Chief Coughlin stood up and put out his hand.
"You can handle this, Peter," Coughlin said. "Congratulations and good luck."
He had, Peter Wohl realized as he put out his hand to take Coughlin' s, not only been dismissed but given all the direction he was going to get.
"Thank you, Chief," he said.
Wohl went to the parking lot, opened the door of his car, and rolled down the windows, standing outside a moment until some of the heat could escape. Then he got in and started the engine, and turned on the air conditioner. He cranked up the window and shifted into reverse.
Then he changed his mind. He reached over to the glove compartment and took out the microphone.
"Radio, S-Sam One Oh One," he said.
"S-Sam One Oh One, Radio," Police Radio replied. They didn't seem at all surprised to hear the new call sign, Wohl thought.
"Have you got a location on Highway One?" Wohl asked.
The reply was almost immediate: "Out of service at Highway. "
"What about N-Two?" Wohl asked, guessing that Dave Pekach, who was, now that he had been promoted, the second-ranking man in Narcotics, would be using that call sign.
"Also out of service at Highway, S-Sam One Oh One," Police Radio replied.
"If either of them come back on the air, ask them to meet me at Highway. Thank you, Radio," Wohl said, and put the microphone back in the glove compartment. Then he backed out of the parking space and headed for Highway Patrol headquarters.
NINE
Elizabeth Joan Woodham did not like to be called "Woody" as most of her friends did. She thought of herself as too tall, and skinny, and somewhat awkward, and thus "wooden."
She was, in fact, five feet ten and one-half inches tall. She weighed 135 pounds, which her doctor had told her was just about right for her. She thought she had the choice between weighing 135, which she was convinced made her look skinny, and putting on weight, which would, she thought, make her a large woman.
She thought she had a better chance of attracting the right kind of man as a skinny woman. Large women, she believed, sort of intimidated men. Elizabeth J. Woodham, who was thirty-three, had not completely given up the hope that she would finally meet some decent man with whom she could develop a relationship. But she had read a story inTime that gave statistics suggesting that the odds were against her. Apparently someone had taken the time to develop statistics showing that, starting at age thirty, a woman's chances of ever marrying began to sharply decline. By age thirty-five, a woman's chances were remote indeed, and by forty practically negligible.
She had come to accept lately that what she wanted, really, was a child, rather than a man. She wondered if she really wanted to share her life with a man. Sometimes, in her apartment, she conjured up a man living there with her, making demands on her time, on her body, confiscating her space.
The man was a composite of the three lovers she had had in her life, and she sometimes conjured him up in two ways. One was a man who had all the attractive attributes of her three lovers, including the physical aspects, rolled into one. The other man had all the unpleasant attributes of her lovers, which had ultimately caused her to break off the relationships.
The conjured-up good man was most often the lover she had had for two and a half years, a kind, gentle man with whom the physical aspects of the relationship had been really very nice, but who had had one major flaw: he was married, and she had gradually come to understand that he was never going to leave his wife and children; and that in fact his wife was not the unfeeling and greedy bitch he had painted, but rather someone like herself, who must have known he was playing around when he came home regularly so late, and suffered through it in the belief that it was her wifely duty; or because of the children; or because she believed practically any man was better than no man at all.
Elizabeth had decided, at the time she broke off the relationship, that it was better to have no man at all than one who was sleeping around.
Elizabeth Woodham, during the winters, taught the sixth grade at the Olney Elementary School at Taber Road and Water Street. This summer, more for something to do than for the money, she had taken a job as a storyteller with the Philadelphia Public Library system, the idea being that the way to get the kids to read was to convince them that something interesting was between the covers of a book; and the way to do that was by gathering them together and telling them stories.
If it also served to keep them off the streets at night, so much the better. Mayor Carlucci had gotten a Federal Grant for the program, and Elizabeth Woodham, the Project Administrator had told her when she applied for the job, was just the sort of person she had hoped to attract.
The hours were from three to nine, with an hour off for dinner. Elizabeth usually got to the playground at two, to set things up and attract a crowd for the three-thirty story hour for the smaller children. The story "hour" almost always ran more than an hour, usually two. She kept it up until she sensed her charges were growing restless. And she took a sort of professional pride in keeping their attention up as long as she could, scrupulously stopping when they showed the first signs of boredom, but taking pride in keeping it longer than you were supposed to be able to keep it.
The playground was on East Godfrey Avenue in Olney. West Godfrey Avenue becomes East Godfrey when it crosses Front Street. It is close to the city line, Cheltenham Avenue. East Godfrey is a dead-end street. A playground runs for two blocks off it to the south, down to where Champlost Avenue turns north and becomes Crescentville Avenue, which forms the western boundary of Tacony Creek Park.
The evening story hour was at seven-thirty, and was thus supposed to be over at eight-thirty, to give Elizabeth time to close things up before the park was locked for the night at nine.
But she'd managed to prolong the expected attention span and it was close to nine before she had told the kids the story ofThe Hound of the Baskervilles, and sown, she hoped, the idea that there were more stories by A. Conan Doyle about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson available in the public library.
It was thus a few minutes after nine when she left the park and walked down East Godfrey Avenue toward where she had parked her car, a two-year-old Plymouth coupe.
"If you scream, I'll cut off your boobies right here," the man with the black mask covering his face said as he pulled Elizabeth J. Woodham through the side door of a van.