Red on Red (53 page)

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Authors: Edward Conlon

BOOK: Red on Red
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There was so much activity that Nick and Esposito barely had time to talk about where it all would lead, the other side of the bargain, even if they had had the inclination. Most of the information from Malcolm was vague, suggestive; enough was not. When Esposito announced one morning that he had to go to court, without further comment, Nick felt queasy. Had there been three solid cases from Malcolm already, three homicide collars? Had he already paid his ransom? It couldn’t have been two weeks since they’d been to Rikers. Esposito had been out of work for months; Nick strove to believe that he must have had a backlog of court appearances. On the kidnapping alone, there must have been—no, nothing: Kiko dead on the street, Miguel dead in jail, the little brother dead in the apartment. Blue on red, red on red, exceptional clearances all, case closed. Nick knew how the next courtroom scenes would play. Malcolm’s lawyer would ask for a copy of the tape, or another copy, and the DA would fail to produce it; there would be conferences, motions, maybe an adjournment; an angry judge would set bail for Malcolm, or release him without it. The system was designed for deliberation, engineered for delay, but it tended to mobilize into brisk efficiency when it was least convenient.

For that reason alone, Nick suspected that Malcolm would be freed imminently, if he weren’t already at liberty. Nick wasn’t ready for how fast it was moving. Tips from Malcolm, a tap on the levers of justice from Esposito, and
Voilà!
So far, it had been easy for Malcolm, and Nick wondered whether handling Michael would prove to be the hard part, or easier still. There were other systems at work, other forces in play, not subject to rules any of them understood.

Later that day, Ivan Lopez came in to the squad, uncharacteristically quiet. He had Grace with him, leading her by the hand like a blind child, and he began to cry as he started to talk. Grace seemed lost, blinking distractedly as she was led in, but she otherwise betrayed no bad feeling. She didn’t seem to recognize Nick. She took her glasses off and put them on again, several times. When she placed him—“Oh! Hi!”—she seemed to gather herself together, to relax enough to exhibit some disdain for her father, suggesting that what was tragic for him was only embarrassing
for her. Still, something was different; she was scattered but scared. Nick did not know which one to address first, who he trusted more for the baseline facts. Yes, he did, but he decided to speak with Lopez, so the man wouldn’t feel disrespected. When Nick sat him down in the interview room, however, he wept. “The Sister, she calls me at work. She says Grace is absent. I come home….
She is ruined.
” Again? So soon? This time, Lopez wasn’t angry, which concerned Nick. He brought Lopez a glass of water, some toilet paper to blow his nose, and left him to collect himself.

Grace was also shaken, Nick could see that, but it was hard to gauge how much she was affected by her father’s hysteria. He led her to another room, and she shook off her backpack, dropping it onto the table with a thump. She wore her plaid uniform jumper. She didn’t look at Nick, at first, but leaned down to check her pack, to see if she’d remembered a notebook. When she sat back up, she had a distracted, fidgety look. She chewed a strand of hair, counted with her fingers and mouthed the numbers
four, five, six
. Nick coughed to get her attention, and her look changed. She seemed older, wrongly wry; he had an image of her at a hotel bar, asking for “the usual.” She swept her hair back and coughed in return. She did not need to wait for questions.

As she was leaving for school that day, there was a knock at the door. There was a man with a toolbox and the kind of dark blue polyester shirt that maintenance workers wear. He asked if her parents were home, and she said no. He said there was a leak in the pipes, he had to come in and fix it. Grace nodded and led him to the kitchen, where she took the milk and orange juice from the counter and put them back into the refrigerator. When she turned around, he stood close, smiling at her. She knew then there was nothing wrong with the pipes. He told her to get a beer from the refrigerator, and she did. This was relayed to Nick with the dull factuality of a book report, blunt and bland in the telling but earnest, determined to show she had done the homework on her own. Elaboration came at an odd point:

“ ‘Get one for yourself.’ That’s what he told me, and I knew something was wrong.

“I go, ‘I don’t drink beer. I’m not old enough.’ I did try it once, but I don’t like it. I don’t.

“He goes, ‘You’re old enough.’ That’s what he said.”

Grace shook her head and went on. She started to walk out of the
kitchen, but he pushed her back, not hard. He began to touch himself, and then he lifted his shirt to show the butt of a gun in his waistband. She went to the refrigerator and got a beer.

“I didn’t like it,” she said. “I only drank a little, and spilled most of it when he looked away for a second.”

Had Nick been outside the interrogation room, watching and listening in, he would have walked away then. He knew what happened next. He could never imagine the evil she had encountered this morning, what it meant to her, but he was horrified that she felt it necessary to protest that she shouldn’t get in trouble for the beer, as if she might get a ticket for it. She was litigating in her mind, what she could be blamed for, what she could not. To talk that way was diversionary, sometimes. One woman Nick had encountered could only complain about the muddy footprints in the house, when two men had broken in and shot her husband in front of her. But this was not quite that. Grace knew she was blameless in this, and she was attentive to any suggestion that it might be otherwise. She thought she had been lucky, in that she had not been killed, and she knew she had made a mistake in letting him in. But her father had opened the door for strange men who’d knocked, saying the landlord had sent them to spray for roaches, the meter had to be checked by the electric company. This was part of city life; the strangers had come and gone. Grace was citing precedent for her error, delving into issues for appeal.

“Well, what happened next, Grace?”

“What do you think? He raped me.”

“There was intercourse?”

“What? Yeah, we fucked.”

The harshness of her words shocked Nick, and she mumbled an apology for dropping “the F-bomb.”

“That’s all right, Grace. Did he hit you? Yell at you? Threaten you? Did he ask you or tell you to have sex with him?”

“He didn’t say anything. He pulled my ear. We went to the living room. Like I said, he had a gun. I took off my uniform and lay down on the rug. It’s the most disgusting rug. It’s this ugly banana-green….”

Nick was supposed to probe her about details, but he couldn’t. They were crucial, but he didn’t have the heart to ask, didn’t have the stomach. What else did he need to know? Of course. “Did you hear about the
guy who was doing this? The guy who was conning his way inside people’s houses, hurting women?”

“Yeah, it was on TV. You think it was the same guy?”

Nick hated this. Her knowledge of the pattern was a complication, a reason for her story to be challenged. She was a problematic victim. She would be seen as such, Nick knew. He hated these cases. Ordinary bad men he could understand. They robbed banks for the money; shot people who threatened their dope spot; stabbed the guy who hit on their girl, or thought he did, when they were drunk or lost their tempers at parties. Bad impulses, bad days, bad ways of dealing with the world; none of it was entirely alien to him. There was always something you could find in the mirror. Nick knew there were risks to that kind of projection, but when you had nothing, you had to reach, try to picture why, work to connect. Not here. This kind of predator might as well have been from a cannibal island, a cult of cat-worshippers, for all they had in common. Just as he felt himself slipping back into his old habit of not wanting to know, it occurred to him that this case would be reassigned to Special Victims. It was not his case. This was rape—both kinds of it, the kid kind and the force kind, and a candidate for a pattern, to boot—and he would have nothing more to do with it, after the interview. Nick was relieved, mostly.

“I don’t know, it may be. First we have to take you to the hospital, get you checked out. And then other detectives who are trying to find this guy, they’re gonna talk to you, too.”

“Does it matter if he’s the same one or a different one?”

“No. Yes. It doesn’t matter, because the guy who hurt you is bad, whoever he is. We want to catch him and put him in jail. And it does matter, because if he’s the same guy who hurt other people, maybe you know something or remember something that can help us get him, and that can stop other people from getting hurt. You’re smart, Grace. I know you are. And the people who want to talk to you are good people. So be honest, okay? Tell them everything you remember, even if it hurts to talk about it, even if it’s a little thing that doesn’t seem important. If you don’t remember something, or didn’t notice, don’t say that you do. Don’t say anything just because you think they might want to hear it. Okay, Grace?”

“Okay, Detective. What’s your name again?”

“Nick.”

“I like that name. It’s my second-best-friend’s younger brother’s name. It’s nice.”

“Thanks, Grace.”

Nick was glad she was able to take her mind off things for a moment, though it bothered him, a little, that she could. Her composure became more striking when he went in to ask Lopez if he wanted to come with them to the hospital, and the response was distraught sobbing. Nick told him to just go home, and he’d bring Grace back later. Lopez nodded, and didn’t move. He would not be an asset to the investigation. Nick told the lieutenant what had happened, and asked him to make the notification to Special Victims. The lieutenant nodded. He’d have them meet Nick at the hospital. The drive was silent except for a remark Grace made at the end, as they parked. Nick opened her door, and she looked up at him.

“Detective Nick?”

“Yes, Grace?”

“That’s a nice tie. Matches your eyes.”

Nick strained not to shudder. He wasn’t sure if there was a hint of flirtation in what she said, but there was something unconscionably casual. Her father’s awful words—“She is ruined!”—came back to him, and he put them out of his mind before he could begin an argument with himself that he might not win. This was not his case, he reminded himself, and its imminent reassignment was now unreservedly welcome. He forced a smile and led her inside.

Two women detectives from Special Victims met them at the emergency room, and then two men followed, the pair they’d met at the diner, seen on TV months ago, from the task force for the serial rapist. Nick floated in and out of the room where Grace was being examined, leaving when the nurses asked for privacy, slipping back in when they were done. Grace wanted him there, and he stayed for her comfort, though he wanted nothing more than to leave. She was a candidate for victim number twenty-five in the case; sixteen attacks had been confirmed by DNA, and eight more were deemed part of the pattern by similarities of description and MO. When the task force detectives arrived, they thanked Nick with enthusiasm, and for the first time in months, he saw cops who looked at him like a found penny instead of a black cat. A big cop and a bigger one, one dark, one fair, the old binary pair. There was the customary blather, the “Sure-I-remember-you,” and “How’s-old-what’s-his-name.”

“Give him my best.” Nick almost laughed at the strategy behind their courtesies. They were on guard against him, concerned he might become proprietary, demanding a share in the glory, a place at the table. Esposito would have, at least before, and Nick was wishing they were working together again, when he remembered that they were. He didn’t even feel like a found penny anymore, after the first real questions were asked.

“Did you ask if he ejaculated inside her?”

“No.”

“Did you ask if she showered or washed after?”

“No.”

“Did you ask if he touched anything in the apartment? Did you set up a crime scene, see if we could maybe get prints, DNA?”

Nick had not. He bristled at some of the questions, at the vague implication that he had to justify their summons to the hospital, the claim on their time. And he knew that he was right to spare Grace from multiple rounds of the same gruesome interview. But sending Lopez home had been flat-out stupid. Nick had done it simply to get rid of him, which hadn’t been wrong—his emotional blowouts would have made it impossible to talk to Grace—but Nick’s own lapse in judgment was a result of his disengagement, his desire to be done with the case. He’d held back, and then he’d rushed to finish. He’d meant to be kind, as well, but he hadn’t done his job.

His dismay did not abate as the new team took over. The detectives were good, Nick thought, but their interview with Grace did not go well. They were thrown by her combination of confidence and innocence, her lack of tears. Though she had flinched and shivered at times when she’d first told the story, later repetitions had a cool, remote tone, as if the event had happened to someone she knew.

One of them asked, “How tall was he?”

Grace thought a moment before responding, “Short. Not really a midget, not a really tiny midget but … kinda like you.”

Nick didn’t blame them when they didn’t believe her, not about the pattern. The similarities to the televised case were public knowledge—the plumber’s helper bit, an approximate description—and the differences were profound. He had never stayed after the rape before, had never used a gun; he had never drunk beer with the victim, and he’d never said he’d call. Grace hadn’t told Nick that; Nick hadn’t asked. She
also hadn’t told him that the man had stolen a photo of her and her father from a table. The rapist had no history of taking souvenirs. The rapist hadn’t used a condom with the others, and the detectives were unconvinced by the thought that she’d persuaded him to put one on. She’d even thrown away the beer bottles. At the hospital, the gynecologist said the results of her exam were inconclusive, which was often the case. Not enough science, too much story. Grace didn’t make sense to Nick, either, but she inspired in him a kind of fearful admiration rather than skepticism.

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