Shield of Justice (4 page)

“You’re welcome.” Catherine recognized the detective’s discomfort as well as her withdrawal. Neither surprised her. She generally found people in Rebecca’s line of work reluctant to reveal intimate details and slow to trust. The police officers she had evaluated all seemed to expect the worst from any situation—or from any relationship. Suspicion and a basic wariness of surface appearances had saved many an officer’s life, but it had destroyed many a marriage, too. She wasn’t sure if it was the work that made them that way, or if those pre-existing traits were what made them so good at their jobs. And that question suddenly interested her very much.

Be honest, Catherine. Rebecca interests you.
She had to admit that she wondered what lay beneath that cool, controlled exterior—for she was certain that there were depths to Rebecca of which the woman herself was unaware. She’d caught glimpses of tenderness when Rebecca smiled, but she remembered, too, the barely controlled rage in the detective’s voice when she had described the rapist’s last attack—and her passionate declaration to stop him.
Oh, yes, there’s much more to this woman than she wants anyone to see
.

“So, what do you need to know, Detective?” Catherine asked as she refilled her half-empty wineglass and directed the conversation away from the personal. At the moment, they had other issues to deal with. She leaned back, watching her dinner companion, waiting.

“Probably more than you can tell me. I need to know what you learned from your evaluation of Janet Ryan. Does she have any memory of the last eight hours?”

“Not much. She remembers pulling into a drive-off on River Drive on her way home from work. She doesn’t remember the time. The next thing she remembers is waking up in the ICU.”

Rebecca frowned. “Does she recall seeing anyone else around when she pulled in? Can she recall anything out of the ordinary?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t specifically ask her. She was pretty disoriented and frightened. I was trying to establish the extent of her amnesia and get her calmed down.”

“Of course,” Rebecca said, trying not to let her aggravation show. She couldn’t expect a psychiatrist to think like a cop. She’d planned to interview the woman in the morning anyhow. “Anything else? Anything at all?”

“I’m sorry, no. Her amnesia is total for the time in question.”

“And you have no doubt that she’s telling the truth?” Rebecca looked at her carefully, watching for some sign of uncertainty.

“None at all.”

Satisfied, Rebecca nodded. Catherine Rawlings had a way of making you believe her. “How long will it last?”

“I don’t know,” Catherine said regretfully. “I wish I did.”

Rebecca stood up, her jaw set with determination. “I can’t wait for her to remember. The time between attacks is getting shorter. If she can’t help us, I’ll have to find some other way to get to him.” She thanked Catherine absently, already preoccupied with planning her next move.

Catherine watched her as she walked to the door, wondering how long it would be before Rebecca Frye let herself rest again.

Rebecca let herself into her apartment and tripped over the gym bag she had left lying on the floor several days earlier. The air had the musty, close smell of an unoccupied house, and when she switched on a floor lamp by the sagging sofa, she caught a shadow of the fine dust covering the sparse furnishings. She pushed open a window and stood looking out. Her second-floor, one-bedroom place was over a mom-and-pop grocery store in a neighborhood that straddled the narrow border between trendy and downtrodden.

She’d grown up a few blocks away and had walked the beat below her window as a rookie, ten years ago. She liked the casual comfort of living in a place where people knew her name, maybe because the people who waved to her as she carried sandwiches back from the deli or trudged wearily past the storefronts after two days on her feet were the only people in her life besides the other cops at the station house.

It was warm for early June, and the night air held just the hint of a breeze. She leaned against the window ledge, hoping to wash away the depression that had settled over her the moment she got home. The empty apartment was too clear a reminder of her own empty life, an aching barrenness she tried hard to ignore whenever she couldn’t outrun it. Usually, she was successful. The demands of her work left her little time for reflection, and when she did have a spare moment, she spent it at the gym, lifting weights until she was too exhausted to think about anything at all. Days, weeks sometimes, passed before she was forced by some phrase or memory to remember that it hadn’t always been this way—that
she
hadn’t always been this way—solitary and withdrawn. Or maybe she had, and she had just never noticed.

The interlude with Catherine Rawlings had unsettled her. The quiet intimacy of the doctor’s apartment, the shared meal, the soft but insistent strength she had sensed in the woman, touched some chord of emotion that she had thought long stilled. For a few brief moments, she had forgotten all about her case, and she had contented herself with just looking at Catherine, being soothed somehow by her gentle eyes and quiet laughter. She didn’t want to think about the quick surge of loneliness she had felt as Catherine’s door closed gently behind her.

She pushed back from the window and looked at her watch—3:00 a.m. She was tired but too restless to sleep. It was one of those times she longed for a drink. Or, she corrected herself, more than one drink, as had usually been the case. Something to deaden the edges of her isolation and ease her away from the horrors and pain she witnessed every day. She fought the urge, again, by turning her mind to her current case. There was something there, she knew, that she just wasn’t getting. A missed connection. Some little thing she had heard, or seen, or
should
have seen, that would give her a handle on him. Whatever it was, it eluded her now.

Unbidden, her thoughts returned to Catherine Rawlings. She couldn’t figure out just what it was that made the woman so compelling. Her integrity concerning her patients was unshakable, and Rebecca admired that resolve even though it was making her job more difficult. She was obviously beautiful, intelligent, and compassionate, but it was something deeper that had captured Rebecca’s attention. Catherine Rawlings had, in the course of a few hours, awakened in her some long-buried yearning for the company and solace of a woman.

Rebecca wondered then if she hadn’t merely imagined the warmth in the doctor’s gaze when she had looked at her. With an irritated shrug, she shook off the memory of Catherine Rawling’s smile.
It’s what she does, you idiot. She’s supposed to make people feel as if they’re supported and really matter.

She tossed her jacket on a chair and pulled off her shoulder holster, draping it on the back, before stretching out on the worn couch. She rarely slept in her bed; the empty space beside her only made sleep more elusive. What she couldn’t know as she finally closed her eyes was that, across town, Catherine Rawlings turned in her sleep and smiled at the image of a tall, blond woman with lonely eyes.

*

It was not yet seven a.m. when Rebecca pulled her red Corvette convertible into the lot behind the Eighteenth Precinct, slotting it in between the police cruisers and vans. She knew Jeff would be upstairs already, typing out their report of last night’s events. She smiled to herself at the thought of Jeff’s face as he labored over the typewriter. She should probably take pity on him because she typed three times faster than he did, but a deal was a deal. As anticipated, she found him hunched over his rickety metal desk in the tiny squad room on the third floor, slowly two-finger typing a report in triplicate.

“Hi, Reb,” he said without glancing up. “Anything from the shrink?”

“About what you’d expect,” Rebecca answered, shedding her jacket to the back of her chair. “Nothing yet. Want some more coffee?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking up long enough to toss her a lecherous grin. “I’m gonna need it. Late night. Shelley was still awake when I got home.”

“Nice to know someone’s making out,” she grumbled good-naturedly as she headed for the table at the back of the room. She threaded her way between dilapidated chairs and dented desks haphazardly crowded together, nodding to the few people finishing up paperwork from the night shift.

She and Jeff Cruz were a two-man team within the Vice unit, specializing in one particular area—sex crimes. They pursued their allotment of battered spouses and child abuse call-outs, but, for most of those cases, they assessed the situation and then assigned the follow-up to uniforms or turfed the appropriate ones to the Youth and Family Services division. Their bread and butter was handling bigger, more organized problems—child pornography rings, prostitution as a subsidiary of organized crime, and, like now, the repeat sexual predator.

She filled two Styrofoam cups to the brim with the evil-looking black liquid that passed as coffee. She carried them at arm’s length back to the desk that faced Jeff’s and pushed a stack of files to one side with her elbow. After settling into her chair, she steeled herself for the first taste of the bitter brew.

“Ah,” she murmured after her first swallow. “Nectar of the gods.”

“You must still be asleep if you think that swill is good.” Jeff reached for his own cup without taking his eyes off his typewriter.

She shrugged and snatched the first page of his report. As usual, it was neat and complete. “You could use the computer, you know,” she remarked. “It would make corrections a lot easier.”

He favored her with a dour look and said nothing.

“Nothing new, I take it,” she continued, skimming the brief review of the latest assault.

“Still waiting on the lab reports, but I figured we could stop down there later and bug Dee Flanagan. See if her crime scene crew turned up anything after I left last night.” Jeff stretched his legs and pushed his chair back from the cramped table. “I ran a background check on the shrink.”

Rebecca looked up in surprise, instantly and unexplainably defensive. “Why? She’s not a suspect.”

“Yeah, I know,” he acknowledged with a shrug, “but she’s tied in with our only witness to date. She might be the one who can open that particular box for us. I figure it never hurts to have a little leverage.”

The idea of strong-arming Catherine Rawlings was not a pleasant one, but as much as she hated to admit it, Rebecca had to agree. If they were going to get anything from Janet Ryan, she suspected they would need the lovely doctor’s help.
And if we can’t get her cooperation, we may have to try less-friendly tactics
.

“So, what did you find?” she asked, careful not to reveal her interest. Jeff might be her partner, but even with him, she rarely disclosed anything personal. She certainly wasn’t about to tell him of the disturbing effect Catherine Rawlings had had on her.

“Professionally, above reproach—medical degree from Johns Hopkins; psychiatry residency at University Central. From there, she accepted a teaching position at the medical school and is now a…” he paused to check his notes, “clinical professor of psychiatry. Directs the residency program; busy private practice. A big shot as those things go. Personally though, it seems the lady is quite a mystery.”

Rebecca listened intently. She wasn’t surprised by the impressive list of credentials. It fit with the impeccable professional image she had formed the previous night. “So, what’s the mystery?” she asked impatiently when Jeff suddenly stopped talking.

“I talked with a couple of the docs I know, and they all say the same thing. Or rather, they all
don’t
say anything. No one knows word one about her personal life. She lives alone, apparently always has. Everyone is happy to tell you about her professional accomplishments, but nobody will say squat about the rest of her life.”

“Maybe there isn’t anything to say,” Rebecca countered, just a hint of irritation in her voice. “Some people are pretty consumed by their work, you know. Look at cops. They leave the station house, go have a few beers with other cops, check in at home for an hour or two, and come right back in. The job is their life.”

Jeff looked at her thoughtfully, thinking if anyone should know about that, it was his solitary partner. “Yeah, well, that may be. But I did dig up something interesting about her private practice—she specializes in rape and incest cases. She’s even done some work with us on that kind of thing. Sensitivity training or something.”

“Huh.” Rebecca thought of Janet Ryan and her amnesia.
Possibly a link?

“And that’s not all,” he continued, “a lot of her private patients are dyk…uh, lesbians.”

Rebecca slowly raised her eyes to his, fixed him with a steady stare, and waited for him to say something further. He looked away.

“Might be useful information,” she said nonchalantly. She felt anything but nonchalant, her mind racing with questions about Catherine Rawlings. She forced herself to consider the information Jeff had gathered. “Maybe I should have another talk with Dr. Rawlings.”

“Thought you might want to,” Jeff replied dryly.

*

Catherine was nearly finished with morning rounds when her pager went off. After excusing herself, she left the group of residents and students, who were discussing the latest drug therapy for depression. She picked up a wall phone and dialed the extension registered on her beeper.

“Dr. Rawlings,” she said as the call was picked up.