“Electrocuted.”
“An accident?”
I shook my head.
“Not likely. By the way, the DA’s giving me a clean bill of health on Gibbons.”
“Just like Bennett promised.”
“He’s rarely wrong,” I said.
“I’ll be happy for you tomorrow,” Nicole said. “What do you want today?”
I plucked a one-page hospital report from the file and handed it to her.
“This is from the ER nurse in ’97. Says my client was taken straight to surgery after admission.”
“Elaine Remington?”
“Yeah. I called the hospital but they won’t give me any more information.”
“This was almost ten years ago. They might not have anything on her. Even if they did, I’m not sure it would be a lot of help.”
“How about a rape kit?”
“If the hospital did one, it would be with the police.”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
Nicole closed the file and pushed it across the table.
“Get rid of that. I never saw it.”
I pushed the file back into the fold of my jacket and waited. Nicole sighed and walked to a window.
“How much do you really know about rape, Michael?”
“That’s the second time I’ve been asked that in as many days.”
Nicole offered a thin look at her reflection in a contoured pane of glass. Then she turned back my way.
“I don’t mean the act itself. What I’m talking about is perhaps worse. In the lab we call it the politics of rape. Can be a tricky thing. Not like murder. I mean, in a murder the victim is dead. There’s that certainty. Rape- not so much.”
She walked across the room, held her ID against a scanner, and opened a large gray door.
“Come on.”
We entered a walk-in cooler filled with rows of steel shelving stacked to the ceiling with evidence kits.
“These are Cook County’s old rapes.”
“How many do you have?”
“There are almost seven hundred kits in this room. All of them contain semen or some other bodily fluid that needs DNA testing.”
I whistled.
“That’s nothing,” Nicole said. “On the South Side, we have an old slaughterhouse converted into cold storage. Probably another thousand kits stored there.”
“All waiting to be tested?” I said.
“Hard to say. A lot of the evidence is old and degraded. Not much left to test. Still, we get hits.”
“How many?”
“I’ve tested about a hundred kits myself and gotten ten cold hits.”
“Convictions?”
“In eight of the ten. Even better, three of the offenders were eventually linked to other assaults. One of the guys raped twenty women. Killed two of them.”
Nicole led me out of the evidence locker and slammed the door shut.
“Problem is, there’s only one of me.”
“And thousands of kits.”
“You got it. Plus, each test costs money. At least five thousand a pop for STR-DNA testing. And that’s where it gets complicated.”
“You have to decide who gets tested and who doesn’t.”
“Actually, the DA decides.”
“Who gets buried?” I said.
“Who do you think?”
“I’m gonna guess you’re not testing a lot of kits from ladies of the evening.”
“Hookers don’t get raped, didn’t you know that? And if you’re black? Well, the next priority request I get for a black woman’s kit to be tested will be the first.”
“I have a reporter you need to talk to.”
“Diane Lindsay? Not as easy as that, Michael. Not if I want to stay in the game.”
“Think about it.”
“Let’s talk about your girl. She’s not a hooker, and, good for her, she’s white. Problem is, she’s a nobody. A very cold case everyone has forgotten about.”
Nicole sat down at a computer terminal and typed in Elaine’s information.
“Let me see what I’ve got. May take a minute.”
I sat down at an adjacent workstation and picked through a stack of rape kits, still sealed and waiting to be processed. Each bore the name of the victim and date of the attack. After the victims’ names were a series of dates and letters, circled and initialed. I asked Nicole a question but already knew the answer.
“The D stands for deceased,” Nicole said. “The A means there was a violent assault attached to the crime. I told my boss I thought all sexual assaults were violent.”
“And you were wrong?”
“Date rape. The girl who drinks too much at the party. They go to the bottom of the pile as far as testing is concerned. We call it the ‘she asked for it’ syndrome.”
Nicole looked up from her terminal and then continued typing.
“I got your girl. It appears all her physical evidence, including a rape kit, was destroyed in 2004.”
I felt the padded envelope in my pocket. Inside it, a woman’s shirt covered in blood. For the moment, I figured it was better to play dumb. Besides, I was very good at it.
“Why would they do that?”
“Statute of limitations had run. Technically, the DA could still prosecute if they got a DNA match. In cases where there is no identified suspect, however, the evidence usually gets destroyed.”
“Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
“Not these days. I can extract DNA from a sample that’s fifty years old.”
My friend shrugged.
“Like I said, you don’t really understand rape until you understand the politics around it.”
“But you can run tests on evidence that old?”
“I just said that, Michael. What is it you need?”
“Maybe a little DNA testing. Just between friends.”
“Are we talking about this woman here?”
I nodded, slid the envelope out and across the desk. Nicole looked at it but didn’t touch.
“So you do have something.”
“Evidence warehouse. No name, no case number, and conveniently misplaced.”
Nicole slid on a second pair of gloves, picked up the envelope, and examined the seal.
“You cut this open?”
“Couple of days ago. Prior to that it was dated and initialed. Those are Gibbons’ initials, by the way.”
“And the date?”
“The day Elaine Remington was attacked. Nine years ago.”
She pulled at the open end of the envelope, shook out the shirt and played her fingers through the knife holes.
“How many times was this woman stabbed?”
“Not sure, but I make it to be about fifteen.”
“And you say she survived?”
“Sort of. She drinks seven shots of whiskey a day. But she’s pretty good at it.”
“Girl has got some major problems.”
