her arrival.
The new painting was laid out on my table. Like rubbernecking at a bad car wreck, it hurt to look at it. Still, I had to pose the one crucial question about its title. But before I could open my mouth, he blurted out the answer to the unanswered question.
“Taste,” he said not to me, but to the door only inches from his face.
Chapter 28
I raced home as soon as Franny and his mother took off in their old truck. Michael immediately stopped what he was doing when I came through the apartment’s front door. He looked up at me, closed the laptop, as if my timing had been perfect.
“Don’t tell me,” he smiled warmly. “Franny painting number three.”
“Sure.”
He got up and stared at the painting. After a silent time he turned to me.
“You and Moll,” he said. “You and Moll at the stream on the day it all happened.”
I nodded.
Like Robyn before him, he traced the letters to the word ‘Taste’ which had been painted in blue-white letters inside the stream water.
“I really see the word this time.”
Then I told him everything else. About my morning get together with Caroline; about the basement art room; about the painting Franny did of Molly and me many years ago-the one that matched precisely a black and white snapshot I just happened to discover on the porch floor of my parents’ home as if somebody had purposely set it there for me; somebody able to anticipate my every move.
“This photo,” I told him, pulling the tattered snapshot from out of my jeans pocket, setting it on top of the closed laptop.
While he turned his attention from the ‘Taste’ painting to the photograph, I told him about the jimmied window; how someone had definitely tried to break into the house. I told him about my confrontation with Franny; about how I didn’t get a word out of him other than confirming my own suspicions. That, number one, he’d somehow witnessed Whalen assaulting Molly and me thirty years ago. Maybe witnessed it through a basement window. And number two: he was trying to warn me of something. I also told him that it was time I went to the police.
Michael looked at me with squinty eyes.
“So long as they believe you,” he said, handing the snapshot back to me. “It’s the right thing to do. But they’ve got to believe you.”
My portfolio bag was stored in the narrow space between the couch-back and the far wall. I pulled it out, unzipped it, reached inside and took out two of my own blank canvases, setting them against the bookshelf. Then I slipped Franny’s paintings inside. I zipped up the bag, slung it over my shoulder and checked my pockets for my cell phone and car keys.
“I really want you to come with me,” I said. “But if you’d rather keep out of it.”
He pursed his lips and shot me a wink of his right eye.
“Let’s go make believers out of the cops,” he said.
Chapter 29
Our decision to drive downtown to the South Pearl Street Precinct had not been indiscriminate. According to the info we’d found online, this was the very place in which Whalen had been jailed after his arrest for the abduction and attempted rape of an eighteen year old college freshman thirty years ago. That single assault led to the discovery of at least a half-dozen prior rapes when, after a photo of Whalen was posted on every local TV station and newspaper, a small flood of brave, young women started coming forward and pointing the finger- women with more courage than Molly and me. Or maybe less to lose by telling the truth.
Being that my father had been a state trooper, I wasn’t entirely a stranger to police stations. But that didn’t make them anymore comfortable to be around. My cumbersome portfolio bag slung over my shoulder, I followed Michael up the granite steps, through the glass doors, across the vestibule waiting area to the large bench. Seated on the bench was a heavyset, gray-haired officer. Set before him was a desktop computer, a phone and a small plaque with the words ‘Watch Commander’ embossed in it.
“Help you?” he grumbled, eyes focused not on us but his computer screen.
“We need to speak with a detective,” Michael announced.
Behind the watch commander’s shoulder, I could make out the not too unfamiliar inner workings of the wide open station-the many uniformed and plain-clothed policemen and women, the identical metal desks set out equidistant from one another, each of them topped with a computer where typewriters might have been back when Whalen was first arrested. Back when my dad was ‘Trooper Dan’. There were the bright overhead ceiling- mounted lamps, the ringing phones, the chiming cells, the buzzing fax machines and at least a dozen voices competing with one another.
“And why is it you need to see a detective?” the watch commander smirked.
I took a step forward.
“I have reason to believe I’m being stalked by a sexual predator.”
The old cop pulled his eyes away from the computer for the first time since we’d approached the bench.
“Come again,” he said, looking up directly into my face.
“I’m being followed.”
Behind his shoulder, I saw that two people were taking notice. Police detectives, or so I suspected. An older man and a middle-aged woman, both dressed in normal everyday, plain clothes. They shot a quick glance in my direction.
“Do you have an ID of the supposed perp?” asked the watch commander.
I hesitated, as though the question shot over my head.
“He’s asking if you know for certain that it’s Whalen who is stalking you?” Michael jumped in.
I nodded.
“Yeah, I can identify the man.”
“You mentioned a name,” the watch commander added, eyes now on Michael.
“Joseph William Whalen,” Michael exclaimed. “He’s registered with Sexual Predators and with ViCAP.”
“Oh, ViCAP,” the old cop smiled. “Looks like you been doin’ your homework.”
“I write detective novels,” Michael said.
“Of course you do. Wait here a minute please.”
He got up, made his way over to the two plainclothes cops. He talked with them while they looked us over again. More carefully this time. When the older of the two approached, I felt my pulse pick up.
“My name is David Harris,” the tall, salt and pepper-haired, black man confessed. “I understand you’re here to lodge a complaint?”
“I have reason to believe I’m being followed.”
“By Joseph Whalen?”
“Yes.”
“You’d better come on through,” he said. “I know of Whalen. I know about what he’s done and what he might have done to more than a dozen still missing young women.”
“How well?”
“I’m the guy who busted him thirty years ago.”
