'I've known a few in my time,' I say.
'Well, that was me. But this twenty-year-old girl, she became a friend. I didn't think about fucking her, and I didn't want to marry her. I just wanted her to be okay. That's all I wanted.' He bites his lip. 'You see, I was a good detective. I was never on the take; I usually caught the bad guy. I never hit a woman. I had rules, right and wrong. But I was never really a decent man. You understand the difference?'
'Sure.'
'But what I was doing with Renee, it was decent. Selfless.' He runs a hand through his hair. 'She came through it and got out of rehab. I mean, really came through it. One of the ones who was going to make it. I lent her some money and she got her own apartment. She started working a job. A few months later, she even started night school. Taking drama classes. Said if she never made it as an actress, she could always be a waitress, but she wasn't ready to give up on her dream yet.
'We'd hang out every now and then. Go to a movie. Always as friends. I never wanted anything else. It was the first time it was more important to me to have a friend than a piece of ass. Best of all, the babies went away. I stopped drinking, made up with the wife.'
He falls silent, and I know what's coming, can hear it like a phantom freight train. I already know the end to this story. Renee Parker, firecracker, saved from herself, gets murdered in a hideous fashion. What I didn't know until now is what that meant to the people around her. For Don Rawlings, it was a point where fate turned on a dime and began hurtling into the black. The point where the dead babies came back and never left.
'I got the call at four in the morning. Didn't know who it was until I got out there.' His eyes look like ghosts in the fog. Lost and howling and doomed to wander. 'He'd burned her good. The ME said she had almost five hundred separate cigarette burns on her. Five hundred!
None of them fatal.' His hand trembles on the desk. 'He'd tortured her and raped her. But the worst was what he did after. Cut her open, took out some of her organs, and dropped them next to her body. Just dropped them there on the concrete, to rot with her.
'It's hard to remember that feeling. How I felt when I saw her there. Maybe I just don't want to. What I do remember is one of the uniforms looking down at her and saying, 'Oh yeah, I know her. Stripper, used to work over in the Tenderloin. Great tits.' That was it for him, all the explanation he needed. He looked down at Renee, remembered her tits, and labeled her. Not a human being, or a bright girl who was turning her life around. Just a stripper.' He traces a finger over an imperfection in the desk. 'They had to pull me off him. Not that it mattered. Can you believe this--that little bastard went in and pulled the file, years later. Under
I'm appalled. I suppose it shows on my face, because he looks at me and nods.
'Believe it.' He sighs. 'So anyway, I kept my past relationship with her quiet so I could stay as the primary on the case. I wanted to catch this guy. Had to catch him. But he was good. No prints, not a damn thing. We didn't have DNA back then, so'--he shrugs--'I went looking where you always do when you come up dry on the physical evidence.'
'Who knew her, who'd been around her,' I say.
'That's right. She was going to night school. Turns out she'd met a guy there. Been seeing him for a week or two. Good-looking kid named Peter Connolly. But right off, I knew something wasn't right with him. Something about the way he talked when I questioned him, like he was making fun of me. Getting away with something. On a hunch, I flashed his photo around at the strip joint she used to work at. Sure enough, people remembered him. The times they placed him there matched what Renee's schedule had been. Then it got better. Turns out Peter had a little drug problem. He'd attended rehab. Can you guess? At the same place and at the same time that Renee had been cleaning up. Now my antennae are way up. Once I found out he'd enrolled in college only a week after she had, I knew, I knew, he had to be my guy.'
He falls silent and doesn't start speaking again.
'I can guess where this goes, Don,' I say in a gentle voice. 'No evidence, right? You couldn't connect him to the crime. Sure, he'd been at the strip club, rehab, and the college. But all of that could be explained away.'
He nods. Bereft. 'That's right. It was enough to get a warrant for his place, but nothing turned up. Not a damn thing. His past was clean.'
He looks back up at me, and his eyes are filled with frustration. 'I couldn't prove what I knew. And there weren't any more killings. No other scenes. Time went on; he moved away. I started dreaming again. Sometimes it was the babies. Most of the time it was Renee.'
No one here feels superior to Don Rawlings now. We know that everyone has that point. Where they can no longer bend without breaking. He no longer seems pathetic or weak. Instead, we recognize him for what he is: a casualty.
Whoever said 'time heals all wounds' wasn't a cop.
'The reason we're here,' I speak into the silence, 'is because VICAP
matched the MO of our unsub to your unsolved case. He has killed again.' I lean forward. 'After listening to you, I'm certain our killer and yours are one and the same.'
He studies my face like someone does when they don't trust in hope.
'You having any better luck than I did?'
'Not in terms of physical evidence. But we did find out one thing that, combined with your suspect of twenty- five years ago, might break this case.'
'What's that?'
I explain to him about Jack Jr. and the contents of the jar. Cynicism begins to fall away from his face, replaced by excitement.
'So you're saying this guy was indoctrinated in this idea of being Jack the Ripper's great-great-grandkid, or whatever, and that it started when he was young?'
'That's what I'm saying.'
He leans back in his chair with a look of amazement. 'Man oh man oh man . . . I never had any reason to check out his mom back then. The dad was long gone and in the wind . . .' Don has the look of someone in shock. Reeling. He gathers himself up and taps on the case folder he'd brought with him. 'That info's in there. Who his mom is, where she lived at the time.'
'Then that's where we're going,' I say.
'Do you think . . .' He takes a deep breath, draws himself up. 'I know I'm not much these days. I'm an old, drunk has-been. But if you let me go with you to see the mother, I promise I won't fuck it up.'
I've never heard someone sound as humble as he does right now.
'I wouldn't have it any other way, Don,' I say. 'It's time for you to see this through.'
53
C ONCORD IS LOCATED north of Berkeley in the Bay Area. We are headed there to see Peter Connolly's mother, a woman named Patricia. The driver's license on file says that she is sixty-four years old. We have opted to show up on her doorstep, rather than telegraph our coming or our suspicions. Mothers have sent their sons on killing sprees before. In this case, who knows?
I am in the zone. It is that place I get to near the end of a hunt, when I know, at a primal level, that we are zeroing in on our quarry. All senses heighten to an almost painful level, and I feel as if I am running full tilt across a piano wire over a chasm. Sure-footed, invincible, unafraid of falling.
I look at Don Rawlings as we drive, and I see a spark of it there as well, though perhaps mixed with more desperation. He has dared to hope again. For him the price of failure might be more than a disappointment. It could be fatal. In spite of this, he looks ten years younger. His eyes are clear and focused. You can almost see what he was like when he was still honed sharp.
We are junkies, all of us who work in this profession. We walk through blood, decay, and stench. We toss and turn with nightmares caused by horrors the mind has trouble encompassing. We take it out on ourselves, or our friends and family, or both. But then it comes toward the end, and we arrive in the zone, and it is a high like no other. It's a high that makes you forget about the stench and blood and nightmares and horrors. And once it is behind you, you are ready to do it again.
Of course, it can backfire on you. You can fail to catch a killer. The stink remains, but without the reward that
