He'd force them to have sex with each other. Sisters to sisters, Mom to son, dads to daughters. You get the picture. Then he'd fuck his favorite or a few of his favorites. When he was done, he'd leave all of them alive except for one that he would strangle while the others watched.'
She swallows, remembering all of this.
'A task force was put together. I was on it as second in command. I was hot for it too. Something about this one got to me. Still don't know why. It was bad, sure, but I'd already seen gruesome.'
'Sometimes it's easier to deal with dead victims than living ones,'
I offer.
She looks at me with renewed interest. 'Funny you should mention that. These families were permanently fucked up. Most ended in divorce. Some of the fathers and kids killed themselves. None of the mothers, though. Still not sure why.'
'For the kids,' Alan murmurs.
'What?' she asks.
'The mothers didn't kill themselves because they needed to be there for the kids.'
She stares at Alan for a moment, then continues.
'The ruin of those poor people is what he got off on. That was his real fix. Once I understood that, I knew that's why he kept them alive. He wanted to go back and watch them be miserable. We posted surveillance around his victims' homes and, sure enough, the fucker showed up. Ohio has the death penalty so he sucked down cyanide gas a few years ago.'
'That's good work,' I say.
'We caught him,' she agrees, 'but it didn't help me. I couldn't get the victims' stories out of my head. The things he made them do. How it affected them. I started to have trouble sleeping and in true cop fashion, I kept it all to myself and turned to the same therapist my dad had always used in rough times. Dr. Johnnie Walker.' Another one of those mirthless smiles. 'Dr. Walker was cheap, he could keep a secret, and he always went down clean.'
'Seen him myself,' Alan says.
'Really?' she asks.
'Sure. Lots of cops have.'
Bitterness spasms across her face. 'The thing is, he's not
'Almost cost me my marriage,' Alan replies. 'What did it cost you?'
Those eyes close once and open again and turn to me and then Alan and then the ceiling. I see a storm in them, wind and rain and thunder, pain and rage and something more terrible but undefined.
'Everything,' she says. 'It cost me everything.' Her voice is a monotone. 'Maybe if I'd reached out, asked for help, I could've changed things. But cops aren't too big on that anyway, and I had the added pressure of being a woman. Someone was always waiting for me to show weakness. I kept it to myself, and I hid it good. One thing a cop can do, man, is lie.' She looks at Alan. 'I drove drunk with Jared in the car. We crashed, he died.'
Silence. She's not looking at us now.
I have a bitter taste in my mouth, like blood. This is just one more terrible story to add to my catalogue of useless and terrible stories. What happened to her did not happen because she was a bad person or a bad cop or a bad mother. Something about that case got to her where others hadn't and drove her to the bottle. One day she was in the car with her son and the bottle made her zig instead of zag. That was the end of her, at least for a little while. The fact that she'd caught the monster didn't matter. She was his last victim.
'I tried to kill myself twice. Once with pills, the other time with a razor. I got put on disability from the force. My husband left me. I was about to give suicide a third whirl when I realized the truth: death was too good for me. What I needed to do was suffer.' She's still talking in that laconic monotone. 'So I moved to LA and I became a whore.'
I flinch at this revelation.
'Why?' I ask.
The large eyes find me, pin me. 'Penance. I killed my son. I de served to suffer. I figured letting myself get fucked by strangers for four or five years for money would be a good start.' She barks a laugh.
'The capper? A guy I had arrested in Ohio had gotten out and moved to LA. Fate sent him my way. He really got off on having the female cop who busted him down on her knees sucking his cock.'
I am aghast. I can't find the words.
'You're not doing that now,' Alan says. 'How'd you come to be here?'
'Time does one thing, Agent Washington. It keeps on going. The world moves on. You get changed by that, whether you want to or not. Doesn't matter how much pain, doesn't matter how much you hate yourself. Sooner or later, even if just in little ways, your soul moves on. I was happy to suffer for what I did to Jared. It was right. But one day I woke up and had the idea that maybe it was enough.'
She shrugs. 'I needed a place to turn. I was raised Catholic, so I found my way here. Father Yates did what he does, and I quit being a whore.'
I realize this is about as abridged as it gets. The gap between whoring herself as penance for her dead son and who she is now is a big one, but this woman is only going to share what she wants to. She's not going to cry, or get touchy-feely, or look toward heaven with a beatific light in her eyes. She might have been a soft flower once--
who knows? That rose had long since turned to stone.
'How well did you know Rosemary?' Alan asks.
The smallest quiver in the cool facade.
'Well. Real well. We'd become best friends.'
'Sorry.'
'Life's a bummer sometimes.'
'You met here?'
'Yeah. We both did volunteer work on Saturdays. Helping other down-and-outers, whatever. I wasn't very talkative. Rosemary drew me out. She had a way about her, a kind of helpless happiness that was hard to resist. Like, she knew everything was fucked up, but she couldn't help laughing anyway. That's what attracted me to her; she never stopped hoping for a reason to be happy.'
Something about the way she's talking makes me ask the question.
'Were you lovers?'
Her eyes narrow, then she sighs.
'Briefly. It wasn't about sex for me, really. I just wanted to be with someone. And I liked Rosemary. We ended it in a good way. I'm not that into women, and neither was Rosemary. We dropped the sex and kept the love. It worked for us.'
'I understand,' Alan says. He moves in gently now, with the question we really want answered. 'Andrea, is there anything you can tell us that you think might help us? Anyone you noticed taking an undue interest in Rosemary? Anyone new working around the church?
Anything at all.'
She shakes her head in frustration.
'I've been racking my brains, believe me. When I heard Rosemary had been killed, I went a little crazy. I never cry anymore, but I destroyed some furniture. I haven't thought about too much else since then. The thing is, Rosemary kept herself on a tight, tight leash. She was addicted to fucking. I'm not saying she was addicted to sex, that's the wrong phraseology. She liked fucking. The more degrading the better. The way she kept things under control was to have a routine and to not change that routine. She'd get up, exercise, work, then come here. Other than spending time with me, that was it.'
'And no breaks or changes in that routine prior to her death?'
Alan asks.
She spreads her hands, helpless. 'No. Nothing.'
'What about here?' he prods. 'New male arrivals?'
'I considered that, believe me. But no, nothing. Sorry, I wish I could be more help, but the only thing I can say for sure is that it wasn't someone from her past.'
