“You gonna tell me what we would or wouldn’t do? Well, let me tell you this. We do things by the book, Parnell. That way, no fancy-pants defense lawyer is going to make us out as fuckups. Or worse, get some perp kicked free because we can’t even do police work right. You got that, Golden Girl?”
On one level, I knew Bandoni was being unfair. I’d read enough reports during my training period to know that cops often asked nicely before resorting to a warrant. It made things faster and kept some judge from deciding a cop was too warrant-happy.
But I was just a rookie. And whether or not to get a warrant wasn’t a rookie cop’s call. Lobowitz’s warning sounded in my ears.
You’re to be on Bandoni’s ass like wet toilet paper. Unless he specifically tasks you with something, you don’t do it. You especially don’t do it if it’s your idea and he hasn’t okayed it.
I closed my eyes. Opened them.
You’re a cowboy, Detective Parnell.
Bandoni was still waiting for my answer. The worst thing about all this was the disappointment in his eyes.
“I got it,” I said. Worse than a sailor with a case of clap.
CHAPTER 16
Life, rookie, is an accumulation of heartbreak.
—Len Bandoni. Private conversation.
I tucked the Tahoe into the parking lot of an abandoned strip mall a couple of blocks from Leopard’s Den. Bandoni and I would wait here while Boz and Cooper watched the venue for the gutter punks. The clouds had lowered, and the sleet morphed into a gloomy dusk shredded by periodic rain squalls.
Don’t like the weather in Colorado? Give it a minute.
Bandoni crossed his arms and sank his chin onto his chest, a posture that invited no conversation. I tuned the radio to the channel we’d agreed on. Then, while Clyde curled up in his crate in the back and Bandoni appeared to nap, I stepped out into the purple light and called crime scene detective Ron Gabel.
“I’m calling for some good news,” I told him.
“Bad day?”
“Won’t give it a victory parade.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to add to your misery,” Gabel said. “I finished running all the samples from the nursing home, looking for a match with the sample from Carolyn Jackson’s rape kit.”
“A whole lot of nothing?”
“You’re familiar with the vacuum of space?”
“Crap.”
“I’m sorry, Sydney. It was a long shot, anyway.”
But Noah Asher’s case had raised another possibility—an angle the original detectives might not have considered. “What about cleaning companies?”
“Come again?”
“We’ve been assuming that the rapist was someone internal. Or at least someone who was there on a regular basis, like the cafeteria staff.”
“Right.”
“But a lot of businesses contract with cleaning companies. And while most of the night janitors are women, the companies also hire men.”
“That’s a good thought, Sydney. I’ll find out if the facility used outside cleaners and get back to you.”
I got back into the Tahoe, pushed my seat back as far as I could, and popped open my laptop. Using spreadsheet software and the five hundred rape-kit files I’d scanned and loaded onto my hard drive, I started sorting data from the kits. I looked at names and dates along with the type of assault, the location, and the age and race of the victim. Some of the assaults were clear outliers—either they were one-offs or the rapist had moved on. In some cases, as with Cohen’s victim the previous day, the victims had chosen not to press charges. Their rape kits sat in mute testimony to their fear.
But when I sorted by the victim’s age, eliminating every woman under the age of seventy, a clump of similarities emerged. With two exceptions involving home invasions, every victim over the age of seventy had been attacked in elder-care facilities. And all the women except Carolyn Jackson—the earliest case in the profile I was generating—had been Latina.
And—here I hesitated as an ice-cold hand slipped down my back—two of the women had reported that their attackers had yellow eyes.
Who the hell had yellow eyes?
Dana’s voice sounded in my mind. There are a lot of yellow-eyed supervillains in the comics world. Nightcrawler. Trigon. Gamora . . . Apocalypse.
I stared out the window. Light from the streetlamps threw watery globes on the wet pavement. A cat darted across the street, narrowly missing disaster as a car roared past.
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel.
Human brains hunted down patterns like mosquitoes heat-seeking for blood. We found the image of the Virgin Mary in our tea leaves and human faces carved into the surface of Mars. So maybe I was spinning ectoplasmic spiderwebs out of wishful thinking. Maybe the elderly women had been as delirious and demented as the police reports suggested.
Or maybe the rapist had been a comics fan.
I puffed out a breath of air and studied the data on the screen, my pulse slamming in my throat, unsure where, in all the data, the actual spider lurked. No one had made the nursing-home connection between the cases before because, of the seven assaults, five of them had occurred in municipalities like Aurora and Englewood, which had their own police departments. And while some of the cases had been clumped together in time, others had happened months apart. I hadn’t spotted a connection, either, because the nursing-home locations hadn’t popped up during my initial go/no-go search for rape kits that could be retested.
Now I shot a text to Gabel.
SEVEN NURSING-HOME CASES IN METRO DENVER. POSSIBLE PATTERN.
He answered, SERIAL RAPIST?
WHAT I’M THINKING. CAN WE COMPARE DNA FROM THOSE SEVEN KITS?
I’LL MAKE IT HAPPEN.
THANKS.
I stepped out again and made one more call, this one
