Some detectives, thinking of retirement, which was based on rank, took the Sergeant's exam hoping that when they were promoted they would get lucky and remain assigned to the Detective Division. Wohl felt sure that Sergeant Cumings was one of those who had taken the gamble, and lost, and wound up as a uniformed sergeant someplace that was nowhere as interesting a job as being a detective had been. That explained his volunteering for Special Operations. If he had been a crony of Harris in South Detectives, that meant he had been a pretty good detective.
And if he could work here, in civilian clothes, he would be, Wohl knew, very pleased with the arrangement. He wondered if Cumings would ask permission to wear plainclothes, and decided he probably would not. He was an experienced cop who had learned that if you ask permission to do something, the answer was often no. But if you did the same thing, like working in an investigative job in plainclothes without asking, probably no one would question you.
Wohl decided that whether Cumings asked for permission to work in civilian clothes, or just did it, it would be all right,
'Anyway, what we need you guys to do,' Tony Harris went on, 'is check these people out. Very quietly. I don't want anybody going where these people work and asking their boss if they think the guy could be the rapist. You work on the presumption of innocence. What you will look for is whether or not he fits the rough description we have-hairy and well spoken. And we look for the van. We've already run these people through Harrisburg for a match with a van and come up with zilch. But maybe his neighbor's got a van, or his brother-in-law, or maybe he gets to bring one home from work. And that'sall you do! You hit on something, you report it to Washington or me, and now Sergeant Cumings. Unless there's no way you can avoid it, I don't want you talking to these people. You just thin out the list for us. Anybody got any questions about that?'
'You mean, we find this guy, we don't arrest him?' a voice called out.
'Not unless he's got the schoolteacher in the van with him,' Harris said, 'with her life clearly in danger. Otherwise, you report it, that's all. We're dealing with a real sicko here, and there's no telling what he'll do if he figures he's about to get grabbed.'
'Like what, for example, he hasn't already done?' a sarcastic voice called.
Wohl looked quickly to spot the wiseass, but was not successful.
Harris's face showed contempt, not anger, but Wohl suspected there was both, and Harris immediately proved it.
'Okay,' Harris said, 'since you apparently can't figure it out yourself. We bag this guy, a hairy guy who speaks as if he went past the eighth grade, and who has a van. We even get one or more of the victims to identify him. But we don't have Miss Woodham, all right? So, if he doesn't figure this out himself, and he's smart, he gets a lawyer and the lawyer says,'Just keep denying it, Ace. Nobody saw you without your mask, and I'll confuse them when I get them on the stand
… make them pick you out of a line of naked hairy men wearing masks, or something!' That's how he would beat the first rapes, unless we can get what we professional detectives call 'evidence.' '
The identity of the wiseass was now clear. At least four of the newcomers had turned around to glower contemptuously at him.
'And we seem to have forgotten Miss Woodham, haven't we?' Harris went on. 'Who is the reason we're all out looking for this scumbag in the first place. Now just for the sake of argument, let's say he's got her tied up someplace, like a warehouse or something. Some place we can't connect him to. So our cowboy says,'Where's the dame?' and our guy says'What dame?' and our cowboy says,'You know what dame, Miss Woodham, ' and our sicko says,'Not only did I not piss all over the one lady, I never heard of anybody named Woodham. You got a witness?' So the latest victim, the one we're trying to find, cowboy, starves or suffocates or goes insane, wherever this scumbag has her tied up. Because once our sicko knows we're on to him, he's not going to go anywhere near the victim. Does that answer your question, smartass?'
Harris handled that perfectly, Wohl thought.
'You think she's still alive?' another newcomer asked, softly.
'We won't know that until we find her,' Harris said. 'That's all I've got, Captain.'
Sabara turned to Wohl.
'Have you got anything, Inspector?'
'Going along with what Harris said, Captain,' Wohl said. 'About not making the man we're looking for any more disturbed than he is, what would you think about putting as many of these officers as it takes in plainclothes? And in unmarked cars?'
'I'll find out how many unmarked cars there are and set it up, sir,' Sabara said.
'If necessary, Mike, take unmarked cars from Highway.'
'Yes, sir. Anything else, sir?'
Wohl shook his head and turned to face Matt Payne, who was now standing beside him.
'Inspector, Chief Coughlin called,' Matt said, surprising Peter Wohl not at all. 'He wants you to call him right away.'
'Okay,' Wohl said, and walked out of the Roll Call Room toward his office.
As he passed Sergeant Frizell's desk, Wohl told him, 'Call Chief Coughlin for me, please.'
'Inspector, the Commissioner just called, too, wanting you to get right back to him.'
'Get me Chief Coughlin first,' Wohl ordered. He walked into his office, sat down, and watched the telephones until one of the buttons began to flash. He picked it up.
'Inspector Wohl,' he said.
'Hold one for the Chief,' Sergeant Tom Lenihan's voice replied.
'Have you seen the papers, Peter?' Coughlin began, without any preliminaries.
'Yes, sir.'
'What's this about you refusing to talk to the press?'
'I wasn't here,' Wohl said. 'Somebody must have told him I was unavailable.'
'That's not what it sounded like in theLedger,' Coughlin said.
'It also said you and I are cronies,' Wohl said.
'The Commissioner's upset,' Coughlin said.
'He just called here,' Wohl said. 'As soon as you're through with me, I'm going to return his call.'
'What about assigning officers to find witnesses to clear the Highway cop?'
'Guilty,' Peter said. 'Except that I didn't assign them. They volunteered. Off duty, in civilian clothes. If they turn up a witness, there will be an anonymous telephone call from a public-spirited citizen to AID. It was actually Dave Pekach's idea, I want you to understand that I'm doing the opposite of laying it off on Pekach. If I had thought of it first, I would have done it first. And I'll take full responsibility for doing it.'
He heard Coughlin grunt, and there was a pause before Coughlin asked, 'Was that smart, under the circumstances?'
'If I could have sent them to find the Woodham woman, I would have,' Wohl said.
Matt Payne appeared at his office door. Wohl made a gesture for him to go away, together with a mental note to tell him to learn to knock before he came through a closed door.
'How's that going?' Chief Coughlin asked.
'The first fifteen, maybe sixteen, volunteers just showed up for duty. I turned them all over to Washington and Harris to ring doorbells. That's where I was when you called.'
'Maybe, until you get the Woodham woman back, you better put the people who were looking for witnesses to the car wreck to work ringing doorbells, too.'
'I will if you tell me to, Chief,' Wohl said, 'but I'd rather not.'
'You want to explain that?'
'Well, for one thing, I think they did all they could, and drew a blank, about finding anyone who saw Mr. McAvoy run the red light.'
'Damn,' Coughlin said.
'And for another, I don't think having Highway cops going around ringing doorbells is such a good idea. The guy we're looking for is already over the edge. I don't want to spook him.'
'You want to go over that again?' Coughlin asked.
Wohl covered the mouthpiece with his hand, and demanded, 'What the hell do you want, Payne?'
