everyone assumed the worst. Her pulse was slow, she wasn't moving or
talking, her face and body were covered with blood. The med techs took
her straight to Emanuel Legacy, and patrol cops called in MCT. We page
O'Donnell and tell him what we have, and he says we don't need a DA to
come out. We don't have a suspect in custody yet, and the scene where
we found the vie, even if it turns out to be the crime scene, is
already fucked up by the high school kids. He tells us to keep working
and to page him if we get a suspect or if anything big comes up over
the weekend.'
This was promising to be a long meeting if Johnson didn't speed it up,
so I broke in. 'How'd you guys split up the investigation?'
'Chuck and his partner, Mike Calabrese, supervised patrol in securing
the scene, and Jack and I went to Emanuel to follow up with the vie. By
the time we arrive, she's been there almost an hour and doing a lot
better. The ER doc told us that most of the blood was from the anal
tearing and a single large laceration on her face. She was out of it
and had a slow pulse because she was on heroin. To be on the safe
side, the doctor gave her Narcan to knock the heroin out of her system
and keep her from ODing. She was bruised up pretty bad, but she was
basically OK by the time we got to the hospital.'
'So that's when you realized it wasn't a Major Crimes Team case after
all,' I said, letting them know that Garcia had already filled me in on
the jurisdictional problems.
Jack Walker responded. As the senior detective he probably felt the
need to justify the decision to keep the case with MCT. 'Depends on
how you look at it. Yeah, if patrol had known at the scene what the
vicactual injuries were, they probably wouldn't have called us out. But
once we got involved, we had a teenage vie saying that a couple guys
pulled her into their car and raped and beat her. She told the doc she
didn't know how heroin wound up in her system; that they must have
injected her during the assault without her realizing it. It looked
like a straight stranger-to-stranger kidnap, doping, rape, and sod of a
little girl. It didn't seem right to bump the case down to shift
detectives.'
'What charge did you use to hang on to the case, attempted murder?' I
asked.
Walker nodded. 'Yeah, we decided we had enough. Actually, it's an
attempted agg, since the girl's under fourteen.'
Intentionally killing a person under fourteen is aggravated murder,
which can carry a death sentence. Luckily, Kendra Martin didn't die,
so the defendants would at most be charged with Attempted Aggravated
Murder.
'So what did you do after you decided to keep the case?' I asked.
Johnson answered. 'We go in to talk to her, and I'm telling you the
girl was a real piece of work, cussing us out, calling us every name in
the book. Accusing us of keeping her there against her will when there
was nothing wrong with her so SCF would make her go home.' Runaways
were notoriously distrustful of the state's Services for Children and
Families department.
'She wasn't making a lot of sense, so we had to explain to her that we
were there to investigate her statement to the doctor. That calmed her
down a little. Still pretty bitchy, though.' Johnson caught himself
and looked over at Garcia for a read on his choice of words. I assured
him his candor was fine and asked him to continue as I pulled a legal
pad from my briefcase.
'Anyway, the vie initially said she was walking in Old Town around ten
on Saturday night, on her way to Powell's Books, when Suspect One comes
up from behind and pushes her into the backseat of what she called a'
he looked down at his notebook ' 'some big, seventies, four-door, loser
shit box.' Said it was a dark color. Suspect One gets in back with
her while Suspect Two drives to a parking lot somewhere in southeast
Portland.
'She says Suspect One acted like the one in charge. He starts getting
real rough with her in the backseat, saying a lot of dirty stuff and
pulling her clothes off. Thing is, right when she thinks he's about to
rape her, she realizes there's nothing there. The guy can't get it up.
So he just goes off and starts beating the shit out of her, then
penetrates her vaginally and an ally with a foreign object, she can't
tell what. The doctors say it was probably some kind of stick they
found splinters. Anyway, they left the parking lot and got onto 1-84
going east. She remembers passing signs to the airport. After they
stopped we're guessing they were out by Multnomah Falls at this point
Suspect One tells Suspect Two to take a turn at her. She thinks he
penetrated her vaginally and remembers Suspect One telling him to
finish off in her mouth. Her memory of what happened toward the end
was pretty hazy. She also thinks they must've taken her purse, because
she had it with her when they pulled her in the car.'
I felt sick. It's bad enough that people like these men walk on the
same planet as the rest of us. The fact that they manage to find one
another and work together is utterly terrifying.
'Could she describe the suspects?'
Ray Johnson nodded. 'Nothing helpful, just that she'd know them if she
saw them again. We figure it's a long shot but go ahead and pull some
mug shots off X-Imaging of guys on supervision for child sods and
