Retribution (26 page)

Three articles came up.

In January of 1991, a female college student at the University of California at Los Angeles awoke at 3:00
A.M.
in her off-campus apartment to a stranger in a rubber clown face standing over her bed. She was brutally raped, tortured, and beaten for several hours. The rapist was not identified and escaped through her first-floor window.

In July of 1993, a female bartender who had just gotten off her shift at 1:00
A.M
. was surprised in her Hollywood apartment by an unidentified man in a latex clown mask. She, too, was brutally raped. She also sustained several knife wounds from her attacker, but was expected to recover, according to the article. Her assailant was not caught.

In December of 1993, a college student in Santa Barbara was found in her first-floor apartment, the victim of a heinous rape and assault by an unidentified man who had broken in through a window in the middle of the night. The perpetrator had worn a rubber clown mask. He had not been identified or captured. There were no suspects.

Three articles. Three assailants with a rubber clown mask. The same MO for all: ground-floor apartments, masked strangers, brutal rapes. It was the same rapist. She expanded her search criteria and found another case farther up the coast in San Luis Obispo with the same MO, but this rapist wore a rubber alien face mask.

Four victims. And she had just started to look. They had happened three years and four counties apart in
probably three different police jurisdictions, and so no one had made the connection. She continued to search the
Times,
but found nothing that linked the cases together. Only one small two-paragraph blurb appeared as a follow-up on the female bartender from Hollywood. It ran about four days after her rape and reported that the unidentified woman had been discharged from the hospital and was recuperating with relatives. It also said that, although the police were still investigating, there had been no arrests made yet and no suspects had been identified. The public was urged to call the LAPD with any information. The
Times
had not bothered doing follow-up articles on the other three victims.

She ran the same search in the other cities Bantling had lived in before arriving in 1994 in Miami. She found a rape with the same MO by an assailant wearing an alien mask in Chicago in September of 1989, and another with a clown mask in San Diego in early 1990. Now there were six. And those were the ones that had been reported. But was it Bantling, or merely coincidence? She MapQuested Bantling’s old addresses in Chicago and San Diego that appeared in his AutoTrack with the addresses of the rape victims in the two articles. He had lived no more than ten miles from each. She held her breath and checked the South Florida papers since 1994: the
Miami Herald,
the
Sun Sentinel,
the
Key West Citizen,
and the
Palm Beach Post,
but there was nothing.

She flipped through Bantling’s passport, which had been surrendered to the court. Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, the Philippines, India, Malaysia. Bantling had traveled extensively throughout the world on business with Tommy Tan and before that, Indo Expressions, another upscale furniture design house out in
California. Business trips that lasted anywhere from two weeks to a month at a time. The furniture-manufacturing plants and galleries that Bantling had visited, according to the list provided to her office by Tommy Tan, seemed to be located in poor towns on the outskirts of big cities where it was easy to remain anonymous. He had made repeat visits to many of the cities. Could he have victims overseas?

C.J. flipped through her Rolodex and found the number for Investigator Christine Frederick with Interpol Headquarters in Lyons, France. Christine and she had worked together a few years back on a murder suspect who had killed his whole family with a shotgun in a hotel room on South Beach. He had fled to the mountains of Germany where Interpol and the German police found him eating schnitzel in Munich, and Christine had helped with the extradition back to the States. They had struck up a friendship in the months that it took to finally get the guy back to Miami. It had been a long while since they had spoken.

On the first ring she got Christine’s voice mail. In French, German, Spanish, Italian, and, fortunately, English. C.J. looked down at her watch. It was already 10:30 at night. She had totally lost track of time. With the time difference between them, it was barely sunrise in Lyons. She left only her name and number and hoped Christine would remember her.

It was dark out, the sun having set behind the Everglades hours ago, and her office was lit only by the banker’s desk lamp with the pull-chain cord that her father had given her. The bright office fluorescents made her eyes hurt after a while, and she liked the intimacy and coziness of her desk lamp. The halls outside her
closed office door were black and long since deserted. She would have to call security in the lobby downstairs to have them escort her to her car.

She turned once again to her office window and DCJ across the street, where lights burned on every floor in the building. Strange, desperate people milled about just outside the chain-link fence topped with razor wire, waiting for their boyfriend or their girlfriend or their pimp or their business associate or their mother to get booked in, or get released. Cop cars flanked the building, bringing in new criminals to replace the ones who could post bond. And in that dirty gray building of steel doors and iron-mesh windows, behind the razor wire, in the custody of the Department of Corrections, sat William Rupert Bantling. The man she had been running from, hiding from, for the past twelve years was now directly across the street from her, no less than fifty yards away. If he was near a window, he could be watching her at this very moment, just as he had promised her he always would. The thought made her shudder, and her skin went cold.

She turned her attention back to her desk to pack up her briefcase and head home. The light from her computer screen glowed brightly in the otherwise-dim office. On the screen was the last newspaper article that Westlaw had pulled up in her search. The state searched was New York. The paper was the
New York Post.
She stared at the words, but it was not necessary for her to read them. The date read June 30, 1988. And although the twenty-four-year-old rape victim’s identity was not being disclosed by the paper, it made no difference. C.J. knew who she was.

She quickly pulled the chain on the banker’s lamp and
turned off the computer. Then she put her head in her hands, and in the darkness where no one could see in, she started to cry.

35

By ten minutes of eight on Friday morning, she was back at her desk once more. Sleep had again been fitful and completely unproductive, filled with screaming, familiar nightmares. So at 5:00 A.M., she had finally stopped staring at the red numbers on her clock and had gotten out of bed and gone to the gym, before heading back down I-9 5 into work.

In addition to the two messages on her office voice mail that Dominick had left for her yesterday, she had another one waiting for her last night on her answering machine at home. He wanted to know why she hadn’t shown up at the ME’s yesterday, and if everything was alright with her. Apparently, they also had some new developments in the case after speaking with Dr Neilson, and he had asked her to call him when she got in.

It was so strange. Here it was, after so many years, that she had finally met someone who could be special in her life. Whom she could talk to, relate with, maybe even eventually allow into her cubbyhole life. When she talked to Dominick, the words came easily. There were no strained gaps of silence. No fluffy conversation. It was all real, every word she had shared with him in every conversation they had had, even when the subject matter was inconsequential. And it sounded silly – juvenile, perhaps – but she felt this anxious excitement just listening to him when he talked, wondering what he
would say, what he would tell her. Each word, each fact, just another piece of the big zillion-piece puzzle to finding out who this man was, what he was thinking, what he was about.

She had never been physically attracted to cops. For the most part she found that too many of them were controlling, on their own personal power trips, such was the nature of their work. And C.J. was not one to be controlled. So it struck her as almost odd how different Dominick was from other cops. He was strong, but not in an overpowering way, and he was in control of every situation without being controlling. He headed a task force that under someone else’s command could be full of egos, but under his they were a unified front – even with all the lights and cameras on them for the past year. She also noticed that Dominick listened before he spoke – another trait that was not too common in cops, or many men for that matter. Over the past ten months she found that they actually had a lot to say to each other outside of defendants and pretrial conferences. And, if they had been given the chance, they could have explored all the things they had discovered that they had in common – biking, traveling, the arts.

She hadn’t wanted to know that much before with any man, not even Michael. With Dominick, she realized that she had almost craved that knowledge. And now that he had shown his feelings for her the other night, she thought that maybe he felt the same way about her. That perhaps he wanted to know every drop of her as she did him. And she just might have let him in, too. That’s what was so hard. To sacrifice all those intense feelings and emotions before experiencing their full potential, always left to wonder what could have
been. Because she just might have let him into her heart, and now that was impossible. He had become another victim in the game.

She toyed for a moment, though, with the idea of calling him back, to hear his voice, to maybe have one more grasp at the incredibly warm feeling she had experienced by the door two nights ago. But she dismissed the idea as quickly as it had come. Her decision to go forward on Cupid came with consequences. She knew that, accepted that.

Nevertheless, she had to talk to him eventually, to regain the ground of professionalism and to go forward on this case. As she was figuring out just how to accomplish this, the phone rang.

‘State Attorney’s Office. ASA Townsend.’

‘
Bonjour,
Madame Prosecutor.’

It was Christine Frederick.

‘Christine? How are you?’ C.J. was not even going to attempt hello in French. Everyone concerned would be better off if she didn’t.

It didn’t matter. The voice spoke back to her in perfect English, with just a hint of a German accent. ‘C. J. Townsend! Well, hello there! How are things in your sunny part of the world?’

‘Sunny. How about you?’

‘I always said if I was going to be a criminal, C.J., I would be a criminal in Florida. It is always so sunny and warm. Things here are good! I cannot complain. It’s not too sunny, though. It has been raining a lot in the city.’

‘You don’t want to be a criminal in Florida, Christine. Stay put on the Riviera where the international criminals are at least rich and the food is – what’s that
word I learned in high-school French class?
Magnifique?’

Christine laughed.
‘Tr
è
s bien, mon amie!Very
good! I got your message from yesterday. Is this a good time to talk to you?’

‘Yes, it is. Thanks for calling me back so quickly. I need your help with something, if I might ask. I don’t want to go through Washington just yet, though, on it. I don’t want anything official.’

‘Sure, C.J. What can I help you out with?’

‘I need you to run an MO through Interpol and see if anything comes up. We’ve got a possible serial rapist here in Miami who has extensive travels outside the U.S., mainly to poor South American countries. Also Mexico, and the Philippines. I need to know if you have anything that matches up.’

‘What have you got?’

‘He’s a white male in his early forties. Uses a mask. He seems to prefer a clown face or an alien face, but he may use some other Halloween figure-type latex mask. Breaks into usually first-floor apartments and targets young women who live alone. He seems to stalk them for a while before he acts. His weapon of choice is a knife, and he forcibly ties down his victims in most instances.’ She took a breath and continued in what sounded, at least in her own head, to be a calm, steady voice. ‘We also have evidence that he is a sadist. He likes to torture. We have a few girls who were cut up pretty badly, physically disfigured on their breasts and in the vaginal area.’

She could hear Christine jotting down notes on the other side of the phone line. ‘Is that it?’ she asked.

‘Yes. Look back over the past decade. In fact, begin with 1990. He started traveling right around then.’

‘How about DNA?’

‘No. Nothing. No prints, semen, hair. He leaves a squeaky-clean scene.’

‘Do you have a subject name for me?’

‘I’ve already run his name through Interpol. I’m trying something new. Do me a favor and run it through without his name. Let’s just look for similarities.’

‘Okay. Will do. What South American countries are we looking at?’

C.J. picked up the photocopy of Bantling’s passport and started reading off countries. ‘Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina.’

‘Okay. Then you said the Philippines and Mexico. Do you want me to try anywhere else?’

‘Yeah. Look at Malaysia and India.’

‘You got it. I’ll call you back when I’ve got something.’

‘Thanks, Christine. Let me give you my cell number in case you find something out this weekend. 954-346-7793’

‘You bet. Hey, whatever happened to that guy who killed his family while on vacation on Miami Beach? The one we found in Germany?’

‘He got the death penalty.’

‘Oh.’

She hung up the phone and thought about Dominick’s message last night. She needed to know what she was in for with Joe Neilson at the Medical Examiner’s. So she picked up the phone and called Manny on his Nextel, hoping that Dominick wasn’t in the room with him.