Hold Still (5 page)

EIGHT

October 6th

It was unseasonably warm for
October, but still a couple of the homeless regulars had taken shelter in the vestibule of the Thirty-Fifth District. Jocelyn stepped over two prone figures and entered the building that housed Northwest Detectives.

The desk sergeant, a middle-aged man named McDowell, smiled at her. “Rush. Good to see you.”

Jocelyn smiled back and gave him a mock salute. “I only took one day off, McDowell. But it’s good to be back.”

The other officer grinned. “It was a long day. Start anger management yet?”

“Had my first class this morning.”

“How’d that go?” McDowell asked.

“I’m in class with five guys who routinely beat their wives and a woman who set her neighbor’s car on fire over a parking spot. What do you think?”

McDowell scratched his head, both eyebrows rising. “Jeez, I think anger management is a good place to get pissed off.”

Jocelyn laughed and made her way up the steps to the offices of Northwest Detectives, which was responsible for four police districts in the city. The upper floor of the building at Broad and Champlost was like an old classroom with its hardwood floors and the faint smell of chalk. Desks were crammed together throughout, the walls lined with filing cabinets. A piss-smelling closet with a pilfered park bench in it served as an impromptu interview room.

Kevin sat behind a desk, his upper body nearly obscured by files and paperwork.

“Rush!” He stood, grinning widely, the skin at the corners of his hazel eyes crinkling. “You’re back. How’s Olivia?”

She looked around, smoothing her jacket with her left palm. “She’s fine,” she said. “She was thrilled that I got an extra day off.”

“Hey, slugger,” Chen, one of the other detectives, said as he passed. “How’s the arm?”

Jocelyn held up her right arm and slid her jacket sleeve to her elbow, revealing the splint she had to wear for the next six weeks. “Good enough to kick your ass.”

Chen laughed. “Good to see you, Rush. Glad you’re okay.”

A commotion behind her drew Jocelyn’s attention. The closet door was ajar. A woman paced back and forth inside. She was in her early twenties, slender with long blonde hair in disarray. Her lavender wrap dress was torn, blood spattered down the front. She held an ice pack to the side of her head. When she turned, Jocelyn saw a black-and-blue mark by her eye. Her bottom lip was split and swollen.

“I already told you what happened,” the woman said. “Can I go now?”

Jocelyn heard a male voice, calm but interested. “Ma’am, I just need you to stay here with me awhile longer. You need to be interviewed by Special Victims. Someone will come get you. We can talk about something else while you’re waiting.”

She recognized the voice immediately. Jocelyn turned back to Kevin, hooking a thumb back toward the closet.

“Is that Friendly Fire?”

“Yeah,” Kevin said. “The Germantown Groper struck again today, only this time, the woman fought back.”

The Germantown Groper had been accosting women in the Germantown section of the city for weeks. He approached them in broad daylight and touched their breasts and genitals. He never went further than that, usually fleeing as soon as the women protested. They had some grainy surveillance footage of him, but nothing more to go on. The composite sketch they had released produced no leads.

“No shit. Did we get him?”

“No, but she got into quite a fight with the guy. She knocked his hat off in the struggle, tried to pull out a clump of his hair. He hit her a few times and took off. She got the hair, though. We bagged it, but we’re waiting for someone from SVU to show up and take her. She was a walk-in. She didn’t want to go down there in a police car.”

Jocelyn stepped toward the closet, and Kevin followed. “How long has she been in there?”

Kevin scratched his head. “Come to think of it,” he said. “They’ve been in there a long time.”

“Tell me about yourself,” Finch went on.

“Are you serious?” the woman said, her voice rising. “Look at my face! I was attacked today. I don’t want to talk to you. I want to go home—or to the hospital.”

Finch again. “Ma’am, I’m sorry. I just thought you’d want some company while you waited. I didn’t mean—”

There was a noisy sigh of exasperation. “Can’t I just go? I mean, you can’t just keep me here, right?”

Jocelyn swung the door open. Finch sat on the bench, slumped against the wall, arms spread across the top of the bench. If he was surprised to see her, he didn’t show it.

“Ma’am,” Jocelyn said, herding the woman out of the closet to where Kevin waited. “Detective Sullivan will escort you downstairs and arrange for some transportation. You need to be interviewed by Special Victims, and they will be sure that you’re seen by a doctor.”

Jocelyn turned to Kevin and fished her keys out of her pocket. She handed them to him. “Call Inez and have her come and take the witness down to SVU in my car.”

Finch waited until Kevin and the woman were out of earshot before he stood and walked over to Jocelyn. He glared down at her, trying to use his height advantage—he was a foot taller—to intimidate her. She put her hands on her hips and thrust her chin up at him.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Finch asked.

“What the fuck are
you
doing?” Jocelyn challenged.

Finch motioned behind him, indicating the closet. “I was interviewing a victim.”

Jocelyn laughed, the sound dry and hard. “That was not interviewing a victim. Where’s your notepad? Where’s your pen? Did you even take any notes?” She waved a dismissive hand in the air. “Forget it. She’s SVU’s problem anyway. How long were you in there with her? You trying to pull a Casanova on a woman who was just sexually assaulted? That’s low, even for you.”

Finch took a step closer to Jocelyn. His breath was on her face. It smelled like mints.
What the hell?
she thought. What kind of cop had minty breath? He went to poke her chest, but she slapped his hand away. “Don’t touch me, Friendly Fire.”

“Don’t interrupt my interviews,” he said.

Jocelyn crossed her arms and looked up at him defiantly. She sensed the crowd that had gathered at her back by the still silence that had overtaken the normally noisy unit.

“Rush,” Kevin called. Jocelyn heard the rustle of bodies as he pushed his way to the front of the other officers. “Hey,” Kevin said as he broke through and came up beside her. “Back up, kid,” he said to Finch.

Finch snickered as his eyes slid up and down Kevin’s frame. “Why, old man? You gonna do something about it?”

Kevin looked at Finch as if he was the stupidest person he had ever laid eyes on. “No, dumbass—she will, and you don’t want to go toe-to-toe with her.”

A ripple of laughter came from behind Jocelyn. Someone said, “Don’t make her break her other wrist.”

“Aren’t you on shift?” Jocelyn asked. “You hiding in the closet so you don’t have to do any work?”

She stepped into him, and Finch backed up. “Or were you just trying to get some ass? You know, there are these places that most men go to pick up women. They’re called bars and clubs. Unless you like your ladies already roughed up.”

The tips of his ears reddened. He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “Fuck you, Rush.”

“Do your fucking job, you little prick. Get off on your own time.”

Jocelyn turned away from him.

“Cunt,” he said.

A collective gasp went up across the room.

“Hey, watch it, kid,” Kevin said. “You’re way out of line.”

Jocelyn turned back and advanced on him, standing on the balls of her feet to get in his face. “You wanna go?” she said. Her anger felt like waves of heat rolling off her body. She pushed him. “You wanna hit me? Come on. Let’s go.”

Kevin stepped between them, a hand on Finch’s chest, keeping him at bay. He looked at Jocelyn. “Rush, let it go. He’s not worth it.”

“Come on, you little bastard,” Jocelyn said. “Hit me, and you’ll see just how much of a cunt I really am.”

Kevin shook his head and put his body directly in front of Jocelyn’s. He looked at her sternly. “That’s enough,” he said. “Let’s go.”

When Jocelyn didn’t move, Kevin took her arm and guided her away from the closet. “
Now
,” he said.

The crowd dispersed. Finch headed for the steps, shooting Jocelyn a deadly glance before disappearing from sight. Jocelyn’s good hand was clenched in a fist. The scar on her left forearm tingled. Heat rose from her collar and enveloped her face. Kevin gave her arm another tug, pulling her back to the present, keeping her from going after Finch. Jocelyn sat at the desk across from Kevin, eyes still on the space at the top of the steps where Finch had just been. Just once, she’d love to pound the shit out of him. Just once. But she was already in deep shit, and a punk like Finch was hardly worth her career. She had Olivia to think about now. She turned toward Kevin and sighed.

“Why do you do that?” Kevin asked.

“He’s an asshole.”

“That’s old news, Rush. You just enrolled in anger management classes—you tryin’ to get suspended too?”

Jocelyn shook her head. “Sorry, Kev—no, he just pisses me off.”

Kevin shuffled some papers around on the desk. There didn’t appear to be any system, although Jocelyn was certain that most of the paperwork would end up on her desk before the end of the night. “It’s okay,” he said. He smiled mischievously and leaned toward her. “I would have enjoyed seeing you put him in his place, though.”

Jocelyn laughed. “If he’s around long enough, that day will come. All right, forget about him. What do we have for tonight?”

Kevin leaned back in his chair and yelled back toward Detective Chen, who’d been fielding calls during the confrontation between Jocelyn and Finch. “What do you got?”

Chen rattled off the night’s calls in a disinterested tone, as if he were reading items from a take-out menu. “I got a shooting at a playground with no injuries, two robberies—one armed—a lady found dead in her garage under mysterious circumstances and a suicide.”

“A suicide?” Kevin said. “What kind?”

“Guy jumped off the Henry Avenue Bridge.”

“How long ago?”

Chen looked at his notes. “About fifteen minutes.”

Kevin looked back at Jocelyn, giving her his that-sounds-interesting look. “What do you think? We can start with something easy tonight. How’s the suicide sound?”

“I don’t know, Kev.” Jocelyn immediately wondered what kind of family the guy had—if he had young children. How many lives had he ruined when he jumped off the bridge? She thought about the last suicide they’d covered six months ago. The guy had lived with his mother. He was her only son. Her husband was dead, and she didn’t get out much. Jocelyn had told her the news standing in the woman’s dusty, Bengay-smelling living room. She’d watched the woman’s face crumple from polite disbelief to unbridled grief—the pain in the woman’s eyes was so immediate and so palpable that by the time Jocelyn had left, she’d felt like going directly to the bar.

“No,” Jocelyn told Kevin. “I can’t do a suicide. Let’s do the playground shooting. After that, I want to pay a visit to Anita Grant and see if I can get her to talk.”

He looked disappointed but conceded, grabbing his jacket from the back of his chair.

“Rush,” Chen called. “Call on three.”

Jocelyn signaled Kevin to give her a minute and picked up the receiver on the desk in front of her. “Rush.”

“It’s me,” Inez said.

“Did you get my keys? Can you take that woman down to SVU?”

“Yeah, sure,” Inez said. Then she hesitated, clearing her throat. “I got your sister down here in CCTV. She hasn’t been slated yet.”

CCTV was a holding area downstairs monitored by closed-circuit television. Jocelyn slouched in her chair. She closed her eyes momentarily and took a deep breath. “What is she in for—drugs or prostitution?”

Inez hesitated again. “Prostitution.”

Jocelyn clenched her hand around the receiver, white-knuckling and releasing. “Book her.”

“What?”

“Book her.”

“I’m gonna send her up to you.”

“No, Inez. This is Camille’s third arrest this year.
This year.
I appreciate the heads-up but no more favors. I’m done trying to help her. Just book her.”

There was a long pause. Dead air. A rustling. Then Inez said, “Okay, fine.”

Jocelyn hung up.

Kevin jangled his car keys. “You ready?”

Jocelyn nodded. They were at the top of the stairs when Chen called for her again. “You got a call on line two.”

Kevin shot her an impatient look, one brow raised, his mouth turned down. “You sure are popular tonight.”

“Give me a minute,” Jocelyn said.

Kevin threw his arms in the air and called over Jocelyn’s head, “Hey, Chen, give the playground shooting to someone else. We’ll take the old woman in the garage.”

Jocelyn snatched up the receiver. “Inez, I wasn’t kidding. Charge her. I’m not going to change my mind.”

“Detective Rush?” said an unfamiliar voice.

“Who is this?”

“I’m trying to reach Detective Jocelyn Rush,” the woman said.

“You got her. What’s this about?”

“Hi, Detective. I don’t know if you remember me. We met in the ER two nights ago. I’m a nurse at Albert Einstein. My name is Kim Bottinger.”

“I remember,” Jocelyn said.

“Anita Grant asked me to call.”

Jocelyn’s pulse quickened, but she kept her tone cool. “I thought you were an ER nurse. Tell me she’s not still waiting in the ER.”

Kim laughed. “No, she’s not. She was admitted the night you guys were here. I went upstairs to check on her a couple of times on my breaks to try to convince her to press charges. There was another detective here—a woman from Special Victims, but Anita wouldn’t talk to her. I think she’s ready to talk now, but she’ll only talk to you.”

“All right,” Jocelyn said. “I’m on my way.”

NINE

October 6th

Twenty minutes later, Jocelyn and
Kevin stood outside Anita Grant’s hospital room. Jocelyn had called SVU on their way to Einstein and spoken with Lieutenant Caleb Vaughn, who’d given her permission to take a statement from Anita. He’d promised to get back in touch with Jocelyn later in the evening. Kim Bottinger had met them in the ER and guided them upstairs.

“I told her you were coming,” the nurse said. She glanced nervously at Kevin, giving him a tight smile. “I don’t think she’ll talk if you’re there too,” she said to him.

Kevin smiled back. “I understand,” he said. “I can wait out here with you.”

Instead of telling him she had to get back to the ER to finish her shift, she nodded. Her cheeks flushed.

Jocelyn suppressed a groan. Kevin was practically glowing. The nurse offering to wait with him was what passed for female attention in Kevin’s world. He was twice divorced, and he logged double the hours Jocelyn did. There was no time for him to date or even flirt. Interviewing crime victims wasn’t the best vehicle for meeting people either.

Jocelyn shook her head. “I’ll leave the door cracked, Sullivan.”

Kevin leaned against the wall and folded his arms across his chest, eyes never leaving the nurse. Jocelyn moved past Kim, and the nurse laid a hand on her forearm. “There’s something else.” She looked around, as if to make sure no one else was listening, and leaned in toward Jocelyn. “A few months ago there was another woman in the ER. She was definitely a hooker. She didn’t say she was raped, but she had the same . . . wounds. We called the police, but she took off before they could talk to her. I don’t know what happened to her.”

“What are you saying?” Jocelyn asked, exchanging a look with Kevin.

“I’m saying this is the second one—that we’ve seen.”

Jocelyn sighed. “Wait here. We’ll talk later.”

Anita’s second-floor room was infinitely quieter than the shitty accommodations she’d been given in the ER. She lay on the bed, her feet propped on pillows. Her hands were still wrapped in gauze and rested, inert, in her lap. Jocelyn pulled a chair up beside the bed. Anita’s eyes darted from Jocelyn to the door and back.

“Relax,” Jocelyn said. “You asked for me, you got me. Just me.”

Tension fell away from Anita’s shoulders, and she let her head loll against the pillow. Jocelyn pulled out a notebook and pen, grimacing as she tried to write with her injured arm.

“What happened to you?” Anita asked.

“Carjacking. You?”

A faint smile crossed Anita’s face. “You ain’t changed at all, Rush.”

Jocelyn smiled back. “Guess not. What about you, Anita? I thought you were clean.”

“I am.”

The two women stared at each other until Anita broke eye contact. She looked straight ahead. After a moment, her lower lip trembled. She crossed her arms and tried to hug herself, wincing at the pain in her hands. A small circle of blood leaked through the bandages on the top of her right hand. “I am clean. I don’t do drugs no more. But I have an ad on Craigslist, okay?”

“Anita.”

Anita glared at Jocelyn. “What? I’m a damn receptionist, Rush. I got two kids, and my mama’s sick. I make twelve dollars an hour. It’s not like I’m supporting a dope habit no more. It’s just—it’s easy money. I screen the clients, and I don’t do it all the time. It’s nothing like working the Stroll.”

The Stroll was an area in Philadelphia where drugs and hookers were easily obtainable, but it was also one of the most violent and unsafe areas of the city—especially for prostitutes.

“I never had a problem until now,” Anita continued. “Like I said, it’s easier to screen my johns this way. Most of the time, I don’t even have to do much. I meet them beforehand in a public place, and then we set up another time and place to meet for the . . . you know—”

“I know,” Jocelyn said.

“So this guy answered the ad and said that him and his friend wanted to have a threesome.”

“How did he answer the ad? Did he call you? Text?”

“He sent me an e-mail.”

“I’m going to need that,” Jocelyn said.

Anita bobbed her head in the direction of her bedside table. “I can forward it to you from my phone before you leave.”

“What was this guy’s name?” Jocelyn asked.

“Larry. Don’t know his last name. His e-mail address started with LJ9124 so his last name might start with a
J
. Or the
J
could be for his middle name, I guess.”

Jocelyn scribbled down some notes, pain streaking through her wrist. She hoped the bottle of ibuprofen she kept in her desk wasn’t empty. She would need some when she got back to the Division. “So, Larry and his friend want to have a threesome. What did you say?”

Anita shrugged. “It ain’t nothing I haven’t done before, so I said sure, let’s meet for coffee, and we can talk about it then. Like I said, I screen them first. If they won’t meet me for coffee, I don’t do it. If we meet for coffee and I get a bad feeling, I don’t do it. If I’m not what they expected, then they can walk away.”

“Where did you meet?”

“The Dunkin’ Donuts on Germantown Avenue. They were both there. Larry, and he said his friend’s name was Angel.”

“What did they look like?”

“They were both black. Larry was tall and kind of thin. I’d say about six foot. He was probably in his mid to late forties. His friend was younger, late twenties I’d say. He was shorter, probably about five-eight and fat. I am talking huge, like a damn house. He didn’t say much. Larry said he didn’t talk.”

“Didn’t talk or couldn’t talk?”

Anita’s eyes drifted up toward the ceiling as she considered the question. “Larry said, ‘He don’t talk.’ But I think maybe he couldn’t talk ’cause he didn’t say a word the whole time. Like maybe there was something wrong with him that he couldn’t talk.”

“Did you agree on an arrangement?” Jocelyn asked.

Anita shook her head. “No. I had a bad feeling. I sat with them for a few minutes. I didn’t like the way they looked at me. They seemed like the kind of guys who wouldn’t respect the arrangement. I seen a lot of those guys on the Stroll. Been raped by a few of ’em. So I gave them a really high price, and they said they only had a few hundred dollars on them and wanted to ‘make a stop’ to get the rest. I told them they should call me when they had all of it, and I left.”

Jocelyn looked up from her notepad. “Then what happened?”

Anita seemed to shrink in the bed. Her body curled into itself, as if she was trying to make herself smaller, more compact. Less of a target. She crossed her bandaged hands over her chest, making an
X
with her arms. “I was walking down Chelten Avenue, and they came up on me in their car. Angel got out and just pushed me into the car. I tried to get out, but Larry took off driving while Angel held me down in the back. I fought like hell. The really weird thing is that he didn’t hit me. I thought for sure he’d hit me, as much as I was fighting, but he didn’t. He just held me. He was so big.”

There was a hitch in her voice, a sudden sharp intake of breath as she tried to hold down a sob.

“It’s okay,” Jocelyn said softly. “Take your time.”

Anita didn’t look at her, but she kept talking. “They took me to this house. I don’t know where it was, though. I couldn’t see where we were driving ’cause he had my face pressed into the backseat. It was abandoned. It was dark by then, but from what I could see, the whole row of houses looked condemned. It was disgusting—trash everywhere and rats. There was a big hole in one of the walls and the windows were smashed out. They dragged me inside, and there was another guy in there already. Larry and Angel called him Face. He had this room near the back of the house lit up with one of those crank-up camping lights. He had a mask on, but I could tell he was a white guy ’cause his neck and his arms were exposed.”

“What kind of a mask?” Jocelyn interrupted.

“A ski mask. Black. I could see his eyes, though. They were blue. He talked real low, like a whisper. He told Larry and Angel to hold me down. They spread me out on the floor—” A sob erupted from Anita’s throat. She had the look of a terrified animal, a rabbit that had just been caught by a larger beast, just felt the predator’s teeth plunge into its tiny leg. Jocelyn reached over and squeezed Anita’s forearm. Anita swallowed and took a moment to compose herself.

“They held me down, and Face hammered nails into my hands. He nailed me right to the floor. Big old nails. I was screaming—telling him no and begging them to let me go, but none of them listened. He kept on hammering. Then he sat in a folding chair down by my feet and he—”

She broke off and looked away, closing her eyes. Her voice was an uneasy whisper when she spoke next. “He told them to do it. He said—he said, ‘It’s your turn.’ ”

“Did he watch?” Jocelyn asked.

Anita nodded. “Yeah. He sat there and watched while they took turns. He was smiling the whole time. I could tell by his eyes. Then he jerked himself off. I thought that was it—that they were done, but then after all that, he got up and made the big one hold my legs. They bent my knees and put my feet flat so Face could hammer my feet into the floor. It was harder than my hands. He struggled a little with my feet, cursing and everything. I don’t even know why he did it. They already got what they wanted. There wasn’t no reason to nail my feet into the ground.”

To quell the rising nausea in her stomach, Jocelyn stood and poured herself a drink of water from the small pitcher on Anita’s tray table. She offered some to Anita, but the woman refused. She returned to her chair and picked up her notebook and pen once more. “What happened after that?”

Anita shrugged, the movement small and jerky. “I passed out. When I came to, Larry was the only one there. He took the nails out. Well, he started to, but by the time he got to my feet, I passed out again. I woke up on the sidewalk outside the emergency room.”

Jocelyn pulled the small brown bag from Stanley’s Hardware out of her jacket pocket. She shook the nails out and spread them on Anita’s bedside table. At the sight of them, silent tears rolled down Anita’s cheeks. “Were they like these?” Jocelyn asked.

Anita nodded. “Yeah,” she said huskily. “They were just regular old nails. I remember they looked so big—like this one.” She fingered a nail with a three-inch-long shaft.

“Regular hammer?”

“Yeah, like the kind you get at any hardware store.”

“What can you tell me about Face?” Jocelyn asked, depositing the nails into the bag and stuffing them back into her jacket.

Anita shrugged and dabbed tears away with the back of her bandaged hands. “Nothing that will help. I only saw his eyes. He was a white guy with blue eyes.”

“Short, tall, fat, thin?”

Anita swallowed. “Tall, probably about six feet. Thin. He was muscular. His arms were real muscular and his chest too. Like he works out.”

“That’s good. What was he wearing?”

“A black T-shirt and jeans. Black sneakers. He looked real neat, though, like put together, like he takes care of himself. He wasn’t wrinkled or nothing.”

“Any tattoos, moles, scars, markings of any kind?”

Anita shook her head. “Nothing that I could see. I only saw his arms and neck. He was all covered up. But he smelled—” She broke off and bit her lower lip.

“What is it?” Jocelyn prodded.

Anita blinked back another onslaught of tears. “This is going to sound weird, but he smelled good. Like soap or cologne or something. Clean.”

“Okay,” Jocelyn said. “That’s good. How about the car? Can you remember anything?”

“It was gray. That’s all I can remember. It was dark, and I was scared. I didn’t get a good look at it.”

“Two doors or four?”

“Four. Angel shoved me in the backseat.”

“That’s good, Anita. Is there anything else?”

Anita swallowed and took a deep breath. She motioned toward her purse, which sat atop her nightstand. “There’s three hundred dollars in my bag. It wasn’t there before. I only had about twenty dollars on me when I went to meet them.”

Jocelyn stood and moved around the bed. “May I?” she asked, reaching for the bag.

Anita nodded. Jocelyn rifled through the bag until she found three crisp hundred-dollar bills, neatly folded in an inside pocket of the bag. “Is this the pocket where you found it?”

“Yeah. I didn’t know what to do. I just put it back in there. You think you can get fingerprints?”

Jocelyn shook her head. “No, not from money. Too many people have handled it. Did you see one of them put it in?”

“No, but it wasn’t there before. Who else would have put it there? They paid me. They nailed me to the floor, raped me, and then they paid me for it. You should take that money. Lord knows, I don’t want it.” A shiver shook Anita’s frame.

Jocelyn folded the money up in a paper towel that she got from the bathroom. “Well, it’s evidence now,” she said. She put it in her jacket pocket, next to the nails, and sighed. She pulled her notebook back out. “I’m going to write down an e-mail address so you can forward me the messages from this guy. Is there anything else you can think of? Anything at all you can remember?”

Anita looked at her bandaged hands, staring at them for a long moment. Jocelyn noticed that the wound on the top of her other hand had started bleeding through. “No,” Anita said. “That’s all I can remember. I know it’s not much.”

Jocelyn closed her notebook and slipped it in her jacket pocket. “Hey,” she said, drawing Anita’s eyes to her own. “It’s enough. Enough to start with.”