“Any injuries that you saw?” the doctor asked Dohner, who shook his head. “No.”
The LPN, moving with surprising speed for her bulk, was at the RPC before anyone else. She pulled the door open.
“Can you get out of there without any help, honey?” she asked.
Mary Elizabeth Flannery looked at her as if the woman had been speaking Turkish.
The LPN leaned into the car and half pulled Mary Elizabeth Flannery from it, and then gently put her on the gurney. She spread a white sheet over her, and then, with a little difficulty, pulled Dohner’s blanket from under the sheet.
“You’re going to be all right, now, dear,” the LPN said.
Dohner took the blanket. The doctor leaned over Mary Elizabeth Flannery as the LPN started pushing the gurney into the Emergency Room. Dohner folded the blanket and put it on the front passenger-side floorboard. Then he picked up the microphone.
“Fourteen Twenty-Three. I’m at Chestnut Hill Hospital with the victim.”
“Fourteen Twenty-Three, a detective will meet you there.”
“Fourteen Twenty-Three, okay,” Dohner said, and then walked into the Emergency Room.
None of the people who had taken Mary Elizabeth Flannery from his car were in sight, but he heard sounds and detected movement inside the white curtained cubicle from which the nurse had taken the gurney. Dohner sat down in a chrome and plastic chair to wait for the detective, or for the hospital people to finish with the victim.
The LPN came out first, rummaged quickly through a medical equipment cabinet, muttered under her breath when she couldn’t find what she was looking for, then went back into the cubicle. The nurse then came out, went to the same cabinet, swore, and t
hen reached for a telephone.
Then she spotted a ward boy.
“Go to supply and get a Johnson Rape Kit,” she ordered. “Get a half dozen of them, if you can.”
She looked over at Dohner.
“She hasn’t been injured,” she said. “Cut, or anything like that.”
“I’d like to get her name and address,” Dohner said.
“That’ll have to wait,” the nurse said.
A minute or two later, the ward boy came running down the waxed corridor with an armful of small packages. He went to the curtained cubicle, handed one of the packages to someone inside, then put the rest in the medical equipment cabinet.
Officer Dohner knew what the Johnson Rape Kit contained, and how it was used, and he felt a wave of mixed rage and compassion for Mary Elizabeth Flannery, who seemed to him to be a nice young woman, and was about to undergo an experience that would be almost as shocking and distasteful for her as what the scumbag had already done to her.
The Johnson Rape Kit contained a number of sterile vials and swabs. Blood would be drawn from Mary Elizabeth Flannery into several of the vials. Tests for venereal disease and pregnancy would be made. The swabs would be used to take cultures from her throat, vagina, and anus, to determine the presence of semen and alien saliva, urine or blood.
It would be uncomfortable for her, and humiliating, but it was necessary to successfully prosecute the sonofabitch who did this to her, presuming they could catch him.
The “chain of evidence” would be carefully maintained. The assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case, presuming again that the police could catch the rapist, would have to be prepared to prove in court that the results of the probing of Mary Elizabeth Flannery’s bodily orfices had been in police custody from the moment the doctor handed them to Dohner (or a detective, if one had shown up by the time the doctor was finished with his tests) until he offered them as evidence in a courtroom.
Detective Dick Hemmings arrived at the Chestnut Hill Hospital Emergency Room twenty minutes after Officer Bill Dohner had taken her there. He found Dohner sitting in a chair, filling out a Form 75–48, which is the initial Report of Investigation. It is a short form, providing only the bare bones of what has happened.
Dohner nodded at Hemmings, who sat down beside him and waited until he had finished. Dohner handed the 75–48 to him. In a neat hand, he had written: “Compl. states a W/M broke into her apt, forced her to perform Involuntary Deviate Sex. Intercourse, urinated on her, tied her up, forced her into a van, & left her off at Bell’s Mill Road & Forbidden Dr.”
“Jesus,” Hemmings said. “Where is she?”
“In there with the doctor,” Dohner said, nodding toward the white curtained cubicle.
“Hurt?”
“No.”