“Form in ranks,” Captain Sabara called, unnecessarily, as the last of the newcomers was doing just that. Then he turned to Wohl, and asked, rather formally, “You want to take this, Inspector?”
“You go ahead, Mike,” Wohl said.
Sabara nodded, and moved in front of the formation of policemen.
“Let me have your attention, please,” Sabara said. “You all know me, and you probably know Inspector Wohl and Captain Pekach, too, but in case you don’t, that’s Captain Pekach, the High Commander, and that’s the boss. Special Operations now has Highway, in case that wasn’t clear to everybody.
“Welcome to Special Operations. I think you’ll find it, presuming you can cut the mustard, a good assignment, an interesting job. And we’re going to put you right to work.
“You all have read the papers,” Sabara said, “and know that a woman named Elizabeth J. Woodham was abducted at knifepoint by a doer we think is the man who has been raping women all over Northwest Philadelphia. Let me tell you, we have damned little to go on.
“Getting Miss Woodham back alive from this critter is the first priority of business for Special Operations. For those of you who don’t know them, the two gentlemen standing beside the Inspector are Detectives Washington and Harris. They came to Special Operations from Homicide and the Inspector has put them in charge of the investigation. They report directly to his office, and if they ask you to do something in connection with this investigation, you can take it as if it came from either me or the Inspector himself.
“We have some cars, and we’re getting more. They have the J-Band, of course, and they have—or will have, Sergeant Frizell will talk to you about that—the Highway Band and the Detective Band, and when the Roundhouse gets around to assigning one to us, will have a Special Operations Band. From now until we get this lady back, forget about eight-hour shifts.”
He paused, looked thoughtful for a moment, then gestured toward Washington.
“Detective Washington will now tell you what we’ve got, and what we’re looking for.”
Wohl saw, except on one or two faces, an expression of interest, perhaps even excitement.
There is, he thought, except in the most jaded, cynical cops, an element of little boy playing cops and robbers, a desire to get
involved in something more truly coplike than handing out speeding tickets and settling domestic disputes, in being sent out to catch a bona fide bad guy, to rescue the damsel in distress from the dragon.
And Mike Sabara has just told them that’s what we want them to do, and the proof stands there in the person of Jason Washington. There is still an element of romance in the title “Detective,” and an even greater element of romance in the persona of a homicide detective, and Washington is literally a legend among homicide detectives; sort of real-life Sherlock Holmes. They are in the presence of what they dreamed of being themselves, and maybe still do, and they know it.
Washington spoke for about five minutes, tracing the activities of the serial rapist from the first job, before anyone even thought of that term. He didn’t waste any words, but neither, Wohl thought, did he leave anything even possibly important out.
“And since we have, essentially, nothing to go on,” Washington concluded, “we have to do it the hard way, ringing doorbells, digging in garbage cans, asking the same questions over and over again. Tony Harris has the only idea that may turn something up that I can think of, so I’ll turn this over to him.”
Tony Harris, Wohl thought, does not present anything close to the confident, formidable presence Washington projects. He’s a weasel compared to an elephant. No. That’s too strong. A mangy lion, the kind you see in the cages of a cheap circus, compared to an elephant. Where the hell does he get his clothes? Steal them from a Salvation Army depository? Did the Judge really give his ex-wife everything? Or is Tony trying to support two women, and taking the cost out of his clothing budget?
But almost as soon as Tony started to speak, Wohl saw that the interest of the newcomers—who had almost audibly been wondering Who the hell is this guy? began to perk up. Within a minute or two, they were listening to him with as rapt attention as they had given Washington. Who the hell is this guy? had been replaced with This sonofabitch really knows what he’s talking about!
Tony delivered a concise lecture on sexual deviation and perversity, went from there to the psychology of the flasher, the molester, the voyeur, the patron of prostitutes, and the rapist, and then presented a profile of the man they were looking for that differed from the one Wohl had got from Dr. Amelia Alice Payne only in that he didn’t mention “the slippery slope” or “invincibility.”
And then he told them what they were looking for, and how he wanted them to look for it: “What I’ve come up with is a list of minor sexual offenders, white males who have misdemeanor arrests for any of a long list of weird behavior. I’m still working on coming up with names….”
He stopped and looked at Wohl.
“Inspector, I used to work with Bart Cumings in South Detectives,” he said, indicating the Sergeant among the newcomers. “Could I have him to work with me on the files?”
“You’ve got him,” Wohl said, smiling at Sergeant Cumings. He saw Officer Matt Payne enter the Roll Call Room, look around, and then head for him.
I’ll bet I know what Payne wants, Wohl thought. And I’ll bet Sergeant Cumings will be out of that uniform by tomorrow morning. If he waits that long to get out of it.
In the Police Department rank structure, the step up from police officer was either to detective or corporal, who received the same pay. There was no such rank as “detective sergeant,” so a detective who took and passed the sergeant’s examination took the risk of being assigned anywhere in the department where a sergeant was needed, and that most often meant a uniformed assignment. After a detective had been on the job awhile, the prospect of going back in uniform, even as a sergeant, was not attractive. Very few uniformed sergeants got much overtime. Divisional detectives, counting their overtime, always took home more money than captains. Homicide detectives like Tony Harris and Jason Washington, for example, for whom twenty-four hour days were not at all unusual, took as much money home as a Chief Inspector.
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’s all 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.