Read Online Fairstein, Linda - Final Jeopardy by Final Jeopardy (v1.1) [html] - Free Book Online

three weeks, and I was desperate to avoid unnecessary phone conversations. Sarah stopped by to discuss several new investigations that needed to be assigned, and to cheer me up with chatter about her baby.
    The only phone call of interest was from Mercer Wallace.
    He was pleased about Katherine Fryer’s input with the sketch artist.
    “It’s the best one yet, Coop,” he told me.
    “She’s really good on facial characteristics. She’s firm about the size and shape of the mustache, and you know how they all say he’s got bad skin? Well, she actually draws these big pockmarks and a deep set of creases down each side of his forehead. Swears that’s exactly where they are. I never had an illustrator as a victim before but it sure helps the sketch take on some definition.”
    I knew exactly what he meant. The typical description started with witnesses saying they’re lousy at doing this, and that the guy was average height, average weight, average-looking, nothing distinctive about his appearance, and so on. I had a folder full of sketches of wanted rapists who looked like everybody and nobody. Try and display one to a jury and claim a resemblance to the defendant on trial and it was more likely to look like three of the jurors.
    Not guilty.
    Mercer went on.
    “Better yet. She also thinks she made out a birthmark. Says she really tried to avoid looking at his private parts, but he kept sticking it in her face and she’s pretty sure he had a fuzzy area on his right thigh, ‘bout the size of a tangerine, two inches southeast of his equipment.”
    Bingo. One of the few advantages afforded a rape victim in identifying her attacker is actually the intimacy of the crime. She gets to see anatomical parts rarely displayed in a bank robbery or mugging. And sometimes there are birthmarks or tattoos or surgical scars that a victim describes the day of the assault, and that a knowledgeable detective photographs the minute he has his suspect in custody. Mercer and I had our fastest conviction on a case when our witness told us the rapist had a tattoo of a spider on his penis. The jury only needed to see the Polaroid of that scorpion for about ten seconds before they voted to convict the defendant.
    Then they spent the next hour eating lunch, because they didn’t want the defense attorney to think they hadn’t spent a serious amount of time deliberating about his client’s fate.
    Once we had a lead on this suspect, Catherine’s description of the unusual mark would help sink him, especially if we didn’t get lucky with DNA testing.
    Mike came back to my office shortly before five-thirty, as Laura was packing up to leave for the day.
    “I don’t blame you for getting out of here,” he said to Wilkie.
“I bet you never knew how unpopular your boss was. I got a list as long as your arm here of people who’d like to get rid of her, and those are just the guys she’s prosecuting, who don’t even know her personally.
Wait till I start with that crew.”
    Laura laughed and said good night.
    “I won’t see you tomorrow, will I?” she asked.
    “No, but we’ll call you from the Vineyard. Have a good weekend and I’ll see you on Monday.”
    Mike and I spent another hour going over the list of possible killers he had culled from my closed case files.
    “You’ve prosecuted some sick puppies, blondie,” he mused as he shook his head over the long accumulation of names he had scrawled during the afternoon, with brief case descriptions next to each of them.
    “Great cop you are. It took you ten years to reach that conclusion?”
“No, I mean, we mess with some ugly characters in Homicide. But your guys torture people who are alive and looking them right in the eye.
And it takes them a lot longer to do it than a shooting or stabbing a couple of seconds in my cases and it’s all over. I never liked working sex crimes, making the victims talk about it in such detail, relive it.
Seeing your screening sheets makes me remember why