All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [20]
The inside of Betsy’s home looked like a small tornado had come through. The kitchen table was overturned, the glass top shattered. Blood sparkled on the shards, and a trail of blood left the kitchen. Taylor followed it, taking pictures, to the living room. Blood soaked a corner of the couch, a lamp was overturned, but the rest of the room didn’t look too bad. Taylor could see rope lying on the floor in front of the couch.
“Let me run this by you. He comes in the back door, surprises her in the kitchen. Awful lot of blood. Did he break her nose, too?”
Fitz was nodding. “Yeah, got her good right in the face before she had a chance to do anything.”
“Okay, so he smacks her in the kitchen, drags her into the living room and assaults her on the couch. When did he tie her up?”
“Just from what Post told me on the phone, he disabled her in the kitchen, and she woke up on the couch, trussed like a Christmas pig. When he finished raping her, he tied her legs.”
“Looks like he looped the rope around the back of the couch.” Taylor was working her way around the room, taking pictures. “See the trailing ends here? That must be where she got herself loose. Okay, let’s finish up here.”
They set about their work, processing the scene, collecting some of the meager evidence the rapist had left behind. They bagged the rope—he always brought his own, plain store-bought nylon rope sold in every hardware store in the country, so it was virtually untraceable. There was no other physical evidence they could find. They had the print from the door, but that too was part of his MO. They set the place to rights as they went. They worked quickly but thoroughly, and when they finished they shared a look. Poor Betsy. As brave a face as she may want to put on, she had been through hell.
Her suspected rapist, dubbed with the moniker “The Rainman,” had been terrorizing the women of Nashville for five years. He’d earned his name because he only struck when it was raining. He’d attacked seven women, eight now, by forcing his way in their back doors, tying them up and raping them. Simple, straightforward crimes. He never spoke, wore a ski mask, always used a condom. His victims had been known to say that it seemed he was almost disinterested in what he was doing. Just tied them up, slipped on a condom, forced his way into their bodies and left through the back door. That was it, nothing more. He’d never hit a single one, just threatened them into compliance with a gun to the head or a knife to the side. He had a unique but relatively innocuous MO, one some experts classified as a gentleman rapist. Until today, none of his victims had been physically injured.
Taylor and Fitz finished up and made their way to the backyard. They smoked companionably in silence for a time, until Taylor felt the need to point out the obvious.
“Think it was a copycat?”
“I think we have to look at the possibility, given this new MO. We’ll know soon enough. If that print on the back door was his, they’ll be able to match it to the other rapes. What a kook. Leave the rope and your print behind. They’ve never gotten a hit off the print, he’s obviously never been in trouble with the law. So how a does a law-abiding citizen suddenly turn into a rapist?”
“Fitz, if I knew the answer to that, I could probably hawk it to the daytime shows and make a million dollars. Let’s get over to the hospital and see if Betsy’s out of surgery yet.”
Nine
Baldwin sat as far back in the cramped seat as his legs would allow and fastened his seat belt for the quick trip to Atlanta. As soon as the plane cleared ten thousand feet and the pilot finished greeting the passengers, he pulled out his laptop and opened his e-mail. The file for the missing girl appeared before him. Shauna Lyn Davidson.
The call had come from Jerry Grimes,