Chapter 5

“Go through it again,” I snapped.

“Dammit, Bill,” Martinez fired back angrily, “we’ve been through it over and over again. It’s fucking 1 AM. I’m exhausted. Going through it one more time tonight isn’t going to help us catch this asshole any sooner.”

“I didn’t ask you, Martinez,” I said, my voice steady, my stare fixed, my eyebrows twitching. The muscles in my neck strained, and I looked like a gorilla about to attack. “Go through it again.”

Right after my conversation with Jude, my phone had rung. There had been another rape. This one got beaten, badly. Martinez and I had rushed to the hospital and tried to get a statement from the victim. She didn’t tell us much before the drugs knocked her out. What she had told us seemed to match the other cases.

“Ok, ok,” he said, giving up. “So, in each case, the suspect was in the women’s homes waiting for them when they came home. He wore a mask and latex gloves and put on a condom when he raped them. He fucked them each one time, then apologized for it. He made them shower after and put the bed linens in the washing machine with enough bleach to sterilize a whorehouse. He also smashed their cell phones, and in one case where the woman had a landline, he ripped it out of the wall before he left. He was average height, average weight and left no physical evidence that we could find: no DNA, no hair, no nothing.”

“Right. What was it the victim told that the perp said to her before he left?”

“Uh, ‘life sucks, and then you die’ or some shit,” Martinez replied.

“No no, it was something else,” I said, pulling out my notebook, flipping through the small pages. “Here it is: ‘Life is suffering. The sooner you realize it, the sooner you can find happiness.’ I’ve heard that before, someplace.”

“What a fucking weirdo,” Martinez said shaking his head, “the mother fucker just beat the shit out of girl because she didn’t cum when he raped her and then philosophizes to her? That’s a cold mother fucker.”

“No shit,” I said, “but he might be right.

“Right? About what?” Martinez asked me, dumbfounded.

“Life is suffering.”