Dr Neilson piped up again. Fortunately his voice no longer had the same bubbly enthusiasm it did five minutes earlier, or else even Dominick would have hit
him, or at least held him down for Manny. ‘I also found evidence of an adhesive residue on her eyelids, and many of the eyelashes were stripped from both of her lids.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I believe he taped her eyelids open as well.’
‘So he made her watch him while he did it? While he tore her heart out? Jesus-fucking-Christ.’ Dominick shook his head, trying to force that very last image out of his head. ‘It’s a good thing we nailed this guy, Bear.’
Manny looked down at Anna Prado’s naked, broken body. She was someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s girlfriend. A girl who was once pretty enough to have been a professional model. Now, industrial-strength black thread held the skin on her chest back together from her navel to her neck and then under her breasts, forming a zigzag black cross, and covering the hole where her heart had been.
‘I hate the fucking ME’s office’ was all Manny could manage to say.
34
134–05 Dahlia Street, Apt. 13, Flushing, Queens County, New York.
There it was in black and white. Right there in front of her on the AutoTrack that Dominick had given her last night. William Rupert Bantling’s address as it appeared on his New York State driver’s license from April of 1987 to April of 1989. A bus ride away from St John’s, a ten-minute car ride down Northern Boulevard to her apartment on Rocky Hill Road, and exactly one block away from the Bally’s on Main Street and 135 th where she used to work out.
C.J. leaned back in her chair and exhaled a deep breath. Even though she had known deep down in her gut that it was Bantling from the moment she heard his sick voice in the courtroom, she now felt a strange sense of both relief and validation at having been right. To know she wasn’t going crazy again. That the voice was real and she wasn’t acting paranoid. The connection she had found was more than just coincidence; it was corroboration in black-and-white print.
He had lived just a few miles from her house, just one block from her gym. She remembered his words to her that night, his snicker of delight as he whispered them in her ear.
I’ll always be watching you, Chloe. Always. You can’t get away from me, ‘cause I’ll always find you.
And he had said that because, she realized, he
physically could watch her. Probably at the gym. Maybe on the subway. Maybe at the Peking House, her favorite Chinese restaurant in Flushing, or Tony’s, her favorite pizza place on Bell Boulevard in Bayside. It could have been anywhere, because he was there, just down the road, the whole time. Her mind raced back in time twelve years to remember the face she now knew – somewhere, anywhere, in her life, but she still drew a blank.
A loud thud and jingle sounded at the door, and before she could say ‘Come in’, the door was flung open and Marisol appeared in the doorway. The jingle was from the seventeen gold bracelets that she wore on her wrist.
‘You wanted to see me?’ she asked.
‘Yes. I want to go over the prefiles that need to be scheduled all of next week on the Cupid case.’ She handed her Bantling’s pink arrest form. Next to each of the officer’s names, she had noted a date and time for their prefiles. She had scheduled Dominick toward the end of the week, even though he was the lead investigator on the case and would normally go first. She had made yet another decision today since her session with Dr Chambers. The first was to go forward on this case to the best of her ability and prepare it for prosecution, one step at a time. And the other was that this was not the time in her life for a relationship with anyone, especially the lead agent on a high-profile case with a defendant who was much more than just a defendant. She needed to get some distance back between them, retreat to professional ground only. No matter what her feelings were for Dominick, no matter what they could be for him, there were too many secrets that could never be shared. And a relationship based on deception and lies is just like
a house of cards in the end. Eventually it all comes tumbling down.
We’re running on a tight time crunch, Marisol, and we’ve got a lot of witnesses.’ She figured she would try the team approach. ‘We’ve got to take this before the grand jury in two weeks. I’ve noted the dates and preferred times for each officer. Set me up for forty-five minutes with each officer, and three hours with Alvarez and Falconetti.’
Marisol reached for the arrest form. ‘Okay. I’ll set them up. You need anything else? It’s almost four-thirty.’
That’s right. The fleeing hour. C.J. had almost forgotten. Come hell or high water, Marisol did not work past 4:30.
‘Yes. I have a ton of research to do for the next couple of days. In fact, I’ll probably be here pretty late tonight doing it. I need you to reset tomorrow morning’s next-of-kin meeting on the Wilkerson case, and the pretrial conference with Detectives Muñoz and Hogan on the Valdon case in the afternoon. We still have two weeks on Valdon before trial. Reset them to next Friday. Oh, and I would really appreciate it if for the next few days, unless it’s the State Attorney himself or the building is on fire, you could just take messages from anyone who calls.’ She smiled, wondering if she could actually get Marisol to laugh.
Apparently not. ‘Fine’ was all Marisol said before plugging back down the hall to her desk, all the while mumbling Spanish curse words that C.J. could hear even through the door that Marisol had closed behind her with a very loud thud. Of course, C.J. doubted that Marisol would bother to tell her if there really was a fire in the building, such was the price of their rocky
relationship, but as far as she knew the smoke alarms worked and it was only a two-floor jump anyway. So much for the team approach.
She sat alone now in her office, in her fake burgundy leather chair, and stared out the window, across the street to the courthouse and the Dade County Jail, or DCJ as it was known, where right now her rapist was being held without bond, a prisoner of the State of Florida, a guest of the Department of Corrections. She sipped on her cold coffee and watched as prosecutors returned from court for the day, some with files in their hands, others dragging boxes behind them, pulled on collapsible dollies. After her session with Dr Chambers today, the thick, blinding fog that had enveloped her thoughts for the past forty-eight hours had begun to clear, and things were again making sense, coming back into perspective. She felt a purpose now, a direction to follow, even if it later proved to be the wrong way.
Although she knew that it was probably fruitless, she called the Cold Case Squad again in New York, to see if the impossible had happened. She was not surprised to find out from the squad secretary that DNA indictments were considered experimental and, to date, had only been done so far in five cases in that squad. C.J.’s case number was not one of the five. And so it was final – prosecuting Bantling in New York would not be an option.
What she needed was answers. Answers to the many questions that had gnawed at her on the Cupid case for the past year. Answers to the questions that she had asked herself over and over again for the past twelve years about her own assault. She felt a compulsion, an overwhelming need, to know everything and anything
there was to know about this stranger, this monster, Bill Bantling. Who was he? Where was he from? Was he married? Did he have children? Family? Friends? Where had he lived? What did he do for a living? How had he known his victims? Where had he met them? How had he chosen them?
How had he known Chloe Larson? How had he chosen her?
When had he become a rapist? When had he become a killer? Were there more victims? Victims that they perhaps did not know about?
Were there more victims just like her?
And then there were the whys. Why did he hate women? Why did he butcher them, torture them? Why did he take their hearts? Why did he kill? Why had he chosen them?
Why had he chosen her? Why had he left her alive?
More than a dozen years and a thousand miles separated her rape and the Cupid murders, yet she found it difficult now to distinguish the questions that needed to be asked. The lines had suddenly become blurred, the questions inextricably intertwined, the answers they demanded the same.
Where had Bantling been hiding for the past twelve years? Where had he played out his sick, disturbed fantasies? She knew from her own experience as a prosecutor of serial rapists and pedophiles, and from the countless seminars and conferences that she had attended over the years, that violent sex offenders don’t just happen. Nor do they just stop. Rather, their crimes usually represent the gradual escalation and ultimate realization of their own distorted sexual fantasies. Sometimes those fantasies will take weeks, months, even years to develop in the mind before they are acted upon, and
for all outside appearances, the offender will be a regular Joe Good Guy, the best neighbor, the best coworker, the best husband, the best dad. It is only inside his head, where no one can see in, that the hideous, corrosive thoughts boil and bubble, finally overflowing in his brain, like lava, consuming all in its path, until the fantasy is realized. A ‘harmless’ Peeping Tom becomes a burglar. A burglar becomes a rapist. A rapist graduates to murder. It is just a matter of taking the next step in the fantasy. And with every crime he commits without detection, the offender becomes more and more brazen, the once-forbidden boundaries disappear, and the next step becomes that much easier to take. And serial rapists do not stop until they are stopped. That means jail, a physical disability that actually prevents them from committing the crime, or death.
Bantling fit the classic profile of a serial rapist. He was also a sadist, a person who derives pleasure by inflicting cruelty and pain on others. She thought back again to that stormy June night twelve years in the past, remembering the minutes that passed like hours. He had planned it all perfectly, from beginning to end, even bringing along his ‘bag of tricks’ to live out the fantasy. Raping her had not been enough. He had needed to torture her, demean her, violate her in every way possible. Her agony had set him on fire, sexually aroused him. And yet, the most powerful weapon that he had used lay not in his bag, or in the jagged knife he wielded, but rather in the very detailed information that he had possessed about her. The intimate, personal facts about her, her family, her relationships, her career – from her nickname to her favorite shampoo – that he wielded like a sword, cutting away her trust in others,
shattering her confidence in a future. Chloe Larson had not been selected at random that night. She had been chosen. She had been hunted.
So if Bantling was, in fact, a serial rapist who had since escalated to serial murder, as she believed was the case, where, then, were his other victims for the past eleven years before the Cupid abductions began in April of 1999?
Her newest neighbor across the street had lived a lot of places: New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Miami. She had scoured the criminal histories from every state that he had ever lived in, but there was nothing, not even as much as a traffic ticket.
On paper, Bantling appeared a model citizen. Could it be that he had lain dormant for more than a decade, bottling his anger and his fantasies deep inside, finally exploding with a merciless and savage fury as Cupid? She doubted it. The careful, meticulous planning of her assault probably meant that she was not his first victim, and his brutality with her demonstrated little self-control. He would have had difficulty controlling his fantasies, his anger, for the few months it probably took for him to stalk his next victim, and there would be no way he could have controlled himself for a decade. C.J. was not even sure if she herself was supposed to have been a murder victim, but instead had survived.
Or had he left her alive on purpose?
She knew that the task force would be ripping Bantling’s life apart, piece by piece, looking for answers as well. They, too, already had a history from every state and local jurisdiction that Bantling had ever lived in. In a matter of days, detectives would be sent all over the country to interview ex-neighbors and ex-bosses and
ex-girlfriends, with the hopes of finding that Bantling had been an ax murderer in California before becoming a scalpel-wielding psycho on South Beach. His name and a description of the Cupid murders had already been run through the FBI VICAP database and Interpol, the International Police Agency, to see if any similar unsolved crimes had occurred in any other jurisdiction or country. Perhaps a sudden rash of young women disappearing in the cities that Bantling had visited on business? But there was nothing. Of course, though, the task force would be looking for a murderer.
Using Westlaw, the on-line legal research company subscribed to by the State Attorney’s Office, she began her search for answers. She started with a search of old newspapers in the cities where Bantling had lived since 1988, beginning with L.A., where he had spent the majority of his time, living at two different residences in the city from 1990 through 1994. She began with the
Los Angeles Times,
first entering search terms for that period fitting the Cupid murders:
blond, women, disappeared, dismembered, mutilated, murdered, attacked, knife, tortured.
Twenty different words in twenty different combinations. She even asked the Westlaw service representative on the phone for help on how to best word the search, but there still was nothing. A few missing and murdered prostitutes, as well as several unrelated domestic incidents, and a few runaway teenagers, but nothing like Cupid. There were no missing coeds or models that looked to be related, no unsolved ritualistic murders, no severed hearts. She ran the same search in the
Chicago Tribune,
the
San Diego Times,
the
New York Times,
the
Daily News,
and the
New York Post,
but, again, there was nothing. Then she tried a new search, once
again in the
Los Angeles Times.
But this one had only five search words:
women, raped, knife, clown, mask.