Raper

By Roderick C. Lankler

A rape victim is found dead at the bottom of an airshaft of an abandoned building in the Alphabet City section of the lower east side of Manhattan. She is the fourth young lady from the mid west, who has come to NewYork City seeking employment, and has met the same fate The pressure on the NYPD to end this string of horrendous crimes is growing. Ian MacDonald, a senior trial assistant district attorney in the homicide bureau of the New York County (Manhattan) District Attorney's Office and Emily Bird, the head of the sex crimes unit of the same office, head up a task force with the NYPD to investigate and apprehend the perpetrators.
The rapers are a group of young men from wealth homes in Westchester. They have concluded that no one would ever suspect affluent young men from the wealthy suburbs of doing this. They have developed a means to locate "Hayseeds" who come off the buses at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and lead them to their downtown orgy pad.
At the same time there is a brilliant young inmate awaiting trial at Rikers Island. He has dreamed up a scheme to bring the courts to a stand still. He has got to be stopped before he succeeds in causing the collapse of the City's criminal justice system. Ian MacDonald may have to go out to Rikers in order to prevent this inmate from succeding. The great work of one of his colleagues safes him from that unenviable trip.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098321604

Book preview

Raper

Roderick C. Lankler

ISBN (Print Edition): 978-1-09832-159-8

ISBN (eBook Edition): 978-1-09832-160-4

© 2020. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental

To Barbara

who puts up with all of this

and to

Beth, Jill.Tracey, and Diana

our wonderful daughters-in-law

and to the Grands,

Bradley, Justin,

Isabel, Hanna, Decker,

Cassidy, Emily, Aidan,

Kyle, and Molly

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

1

Screams rocked the Alphabet City neighborhood of Manhattan prompting a 911 call at one in the morning. The dispatcher sent the police to an address on Avenue B. When the officers arrived, they could still hear the screams. They pulled out their weapons, ran into the building and up three flights of stairs, following the sound.

On reaching the apartment, there was a padlock on the door locking it from the outside. One of the officers put a bullet through the lock. They pried the ruined padlock off the lock hasp and pushed the door open.

In the back room, they found a naked teenage girl lying on a mattress. She was lying beneath a window that opened to an air shaft. When she saw the officers, she stopped screaming and reached for something to try and cover her nakedness. She attempted to talk, but made no sense whatsoever between sobs. Her whole body was shaking violently. She kept pointing to the window. When the officers looked out the air shaft window, they saw a body lying on a heap of garbage three stories below. They called for backup.

******

The apartment was a railroad flat—one room opened to the next. There was no hallway. The apartment’s door opened into a room that must have once served as the living room. There were two mattresses thrown on the floor by the opposite wall. In between the two mattresses, was an old fruit crate supporting a flat-screen TV with rabbit ears and a CD player. The CDs piled next to the TV were all porn movies. Porn magazines and sex toys littered the room.

The next room, in better days, had probably been the dining room because it was right next to a kitchen. Then came a disgusting bathroom. The last room had a window that opened to an air shaft. More porn was scattered around this room. The place smelled of must, sweat, stale beer, vomit, and sex.

Assistant District Attorney Ian MacDonald did not make a habit of going to crime scenes, but he went to this one for two reasons. One was that the commanding officer of Manhattan South Homicide, Captain James LoMurko thought it would be a good idea, and the other was that the district attorney, Ian’s boss, would probably also think it would be a good idea. Ian thought that those were two very good reasons.

The girl was still crying. She had a ratty blanket draped over her naked shoulders. Detective Harriet Finn from the sex crimes unit was trying to calm her down. If Harriet couldn’t succeed, no one could.

Most of the police activity was in the last room. LoMurko took Ian to the window that opened on to the large air shaft that was about twenty by twenty feet, and ran the full five stories of the building. The sill and casing were covered with fingerprint dust from the crime scene unit. They had found lots of prints. LoMurko pointed down and said, Watch out for the dust. Don’t get it on your clothes.

Ian stuck his head out the window and looked down. There was all sorts of garbage at the bottom of the air shaft. On top of the garbage was the splayed body of a young woman. She was naked. Next to her, was a large doll—the doll was also naked.

2

The police officers of the Emergency Services Unit found a ground-floor doorway that led into the air shaft, but they had trouble opening it because of the garbage. The door hadn’t been opened in years. When they finally got through and reached the girl, it was clear that there was nothing they could do for her. They would wait for the arrival of the medical examiner from the morgue.

Soon, homicide detectives, sex crimes detectives and crime scene unit officers made it difficult to move in the apartment.

Ian found that this was usually the case, and it was why he had stopped going to crime scenes in the first place. He felt like he was a voyeur who was in the way—it was better to leave this stuff to the pros.

He went over to Harriet and introduced himself. She had heard about Ian. It’s great to finally meet you Mr. MacDonald. Unfortunately, we haven’t had a case together. Harriet was a First Grade detective. That is as high as you can go in the Detective Bureau. She was an experienced professional.

Please, it’s Ian—Mr. MacDonald is my father. I’m happy to meet you too. Emily speaks very highly of you.

Emily was Assistant District Attorney Emily Byrd, who was in charge of sex crimes prosecutions in the district attorney’s office. She was a close friend of Ian’s.

I know Emily is going to be all over this case, Ian added. I will talk to her, but I don’t have to tell you that we have to keep the fact that we have a witness under wraps. I’m afraid there is a ton of press outside. It is not going to help us if her existence is known. We have to figure out how to get her out of here without the press seeing her. Maybe, we could dress her as a cop? I would also like to speak to her as soon as possible. I am going to leave that up to you, but don’t forget me.

I won’t, Ian. You are pretty hard to forget, Harriet said.

Even at four in the morning, in a dump of an apartment in Alphabet City, Ian MacDonald looked good. He ran marathons, which helped him keep his six feet to somewhere around 150 pounds. He also played golf and that gave him a great tan, accentuating his brilliant white teeth and steel-gray eyes. His jet-black hair had just a touch of gray around the temples. He was a good dresser, not great, but good. His suits fit and were always pressed, and his shoes had a terrific shine. On that fateful morning, he had on a blue plaid shirt covered by a yellow cable-knit sweater and neatly pressed light-gray pants. He had taken off his windbreaker. The apartment not only stunk, but it was getting stuffier by the second.

LoMurko walked Ian down to the squad car that would take him home. Ian talked to him about sneaking the witness out of the apartment.

We will figure that out one way or another. This horror scene is the first break we’ve caught, Ian. Maybe this live witness will help us learn something about those other dead girls.

I hope so, Jim, because there is going to be a shitstorm in the papers tomorrow. Look at all the TV trucks out here on the street at this hour of the morning.

There had been three other teenage girls found murdered in Manhattan during the past two months. They were all from different parts of the United States, and all of them had been sexually assaulted.

Look out. Here they come.

LoMurko tried to shield Ian from the onrushing reporters. He was a big guy, a former Marine, six and a half feet tall with a crew cut that totally belied his fifty-two years. LoMurko was a poster boy for the New York City Police Department.

Captain LoMurko! What can you tell us? We hear there is another dead teenager. Will you confirm that? Is it another girl?

Jim LoMurko was always up front and straight with the press. They knew that, and respected him for it.

I’m afraid that I do have to confirm that, but unfortunately, that is about all I can tell you at this point. Assistant District Attorney Ian MacDonald is here and he may have more to say.

All the microphones immediately shifted to Ian. He was taken aback by what Jim had just done, but managed to say, An unidentified female, probably in her late teens or early twenties, has been found dead at the bottom of an airs haft. We have no knowledge of the circumstances of her death at this time so I don’t want to comment on anything more. Whatever I say might be misleading. I’m sure that we will have more information for you later in the day.

But Ian can you tell us . . . There was a cacophony of questions as LoMurko led Ian, cutting through the press, to his squad car.

You’re killing me, Jim. Ian had a smile on his face.

You know what I was doing. I’ll be at your office later in the morning. Indeed, Ian did know what LoMurko was doing. He was making sure that the press, and, therefore, the public, knew that the district attorney’s office was present at the scene at two in the morning.

3

Amy Bains was smart, cute, and careful. She had had her tenth birthday last month. She had sprung up to almost five feet; her bright red hair was becoming a little darker. The only thing she really worried about, was getting pimples. Lots of the kids in the upper grades at her school had pimples and they were disgusting. She had learned to scrub her face. Her mom, Cece, told her there was medication she could get when the time came—those would help her keep away the pimples. So far, there were no pimples. Clothes were becoming more important, but not as important as being careful so as to not get pimples. She liked wearing skirts and sweaters more now, than her usual blue jeans.

She loved her mother and father, and did whatever they told her to do. If they told her certain things were not safe to do, that was enough for her. Those things wouldn’t be done. Period. She accepted their judgement. That didn’t mean Amy told her parents everything she was thinking of doing. Not by a long shot. Some things, Amy didn’t need to be told about. She used her common sense and just didn’t do them. Going into any of the abandoned buildings in the neighborhood, for example, was not a smart thing to do. Some of them were falling down—the stairs might collapse. Some of them had weird people in them—weird people were not safe people. Amy knew what a junkie was, and she knew that there were a lot of junkies using drugs in some of the abandoned buildings. She hated the junkies and stayed far away from them.

There were several buildings that her father, Buff Bains, took care of. These were safe. Things weren’t falling down. The tenants weren’t weird—at least, most of them. There were no junkies. Buff would chase them out of his buildings with a baseball bat. There were plenty of other buildings for them to go to. When he chased them, they didn’t come back.

There were other things that she knew her parents didn’t worry about. She could talk to them about these things. They would let her do them. Peter, for example. They would let her play with Peter.

She and Peter had been friends since he had moved into the neighborhood five years ago. They were in the same grade and they walked to school together. That had started in kindergarten, and they were now in fifth grade. Each morning, Peter would pick Amy up at her front stoop and off they would go. Amy once tried to hold Peter’s hand as they walked, but he would have none of it. He said it made him look like he was blind. Amy never tried it again.

Her parents liked Peter and knew he would not let anything happen to Amy. She knew that if she asked to go someplace with Peter, they would probably let her go.

It was Saturday morning and she was waiting for Peter now. As soon as he showed up, they would go to their new clubhouse. Her parents didn’t have to know about the new clubhouse. She and Peter had had several clubhouses—one had been in Peter’s clothes closet, another had been in a little room off the furnace room downstairs in Amy’s apartment building. This new clubhouse was bigger and fancier. It was on the fourth floor of the building her father took care of, across the street.

Her father had told Amy that she should not go into any of the abandoned buildings in the neighborhood. For the most part, she and Peter didn’t. But the building across the street wasn’t really an abandoned building. Amy knew that her father had some tenants in at least one of the apartments. She had seen them moving into an apartment on the third floor.

Amy thought there were at least five of them. She and Peter had sat on the stoop of the building as they were moving stuff in. They seemed to have a bunch of mattresses, but Amy didn’t see any beds.

Hi, Amy said, Welcome to the neighborhood. I’m Amy.

A guy with a gruff voice said, Get out of the way, kids, before you get hurt.

Hello, pretty little girl, another of them said. Could you move over by the edge of the stoop so we don’t hit you with any of this stuff. We wouldn’t want to hurt you.

Sure. As Amy moved, she thought to herself that he seemed like a nice man. Then one of the others came over to him and said, No talking, remember?

Sorry Paco, I forgot, the nice guy replied, meekly.

As they were finishing moving the stuff in, the one called Paco came over to Amy and Peter and said, You don’t live in this building, do you?

No, we don’t, Amy replied.

Good, then I don’t want to see you around here anymore, he said, and walked away. They all got into a car and drove down the street.

Wow! Amy exclaimed. He sure wasn’t very friendly.

I’ll say. He was sort of scary. What about our clubhouse? D’you think we should move it? Peter asked.

No, we’re up on the fourth floor. I’ll bet you they never go above their place on the third floor. We will know if they are around because we’ll see their car. We will just stay away from them. What do you say we go up and take a look at their place?

I don’t know, Amy—maybe we should stay out of the building. That Paco guy worries me.

Come on, Peter, don’t be such a scaredy-cat. Amy got up and walked into the building.

******

They went up to the third floor. Look, the thirdies have put a padlock on the door. We can’t get in. That sucks, Amy said.

Peter laughed. The thirdies—I like that name. That’s what we will call them. I’m just as glad we can’t get in. Let’s go up to our clubhouse.

They walked up to the fourth floor. Their clubhouse was not directly over the thirdies’ apartment—it was on the other side of the hall.

Later that evening, just before dinner, Amy was in her room lying on her bed, thinking. Maybe I should tell mother and father about what happened today with the thirdies. She knew her father wouldn’t be happy. She also knew that they would have to forget about the clubhouse. Maybe the fact that her father wouldn’t be happy was enough of a reason to get out of there. She was concerned because she didn’t know what to do. Finally, she concluded she would say nothing, at least for now. She would see how things developed. If there were any problems, she and Peter could always just close the clubhouse, move their stuff out, and find someplace else. Let’s take one thing at a time, she thought. Decision made, she got up and went into the dining room for dinner.

******

Now it was Amy who was scared—really, really scared. She and Peter had gone to their clubhouse around 6:30 pm, right after their dinner. They had agreed to meet at her stoop and look for the thirdies’ car. Seeing none, they went into the clubhouse building and climbed quietly up the stairs. As they passed the thirdies’ apartment, Peter checked and saw the padlock on the door. They continued up to their clubhouse. Each floor had four apartments—two in the front facing Avenue B and two in the back. It was the back apartments which had the air shaft. The thirdies’ apartment was at the back, on the downtown side. The clubhouse was in the front on the uptown side. Amy thought this was good—it meant that they could walk around without anyone hearing them on the floor below. They had both brought some comic books along with them which they had been reading when Amy said, It’s getting late. I think we should be getting home.

Peter agreed and stood up to leave when they heard the sound of people coming into the building. Amy quietly maneuvered over to the edge of the stairwell where she could look down without being seen. It was the thirdies—all five of them—and they had two girls with them. They came up to their apartment, unlocked the padlock and went inside.

Come on, Peter said. We’ve got to get out of here.

Not yet, insisted Amy. If they come out of the apartment, they will see us. What will they do to us if they see us?

They’ll grab us and beat us up, maybe even kill us. You’re right. We heard that guy when he told us to stay away from the building—he wasn’t kidding. Fine, let’s go back into the clubhouse where we can listen. If they get quiet, maybe we can tiptoe down the stairs and get out of here.

The thirdies didn’t get quiet, they only got louder. There was laughter, and even shouting at some point. It sounded like they were watching the TV. Then in a couple of minutes, Amy heard a girl say No! and Stop it! and You’re hurting me! and Enough, I said ENOUGH! And then there was crying and sobbing—and a sound of someone almost screaming. Amy looked at Peter.

My god, what is going on down there? she whispered. She was scared. Her eyes started to tear up.

I don’t know, Peter said.

Suddenly, the door to the thirdies’ apartment opened. Amy and Peter immediately stepped back into the clubhouse, shut the door, and held their breath as they strained their ears to listen. They heard someone on the stairs. Amy said, I think I’m going to faint. Peter put his arm around her.

We are in luck. I think I hear them going down the stairs, not up, Peter said as he moved toward the front window overlooking Avenue B.

They said something about getting beer. Maybe they are going up to Martin’s convenience store, Amy said.

Be careful, don’t let them see us, Peter ordered as she followed him to the window. They saw the thirdies walking uptown, all five of them.

They’ve gone. Let’s get out of here. I am really, really scared, Peter.

Me too. Don’t say a word about this to anyone.

When Amy entered her apartment, she went straight to her room. Her mother called out to her from the kitchen and asked her where she had been, and Amy answered that she and Peter had found some neighborhood kids down at Tompkins Square Park and all of them had hung out.

Not wanting to talk to anyone, Amy said, Good night, Mom. I’m reading my homework and going to bed.

Good night, Amy. We love you, her parents responded.

You too, Mom and Dad, Amy said, her voice shaking.

******

The siren woke Amy up. It sounded like the police car had stopped right in front of their house. She got out of bed and there it was—a police car with all those lights flashing on and off and rotating. Then she thought she heard a shot from their clubhouse building. She looked but saw nothing more. As she started to climb back into bed, she heard more sirens. Soon, her street was filled with police cars. All their lights were flashing and she could hear their radios blaring with people yelling orders. There were some of those TV trucks with the antennas on the top present as well and then an ambulance turned up. Amy started to shake again.

She heard her father tell her mother that he would be right back as he went out their front door. Amy pulled herself together and then went out to the living room. Her mother was there. She was pacing around the room, half-asleep when Amy asked, What has happened Mom?

I don’t know, love. It must be something in the apartment across the street. Your father has gone to find out. I’m sure he’ll be back in a few minutes. Go back to bed and go to sleep. It doesn’t involve us, her mother responded.

Amy turned to go back to her room and thought, I hope not.

She got back into bed. Her stomach was a mess. She wanted to get up and tell her mother about what they had seen and heard, but she thought she would wait. She heard her father come back. Amy stayed in her bedroom and listened.

This is awful. There is a dead girl at the bottom of the air shaft. It looks like she was raped. They asked me what I knew about the building and I didn’t tell them that I had any connection. I was scared, Cece. If I tell them I’m the super, they are going to ask me about those guys on the third floor. It can’t lead to any good.

Her mother said, "Aren’t you going to have to tell the police? After all, there is a dead girl. Won’t they find out who the