The six cities came up with a zero on the prints. Details went to the state capital at Richmond where prints covering the whole of Virginia were stored. Days went by. The answer came back. Sorry. The next step up is the FBI covering the entire USA. It uses IAFIS – the International Automated Fingerprints ID System.
The pathologist’s report made even hardened homicide detectives queasy. The girl appeared not much more than eighteen, if that. She had once been pretty, but someone, plus her lifestyle, had put an end to that.
Vaginal and anal dilation was so exaggerated that she had clearly been penetrated, and repeatedly, by instruments far larger than a normal male organ. The terminal beating had not been the only one; there had been others before. And heroin abuse, probably dating back no more than six months.
To both homicide and vice detectives in Norfolk the report said ‘prostitution’. It was no news to any of them that recruitment into vice was often accomplished by narcotic dependency, the pimp being the only source of the drug.
Any girl trying to escape the clutches of such a gang would certainly be punished; such ‘lesson learning’ could involve forced participation in exhibitions featuring brutal perversions and bestiality. There were creatures prepared to pay for this, and thus creatures prepared to supply it.
The post-autopsy body went into the cold room while the search for identity continued. She was still Jane Doe. Then a vice detective in Portsmouth thought he might recognize the circulated photograph, despite the damage and discoloration. He thought she might have been a hooker going under the name of Lorraine.
Enquiries revealed that ‘Lorraine’ had not been seen for several weeks. Prior to that she had worked for a notoriously vicious Hispanic gang who recruited by using good-looking gang members to pick up girls in the cities to the north and entice them south with promises of marriage, a lovely vacation, whatever it took.
The Portsmouth vice squad worked on the gang but with no result. The pimps claimed they had never known Lorraine’s real name, that she had been a professional when she arrived, and that she had left voluntarily to return to the West Coast. The photograph was simply not clear enough to prove otherwise.
But Washington did. They came up with a firm ID based on the prints. Amanda Jane Dexter had tried to fool the security of a local supermarket and shoplift an item. The security camera won. The juvenile court judge accepted her story, backed by five classmates, and let her go with a caution. But her fingerprints were taken. They were with the NYPD, and had been passed to IAFIS.
‘I think,’ muttered Sgt Austin of the Portsmouth vice squad when he heard the news, ‘that I might at last be able to get those bastards.’
It was another filthy winter morning when the phone rang in the apartment in the Bronx, but perhaps a good enough morning to ask a father to motor three hundred miles to identify his only child.
Cal Dexter sat on the edge of the bed and wished he had died in the Tunnels of Cu Chi rather than take this kind of pain. He finally told Angela, and held her while she sobbed. He rang his mother-in-law and she came over at once.
He could not wait for the aeroplane out of La Guardia for Norfolk International; he could not have sat and waited if there had been a flight delay due to fog, rain, hail, congestion. He took his car and drove. Out of New York, across the bridge to Newark, on through the country he knew so well as he had been hauled from one construction site to another; out of New Jersey, through a chunk of Pennsylvania and another of Delaware, then south and ever more south past Baltimore and to the end of Virginia.
At the morgue in Norfolk he stared down at the once lovely and much-loved face, and nodded dumbly to the homicide detective with him. They went upstairs. Over coffee he ascertained the basic outlines. She had been beaten by person or persons unknown. She had died of severe internal haemorrhaging. The ‘perps’ had seemingly put the body in the trunk of a car, driven into the most rural part of First Precinct, Virginia Beach, and dumped it. Enquiries were proceeding, sir. He knew it was a fraction of the truth.
He made a long statement, told them all about ‘Emilio’, but it rang no bells with the detectives. He asked for his daughter’s body. The police had no further objections but the decision was down to the Coroner’s Office.
It took time. Formalities. Procedures. He took his car back to New York, returned by air and waited. Eventually he escorted his daughter’s body, riding in the hearse, back home to the Bronx.
The casket was sealed. He did not want his wife or any of the Marozzis to see what was inside. The funeral was local. Amanda Jane was interred just three days short of her seventeenth birthday. A week later he returned to Virginia.
Sgt Austin was in his office in the Portsmouth police HQ at 711 Crawford Street when the front desk phoned to say there was a Mr Dexter who wished to see him. The name did not ring a bell. He did not connect it with his recognition of a battered face in a photograph as the departed hooker, Lorraine.
He asked what Mr Dexter wanted and was told the visitor might have a contribution to make in an ongoing enquiry. On that basis, the visitor was shown up.
Portsmouth is the oldest of the six cities; it was founded by the British well before the revolution. Today it slumps on the southwest side of the Elizabeth River, mainly low-build redbrick, staring across the water at the high-rise modern glitz of Norfolk on the other side. But it is the place many of the servicemen go if they are looking for ‘a good time’ after dark. Sgt Austin’s vice squad was not there for decoration.
The visitor did not look much compared to the muscular bulk of the former linebacker turned detective. He just stood in front of the desk and said:
‘You remember the teenager, turned to heroin and prostitution, gang-raped and beaten to death, four weeks back? I’m her father.’
Alarm bells began to tinkle. The sergeant had risen and extended a hand. He withdrew it. Angry, vengeful citizens had his fullest sympathy and could expect nothing more. To any working cop they are tiresome and can be dangerous.
‘I’m sorry about that, sir. I can assure you that every effort—’
‘At ease, sergeant. I just want to know one thing. Then I’ll leave you in peace.’
‘Mr Dexter, I understand what you must be feeling, but I am not in a position—’
The visitor had put his right hand in his jacket pocket and was pulling something out. Had front desk security screwed up? Was the man armed? The sergeant’s own piece was uncomfortably ten feet away in a desk drawer.
‘What are you doing, sir?’
‘I’m putting some bits of metal on your desk, Sergeant Austin.’
He went on until he was finished. Sgt Austin had been in the military, for they were of a similar age, but had never left the States.