thought she might be on drugs or something. She found the diary instead.
And Madden’s search? Had it turned up anything? Well, he told them, aside from the CD-R and the calls she’d made, he’d discovered a nearly empty bottle of Percoset with Cogan as the prescribing physician, as well as a more promising piece of evidence linking her to the doctor: a pair of scrub pants with a Parkview Hospital logo stamped on them. They were buried in a drawer and appeared to have a small stain with dried seminal fluid in the crotch area. Encouraging as that sounded, he didn’t want to raise their expectations. Even if it came back positive for Dr. Cogan’s DNA, he said, it didn’t prove anything. They needed more.
It was then that the father said, “Please let us know how we can help, Detective. We’re devastated, but we still want to see that son of a bitch brought to justice. He killed her.”
The way he said it, so flatly and unemotionally but with utter conviction, disturbed Madden. He wasn’t surprised that Kroiter believed Cogan was somehow responsible for Kristen’s death (the alternative was too ghastly), but his tone just struck him as too assured.
“Well, Mr. Kroiter,” he felt obligated to clarify, “we haven’t determined that your daughter’s death was a homicide.”
“You will,” he said.
Sitting at his desk now, Madden sighs deeply, takes off his glasses, and rubs his eyes. He’s been up for two hours, working on the report. His children call the small spare bedroom that doubles as his office “the computer room” because he’d set up a pretty fancy computer, his one real toy, on the desk, along with a color printer and a scanner. There’s little else in the room: A fold-out couch, one large bookshelf filled with mostly non-fiction books (Madden doesn’t care much for novels and only goes to movies for his children’s sake), and a line of family photos on the window sill. On the wall, there’s a framed picture of him with the three other detectives from the general crimes unit, Billings, Burns, and Fernandez, as well as various diplomas and award plaques. Though there’s space for it, a feature from the San Jose Mercury News that his wife, Maria, had framed for his birthday, sits on the floor, propped against the bookshelf, mostly hidden from view.
Only if you venture to that far corner of the room and face back toward the door will you see that the headline reads: “Handicap Doesn’t Slow Detective in Race to Catch Criminals.” Ask him why it hasn’t found a place on the wall and he’ll humbly mutter something about not feeling comfortable about tooting his own horn, he’s no show-off, and the frame would be in the closet if it hadn’t been a gift from his wife. Nicaraguan by birth, she was Pastorini’s housekeeper when they first met, and though they seemed an unlikely match—she barely spoke English, he barely spoke to women—their marriage had only gotten better as she became more fluent in English and he in Spanish. After thirteen years, he liked to tell people it worked because she thought he was too good for her and he thought she was too good for him—and that wasn’t far from the truth.
The truth about the article is that it embarrasses him for a different reason. Buried in the middle of the piece is a reference to the sexual abuse he calculatingly divulged years ago to extract sympathy. At the time, the acknowledgment had been easily rationalized, a trifling revelation to which he was entitled, to help level the playing field and get the promotion he’d so badly wanted. But today it only represents pity. He looks at the headline and can’t help adding a multiplier. “Double Handicap Doesn’t Slow Detective . . .”
As a boy, while being treated for polio, a physician had sexually assaulted him. He told the reporter who’d interviewed him for the article that initially he hadn’t known he was being abused. The doctor was crafty and, ironically, patient. Madden’s mother liked reading the magazines in the waiting room, and after their first visit, the doctor suggested she might be more comfortable remaining there, particularly since the boy seemed embarrassed to have her in the room during parts of the check-up.
“I was nine,” he told the reporter, “I didn’t know what was required or not. But I’d had these exams before. I’d been to several doctors. So it seemed OK.”
For instance, the doctor would hold his