Dana knew that she wasn’t alone. Not even close. Still, that knowledge didn’t make her feel in the least bit better about what had just happened to her. How could it? Nobody on the Titanic had taken comfort in the knowledge that so many others were sinking down to their watery graves with them, had they? Hadn’t taken solace from the fact that they’d have plenty of company in their icy tombs for eternity. Not unless they’d been complete fucking assholes who’d deserved to die anyway.
Worse, the astronomical number of reported rapes didn’t even scratch the surface of the problem. One National Crime Victimization Survey showed that just thirty-nine per cent of all rapes and sexual assaults in the United States were reported to law-enforcement officials each year. And less than ten per cent of all male-on-male rapes were ever reported, with the victims most often believing it was a personal matter or fearing reprisal from the assailant.
Dana stretched her neck, feeling like a prizefighter preparing to enter the ring. She knew exactly how those other victims felt. But she didn’t fear reprisal from her primary assailants in the least little bit. They were dead, after all – killed by the woman dressed in black. What Dana did fear, however, was what she’d to do to the sadistic bitch who’d killed the rapists when she finally caught up with the conniving whore.
Horrible thoughts crept into Dana’s mind. Thoughts of how she might murder another human being in cold blood and actually get away with it.
First things first, though. Before she could do anything else, Dana needed to find the woman. Luckily for her, though, as an FBI agent, that’s precisely what she was best at doing. The best in the entire world, according to Newsweek’s recent cover story.
Dana clamped her teeth together until her jaw began to ache. Rape had always been a crime that she’d despised almost as much as murder. And why not? It was practically the same thing. Rapists took lives, too, even if their victims survived the brutal attacks. There were lots of different kinds of deaths, after all. The death of innocence. The death of a getting a good night’s sleep. The death of knowing that you could walk freely around your fellow man without becoming a victim. In Dana’s mind, the perpetrators of rape deserved nothing less than the death sentence. Or, at the very least, total castration. And their accomplices – cowardly jackals like the woman in black – should be held every bit as accountable as the hyenas that had performed the animalistic acts of invasion in the first place.
Dana stopped pacing when the squad cars and ambulances finally came racing up to the scene, sirens screaming and blue-and-red lights flashing. Two uniformed cops emerged quickly from the lead vehicle and ushered the looky-loos who’d come outside the coroner’s office to see what was going on back inside the building. Five minutes later, yet another squad car pulled up to the scene. This one held Gary Templeton inside and brought the total number of emergency vehicles in the parking lot to more than twenty.
Dana immediately took Templeton to one side and gave him her fabricated version of events while Templeton’s boss set up a perimeter around the crime scene. Even in a city as violent as Cleveland – a city with a homicide rate that had shot up eighteen per cent in the past year – no less an authority than the chief of police himself had rolled out of his warm, cosy bed to brave the frigid winter conditions when he’d been informed that two men had been brutally murdered in a municipal parking lot, an incident that marked the fourth multiple-victim murders of the year in the besieged city. If Dana had her way, though, there would have been three dead bodies here tonight instead of just two. And she sure as hell wouldn’t have been one of the ones they’d be zipping up into a body bag.
Dana closed her eyes. After all these years on the job and of never quite understanding how a human being could take another’s life without remorse, she was starting to see exactly how you could be driven to murder. Hell, she was practically getting a limo ride there herself.
Dana refused Templeton’s offer to go inside the coroner’s office building where it was warmer. More heat was the last thing in the world she needed right now. The intense rage boiling in her chest