Officer Koper drove past the Civic and around the corner to where the girls were waiting. I’m sure his heart was pounding just a little faster after he saw the logo on the back of the car. They told him what he already knew, that they’d spotted the car a few minutes before calling the police. Koper took their names and numbers and told them to get home. Then he called Detective Parsons.
I didn’t believe it at first. We’d had over, what? Twenty-six false alarms? That’s a couple every month. You get numb to it after the first few. Honestly, I wanted to catch this guy. I really did. Not just for the Kramers, but selfishly. This is the kind of collar that makes a career, you know? But you gotta be realistic, too. Tom Kramer, he had no choice. As a father, you sit there and you live with that guilt. He used to say to me all the time that he failed to protect his little girl. I’m sure he said it to you and everyone else who would listen. So, yeah, he’s gotta do everything he can do until he gets past it. Or maybe he dies trying after forty years. I never told the guy to leave us alone, to stop calling. Nope. Never. I always said, “Yes, Tom. No problem.” Had guys calling departments all over the country. It wasn’t enough to cover the Northeast. And those ads and flyers. I just put it on our rookies. Made ’em pay their dues. It became a joke in the department. We gave the list a name. Called it “the bitch list.” Oh … wow, I guess that could be taken the wrong way. It was because we’d become Tom Kramer’s bitch. I know—it’s a horrible expression. But these guys are young. Anyway, when this call came in, I was like, “Yeah, right. Probably a Ford this time.” But Koper swore it was a Civic. Sitting there by the school, no less, empty and in the spring again. I started to think that maybe this guy had come back to relive the moment, or maybe repeat the ritual. Can you imagine? Now, that would be a story.… I drove up there in an unmarked car. Had my partner with me. And we just sat across the street, a little down from the Civic, between two other cars. We sat there for two hours and twenty-one minutes. Then we see this guy walking down the street. And I knew just from looking at him that we were gonna be making an arrest.
Chapter Eleven
The driver was a young man named Cruz Demarco. He was arrested in Fairview for selling marijuana. He picked up an additional felony charge for selling drugs within 1,500 feet of a school. Of course, that was just the beginning.
I have two observations. First, while it may seem absurd that the presence of a modestly priced sedan on a residential street in Fairview would arouse such suspicion, it is actually quite logical, and in this instance, it paid off. It was profiling. There’s no way around that. I don’t disagree with our decision as a community to curtail its use. There are unfair consequences to innocent people, and that is unacceptable. However, that argument does not diminish the statistical facts. By example, there was a very low probability that the Civic, with New York plates, under those circumstances, belonged to a resident—maybe 1 percent. This is a fact—not an opinion. Checking Civics in Fairview was the first thing Parsons did after interviewing the kids at the party. There was a larger probability that it belonged to a housekeeper, landscaper, nanny, caregiver, relative, or the like. Consider also that no one came forward to report anything like this. Given the time of day and where it was parked, the largest piece of the pie chart would contain outsiders. And why would an outsider be parked outside a high school party, at night?
The second observation I have is how everyone in this town was so eager to believe Jenny had been raped by an outsider, how they clung to this Civic like a life raft of hope. Parsons was first and foremost among them. His excitement at finding this car felt desperate to me.
My heart was pounding when we approached the car. Man, I was so glad we waited for a transaction to go down. I was ripe for a bad search. No way I was letting this guy go without questioning him and searching that car. I kept thinking, “Holy shit. We got him! We got him!” But we didn’t have probable cause till we saw the sale go down. Thank God my partner was there, holding me back.
An unwitting sophomore named John Vincent had emptied his mother’s wallet earlier that morning in anticipation of Demarco’s return to Fairview. He walked nervously to the passenger side of the Civic.