Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005

Five minutes later I’d recovered my cell phone from the security pod on the citizen side of the bars. Then I called Steve Rothenberg to tell him I’d give it a day. Or two.

I hadn’t been out to Calem for a while, and driving through the town center reminded me of why I never much liked it. Too clean, too cute, too aware of itself as a picture-perfect place to live. I tried to imagine the battle some poor school administrator had to have fought to get METCO kids like Devonne Tinch out to paradise.

I found a parking place on the street just down from the police station itself, but when I asked the civilian behind the inside counter for the one detective I knew there, she said he was on vacation. Then I mentioned Devonne Tinch and got a rotten egg scowl from the civilian, who asked to see my ID before calling “upstairs.”

The officer who came out a door to a short staircase was fortyish and plump, with an hospitable smile on her face. A generation before, she’d have modeled as a homemaker baking sugar cookies and pouring large glasses of milk.

“John Cuddy?”

“That’s me.”

“Aphrodite Smith.”

I tried not to cringe, but Smith caught something. “My parents figured that with a plain last name, I’d need an exotic first one to spur me on to beauty and grace. Nice game plan, just didn’t work.”

I was beginning to like her. “I gather you’re the detective on the Tinch case?”

“Sergeant Detective. Like the Boston force, we do rank first, duty second.”

“There somewhere we can talk?”

“Follow me.”

Smith entered a small interrogation area with the square footage of a walk-in closet. Table, chairs, one-way mirror on the wall. If there were four of us instead of two, you’d picture that stateroom scene from one of the Marx Brothers’ movies.

We sat, she examined my ID a little more thoroughly than the civilian had, then handed it back to me.

“You’re the visitor, Mr. Cuddy.”

“I’ve been asked by Mr. Tinch’s lawyer to investigate Lisabeth Hamilton’s complaint of rape against him.”

Elbows came onto table, chins in palms of hands. “First ground rule: I do not say the name of the complaining witness.”

“Fair enough. Does the witness have an explanation for why she waited two months to report the supposed attack?”

A disappointed look. “Mr. Cuddy, I hope you’re neither that stupid nor that disingenuous.”

“Ms. Hamilton reported the ‘rape’ only after she realized she was pregnant.”

“Girls that age have irregular periods, and they’re often late.”

“A reason why Ms. Hamilton might not be sure she was pregnant, but not a reason why she wouldn’t be sure she’d been raped.”

“Mr. Cuddy, certainly you know how difficult it can be for any victim of violence to pursue it formally. In this case, the witness did not believe she recognized her attacker, so there was no one to accuse. And she wasn’t even aware of the DNA Registry being in existence.”

“Lucky thing, then, that she came forward even when she did.”

Smith paused, then rolled her head on her shoulders. “She was a frightened little girl, Mr. Cuddy. After being attacked, she took off her clothes and bathed, as anyone might under the circumstances.”

“She washed herself, but not her clothes.”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t throw them away, either.”

“As stated in my report, which I’m sure Mr. Rothenberg has shown you, the witness placed her clothes from the incident in a plastic bag.”

First shades of the O. J. case, and now Monica’s. “You’re comfortable with a DNA match based on two-month-old stains and three-year-old database samples?”

“The techies are, so I am too.” Smith lowered her voice, made it a little chilly. “For God’s sake, they’re exonerating convicted inmates left and right on matches — or failures to match — that go back two decades.”

“Did you test Mr. Tinch’s older brother, Maurice?”

“We requested he provide a sample, but Maurice Tinch declined, as he has every right to.”

“Won’t a jury wonder about that, though?”

“Not my department.” Smith spread her hands on the tabletop and dropped her voice another five degrees. “Look, Mr. Cuddy, Calem is a good town. I grew up here, and when the METCO program was struggling to get off the ground, people like Grant and Willa Hamilton argued in favor of bringing kids like Devonne Tinch into our public schools, to which the Hamiltons send their own children. Through the years, ninety-five, even ninety-nine percent of these METCO kids have been fine, but every once in a while, things go haywire, probably something from when they were younger and a kind of flashback hits them. And then they commit an incredibly stupid crime.”

When Smith seemed to be finished, I said, “Given that it was a rape, why not just have an abortion? Quietly.”

A sigh. “Mr. Cuddy, in this commonwealth, any child under sixteen must have a parent’s permission to have an abortion, or she has to go before a trial judge to get a court order.”

I considered that. “Difficult path to follow for the daughter of a judge and a conservative state politician.”