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more than writing up the necessary reports, although it took him a couple of days to do so.” She sounded a little annoyed by this.
    Dartelli allowed as how any CAPers detective would have acted in pretty much the same way; suicides cleared quickly.
    “Listen,” she confessed openly, “this is the kind of thing I celebrate. A known piece of shit takes himself out. Saves me time and energy. Five months on a five-year sentence? That’s justice?” she asked angrily. “But it was a suicide, and it was investigated by Kowalski.”
    “Meaning?” If she had evidence to support that Kowalski had somehow mishandled the investigation, then it was a case for Internal Affairs, not CAPers, not him.
    She didn’t answer his question directly. “Gerry Law worked the young girls in the neighborhood. Befriended them. Got them to trust him. Obtained a promise of secrecy. And then the horrors began. He took his time with them to make sure he could count on their secrecy—broke them in slowly. Kept some of them for several years. Took photos and videos. Sold some of them, used the photographs to blackmail the older ones: ‘You wouldn’t want your mother to see this.’ Pure slime. Discarded those over fourteen. We had some mothers who suspected someone in the neighborhood, but couldn’t find a witness. He had them all too well trained.”
    “You knew but couldn’t do anything?” Dartelli asked incredulously.
    “Suspected,” she corrected. “This kind of abuse is often first noticed in the bathtub at home or at the doctor’s office. It’s insidious because it’s not always that obvious, depending on the act. A doctor has to know what to look for. Parents—mothers in particular—are often the worst: They don’t want to believe what they see. Happens all the time.”
    “But you busted him,” Dartelli recalled. He leafed through the CAPers file, studying the photographs of the hanging. Lawrence’s body hung by the neck from a length of wire fixed to a ceiling light fixture that was itself pulled out of the Sheetrock.
    “Sure. We got lucky, but only once. Seven arrests, one conviction—you know the drill.”
    Dartelli also knew the frustrations that went along with such work.
    As he reached Bragg’s forensics report, she asked him, “Why use a strand of lamp wire? Does that sound right?” He flipped forward to the detailed report of the apartment’s contents.
    “What are you saying?” he asked. But he understood the question perfectly well: She doubted the suicide.
    She said, “If you’re Lawrence and you’re planning to do something like this, why not get a piece of rope?”
    Dartelli hurried through Bragg’s crime scene report. It lacked detail, indicating a hasty job typical of both a suicide investigation and Kowalski’s lax approach—the usual cotton and synthetic fibers expected in any home, some copper filings from the lamp cord found on the floor under the body, nothing special.
    “How did you finally get him?” Dart asked, trying to keep her away from questioning the suicide.
    She answered, “An eighteen-year-old girl came forward. She had seen some Oprah program that dealt with sexual abuse, and realized what had been done to her and how she had blocked it out. We put her on the stand and she identified him, but she fell apart on cross and that cost us. He gets five years, commuted to one—out in six months; five, as it turned out, because of prison overcrowding. I mean, here’s a piece of shit that had done over a dozen young girls by some counts, and he gets virtually nothing.”
    Dartelli pulled out the medical examiner’s report.
    Abby reached over his shoulder and flipped past to a photocopy of Lawrence’s suicide note. “Let me ask you this,” she said. “You’re Gerry Law, slime ball pervert, and here is your last comment to the world. Two sentences, the grammar correct, the message simple. ‘I can’t live with my crimes. Forgive me.’”
    Dart studied the photocopy. The