The detective was polite each morning when he called, and Davis feigned patience each morning when the detective, after small talk, confessed to having no leads. Well, not zero leads, exactly: a profile had been made of the attacker. The police believed he was white and fair-skinned. They had some general idea about his size, based on the placement of the bruises and the force exerted on her arm, breaking it in two, but that ruled out only the unusually short and the freakishly tall. They did not think he was obese, according to their reconstruction of the rape itself. He may or may not have been someone Anna Kat knew – probably not, because if she had been expecting someone that night, she might have told somebody, but then again, who can say? The medical examiner said the injuries were consistent with rape, but could not comment on whether the state’s attorney would include sexual assault along with the murder charge when police apprehended a suspect. When Davis expressed outrage after that information had appeared in the paper, the detective settled him down and assured him that when a beaten, broken, strangled girl has fresh semen inside her, that’s a rape in the cops’ book, no matter what the M.E. says; and then he apologized for putting it that way, for being so goddamn insensitive, and then Davis had to reassure the detective. That’s all right. He didn’t want them to be sensitive. He wanted the police to be as angry and raw as he was. The detective understood that the Moores wanted a resolution. “We know you want closure, Dr. Moore, and so do we,” he said. “Some of these cases take time.”
Often, the police told the Moores, a friend of the victim will think aloud during questioning: It’s probably nothing, you know, but there’s this strange guy who was always hanging around… This time, none of Anna Kat’s friends could offer even a cynical theory. Fingerprints were too plentiful to be useful (“Everyone in town has had their palms on that countertop,” the detective said), and the police were sure the perpetrator had worn gloves anyway, by the thickness of the bruises on her wrists and neck. Daniel Kinney, Anna Kat’s off-again boyfriend, was questioned three times. He was appropriately distraught and cooperative, submitting to a blood test and bringing his parents, but never a lawyer. Interviews with Northwood students continued.
Blond hairs were found at the scene, and police had determined they belonged to the killer by comparing the DNA to his semen. With no suspect sharing those same microscopic markers, however, the evidence was an answer to an unasked question. A proof without hypothesis. Before or during the rape, she had been beaten. During or possibly after the rape, she had been strangled. One arm and both legs were broken. Seven hundred forty-nine dollars were missing from a pair of registers, and there might have been some clothes gone from the racks. (The embarrassed store manager wasn’t sure about that, inventory being something of a mess, but it’s possible that a few pocket tees were taken. Extra large. The police noted this in their profile.)
Northwood panicked for a few weeks. The bakery, True Value, Coffee Nook, the fruit stand, two ice cream parlors, six restaurants, three hairdressers, and two dozen or so other shops, including the Gap, of course (but not the White Hen), began closing at sundown. More spouses met their partners at the train, their cars in long queues parallel to the tracks each night. The cops put in for overtime, and the town borrowed officers from Glencoe. If you were under eighteen, you were home before curfew. The Chicago and Milwaukee TV stations made camp for a while on Main Street (news producers determined that Oak Street, where the Gap shared the block with a carpet store, a parking lot, and a funeral home, didn’t provide enough “visual interest” and chose to shoot stand-ups around the corner, where there was more pedestrian traffic and overall “quaintness”), but there turns out to be a limit to the number of nights you can report that there is, as yet, nothing to report, and TV crews disappeared as a group the day a Northwestern basketball player collapsed and died of an aneurysm during practice.
The old routine returned in time. By spring, Anna Kat might not have been forgotten – what with the softball team wearing the “AK” patch, the special appointment of Debbie Fuller to fill the vacancy of student council secretary, and the three-page, full-color yearbook dedication all keeping her top of mind around campus – but Northwood became unafraid again. A horrible alien had killed on its streets; Northwood had been shattered, and the people made repairs. The town grieved and, like the alien, moved on.