Killer cop and accomplice (Book 2)

In my previous comments, I said the killer cop, Blaese, had to have an accomplice to make the logistics work out.

I even have a suspect: his police partner, Rainwater. When word somehow leaked out that a cop was suspected, Rainwater hastened to tell Riley that Blaese did like to stop women who looked like his ex-wife and therefore like the two dead women they know about and the two missing women whose cars turned up in the same place. But, golly gosh, Rainwater didn’t say anything because “I was a rookie, and he was my superior.” Which is why, of course, Rainwater continued to keep his mouth shut even as the bodies turned up.

I can imagine how Rainwater became the accomplice of the killer cop, Blaese. Let’s say they’re sitting by the side of the road stopping the occasional speeder. It’s boring and they chat a bit. One day, Blaese stops a woman and she gives him some attitude. He lets her go, gets back in the patrol car, and gripes about women thinking they can just do what they want. Rainwater agrees, and as the days pass, they bond over their shared hatred of women. Then Blaese stops a woman who looks like his ex-wife, she gives him some static, and he strangles her right there on the spot. Rainwater responds with “Oh my god, you’re going to get caught!” instead of “That’s it; you’re under arrest.” And now Rainwater’s an accomplice helping Blaese move cars around.

My guess is on the occasions of the murders, they are both in the patrol car. Blaese pulls over a woman who matches his type, overpowers or kills her, and drives off while Rainwater stays in the patrol car making it look like an active police presence. Blaese cleans the woman’s car, dumps her body somewhere (two bodies are unaccounted for), drives the car to the farm/dump site, and calls Rainwater to come pick him up. They go back on patrol as if nothing happened.

Riley says this about Rainwater in the next book: “I believed in him until he proved me wrong.” That looks to me like sometime in the series, he’s going to prove her wrong. This story is first person past tense, so she’s narrating events in the past. If she was trying to convey that she was believing in him conditionally, she should have said something like, “I would believe in him unless he proved me wrong”. Or she could have just said, “I believed in him”, leaving it open whether he would prove her wrong later. But the writing is careless enough that I’m not sure whether this is actually intended to indicate that he will prove her wrong.

There’s a point I left out of the review. Blaese beat his then-wife into a miscarriage not once but several times, eventually rendering her unable to bear a child, and he smirked triumphantly when the doctor told her she couldn’t bear a child. This in a small town with one doctor. Not the current doctor, but his kind, beloved predecessor.

Cops do protect each other, but letting it slide that “Joe knocked Mary down — well, he was drunk and she’s a shrew” is infuriating, but also way different from letting it slide that “Joe beat Mary into miscarriages over and over and obviously enjoyed it.” Why didn’t the kind, beloved former doctor report this? To the State troopers if the local police won’t do anything?

It probably could have worked, or at least not set off my nonsense detector, if she’d just said he beat her up repeatedly. She could have hidden the results of a normal beating and never seen a doctor, but beatings severe enough to cause miscarriages? That’s a medical emergency and she had to have seen a doctor. Repeatedly.

And then we have consider Jamie.