I suppose cold case is a bit misleading, but when I went back to look at the file later, after out conversation, it was a confusing mess of a situation. The victim, who came to visit me that day, was a young man named Marcus, though he’d been younger when the case had first come through the department, before I’d been added to the sex crimes unit here in the city. He was, according to the officers who had taken his statement, an extremely volatile and unreliable witness to his own assault, whatever it might have been. Over the course of several interviews, the story Marcus was telling kept shifting–at times it was a kidnapping, at other times a physical assault or mugging, or at others, a rape. The officers decided that there was nothing to pursue, because Marcus couldn’t actually be counted on to be clear about what, exactly, had happened that night, but Marcus had been persistent. For months, he’d kept coming back, harassing the officers, demanding the find him, that they had to find him, that he had to know who it was who had done this to him. Eventually, the officers had threatened to charge him with filing a false report, and he’d stop coming in. Now, I had the distinct pleasure of dealing with him.
As for what had happened to Marcus exactly, the basic details of the event were at least consistent. He had been out with some friends at a gay bar one Saturday night, late, and all of them had been drinking heavily. There was…an altercation of some sort, with someone, though the details of the figure were inconsistent. At times, Marcus would describe him as a rather unassuming man: short, thin, glasses, scruffy and quiet. At others, he was a hulk–taller than him, heavily muscled, pure black eyes, strong enough to pin him to the wall with one hand. As for what had happened exactly…well, Marcus claimed this man drugged his drink, and then followed him and his friends when they’d left the bar, not feeling well. The man had ambushed them in an alley, either mugging, assaulting, or raping Marcus, depending on which version he was telling, and then, when Marcus hit him in the head with a brick, he’d fled–or so he claimed. The place where he alleged the struggle had occurred had no signs of a struggle, and no bloody brick. His friends hadn’t been any help either, or at least the ones they could find. An odd case for sure. Something had happened to him, because there were pictures of him with wounds that didn’t seem self-inflicted, unless he was particularly masochistic, but whatever the real story was, Marcus either didn’t want the police to know it, or didn’t know what had happened himself, really.
In any case, I was deep in shit already, dealing with that insane interview and Bernard’s sudden disappearance, that this guy’s appearance at my desk, claiming to have a tip about the Bruiser, wasn’t really something I wanted to deal with at the moment, and so I was terse and impatient. It wasn’t until he shoved the pictures in front of me that he’d found on the internet, that I began to actually pay attention to what he was saying, especially when he threatened to take them to the news media instead.
Apparently, Bernard had possessed a side that few in the city knew much about, and one that none of us had uncovered during the investigation. In all honesty, most of our energy had been invested in trying to unravel the mystery of his shifting identity and volatile behavior, to do much digging into him and his past. Marcus, on the other hand, had, and the pictures only served to make everything more complicated. Bernard, it seemed, had been a rather common sight around the BDSM circles of the city, always as a sub, often involving himself in some scenarios that appeared…rather extreme in their execution. One photo stood out to me in particular, of Bernard–the old Bernard, from the photos and the identification, in the middle of a grungy basement, perhaps even the basement we had found him in, kneeling on the filthy floor, naked aside from a leather harness, a chastity cage, and a thick metal collar around his neck–not as large as the one he’d had on, but the parallels between the photo and the condition we had found him in were impossible to deny.
Was it some sex scene gone awry? Given the secure nature of Bernard’s work at a defense contractor, I doubted that he had much interest in this sort of compromising information getting out into the open, which would explain why he would avoid telling me about it when I interviewed him. But then why, if he was worried about secrecy, would he then go on TV, proclaim his love and devotion to his unnamed and unknown master and captor, and then disappear into the night? Somehow, the entire thing made even less sense than before, and when I pressed Marcus for details about where he had found this, and what he’d been doing looking for it, he refused to give me any background to them at all. Instead, he wanted to talk about his own case from years ago–because he was certain that the man who had done this to Bernard, was the same man who had assaulted him in that alley, raped him, and tried to kidnap him off to who knew where.
Was it plausible? Sure. Was I ready to accept that this rapist had been active in the city for years, doing who knew what to men this entire time, and somehow no one had even been aware that it was happening? I was definitely not. After all, I had assumed, up to this point, that the man who had placed the 911 call leading us to Bernard was the rapist, though I wasn’t entirely sure why he would do so. But if he’d been secretly active for years…it meant that not only was he much more skilled at this than I was ready to admit, but that there also had to be some reason he was making his crime public. Now, he wanted us to know about him–and that meant either that the guilt was finally breaking him (which, in my experience was unlikely) or things were about to get much, much worse.
Bracken's Corner 