The Death Factory Read Online Free PDF

picture of her. He leans over her and hisses that if she calls the police, he’ll paste the photo all over ‘Spick Town.’ Then he vanishes, leaving her alive but seriously injured. Once he leaves, she manages to call 911, and the paramedics and cops show up.”
    “It was the Conley kid wearing a mask?”
    “Maribel has zero doubt. First, his size was right. Second, he talked to her while he was raping her—mostly a furious, guttural whisper—but she recognized his voice. Third, the guy smelled like Conley. And that’s something we all know, what a lover smells like. Fourth, she recognized his dick. He was uncircumcised, which is rare among white males in Texas. So was our masked perp.”
    “Goddamn. What happened?”
    “The cops listened to her story, then arrested Conley.”
    “But he told a different story.”
    “Oh, yeah. He admitted coming on to her at the party, even to going to her apartment. He wanted to get laid, he told the detectives. Who doesn’t, right? Maribel didn’t want sex, Conley said, but he’d given her the gold pin, and she seemed to feel bad for him, so he laid a guilt trip on her. Probably to get him to go away, he claimed, she gave him a hand job on the porch.”
    Jack groans. “Which explains the semen.”
    “On her nightie, anyway. Maribel denied that, of course.”
    “What about the carpet?”
    “The carpet became all-important. Because Conley claimed he never went inside the apartment. He told detectives that after the hand job, he was satisfied, so he split, then went to get stoned with some friends and watch the jets land and take off at the end of the runway out at Hobby Airport.”
    “The friends backed him up?”
    “To the hilt. Five guys, all from affluent families. And because they admitted getting stoned, the cops gave them credibility points for candor.”
    “What about the camera? The flash photo? The cops never found those?”
    “Nope. Maribel identified the camera from pictures as a Sony Mavica, an expensive digital camera, which was unusual for the time. She’d never seen Conley with one before, and she admitted that.”
    “The cops searched all his computers at home and work for the image?”
    “Yes. They found nothing.”
    Jack shakes his head thoughtfully. “So this crime lab tech, Vargas, must have come to see you about the carpet.”
    “Exactly. Maribel had showed them the spot where Conley had raped her. The tech at the scene had looked at the carpet under a special light and seen no signs of semen. So they cut out the patch where the girl said the perp ejaculated, bagged and tagged it, and took it down to the crime lab.”
    “Okay.”
    “Here’s where the problem starts. The head of the DNA section of the crime lab, Dr. Daman Kirmani, decided to handle the carpet analysis himself. He went over the swatch with a light and saw nothing. Then he did a microscopic exam of a random sample of the fibers. Finding nothing, he declared there was no semen on the carpet and reported that to the DA’s office. That report became the key factor in what would be the plea agreement. Because the lack of semen on the carpet seriously damaged the credibility of Maribel’s story. Forensics had ‘proved’ there was no semen inside the apartment, other than that on Maribel’s nightie. The semen on the nightie did belong to Conley, but he’d already covered his ass in his original statement.”
    “But the medical exam of the girl—”
    “Definitely proved a rape occurred. Serious trauma from the bottle. Maribel also had a shattered orbit beneath the eye, a concussion, a broken jaw, two broken teeth, defensive injuries of the hands.”
    “Christ!” said Jack. “So somebody had obviously beat the living shit out of her.”
    “Right. And nobody disputed that a violent rape had occurred. But as regards Wes Conley, it was a he-said/she-said deal. As a result, once the cops sifted through all the evidence, the assistant DA saw a fairly weak case against the kid for