NIGHT OF THE CAT

Police officer Carrie Lubick, a onetime teacher who left the classroom to take care of San Francisco's seedy Southern district, is on the track of a rapist who preys on the most vulnerable victims of all: three elderly women, and now, a 12-year-old girl. When another policewoman with a memory for license-plate numbers places the same red '69 Ford near the scene of two assaults and a burning city block, Carrie suspects that the rapist and the arsonist may be the same (``He raped the building,'' she tells one skeptical colleague). Thick with undifferentiated cops almost to the exclusion of civilians (though the defiant young victim is drawn with a sure hand); even the perp doesn't have a name or a speaking role. First-novelist Schermerhorn seems to be trying for a West Coast 87th Precinct, but succeeds in creating only a portrait of the officer as surrogate mom.