Blood Born

by Matthew Warner

  The fact that two women up here had been raped in the McLean district and that the assailant was still at large had of course been reported in community newspaper “crime logs” and in the summaries routinely posted on the police website. But these incidents had only attracted minor attention so far. Randall doubted the average woman on the street even knew about them. Attention was far more focused on the recent spate of missing coeds—a series of disappearances of women aged eighteen to twenty-five.

  She slowed at the door to the first victim’s room, hearing a moan: “Oh God oh God oh God . . .”

  Swallowing, she hurried in.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Randall paused just inside the door, gaping at the sweating, yelling woman on the bed. She wondered if she’d walked into the wrong room and this wasn’t Valarie Thompson after all. But then she recognized the grayhaired man sitting beside the bed as the twenty year old’s father. No mistake.

  “Oh God oh God oh Jesus!”

  Valarie Thompson had been raped six days ago while leaving Sharky’s bar on Route 7, where she worked as a waitress. It had been three a.m., and she was the last person out. Nobody witnessed her inserting her key into the door of her small Plymouth Horizon, a used two-door sedan she’d picked up from an unscrupulous car dealer in Centreville who gave Valarie a “blowjob discount.” The car dealer, an overweight shitbag with a previous conviction for misdemeanor stalking, had been calling Valarie’s apartment three times a day to ask for another date (upsetting her boyfriend and one-year-old daughter), so Randall at first suspected him for what followed.

  The moment Valarie inserted her key, she heard a footstep behind her—not the hard clop of a shoe, but the soft slap of a bare foot. There were no other cars nearby under the bright parking lot lamp. The sound was close enough for the hairs to rise on the back of her neck.

  She turned just in time for a large hand to slap her across the face.

  The blow was so hard that it fractured her cheekbone and dislodged a crown from a molar. Her head smashed against the roof of her car and knocked her out. She slid down the side of her door, past the key ring still hanging there.

  When Valarie Thompson came to, she was face down on the gritty asphalt beside her tire. Her tight jeans and panties had been yanked down to her ankles. Her shoulder stung, and she realized she’d been bitten. A pair of hands like granite pressed against her back, pinning her to the ground as her attacker raped her from behind with a penis the size of a billy club. He abraded her with body hair so coarse that the skin beneath her buttocks was raw the next day.

  The rapist grunted a guttural hrah hrah hrah that reminded Valarie of a lion rutting in the wild. As she later told Randall, maybe it was the sheer animalistic quality of that growling chant—its low-pitched snarl, the way it seemed to come from a throat not even designed for speaking—that caused her to pass out again until the attack was almost over. Animal or not, she was sure that as her rapist climaxed, filling her with gummy sperm that smelled like rotten eggs, he chuckled. It was hard to be sure of anything, however, as Valarie slipped in and out of consciousness. Even the attacker’s second bite, the one that punctured her jugular and caused her to scream so loudly that a passing motorist turned to investigate, seemed to have happened to somebody else.

  Randall was familiar with that state of mind—the brain’s self-protective mechanism in times of severe stress—when awareness seems to hovers nearby, observing the trauma taking place but itself remaining untouched. It was, she supposed, why criminals often said it felt like somebody else had robbed the convenience store or gunned down the school children, and why people who’d almost died on the operating table claimed to have floated outside their bodies while surgeons scrambled to keep them alive. The upshot, unfortunately, was that Valarie couldn’t give much of a physical description of her assailant—just like Daniella Connolly.

  The motorist who heard her scream found her lying beside her car. He called 911 and covered her with a blanket until help arrived.

  The next day, Valarie Thompson’s stomach and breasts ached so much that touching them made her cry out. When not shrieking or throwing up, she demanded food. Because she began dropping weight so swiftly and alarmingly, the doctors indulged her appetite even as they conducted pelvic exams in search of suspected tumors. Those exams indeed indicated what was happening—but it wasn’t tumors.

  Meanwhile, Randall interviewed the sleazeball car dealer. He produced credit card receipts and witnesses to prove that he was at a DC strip club at the time of the rape.

  All of this happened less than a week ago.

  No wonder, then, that Randall was so shocked at the young Caucasian woman’s appearance tonight—a change so pronounced that Valarie might have been somebody else.

  Valarie Thompson looked like she’d swallowed a beach ball. Randall wasn’t a doctor and had no child-rearing experience of her own, but she guessed Valarie was the equivalent of eight months pregnant.

  “I can feel it moving. Oh good Lordy, it’s kicking me!”

  As she screamed, minute blood droplets sprayed from her mouth. Her father wiped them away. Valarie grimaced, showing reddened teeth; her gums were bleeding. As she gasped for breath, bloody mucus leaked out of her nose.

  There was business to conduct, but for now Randall could only stand there and lean against a rolling meal table to keep from fainting. She’d seen a lot of shit during her relatively short career—gunshot wounds, water-bloated corpses, even a body eviscerated for a kidney—but her mind simply rebelled at the sight before her now. Maybe it was because the victim wasn’t dead or because Valarie Thompson was a woman. Whatever the case, Randall already knew she would be seeing this one behind her eyelids for quite some time.

  Perhaps the most pronounced change in Valarie—other than the grossly distended abdomen—was her emaciation. Slackened flesh hung from sharp cheek bones, bruised where she’d been hit by her attacker and slammed into the car. Valarie’s head, with her sweat-soaked hair, looked like a skull with skin. Her breasts, which during a normal pregnancy should have been swollen with milk, were nonexistent. One was partially exposed by the wide neck of her hospital gown, and it resembled a deflated balloon. A week before, they were so perky that Randall caught ER Nurse John sneaking peeks. What remained now stained the front of her gown with wet patches.

  “Just stay calm, Val,” her father said and caressed her forehead. Randall imagined the young woman’s skin felt like a furnace under his hand.

  “Make it stop! Oh God, Daddy, make it stop.” As Valarie yelled and cried, her fluid-swollen, varicose-veined calves thrashed atop the pillows stacked under her feet. “I can’t . . . I can’t breathe.”

  The father cast an imploring look at Randall. She immediately fetched Dr. Bowen.

  It took a while, but Bowen, the father, and a nurse managed to calm Valarie down. The nurse affixed an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose. Bowen probed her stomach and assured her everything was normal—which was a laugh because nothing about this situation was even in the same solar system as “normal.”

  Valarie complained she was thirsty and hungry, so Bowen promised another meal would be delivered soon, but only if she made an effort to sleep. Before leaving the room, the nurse took away the two meal trays stacked on the windowsill—each containing piles of gnawed chicken bones—and emptied the Foley catheter’s reservoir hanging below a bed rail. Randall watched as the plastic container continued to fill with more urine. Within minutes, it contained a quarter inch of fluid.

  As this took place—and while Randall stood there feeling invisible for all the attention she was getting—Bowen conferred with Valarie’s father. The father twanged in a curious mountain accent that yes, he was perfectly gawd-damned aware it was after gawd-damned midnight and far past visiting hours, but he was gawd-damned well not going nowhere, so Bowen might as well back the hell off.

  Bowen frowned at this but nodded. He asked the father to apply lotion to the dry skin on Valarie’s face an
d arms when he had a chance, and then he beat a hasty retreat.

  Randall followed Bowen into the hallway. “Doctor.”

  He whirled, scowling at her, before composing himself. “Yes, what is it?”

  “Question. Why are you allowing her to eat like that?”

  “Is this part of your investigation?”

  Randall just stared at him.

  Bowen sighed, then looked at his feet. “I’m not sure, to be honest. This whole thing is something no one’s ever seen, and I’m flying by the seat of my pants.” He looked up. For the first time, Randall noticed his bloodshot eyes and drawn features. He’d probably been on duty for over sixteen hours. “All I know is that that girl is growing a baby inside her at more than thirty times the normal rate. She could give birth within days. And that means she requires an incredible amount of protein to meet those demands. Apparently it’s not enough. She’s still losing weight, and the baby may not survive. But in the absence of a compelling reason not to, I don’t see why I shouldn’t give her what she needs.”

  Randall glanced at the nurse who was finally leaving Valarie’s room, looking ashen. “What do your colleagues think?”

  Bowen snorted and began walking off. “They see a big malpractice suit in my future no matter what I do.”

  Randall watched him go. She took a deep breath, opened her notebook, and returned to Valarie’s bedside.

  The father was gently wiping Valarie’s head with a wet washcloth as she tried to sleep. Randall found it a touching gesture, as age-old as medicine and maybe even parenting, which was where she supposed medicine first came from. When the man looked up and smiled, Randall saw he’d been crying.

  She cleared her throat, trying to keep her own emotions in check. Damn, but that was hard when she was so tired all the time. “Valarie, I need to ask you a couple questions.”

  Valarie’s eyes snapped open. “I’m gonna die, ain’t I?”

  “No, I . . . I just came in to ask if the name Eric Gensler means anything to you.”

  Valarie looked at her for a moment before closing her eyes again. Randall was afraid she’d fallen asleep, but then the girl’s face pinched up as if from sudden pain, and she answered, “No. Ain’t never heard of him.”

  Randall wondered if she was lying—perhaps remembering a threat.

  “Know what the funny part is?” Valarie said. “I was on my way to the all-night drugstore. I was gonna get that female condom thingy.”

  Randall sighed and closed her notebook.

  “Billy and me, we done tried that rhythm method, but we ain’t good at it. After last time I was pregnant, I said we’re trying other things, but he don’t like condoms, you know?” Valarie looked at her. “You have children?”

  Randall shook her head.

  “You start counting days when you don’t want more. I seen it was two weeks from my period, and I knowed I was the most, y’know, fertile? So I wanted some protection for when I got home. I knowed he’d be up waiting for me.”

  Randall glanced at the father, wondering if the man felt embarrassed at hearing about his daughter’s sex life, but he was gazing out the window.

  Then Valarie’s last remarks replayed in her head. Her internal bloodhound started sniffing. “Valarie, when was your last period? What day?”

  “June seventeenth,” she said without hesitation.

  Randall checked her notes. “That’s almost two weeks exactly before your assault.”

  “Uh huh. I was fertile.”

  “Hmm. Well, thanks for your time, Valarie.” Randall nodded at the father and started out. “Get some sleep.”

  “Thank you for—” Valarie began, but she whimpered and curled onto her side in pain. A contraction? Randall wondered.

  Randall didn’t want to stick around for that—she was afraid she’d lose her composure if she did—so she hurried off to the second victim’s room. Her stomach held a hard knot of tension, as if a baby were growing inside her.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The second victim, Sandy Giddes, was also awake when Randall entered her room. Unlike the first woman, she was presently alone, and her pregnant belly was only half as large. Still, at only a few days post-rape, the change was shocking.

  Like Valarie, Sandy Giddes was in her twenties and also emaciated except for her stomach. She had pulled her gown up and pushed her blankets down to expose it, as if to give it air. Randall glanced at the red stretch marks and vowed to look at the woman’s face only.

  She kept the interview as short as possible. Did Sandy remember anything else about her attacker’s appearance? No, it’d been too dark to see. Did she know Eric Gensler? No. Had she been on birth control at the time? No. When was her last period? A couple weeks before the attack.

  Randall thanked her and fled the room.

  Dr. Bowen looked at her strangely as she hurried past the nurse’s station. She locked herself in the women’s restroom at the end of the hall. Leaning against the wall, she covered her mouth and struggled not to sob.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  She knew the case shouldn’t be getting to her like this. Yes, the victims were women, and she was a woman, and yes, she couldn’t help but be terrified at the idea of being in their place. And yes, a small part of her worried that this was more than she could handle, that she’d fail, and the department would look down its nose at the young female detective and say she didn’t deserve to be where she was. . . .

  But there was more to it than that. Something was wrong with her. The fatigue, the nausea, the mood swings, the allergies, her sometimes tender breasts, and her foggy thinking were all telling her something. If she didn’t know better, she’d say she was pregnant, too, except she hadn’t had a boyfriend in three years.

  Goddammit, get it together. You don’t have time for this wussy shit.

  At the sink, she splashed water onto her face and glared at herself in the mirror. Her hands felt cold, as if she were a smoker with poor circulation, so she turned on the hot water and held them under the spray until they were about to scald.

  Focus on the case. Get your head together.

  All right, the case. She would proceed for now on the assumption that Daniella’s attacker was the same person who raped the other two victims. The Eric Gensler connection was interesting, but it seemed the boy would prove more valuable as a potential witness than a suspect.

  As for the proximity of the first two victims’ last periods, which had attracted Randall’s interest, she supposed on further reflection that she shouldn’t be all that surprised. A woman’s menstrual cycle is roughly a month long. About two weeks after a menses, a woman ovulates and remains fertile for a short span of days. Valarie Thompson and Sandy Giddes were raped when they were the most fertile, hence their pregnancies now. It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out.

  But what were the chances of both of them being raped in the exact middles of their cycles, when they were the most fertile? Why hadn’t he raped women who were not ovulating? Did he know who was fertile?

  Randall opened her notebook and jotted down a reminder to ask about the date of Daniella’s last period. Of course, she could go back to the ER right now to ask, but there was a crime scene to visit.

  Besides, I just need to get the hell out of this hospital for the night.

  Chapter 4

  It was nearing two a.m., and Detective Randall needed to get going. But she first went to the nurse’s desk and waved over Dr. Bowen. She asked that Daniella be transferred up here to the isolation ward after she was finished in the ER.

  Bowen looked thoughtful as he removed his glasses and cleaned them on his giraffe-embroidered lapel. “Might be problems with that. I just talked to ER about her head injuries, and she’ll be a Neurology patient first.”

  “What? This wasn’t a problem with the other two.”

  “They didn’t have skull fractures.”

  Randall glanced around for eavesdroppers before leaning in. “Create an excuse. Bribe John—
tell him I’ll go out with him—I don’t care.”

  “I’m telling you, she’s not my patient.”

  “Listen, if her blood test tomorrow shows she’s pregnant, then she will be your patient—except she won’t be secured here already. Word will get out that much faster, and Channel Nine will be crawling up her ass with a microphone. Now is that very healthy for a patient?”

  Bowen sighed and bowed his head. “Fine. What’s one more nail in my coffin at this point?”

  Randall watched him storm off. There was nothing more she could do.

  Time to get to that crime scene by the movie theater.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  As she parked in the alley between the theater and parking garage, Randall wished she could go home to bed. She’d only been up since the early evening, when most people were eating dinner, but she felt like she hadn’t slept in days. She suppressed the urge to seek out another cup of coffee. Would’ve been nice, though. She would have loved to wrap her cold fingers around a steaming mug and perhaps do one of the meditation exercises she’d learned for her first-degree black belt. She was still rattled by what she’d seen in the hospital. Unfortunately, she didn’t have time for that luxury right now.

  Officers Cowden and Pavlik nodded their greetings as she ducked under the yellow police tape, then returned their attention to the two crime scene technicians. The technicians remained hunched over their flashlight haloes as they slowly inspected the ground. Cruiser headlights and portable flood lamps provided further illumination.

  One of the techs finally stood up from his unnatural posture. She thought the big man looked ridiculous, dressed in his lint-free jumpsuit, hair net, paper overshoes, and rubber gloves—like some weird kind of police field surgeon. It was complete forensic overkill in a case like this, but Sergeant Tucker was simply that kind of officer. Maybe that’s why she respected him so much.

  “Randall,” he rumbled, grinning. “How’s it hanging?”

  “Very funny,” she said while Cowden and Pavlik laughed. “I like your new veil.”