Protectors

by Kris Nelscott

  The locker room smelled of damp tile, wet towels, and industrial-strength cleaners. Pammy had managed to clean it up enough to make it presentable for the morning’s classes, but it still had a dinginess that seemed unique to heavily used locker rooms everywhere.

  The baby’s nest of towels remained on the bench. Norma kept looking at that nest as if it had given her inspiration. Or maybe, strength.

  Because God knew, this woman needed strength. She had stayed with her sadist much too long.

  Her torso was an abstract painting of bruises, bruises upon bruises upon bruises. She had winced as Eagle pushed on them, feeling for swelling underneath the skin, especially around the stomach and the vital organs.

  Eagle hadn’t found anything on the torso, except the badly healed unevenness of a broken rib. Norma’s buttocks and thighs had taken the most serious beatings. It looked like the rat bastard had kicked her repeatedly in the lower back. Two bruises shaped like footprints crisscrossed over the back of her right thigh, and that was where her limp originated.

  Eagle worried about that injury. If the bone was fractured, Norma would probably be all right. But if it was broken, its sharp edges could jab an artery.

  Eagle had already told Norma that she needed to get an x-ray on the leg, and Norma had said no.

  He’ll find me at the hospital, she said, and that was true enough.

  Now, she hovered over her clothing as if putting it on again would hurt. She glanced at the showers.

  “Do you mind if I take a shower?” she asked. “I haven’t all day….”

  “I don’t think that would be a problem.” Eagle stood. “Just avoid the tape on your nose, like I told you. Don’t get it wet yet.”

  “Okay.” Norma didn’t sound daunted by that. Maybe she’d had her nose taped before.

  “I’ll get a towel for you,” Eagle said. “And be right back.”

  Pammy kept a few towels in the janitor’s closet for women who had forgotten theirs. Eagle would fetch one from there.

  As she left the locker room, she grabbed her bag and carried it with her. She knew better than to leave a bag with any kind of knife or the small drugs that she occasionally used alone with anyone.

  Stella was leaning on the counter, reading something—probably the lists. She raised her head as Eagle emerged.

  “Well?” Stella asked.

  “In a minute.” Eagle opened the janitor’s closet near the kitchen, grabbed the thickest, softest towel she could find, and carried it back inside the locker room.

  Norma was behind the shower curtain, the rest of her clothes neatly folded on that chair.

  “I’m setting the towel on the edge of the bench,” Eagle said.

  “Thank you.” Norma’s voice sounded normal, as if she hadn’t been through severe trauma at all. The woman had clearly been abused for a long time. She knew all the tricks to hide the damage her husband had done.

  Eagle had tried to get her to talk about the marriage, but Norma wouldn’t say a word about it. She only told the story of the baby’s injury and how hard she had fought to get the child away from him.

  The look in his eye… she had said, her voice trailing off. The look in his eye….

  She had come back to that statement more than once. Apparently, the look in her husband’s eye had finally awakened her to what she had subjected herself to. Or maybe he had trained that eye on the child, and that had frightened her.

  Although Eagle had asked for clarifications, Norma had given her none. And, really, it wasn’t Eagle’s business.

  Eagle’s business was to figure out the extent of the injuries, and she had done that as best she could, without access to an X-ray machine and more sophisticated equipment.

  She let herself out of the locker room to find Pammy standing beside Stella, waiting. Eagle had expected Strawberry, too, but apparently, Strawberry remained in the kitchen with the baby.

  The hippie-dippy ding-a-ling had proven herself to be pretty solid. Despite her own misgivings, Eagle was impressed.

  “Well?” Pammy asked.

  “Norma needs to see a doctor,” Eagle said. “There’s an injury on her left leg that I’m pretty worried about. Her nose is broken, and I’m not sure about her left cheekbone.”

  “Should I take her to the emergency room?” Stella asked.

  “Even if you wanted to, she won’t go,” Eagle said. “And it can wait. She needs to see someone though, and I recommend that the someone isn’t in the Bay Area. That husband of hers enjoys hurting her. It looks like he’s been doing it for years.”

  Pammy glanced at the locker room door. Eagle recognized the expression. She was worried that Norma would come out to find them discussing her.

  “She’s taking a shower,” Eagle said. “I think this is the first shower she’s had in a while where she didn’t need to keep the baby close or keep an eye out for her husband.”

  Pammy nodded.

  Stella was frowning. “I don’t know where to take her. Her family doesn’t want to be involved, but they might—”

  “You got a smart husband here,” Eagle said. “He’s gotten away with this for a long time. He’ll want her back. Even if the family wanted to be involved, they’re out of the question.”

  Stella sighed. “You’re right.”

  Pammy did not volunteer anything. She was quiet, which wasn’t like her. Eagle looked at her, afraid that Pammy would ask her to take Norma out of the Bay Area. Eagle had taken an injured woman out of the Bay Area for Pammy once before. That woman had fought back hard when her husband attacked her. He had badly injured her, and Eagle had taken her to a hospital in Bakersfield, which was almost too far away.

  Eagle had stayed until the woman pulled through, and then helped her get out of town.

  But that woman had had her own stash of money saved up, and had been planning her escape for years.

  Eagle had a hunch Norma’s departure was a spur-of-the-moment thing—a run-away-now impulse that she couldn’t have imagined doing one week earlier.

  It made Norma’s escape less likely to succeed. It also meant she probably had few friends, no resources, and no idea how to survive on her own.

  “Thank you, Eagle,” Pammy said softly.

  It sounded like a dismissal. Eagle tilted her head. She hadn’t expected that.

  “You have a plan?” Eagle asked.

  “Yeah,” Pammy said. “We have some options.”

  Stella looked at Pammy in surprise. Clearly, Stella hadn’t been apprised of the options either. Did that mean Pammy and Norma had come up with something? Or Pammy and Strawberry?

  That last thought made Eagle deeply uncomfortable. She wasn’t exactly sure why.

  At that moment, the locker room door opened, and Norma emerged. Her wet hair hung over her shirt, and her bruises looked bright. The swelling on her face seemed more pronounced.

  The tape did not look wet, however. Norma had listened to that instruction, at least.

  “Where’s Raquel?” she asked.

  “In the kitchen, with Strawberry,” Pammy said.

  Norma bit her lower lip, then glanced at the plate-glass window. The reflections of all four women looked blurry in the glass. Someone could see them; maybe not identify them, but see them.

  “Where do we sleep?” she asked.

  “We need to discuss that,” Pammy said.

  “What about the usual spot?” Stella asked. Generally, they placed the women in the locker room, with a foam pad and sleeping bags. The room was safe, enclosed, and windowless. No one on the outside could see any light filtering under the door.

  “Could you set it up?” Pammy asked Stella.

  Stella glanced at Eagle, surprised. Eagle understood, though. Pammy wanted to talk to Strawberry and Norma alone.

  “You need me for anything else?” Eagle asked. She didn’t want to get roped into driving Norma somewhere. Unlike the woman a few months ago, Norma could change her mind at any second, putting her driver at risk.

&nbs
p; Pammy opened her mouth, then closed it as if rethinking her initial response. She glanced at Norma.

  “Do you have any questions for Eagle?” she asked.

  Norma didn’t meet Eagle’s gaze. That behavior was pretty common after something this traumatic.

  “No,” Norma said, then added in a near-whisper. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” Eagle grabbed her bag and headed toward the kitchen. She was going out the back, no matter what Pammy said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Pamela.”

  “Thank you for coming on such short notice.” Pammy sounded as formal as Eagle had. She didn’t follow, probably waiting for Eagle to leave before talking plans.

  Eagle straightened her shoulders as she walked. All those years, and she still had trouble shaking off some patients. Norma was one, mostly because Eagle had a hunch nothing she said would make any difference at all. This woman would go back to her husband, get punched until something vital gave way, and then she would die, leaving her child alone with a monster.

  Eagle pushed open the kitchen door. Strawberry was sitting on a chair at the table, her finger clutched in the baby’s tiny hand. The baby had fallen asleep that way.

  “You’ve volunteered?” Eagle asked, almost before thinking about it.

  “Yeah,” Strawberry said. “I can get her out of the city.”

  “You know she’s just going to come back, right? You know this will end badly,” Eagle said.

  “I don’t know that,” Strawberry said. “Neither do you.”

  Her voice shook just a little, though. She suspected things would go awry.

  “The kid’s got your heart already,” Eagle said. “They always grab on, tight as she’s holding your finger right now. But that kid’s not yours.”

  “I know,” Strawberry said.

  “You don’t know,” Eagle said. “Not deep down.”

  Strawberry started to speak, but Eagle held up her free hand.

  “You listen for a minute,” Eagle said. “Because I’m thinking of you. If you’re taking them somewhere, then take them there. Get them set up. And leave. Don’t ask for updates. Don’t ask to be informed if they come back. Don’t volunteer your address or your phone number. You let that woman do whatever she’s going to do, and you don’t interfere.”

  Strawberry moved the baby’s hand slightly. “You don’t have a lot of faith in her.”

  “I’m not worried about her,” Eagle said. “I’m worried about you.”

  Strawberry looked up, clearly surprised.

  “Other people’s shit is heartbreaking. It’s just heartbreaking. And you’re volunteering in the worse kind of situation. You’re not careful, it’ll take you down.” A lump rose in Eagle’s throat. She swallowed. The lump moved down just a little.

  “Is that what happened to you?” Strawberry asked.

  Eagle wasn’t sure what the question meant. Maybe Strawberry was asking about her cynicism, maybe her rudeness, maybe her personality. Eagle wasn’t going to ask for a clarification.

  “They teach you when you become a nurse to let the patients go. You can’t make them eat right. You can’t make them follow the medical protocols. You can’t even make them come back if they break a wound open and start bleeding again. Your job ends at the door, because it has to. Do you understand?”

  Strawberry’s eyes were big. “Yes.”

  She didn’t understand. No one could understand. Hell, Eagle had had two years of domestic experience before heading to Saigon, and she hadn’t understood. She’d looked up too many of them, asked too many of them to report. They had stolen her heart, some of them, and now she would never get it back.

  “You won’t listen,” Eagle said as she walked around the table. She didn’t look at that baby again. She had deliberately not called the baby by her name. Eagle didn’t even want to think about the footie pajamas, the bruise on the shoulder, those big blue eyes.

  She didn’t want to think about them, and she wouldn’t. Not once she went out the door.

  “I hear you,” Strawberry said.

  “Yeah, you hear me,” Eagle said. “But you don’t listen. No one does on their first one. But you’ll remember this conversation. Believe me.”

  Strawberry watched her. “Answer me one question.”

  Eagle hadn’t expected that. She’d expected some more denials, not that strong voice.

  “What?” Eagle asked.

  Strawberry moved the baby’s hand again. “If you think this is going to fail, why do it?”

  Good question. There was no easy answer.

  “Because,” Eagle said, that lump threatening again. “Every once in a great while, someone proves me wrong.”

  30

  Val

  There were a lot of little towns in the San Francisco Bay Area, many of them incorporated with their own police forces. Since I didn’t have a Bay Area phonebook in front of me, I couldn’t look up the various numbers. And I was at a disadvantage with San Francisco Police Department too.

  Even though I had gotten phone numbers and a list of stations from the operator hours earlier, I couldn’t figure out exactly how the San Francisco PD was organized. I supposed I could call the San Francisco PD in the morning and ask. I would have to use some general number, and lie about a reason for getting background on the stations.

  Or I could go to the library when it opened and look all of that up. But it seemed like a waste of time to me.

  Besides, I had a hunch the morning staff at all of the stations would be a lot savvier than the night crew. The night crew in the smaller towns believed that I was dealing with a demanding night court judge and a squirrely dope fiend with information on an unsolved.

  Night crews understood urgency. Morning staff didn’t. Everything could move at a leisurely pace, because day cops believed that there were plenty of courts and plenty of judges and plenty of time—at least, so long as that time fell between nine and five.

  About an hour into my phone routine, I had brewed some coffee, which I would probably regret later. Or not. I hadn’t been able to sleep anyway, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to sleep now.

  After I had spoken to Detective Carter with the Berkeley PD, I had gone into my living room and grabbed the legal pad I used for keeping track of bills. I brought it to the kitchen table, along with a bowl of Cheerios and a cup of coffee, and wrote down everything Carter had told me.

  I figured I’d lose track of information quickly, otherwise.

  Then I searched my stuff for the map I had bought of California, back when I was thinking of leaving Berkeley. The map was pretty big, so it didn’t give me as much information as I wanted. But it did tell me just how many small communities there were in the Bay Area.

  More than I could handle in one night’s series of phone calls.

  I made a list of the places I’d contact, starting with some of the smaller towns. The San Francisco cops wouldn’t buy my story. They’d want to know who the judge was or why I wouldn’t be able to come down to their station. I’d have to figure out a different way to deal with them.

  But some of the smaller municipalities wouldn’t know what the inner workings of the SFPD were any more than I did. And those were the places I wanted to target first.

  Besides, I had a benefit most people didn’t. I knew that cops were territorial, and they didn’t like to share with other cops, even within major city police departments. Just because a woman’s body had been discovered wrapped in a blanket in one municipality, no one would think to check if another woman’s body had been found in the same way in another municipality.

  However, I wasn’t quite certain how to handle the two separate cases that I was investigating. I wasn’t sure Darla Newsome had any ties to the man in the truck. If I asked about the man in the truck, I would taint the Darla Newsome investigation. If I asked about Darla first, then I would raise suspicions about the guy in the truck.

  I eventually decided to do exactly what I had done with the Berkeley PD. I asked
about Darla first, and then I asked about the truck—saying that it was of interest in a homicide that might be tied to Darla’s case.

  I made six phone calls in the first hour, none of which were as fruitful as the call I’d made to Berkeley. No one had an open-unsolved of a brown-haired woman in the right age group, and the farther I got out of San Francisco proper, the more likely it was that a truck was involved in all measure of crimes, not just a suspicious death.

  More than once, the police officer I spoke to mentioned a sheriff’s department, pointing out that I needed to talk to someone at the such-and-so county office. It varied by police department as to which county sheriff they referred me to, but they always did with the same kind of sentence.

  The rural departments see more body dumps than we do. Usually we get the junkies, and the rural guys get the random killings.

  The words were spoken with such coolness, such acceptance, that I ended up chilled. After a while, I found myself gripping my coffee cup, not because I wanted more to drink, but because I needed the warmth.

  By 12:30, I shut off the fan in the kitchen window. I liked to think the chill I was feeling came from the crisp night air. I looked out over the fenced-off backyard.

  The light in the neighboring house was off. It felt like I was the only person awake at this hour—me, and the police officers I’d been talking to.

  Weirdly enough, the conversations kept me calm. If I had thought this through before I started making the phone calls, I would have thought that investigating would have made me more paranoid, not less.

  But I felt like I was doing something. Moreover, I felt like I was doing something useful. I hadn’t had that feeling for a long time.

  And that feeling more than overwhelmed the sadness I felt at all of the unsolved cases the officers mentioned as they thumbed through their files. Some officers had no open homicides involving young women, and some had no open homicides at all.

  But others had all manner of suspicious deaths. A couple had complained about lack of resources, and one wished out loud that the case I’d been discussing was related to something in his files.