He Was Not There

by P. D. Workman

  “Nice to meet you,” he said to Zachary, not meeting his eye or paying any attention to see if he answered or not. He led Zachary through a number of corridors to a small meeting room. It was furnished with a wood conference table and soft chairs, not the spare, sturdier furniture of an interrogation room. A room intended for meetings with families and victims, not violent offender interviews.

  There was an old, yellowing folder on the table. Maybe half an inch thick, with an archival bar code on the front and Heather’s name neatly printed in black felt pen on the tab. Able motioned for Zachary to have a seat on the side of the table, not the head where the folder was.

  “So Heather is your sister?”

  “Yes.”

  Able stared at him. Zachary worked his wallet out of his back pocket and produced his driver’s license. He also unfolded the authorization note Heather had written and smoothed it out on the table while Able examined his license and compared the picture to Zachary’s face. He’d lost weight since the picture had been taken, but it was still a good enough likeness. Able glanced at the authorization letter but didn’t read it, pick it up, or make a copy. He sat down in front of the folder.

  “So you remember when she was attacked? You were how old?”

  “I would have been twelve.”

  “So you probably weren’t told much.”

  “I was in a different foster home. We were only recently reunited, I didn’t hear about it at the time.”

  “And what has she told you?”

  “The basics. A stranger attack when she was walking home from school through a wooded area.” Zachary swallowed and tried to keep his voice unemotional. “She was dragged to an isolated area and assaulted at knife point, then released. She told her foster mom and that started the whole investigation.”

  Able nodded. He opened the file. Zachary could see the edges of the yellowing pages, all trued up at the top and inserted into a two-prong fastener. There were brown, heat-transfer fax reports that were probably completely unreadable if they hadn’t been copied onto regular paper. Some colored forms. Heather’s sad story, all reduced to a small sheaf of papers. Just like Zachary’s experience with Archuro, all summarized in bald, unfeeling description by someone removed from the experience. But it was good that it was all reduced to words on paper. That meant that it was recorded for anyone who needed to know the details and he could forget about it. He didn’t have to think about being trapped in the dark, dirty shack, too drugged to do anything to stop a man who wanted nothing more than to control and degrade him.

  “Sir…?”

  Zachary caught his breath, startled. He looked at Able and tried to relax his body. This interview wasn’t about him. It was about Heather. Helping her to find the man who had hurt her and to put him behind bars or somehow assure her that he wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone else again.

  He cleared his throat. “It doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot to go on there.”

  Able looked down at it again. “They investigated what they could. But Miss Goldman was not able to provide them with any kind of description of her attacker. Average height and build, white, wearing a mask. No identifying features. Nothing that she noticed about him. You would think that she could have at least given eye color, but maybe not. Maybe it was too dark or her eyes were shut or she was just too panicked to notice.”

  “So what did they do? Canvassed the neighborhood to see if anyone had seen anything? Check registered sex offenders in the area?”

  “No sex offender registry until 1996. They checked anyone known to police. But without a description, there wasn’t much they could do.”

  “What about the rape kit?”

  Able looked down at the folder, fiddling with one of the corners. He flipped through a few pages as if looking it up, but Zachary knew from his body language that he already knew what he was going to tell Zachary, and it wasn’t good news. Able searched for a form and held the other pages in place so they wouldn’t flop back down over it.

  “She was taken to the hospital and a forensic sexual assault kit was performed that day, as well as treating her injuries.” He looked up at Zachary. “He beat her up pretty good. Her foster mother couldn’t have helped but see that something had happened to her.”

  Zachary nodded. Heather hadn’t told him those details, but he wasn’t surprised. Rape wasn’t about love or sex. It was about violence and control. Depravity.

  “So what were they able to discover from the forensics at the time?”

  “Not a lot. The technology wasn’t where it is now. There were dark hairs recovered. Straight. They should have done blood typing, but I don’t see any on the file. It was too long ago for any kind of DNA testing.”

  “But that can be done now, if the samples were preserved.”

  Able didn’t look at him. Zachary waited. The duty officer had told him that there wasn’t any physical evidence. He wasn’t sure how they could have done a rape kit and then lost it, but it was decades before. Things went astray. Got mis-cataloged. It happened.

  “The rape kit was destroyed,” Able said finally.

  “Destroyed. By accident?”

  “No. It wasn’t the same as it is now… They couldn’t use it to develop a profile. They could only test it against suspects, compare samples. If there were no suspects, and the case wasn’t going anywhere… they had a policy.”

  “A policy on what?”

  “On retention of rape kit evidence. They were only retained for two years.”

  “Two years? But there’s no statute of limitations on rape.”

  Able scratched his ear. “There’s no statute of limitations on aggravated sexual assault. Sexual assault has a six-year limitation. But back at the beginning of eighty-nine, before your sister’s case… aggravated was six years and sexual assault was three years.”

  “But if they destroyed the evidence at two years…”

  “That was just the policy at the time. In some jurisdictions, it was as little as six months. Or if it didn’t look like there was any chance of solving the case… it might be ditched within a few weeks. They never anticipated that we’d be able to do anything with it decades later. It was beyond imagination.”

  Zachary sat back in his chair, head spinning. After all that Heather had gone through, the rape, the kit, and the decades of emotional trauma that followed her everywhere she went, she was going to have to face the fact that all of the hard evidence in the case had been destroyed, and with it, any chance of identifying the unknown man.

  He would still go through the motions of following up on every lead and trying to solve the crime, but the chances that the police who had initially investigated it had overlooked some obvious clue that was still usable thirty years later were slim to none. Without the evidence, they were up the creek.

  “Sorry,” Able said without looking at him. “Wish I had some better news for you. But maybe… this is a sign that it’s time for her to just move on, and give up on the case ever being solved.”

  Like the duty officer Zachary had talked to the first day, Able didn’t seem to have any comprehension of just how impossible that was. He had no doubt that Heather had tried to move on. She had gone on to get married and have a family. But she hadn’t been able to leave it behind and had finally turned to Zachary for help. He hated the fact that he was going to have to tell her that it wasn’t going to work.

  “Well…” Able closed the file and started to heft himself up from the table. “I’ll show you out.”

  “I still want to look at the file,” Zachary said, not getting up.

  “Why would you want to do that? There’s nothing in there. I’m telling you. I’ve read through it. They did everything they could, and they weren’t able to find the perp. Being able to find a stranger without any forensics is hard enough when it just happened. But decades later? There’s no way. It can’t be done.”

  Zachary nodded. “I know. But I need to do this for her.”

  Able stared at
him, waiting for him to reconsider and come to his senses.

  Zachary bit his lip. He shook his head. “I’ve been where she is. I know what she’s going through. I have to do what I can. Maybe I can’t do anything for her, but I have to try. This is all my fault. I have to try to make it right.”

  “Your fault?” Able questioned, not sitting back down, but towering over Zachary and making him feel ten years old all over again. “You said that you weren’t even in the same home as her. So how could any of this be your fault?”

  “It was because of me that she was there, in that home. It’s my fault that we all got separated and had to go into foster care. Because of the stuff that I did. If I hadn’t… then we would both have still been home with our biological parents, and this wouldn’t have happened to her.”

  “I’m not exactly a fatalist, but I don’t think it’s that simple. I think some stuff is going to happen, no matter what, we can’t stop it. If it didn’t happen in that foster home when she was fourteen… then maybe in another when she was sixteen. Do you know how many women are sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime? Yeah, kids in foster care are a big target group, girls and boys, but outside of foster care, a high percentage of women still get assaulted. And some women are just natural targets, no matter what they might do to try to protect themselves.” He shrugged his thick shoulders. “You can’t put that all on yourself.”

  “The only reason she got in contact with me again was because she thought that maybe I might be able to help her out with this. That maybe there was someone who could understand what she had been through and who cared enough to try to get her justice.”

  Zachary reached for the file.

  “It’s a small file. It won’t take that long for me to read through. I can make my own notes, right? I can make notes, just not photocopy it?”

  Able stood there looking at him. “She’s lucky to have you, but you’re an idiot. Go ahead. Read the file. You’re just putting yourself through extra emotional trauma that you don’t have to. Cops have to face this stuff and deal with the emotional fallout that comes from seeing the world’s depravity. You don’t have to.”

  Zachary pulled the file over to himself and opened it up. He said nothing, just looked at the first page in the file, which was the last page chronologically, and skimmed over it.

  Able paused in the doorway. “I’m just across the hall. Give me a shout if you have any questions. Check out at the front desk when you leave. Leave the file and everything in it here.”

  He left the conference room, shutting the door much harder than he needed to.

  8

  Zachary looked at the first page of the file after Able was gone. It was a densely handwritten form, and he knew from experience that he wasn’t going to be able to get through the whole file or to absorb everything he read. He was better at reading than he had been in school, but he’d also taught himself some tricks. One of them was to use the tools at hand and to give himself lots of time to go over things repeatedly, getting another layer of knowledge each time.

  Able wasn’t there directly supervising him and, as far as Zachary knew, the video surveillance inside the room hadn’t been turned on either, so he pulled out his phone and went to work. He opened up the two-prong fastener so that he could lay each page flat and work with one at a time instead of trying to hold the file open like Able had. He took a quick photo of each page, and the camera straightened and squared them and started processing them in the background. It wouldn’t be able to interpret the handwriting, but it would be able to OCR the typewritten information so that he could search it for keywords later. And he would have all the time he needed to read and re-read each page of the file.

  He skimmed each page as he took his photos, reading the form headings and phrases on the typewritten statements and reports. Incident report. Evidence logs. Who had been questioned, what streets had been canvassed. He would go through it all and make sure that no lead had been left unfollowed. Did she have classmates who knew what was going on? Had other girls been assaulted? Had there been any eyewitnesses who saw the man in the mask or someone dressed in dark colors as he had been? He could put together a profile. They could find something out. Even if it didn’t lead anywhere, at least he could show her that he had done everything he could to help her out.

  He stopped when he got to the pictures.

  Long, spindly arms and legs. Unruly or uncombed blond hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. Bruises all over her body. He had cut her throat a couple of times, minor lacerations. He hadn’t drugged her. He’d used force and violence to keep her under control.

  Zachary laid the pictures out one at a time and snapped photos of them. Her eyes had been blocked out, and in some of the pictures, the more intimate parts of her body, but they had taken close-ups of those areas as well, showing the bruising and tearing. He felt nauseated, but went on, working his way mechanically through the stack. Maybe Kenzie would be able to tell something from the photos. Something that they now knew on a visual inspection that they wouldn’t have known back then.

  He was relieved when he got through the small stack of photos and got back to statements and questions. There was commentary on what Heather had been wearing at the time. Where she had been and the time of day. All pointing toward the authorities thinking that she’d gotten herself into the situation by being careless. Or worse, that she’d been asking for it. That had been the culture at the time. Victim blaming. Shaming. Rather than being kind and gentle in their questions, they would attack her with their words, trying to break her. Trying to get her to admit that it had all been her fault or that she had made it all up.

  Zachary himself had known, even at a very young age, that he couldn’t go to the authorities with complaints about the abuse that he received. He had known that they would blame him. Didn’t he get blamed for everything else? Didn’t they always tell him that it was his own fault when he got hurt? He was too impulsive, he made stupid decisions, he took risks. He never stopped to think about what he was doing or what the consequences could be.

  Going to anyone to report sexual abuse would just be admitting that he wasn’t big enough, strong enough, or man enough. That kind of thing didn’t happen to real men. And Zachary, always small for his age, always skinny with twigs for arms, did not need to be told how unmanly he was.

  When he got back home, he wanted nothing more than to just lie down and go to sleep again and shut out the rest of the world, especially all that he’d just seen of what had befallen Heather.

  First, Heather had been attacked. Then she’d had to endure the questioning at the hands of the policemen who wanted to find out whether it had really been an attack, or whether she had somehow consented or asked for it. They should have known, looking at her bruises, just as her foster mother had known, that there was no issue of whether consent had been given. Heather had obviously been attacked. It hadn’t been some kind of frat party mistake. It hadn’t been a date. Even if she had arranged to meet with someone—and Zachary believed her when she said she hadn’t—that person had been there only to victimize Heather.

  Had her foster mother not known what kind of culture they would face if she took Heather in? Maybe she was a militant mom, wanting to change the world and make things better for her foster kids, even at their own expense. Zachary remembered then that she hadn’t had a lot of foster kids. Heather said that she had two older sons and had wanted to take in a girl. So Heather wasn’t one of many, as Zachary had usually been when he was placed in a new family, but just one girl, maybe their only foster. Maybe her mother hadn’t known what kind of a world was out there for a teenage girl who was just trying to find her way in the world and hadn’t known the kind of rape culture that they lived in.

  Zachary was thinking longingly of his bed from at least ten miles away. But when he got up to his apartment door, he could see that someone had been there. There was a sticky note at eye level, beside the peephole.

  I’m here.
K

  Kenzie. She knew better than to surprise him by being in his apartment unannounced. Even though he had given her a key, she still didn’t usually go into the apartment if he weren’t there. She knew that he had previously called the police on Bridget when he had thought there was an intruder in his apartment. Best not to startle him or to have the police on the scene because of a visit from his girlfriend.

  Zachary pulled the note off of the door and turned the handle. Without the note, he would have noticed that the door was unlocked, and that would have set off all kinds of alarm bells. He closed and locked the door behind him and walked through the kitchen into the living room.

  “Hey.” He gave Kenzie a smile and held up the note. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “I figured it was better not to give you a heart attack.”

  “Yeah. Much appreciated.”

  She knew how jumpy he had been since the attack. It wouldn’t be hard to send him into a flashback.

  “Long day?” Kenzie asked, looking him over.

  Zachary rubbed his eyes with the pads of his fingers. “Yeah, a little rough.”

  “Come sit down.” She patted the couch cushion next to him. “Get yourself a drink and come relax and tell me about it.”

  He went to the fridge for a soft drink and returned.

  “I’m working on a new case.” He elected not to tell her that it was Heather. She could be more objective if she didn’t know that it was his sister. And he wasn’t sure how comfortable he was sharing Heather’s story with anyone without her express permission. “It’s a cold case. Really cold. Thirty years ago.”

  “A murder?”

  “Aggravated sexual assault.”

  She cocked her head. “Do you really think that’s wise?”

  “Why?”

  “I just think… you’ve been having such a hard time since… you know… Archuro… I didn’t think you’d want to be reminded about what happened to you.”