by April Smith
Nancy gestured. “Sit down, Ana.”
I had been unconsciously keeping my distance, as if Juliana were not a normal teenage kid but a brittle specimen that might become contaminated by human warmth and breath. Still I chose the opposite couch, to give her space. I noticed Nancy sat close, knees almost touching the girl’s. She held a clipboard thick with forms.
“I’m going to give you a complete medical examination to make sure you’re okay. But first, I’m going to ask some questions about what happened, so I know what to look for. Just tell me as much as you can.”
At this point all we knew was Juliana had been let out or escaped from a vehicle somewhere and had somehow made her way back to the M&Ms. She might have been released a block away. It might have been Van Nuys. It might have been the abductor. It might have been a friend.
Juliana said nothing. Nancy said nothing. We sat in silence for a very long time. I tried to make myself still. I looked at an orchid.
Finally Nancy tried again. “Whatever you can tell me is helpful. If you don’t remember, that’s okay.”
Juliana crossed her arms and legs.
“A few hours ago you got out of a car—was it a car?”
I could barely hear when Juliana murmured, “A van.”
Nancy said, “Okay, a van.”
“What kind of a van?” I asked. “Can you describe it?”
She shrugged. Her head was down.
We waited.
I offered some prompts without replicating Stephanie and Ethan’s description: Was the van old? New? Color? Did she notice the stereo, or some CDs lying around? It was very foggy tonight. Could Juliana tell where she was when she got out of the van?
“Can’t we just, please, get this over with? My parents are freaking out.”
Before I could respond Nancy silenced me with a look. She stood up and pulled a leopard from a shelf of stuffed animals.
“I love this guy,” she said. “He’s so soft.”
It wasn’t a new leopard. Its spots were yellowed from much handling. She handed the thing to Juliana, who clung to it greedily.
“Let’s talk a little about your general health,” Nancy began again casually. “When was the last time you saw a doctor? Are you taking any medications? How old were you when you got your period?”
She was able to get Juliana to occasionally respond with one-word answers, each time in a voice so injured I found myself staring at the plaid cloth around her neck, telepathically communicating to Nurse Nancy, It hurts!
Still she pressed gently on, asking if Juliana had consensual intercourse in the last seventy-two hours.
Juliana answered, “No.”
From her wide-eyed reaction to the question, I knew she’d never had consensual intercourse, even once. Right then, I thought I would lose it.
She had been a virgin.
My concern had been to protect her life, I hadn’t worried about the fine-tuning, but now there was another reality that hit me like a body blow, and everything came unloose inside. In one smoldering moment I saw her innocence ignite with a whoosh! like a huge gas flame; and inside that flame there had been such bright wholeness.
This would be Juliana Meyer-Murphy’s first oh-my-God experience with a man. Whatever happened during those absent days to strangle the voice out of her would now become the core image of sex this young woman would take with her through life, where the rest of us fondly, or even ambivalently, carry the saga of the first boyfriend, the parents’ bed—or the beer party, the mosquitoes and the riverbank.
Whoosh.
Nancy had seen it, too, and was assuring Juliana that her first sexual experience with someone she loves would still be special, would still be her choice. The girl was nodding, but I wondered how much she was able to take in.
“Can I have one of those guys?” I indicated the stuffed animals.
“A puppy, or a loon?”
“I’ll take the loon.”
A loon is a striped bird like a duck with a fat round body that, if soft and stuffed, fits just comfortably under the arm. I recommend holding on to one.
“Did he have sexual intercourse with you?” Nancy waited. “Did he penetrate you with something else? Each act is a different crime, okay? I’m going to ask more questions than your doctor usually asks, not only because I want to account for every crime that happened, but to help during the medical exam.”
“I can’t say. After I first got in.”
“You mean, first got into the van?” I said eagerly. “When he first made contact with you?”
She was shaking her head no. I was desperate. No, what?
“Do you want to take a break?” Nancy offered with an easy smile.
“I really don’t.”
“Don’t what, Juliana? Don’t remember? That’s all right.”
“I’m not in the mood,” whispered the girl.
Nancy put the clipboard down. “We can continue this later.”
“Wait!” I cried without thinking.
Nancy turned to me with the same compassion she had shown the victim. Obviously we were both in need of guidance.
“It’s up to Juliana,” she said.
“I know, but—Juliana, honey—we really need your help in remembering everything you can—”
“I’m sorry,” Nancy said more sharply. “Juliana can decide if she’s comfortable or not or if she wants to go on.”
I had to sit there, gears spinning, waiting as Juliana continued to gnaw on the leopard’s ear like a three-year-old until it turned dark and wet. She was making speaking noises that were buried in the fur.
“What is it?” Nancy asked, leaning forward. She seemed to listen, but it was more than listening. “Tell me.”
Juliana shook her head.
“What’s your very worst fear? Your biggest concern?”
She didn’t answer.
“Juliana,” I said, and she looked at me. “I’m an FBI agent, and I carry a gun, but things still scare me—I’m not even talking about on the street but things that are inside. I still wake up, sometimes, and I’m all by myself. Man, it would be a relief to have someone to talk to.”
Finally, tentatively, Juliana lowered the animal.
“I’m scared … because … I might not ever … be able to … have a baby.”
Her words, barely audible, dwindled to a mewing wisp of nothing.
We were on our way to the examination room to collect the physical evidence. Nancy said she could have a support person present, and Juliana had silently pointed to me, a gesture that flooded me with gratitude.
Just outside the doorway I touched Nancy’s arm.
I understood the enormous vulnerability of the sexual assault victim, the need for sensitivity and emotional support. But also I had a team of agents and policemen with technical backup ready to roll. If I could get hard information from Juliana about the offender or offenders—method of approach, control, display of weapons, threats, what kind of physical force—we could mobilize right now. Otherwise, Rick could rightly argue we’d recovered the victim and it would all go away.
“I need a narrative account of what happened to her,” I told the nurse quietly.
“There’s a period of time she can’t remember. It’s possible she was drugged.”
“Drugged?” Fear snagged me.
“Roofies. We see a lot of it.”
Rohypnol and GHB are two “rape drugs” you can buy on the street. Put into a drink, they will render the victim unconscious, then he or she wakes up, mauled, in another part of town with no memory of how it happened. Because these drugs can metabolize quickly without a trace, they are currently the preferred weapons in sexual assaults.
“No,” I moaned and trotted after her. “You understand why I have to ask questions.”
“She has the right to decline to answer.”
“I know all about her rights. I’m not suggesting we traumatize her further in any way. But in order for the investigation to move forward—”
“I see that, but, with respect, I think we can press just a little harder, given the fact this guy is out there and likely to do it again.”
“You’re impatient, and I don’t blame you.”
The door to the exam room was open and Juliana was just inside. I could tell from Nancy’s preoccupied look she was not about to leave her alone for more than another few seconds.
“I’m asking for your cooperation,” I said urgently. “You’re the expert, you know how to get her to disclose.”
“I’m impatient, too,” Nancy said. “I want to proceed with the evidentiary exam so she can go home and be with her family. But she has the right to withdraw her consent at any point in the examination, and if she does, I will stop. She needs to feel comfortable in her medical care.”
“I need to move. I’ve got a task force ready to go—”
“I don’t give a shit what you need to do,” Nancy said, still serene.
Still, every doorway holds an opportunity, and inside the exam room there were two.
Juliana’s body: a crime scene. Evidence would be recovered, as in any crime scene, and as in any crime scene, a story would be told.
Juliana’s trust: she asked me to be in here. In the long run her confidence would be invaluable.
It was another carefully muted room, not like the bus terminal where I see my gynecologist at the HMO. Pale wood. Beige-on-beige, a subtle cloud pattern embossed on the wallpaper. There was a computer in a corner and an examination chair in the center where you could sit up and look into your nurse’s eyes. Her mom would be relieved to know that Juliana did not have to lie back on a paper-covered table with stirrups.
“You’re worried about being able to have a baby.” Nancy was close, maintaining eye contact. “You’re worried about the injuries inside your vagina. I’ll have a better idea when I take a look. I’ll tell you what I see. I’ll never withhold information. I’ll always tell you the truth.”
Juliana scanned the room.
“How … are you going to look?”
“Oh!” said Nancy brightly. “We’re going to see it all right here on this screen,” and she patted a monitor on a cart, which held a VCR and a video camera. “If you want to watch, I’ll explain it to you as I go. But that comes later.”
Later, Nancy would explain to me it was a colposcope, a camera at the end of a long stalk that magnifies sixteen times. She would flick switches and point the lens at the pattern on a sheet covering the examination chair, slowly zooming in on a teardrop-shaped paisley, and I would watch on the monitor as the paisley became a country with green boundaries, a continent of blue, a universe of emptiness; until we were looking at the spaces between the cotton threads.
Later, we three strangers would become linked by the shared sight on the TV screen of the lacerations inside Juliana’s vagina—invisible to the naked eye but vast as crimson canyons when magnified—and deep, mysterious half-moon cuts in a row.
The livid marks of a man’s fingernails.
But now Nancy broke the seal on a rape kit and began to unpack white envelopes for evidence collection.
Step one was debris.
Step two was dried secretions.
Step three was external genital examination.
Step four was pubic combings.
There would be nine steps in all.
“Would you feel comfortable taking off the scarf?”
The girl unwound the material, revealing a necklace of watercolor bruises in wine and black.
“How did that happen?” Nancy asked without any kind of inflection, which might have indicated outrage or alarm. Obvious marks of strangulation are rare.
“I don’t know.”
“Okay. Can you open that sweatshirt a little and sit here, and I’ll take your vital signs?”
The ER doctor had ordered X rays to rule out fractures of the larynx and scans to check for soft tissue damage. The bruises would be photographed, and analysis would show the suspect had used a metal chain as a ligature to strangle Juliana several times to the point of unconsciousness or almost death. When she revived, he would perform sex acts and then strangle her again.
As Nancy pressed the disk of the stethoscope to Juliana’s chest she smiled tenderly and said, “You have a kind heart.”
My knees buckled.
I felt an unreasonable amount of love for Nancy Reicher, RN, NP, with the plucked eyebrows.
“Let’s come over here and take off your clothes. We’re going to need to keep them for evidence, so afterward”—Nancy opened a cabinet—“you can go home in one of these.”
Inside were shelves of royal blue sweatshirts and sweatpants and rubber thongs in ascending sizes.
“There may be evidence on your clothes. Dirt or fibers, stuff like that. We need you to undress carefully. I’m going to put down some pieces of paper on the floor to collect anything that falls out of your clothing, and then we’re going to collect everything you have on and put it in this bag. Let’s go behind the curtain.”
She drew some fabric across a track so a quarter of the room was hidden. I stood by the counter looking over the evidence packets. It would be a slow and meticulous examination. The oral cavity. The swabs for sperm. Examination of the buttocks, perianal skin and anal folds. Drawing blood to test for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. The careful cataloguing, signing, dating, sealing of every piece to maintain the chain of custody.
“I need your underwear, too,” I heard Nancy say from inside the curtain. “Are you okay?”
How many times was she going to ask if Juliana was okay? I was aware that my pits were damp. I was thirsty and wanted someplace to sit down.
“Now I’m going to use a long-wave ultraviolet light called a Wood’s lamp,” came Nancy’s voice. “All kinds of stains show up that we couldn’t see under white light. We’re going to scan your body for evidence. But first I’m going to turn out the lights. Are you all right out there, Ana?”
“Fine.”
The windowless room went pitch black.
Inside the curtain a purple light went on.
“I’m just going to scan your body with this lamp.”
It was hot and close and surreal in that room. Shades of purple light danced above and below the curtain like a gruesome attraction in a carnival of perversions.
“It’s like a black light,” Nancy was explaining. “Do you know if he ejaculated outside your body?”
I could not hear Juliana’s reply.
“Well, here are some dried secretions, and you can tell they’re semen because they turn yellow under the Wood’s lamp. I’m just going to swab it. Turn around for me. Thanks.” There was a pause. Then, “Would you mind if I asked Ana to see this?”
Juliana’s voice was faint with exhaustion. “Yeah, sure, I don’t care.”
With the chill clatter of metal rollers, Nancy slowly swept the curtain aside, and I saw Juliana Meyer-Murphy standing naked in a violet column of light.
She had her father’s slope-shouldered slump, with his tendency to spread at the hips, but the long legs were her mother’s; soon the baby fat would go. They had put clean dressings over the area on her chest where the offender had cut meticulously with a fine instrument, crosshatching, like an etching, to draw a steady beading of blood. On the Tanner classification of sexual maturity, a five being a fully mature adult woman, Juliana would rate a four. She had no pubic hair, not because it had not developed but because it had been shaved off; you could see the raw raking furrows of the razor.
Under the tinctures created by the lamp—cobalt, ultramarine, magenta, rose—her body looked like a Romantic sculpture splattered by a madman in a purple haze. It made me feel ashamed to see her so exposed, and yet I kept on looking, because the more I looked, the more I could see the assault in progress, as if it had been conjured.
“What kind of shoes
did the assailant wear?” I asked.
“I have no clue.”
“Were they sneakers? Sandals? Boots?”
I already knew the answer.
“Boots,” breathed the girl.
She was right. “Anything special you remember about them?”
“They were clean.”
“New?”
“Polished.”
I nodded.
“Thank you. Thank you very much.”
“I was thinking you might want a forensic photographer to document this,” Nancy suggested.
“Yes, I would.”
Blunt-force injuries such as those sustained by hammers or shoes create rapid tissue compression, which results in bruising and bleeding below the skin. The contusions on Juliana’s back would have been clearly visible to the naked eye, but the impression of the weapon used to cause them would not. Now, out of the anarchistic splotching, there appeared a glow-on glow, a ghostly memo, as if sent by the offender in almost-invisible ink.
“What?” Juliana asked, craning her neck. “Where is it?”
“On your lower back,” Nancy said.
“What’s the big deal? I can’t feel anything.”
“He left a partial imprint,” said the nurse matter-of-factly. “It’s pretty clear. It’s the sole of a shoe. At some point he must have stepped on your back.”
Stamped on her back, while Juliana lay on her stomach, unconscious. Stamped, she should have said, since she had promised to tell the truth, trampled or stamped, using the full weight of the boot with his body behind it, blunt-force heavy impact.
