by CJ Lyons
He kissed the top of her head, his fingers ruffling through her hair before separating from her. “I believe in you, Nora. Never forget that.”
Jerry returned, accompanied by his partner, Janet Kwon. “You ready?”
“Can Seth come with me?”
“No. Sorry. Like I said, Janet needs to clear up a few things with him.”
Nora caught an unfamiliar edge to Jerry’s voice, but before she could say anything, Janet had separated Seth from her and was leading him into a small interview room down the hall. Jerry touched her on the arm. “Here we go.”
He led her through the door into a small room furnished similarly to the family lounge at Angels. Two vinyl love seats created the outside walls of a square with two more identical vinyl chairs at top and bottom. A low coffee table with two boxes of tissues and an assortment of sodas stood in the center of the square.
The chairs had already been taken. A woman with short, spiky strawberry-blond hair sat in one, legs crossed, top leg bobbing in time with her hand as she awkwardly tapped a cigarette free from a pack. The action was difficult because her left arm was in a cast.
“When’s it come off?” the second woman asked. She had no obvious injuries. Her hair was shoulder length and dyed onyx. But her eyebrows were lighter, almost the same shade as Nora’s own.
“Next week,” the smoker said as soon as she inhaled several puffs, stacking them one on top of the other, ignoring the No Smoking sign across from her. Her foot never stopped its motion.
“Ladies,” Jerry interrupted, easing Nora forward until she had no choice but to take a seat on the nearest love seat. “This is Nora. Nora, this is Meg and Amy.”
“Hi,” she said, nodding at each, barely catching that the strawberry blond was Meg, and Amy was the one with the bad dye job.
“Welcome to the club,” Amy said. “When did he get you?”
“Three years ago,” Nora answered, startled by her frankness. "Almost three, now."
“I was fourteen months ago,” Amy feathered her fingers through her hair, “and she was—”
“Seven weeks ago.” Meg had already sucked her cigarette down to the filter, but she kept on inhaling, her lips pursed so tight that her lipstick bled into the skin around her mouth.
“Guess that makes you the first one. Lucky you.” Amy turned to Jerry. “How’s this going to work?”
“First, thank you both for agreeing to this. It’s not how we usually do things, but—” Jerry sank into the last love seat, elbows on his knees, leaning forward, mirroring the anxiety of all three women. “I know this is a lot to ask. And I appreciate your helping us. I’ve read your statements, but I thought that getting you three together, you might be able to fill in the gaps, maybe spark a memory—anything to help us nail this guy.”
“Uniontown cops said it couldn’t be done.” Amy interrupted him, obviously wanting to be in control. “Not without evidence.”
“That was when they thought they only had one victim. Now we have four in the area. And a pattern. What we call a—”
“Signature,” Amy put in. “Yeah, we get it. We watch CSI, you know. Is this legal, us talking together?”
“The fact is, that with no forensic evidence and no way for any of you to identify your attacker—”
“You can’t convict him even if you do catch him. Right?” Amy shifted her weight to the edge of her seat, planting her feet, ready to bolt. “So what are we even doing here?”
Nora wanted to tell the other woman to just shut up and let him talk, get this over with, but she didn’t. Instead, she opened a can of Sprite and sat back, concentrating on the way the condensation dribbled off the can and onto her hand. The bubbles scratched against her throat, felt sharp, and she remembered feeling that same tightness when she’d been taken, the rapist’s knife against her neck.
Jerry didn’t seem to mind Amy’s power play. He kept his voice low and steady, nonconfrontational. “If you can help me find him, maybe we can convict him for murder.”
“Murder?” Meg gasped.
“I’m afraid so. His last victim died.”
Silence swirled between them as each woman reluctantly settled back into her chair and met the others’ eyes.
“How’s this gonna work?” Amy asked.
“I thought we’d start from the beginning, each of you chiming in as you remember events. Amy, do you want to describe how he initially approached you?”
Amy pushed back in her chair, as far back as she could get without toppling it over. “Why doesn’t she? After all, she was the first.”
It took Nora a moment to realize that both Meg and Amy were staring at her, waiting for her.
She swallowed, the soda scratching and almost choking her. Coughing, she put the can down on the table. Swirling it around the smooth veneer, she traced wet spirals as she spoke.
“It was New Year’s Eve. My date and I were both a little drunk, so we took a cab. He dropped me off in front of my building, and I was walking up the steps.” One of the other women made a sharp, gasping noise, but Nora didn’t look up to see who it was. “He came up behind me; I never saw him. Put a knife to my throat, dragged me to his car, made me kneel down, put glue in my eyes so I couldn’t see, duct-taped my hands, and threw me in the trunk.”
“With me it was a gun.” Meg’s voice was raspy from more than smoking, Nora realized. She looked closer and saw that she still had red marks, thin like wire, along her neck. Maybe they were permanent; maybe he had damaged her voice box when he choked her?
“Me, too,” Amy said. “But after we got there, to the first place, it was always a knife.” She shivered, pushing up her sleeves, revealing thin lines of scars arcing over her arms. “He liked cutting. A lot.”
“He liked a lot of things,” Meg said, lighting another cigarette. “Cutting, pinching, choking, hitting. Talking. God, that made it worse—he wouldn’t shut up.”
Nora found herself nodding in unison with Amy.
“Tell me about his voice,” Jerry said in a low voice, now leaning back, keeping out of their way.
“Weird, mechanical.”
“Tinny—not a robot’s, but like the voice on the elevator that tells you what floor you’re on,” Amy added.
“Not human,” Nora said. Both women looked at her, making eye contact before quickly looking away.
“Could it have come from a computer?”
“It was like in surround sound, so yeah,” Meg said, eyes drifting shut, body rocking as she remembered. “And he had a headset or Bluetooth thingy on—I knocked it off once and it made a noise when it hit the floor.”
“After the car ride, the first one, can you remember anything about where he took you? Did he carry you from the car? Did you walk? How far was it? Any sounds, smells?”
As Jerry led them each through their captivity, it became clear that they had all been kept in the same place before being dumped elsewhere. But Nora’s experiences were quite different from the other women’s. The other two women hadn’t had the “date” at all, hadn’t been forced to pretend to make love with their captor, nor had he worked to pleasure them.
He had beaten them, used them, cut them, done unspeakable things to them, heaped verbal abuse on them, called them harlots, whores, sluts, bitches, had repeatedly strangled them using his hands, wire, plastic bags, and their own hair after he chopped it off, had carved words into their flesh along with spray-painting them with graffiti . . . the list of atrocities went on and on.
The only thing he didn’t do was actually have sex with them.
“Do you think that was because you fought back or because he couldn’t?” Jerry asked Amy when she finished describing her attempts to kick and head-butt the attacker.
“He couldn’t get it up,” Amy said triumphantly. “Maybe ’cause I kneed him in the balls hard enough to rupture them.”
“He couldn’t—er—perform with me, either,” Meg put in, her head turned to focus on a distant corner of the ceiling. “But I didn�
�t fight. I just lay there limp, let him do whatever he wanted. I just wanted it to be over.”
Nora felt Jerry’s gaze on her and knew he also was seeing a disturbing trend. Nora had been a love interest. She had been forced to be an active participant. Only with Nora had the attacker been able to perform sexually.
She’d been the first. The attacker hadn’t selected her at random, stalked her, and then attacked her as part of a pattern. He had wanted her. Chosen her.
Then when she disappointed, he had thrown her out like garbage and began to vent his rage on other women. Women who looked like her. Same build, hair in the reddish spectrum, same pale complexion, same upturned nose, same lips that her father called a Cupid’s bow.
Nora retreated to a corner of the love seat, curled up, knees to her chin, her chest heaving as she tried to stave off a panic attack.
Concentrating on her breathing, head rushing with noise that had nothing to do with the words the other women were saying, she felt herself drifting away in a sea of gray, until Amy’s voice cut through.
“He kept talking about how I needed to be taught a lesson, that I had no idea what love really was, that I was just a cheap whore. Acted like it was my fault he couldn’t get it up.”
“Yeah,” Meg said, pulverizing her cigarette against the bottom of the ashtray. “Same here. Over and over, about how he had sacrificed everything for love, and I wasn’t worthy. He used that word a lot. Worthy.”
Amy was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, it wasn’t with her previous strident anger. “He knew things about me. Where I lived, my boyfriend’s name. Where I worked. Said if I disrespected him again, he’d know, come back.”
Meg shuddered, looked away, and blinked hard. Her foot stopped bouncing for a long moment. “I still live in the same place,” she said in a small voice. “Don’t have money to move.”
“Is there someone who can stay with you the next few days?” Jerry asked. “Or somewhere else you can—”
“She’s coming home with me,” Amy said, standing up and brushing her hands against her jeans as if shooing away Jerry and the memories his questions dredged up. She walked around the coffee table and placed her hands palm down on Meg’s shoulders. “Come on, Meg. We’re done here.”
Nora heard the door shut behind them but didn’t turn her head. She sat there, arms hugging her knees to her chest, not blinking.
Jerry must have escorted the others out because the door opened again a few minutes later and he sat down beside her.
“You okay?” he asked without touching her. Like he was afraid she would shatter. She wondered if maybe he was right.
“It was me. He wanted me—something from me.” Her eyes were half shut, giving her a narrow view of her gray world. “Something I couldn’t give him. It pissed him off and he kept going after other women—” She stopped herself, resting her forehead on her knees.
Jerry was silent, merely wrapping his arms around her shoulders. Somehow it wasn’t as comforting as Seth’s embrace. But then again, nothing was.
“Why me, Jerry?” she asked, her voice shredded with tears. “What does he want from me?”
28
Narolie’s face appeared calm as the sedatives finally took effect. Amanda only wished she felt as calm. Ever since one of her patients, a little baby, had almost died during an MRI, she hated coming down to that part of radiology. No one blamed her, but she couldn’t shake the guilt or the sense of doom that settled on her every time she watched a patient enter the MRI chamber.
Lucas leaned forward, squinting into the computer screen as the machine chugged and clanked and clanged. Views of Narolie’s brain appeared.
“Anything?” Amanda asked, knowing Lucas could pick up subtleties that no computer ever would.
“No,” said the radiologist sitting beside Lucas.
“Yes,” said Lucas. “Hyperintensity in the hippocampus.”
The radiologist frowned, glanced at where Lucas was pointing the tip of his pen, then slowly nodded. “You’re right.” New images appeared, magnified, and the radiologist twisted his mouth into a wry smile. “Damn it, Stone, I hate it when you do that.”
“What is it?” Amanda asked, her hand wrapping around Lucas’s arm, forgetting all about protocol or propriety. Lucas didn’t seem to mind; he covered her hand with his and gave her a quick squeeze.
“Encephalitis,” he said.
“Right,” the radiologist agreed. “Definite signs of meningeal enhancement. Usually I see this with herpes virus, but there are others.”
“West Nile, Rift Valley, Eastern equine, Chikungunya,” Lucas supplied. The litany of diseases sounded like a death knell.
“Is there a cure?”
Both men swiveled in their chairs to stare at her. “No.”
Lydia pulled the Escape into her driveway and took her gun case out of the back with regret. Shooting something would feel so good right now. Much better than this pent-up, churning anxiety—all about things she had no control over.
She jogged into the house and tossed the case onto the kitchen table, startling Ginger Cat, who was sprawled out napping in the center of the empty dining room floor. Ginger Cat deigned to flick an ear at her, then closed his eyes again.
The expression on Nora’s face still haunted her. Was there a word for more than terrified? More than exhausted? The closest she could come was despair.
Lydia banged around in the kitchen, more for the chance to make noise than actual cooking. She ended up chopping up an avocado and a tomato and tossing in some shredded carrots and cheese for her own version of guacamole and ate it scooped onto some Black Russian bread from the bakery down on Penn.
She ate standing up, as usual, wandering through her house, plate in hand. The empty corner of the dining room beckoned to her. Her long board used to stand there, a Kalama eight-foot, six-inch board with a polycarb tri-fin. If she closed her eyes she could feel the wind and surf on her face, the roll of the board beneath her feet. . . She’d been here only a few months, but already L.A. seemed a distant memory.
She wished some of those memories would stay buried. Like the memory of the day her mother was murdered. Reading the LAPD’s report, going to that crack house today . . . she couldn’t stop the memories from resurfacing. Somehow Nora’s torment and her mother’s were becoming all tangled up, screams and pain and terror mangled together, and all Lydia could do was stand by and watch, helpless.
She shuddered and stepped into the center of the empty room. Why was everyone saying she needed more stuff? she wondered as rain-cast shadows played over the polished red oak floors and the bare vanilla-apricot plaster walls. More stuff just meant more things you could lose, more stuff to be taken away from you, mourned over. . .
Ginger Cat sensed her restlessness and wound between her legs, brushing his body against her. She sat down on the bare floor, scratched him behind his ears, and was soon rewarded with a jangled rumble that was his version of a purr. Even that was no comfort. When she’d first come to this house and found Ginger Cat, he was an exotic creature, a graveyard cat that resembled a wild panther.
But now he seemed to have adopted her—had even come to accept Trey—and was spending more time inside the house. If she was around he wouldn’t let her out of his sight, as if he’d anointed himself her protector.
Domesticated.
Caged in. By walls, by people, by duty.
“This was a mistake,” Lydia said, standing up, disrupting Ginger Cat’s purr-fest. She opened one of the French doors, ignoring the frigid wind that sliced through her still-damp clothing. “Go on, shoo, you don’t belong inside.”
The cat sat back on his haunches and looked at her as if she were the crazy one.
“You should be running around, free, not caught up here—” She waved her hand at the empty space, the empty walls that created Ginger Cat’s prison. Her prison? Maybe she was the one who’d made a mistake. Maybe she was the one who wasn’t compatible with domestic life.
Maybe she was the one who needed to return to the wild.
Instead of leaving, Ginger Cat padded over to her, wound his body around her legs, placing himself between her and the door, and nudged her away from the opening with his head. Herding her. Away from danger. Back to comfort and safety.
She let go of the door, a final gust of wind swirling through the room, whistling like a banshee as it slammed the door shut. Leaning her forehead against the chilled glass, she ignored the winter wind rattling through her body and stared out at the gray.
“Why won’t you leave?” she pleaded with the cat, who answered by rubbing the side of his face against her leg. Tears pricked the back of her eyes, and she blinked furiously. Everything she’d seen and heard today and it was a damn cat who finally made her cry?
29
“So I don’t have that meningo thing?” Tank asked as Gina led him from the family room. “I’m not going to die?”
It had to say something hopeful about the boy that his first thought had been about Narolie and only now was he worried about himself. Gina smiled at the skinny teen, taking care not to touch him—not now that she knew what he had.
“No, Tank. If I’m right, you’re going to be just fine.” A screeching noise down the hall made her look up. It was Tank’s mom along with LaRose, both clattering as fast as their heels would take them. “Shit.”
“Harold!” Mrs. Trenton’s exclamation points hit mezzo-soprano as she launched herself at her son, half-hugging him, half-hauling him away from Gina. “What have you done? I was so worried!”
“He’s fine,” Gina said firmly. “Come in here, please. I’ll explain everything.” She pulled the curtain back on an open bed space. Mrs. Trenton balked at the less-than-executive-suite surroundings, so Gina added, “I’m sure you don’t want to discuss this in the middle of the hallway.”
That did the trick. Tank’s mother practically shoved him behind the curtain. LaRose tried to follow, eyes gleaming at the prospect of insider info, but Gina intervened, blocking her path. LaRose relented and turned away.
