BRIANNA DENISON
Of all the nights we spent in Reno, none seemed as silent as the night of 19 January, 2008. The university car park was empty. There were no cars in College Drive either. The Terrace, a bar where, on Saturdays, they played music and held barbecues, was closed and dark.
“I think there’s some event going on elsewhere in the city,” Ángela said. “All the students must be there.”
We had got into the habit of going for a walk after supper, from our house as far as the lake on the campus, but that night we couldn’t. The girls refused to go.
“Don’t you want to see the swan?” I asked Sara.
“No,” she said.
“Why not?”
“It feels like something bad is about to happen,” Izaskun said, answering for her sister.
When we read the Reno Gazette-Journal on Monday, January 21, those words seemed like a premonition. The news was on the front page: on that same silent Saturday night, Brianna Denison, a nineteen-year-old student at Santa Barbara University in California, who had come back to Reno, her hometown, for the snowboarding festival SWAT 72, had been kidnapped from the home of the friends she was staying with.
The newspaper showed a small map of the scene of the kidnapping. The house was almost next to ours, on the junction of Sierra Street and College Drive. It was only fifty or sixty yards from our door to theirs.
The article gave more details. The pretty petite young woman, only five foot tall and weighing about a hundred pounds, had been kidnapped after attending a concert in the park next to the Truckee river, while she was asleep on a sofa just a few feet from the front door. According to the police, the criminal had acted alone and had simply opened the door and carried her off. The girl’s friends, sleeping in the other bedrooms, had heard nothing. Nor it seemed had the friend’s dog, which was also in the house, because it didn’t even bark. Since the front door was made of glass panes through which you could see into the interior of the house, it was possible that the whole thing had happened by chance, and that the predator saw the girl through the glass door and decided there and then to commit the crime. The police, however, thought it more likely that the criminal had seen his victim beforehand, perhaps at the Hotel-Casino Sands Regency, where she’d had a meal before the concert, and that he had followed her back to the house.
On Tuesday there was more information. The police were linking the kidnapping with the sexual assaults that had taken place near the university in the last few weeks. In both cases, the victims had been girls of slight build, like Brianna. The newspaper repeated the information published when those two assaults had taken place: the first on October 22, 2007 in the Whalen Parking Complex, the second on November 13 in the parking lot of 401 College Drive.
“We’re in his territory,” I said to Ángela.
“Right in the middle,” she said, and we both looked through the window at the house where the kidnap had taken place. It was a really pretty house and had recently been repainted a reddish colour.
We were trapped beneath a taut membrane, which captured and amplified every sound, every movement: the police sirens, the clatter of helicopters overhead, the checkpoints on the exits from the interstate, the interrogations that took place in the street itself and in people’s houses. In the normally deserted area around Izaskun and Sara’s school, there were now policemen apparently called up from the reserves. And they weren’t the only people who were armed. Some fathers went to pick up their children wearing a gun at their waist.
At night, I was aware of a kind of vibration, the effect of everything that had happened during the day, and I found it hard to sleep. The police had told us that the criminal was probably still going about his normal life in the area between North Virginia Street and Rancho San Rafael Park and between the McCarran beltway and the I-80. As Ángela said, College Drive was right in the middle.
When I couldn’t sleep, I saw things differently. I would look out into the garden and discover suddenly that the trees growing behind the hut formed a small wood, full of shadows and hiding places; I would look up at Earle’s house and realise that the windows facing College Drive corresponded to the rooms reserved for guests, not to the kitchen or the living room, and that, should the predator decide to visit us, Earle would be unlikely to notice anything. Then again, the windows of the girls’ bedroom were less than six feet from the ground. More importantly, Izaskun was about the same height and weight as Brianna. She might still only be an adolescent, but could pass for a petite young woman.
Ángela and I were the first people to be interrogated by the police. Had we seen anything odd on the night of January 19 to 20? No, but we had seen something odd that afternoon. A well-dressed man had got out of a limousine and dumped a leather suitcase in one of the trash cans in the street.
“Which trash can was it, exactly?” one of the policemen asked, stepping out onto the porch. I showed him.
The police came back a second time. Thinking it was Ángela, I opened the door in my dressing gown, my face still covered in shaving foam, and I felt so embarrassed that I couldn’t understand what they were saying until Izaskun and Sara came and translated for me. They had come to search the house. I let them in and they searched the garden, the raccoon’s hut and the cellar.
“Good idea,” one of the policemen said when he saw that the small cellar windows, at ground level, were covered with pages taken from newspapers and magazines. This had been Mary Lore’s idea. She knew that Izaskun and Sara used to play there and thought that the criminal might be able to see them from the usually deserted passageway that led from the garden into College Drive.
February arrived and with it came cold weather and grey skies, the latter something of a rarity in Nevada. On the 2nd, it snowed. The 3rd was a brilliant day of blue skies. On the 4th it snowed again. Indifferent to these meteorological changes, the Reno Gazette-Journal kept us up to date on the police investigation: the bloodstain on the pillow Brianna Denison had used belonged to the girl herself and so could not provide a D.N.A. sample from the criminal. The investigation was taking a different direction now. The police were questioning registered sex offenders who had committed rape or acts of paedophilia in the past. They appealed to the public to help, but not to call the police with mere trivia. Too many calls would simply slow down the investigation.
The vibration affected the whole city now. Female students going home at night took taxis laid on by the university. Posters bearing a photograph of Brianna Denison were put up in supermarkets and tied with blue ribbons to traffic lights and bridges and to the street lamps along by the Truckee river. The police also distributed reproductions of an Identikit picture of the criminal, based on descriptions given by the two students who had been attacked earlier: a simian, Neanderthal face, difficult to imagine as a real face. Can you really recognise someone without knowing what their eyes or voice are like? Every time I looked at the Identikit picture on my way to the library, it seemed to me that without eyes or voice, many bodies would be completely interchangeable.
“Oh, I agree absolutely,” Dennis said, when I mentioned this to him. “You could take that picture and create another hundred different faces on the computer.”
On the 7th, the temperature rose, and the piles of snow that had accumulated in shady areas melted and filled the streets with puddles. On the 8th it froze again, and the membrane covering the town seemed to lose its ability to vibrate, leaving a dead, lethargic calm. More cold days followed, more icy temperatures. The town seemed to have just one inhabitant: him. He moved about freely, getting on with his normal life, going to work, perhaps even teaching at the university and going back home to sleep. What’s more, months earlier, one of the girls he had raped before kidnapping Brianna Denison had said – and the newspaper quoted her words again now – that he was clearly a professional rapist who, as Dennis had told me, shaved his pubic region so that not a single hair or any other organic substance would betray his D.N.A.
The 12th was different.
Sara slipped on the steps when we were leaving for school and banged her head, an injury that, at first, seemed rather serious. She kept falling asleep on the way to the McCarran Medical Centre, and we had to shout at her to keep her awake. The anxiety of the next few days – she was kept under observation for forty-eight hours – freed us from the situation we had been living through. Our fear of what might happen to Sara was far greater than our fear of the criminal.
On the 16th, at around five in the morning, I picked up that day’s copy of the Reno Gazette-Journal from the porch and went into the kitchen to read it. The news was all over the front page. Brianna Denison had been found strangled on a piece of waste ground near the airport.
The whole town was shaken. There was a continual wailing of sirens, but nothing happened. It soon became clear that the only hope was that he would try again – rapists always do – and that the victim would be able to use a pepper spray on him or shoot him. Otherwise, only a tip-off would lead to his arrest.
We couldn’t leave Reno. Izaskun and Sara had to stay until the end of the school year, and Ángela still had work to do at the university. As Adam García, the police chief in charge of the case, put it, we must carry on as normal, but without allowing ourselves to succumb to a false sense of security. We must remain vigilant.
REVIEW AND SUMMARY OF WHAT HAPPENED IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING BRIANNA DENISON’S KIDNAPPING
SNOW
It snowed in Reno on the three days after the kidnapping, on January 20, 21 and 22. Every flake that fell was like a word, always the same word, the one we heard everywhere: Rape! Rape! Rape! It gave me a headache. One morning, I noticed raccoon tracks on the snow covering the garden porch, and for a few hours, until Ángela calmed me down, I was gripped by the absurd belief that our raccoon had turned rabid. I wondered, too, how we would defend ourselves if the criminal attacked at night, and when I found a ski pole in the cellar, I decided to keep it under the bed, just in case.
When it stopped snowing, there was a void, like the silence when an engine suddenly stops running.
THE HELICOPTER
As soon as the weather improved, the helicopter started patrolling the skies over Reno. You would often hear it during the day and at night as well.
I called in at the Center for Basque Studies and found Mary Lore looking very depressed.
“He’ll kill her, I’m sure of it,” she said.
When I went to buy a coffee from the stall outside the library, I repeated this remark to Earle and Dennis.
“It’s not that he will kill her,” Earle said. “The girl’s already dead.”
“We mustn’t lose hope, Bob,” Dennis said, and his eyes grew moist with tears.
I asked about the security helicopter.
“I think they’re looking for the vehicle,” Earle said.
“Probably,” Dennis said. “In any case, there’s loads of information on the Internet. People are giving the police various clues to follow up. We mustn’t lose hope.”
SPECIAL AGENTS
A note published in the Reno Gazette-Journal on January 23 informed readers of the arrival from Chicago of policemen who specialised in investigating sex crimes.
The snow returned. It was snowing in town, in the Sierra Nevada, in the desert. The cold crept in through the cracks in doors and windows.
RENO POLICE BULLETIN
Eight days after the kidnapping, on January 28, 2008, the Reno police published a bulletin, a single, well-produced sheet on high-quality paper. It bore a photograph of Brianna Denison and asked the public to collaborate in the task of tracking down the criminal. It added that Brianna’s kidnapper and the man who committed the sexual assault that took place on December 16, 2007 in Terrace Drive were one and the same person, which meant that they had a D.N.A. sample.
“It is important to know that because the D.N.A. that has been collected is valid and conclusive, any person who is brought to police attention can be easily, definitively, and unobtrusively eliminated or identified as a suspect.”
The bulletin ended with descriptions of the suspect and the victim.
DESCRIPTION OF THE SUSPECT
“White male, approximately 28 to 40 years old, taller than 5 feet 6 inches but not excessively so; a stomach that was described as not excessively large and firm but not flabby; an “innie” belly button, shaved pubic region, a light covering of hair on his arms; and facial hair about a quarter to a half an inch long below his chin which was soft.”
DESCRIPTION OF THE VICTIM. BRIANNA ZUNINO DENISON
“19 years old, 60”, 98lbs, long dark brown hair, blue eyes, her nose is pierced on the right side, and she has a scar on her left knee. She was last seen wearing a white tank top with pink angel wings, rhinestones and ‘Bindi’ on the back and pink sweat pants.”
A BABY’S SHOE
The police bulletin added a detail to the description of the criminal’s car. One of his previous victims had noticed a baby’s shoe underneath the passenger seat.
MESSAGE TO L.
How easy everything is in that story about the glass slipper. “The gentleman made Cinderella sit down and, placing the shoe on her foot, he saw that it fitted perfectly. Her two sisters were astonished, and even more astonished when Cinderella produced the second shoe from a bag and put it on her other foot.” Outside the story, though, things are much more complicated. If the police had found the baby’s shoe seen in the criminal’s car, and then scoured Sparks and Reno, trying it on every baby they found, the result would have been a useless list of a thousand or more addresses. Magic doesn’t exist in real life.
QUICK RESPONSE FROM L.
No, magic doesn’t exist. I was taking a new, supposedly miracle drug to combat diabetes. But it has no effect on me whatsoever, and the doctors have advised me to stop taking it. Not to worry, though. They assure me that soon other drugs will become available, and that one of them will cure me.
THE FIRST SUSPECTS
According to the Reno Gazette-Journal, they had done D.N.A. tests on thirty-four registered sex offenders who lived near the university. Since all these tests proved negative, they would have to widen their search to all of Reno and Sparks. Collections would be made at football and basketball matches to pay for these tests.
The newspaper published photographs taken in different parts of the town. These showed posters tied onto street lamps with blue ribbons and bearing a message directed at the criminal: “Bring Bri Back.”
DENNIS’S CONTRIBUTION
The five of us, Mary Lore, Earle, Dennis, Ángela and myself, were having lunch in the university diner. Mary Lore was feeling very low. It had been two weeks since Brianna Denison was kidnapped, and the ubiquitous blue ribbons had an increasingly hopeless air about them. The criminal was still at large, and it didn’t seem as though it was going to be easy to track him down.
“They’ll find him,” Earle said. “That shoe will be the clincher, I reckon. The mother of the child is bound to have her suspicions. Men don’t usually shave off their pubic hair.”
“Perhaps she knows, but doesn’t want to report her partner,” Mary Lore said.
Earle disagreed.
“Any accomplice to a kidnapping risks spending the rest of her life in jail. I’m sure she’ll think it through, and if she wants to go on living with her child, then her only option is to go to the police.”
“Maybe she’s very submissive and doesn’t dare,” Ángela said.
Earle made a gesture as if he were cutting his throat.
“She’d better dare, because she’s risking her own life.”
I told them what I had written to L. After all, Cinderella had a fairy godmother to rely on, but the Reno police had only themselves.
“I’ve made my contribution,” Dennis said.
We waited for him to explain. He hesitated.
“Come on, Dennis. You’re among mature adults,” Earle said. “Well, three mature adults and one old man.”
“It was something I read in Lolita th
at gave me the idea,” Dennis said. “The paedophile in the novel hires the services of a prostitute who looks like a child. I thought that perhaps there might be such prostitutes in the brothels of Nevada. And it turns out that they do offer that service. They take on prostitutes who are over eighteen, but who still have the body of a child. To attract paedophiles, I suppose.”
He paused.
“Brianna is or was very petite. And so was the girl he raped last year. He has a taste for little girls. He’s like Humbert Humbert.”
Dennis looked at us.
“I mean the character in Lolita,” he explained.
“I hope he isn’t like Humbert Humbert,” I said. “Not only was he extremely intelligent, he also had access to divine help. God got him out of every sticky situation he got into.”
“I’m sure he’s not like him,” Earle said.
Dennis continued to expound his theory:
“Well, I just thought that a man with those tastes would probably go to brothels and would choose prostitutes who looked like children. If so, the cameras in the brothels would have filmed him on various occasions. I told the police they should analyse those images and ask the prostitutes if they remembered any client of theirs who had a shaved pubic region, for example. They seemed very interested.”
“A very good idea, Dennis,” Mary Lore said, and we all agreed.
Earle whispered to me:
“If the police took up his suggestion, they’d be faced by the same situation as they would with the baby’s shoe. They’d have a list of hundreds of men.”
Dennis asked what he was saying, and Earle patted him on the back.
“I was just saying that prostitutes tend to have very poor memories when they talk to the police.”
Nevada Days Page 24
