by Kylie Brant
“I’m sorry to have to bother you again. I know this is difficult. We’ve got the other reports, but we just have a few more questions.” He purposefully left the chair closest to Billings for Abbie, figuring the woman wouldn’t want a man anywhere near her right now. Although when they’d made their introductions, she hadn’t paid any more attention to Phillips than she had to him.
“Hi. I’m Abbie Phillips.”
Ryne glanced up in the midst of taking out the victim questionnaire they’d prepared for this case to see Abbie leaning forward in her chair, addressing Billings. “If you don’t feel up to this now, Barbara, we can come back later. Or if at any time you want to call a stop, we can, and wrap it up another time.”
Billings looked at her, really looked at her, and in a flash, Ryne realized Phillips knew what she was doing. Establishing a rapport. Placing empathy above the task at hand. Grudgingly, he acknowledged it was working. For the first time since they’d entered the room, the woman was making eye contact with one of them.
“I’d just as soon get it over with.”
Abbie nodded. “Okay. You probably haven’t had time to call the rape crisis center, but you were given a card, right?”
The woman’s gaze slid away as she gave a jerk of her head.
“Counseling will help. It’s hard taking that first step, but after you do, you’ll see.”
“That’s what I tried to tell her.” Nancy Billings was fluttering behind the couch, as if to protect her daughter from what was to come. But Ryne knew that no one could protect Barbara from what lay ahead of her. And though he wasn’t a fan of shrinks, from the report he’d read, the woman would do well to follow Phillips’s advice. She was lucky to be alive. But she was going to need help remembering that.
“The downside is, after you find out for yourself, you’ll have to admit your mom was right.”
Abbie’s words didn’t bring a smile to Billings’s face, but her expression lightened a little. “She does like to hear that. Maybe I’ll make her day tomorrow.”
“Sounds like a win-win to me.”
Ryne recognized the opening he’d been given. “Ms. Billings, your statement said you were attacked inside your home. When did you first become aware you weren’t alone?”
The blood drained from the woman’s face. “I went in through the garage entrance and dropped my purse and keys on a small table in the hallway. Then I went to the front door and opened it to get the mail. I don’t always lock the garage entrance. I mean, I have an electric door opener with no other way into the garage, and I’d shut that after me. But I know I locked the front door when I came back inside with the mail.”
“Your mailbox is next to the front door, right?”
She nodded. “I don’t even have to step out of the house. I just reached to get it from the mailbox, then shut the door. I’m sure I locked it.” Her fingers plucked at the edge of the quilt and she looked up at her mother, as if for reassurance. “I always lock it.”
He was losing her. Ryne recognized the note of panic in her voice, saw her mother respond to it with a hand on her shoulder, a frown directed at him. But before he could say anything else, Abbie put in smoothly, “If your mail is anything like mine, it’s mostly junk. Did you look at it right away after you locked the door?”
And that neatly, she snapped Billings out of the self-doubt that had begun gnawing at her. “Mine is mostly bills, actually. There’s this place you can write to get your name off the junk mailing list. I did that a couple years ago and it really helped.”
Abbie’s voice was easy. “Sometimes I just let mine pile up and go through it all after a few days, and others I go through every single piece right then. Depends on my mood, I guess.”
There was an imperceptible easing of tension from the other woman’s frame. “I like things neat. I always go through it right away. I had a letter from my aunt that day, and I opened it in the hallway and was reading it on my way into the kitchen. She just had a hip replacement, and she was letting me know how she came out. I put the letter by the phone, so I could read it to my mom later. And I put the bills on a little desk I have in the kitchen.”
“Did you open them first?” Ryne was running a mental clock in his head, trying to figure the amount of time that must have elapsed since she’d come in the garage door.
She shook her head. “I pay bills every other week. I just put them where I keep the others. Then I went to the refrigerator, to get an idea for dinner. And when I turned around . . .” Her voice faltered. “That’s when I saw him.”
“Where was he?”
Billings hugged the quilt closer around her. “In the dining room. My house has a galley kitchen with an attached dining area. He was just standing there, all relaxed like, leaning a shoulder against the wall.” Her voice had begun to shake.
“What did you do?”
“I screamed. I think more than once. He didn’t come at me right away. He waited until I ran for the sliding glass doors before grabbing me from behind and throwing me to the floor. And then he started hitting me.” Her fist clenched, and pounded lightly in her lap to punctuate her words. “Over and over and over.”
The bruises on her face were neon reminders of her ordeal. From the pictures they’d seen earlier, he knew they were the least of her injuries.
“Why don’t you bring Barbara something to drink? A water or iced tea.” Ryne directed the words toward Nancy Billings without ever looking away from the younger woman. It was rare for him to conduct an interview with another family member present, but Barbara had flatly refused to meet with them alone. When the older woman moved to obey, he said, “Did you notice anything missing from the kitchen before you tried running? Anything out of place?”
The question seemed to puzzle Barbara. She frowned, shook her head. “I wasn’t taking inventory. I was looking around for a way out, a way to . . .” Her words stopped abruptly, as if realization had just slammed into her. “The knives were gone.”
He exchanged a glance with Abbie.
“I keep a cutlery set on the counter. When I was screaming, I looked for the knives, for something to defend myself with, and they were gone.”
Which meant the attacker had probably been inside before the woman came home, Ryne thought grimly. “Where else did he hit you? How many times?”
“The . . . the face, mostly.” Her mother had reentered the room with a glass of iced tea, which she pressed into her daughter’s hands. “And the stomach, too, but mostly the face. I lost count of how often.”
“Were you resisting?”
Her nod was jerky. “At first. I was struggling like a wild thing, trying to slug him, scratching and kicking.”
“Do you think you might have marked him? Scratched him maybe?” In her earlier statement she’d described the man as covered completely in black. Long-sleeved black shirt, gloves, black jeans, and tennis shoes. With no bare skin showing, the chance of him sustaining an injury from a scratch would be slight.
“I don’t think so.” The glass was clutched tightly in the woman’s hands, and she looked down at its contents. “He had a face mask on with slits for the eyes, nose, and mouth. And he wore gloves. I would never be able to identify him.”
“No. But maybe you remember other details. His height, his build . . .” Billings was shaking her head before he finished the statement.
“I don’t know. I’d just be guessing. I’m not good at that kind of thing anytime, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. I just don’t know.”
“When you were fighting with him in the dining area, how much taller than you did he seem?” Abbie asked.
Billings shrugged, sending her a helpless look. “It was like my mind shut down and all I could do was react. And after he slugged me, I was kind of out of it. I felt a needle jabbing into my arm, and things are hazy after that.”
Abbie reached out, covered Barbara’s clenched fist with her hand. “That’s understandable. Basic survival instinct kicking in. And whatever he gave y
ou was designed to leave you foggy.”
“Try thinking back again to when you first saw him,” Ryne suggested. “Do you have anything hanging on the wall he was leaning against?”
Her brow furrowed. “Sure. Some framed antique prints of early 1800 Savannah. And a shelf with some old tins.”
“Which was he closest to?”
Barbara sent a puzzled look from Ryne to Abbie. “The shelf of tins.”
“Where was his head in comparison with the shelf when he was leaning against that wall? Above the shelf? Below it? Even with it?”
Understanding dawned in the woman’s expression. “Below it. The shelf is six feet from the floor?” Her gaze swung to her mother, who nodded. “We hung it when I moved in. Took us forever to get it straight.” She swallowed, looked away. “The top of his head was about five inches or so below the shelf.”
The rise in inflection at the end of the sentence was more question than statement, but it was something, Ryne supposed. If she was accurate at all in her estimate, the man would have been around five foot nine when he was standing upright.
“What about his build? Was he stocky? Slender?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t big. My ex weighed about one ninety and this guy wasn’t near as big as him. But he was really, really strong. I couldn’t get away no matter how hard I tried.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper.
Abbie nudged the hand Barbara held the glass in. “Take some time, Barbara. Drink. Go on.” She waited until the woman had obeyed, then sent her an encouraging smile. “You’re doing great. And you’re still fighting him. With every detail you give us, you’re bringing us closer to catching him, so keep fighting, okay? This won’t take much longer.”
A reluctant respect bloomed in Ryne when he saw the tremulous smile the woman sent Phillips. She was proving more useful than he would have thought, although given his initial reaction, that wasn’t saying much.
“You said things got hazy after he injected you.” Ryne watched Barbara’s hand creep up to clasp her mother’s, where it lay comfortingly on her shoulder. “At any time did you lose consciousness?”
“I think I must have. Because the next thing I remember, we were in my bedroom.” She shuddered, squeezed her mother’s hand hard. “I was lying on the bed naked, and my hands were tied together, above my head.”
“Can you show me the position they were in?” Ryne set down his pen and held his wrists together. “Were the palms facing inward? Or were they side by side like this?”
“They . . . they were . . .” Something seemed to snap inside the woman and her voice rose. “What difference does it make? I mean, really? How my hands were tied or how many times he hit me. How is that going to help? How is any of this going to help?”
“Maybe you both should go,” Nancy Billings put in. She rounded the couch and sat down close to her daughter, slipping an arm around her shoulders.
“It’s important because you don’t know who raped you, Barbara.” Abbie waited for the woman to look at her before going on. “Neither do we. But we do know the guy has been doing this for a while, and there’s a reason he hasn’t been caught. So every minute detail you can provide helps us, because then we put it together with other tiny little details. It’s kind of like one of those thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles. You know the ones?”
The woman gave a slow nod, her gaze fixed on Abbie’s.
“You dump out the box and you’ve got like two hundred pieces of sky and you wonder how in the world you’re ever going to put them all together. And if even one of those pieces is missing, there’s a chance you might not get the others to fit. That’s why everything you can tell us is critical. Things that seem inconsequential to you might be important to us because it helps us build a picture of the man who attacked you. A guy like this has a ritual, and the more we know of it, the better we can predict his behavior.”
Barbara moistened her lips. “You believe . . . you think he’ll do this again.”
“He will.” Ryne wished he didn’t have reason to be so positive about that fact. “You weren’t his first and you won’t be his last. Unless we can stop him.”
“Perhaps we should do this another time,” Nancy Billings murmured to her daughter. “After you’re stronger.”
“No.” Barbara let out a long shuddering breath. “The sooner they can get started, the sooner he can be caught.” She held her wrists out in front of her, palms pressed together. “I was tied like this. I don’t know what he used.”
“What about your legs? Were they bound, too?”
Billings shook her head. “No. I kicked at him a few times. At least I tried. But whatever he gave me. . .I was so weak. I don’t think I hurt him.”
“What was his reaction each time you resisted?” Ryne went back to the questionnaire.
“He’d hit me again. In the face and head. Sometimes on the breasts. He’d just pound on me until I stopped trying to fight at all. I just. . .I just wanted him to stop hitting me.”
“Of course you did.” Abbie’s tone was reassuring. “And the fact that you quit resisting didn’t affect the outcome, Barbara. Nothing you did could have changed things. None of this was your fault.”
“He never spoke at all.” The woman rubbed with her thumb at the condensation that had formed on the glass she still held. “Not once. That made it even more terrifying. It was like he wasn’t even human. And nothing I said, not when I cried and pleaded, nothing made any difference.”
Although her words weren’t quite steady, she seemed to have found a well of inner strength to draw on. And that proved helpful as Ryne led her painstakingly through every detail of the attack. How the victims reacted to the process depended a great deal on the individual. Some dissolved into tears or withdrew completely. Others were reluctant to share the most degrading aspects of the rape, as the horror was revisited in the retelling.
Billings seemed to shift away, as if disassociating herself. She didn’t appear aware of her mother’s tight grip on her hand. Of Abbie’s compassionate expression. Her recital was flat, devoid of expression. And maybe all the more gruesome for it.
Like the other victims, once she’d been injected, her memory got foggy. She did remember that the rapist never undressed, which was in keeping with the statements from the other rape victims. She could recall the types of sexual assault inflicted, but was unable to list them in sequence or recall the exact number. She was able to describe with sickening clarity the nature of the paraphernalia used on her, the excruciating pain, and the torment that had seemed endless.
But despite her cooperation, by the time Ryne had neared the end of the questionnaire, he had little new information to add to their file on the rapist.
“Ms. Billings, do you recall any sudden changes in the rapist’s behavior?” When she shook her head, he pressed, “There wasn’t any certain moment in which he seemed to escalate to even more violence?”
Her voice was bitter. “He was violent from the first minute he touched me. But the only time he seemed out of control was when I resisted. Most of the time I had the impression he didn’t have any feelings at all.”
That perception could be owed to the mask the man wore, Ryne figured. Without a visual clue of the man’s emotions during the assault, he’d seem even more inhuman.
Or it just might be an eerily accurate depiction of a psychopath.
“At any time did he seem to experience sexual dysfunction?”
Ryne looked at Abbie as she asked the question. It was one of the last on his questionnaire, but she hadn’t seen the prepared list.
Billings just shrugged helplessly. “Like I told the other detectives at the hospital, after he shoved that needle in my arm, I wasn’t that aware of him, you know? It was like all my other senses faded except for feeling. Sensation was heightened unbearably. Like it wasn’t enough for him to rape me, nearly kill me,” she went on bitterly. “He had to give me something to make it even more painful.”
And that, Ryne thought, migh
t be the one most critical detail they had about the scum they were looking for. Certainly it jibed with what the other victims reported.
“Have you received any calls or notes from unidentified persons lately? Either before or after the assault?”
“No.” But then the import of his words seemed to strike her and her gaze flew to his, stricken. “Oh God. You think he’ll try to contact me?”
“Probably not. But if you get any strange messages, let us know, all right?”
She seemed to shrink back into the quilt, as if trying to make herself disappear. And Ryne knew she wasn’t going to hold up much longer. “What’s the last thing you remember before he injected you the second time?”
Her chin sank to her chest. “He was packing up. Putting things away and I remember thinking, ‘Finally. Maybe he’ll kill me or just leave.’ And I really didn’t care which. I just wanted it to be over.” She swallowed hard, pulled the quilt more tightly around her. “And then he jabbed me with that needle again, and I . . . I got so mad all of sudden. I couldn’t stop thinking, why me? What had I ever done to deserve this? Things started to get fuzzy again, but I was so angry that he was going to get away with this. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to kill him. And then my hands were free.” The quilt was shaking now with the force of her shudders. “I don’t know how, he must have freed them, but I tried to sit up and swing at him. I think I hit him. I was aiming for his face.” Nancy Billings reached out to hug her, and Barbara seemed to crumple into her mother’s embrace. “He went crazy, and this time when he started punching me . . . I must have blacked out. Because I don’t remember anything until I woke up in the water.”
“Was he gone then?”
She didn’t seem to hear his question. “I thought I was going to drown. My mouth was taped and the water kept getting higher until it would get in my nose unless I pressed my face against the top of the cage.” Her voice broke then, and she buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. “It was just like being locked in a nightmare. Only I couldn’t wake up. I couldn’t ever wake up.”
They wouldn’t get more from her today. Ryne flipped his notebook shut, feeling suddenly ancient. The wrecked and weeping woman on the couch was oblivious to them, caught in a vivid wash of memory that might never weaken.
