The Girl on the Bridge

by James Hayman

  McCabe put his glove back on and once again looked down at the dead woman. He knew it was way past time to stop playing Lone Ranger and call in the cavalry before he got his own ass shot off. Still gazing into the trunk, he pulled his phone from his pocket and started to make the call.

  Thinking about it later, he wondered why he didn’t hear the footsteps coming up behind him. Maybe it was because his mind was too focused on trying to figure out why Norah had been murdered. Or who had done it. Or maybe Maggie was right when she insisted that his hearing was going. Especially when he couldn’t hear a thing she said when they sat across from each other in the back booth on a crowded night at Tallulah’s. Whichever it was, the simple fact was that McCabe neither heard nor sensed the person approaching from behind. At least, not until he felt the barrel of a small handgun thrust into the left side of his neck. He instantly dropped and started turning in an effort to grab the hand holding the gun before the shooter could fire. But it was all in vain. Just as he began the turn something hard and heavy slammed into the right side of his head.

  McCabe stumbled first to his knees and then facedown on the hard concrete floor. His world turned black. Michael McCabe, whose only experience in the ring was occasionally sparring with Brian Cleary at the Portland Boxing Club, was knocked out just as quickly and just as cold as if, for some idiotic reason, he tried going fifteen rounds with Evander Holyfield.

  Chapter 21

  MAGGIE FIGURED SHE’D listened to about as much as she could take of Heather’s sob story about her unfulfilled dreams of theatrical stardom. Even worse, thanks to her fourth or maybe it was her fifth glass of wine, the wannabe actress was starting to slur her words. While the alcohol might help loosen her tongue, Maggie needed the words that came out of her mouth to be at least minimally coherent. It was time to cut to the chase. Past time, in fact. Maggie got up from the love seat, walked behind it and stood, resting her hands on the back. A dominant position, especially given that she was nearly six feet tall, from which she could look down at Heather Loughlin as she grilled her. “Okay, Heather. It’s time for you to tell me everything you know about the girl your husband and Joshua Thorne and maybe some other fraternity brothers raped their senior year in college.”

  Heather stared up at Maggie, abruptly alert to unexpected danger. She suddenly seemed less drunk. “I don’t know what you’re talking about?”

  “Come on, Heather. Of course you know. The freshman girl Charlie and Josh Thorne and, from what I hear, a bunch of other Holden College Warriors—that’s their nickname, isn’t it, the Warriors?—the girl they gang-raped at a fraternity party in the fall of their senior year.”

  Heather stared blankly as if the question had struck her dumb.

  “Don’t just sit there and say nothing, Heather. You and Charlie were dating back then, weren’t you? Hell, you must have been. It was only a few months before he gave you—what did you call it?—the world’s smallest diamond. And it was a Saturday night so wouldn’t you, the almost fiancée, have been with him? Or at least nearby when it happened? You were at that party, weren’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Charlie would never rape anyone.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Heather reached across to get her glass from the side table. She missed. It tipped. Some wine spilled on her jeans.

  “Oh, shit.” She got up to wipe it off.

  “Sit down, Heather,” Maggie commanded. “Put the glass down. Your jeans can wait. This investigation into your husband’s murder can’t.”

  “Charlie died in a terrible accident . . .”

  “Wake up, Heather. Charlie’s death was no accident. I’ll say it as plainly as I can. I believe, and Detective Bernstein agrees with me, that your husband was murdered ten days ago in retaliation for the recent suicide of the freshman girl he attacked and raped at Holden College in the fall of his senior year. Joshua Thorne may also have been murdered for the same reason.”

  Heather paled. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Jesus Christ, Heather, please don’t give me any more of this bullshit. Josh told his wife and his wife told us that it was Josh who raped the girl first, that Charlie went second and who knows how many others came next. No pun intended. It took the girl, who was just a seventeen-year-old freshman, a few months to work up the courage to go to the college administrators and charge these two big, strong football hotshots with forcible sexual assault. In other words, rape. She had passed out by the time the others took their turns so Josh and your soon-to-be fiancé were the only ones she could name.”

  Heather looked up. Her face squeezed itself into a distorted rage. “You shut up, you fucking bitch!” she screamed. “You’re shitting on the memory of a man I loved and just buried and everything you’re saying is just bullshit!”

  Maggie leaned in further, still resting her hands on the back of the love seat and wishing she could get closer. Wishing she could get right in Heather’s face. “Bullshit?” asked Maggie. “Really? The college told the girl, the one Josh and your husband raped, that she couldn’t press charges because she’d waited too long to come forward. There was no longer any physical evidence to prove her case. And maybe more important to the college administrators, the men who did it, the rapists, were big-deal athletes. Football and lacrosse stars. The publicity backlash if it went public would have been murderous. Contributions from wealthy alumni would probably take a dive. Especially alumni who were football fans. And maybe even well-heeled female alumnae who didn’t like hearing about gang rapes by star athletes. And then, of course, who knows how many smart high school seniors would suddenly change their minds and decide their first choice college was Bates or Hamilton or who knows where. But anywhere other than Rape Central.

  “So the deans told the girl to forget about it. Told her to shut up and pretend it never happened. But that was kind of tough for her to do. Because by this time the rumor mill was in high gear and word of the rape had spread all over campus. So even if Charlie didn’t tell you about it himself, a whole lot of somebody else’s would have. Holden’s a small school. Less than two thousand students. No way you could have avoided hearing the rumors of what your husband did.”

  By this time, Heather was rigid with anger. “I told you to shut the fuck up!”

  But Maggie kept pressing. “So don’t sit there and try to hand me any more of your crap about this being the first time you ever heard about it.”

  Heather pushed herself up on wobbly legs. “Leave me alone, you fucking bitch!” she screamed. And as she screamed, she picked up her half-full glass of red wine, reared back and hurled it at Maggie’s head. Maggie barely managed to dodge the missile, which flew past her left ear and smashed into the seventy-five-inch flat-screen TV where it shattered into a million pieces. The muted screen went dark.

  “Get out of here!” Heather screamed, her hands covering her face. “I don’t want you in my house! Get out! Get out! Get out!”

  Maggie calmly wiped red wine from her face with the sleeve of her jacket. Didn’t make much difference to the jacket. The wine stains wouldn’t come out anyway. It was time to let up a little. Lowering her voice to a calm, friendly tone, she said, “Heather, I really think you’d feel a lot better if . . .”

  But Heather wasn’t done. Before Maggie could finish speaking, Heather charged Maggie, her fists clenched. She drew back her right arm to throw a fist at Maggie’s face. Moving fast for a woman her size, Toni Bernstein was up and on her, grabbing Heather from behind before the fist could land. Toni turned her and pushed her down until her body was doubled over the arm of the love seat. Bernstein then pulled both of Heather’s arms up behind her and, with the practiced ease of the veteran cop she was, snapped a pair of cuffs around the struggling woman’s wrists. Then with one hand on the back of Heather’s neck she pushed her face down into the cushions of the love seat.

  Heather struggled, arching her body, first left, then right. Trying desperately to free herself from
Bernstein’s grasp. “Let me go,” she snarled. “Let me go, you fucking bull dyke bitch!”

  But Bernstein was too strong and Heather knew it. After a minute she simply let herself go limp.

  Bernstein pulled her to her feet and frog-walked her back to her own seat and sat her down. “All right, Mrs. Loughlin. Because I know you’ve been under a lot of stress,” she said in a quietly controlled voice, “I’m going to give you two choices. Choice number one, you can stop drinking right now, sit quietly in your seat and do your best to answer Detective Savage’s questions like a responsible adult. If you promise to do that, I’ll remove the handcuffs and we can continue. But if you don’t, and this is your second option, I’m going to place you under arrest for assaulting a police officer, take you down to the station and lock you in an interview room where you can either answer Detective Savage’s questions or, if you don’t want to, you can submit to a body cavity search, change into a jumpsuit and have your cute little rear end tossed in a jail cell. The choice is yours. But if you decide to choose door number two, let me know now so I can read you your Miranda rights before we load you into my car to head downtown.”

  Chapter 22

  HEATHER LOUGHLIN SUCKED in a series of deep breaths and let them out slowly. She looked from one detective to the other before finally saying in a quiet voice, “Okay. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being rude.”

  “Rude?” asked Maggie, stifling a laugh. “You’d place your violent behavior under the category of being rude?”

  “Yes. It was rude. And yes, also violent. But you must know I’m very upset by Charlie’s death and I guess it’s obvious I’ve had too much to drink. It won’t happen again. If you would please remove the handcuffs I’ll answer your questions as best I can.”

  Maggie nodded at Bernstein and Bernstein pulled Heather to her feet and unlocked the cuffs. Heather sat back down and rubbed her wrists. “By the way,” she said to Maggie, “let me pay you for your jacket. That wine’s probably ruined it.”

  “I’d rather you just answered my questions. I need you to tell me what you know about the rape and how you know it.” Maggie took a small digital recording device from her jacket pocket. “I’m going to record what you say.”

  Heather blinked her eyes, saying nothing, apparently debating how best to tell the tale. “I should tell you I learned some of this back in 2001, the year it happened. A few of the details I only learned recently.”

  “How recently?”

  “Early January. A man I’d never met visited me and filled in parts of the story I didn’t know about. Anyway, the rape happened in the fall of my junior year at Holden. Charlie and Josh’s senior year. A Saturday night in October about a month after 9/11. I think everybody in America remembers those days after the attacks so clearly because it was all so awful and the atmosphere was so tense. Anyway, that particular Saturday night there was a rush party at the fraternity both Charlie and Josh belonged to, Alpha Chi Delta. It was considered one of the two or three best houses on campus. A lot of the football players and other athletes belonged to it.”

  “A rush party?”

  “Yes. Any freshman boys who were interested in rushing Alpha Chi were told that if they wanted to be considered for membership they’d have to show up at this party to be evaluated. Part of the evaluation was that they have to bring at least one freshman girl to the party who was good-looking enough to pass muster. If they brought two girls, it made their chances of getting in and maybe getting a bid even better.”

  “Who decides who’s good-looking enough?” asked Maggie.

  “One of the senior brothers, usually a football player, is stationed at the door and he makes the decision. The idea is that anybody who wants to become a brother has to be cool enough to bring, as they put it, one or two hot-looking babes. Otherwise they get turned away.”

  “Sounds like my husband would’ve been out of luck,” said Bernstein. “Leastways, if he’d brought me.”

  Heather actually smiled at the remark. “I don’t know. Depends what you looked like when you were eighteen.”

  “Like I look now. Only thirty years younger. Anyway, keep going with your story.”

  “There were probably a hundred people there. Dancing. Drinking beer. Making out. Just about all the girls who were there were freshmen who’d come with one or another of the potential rushees. Other than that there were probably a few local high school girls.”

  “But you’re saying you weren’t there?”

  “No. I wasn’t. The only time I ever went to an Alpha Chi rush party was my freshman year. It’s where I met Charlie so I know how the party goes. The upper classmen immediately start bird-dogging the best-looking freshman girls the boys bring to the house. It’s like the new girls on campus are, I don’t know, an offering to the older brothers. Kind of a gift to gain admission.”

  “An offering?” Maggie asked. “The freshman girls are supposed to be offerings? Is that what you called it?”

  “Yeah. I know it sounds kind of crude but it’s not really that bad. How it worked was that after they got there all the freshmen guys are herded upstairs and locked in this attic room where a couple of the upper classmen, the so-called rush committee, are stationed first to interview them and second to make sure they don’t try to escape. Meanwhile the rest of the upper classmen . . .”

  “How many?”

  Heather shrugged. “Forty or fifty. They’re at the party downstairs trying to get to meet the ‘new talent,’ as they called it. Senior boys get first pick of the best-looking girls. Juniors go second and so on.”

  “What are you telling me? That all the girls got raped?”

  “Of course not. It wasn’t like that. I’m sure the boys all would have loved to have gotten laid with one or another of the freshmen girls but I don’t think many, if any of them, actually did. The party had nothing to do with rape. Mostly they just danced and drank and, if they wanted to, they made out. If some had sex, and some probably did, as far as I know it was totally consensual.”

  “Keep going.”

  “I never heard anything about Charlie being involved in any accusations of rape until much later. The beginning of winter term after Christmas break. All I know is when we got back to campus for winter trimester, there were all these rumors swirling around campus that some freshman girl was accusing Josh and Charlie, who were well-known on campus ’cause they were the two biggest stars on both the football and lacrosse teams, and also accusing some of their other fraternity brothers of gang-raping her at Alpha Chi’s October rush party. It was all anybody on campus was talking about.”

  “And everybody knew what the girl’s name was?”

  “Yes. Hannah Reindel. She’d gone to the dean of students and accused Josh and Charlie of raping her at the rush party. She claimed Josh put drugs in her drink. Roofies, I guess. Or maybe something else. Anyway, when she started getting groggy, she said he dragged her upstairs to a room where Charlie and some other guys were supposedly waiting. She claimed that Charlie was the one who ripped her clothes off but that Josh raped her first. After that Charlie took his turn. Then a bunch of others. She said she was too groggy from the drugs by that time to remember who or how many others there were. She just said she was sure there were a bunch of them. The only names she remembered were Charlie and Josh. Maybe because they were well-known athletes or maybe because they went first. Before she passed out.”

  Chapter 23

  MCCABE WASN’T SURE how much time had passed before he slowly regained consciousness and staggered to his feet. All he knew was that he had a bitch of a headache, the side of his face felt hot and swollen, the garage door was open, cold wet air was blowing in and the car that held Norah Wilcox’s body was gone. And so was the cell phone he’d been about to use to call for help when his world went black.

  When McCabe felt steady enough to remain upright without holding on to anything he went through all his pockets looking for the phone, not really expecting to find it, which he didn’t
. Not in the pocket he usually kept it in. Not in any of the others. Next he checked to see if his Glock was still in its holster. Happily it was. But first things first. McCabe needed help and that meant he had to find the phone before he did anything else.

  It was possible it had fallen from his hand when he went down. Or perhaps when he was being dragged across the floor? It was too damned dark in the garage to see much of anything especially now that he didn’t have the help of the iPhone flashlight. He got down on his knees and started checking the floor around him, sweeping his hand from left to right, starting from where he’d regained consciousness to where he figured he must have been standing when he was looking at Norah’s body in the trunk. He couldn’t find the phone anywhere. Nothing but a whole lot of dirt and what felt like a gooey oil stain.

  Okay, he told himself, ignore the pain. Think clearly. The killer was gone. Probably to dump the body. And McCabe needed to find his phone. No reason he could think of not to turn on the lights. He pushed himself back onto his feet, half walked, half staggered toward the kitchen door. After thirty seconds of stroking the wall he found the switch and turned it on.