The Girl on the Bridge

by James Hayman

  “I guess that depends on whether or not you’re planning any further hostilities.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, then, fine. Peace. At least for now.” They sat down and when a waitress came by McCabe ordered a toasted bagel with cream cheese and black coffee. The waitress disappeared. McCabe waited for Rachel to begin.

  “I have no real excuse for what happened last night other than to say I went more than a little crazy when you told me Josh had been murdered. I felt trapped between rage, grief and a desire to punish him for the stupidity of what he’d done. Including the rape . . . rapes plural actually. I wasn’t ready to tell you about that as long as I thought he might be alive. Anyway, I’m very sorry about all that.” She smiled a thin smile. “Even though, despite your bruises, you are a good-looking man. And a good one. Some guys wouldn’t have been as restrained as you were last night.”

  McCabe let the comments and compliments pass. “Yesterday you swore to Detective Savage and me that there was no way your husband was a rapist. You insisted he was too charming. Too good-looking. It was too easy for him to attract any woman he wanted to ever need to rape anyone. Why did you decide to change your story today?”

  “Yesterday I thought or at least hoped Josh was alive. That there was some chance our lives could get back to some semblance of normal. At the time protecting him from charges of rape seemed like the right thing to do. Today I know he’s dead. Protecting his reputation is no longer the first priority. Finding his killer is.” Rachel’s pause was perfectly timed. “I think I may know who that is.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “A day or two after Josh got that call from Charlie Loughlin, I was called by a man named Evan Fischer. Fischer told me he had information about a gang rape at a Holden College fraternity party back in the fall of 2001. Information he was sure I’d want to know. I told him what I told you yesterday. That I had heard about it and questioned Josh about it and he convinced me that the charges of rape were nothing but lies. The girl who was supposedly raped was the campus slut and the sex was consensual. Not just asking for it but practically begging.”

  “Rather like you last night?”

  “It hurts when you say things like that.”

  “I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

  “I told Fischer that unless he was one of the rapists and could prove what happened I wasn’t interested in listening to his stories. Fischer begged me to at least listen to what he had to say. That he had information he was sure would convince me it was Josh who wasn’t telling the truth. At least, not the whole truth. He said he knew exactly what happened at this party and said it was even worse than I thought. I asked how he’d come by his information. He said he was there that night. If I agreed to meet with him, then he would tell me everything he knew. I thought at first that he might be one of the other rapists who supposedly ‘climbed aboard.’ I asked him if he had told Josh what he knew. He said he had and that Josh accused him of spreading lies. Threatened him with legal action and maybe worse if he continued to do so.”

  “Worse meaning physical violence?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway, I decided to hear what Fischer had to say. I decided it was stupid to ask some man I’d never met or even heard of before to come to the apartment and tell me about how he had raped someone. I also didn’t want to meet in some coffee shop or restaurant where we might be overheard. To make a long story short, I decided to take a sick day from school and asked if we could meet at one o’clock the next afternoon on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which is about a five-minute walk from my apartment. I knew there wouldn’t be too many people hanging around in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon in January but there’d be enough for me to feel safe. The forecast for the next day was sunny with a high in the low thirties so if we dressed warmly it wouldn’t even be particularly uncomfortable. I told him I’d get there early and wait for him on a specific bench.”

  “He agreed to the time and place?”

  “He did.”

  “Can you tell me what he said?”

  “I can do better than that. I recorded the entire conversation with my iPhone. Did you bring it?”

  McCabe handed over the phone “He didn’t know he was being recorded?”

  “No. But in New York it’s perfectly legal as long as one party in the conversation is doing the recording. I checked.”

  “I know that,” said McCabe. “But why did you decide to record it?”

  “To have a record. One I could confront Josh with if I ended up believing what Fischer had to say. If Fischer convinced me that Josh was lying, that he really was guilty of the gang rape, I had decided to divorce him.”

  “Where did you hide the recorder?”

  “In plain sight. I got to the designated bench early and was sitting there fiddling with my phone . . . pretending to write some texts . . . when he arrived. I just clicked on the recording app and put the phone down on the bench between the two of us. I don’t think he noticed or, if he did, he didn’t care.”

  “How long is this recording?”

  “It runs twenty minutes or so. I used an app called Voice Record Pro.”

  McCabe had the same app on his phone. It could record conversations of any length with pretty reasonable quality.

  “Have you edited it in any way?”

  “No. It’s all there just as I recorded it.” Rachel looked around. A few more people had entered the dining room. “Listen, it might be better if we listen to it in my room. I can’t play it here. Too public. And no, I won’t take my clothes off again.”

  A pair of aging biddies at a nearby table threw disapproving glances in their direction. Rachel smiled. “See, we can be overheard.”

  Did McCabe want to go back to Rachel’s room? The other option was taking the recording back to 109 but Rachel would be more relaxed answering questions here. He seriously doubted she was planning an encore striptease.

  When they got to the room Rachel sat demurely on the opposite side of the coffee table from him. She put her phone on the table and pressed Play. Initially, all McCabe heard was background noise. Wind blowing in from New York Harbor. A rumble of traffic from the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, which runs beneath the promenade. A barking dog or two. Occasional chatter from passersby. But when they started speaking Rachel’s and Fischer’s voices were loud and clear enough to hear every word. McCabe could feel Rachel watching him as he listened.

  “Rachel Thorne?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I sit down?”

  “Of course.”

  “My name is Evan Fischer. I’m an assistant professor of Behavioral Psychology at the University of New Hampshire. My specialty is studying the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, among victims of violent attack.”

  “Like in Iraq?”

  “No. I study trauma stemming from noncombat situations. Muggings. Home invasions. Heart attacks. But most specifically rape. I’ve published a number of papers on the subject if you’re interested. I also happened to have been married to Hannah Reindel.”

  “Who is Hannah Reindel?”

  “You’re not familiar with the name?”

  “No. I’ve never met anyone by that name.”

  “She’s dead now but Hannah was the young woman your husband, Joshua Thorne, picked out of a crowd of freshman girls at a fraternity party at Holden College in 2001. He drugged her, dragged her to a room where five of his fraternity brothers were waiting and raped her. He picked her out of a sea of gyrating college kids like a shark homing in on its chosen prey.”

  “A shark? Come on, Professor, isn’t that a little over the top?”

  “I don’t think so. He obviously saw someone he wanted to have sex with and he did whatever it took to get her.”

  “Josh can be very charming.”

  “This had nothing to do with charm. Your husband gave this young woman, who was a seventeen-year-old virgin at the time and who didn’t drink alcohol, a glass of sweet fruit juice laced w
ith drugs.”

  “Roofies?”

  “No way of knowing for sure but I think it must have been something stronger from her description of the effect. When the drugs hit she could barely stand up. When she was sufficiently groggy not to raise a ruckus, though the music was so loud raising a ruckus probably wouldn’t have helped, he dragged her upstairs to a filthy bedroom where half a dozen other men, all football jocks like your husband, were waiting like a swarm of pilot fish eager for the great white to bring them what they were hungry for. They locked the door, ripped Hannah’s clothes off and threw her down on a filthy bare mattress where they took turns raping her. Naturally the shark went first.”

  “The shark being Josh?”

  “Yes. When he’d had his fill of her, the others climbed on.”

  “Do you know the names of the others?”

  “Just one. Charles Loughlin. Hannah passed out after Loughlin finished with her and she was unable to identify the others. Needless to say they never came forward of their own accord. And your husband refused to provide their names. But she said there were four others. Which made six in all.”

  “How do you know this? Were you there?” asked Rachel.

  “To my everlasting sorrow I was.”

  “Were you one of them? One of these pilot fish?”

  “No. I wasn’t in the room. If I was I might have been able to stop it.”

  “Physically?”

  “Of course not. Look at me. Your husband or any of the other jocks could have beaten the shit out of me with one hand tied behind his back. But I could have called the campus cops. Threatened to report them. Sadly I wasn’t in the room. But I was in the fraternity house. I was the one who brought Hannah to the party. It was a rush party and the rules stated that any freshman guy who wanted to rush the Alpha Chi house had to bring a pretty girl as his ticket for admission. Hannah was more than pretty. She was beautiful. And, at the time, a good friend. While she wasn’t my girlfriend, after I practically begged her to come she finally agreed to be my ticket to the party. After we got there all the wannabe pledges including me were herded upstairs to a large attic room and we were locked in for hours of preliminary hazing from some of the sophomore brothers. The junior and senior brothers stayed downstairs and had their pick of the freshman girls. Your husband chose Hannah.

  “When they finally unlocked the door to the chapter room and let me and the other freshmen boys out it was after two o’clock in the morning. The place was pretty much empty except for a few drunks or druggies sleeping it off on the floor and some sofas. After we were let out the other freshman boys all left. Some with the girls they brought. Some alone. I couldn’t find Hannah but I didn’t think she’d have left without me. She didn’t have a ride or a heavy coat and it was freezing cold out.”

  “She might have gotten a ride with someone else.”

  “She might have but she didn’t. Anyway, I figured I’d better search the place before leaving without her. I went from room to room and couldn’t find her anywhere and was almost ready to give up. But then I did find her. I opened the door to one room that seemed to be used as a storage room and there she was. Lying naked and shivering, huddled into a fetal position on a dirty bare mattress. There was cum on her belly and buttocks and in her pubic hair. There were dried bloodstains on her legs.”

  “Blood?”

  “Yes, blood. Hannah went into that room a seventeen-year-old virgin. She came out the severely traumatized victim of six vicious rapists. One after another after another. Actually, it was probably more than six. I’m sure some of these so-called gentlemen went after her more than once.”

  “Dear God.”

  McCabe looked across at Rachel. Found it hard to intuit what she was thinking. Her eyes were intently focused on the phone, her attention on the words she was listening to. Words she’d certainly heard more than once before.

  “I went around the room looking for her clothes and eventually found everything except her underpants. The clothes had all been lumped together in a ball and tossed into an otherwise empty closet. I don’t know but my guess is somebody, maybe your husband, maybe one of the others, kept the underpants as some kind of sick souvenir. I helped Hannah get dressed and, because she was shivering uncontrollably, I put my winter jacket on her. We walked downstairs as best we could. She was hanging on to my arm like someone hanging on to a life preserver. The whole place was a shambles, but on the way down we didn’t see anyone awake enough to ask or answer questions. Actually, I think it would have been worse for Hannah if we had. I drove her back to her dorm and took her up to her room. When we got there she just lay down on her bed in the same fetal position she’d been in before, staring blankly for hours at nothing in particular. Not really seeing anything. The look in her eyes scared me. I now know it’s what traumatized combat veterans call the ‘thousand-yard stare.’”

  “Did you ask her what happened?”

  “Of course. But she wouldn’t say anything. She was simply mute. It was weeks before she was able to talk to me about it. But even years later describing what happened that night caused her incredible pain. She never even told her parents about what had happened, because they were . . . are . . . the kind of people who wouldn’t know how to handle what she had to say. They wouldn’t have been able to talk about it. Not uncommon. When someone they love is viciously raped like Hannah was people don’t know how to address it. A lot try to act like everything’s okay and it never really happened. I’ve run into people in my practice, well-meaning people, who behave exactly that way. Say things like, ‘You have to try to get over it,’ ‘Don’t dwell on it, try to think about your future and not what happened in that room.’ And worst of all, some actually blame the victim. A lot of cops do that. They ask things like, ‘Weren’t you really asking for it?’

  “Most people who haven’t experienced gang rape have no idea how traumatizing, how utterly disabling, an experience like that can be to a young and sensitive woman like Hannah.

  “But even before she was able to talk about it to me, I was certain she’d been raped multiple times by multiple men. There was no way it could have been anything else. I wondered at the time if any of the other freshman girls had been dragged into other rooms and raped that night or if Hannah was the only one. I think she must have been. Somebody told me later they call what happened to her winning the President’s Award.”

  “Why did they call it that?”

  “Because the president of the house gets to choose the victim.”

  “And Josh was president.”

  “Yes. Anyway, when I got her back to her dorm room, I sat there with her for a couple of hours waiting for her to show some signs of life. Waiting for her to tell me what happened. But she didn’t. All she did was to take a shower, after which she lay back down on her bed. Finally I found her winter coat in her closet, put it on her and walked her back to my car. She hadn’t even recovered enough to ask where we were going. But I drove her over to the student health center. At six A.M. on a Sunday morning there was only one nurse on duty there and I had to bang on the door to get her attention. When she finally let us in she asked Hannah what was the matter. Hannah still wasn’t responsive. So I told the nurse that, while I didn’t know for sure, I thought Hannah had been raped. The nurse looked at me kind of squirrelly and asked if it was me who had raped her. That’s when Hannah finally spoke. She looked up and said, ‘No it wasn’t Evan. He wasn’t there. It was a bunch of other guys.’

  “‘How many?’

  “‘I don’t know. A lot.’

  “The nurse put her arm around Hannah’s shoulders and tried to comfort her. She told her she was very sorry but there was nothing they could do for Hannah there. That she’d have to go to the hospital in Plattsburgh and have a rape kit done and that the police would have to be brought in. Hannah listened for a couple of minutes. But when the nurse was in the middle of explaining what a rape kit was and what Hannah would have to go through to get the evidence they’d need to
prove the rapes she suddenly just turned around and walked out. I called for her to come back but she didn’t. I followed her to my car. She was sitting in the passenger seat and told me to take her back to her dorm. I wanted to drive her to the hospital. She said no and we argued about it for a little while but in the end I listened to her. I know now that the hospital in Plattsburgh, the Champlain Valley Medical Center, is exactly where we should have gone if your husband or any of the others were ever going to be punished for their crimes. I also know that an invasive internal examination and questioning by detectives wasn’t something that someone as sensitive as Hannah could have handled at the time. But back then I was just this innocent goofy kid who was hopelessly in love with this beautiful girl who didn’t love him back and when she said, ‘I’m not letting those people touch me. I’m not going to let anyone touch me there again. Not ever. Take me back to my dorm,’ I simply wasn’t strong enough to argue with her so I did what she asked.

  “I dropped her off outside her dorm room and watched her walk inside. I can still see every step she took vividly. Possibly the most painful thirty seconds I’ve ever experienced in my life. After she went through the door I sat in the car and began weeping. I blamed myself for everything that had happened to Hannah that night. Told myself it was my fault. I was the one who wanted to join this stupid fraternity. I was the one who asked . . . Christ, I actually begged Hannah to come to this party with me. I was, God forgive me, actually excited at first to see that the girl I’d brought to the party was dancing with the guy I knew was president of the fraternity and quarterback of the football team.”

  “You knew who Josh was?”

  “Everybody on campus knew. He was a star. When I didn’t see them anymore I stupidly thought she and Josh were together and Hannah was telling Josh what a cool guy I was and how they should make me a brother. Fat chance.

  “Anyway, Hannah avoided me for the next couple of weeks and I was too shy and too consumed with guilt about what I had done to go anywhere near her. But finally she called me and asked me if I would come pick her up with my car and take her for a ride. We drove for a couple of hours mostly on back roads going nowhere in particular and, after swearing me to secrecy, she managed to tell me, in fits and starts, most of what went on in that room. At least the parts that happened before she passed out. I told her she had to go to the police. Rape is a crime and these people had to be arrested. She told me she couldn’t handle standing up in public and telling people—the police, lawyers, judges and others—what had happened to her.”