Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [33]
Under the tinctures created by the lamp—cobalt, ultramarine, magenta, rose—her body looked like a Romantic sculpture splattered by a madman in a purple haze. It made me feel ashamed to see her so exposed, and yet I kept on looking, because the more I looked, the more I could see the assault in progress, as if it had been conjured.
“What kind of shoes did the assailant wear?” I asked.
“I have no clue.”
“Were they sneakers? Sandals? Boots?”
I already knew the answer.
“Boots,” breathed the girl.
She was right. “Anything special you remember about them?”
“They were clean.”
“New?”
“Polished.”
I nodded.
“Thank you. Thank you very much.”
“I was thinking you might want a forensic photographer to document this,” Nancy suggested.
“Yes, I would.”
Blunt-force injuries such as those sustained by hammers or shoes create rapid tissue compression, which results in bruising and bleeding below the skin. The contusions on Juliana’s back would have been clearly visible to the naked eye, but the impression of the weapon used to cause them would not. Now, out of the anarchistic splotching, there appeared a glow-on glow, a ghostly memo, as if sent by the offender in almost-invisible ink.
“What?” Juliana asked, craning her neck. “Where is it?”
“On your lower back,” Nancy said.
“What’s the big deal? I can’t feel anything.”
“He left a partial imprint,” said the nurse matter-of-factly. “It’s pretty clear. It’s the sole of a shoe. At some point he must have stepped on your back.”
Stamped on her back, while Juliana lay on her stomach, unconscious. Stamped, she should have said, since she had promised to tell the truth, trampled or stamped, using the full weight of the boot with his body behind it, blunt-force heavy impact.
Juliana’s mouth turned down, and she emitted a series of guttural screams.
“Get it off me! Get it off!”
A Wood’s lamp is a coherent light that causes materials and messages to luminesce. This particular message was clear as day: the offender had declared that he was a powerful and commanding man and the rest of us bugs under his feet.
Juliana wanted the impression “off!” like a spider crawling up her back, “off!”—and her cries were hideous and freakish squawks; her twisting, flailing arms kept beating us away; the curtains buckled, the lamp, discarded, rolled upon the floor, spinning wild purple rays around the darkened room.
The lug-soled design of a size-ten boot floated in and out like a wondrous charm.
Nine.
Something happened to Andrew and me that night. After Juliana was released, we came back to my place and drank enough tequila to shine our own black light on those illicit dungeon doors—the ones that appear only, under the right conditions, in total darkness. Once you find them and you enter, certain things are left behind that cannot be reclaimed between two people.
Most of all, after the physical ordeal of the case, I wanted comfort. I wanted us to bleach our sins with astringent soap and scalding water, and make love, and fall asleep like new puppies in a box full of clean sheets. I wanted the relief of knowing that despite the roughneck ride we were on, we could always return to the kind of private shelter we had discovered at the Sandpiper, the very first weekend we went away together, where, at dusk, on windswept Moonstone Beach, we had walked until our fingers froze, and came back and lit candles and lay in the bathtub in the steamed-up motel bathroom, hot as a sauna, and told our secrets. I remember resting my head against a sopping towel laid over the edge, and how we faced each other, my legs inside his, the strong heavy bones of his shins buffering mine against the cool porcelain, surrendering to our nakedness and the dissolving boundaries between us, the comfortable bubbly water, letting go inch by inch, until I was able to accept, at last, his enduring offer of safety. There is no deeper luxury.
In the canyon of those forgotten hours of the