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By Root 717 0

night, half senseless after bearing witness to the interminable rape exam, I craved that luxurious feeling of safety again, even ran a bath, as if Andrew and I could both fit inside the half-size plastic shower-tub of the apartment in the Marina. But we were too drunk, at odds, on the job, did not have time for luxury, had seen so many borders violated it seemed useless to defend them. He turned the water off. He wanted me to do it on my knees on the floor, like a hooker. I didn’t want to; he made it a challenge; so I did, as if wild submission were the same as wholehearted surrender, as if it could take you to the center of the labyrinth. I couldn’t find where we were on the bed, up, down or across. He wanted me to slap his face. He got up and came back with a belt. It had never been like this before. When I had an orgasm, I cried. I didn’t know what it was about. He held me, panting.

Now I see why I had been so desperate to be sanctified by water, by touch. Andrew and I had become profoundly contaminated by the materials we were working with. (The Bible talks about cleansing with blood; Andrew believed it, but I have never known true atonement to work that way.) Like a chemical reagent that causes evidence to glow in the dark, the alcohol had made that contamination observable for a brief period of time, but the kind of perversity that had acted on Juliana Meyer-Murphy, and therefore on the two of us, does not go away with daylight. You carry the toxins. Maybe he was angry at being reassigned from the Arizona investigation, had to put me in my place for a lot of reasons; but there was something about the purposeful way he took us to the edge that hinted he knew all about dark places, and savage unrestraint.

After Juliana went home, we withdrew from the M&Ms’, shut down the command center at the Santa Monica Police Department and initiated a nationwide manhunt for the suspect from a war room at the Bureau.

The war room consisted of a disused space near the lavatories: two old windowed offices with the dividing wall taken out and lined with metal shelving that held somebody’s collection of administrative operations in thick unreadable binders and textbooks called The Biology of Violence and Ransom, probably not cracked since some of the World War II vets were laid to rest in the VA cemetery across the way. In a contemplative moment your eyes could travel from those shaded white markers north to the lustrous Italian marble of the Getty Museum, perched like a mythical griffin over the mountain pass.

We had our own artwork going. A real exhibition. The tattered old timeline from the command center had been reinstalled upon the wall, beginning when the 911 came in and listing every event—when the police responded, when the Bureau was called, who was interviewed, when each polygraph was done—all the way up to “Someone is walking up the street” in the fog. There were aerial photos of the Promenade obtained from the satellite facility at headquarters and location shots of the storefronts. Posted also were my hand-drawn diagrams showing the true distance and relationships between Willie John Black’s doorway and the fountains and the bench where Juliana may have met the suspect.

Then, in the Purple Gallery, we had close-ups of the bruise patterns on Juliana’s neck and the fine cutting on her chest, and a series of photographs using reflected UV light that showed the lug-soled design of the boot taken from the skin of her back. For this expertise we had to wait an extra two hours at the Rape Treatment Center while a forensic photographer fought standstill traffic all the way from a private lab called Result Associates, out in Fullerton.

I had assigned young Jason Ripley as administrative case agent, which meant he was in charge of the paper, hauling cartons of printouts from Rapid Start, trying to keep the sub files organized. We were on our knees, hands deep inside the boxes, scraping our knuckles on bristly reams of paper, when I felt a presence behind me and heard Kelsey Owen say, “Congratulations on recovering the victim.