Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [42]
She moved away and found some tissues, and we each sat rigid in a denim beanbag chair. She wheezed quietly. I sat. With this child who was not my child. In the big house north of Montana, in the generous room with the sheer white curtains—and computer and clothes, boom box and stuffed animals—and the purple light encompassed us. We were alone together in a cone of purple light.
“What is this?”
I held a get-well card signed with smiley faces, twenty names.
“From the swim team.”
“I swim, too.”
Neighbors had been leaving things, her mother told me: a flat of strawberries by the front door.
“There is good out there,” I reminded her.
“Why did this happen? I keep asking the therapist.”
“What does she say?”
Juliana’s eyes lowered. “That it’s not my fault.”
I looked up at the dense foliage of a tree outside the window. I could see it was an avocado. The fruit would fall into the narrow space between the houses.
“The man who raped you was acting out his own scenario of power and control. It was all about him. He was brutal, overpowering, clever and deeply driven to do what he did. There’s no way you could have stopped him, he had it all planned out. You survived. Because you know something, Juliana? You have a sense of yourself. You’ve been through an experience your friends cannot ever conceive of.”
“That’s not right.”
“What isn’t right?”
“Ray wasn’t like that.”
She said his name.
Eleven.
I expected everyone to feel the urgency I felt, the surge of momentum that comes with a major break. There would be eager questions, and relief that someone like me, 110 percent committed, was in charge. Andrew and his lieutenant would be there, pumped. Galloway and his ASACs. I was ready for us to bear down and get this guy.
I did not expect to be ambushed.
The briefing was held in our state-of-the-art emergency operations facility. A row of clocks reported the time from the Pacific to the Zulu zone. There were banks of computers, TV screens, a radio console and one-way glass through which the proceedings could be observed. A situation board ran across the front of the low-ceilinged room, a row of chairs before it, facing the troops. It was from those chairs on that platform that Rick and I would address the investigative team.
By 8 a.m., fifty agents and support personnel were grouped around the urns of coffee and cafeteria doughnuts that had been placed on the window ledge, talking shop. To the south, beach cities and teeming flats were bleached by the bandit sun like an overlit transparency. The hot cityscape seemed to leap up and attack. It hurt your eyes, even through the tinted glass.
Everyone wore sport coats or dresses; I had on the slim black pantsuit. Andrew strolled by, unshaven, the open leather jacket over a midnight blue cowboy shirt, faded jeans and boots, wearing his resentment like the shield on his belt. Nobody but Barbara knew we were going out, but I felt embarrassed where I wanted to be proud. He’d looked pretty sharp for the briefing on his turf.
“Where’ve you been?”
“Caught a homicide.”
“Isn’t this your most important case?”
“Nothing’s more important,” Andrew agreed, deadpan.
“I’ve been trying to call you.”
“I called you back,” he said.
“Once.”
We broke it off as Lieutenant Barry Loomis came over and Andrew formally introduced me for a second time to his boss, whom you also could not miss in a room of clean-shaven straight guys—he’d be the one with the thick brush mustache and Tasmanian devil tie.
“Go get ’em,” Barry urged, as if I were some kid in Little League.
Rick and I took our seats, looking out at rows of attentive faces. Andrew, center section, gave me a lazy thumbs-up, chuckled at something Barry said. Galloway, wearing a snowy white turtleneck