The Third Twin - Ken Follett [54]
Jeannie looked across at her. Lisa was white-faced with passion. Jeannie hoped it was doing her good to get these feelings out. “You’re not weak,” she said.
“You’re tough,” Lisa said.
“I have the opposite problem—people think I’m invulnerable. Because I’m six feet tall and I have a pierced nostril and a bad attitude, they imagine I can’t be hurt.”
“You don’t have a bad attitude.”
“I must be slipping.”
“Who thinks you’re invulnerable? I don’t.”
“The woman who runs the Bella Vista, the home my mom’s in. She said to me, straight out, ‘Your mother will never see sixty-five.’ Just like that. ‘I know you’d prefer me to be honest,’ she said. I wanted to tell her that just because there’s a ring in my nose it doesn’t mean I have no goddamn feelings.”
“Mish Delaware says rapists aren’t really interested in sex. What they enjoy is having power over a woman, and dominating her, and scaring her, and hurting her. He picked someone who looked as if she would be easily frightened.”
“Who wouldn’t be frightened?”
“He didn’t pick you, though. You probably would have slugged him.”
“I’d like the chance.”
“Anyway, you would have fought harder than I did and you wouldn’t have been helpless and terrified. So he didn’t pick you.”
Jeannie saw where all this was heading. “Lisa, that may be true, but it doesn’t make the rape your fault, okay? You’re not to blame, not one iota. You were in a train wreck: it could have happened to anyone.”
“You’re right,” Lisa said.
They drove ten miles out of town and pulled off the interstate at a sign marked “Greenwood Penitentiary.” It was an old-fashioned prison, a cluster of gray stone buildings surrounded by high walls with razor wire. They left the car in the shade of a tree in the visitors’ parking lot. Jeannie put her jacket back on but left off her panty hose.
“Are you ready for this?” Jeannie said. “Dennis is going to look just like the guy who raped you, unless my methodology is all wrong.”
Lisa nodded grimly. “I’m ready.”
The main gate opened to let out a delivery truck, and they walked in unchallenged. Security was not tight, Jeannie concluded, despite the razor wire. They were expected. A guard checked their identification and escorted them across a baking-hot courtyard where a handful of young black men in prison fatigues were throwing a basketball.
The administration building was air-conditioned. They were shown into the office of the warden, John Temoigne. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a tie, and there were cigar butts in his ashtray. Jeannie shook his hand. “I’m Dr. Jean Ferrami from Jones Falls University.”
“How are you, Jean?”
Temoigne was obviously the type of man who found it hard to call a woman by her surname. Jeannie deliberately did not tell him Lisa’s first name. “And this is my assistant, Ms. Hoxton.”
“Hi, honey.”
“I explained our work when I wrote to you, Warden, but if you have any further questions I’d be glad to answer them.” Jeannie had to say that, even though she was itching to get a look at Dennis Pinker.
“You need to understand that Pinker is a violent and dangerous man,” said Temoigne. “Do you know the details of his crime?”
“I believe he attempted to sexually assault a woman in a movie theater, and killed her when she tried to fight him off.”
“You’re close. It was at the old Eldorado movie theater down in Greensburg. They were all watching some horror movie. Pinker got into the basement and turned off the electric power. Then, while everyone was panicking in the dark, he ran around feeling girls up.”
Jeannie exchanged a startled look with Lisa. It was so similar to what had happened at JFU on Sunday. A diversion had created confusion and panic, and given the perpetrator his opportunity. And there was a similar hint of adolescent fantasy about the two scenarios: feeling up all the girls in the darkened theater, and seeing the women running naked out of the changing room, if Steve Logan was Dennis’s identical twin, it seemed they had committed very similar crimes.
Temoigne went on: “One woman unwisely tried to resist