“What do we know about him?” she asks again, the prosecutor who seems to have no feelings about what just happened.
Her attacker is in critical condition. Win is careful what he tells her. It is, to say the least, a highly unusual situation. She is accustomed to asking the state police anything she wants and having nothing withheld from her. She is the district attorney, is in charge, is programmed to demand details and get them.
“Ms. Lamont,” Sammy says respectfully, “as you know, he had a gun and Win here did what he had to do. Things happen.”
But that’s not what she’s asking. She looks at Win, holds his gaze remarkably well considering that just hours ago he saw her nude, lashed to her bed.
“What do you know about him.” She poses it not as a question but a command.
“This much,” Win says. “Your office prosecuted him in juvenile court about two months ago.”
“For what?”
“Possession of marijuana, crack. Judge Let-’em-Loose Lane gave him a reprimand.”
“The prosecutor certainly wasn’t me. I’ve never seen him before. What else?”
“Tell you what,” Win says. “How about letting us get our job done first, then I’ll tell you anything I can.”
“No,” she says. “It won’t be what you can. It will be what I ask.”
“But for now…” Win starts to say.
“Information,” she demands.
“I got a question.” It is Sammy who says this from his remote position near the wall. “About your getting home last night.”
His ruddy face is grim, something in his eyes. Maybe it’s embarrassment. Maybe talking to the district attorney after she’s been through something like this somehow makes him a voyeur. Lamont ignores him, ignores his question.
“I had dinner with you,” she says to Win. “I got in my car and drove back to the office to finish up a few things, then drove straight home. Because I didn’t have my keys, I went around to the back of the house, put my code into the key box, got out the spare key, and was unlocking the back door when suddenly a hand clamped over my mouth and someone I couldn’t see said one sound, you’re dead. He pushed me into the house.”
Lamont does a fine job reciting the facts. Her assailant, now identified as Roger Baptista of East Cambridge, an address not far from the court building where Lamont works, forced her up to her bedroom, began yanking electrical cords from lamps, from the clock radio. Then her home phone rang. She didn’t answer it. Then her cell phone rang. She didn’t answer it.
Win calling her.
Her cell phone rang again and she thought fast, said it was her boyfriend, he was getting worried, might show up, so Baptista told her to answer the phone and if she tried anything he’d blow her head off and then kill her boyfriend, kill everybody, and she answered. She had the brief, peculiar conversation with Win. She says she ended the call and Baptista forced her to undress and tied her to the bedposts. He raped her. Then put his pants back on.
“Why didn’t you resist?” Sammy asks her as delicately as possible.
“He had a gun.” She looks at Win. “I had no doubt he would use it if I resisted, probably would use it, regardless. When he finished with me. I did what I could to control the situation.”
“Meaning?” Win asks.
She hesitates, her eyes cutting away from him, says, “Meaning, I told him to do what he wanted, acted as if I wasn’t frightened. Or repulsed. Did what he wanted. Said what he told me to say.” She hesitates. “As calm and noncombative as I could muster under the circumstances. I, uh, I said it wasn’t necessary to tie me up, I, well, I worked with cases like this all the time, understood them, knew he had his reasons. I, well, I…”
The small room echoes with the ensuing silence and it is the first time Win has ever seen Lamont’s face turn red. He suspects he knows exactly what she did to stall Baptista, to calm him, to connect with him in the remote hope he would let her live.
“Maybe you acted like you wanted a little,” Sammy suggests. “Hey, women do it all the time, make the rapist think it’s okay, they’re good in bed, fake an orgasm and even ask the guy to come back another time like it’s a date or…”
“Out!” Lamont fires at him, pointing her finger. “Get out!”
“I’m just—”
“Didn’t you hear me?”
He leaves the room, leaves Win alone with her, not his first choice. Considering he critically injured her assailant, it would be preferable and prudent to interview her with at least one witness present.
“Who is this piece of shit?” Lamont asks. “Who? And do you think it’s a goddamn coincidence he decided to show up at the house the same night my keys mysteriously disappeared? Who is he?”
“Roger Baptista…”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“When’s the last time you saw your keys?” Win says. “You lock up with them when you left for work this morning? Actually, yesterday morning.”
“No.”
“No?”
She is silent for a moment, then, “I didn’t come home that night.”
“Where were you?”
“I stayed with a friend. Left there for work in the morning. After work I had dinner with you, checked by my office. That’s the chronology.”
“You mind telling me who you stayed with?”
“I do.”
“I’m just trying…”
“I’m not the one who committed a crime.” She stares coldly at him.
“Monique, I assume your alarm was set when you unlocked the door with your spare key,” Win pointedly says. “Baptista clamps his hand over your mouth as you’re unlocking the door. So what about the alarm after that?”
“He told me if I didn’t disarm it he’d kill me.”
“No panic code that silently alerts the police?”
“Oh for God’s sake. And you would think of that if it were you? See what security precautions you revert to when someone’s got a gun to the back of your head.”
“You know anything about a can of gasoline and some rags found by your back door, in the bushes?”
“You and I need to have a very important conversation,” she says to him.
Sykes drives her personal car, a ’79 blue VW Rabbit, through the Old City, as Knoxville’s historic downtown is called.
She passes Barley’s Taproom & Pizzeria, the Tonic Grill, deserted and dark, then a construction site that was shut down the other day when a backhoe dug up bones that turned out to be cow, the site having been a slaughterhouse and stockyard in a long-ago life. Her uneasiness — the jitters, as she calls them — gets worse the closer she gets to where she’s going. She sure hopes Win’s insistence that she track down the Vivian Finlay case records immediately is really urgent enough to merit her waking up the Academy director, then the chief of the Knoxville Police Department, next several other people with the Criminal Investigative Division and Records, who couldn’t find the case, only its accession number, KPD893-85.
Last and most unpleasant of all, Sykes woke up former detective Jimmy Barber’s widow, who sounded drunk, and asked what her late husband might have done with his old files, paperwork, memorabilia, et cetera, when he retired and packed up his office at headquarters.
All that crap’s in the basement. What you people think he’s hiding down there, Jimmy Hoffla? The damn Da Vinshay code?
I sure am sorry to bother you, ma’am. But we’re trying to locate some old records, careful what she said, mindful that Win made it clear something unusual is going on.
I don’t know what’s got such a bug up y’all’s butt, Mrs. Barber complained over the phone, swearing, slurring, nasty. It’s three damn o’clock in the morning!