Her eyes reopened, more purposeful, reminiscent of the Gail of just yesterday. “No, no. It’s okay.” She paused. “It was my breathing that woke me up-or the difficulty I was having. I felt something heavy on me. For a split second, I thought it was you-that I was dreaming, or that you’d come back. I opened my mouth and his hand pushed my head to the side-that’s when I saw the clock, and when I realized what was happening. It was almost clinical, as if something inside of me snapped to the outside and said, ‘You’re being raped-remember everything you can. Joe will want to know,’ as if it was happening to someone else.”
I paused before asking, “Did you ever catch a glimpse of him?”
She shook her head. “It was too dark. He fumbled around with the pillowcase for a couple of seconds-that’s when I first realized my hands were tied, because I tried to push him off-and then he pulled it over my head. After that, I couldn’t see a thing.”
“Was he trying to get the case off the pillow, or just having a hard time getting it on you?”
“It was already off the pillow. My head was flat on the mattress. He’d done all that before waking me up.”
“Okay-a little off the subject: On the list you had delivered to the police department this afternoon, you marked down, ‘Peter Moore’s people.’ I know you meant Krystal Kleer, but did that refer to when they installed those windows last year?”
Again, she looked both embarrassed and angry. “It’s so crazy, wondering who, of all the men you’ve set eyes on, was the one that finally raped you. It could have been anyone, Joe. It could have been a counter clerk at a shop, or a gas-station attendant, or even someone reading the newspaper and seeing my picture-someone I’d never even seen before.”
I reached out and took her hand again. “Maybe, but something made you write the window people down. What was it?”
She took a deep breath, doubt clouding her earlier determination. “Probably nothing-certainly nothing that anyone can do anything about. It was the equivalent of a wolf whistle in the street, or someone leering at you… ”
“One of them did something like that?”
She squirmed in her seat, still trying to avoid the inevitability of what she’d set in motion, the impact her words might have on others. “It wasn’t that obvious, or that direct. It was more a feeling I got from one of them-the way he looked at me.”
“Did you get a first name or a nickname?”
“No. That’s why I wrote it down the way I did. He was tall-over six feet-with black hair tied back in a ponytail and bright blue eyes. That’s what kept bothering me when they were here. It was so obvious every time he looked at me, because of those eyes.”
“But he didn’t do anything physical-touch you or anything?”
“No… It wasn’t a touch. It was creepier than that. I offered them both coffee, and I served it on a tray in the living room. I was wearing a work shirt with buttons down the front, unbuttoned at the top, and as I leaned forward to put the tray on the low table, the one with the blue eyes stood up slightly, so he could see down my shirt. It was so blatant… I jerked my head up when he did it, at first wondering if he was going somewhere, because of how quickly he’d gotten to his feet, but he just stayed there, watching me. No apologies-he didn’t try to pretend he was looking at something else, like most men do. He just kept looking until I put the tray down-I damn near dumped the coffee-and then he smiled at me. Nothing was said, but I felt like it had been. I left right after that-told them to close the door behind them. I had to get away-I felt I’d been trespassed upon.”
I almost asked why she hadn’t told me anything about it before I realized what a predictably masculine response that was.
She apparently sensed the question anyway. “Later, I felt kind of foolish. It’s hardly the first time something like that’s happened. Every woman knows most men’ll try to catch a glimpse either up her skirt or down her blouse. It’s an obnoxious fact of life.”
I felt distinctly uncomfortable, recalling how often I had done just that. “Did you ever see him again?”
“No. It was a quick job-only two windows. They were done the same day they began. But I never wanted to use Krystal Kleer again… ” She stared off into the distance briefly. “And now I feel I may have gotten this man into a lot of trouble.”
“Not unless he did it. Let me go back a bit. When you served them in the living room, it was in front of that row of older windows behind the couch, right?”
She nodded.
“Did you see either of them showing an interest in those windows-examining them in any way?”
“No. They were just sitting there. Their backs were to them.”
She leaned forward and rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands.
I stroked the back of her head. “You okay?”
“It’s just this headache-I’ve had it all day.”
“You had any aspirin?”
“A couple, a long time ago.”
I was rubbing her back again, acutely aware of how thin and frail it felt. “When was the last time you ate anything?”
I felt her sigh-it was eloquent enough.
I got off the bed and circled around in front of her, squatting down to look into her face. “Look, I know lying in bed hasn’t been a big success, but why don’t you try it one more time while I get hold of some more aspirin and maybe a sandwich or some soup at least. You need something inside you or you’ll get sick, on top of everything else.”
She didn’t resist as I pulled her gently out of her seat and guided her to the edge of the bed. I propped up the pillows and set her down against them, covering her legs with a blanket I found draped over the footboard.
She held onto my forearms as I finished tucking her in, her eyes brimming with tears again. “Joe-what if he had AIDS?”
I felt my heart skip a beat. “One thing at a time. We’ll run blood tests and rule it out, but you can’t worry about it right now. Just work on what you can get your hands on.” I kissed her cheek and straightened up. “Let me get you something to eat.”
I found Susan downstairs and we quickly put together a small plate, along with some orange juice and two aspirin, but when I returned to the upstairs bedroom, Gail had finally fallen asleep.
I watched her for a few minutes, seeing how shallow her breathing was; every once in a while, her fingers would twitch, or her brow suddenly furrow. I could only imagine what nightmares were clashing inside her, and hoped with all my heart that they would soon be put to rest.
7
I couldn't go home that night. For entirely different reasons, my place was no more appealing to me than Gail’s was now to her.
I returned to the department around midnight. I’d now been up for some twenty hours. The command post was ghostly in its emptiness, like a battlefield stripped of warriors-all except for a single policewoman from the graveyard shift, who presumably had been instructed on how to continue the sifting process that Ron had been overseeing all day. She was young and relatively new on the force, not an uncommon occurrence in a town the size of Brattleboro, whose police department was often used as a stepping stone to other, more lucrative jobs in law enforcement elsewhere. Particularly in the patrol section we had quite a few people who were inexperienced, underpaid, overworked, and yet were expected to have at least a passing knowledge of every aspect of a police officer’s duties.
But spreading our resources thin was the only way we could afford to maintain a “full-service” operation, and it usually, if sometimes just barely, fit the bill-as long as no major cases came along to throw us all into turmoil.
Which is what was worrying me now. Unless something broke soon, the personnel allotted to finding Gail’s attacker would begin dwindling in direct proportion to the growing pile of other cases.
I grabbed a chair and pulled it over to the bulletin board with the timetable that Sammie had shown me a few hours ago. Additions had been made since then. Actual names written under older labels, like “voices heard walking by” and “jogger headed south,” indicated that real people had been linked to events, and-because Ron had written them in black ink and not red-that they’d also been eliminated from the suspects list. The pickup with the cap, going by at 4:15, was still unidentified, however, and its status had been upgraded by an accompanying red question mark. Harry Murchison, window installer, was going to merit an interview soon.