“Drop that, go with the special agent. Only come back here if we have a casualty drill or something. I’ll tell Beaster. He’s her petty officer,” Grissett told Aisha.
“Shall we go? And maybe just stop topside for a couple of minutes, get some air—”
“Can’t,” Ryan said. “Not right now. They’re running some kind of loading drill. Want everybody to stand clear.”
“Then can you take me to the unit commander’s stateroom? Petty Officer Ryan? I believe that’s what the exec said.”
“Seaman, ma’am. Yes ma’am—”
Aisha rearranged her cover-up, and reached for her purse. “It’s time to meet Petty Officer Terranova.”
For the first victim interview, it was important to pick somewhere neutral. If she’d been attacked in a work space, you didn’t meet in a work space. If an officer was involved, you avoided the wardroom. In most cases, that boiled down to either Aisha’s own cabin, or some semiprivate location like the library.
When Ryan tried the knob of the unit commander’s suite it was unlocked. Inside they found a large office space with a built-in desk, a blank computer screen, a coffee table, a settee, and two chairs. An open doorway showed the foot of a bunk next door. She had just time enough to use the little attached head before someone tapped at the door.
The chubby young white woman’s brown-sugar hair was twisted back into a ponytail. She wore dark blue coveralls and heavy black steel-toe boots, and carried an issue of Sea Technology under her arm. Aisha estimated her at about five three, maybe 130, 140 pounds at the outside. Her exopthalmic, watery blue eyes blinked rapidly, gaze darting around the space. This was the woman they called the Terror?
“Beth?”
“Yes ma’am.” Terranova came to attention.
“Please stand easy. I don’t have a military rank, and you don’t have to call me ma’am.”
Ryan cleared her throat. “Um, do you want me to stay, Aisha?” She nodded to the girl. “Hi, Beth.”
“Hi, Duncanna.”
Of course they knew each other, in a complement as small as this. “Outside, please, um, Seaman. In the passageway. Don’t let anyone in. Beth, is it all right if I lock this door?”
“Sure. I’d rather you did.”
Her accent made it something like “Shueh, I’d rada you did.” Not to make fun, but she’d heard Joisey-speak from earliest childhood, from bus drivers, newsstand vendors, taxi drivers, cops roving the streets of the most polyglot city on earth. Working-class whites, most of whose gazes had slid past a little black girl in a modest dress.
“Beth — it is Beth? Yes, I see it is. From your file. Please sit. I’m Special Agent Aisha Ar-Rahim, Naval Criminal Investigative Service. I’m here to investigate the attack against you. Is it all right if I record this interview?”
Terranova nodded silently. Aisha set up the case cracker laptop and adjusted the camera so they were both within its field of view. “How are you doing? Holding up?”
“I’m doin’ okay.” But her tucked elbows, arms crossed over her chest, and hunched posture said otherwise. As did the dry white flecks around her lips, and the dull eyes.
“Are you still under sedation, Beth?”
“No.”
“Sleeping okay?”
“No one’s sleeping. We been goin’ six on and six off, general quarters for missile defense.”
“I understand you occupy a key position in the Weapons Department.”
“Operations, not Weapons. I’m the lead Aegis petty officer. I run the SPY-1s. The radars. The big panels on the sides of the bridge.”
“I see. That does sound important.”
“It means that if we get attacked, we don’t get sunk.”
“I see.” Aisha took a breath. “Well, Beth, most people in your situation experience mixed emotions. Generally, anger and shame. I understand, and I sympathize. But my job’s to investigate a crime, and pass what I develop to the naval justice system. If everything works right, we catch the guy who raped you, and put him where he can’t hurt you again, or anyone else.
“With that in mind, I need to take you step by step through what happened. Starting even before that — with anyone who expressed interest, asked for a date, said he wanted to hook up on liberty. Don’t worry how trivial it seems. Just tell me who occurs to you first.”
Terranova sat stoically silent for a while, then told her about the castaway. Aisha didn’t object, or say he’d already left the ship before the rape; just noted it. “Good. Who else?”
A shrug. “Nobody.”
“Really? You’re an attractive girl. On a ship with three hundred guys. Nobody’s hit on you? Not in the four months since the ship left home port?”
“I’m not that pretty.” Terranova sounded sullen, head lowered. “The other girls, guys like them better.”
All right… “How about your work center? Anyone you’re close to there?”
“I work with the new chief… Chief Wenck. With Ginnie Redmond. And the other guys in the Aegis team.”
“No close friendships? No enemies?”
A sigh, another shrug. “I’m the lead PO. It’s like, an official relationship.”
“All right, let’s go on to the incident. Tell me what happened.”
“I was down in female berthing. I got a shower. Then I remembered I left something in the Equipment Room. While we were looking at replacing one of the cards.”
“What did you leave?”
“My, um, birth control pills.”
Aisha carefully did not look surprised. “What were you doing with birth control pills in the Equipment Room?”
“I took them out of my pocket because I just had too much shit in there. The pockets on these coveralls are crap. Things fall out. If we lose those, the corpsmen give us a rough time. Like they cost the Navy all this money, or they have to account for each pill, or something… and some of the guys, they… like, think it’s a joke, if they steal them and hide them. Then we have to go nuts and raise a stink, until they give them back. And they say things like—”
“Like, ‘What do you need these for, you’re not putting out for me,’” Aisha supplied. Nothing she hadn’t heard aboard the carrier. “I realize this is personal, Beth, and it will be off the record in any written report. But are you in a current relationship?”
“No,” the petty officer murmured at last.
“Coming off one, maybe? With someone here?” Terranova shook her head again. “So, the samples the doctor took, those will tell us exactly who the rapist was? Once we can get them tested?”
“…I guess so.”
“Beth, it’s very important we nail this down now so there are no gray areas later. Did you, or did you not, have sex in any form with anyone else, in the week before the crime?”
“No. I did not.”
Aisha noted and underlined it. “All right. Thanks. So, you were taking the pills in case…?”
“Yeah. In case. Anyhow, it’s not good to stop them, start them, stop ’em again. The girls all say you can’t depend on them to work if you start doing that.”
“I’ve heard that.”
Terranova murmured, “I was dating a guy for a while, back in Norfolk.”
“From the ship?”
“No, he worked at a truck place in Virginia Beach. But I guess he didn’t… wasn’t… that interested after all. That was the last time I did it.”
Aisha waited, but that seemed to be it. Too bad; the ex-boyfriend was always the number one suspect. Terranova added, “Then I heard somebody outside, in the passageway. I went out, but I didn’t see anybody there.
“But when I went out again, the overhead lights outside were off. Somebody grabbed me from behind and stuck a knife in my neck. Then he pushed me back into the Equipment Room, made me take my coveralls off, and raped me.”