“Kicking up a fuss,” Tull’s voice was at once knowing and inviting, creating a silence for the doctor to fill.
“She said one of the staff members raped her,” Dr. Blount said, as if remembering a minor annoyance. “A teacher, who oversaw the girls’ lesson plans. We confronted him immediately and he admitted the incident, only he said it was consensual. We fired him. What else could we do? It’s not as if we were negligent. We do a background check on everyone who works here. It was an isolated incident.”
“An isolated incident.” Tess didn’t realize she had spoken aloud until Tull glanced at her.
“He said, she said,” the doctor said helpfully.
Tess pressed her palms against the cream-colored wall. It was cool to the touch, smooth as ice cream. Everything was so pretty here, so perfect. Everything except the patients themselves, who had destroyed their bodies, their complexions, their teeth, even their organs. Yet Gwen Schiller’s beauty could not be snuffed out; she had still been beautiful when Sukey saw her. She had a bloom that nothing could strip from her-not her own habits, not the streets, not this clinic.
“But Gwen said she was raped. She didn’t describe it as ‘consensual.’” Tess loved Tull for pressing this point home.
“Yes, that was her story. But she would have said anything to leave here, to force her father to come get her. She was very fixated on getting his attention, on disrupting his new marriage any way she could. I am a psychiatrist, I understood the dynamics of the situation very clearly.”
Tull let this pass. “What was the time frame? When did Gwen arrive, and when did she make the complaint?”
“She arrived in late August and hadn’t been here two weeks when she went to Sheila with her story.” The doctor pulled himself up, a little self-righteously, puffing out his chest and his shoulders. “The staff member was dismissed by the end of the day, I can tell you that much.”
Tull nodded, as if admiring the doctor’s decisiveness. “So Gwen tells you she was raped, and you fire the guy. Did you have her examined, or ask if she wanted to file a criminal complaint?”
“She didn’t say anything until several days after the incident.” That word again. Tess wanted to tell the doctor a fender bender was an incident, rape was a crime. “And, as I said, there was no way of knowing what really happened.”
“Didn’t you find it coincidental that she ran away a few weeks later?”
The doctor’s narrow shoulders sagged, but his pity was only for himself. “We thought she would contact her father immediately, and that would be that. Then, a few weeks after she disappeared, her father wrote to her via the school’s e-mail account and we realized he didn’t know she was gone. It was our computer system. It was easy enough to change Gwen’s password and send her father e-mail. We had kept her disappearance from the other girls, so we didn’t have to worry he might hear from anyone else. We didn’t see the harm in letting her father think she was still here, as long as we continued to look for her. Her eighteenth birthday came and went, and we never found her, so we told her father she had checked herself out, which really wasn’t that far from the truth. As for the billing-we didn’t know what else to do. But of course, we’ll give the money back, every penny of it. We never meant to deceive anyone.”
Dr. Blount looked at them beseechingly. Criminals were always so sure of their right to empathy. Tull turned to Tess, disgust sharp in his face, even as his expression warned her to control herself. He need not have worried. She was still standing by the wall, her palms pressing against it hard enough to leave grimy marks, or so she hoped.
Her only fear was that if she lost contact with the wall, her hands would wrap themselves around the doctor’s throat and never let go.
chapter 17
“I NEED YOU.”
The voice was Crow’s, coming to Tess through the fog of sleep. For once they were in his apartment, because they had drunk too much at dinner, and Crow’s small nest had the virtue of being within stumbling distance of the Brewer’s Art.
Half-awake, Tess rolled into him. Dream and reality merged, enriching the other. They often came together this way and she liked the illicit, phantom quality of these meetings. Not even Crow’s fumbling in his nightstand drawer disturbed the mood.
“I need you,” he repeated.
“I need you, too,” she assured him. At other times of the day or night, they were more apt to say “I love you,” possibly “I want you.” Or, in imitation of a song that Crow particularly liked: “Baby, take it all off.” But in the middle of the night, it was always: I need you.
The only problem was that Crow’s midnight raids tended to wake Tess up, while he slept more soundly than ever. She lay in his arms, feeling last night’s alcohol buzz shift into this morning’s hangover. Martinis, followed by many glasses of red wine, and a memorable dinner, not that she could remember a bite of it. Veal? Lamb? Something tender and young and decadent. They had been celebrating, but Tess was no longer sure why.
The events of the past two days ran through her mind like a slide show. There was Tull, presiding over a press conference at the state police headquarters, explaining how she had identified Gwen Schiller, and how the clinic how deceived Gwen’s parents. He held back the information about the sexual assault-even in death, Gwen deserved her privacy. It would get out, eventually, as state agencies moved to close down Persephone’s and strip the clinic of its license. But Tull was determined the information wouldn’t come from him.
Next slide. Tess saw Herman Peters, the boy-wonder police reporter who looked so deceptively innocent, scribbling away in his notebook with an excitement that bordered on the sexual. She saw the gleam in his eye when she began telling how she had faked the capsize, remembering to give Whitney full credit for the idea and the execution. Some reporters had laughed, and she hadn’t liked that part. A girl is dead, she had wanted to say. A beautiful girl is dead, and she shouldn’t be, and the only thing I’ve done is make it possible for her father to take her remains from a pauper’s grave at Crownsville. Tess saw herself, angry and flushed. She mentioned going to Philadelphia, although she didn’t name Devon. Tess’s mother called the next morning and asked why she couldn’t have put on some lipstick, if she was going to be all over the news, maybe comb her hair. Her father said she looked great, but could she smooth things out with Ruthie, who wasn’t too happy to learn about the break in the case at the same moment the rest of Baltimore did. “Sorry, Dad, we were running against the clock,” Tess said, but she saw his point.
A booth in Frigo’s Bar. Ruthie Dembrow’s mouth was a grim, straight line, no lipstick to brighten it. Tess had done what she had asked her to do, yet she had not found what Ruthie wanted. There was no connection between Henry and Gwen. The people who knew the secret of Gwen’s identity had no idea she was dead, so how could they have sought revenge against Henry?
“But this hospital, this clinic,” Ruthie had said, her overarched brows drawn down in a frown, her eyes locked on Tess’s. “If they knew it was her, wouldn’t they want it to be secret, so they didn’t end up in all this trouble?”
“You mean, did the people at the clinic have Henry killed, in case it turned out he did know who his victim was? I honestly don’t think so, Ruthie.”
“It doesn’t feel right to me,” Ruthie insisted. “He was talking about a new trial, an appeal. Did I tell you that? He said there were mitigating circumstances.”
Didn’t they all, Tess thought. She thought again about the rubber tube, how Henry had stopped to play a joke on Gwen’s corpse. Ruthie didn’t know her brother as well as she thought she did. Even with the cops, he had played the stoned huffer for all it was worth. “I know he didn’t mean to kill her, Ruthie. But he did.”