“He found my raincoat….”
“Where was that?”
“In the hall closet,” she said. “And he told me to get up, and he put my raincoat over my shoulders. And he said that if I tried to run away, he’d…he’d stick the knife up…in me…he’d stick the knife between my legs.”
“And then?”
“He took me out the back and put me in the back of his van.”
“Tell me about the van,” Hemmings said. “Where was it?”
“In the parking lot behind my apartment.”
Hemmings tried and failed to recall a mental image of the garden apartment complex parking lot.
&n
bsp; “What kind of a van was it?”
“A van,” she said, impatiently.
“Where did he put you in the van?”
“In the back.”
“Was there a door on the side, a sliding door, maybe? Or did you get in the front?”
“There was a sliding door. He opened it, and told me to get in and lay down on my face.”
“Did you see anything in the back of the van? I mean, was it plain in there, or did he have it fixed up with chairs and upholstery? Was there a carpet, maybe?”
“No. The floor was metal. And there was nothing in there. Just a van.”
“Did it look to you like a new van, or one that has been around awhile? Was it scratched up, maybe? Was there a peculiar smell? Anything like that?”
“It was dark, and I had my face on the floor, and I couldn’t see anything,” she said.
“And then what happened?”
“He got in front and started it up, and I guess he just drove me to where he pushed me out and the cop found me.”
“Did anything happen while you were in the van? Did you hear something, maybe, that stuck in your mind. Can you think of anything at all?”
“I thought he was going to kill me,” she said. “I was praying.”
“Tell me about what happened when you got to Forbidden Drive,” Hemmings said.
“I knew we’d left the street,” she said. “A regular street, I mean. It sounded different under the wheels.”
That response disappointed Dick Hemmings a little; if she had picked up on that, she more than likely would have picked up on anything else odd that had happened. Therefore, nothing interesting had happened.
“And?”
“And then he stopped, and I heard him opening the door, and then he told me to get out. He said that I should walk away from him, and if I turned around to look, he would kill me.”
“And he was still wearing his mask?”
“Yeah.”