“It’s okay. If you could—”
“I should go. Good luck to you, Chief Tolliver. I’m sorry I wasn’t more helpful.”
Jeffrey stopped short of grabbing her arm.
He watched Sibyl Adams using her cane to find her way down the sidewalk. A student joined her. Then another one. Soon, she was one of a crowd.
Jeffrey closed his eyes and tilted his face up to the sun, the same way Sibyl had. He heard a truck drive by. The wind picked up, rustling through his hair. He racked his brain, searching for any report that had come across his desk with the name Thomasina Humphrey attached.
Nothing.
He walked back into the station. Sara was still in his office. She had opened her laptop to work. His computer monitor was turned so she could see if an email came in.
Jeffrey closed the door. He leaned his back against it, his hand still on the knob.
He told Sara, “Thomasina Humphrey.”
She lifted up her chin, acknowledging the name.
“Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“Obviously.” She seemed to want to leave it at that.
Jeffrey looked back at the squad. Every chair had a butt in it. Half the patrol unit was loitering outside the briefing room, waiting for Jeffrey to start the day. He was not going to have another argument where he was the only hysterical idiot anybody could hear.
“Sara.”
She took off her glasses. She closed her laptop. She turned in her chair to look at him. “Sibyl brought her to me about five months ago, at the end of October. Tommi didn’t leave at the end of her morning class. She had started bleeding. She made out like it was her period, but Sibyl could tell something was wrong. She talked to her. It took a while, but Tommi admitted that she had been raped the night before.”
Jeffrey took a beat in order to keep his temper in check, because rape was a crime, and Sara knew this, yet she hadn’t reported anything to him. “Did she know her attacker?”
“No.”
“Did she report it?”
“No.”
“Did you tell her to?”
“Once, but she refused, and I didn’t press her.”
“Because?”
“Because she was a good student. She was careful. She always had her nose in a book.”
“You really think now is the right time to throw those words back in my face?”
“No, but you need to listen to me about this, Jeffrey, because it explains a lot of things.” Sara stood up. She walked over to him. “Do you remember that book you read to me, the one about Hiroshima?”
There was something so intimate about her tone that she was able to put him back in that exact moment. They were both lying in bed. He loved reading to her at night. Jeffrey was showing her some photographs from his book, reading out some of the more poignant lines.
She said, “You told me about the shadows, do you remember that?”
He did. The heat from the atomic explosion was so intense that anything in its path burned a shadow into the walls or pavement behind it. A man walking with a cane. A person sitting on a set of stairs. Plants and bolts and machinery. They had all left permanent shadows that you could still see today.
Sara told him, “That’s what rape is like. It’s a black shadow that burns through you. It alters your DNA. It follows you for the rest of your life.”
“How bad was it?”
“Very bad,” Sara said. “I knew Tommi from before. She was one of my patients. That’s why Sibyl brought her to me. She thought I could help her.”
“Did you?”
“I sutured her. I gave her pain medication. I promised her I wouldn’t tell anyone. That was her overriding fear, that her father would find out the details, that her friends and teachers and everybody on campus would know. But, did I help her?” Sara looked haunted by the question. “You can’t help anyone who goes through that. You can try to make them feel safe. You can listen to them. The only thing that you can really do is hope and pray that they find a way to help themselves.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” he told her. “But why did Sibyl bring up Tommi’s name in relation to Leslie Truong?”
“I assume because the next day, Tommi disappeared from school. She left all of her things. She didn’t come back. She didn’t contact anyone. Her phone was disconnected. She was just gone.”
“Kevin Blake didn’t—”
“Her parents withdrew her from class. I’m not sure what happened to her things.”
“But Sibyl—”
“You need to leave it alone.”
“Tommi Humphrey was the victim of a crime. From what you’re saying, it was a serious crime. And now Leslie Truong is missing. Who knows what the hell happened to Beckey Caterino. These are links, Sara. We have to explore them.”
“Are you going to open up every rape investigation in town? How are you going to find the women who were too damaged, or too afraid, to report it? How are you going to locate girls who left the school because fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes of their lives erased every meaningful second of the two decades that came before it?”
He seldom heard Sara speak so passionately about something so raw. He had always wondered about Tessa. She had spent a lot of drunken nights during high school and college. Jeffrey could vividly recall making a five-hour drive to Florida in the middle of the night to talk the local sheriff out of charging her for drunk and disorderly.
He chose his words carefully. “If there’s a connection between what happened to Tommi Humphrey and what happened to Beckey Caterino or Leslie Truong—”
“Leave her alone, Jeff. Please. For me.”
He was so close to agreeing with her, if only because he wanted desperately to do something, anything, that made Sara trust him again.
Then his computer chimed, announcing a new email.
Sara went behind his desk. She put on her glasses. She did a couple of clicks. He could see the images reflected in the lenses.
She said, “Come here.”
Jeffrey stood behind her. He guessed he was looking at a slide from an MRI. He recognized cervical vertebrae stacked down from the skull, but the cord running behind it resembled a piece of rope that had frayed at the middle. Fibers jutted out. Something that looked like a liquid bubble encased the area.
Sara said, “This is the spinal cord puncture. Something sharp and pointed entered the skin here.”
Jeffrey felt Sara’s fingers press against the back of his neck.
“Her legs would be paralyzed, everything from here down.” Her hand went to her hip. “This injury was deliberate. It wouldn’t happen from the fall. I would guess the instrument was similar in shape to an awl or a counterpunch, but don’t quote me on that.”
Jeffrey held back his questions. Sara was opening the next file, which was an X-ray.
“The skull fracture.” She clicked in for a closer view.
Jeffrey knew what an intact skull was supposed to look like. The fracture was at the back of the head, the spot where most men started to go bald. The bone had splintered into sunrays. A semi-circular piece rested against the brain.
Sara knelt down, leaning in close to the monitor. “Here.”
Jeffrey leaned down beside her. He followed her finger as it traced a crescent shape at the bottom of the fracture.
He knew that she wouldn’t say definitively what had happened, so he asked, “Best guess?”
“It’s not a guess,” Sara told him. “She was hit in the back of the head with a hammer.”
Atlanta
11
Sara couldn’t finish her second Scotch. Her stomach felt sour. She was shaky in a way that was hard to articulate. Jeffrey’s notes. Jeffrey’s files. Jeffrey’s field interview cards. Jeffrey’s ruler-straight lines drawn across a faded topographic map of Heartsdale. His ghost sat at the table across from her as she read his words from eight years ago. The names came back with a startling clarity.
Little Bit. Chuck Gaines. Thomasina Humphrey.
The delicate script was such a sharp contrast to his tough exterior. Jeffrey had been the embodiment of tall, dark and handsome. He’d had a football player’s swagger combined with a wonderfully sharp intelligence. Even in the precise, technical jargon of a police report, the summation of a witness interview, the transcript of a phone call, his personality shone through.
Sara held one of Jeffrey’s spiral-bound notebooks in her hand. It was roughly the size of an index card. He had put the dates on the cover alongside the cases encapsulated inside. She flipped it open. Grant County was a small enough force that the chief of police doubled as an investigator. Every case that Jeffrey had worked on had made it into his notebooks. He had been a meticulous record keeper. Sara paged through the headers in the first few dozen pages—
Harold Niles/burglary. Gene Kessler/bike theft. Pete Wayne/stolen tips.
$80,000.