The Girl in the Glass Box

by James Grippando

Chapter 16

  “Nope,” said Andie. “No way are you going to El Salvador.”

  Jack was in bed, Righley had been down for hours, and Andie was sitting on the edge of the mattress brushing her hair. She had green eyes from her Anglo father, but that raven-black hair was from her mother, who was a descendant of the Yakama tribe in central Washington’s Yakima Valley. Jack didn’t have to look far to get the “we’re all immigrants” message.

  “If I’m going to make a case for asylum, I have to prove that my client was sexually assaulted in her home country. Her daughter witnessed it but has no memory of it. The last thing I want to do is resurrect those memories for Beatriz.”

  “How does going to El Salvador solve anything?”

  “I get off the plane, I go straight to the courthouse, and I meet with the prosecutor who decided that Julia should get no jail time for violating El Salvador’s law against abortion. Obviously he believed she had been sexually assaulted, or he wouldn’t have made that recommendation. I get an affidavit from him saying exactly that, and I come home.”

  “Can’t you just call him?”

  “I’ve been trying. He won’t call me back. If I go see him, I know I can make it happen.”

  “One problem.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not going.”

  “Can we talk about this, please?”

  “Jack, no. First off, plane tickets aren’t free. Who’s paying for all this?”

  “I’m using miles where I can, so it’s really not much so far. And I started pulling tax info for the accountant this week. Last year was my best ever practicing law. We can afford to give something back.”

  “And I love it that you think that way. I truly do. So forget that. Money’s not my real issue. Jack, do you realize that, other than actual war zones, San Salvador has the highest murder rate of any city in the world?”

  “Let’s not exaggerate.”

  “I’m not exaggerating. I work for the FBI. I know these things. Eighteen homicides a day in a country that has fewer people than the state of Massachusetts. The rate is like twenty times higher than the worst city in the United States. This is an entirely unnecessary risk. You’re a married man with a four-year-old daughter.”

  “And an eight-year-old golden who still thinks he’s a puppy.”

  “Fine. Make fun, Jack.”

  Jack slid across the mattress and sat right beside her. “Hey, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a jerk.”

  “I know,” she said with a smile. “You just can’t help it.”

  “Absolutely true. And this big jerk has a really big problem. I need something more than my client’s testimony to convince an immigration judge that she was the victim of sexual assault. I’d like to be able to do that without psychologically scarring her daughter.”

  Jack held his wife, and she leaned against him. The warmth of her body through the silk nightie felt good.

  “There are ways to minimize the trauma for Beatriz,” said Andie.

  “What are you thinking?”

  She pulled away from him, unfastened the long gold chain around her neck, and dangled her pendant in front of him. Slowly, it swung back and forth before his eyes, and Jack followed it.

  “You want to have sex tonight,” she said, talking like a hypnotist. “You really want to have sex tonight.”

  Jack tried not to laugh. “Hypnosis?”

  She stopped. “Yeah. Why not? We’ve used it on child witnesses. Some people say it works. Maybe it does.”

  The pendant started swinging again.

  “What do you think, jerko?” she asked.

  “I’m kind of a skeptic,” said Jack. His gaze drifted away from the pendant, meeting Andie’s. She looked amazing. “But for some reason, I suddenly want to have sex tonight.”

  Andie laughed, put the talisman on the nightstand, and pulled Jack into the sea of blankets.

  Jack knew exactly which psychiatrist he wanted Beatriz to see, and on Thursday afternoon Elaine Moore, M.D., was available.

  Dr. Moore was not the world’s biggest proponent of hypnotically induced memory recall. She used hypnosis in her practice, but she used it cautiously. So cautiously that, in one of his capital cases at the Freedom Institute, Jack called her as an expert witness to attack the use of hypnosis in a police homicide investigation. It was Dr. Moore’s testimony—“Uncorroborated, hypnotically elicited memories can lead to the wrongful imprisonment of innocent people”—that had won a last-minute stay of execution for Jack’s client.

  The session with Beatriz lasted about an hour. One of the very first things Jack had done for Julia was the paperwork naming Cecilia as Beatriz’s health-care surrogate. It was intended for medical emergencies, but it also allowed Cecilia to sign the medical consent form for both the hypnosis and the videotaping of the session. Jack met with Dr. Moore in her office, without Beatriz or her aunt, to watch the video.

  “Do you want to start from the very beginning, pre-hypnosis?”

  “Better fast-forward,” said Jack. “I might go under just watching you do it.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Jack.” She smiled, seeming to understand that he was kidding. “Just so you know, Beatriz wanted her aunt with her, but she’s off camera.”

  Dr. Moore cued up the video to about the middle of her session with Beatriz. Jack watched the screen. Beatriz was seated in a chair with eyes closed and shoulders slumping. All sign of worry and nervousness had vanished from her expression. Peaceful was the word that came to Jack’s mind.

  Dr. Moore adjusted the audio and, with a push of a button, the screen came to life.

  “Beatriz?” the doctor in the recording said in a soothing voice. “What can you see?”

  “It’s dark.”

  Of course it’s dark, your eyes are closed, was Jack’s initial reaction. But he quickly picked up on the fact that she was recalling a dark place.

  “Can you see anything?” the doctor asked her.

  “Lines. White lines. Light.”

  “What else?”

  “It smells like Mommy’s clothes in here.”

  Dr. Moore hit pause. “It took us a while to get to this point. She was hiding in a closet. Her mother’s clothes were hanging above her. The white lines she’s talking about are the slats on a typical closet door.”

  “Got it,” said Jack.

  The video resumed.

  “Can you touch the lines, Beatriz? Can you feel them?”

  “Uh-huh. On my face.”

  Jack said, “So her face is pressed up against the closet door?”

  “Right.”

  The video continued.

  “What do you see now?” the doctor asked her. “I want you to think hard and tell me what you see.”

  A minute passed, and Jack watched the transformation on the child’s face. The peacefulness evaporated before his eyes. Something seemed to rise up inside her, forcing the words from her mouth in Spanish.

  “Stop!” Beatriz shouted.

  Another minute passed. The expression on Beatriz’s face was one of horror.

  “Stop what?” the doctor asked, prodding, also having switched to Spanish.

  “Stop! Stop hurting her!”

  The child’s anguish was getting harder for Jack to watch, but he didn’t dare turn away.

  “Stop! Papi, stop!”

  Jack felt chills.

  “That’s enough!” Cecilia shouted, suddenly appearing on-screen. She hugged her niece and held her tightly in her arms. Dr. Moore stopped the video.

  “Obviously Beatriz came out of it there,” the doctor said.

  “Is ‘Papi’ who I think it is?” asked Jack.

  “Yes. I spoke with Beatriz afterward. Papi is what she called her father right up until the last time she saw him.”

  “So what she saw—” Jack started to say, then stopped to catch his breath. “Beatriz saw her father sexually assault her mother?”

  “That’s one interpretation,” said Dr. Moore.
<
br />   “Do you have another one?”

  “Yes, absolutely. That’s why I’m skeptical of the use of hypnosis in police investigations. Another perfectly sound interpretation is that Beatriz was playing in the closet and happened to catch her parents having sex in their bedroom. That’s a traumatic event for a child.”

  “Even more traumatic for an adult,” said Jack, trying not to imagine it.

  Another psychiatrist might have found it inappropriate, but she knew Jack well enough to appreciate the sometimes warped sense of humor that allowed death penalty lawyers to maintain their sanity.

  “You see my point, right, Jack?”

  “I do.”

  “It’s my view that the underlying response to hypnosis always implicates some level of fantasy and imagination. So be careful with this.”

  “I will be.”

  “You shouldn’t take anything you heard in that video at face value. You need corroboration. Do you get my drift?”

  “I do,” said Jack. “The way I see it, Beatriz’s mother could use a little refresher on the free flow of information between a client and her lawyer.”

  Chapter 17

  Beatriz climbed out of bed before dawn. It had been a sleepless Thursday night, and her alarm wouldn’t sound for another forty minutes, but she couldn’t take another minute of lying there on her back, wide awake, staring at the ceiling.

  What do you see, Beatriz?

  She had no memory of seeing Dr. Moore speak those words, but she couldn’t stop hearing that voice in her head.

  Tell me what you can see?

  She stood motionless beside the bed, alone in the darkness of what Cecilia called the “spare bedroom.” With no closet and barely enough room for a twin bed and a dresser, it wasn’t much of a bedroom; and it was a “spare” only in the sense that neither Cecilia nor her three roommates used it, but it was rarely unused. An endless stream of friends and relatives passing through Miami had slept there on the journey to somewhere else, someplace better.

  Beatriz took one step and stopped. The ceramic floor was cool beneath her feet, but she suddenly felt a rush of fear and anger inside her that burned like an electric current. The mini-blinds on the window were closed, but there was just enough of an opening for the light of a streetlamp to shine through the slats. White lines of light in the darkness, like the slatted closet door in her parents’ bedroom.

  What do you see, Beatriz?

  She lunged at the dangling cord and yanked it so hard that the entire set of mini-blinds came crashing down from the window frame. It made a terrible metallic racket when it hit the tile floor, like exploding soda cans, and Beatriz let out a scream so loud that she frightened herself. As she fell to the floor, sobbing, a light blinked on in the hallway. Cecilia came running into the room, switched on the bedroom lamp, and saw the mess.

  “Beatriz! Are you all right?”

  Cecilia lifted her niece from the floor, sat her on the edge of the bed, and held her. “Beatriz. What happened?”

  Beatriz could barely sit up. “I saw it again,” she said, choking back tears.

  Her aunt stroked her head gently. Beatriz waited for her to ask her what she saw again, but the question didn’t come. Cecilia seemed to know.

  “It’s all right, baby,” she said, rocking her sister’s child. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  Alarmed by the commotion, Cecilia’s roommates suddenly appeared in the doorway. Cecilia assured them that everything was okay. They said nothing to suggest that Beatriz was no longer welcome, but the room had been a bit of a teenage mess even before the mini-blinds were splayed across the floor, and Beatriz suddenly felt like an intruder, or at least like a burden.

  “I need to get ready for school,” she said.

  “It’s early,” said Cecilia. “Why don’t you try to get a little more sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  Her aunt let her go, and Beatriz made her way down the hall to the bathroom. A single bathroom for three women and a teenage girl was not without problems, but Beatriz had no complaints. A hot shower was not something to be taken for granted. At some point in the life of this old house, probably when the neighborhood was considered upper middle class, a previous owner had ripped out the bathtub and installed a walk-in shower like Beatriz had never seen before. The door was glass. The two side walls were made of glass blocks, floor to ceiling. When the water was hot enough, and with the light shining through the blocks of blurred glass, tiny rainbows shimmered in the rising steam. Beatriz liked to turn on the shower, sit inside the glass box, feel the splash of hot water on her face and body, and let the rainbows rise from nowhere.

  “Beatriz?”

  She stirred, confused. Water was falling from above, but it was lukewarm, not nearly as hot as she liked it. She heard knocking but not on the shower door. Someone was in the hallway at the bathroom door.

  “Beatriz, are you okay in there?” It was Cecilia.

  The water in the shower stall was three inches deep. Must’ve fallen asleep.

  Beatriz rose, turned off the shower, and wrapped herself in a towel. Her aunt was right outside the door when Beatriz opened it.

  “You’re going to miss your bus if you don’t hurry, sweetie.”

  Panic struck. Beatriz was working on the “perfect attendance” award at school—zero absences, not a single tardy slip. She was determined not to blow it, even though her twenty-minute ride on a school bus from her house in Little Havana was now a forty-minute ride on a city bus from her aunt’s house. Beatriz hurried to her bedroom, dressed in record time, and grabbed her backpack on the way out of the house. She ran all the way to the bus stop and caught the Number 11 bus just a split second before the driver closed the hydraulic doors. There were plenty of open seats. She took one about halfway back and slid all the way over to the window, catching her breath and pulling a comb through her wet hair, as the bus pulled away from the curb and merged into morning traffic.

  Beatriz was peering out the window, alone with her thoughts, when a stranger sat down beside her. Beatriz had been the only passenger to board at her stop, so for some reason the man had moved from somewhere in the back of the bus to be next to her. She shifted closer to the window but didn’t say anything.

  “I know your mother,” the man said.

  She didn’t look directly at him, but with a cut of her eyes she caught a glimpse. She was certain she’d never seen him before. “Who are you?”

  “Your mother used to work for me at the coffee shop.”

  Beatriz had yet to hear a full explanation of why her mother had rushed home from work at Café de Caribe and told her to pack their bags, but the vibe she was getting from this man was not a comfortable one.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “I need to get a message to your mother. Unfortunately, she’s kind of hard to reach these days. So I want you to deliver it to her.”

  Beatriz was reluctant to say yes or no.

  “Will you do that for me?” he asked.

  “I guess so.”

  “Her lawyer came to see me. He’s giving her very bad advice. Tell your mother that no one is going to believe her. The judge will believe me.”

  Beatriz was silent. The bus slowed as they approached the next stop.

  “And tell her that calling me a liar is a very foolish thing. Because I have ICE on speed dial. And I know where you live.”

  The bus stopped and the doors opened. McBride rose, walked to the front, and stepped off the bus.

  It gave Beatriz a chill to see him standing on the sidewalk, watching her through the window as the bus pulled away.

  Chapter 18

  Jack decided that his next visit to Julia would piggyback on the wallet of a paying client. The following week, he had a sentencing hearing before a federal judge in the Northern District of Georgia for a white-collar client who would soon be wearing orange. Macclenny was in the final analysis “on the way” to nowhere, but Hartsfield-Jackson Atlan
ta International Airport via Jacksonville with a side trip to the Baker County Facility worked just fine.

  They met in the usual room, at the usual table, in the usual chairs. Julia wore the same orange that Jack’s convicted Georgia client would be wearing for the next ten years. Julia even looked bored, no spark in her eyes and no hope in her voice. The monotony of prison life was unbearable for the guilty or the innocent, the convicted or the uncharged, the inmate or the detainee. And detention was prison, no two ways about it.

  “Beatriz delivered quite the surprise last week,” said Jack.

  “I heard.”

  “From whom?” Jack hadn’t told her.

  “Cecilia. I called Beatriz over the weekend, and my sister filled me in.”

  Jack gave her another quick lecture about no privacy on jail telephones, but that was not at all the point of his visit. “You didn’t tell me that the man who sexually assaulted you was your husband,” said Jack.

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “You told me you didn’t know the man who raped you.”

  “I’m not sure I actually said that, but it wouldn’t be a lie if I did. By the time Jorge did this to me, I felt like I didn’t know him.”

  “Don’t be cute with me, Julia. The identity of the man who sexually assaulted you is critical information. If Beatriz was a witness, how did you think I would not find out?”

  “She was in a closet. It was dark. She heard me screaming and knew I was being attacked. She never told me or anyone else that she saw the man who was hurting me.”

  “Are you telling me that this session with Dr. Moore was the first time Beatriz identified your attacker?”

  “As far as I know, yes. Now I regret that I even told you she was a witness. I would never have brought her into this if I’d thought this would come out. Do you think I wanted her to know that her father raped her mother?”

  “She’s always known it. The hynopsis just helped her recall.”

  “And now she’ll never forget it,” said Julia, her voice shaking. “I can’t believe I did this to her. What kind of terrible mother am I?”

  Jack recalled his conversation with Cecilia—when she’d withdrawn her words—and wondered if the similar accusations had been laid in the phone conversation between sisters.