by Neal Baer
When Claire returned and reentered the Forensic Psychiatry fellowship, Frank helped her find and move into her new apartment, insisting on paying the difference in rent over and above what Claire could afford on a medical fellow’s stipend, and then began making frequent trips from Rochester to Manhattan under the guise of “having business in the City.” Though her father swore it was just a coincidence he was assigned to some new project, Claire later learned Frank arranged the whole thing so he could be with her for a few days every other week.
She was about to open the door when a wide-awake voice came from behind her.
“You look beautiful.”
Claire turned. Her father was sitting up. Frank Waters was tall, thin, sporting a full shock of thick grey hair and the piercing green eyes his daughter inherited. His addiction to the gym made him look and move like a man who was a decade younger than his sixty-six years. He lifted off the comforter, revealing blue silk pajamas just a shade lighter than Claire’s suit.
“Thought I was being quiet,” Claire said.
“You didn’t wake me,” her father assured her.
She came over, gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Go back to sleep,” she said.
“Nah,” Frank replied. “Gotta hit the gym and then I have a day full of meetings. What time do you think you’ll be home?”
Claire knew it was his way of being protective. “Probably around eight,” Claire replied. “My day’s loaded too.”
“That why you’re so rattled?” Frank asked.
Claire thought she’d given away nothing. How did he know?
“I’m fine,” she said, trying to make light of it. But Frank knew better.
“I could always tell when you were upset. Even before you knew,” he said.
Claire knew from experience that it was useless to try to fool him.
“It’s nothing. I had a nightmare.”
“You had those as a child too,” Frank said.
“I know, Dad,” she said, slipping her pumps on.
“You’d wake up in the middle of the night and tell me all about them.”
“I’d tell you about the one I had last night. But I can’t remember it.”
Claire didn’t want to talk about the dream. It would only make her late and open the anxiety floodgates.
“Maybe I can jog your memory,” Frank offered, not waiting for Claire to refuse. “Do you remember how you woke up?”
“Yes,” Claire answered, checking her watch to give her father the hint that she didn’t have time for this. “I sat up in bed with my hand over my mouth.”
“So I wouldn’t hear you scream?” Frank asked. “Why would you think to do that in a nightmare?”
Claire smiled at the irony of having her head shrunk by a physicist.
“So I wouldn’t wake you up?” she asked playfully.
Now her father smiled. “Maybe the nightmare was about me.”
“I don’t think so,” Claire said.
“But you said you don’t remember. So how can you be sure?”
Checkmate. The conversation ended where it always did—at a brick wall. Until Frank tried another tactic.
“You know,” Frank began, “when you were a child you used to talk to someone who wasn’t there.”
“Yes, Dad,” Claire said, sighing. “That I do remember.”
“We were worried about you. Mom and I.”
“It’s common for children to have invisible playmates,” she said in her official psychiatrist’s voice.
Frank knew that tone; he’d heard it from his daughter many times and was no stranger to what it meant: “I’ve gotta go.” He used a similar tone with her many times and knew when to stop pressing her.
“Well, you’d better get going. You don’t want to be late.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Have a good day, Puppy.”
He blew her a kiss. Claire smiled at the pet name her father had called her for as long as she could remember. She blew him a kiss back and walked out to face the world, feeling just a little more secure.
He didn’t want to be late. He gathered all the items he would need: the pots, the rolled-up cloth with the razor-sharp chef’s knives and shears. He felt a pounding in his head. A rhythm almost like a drumbeat that drowned out any thoughts that would stop him from what he was compelled to do. He grabbed the tent along with the pots and knives and left his studio apartment, stepping out into the cool early morning sunlight that promised a beautiful day.
Arriving at the MSU hospital, Claire rushed out of the elevator, hoping she’d make it to her office before her supervisor, Dr. Fairborn, noticed she wasn’t there. But she’d gone just a few steps when the voice she dreaded came from behind her.
“Good morning, dear.”
Its sincerity made Claire feel even guiltier. Dr. Lois Fairborn had run MSU’s Department of Psychiatry for more than a decade, and was now doing double duty after inheriting the reins of the Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship in which Claire was about to begin her second year. She was trim, in her early sixties, with silver hair she recently stopped dying auburn. She wore a charcoal Armani suit, and several strands of pearls.
“Sorry I’m late, Dr. Fairborn,” Claire answered.
“No worries,” Fairborn said.
“I just assumed you’d be in class this morning.”
“No,” Claire replied, “Professor McClure is giving them time to finish their research papers and told me I didn’t have to be there.”
“Oh, yes,” said Fairborn, flustered, “I forgot.”
Walt McClure, a professor in MSU’s Criminology and Forensic Sciences Department and a “friend” of Fairborn’s (the speculation was that they were a lot more than just friends) taught a graduate seminar in criminal profiling. He asked Fairborn (perhaps during pillow talk) if Claire would be up for some guest lecturing on recent advances in psychiatry and genetics, especially a new field called epigenetics, which was beginning to show that the way one is a treated as a child can permanently change the neuronal circuitry of the brain. If a child wasn’t nurtured by his mother, for instance, that lack of love could change the child’s brain, emotionally crippling him for life. Speaking to a classroom of students was about the last thing Claire wanted to do, but she figured she’d do it, get it over with and it wouldn’t hurt too much, especially since Claire thrived on the latest scientific research that explained human behavior.
But the class was intimate, only ten students and Professor McClure, and to Claire’s surprise, she lit up the moment she started talking. She instantly engaged the students, who asked her dozens of questions, and was so entertaining and lively that McClure asked her to return on as many occasions as she had time for; to, in essence, co-teach the class for the rest of the semester. Claire, surprised that she’d taken to teaching in a way she never expected, quickly said yes.
“How’s it going?” asked Fairborn, though she already knew the answer.
“Better than I thought,” Claire replied. “The students seem to like me. But you already know that.”
“Busted,” Fairborn said with a smile. Her relationship with Claire had transcended bullshit ever since Claire started seeing Fairborn twice a week for therapy.
“Okay, then. How are you holding up?”
Claire was silent for a moment, considering how to answer.
“Good. I’m good,” Claire replied.
“Think I saw Rosa Sanchez waiting by your door,” Fairborn said.
Claire smiled and checked her watch. “My model patient,” she said. “Early as usual.”
But she hadn’t even rounded on her other, hospitalized, patients yet. Fairborn seemed to read her mind.
“I’ll take care of your inpatients.”
Claire was grateful not to have to keep Rosa waiting. “Thanks, Doctor,” she said to Fairborn.
“You’re welcome, dear,” Fairborn replied, eyeing Claire, to signal she wasn’t done with their conversation.
“Dr. Fairborn, is the
re something else?”
“You seem preoccupied lately. Is everything okay?”
Claire took a breath. “I’ve been having nightmares.”
“What’s your day like?” Fairborn asked, concerned.
“Packed,” Claire replied.
“Come see me when you get a free moment,” Fairborn suggested.
“Thanks,” Claire said, again grateful. “I will.”
He maneuvered the car through the bumper-to-bumper traffic that was morning rush hour in Manhattan. Driving soothed him, for it, too, was a way of constructing order from chaos. So many vehicles, jockeying for position, honking, wheels screeching, then each arriving at its proper destination. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard and smiled. He’d be on time after all.
Rosa Sanchez stood at the door to Claire’s office. As Claire approached, she saw immediately that her pretty, petite twenty-four-year-old patient with dark brown hair and bangs almost covering her walnut-shaped eyes had the weight of the world on her shoulders.
“What is it, Rosa?” Claire asked, concerned, as she unlocked and opened her office door. She could see that Rosa was shaking.
“The ACS says I still can’t see my babies,” Rosa replied.
They entered the office and Rosa plopped down on the soft, comfortable dark green velour sofa. Claire sat in the leather chair across from her.
“Tell me everything that happened, from the beginning,” Claire urged Rosa.
Claire already knew most of it. Six months earlier, Rosa had been on top of her world. Working nights cleaning office buildings, she did such an excellent job that she caught the attention of the company’s owner, Larry Merchant, who promoted her to shift supervisor at one of his most important clients’ office towers. The extra pay that came with the promotion allowed Rosa, her husband Franco (a New York City sanitation worker), and their two children Pablo, four, and Adelina, six, to move from their cramped one-bedroom apartment in the South Bronx to a clean, three-bedroom place on the Grand Concourse in the borough’s Fordham Manor section.
Life was good. Until one night, shortly after starting her supervisory job, when Rosa saw Larry Merchant heading toward her, smiling. Pleased that the place was immaculate, he pulled Rosa into the CEO’s office and, without ceremony, put his hands all over her. When Rosa refused to satisfy him and pushed him away, Larry threatened not only to fire her, but also to report her to Immigration. To which Rosa, no shrinking violet, replied that she was born at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, which made her just as American as he was, and that if giving him a blow job was what it took to keep her job then he could take it and shove it. Then she walked out the door.
And right into the nearest police precinct, where she filed a complaint against Larry Merchant for sexually assaulting her.
When the cops arrested Larry the next morning, he had a different story to tell. He claimed Rosa put the moves on him, and when he refused her advances, she threatened to tell his wife that they’d been having an affair and that was the reason he promoted her in the first place.
In the police world, this was the classic “he said, she said” sexual assault complaint. It was Rosa’s word against Larry’s. There were no witnesses. And Rosa didn’t have a mark on her.
The Special Victims Unit detective who heard Rosa’s story presented the case to an Assistant District Attorney assigned to Sex Crimes, who decided it was a loser from the get-go. She ordered the SVU Detective to void Larry Merchant’s arrest and cut him loose.
Larry walked. Rosa was disgusted, bolstered only by the knowledge that at least the bastard couldn’t fire her because she had already quit. She was sure she and Franco could make ends meet—at least for a while—on his salary.
What she didn’t know was that her troubles were only beginning.
A week later, Franco came home from work one night and announced to Rosa that their marriage was over. He was leaving her for a woman he had been having an affair with for nearly a year. When Rosa asked him for child support, Franco told her she should have slept with her boss to keep her job, and that if she wanted a cent out of him she’d have to take him to court.
Rosa went right to a neighborhood check-cashing place she used many times, and cashed two checks, each for five thousand dollars. The owners were reluctant to hand over so much to her but they knew and liked Rosa, and felt bad when she explained her situation to them. And they never liked Franco. So they gave her the money, which she used to pay three months’ rent on her apartment.
Except Franco had already emptied out their checking and savings accounts.
When Rosa’s checks bounced, the owners of the check-cashing place called the police.
Rosa tearfully explained to the detective who arrested her that she had no idea her bank account was empty, and that she was sorry.
The detective took pity on her and recommended to an ADA in the Bronx District Attorney’s office that there was no intent and therefore no crime. But the ADA saw the case as an easy win and arraigned Rosa on two counts of grand larceny in the third degree.
Suddenly, Rosa, never in an ounce of trouble in her life, faced seven years in jail. She was tried and found guilty and transported to the Singer Center, the lone women’s facility among the ten houses of detention making up Rikers Island, New York City’s notorious jail, to serve out her sentence. Her mother promised to bring her two children to visit as often as possible, but after several months her mother had to go back to work to support the kids, and Rosa saw her children only twice a month.
And that’s where things went from really bad to a whole lot worse.
Rosa was assigned to mess-hall duty, where she helped prepare, cook and serve meals for her fellow inmates. Though all the corrections officers who dealt with females in the living quarters were women themselves, the CO who supervised the mess hall and its workers was a man—Jack Storm—aptly named considering his raging temper.
And Storm took a liking to young, pretty, twenty-four-year-old Rosa.
One night, not long after Rosa was assigned to the mess hall, she was on after-dinner cleanup duty, exiting a supply closet with a broom, when this officer pushed her back inside, shut the door and groped her.
Rosa told him to stop. Storm replied with a blow to Rosa’s head.
And then he pulled down her pants, bent her over and forced himself inside her.
When he was done, Storm told Rosa that should she consider telling anyone about their encounter, the next blow to her head would be fatal.
The women on mess-hall duty who found Rosa bleeding in the closet warned her not to report what happened. She wasn’t Storm’s first victim, and the rest of them knew that the best way to get along with this man was to just give him what he wanted. They assured Rosa her time would pass more smoothly. Rosa nodded and said she understood.
And then she called her Legal Aid attorney. Who in turn called the Queens Special Victims Unit of the NYPD.
It was only a few hours before the attorney showed up with a teddy bear of a detective named Vito and a warrant, signed by a judge, ordering Rosa’s release into protective custody.
Rosa was taken to Elmhurst Hospital, where a sexual assault nurse examiner performed a “rape kit,” gathering forensic evidence of the rape from Rosa’s body. Rosa was then brought to the SVU office at the 112th Precinct in Forest Hills, where she gave Detective Vito a statement. Vito told her he had an informant in Rikers who knew exactly what happened and corroborated Rosa’s story. He was going to put Rosa in a hotel under twenty-four-hour guard while the lab at the city’s Medical Examiner’s office rushed the DNA from her rape kit through the process. He’d been trying to get Jack Storm for years, but not one of the CO’s victims had ever been willing to testify. Detective Vito asked Rosa whether she would step up and testify against this monster in court, to put him away so he could never victimize another woman.
Rosa said yes. And what came next all but made her head spin.
Storm was arrested and a sample of hi
s DNA taken for comparison to the DNA of the semen found in Rosa’s body. It was a dead-on match.
When word spread among the female inmates, more than a dozen women came forward claiming they were victimized in much the same way as Rosa. And, like Rosa, all of them were first-time offenders convicted of nonviolent crimes, serving short sentences.
Storm was charged with forty-two counts of rape and sexual assault. The evidence against him was bulletproof.
The City contacted Dr. Fairborn, asking if her psychiatric fellows would be available to evaluate Storm’s victims to see if they were suited for early release, and counsel them as sexual assault victims who no doubt suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Fairborn agreed and assigned Rosa Sanchez to Claire, knowing that Claire had the skill to help Rosa find her way back through the trauma she had suffered.
Claire determined not only that Rosa was a candidate for early release, but that she never belonged in jail in the first place. She and her colleagues in the Fellowship Program returned similar verdicts on every one of the seventeen other victims of Jack Storm, recommending their immediate release from Rikers and probation if deemed necessary.
Rosa and her fellow victims were all sprung from jail and on probation within a week. None of them ever had to testify, however, against the corrections officer who attacked them, for on the eve of his trial Jack Storm took a nine-millimeter Glock, sat in a reclining chair in his den and blew his brains all over the ’70s-style wood paneling.