“No, I’m free all day. But you’ll have work to do. This new case.”
“Old case,” Zachary corrected. “If you’re not in a hurry, then why don’t we go back to bed and see if we can forget about Bridget calling?”
Kenzie gave him a warm smile.
10
The fridge whirred to life as Zachary looked inside it, then closed the door without taking anything out. Zachary stood in the kitchen and looked at the time again. The day was getting away from him, marching on before he’d managed to get anything done. Kenzie was in the shower and had been in there for much longer than her normal splash-and-dash. He didn’t know whether to put on coffee and toast, or to wait until she got out of the bathroom, or if it were too late to worry about breakfast and he should just use the quiet time to blast through a few emails.
Eventually, he turned on the coffee maker and drifted over to his desk and booted up the computer.
By the time Kenzie got out of the shower, the whole apartment was feeling humid and sticky. Zachary turned his head as she left the bathroom to get dressed, but she didn’t say anything to him or poke her head in, so he just left her to get ready for the day on her own. She didn’t need him hovering over her while she dressed.
Eventually, she made her way out, crossed behind him into the kitchen, and returned with a mug of coffee. She sat down on the couch. He could feel her watching him. He looked in her direction.
“What’s up?”
“Can we talk for a minute?”
Up until then, Zachary had been feeling pretty good about himself. But a serious talk meant that he had done something wrong. And if he were to judge by the length of her shower, it wasn’t a minor detail.
Was she still upset about Bridget’s call? He shouldn’t have answered it. He shouldn’t have left the room to talk to her. He should have just done like Kenzie said and told her to shove off.
“I’m sorry.”
She quirked an eyebrow at him. “Sorry for what?”
It was a foster mom’s favorite trick to find out if he really understood what it was that he had done wrong. Foster dads were almost always happy if he just said he was sorry. There might still be a punishment, but they were happy to just dispense with arguments and lectures and get on with it. Women were different.
“I’m sorry about Bridget’s call. I shouldn’t have taken it, you’re right. I should just block her.”
“Oh.” She waved the subject away as if it were nothing. “That’s not what I wanted to talk about.”
He shifted to find a comfortable position. He swallowed and tried to force himself to sit absolutely still and not fidget.
“Zachary… I’m not even sure how to say this.”
It sounded like the beginning of a breakup talk. How could she be breaking up with him when they had just started sleeping together? Was that the culmination of their relationship, and now that she’d reached the peak, she was on her way out the door?
“Just… say what you’re thinking,” he encouraged, hoping he wouldn’t regret it.
She still didn’t speak right away, looking for the words. She eventually started haltingly. “When we’re together… something happens to you. You go away. You’re going through the motions, but your head… you just aren’t there. You check out.”
Zachary looked at her, trying to think of an argument to counter what she said. Bridget had never said that. Bridget had always said the opposite—that he was excessive in lovemaking. Immoderate.
He just sat there with his mouth open, unable to marshal any defenses.
“I’m sorry,” Kenzie shook her head and took a drink of the coffee. It had been sitting on the burner throughout her marathon shower, and she winced, but drank it anyway.
“No… that’s my fault, not yours. I… I’ll try to do better.”
“Do you even know you’re doing it? What are you feeling when that happens?”
He shook his head, trying to make sense of what she said. He had done everything he could to convince her that he was okay, that he wasn’t damaged. He didn’t pull away when she touched him or cuddled. He never told her no, or that he was too tired or too anxious. He initiated intimacy, just as he had that morning. But it still wasn’t enough for her. She still thought that there was something missing.
Him. He wasn’t there.
When he thought back to what had happened that morning, he could remember everything they had said and done, up to a point. And then, as she had said, it was like he had left the room. While one part of his brain stayed behind to keep everything running, the part that was really him left. He was vaguely aware of what had happened after that point, but it was behind a heavy veil. He had no longer been a participant.
Zachary stared down at his hands, embarrassed, his skin warming as he tried to figure out what to say and how to fix it.
“I guess I feel… overwhelmed. I don’t know.”
“I feel like you don’t want to be with me. Like you’re thinking of Bridget or someone else and I’m not even there.”
“No! No, I don’t want to be with anyone else. I wasn’t thinking of Bridget.”
Her eyes were intense as she studied his face. He hoped she could see the truth there. He hadn’t ever used Kenzie as a surrogate. He was with her because he wanted to be with her, not someone else.
“Then what’s going on?” There was a long, awkward pause. “Do you know what dissociation is?”
“Yes, of course.”
But he hadn’t thought of it that way before. He had flashbacks. He had anxiety attacks. But he hadn’t felt separate from what he was doing. Not until Teddy had drugged him to be free to do what he pleased. Since then… it had returned a number of times, without his really being aware of it.
“Have you ever had a psychiatrist diagnose you with dissociation?” Kenzie asked.
“No.”
“If you’re having dissociative episodes, you need to talk to someone about it. You’ve experienced a trauma and your brain and your body are trying to deal with it.”
He lifted his hands helplessly. She knew that he saw several different doctors and a therapist and was also going to support groups sporadically. He didn’t know what more she expected him to do to fix himself.
“Have you talked to anyone about being kidnapped? I’m not saying you have to tell me about it, but… you need to work through it. It was traumatic and you haven’t fully recovered.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Do you want to keep dissociating every time we make love? Because I’d kind of like it if you were around for that part.”
“I will be,” he promised. “I’ll work on it. I’ll try harder.”
She sighed and had another sip of her coffee.
11
Zachary brought up the documents contained in Heather’s police file on the screen of his computer so that he could focus on them and gather everything he could from what had been recorded thirty years before. He tried to forget that it was Heather, his big sister, and just to concentrate on the details in the reports.
It had been a warm spring day. She was cutting through the park on her way home from school in the afternoon, something the students were not supposed to do. Zachary didn’t find any explanation as to why it was out of bounds, whether there had been attacks there before or whether students had misbehaved, littering or breaking tree branches, or if there was another problem like drug dealing or prostitution going on in the shadows of the trees. Whatever the reason, Heather had known the rule against going through the park and had chosen to disobey it.
Zachary could remember a conversation he’d had with a psychologist when he first went to the Petersons. The psychologist had wanted to know why Zachary had disobeyed the rules at his school. The upshot of the conversation was that Zachary often disobeyed the rules when they were a barrier to what he wanted. He felt the rules were unfair, or that the adults didn’t really understand the situation, or that he was an exception to the r
ule for one reason or another, and went ahead and did what he wanted to.
Of course, everyone did that at some time or another, justifying speeding because they were late, taking towels from hotels or hospitals because they felt they had been overcharged, or breaking curfew because they really wanted to attend a concert or party. But Zachary had broken rules with serious consequences, first and foremost the fire on Christmas Eve. The psychologist wanted to curb his impulsive rule-breaking to prevent further catastrophes.
Like Zachary, Heather had been quick to bend or break a rule that she felt unfair, and had done so that day in cutting through the park. According to the police report, she had been provocatively dressed, in short-shorts and a halter top. He didn’t know if she had gone to school in an outfit like that. From what he remembered of the various schools he had gone to around that time, the students were not allowed to wear anything above the knee or that bared the shoulders or showed cleavage. Students who showed up in inappropriate dress were sent to the home economics room to alter their clothing, outfitted from the lost and found, or sent home to change. Maybe she had changed into a cooler outfit after school let out, wanting to be comfortable in the summer heat.
It had been a daylight attack. Because the park was off limits for the students, it had been isolated and it had been easy for the perp to grab her and drag her off where no one would see or hear her, a knife at her throat to quell any protests.
Zachary couldn’t find any indication that the police had identified the exact spot she had been assaulted. There were no footprints taken or notes made of litter that might have been nearby that could have been analyzed in case he had dropped something and left his fingerprints behind. And of course they hadn’t been looking for DNA. It would seem that they had simply noted the park as the place of the crime and had not made a direct examination of the scene.
There were notes that Heather was distressed and didn’t want to talk, and that her foster mother had insisted a report be filed despite Heather’s protests.
She had changed her clothes after the attack, but there was no indication that the police had asked for the clothes she had been wearing at the time or gone to her house to retrieve them. She had been interrogated for some hours before the police were convinced that it had, in fact, been rape and that she hadn’t just gone for a tumble with some boyfriend and was trying to cover the fact up so she wouldn’t be in trouble at home.
Zachary looked at the pictures of her and couldn’t believe that the police could entertain the idea it was anything other than an aggravated sexual assault.
After that determination had been made, they had sent Heather to the hospital for treatment and the collection of the forensic sexual assault kit. Heather’s foster mother had not taken her to the hospital for any treatment before taking her to the police station. While Zachary was glad she was so determined that the assault be properly reported and documented with the police, he wondered at the heart of a mother who was more concerned about the police report than the possibility of broken bones, concussion, internal bleeding, or any other injuries her foster daughter might have been suffering. Was she more concerned about establishing that the child had not been assaulted in her own house than she was in having her treated?
He took a break from the forms, putting his hands over his aching eyes. He knew he had been sitting at his desk staring at the screen without blinking for much too long. Kenzie had once suggested that he should set a timer to remind himself to get up and walk around and rest his eyes every fifteen or twenty minutes, but Zachary didn’t like being pulled away from a job once he was focused on it. If he had been interrupted every fifteen minutes, he’d have to reestablish his focus over and over again, and that just wasn’t the way his brain worked. He could hyperfocus for long periods of time, but if he were interrupted, it was hard to get back into it. He wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.
He got up and poured himself a cup of coffee, even though it had been sitting on the warming burner for some hours. He put a cold cloth over his eyes for a minute or two and attempted to get some hydrating eyedrops into them, which was always a challenge because his eyes were determined to blink to avoid the drops no matter how he positioned the bottle or tried to keep his lids pinned open with his other hand.
He returned to the file, took a deep breath, and dove back in again. After the initial report, there had been some investigation. As Able had said, they called on the sexual predators that they knew, which would have been only a very small percentage of those who were actually living in the area. The police would only know of those with multiple convictions, those who were on parole, or who had warnings out on them that they were expected to reoffend. People who hadn’t been caught for some time or since moving into the neighborhood would be unidentifiable. Zachary studied the names and descriptions of the various sexual predators they had talked to, memorizing their names and trying to see whether any of them could actually be ruled out.
Heather’s vague description of a man who was of average height and build eliminated only a couple of them. There were a few with ironclad alibis—namely the ones who had been in court or jail at the time of the assault. The others’ whereabouts were harder to verify. They had been with friends, home alone, or at the bar. The police had nothing that would rule them out, but also no reason to suspect them other than that they were known sex offenders. All of them had, of course, claimed to be reformed. The police had tentatively eliminated those who had a preference for boys or for prepubescent girls, since Heather was too well-developed for someone looking for a child’s physique.
That still left way too many options. They hadn’t been able to narrow the pool down to two or three solid suspects. And, of course, the perpetrator might not have been a known sex offender. He might have been someone who was just trawling the area at random, who had never been convicted before, or who had moved into the area without their knowing about it.
There was no mention in the file of similar assaults in the area, so the man had apparently not established a recognizable pattern. Maybe Heather had been his first victim. Zachary doubted it, but it was possible. Offenders usually worked up to an attack like that. The rapist first behaved inappropriately with girls he knew personally. He groped strangers or was caught peeping. He had questionable encounters at parties and bars, until he reached the point where he had to do something bigger and more audacious to satisfy his drive. Then there were a couple of bumbling, abortive attempts before he managed to close the deal.
The attack on Heather felt experienced. Maybe even someone that the school was aware of, hence the prohibition on walking through the woods. It hadn’t been his first attempt, Zachary was sure of that.
Before making the call, Zachary reviewed the list of notes and questions he had made as he reviewed the file. He called Tyrrell’s number first.
“Zachary! Hey, how’s it going?”
“Good. Everything is fine. Uh, I wasn’t sure…”
“Mmm…?”
“Whether I should contact Heather directly, or whether I should go through you. Because she went to you initially, she might not be comfortable talking to me directly.”
“No, you should call her. The whole reason that she thought you might be a good person to investigate it is because of what you went through. She drew her own conclusions from what was in the news. She and I talk sometimes, but she never discussed anything personal like that with me.”
Zachary knew there was a question behind Tyrrell’s words. Zachary hadn’t told him, or Kenzie, or the nagging reporters what had happened during his imprisonment by Archuro. The police had carefully worded any of their releases or interviews with the press to leave the question open, trying to give Zachary his privacy, but when word had spread about the details of what the man had done to his other victims before finally killing them, people easily drew a line to Zachary and made the assumption that he had been a victim of similar depravity. Tyrrell would never ask him directly, but Zachary
knew the question was there every time Tyrrell mentioned the kidnapping.
“Great,” he said, without giving Tyrrell any more details than he already had. “I’ll call her, then.”
“Sounds good. And you and I should get together for supper again before too long… maybe take in a game.”R.
Zachary nodded automatically. “Sure, that sounds like a good idea,” he agreed. But he didn’t suggest a date.
“Okay… I’ll call you, then. We’ll talk about it another time.”
12
Zachary was more nervous about calling Heather’s number. It wasn’t going to be an easy call, and he wondered if he should meet her in person to make sure that she was okay and didn’t go off the rails. If it had been Zachary, he was pretty sure he would have gone off the rails. He couldn’t imagine how devastating it would be if he got a call from the police saying that because of some glitch or technicality they would not be able to prosecute Archuro for what he had done.
But in the end, he was too much of a chicken to go to her house and see her face-to-face. Maybe it would be easier for her if she could just hang up and go cry into her pillow.
He dialed the number and it rang a number of times before Heather picked up. She probably didn’t recognize his number, being so new to her. Her answer was tentative. “Hello?”
“Heather, it’s Zachary.” There was no response, and he tried again. “Zachary, your brother.”
“Uh… hi. I guess I wasn’t really expecting to hear from you.”
“Would there be a better time for me to call?”
“No. Best to just get it over with, I guess, like ripping off a bandage. You didn’t find anything?”
“I’m not actually done yet, but I don’t have a lot of leads. I just wondered if I could ask you a few questions.”
He Was Not There Page 7