Closer Than You Know

by Brad Parks

He started running around with a girl named Wendy Mataya, who was as beautiful as she was dangerous. They made quite a pair—Teddy was broad-shouldered and handsome, like my father—and they spent their high school years scoring drugs, partying, and racking up juvenile records.

  When Teddy turned eighteen, I sat him down and staged my version of an intervention, convincing him that the consequences of stealing and dealing were about to become a lot more severe. I then convinced his parents—who were just about through with him by that point—to fund his tuition at a local vocational school, where he learned HVAC repair.

  To his credit, Teddy buckled down and earned his certificate. He then found a job and moved into a large house he shared with three other guys, one of whom was a young sheriff’s deputy, none of whom he knew from his drug days. I was thrilled.

  Once Alex was born, Teddy made noises about how he planned to be a devoted uncle. But after a spate of visits early on, I hadn’t seen him as much recently. My friend Marcus had shown more interest in Alex than Teddy had. I thought maybe Teddy was just busy.

  Now, as I cleared away the police tape, I wondered what he had really been up to. Teddy had a key to my house. Knowing he couldn’t risk bringing drugs into his apartment—not with a sheriff’s deputy for a roommate—had he stashed them at my place?

  I entered through the front door into the scene of a catastrophe. My once-tidy home had been ransacked.

  In the living room, all the furniture had either been knocked over or shoved out of place. Picture frames had been removed from the walls. The television was lying facedown. Ben’s jazz records—a collection of hidden gems he had found at yard sales or used shops for fifty cents or a dollar, even though many of them were worth far more—had been toppled from their place of honor on the shelf in the entertainment center and left in loose piles. Books, my beloved books, had been pulled from the shelves and stacked haphazardly.

  In the kitchen, all the drawers had been yanked out of the counter and emptied, their contents strewn about. Plates, bowls, and glassware had been removed from the cabinets and dumped on the kitchen table. Pots and pans littered the floor.

  In our bedroom, the mattress and box spring were leaning against the wall. My dresser drawers had been pulled out and left wherever it was they landed. Most of our clothes were tossed in a heap in the corner, except for my bras and underwear, which were in the middle of the room. Someone wanted me to know they had received particular attention.

  The loving sanctuary we had worked so hard to make for ourselves had been defiled. Along with it came the destruction of the myths I had built for myself: that I was somehow safe here, that this place was different, that bad things couldn’t reach me as long as I was inside these four walls.

  Nothing was broken, at least not that I saw. But they had gone out of their way to make our home as much of a shambles as possible. Anything that didn’t have an implicit value had been tossed about or trampled.

  We can do this to you, they seemed to be saying. And there’s nothing you can do back.

  I ended my tour in the nursery, which hadn’t been spared the authorities’ fury. Alex’s crib was lying on its side. The contents of his changing table were everywhere. His little onesies had been unfolded and flung into a mound along with loose diapers, tubes of A+D Ointment, packages of wipes, and all the other bits of babydom that had once been organized so perfectly.

  Up in the ceiling, there was a gaping hole where the air-conditioning exchange cover should have been. It had been removed and placed over near the closet, leaving the vent wide open.

  In the corner, I spied the plush bear Marcus and Kelly had given Alex—a little guy named Mr. Snuggs, according to his tag. Poor Mr. Snuggs had been knocked off the shelf where he lived. I picked him up and put him on the changing table.

  It was impossible, in all the destruction, to tell if they had discovered any drugs; or where they had found them. But they must have gotten something. That’s why Alex was now with Social Services.

  I slumped into the rocker-glider where I often nursed Alex. Like some Pavlovian reaction, my nipples sprung leaks. Ordinarily, I would have fed Alex hours ago. My breasts were now rock hard, so swollen they felt like they were going to rupture. I needed to do something to relieve the pressure. My electric breast pump, the one provided to me by my fabulous insurance plan, was stored at work. So was the hand pump I used as a backup. I didn’t need those things here. I had Alex.

  There was no choice. I staggered into the bathroom and unbuttoned my blouse. I lowered the now-sodden flap on my nursing bra.

  Then, trying not to see myself in the mirror—because I didn’t even want to know what I looked like at a moment like this—I lowered my breast toward the sink and began massaging around the nipple.

  The milk came instantly, thick at first, then thinner once I got it going.

  All the while, I watched as the precious fluid that should have been nourishing my baby disappeared down the drain.

  SEVEN

  After coffee, after a shower, after an omelet, and after a quick perusal of The Washington Post on her iPad, Amy Kaye figured she had dawdled enough.

  Her bravado with Aaron Dansby aside, she actually did need to familiarize herself with the Coke Mom case if she was going to write up a bill of indictment for the grand jury. Her interview with Daphne Hasper wasn’t until ten a.m., still two hours away. Amy thought she might as well get her call to Sheriff Jason Powers over with.

  Powers was a tobacco-dipping, Reba McEntire–loving, huntin’, fishin’ country boy, through and through. In defiance of stereotypes, he never seemed to have a problem with Amy being a Northerner or a woman. Amy had always found him both easy to work with and competent.

  Now well entrenched in the job, Sheriff Powers did not keep a predictable schedule. He might be in the office, or he might be patrolling the fairways at a local golf course. He was a notorious night owl and seemed to enjoy roaming around the county during the small hours. Patrol officers knew not to spend too much time hanging out at Sheetz, because it was entirely possible the boss would show up unannounced, driving his personal vehicle, and catch them loafing. Amy sometimes got emails from Powers at five in the morning and sometimes ten at night.

  She wasn’t sure when he actually slept. She simply called him when she needed him, knowing she would either get him or not.

  This was one of the times she got him.

  “’Lo,” he said.

  “Hey, Jason, it’s Amy Kaye.”

  “What’s going on?” he said in typically easygoing fashion. Unlike Dansby, who was constantly paranoid about reelection, Powers had faced the voters twice now—and his father six times before that. They had never lost.

  “I wanted to check in with you about this bust on Desper Hollow Road.”

  “Oh. So now that Dapper Dansby is done with the cameras the real work can begin?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What do you need to know?” Powers asked.

  “How’d you get probable cause?”

  “CI.”

  A confidential informant. The standard-issue infantry rifle in the war on drugs.

  “He do a buy for you?”

  “Yep.”

  “You pay him?”

  “Yep. Hundred bucks.”

  Not that it mattered. But it had to be disclosed. The defense usually tried to make an issue out of it, painting it as the prosecution buying its information. The argument typically didn’t get much traction. Juries didn’t care.

  “Have you used him before?

  “Yeah. Coupla times.”

  That was good. The law made a distinction between confidential informants who had previously provided information and new ones. Veteran CIs were deemed “reliable” and didn’t have to be named in a search warrant. It was one less avenue of attack for defense attorneys whose first and best play i
n cases like this was to attack the validity of the warrant.

  “Who executed the warrant?” Amy asked.

  “Kempe.”

  Another good break. Lieutenant Peter “Skip” Kempe was as solid a detective as could be found at the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office. He was authoritative, but not overbearing about it. He presented information in a straightforward fashion that came off as incontrovertible fact. Amy had put him on the stand during the Mookie Myers case and was pretty sure at least four of the jurors wanted to invite him over for dinner when he was done.

  “He do it clean?”

  “Yeah, as far as I know, no troubles.”

  “Aaron told me they got half a kilo of coke. Is that . . .”

  “Dapper Dansby stretchin’ the truth?” Powers said, laughing. “No, he got it just about right. Four hundred eighty-seven grams. Almost as much as Mookie Myers. Same brand as Myers too.”

  In a sign that drug dealers were every bit as cognizant of the importance of product differentiation as Madison Avenue advertising executives, illicit drugs in modern America often came with brand stamps. The idea was that certain brands were better quality, something that mattered to a discerning junkie.

  “Dragon King, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “So, what, you think this lady took over Myers’s operation?”

  “Looks that way. We found scales and baggies and all that, but we also found a list of customer names and numbers. It’s a lot of the same folks who bought from Mookie. Some of our favorite people.”

  “But how does a white woman with a kid end up having any connection to someone like Mookie Myers?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe she was a customer? Doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  Virginia’s statute regarding possession with intent to distribute was written in a way that meant the Commonwealth didn’t actually have to prove a dealer had made a sale. The law presumed that a person who possessed enough product was planning to sell it.

  “No, I guess not,” Amy said. “Where did you find it anyway?”

  “Taped inside the air-conditioning duct in the nursery.”

  “The nursery?”

  “Yeah, I guess this lady figured that’d be the last place we’d look. The supplies were in a closet. Oh, and you’re gonna love this: In the same box where she kept the supplies, we also got her cell phone. Had pictures of her and her kid on it and everything.”

  “Oh, perfect,” Amy said.

  Merely finding drugs in a defendant’s home might not be enough to establish possession. You had to prove the person knew the drugs were there and had what the law called “dominion and control” over the materials. Pairing drug paraphernalia with the defendant’s cell phone—and not just some anonymous burner—accomplished that quite nicely. In the modern world, few things were more personal than someone’s mobile phone.

  “All right,” Amy said. “Anything else I need to know?”

  “Nothing that comes to mind. This should be pretty open-and-shut. You want me to have Skip call you?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got a meeting shortly, but sometime this afternoon would be great. Will he be available for a grand jury on Friday? Dansby wants to direct indict.”

  “I’ll make him available.”

  “Thanks,” Amy said. “By the way, what’s the defendant’s name?”

  “Melanie Barrick.”

  Amy nearly dropped her phone.

  “What?” she said sharply.

  “Melanie, common spelling. Barrick. B-A-R-R-I-C-K.”

  Amy couldn’t talk. And from the other side of the phone, Powers had no way of knowing just how dumbstruck she was.

  “You got anything else?” he asked. “I’m about to tee off here.”

  “No, I’m good,” she squeezed out.

  “Okay. See ya.”

  Amy put down her phone then spent a minute staring at her kitchen table. She didn’t know Melanie Barrick personally.

  But she did professionally.

  Melanie Barrick was one of the whispering rapist’s most recent victims.

  EIGHT

  Call it a flashback or some kind of post-traumatic stress reaction.

  There was just something about spending the evening in my ruined home—steeping in that feeling of violation—that took me back to where I had been almost exactly a year before, to a day, a place, and an episode that was suddenly revisiting itself on me even though I certainly hadn’t invited it.

  The day was March 8.

  The place was that awful ground-floor apartment.

  The episode began when I felt a gloved hand clamp over my mouth, jolting me out of a sound sleep.

  “Please don’t scream,” a man said in a whisper that was, all at once, both ethereal and terrifying. “I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

  In the scant glow of a nearby streetlight that snuck around my blinds, I could see a man in a ski mask hovering over me. The hint of skin that showed around the eyeholes told me he was white. The rest of him—arms, hands, legs, neck—was covered.

  My first thought was that I should bite his hand, even if it would just give me a mouthful of glove. Then I would kick him, then claw his eyeballs, then . . .

  Then, with his other hand, he brought a machete up to my face. It was a thick, heavy chunk of metal at least eighteen inches long. Its steel had turned dark, basically black. Only its sharp, cruel edge remained silver, and it glinted at me.

  “I’ll only use this if I have to,” he whispered. “Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Am I going to have to hurt you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m going to take my hand off your mouth now. Can you please stay quiet?” He removed his hand. “Are you going to be good? You can answer.”

  “Yes,” I said meekly.

  “Thank you. Now could you please remove your top?”

  I complied, resorting to a survival technique I had learned in childhood. I pretended that I could take a piece of myself—the most important part—and lock it in my heart, where it would be safe from the rest of the world. It was a trick I sometimes told my fellow foster kids about. And it helped me again with that loathsome whispering man.

  For as much as I wondered later about what would have happened if I resisted—Should I have tried to fight him off? Should I have screamed and hoped it scared him away? Should I have peed on him or found some other way to gross him out? Should I have run?—the mere fact that I was around to have those thoughts eventually made me decide I had done the right thing.

  He took my bedsheets and the clothes I had been wearing when he was done, then disappeared out the same window he had jimmied open to let himself in.

  When I was sure he was gone, I put on a sweatshirt and jeans, then called Ben and asked him if he would come over. He was just my boyfriend then, though we had been dating exclusively for some time. The irony was that he had kept trying to convince me to move in with him, but I didn’t want to give up my independence.

  He held me through the night, crying with me the whole time, reminding me he loved me, saying it wasn’t my fault, telling me there was nothing I could (or should) have done differently.

  In the morning, he convinced me I had to call the police. The professor in him cited all the statistics about the underreporting of rape, saying the crime was never going to get the attention it deserved until its true prevalence was better understood.

  The boyfriend in him was just angry. He wanted to nail the bastard who had done this to me.

  That led to a long day of reliving the attack, first with the Sheriff’s Office, then with the prosecutor, a woman who asked a lot of detailed questions.

  At one point during our interview, she made a reference to the rapist’s black machete being held in my face.

  “I didn’t s
ay anything to you about the machete being black,” I said. “How did you know that?”

  “Oh, I thought you said it was black,” she said.

  But she was a terrible liar.

  “I’m not the only one, am I?” I asked.

  She didn’t reply to that. She didn’t need to. I already knew, from the way he acted with me, that he had done it before.

  The Sheriff’s Office got my attacker’s DNA off the rape kit, though naturally it wasn’t a match for anyone in the system. Between that and my totally worthless description, the authorities got very quiet and the case went unsolved, just as I somehow suspected it would.

  And then? Well, then nothing. I went on with my life.

  I don’t want to make it sound like I just shrugged the thing off. Far from it. I couldn’t get that awful whisper to leave my mind. It was in there all the time—all day and, worse, all night. It made me feel like my assailant was forever around the corner, waiting to pounce.

  Logically, I knew I was just imagining it. But don’t underestimate the power of human imagination. It’s given us everything from world-changing religions to the atomic bomb. It’s more than capable of keeping a one-hundred-twenty-pound girl chained to her mental demons.

  For weeks, I was afraid to stay in my apartment, but I was also terrified to leave. I felt exposed and vulnerable wherever I went. Even worse than hearing the echoes of that whisper was the feeling when I saw a man whose proportions resembled my attacker—which was a lot of them, given how average the guy was. It made me wonder: Is that the guy? Is he right now envisioning me naked, scared, totally in his control?

  And then it was like being right back in my bedroom, tasting that glove.

  Even friends could trigger the reaction. The first time I saw Marcus, who had never been anything but chivalrous in all the years we had known each other, I freaked out and had a full-blown panic attack.

  Ben suggested therapy, but I knew it wouldn’t help. I had done therapy before, as a kid. I didn’t need to talk the thing into submission. Within a lifetime of crappy things that had happened to me, this was just one more crappy thing.