Closer Than You Know

by Brad Parks

  I retreated back down the steps and sat in my car. I flashed back to the conversation we had in the parking lot, when he had bailed me out, when I thought I—his all-knowing older sister—could stare the truth out of him.

  Are you seeing Wendy again? I had asked.

  No! he insisted.

  And I actually believed him. Now I found myself asking the question I least wanted to consider.

  What else had he lied about?

  TWENTY-SIX

  The hand was on her hip, pressing just a little bit.

  In those moments of incoherence between sleep and wakefulness, Amy Kaye wasn’t sure if this was part of a dream, or whether her husband really was sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “Ame . . . Ame . . . ,” he said.

  She stared at him with incomprehension, then it finally clicked in: Yes, her husband was there. He was no longer dressed in chef’s clothing, but he still smelled like onions. Could you smell in dreams? No. So she must have been awake.

  “Your phone was ringing, and I saw it was Jason Powers, so I answered it,” he said softly.

  He had been covering the mouthpiece with his finger but was now holding the phone out for her. Amy grabbed it, sitting up, now at least semifunctioning. The clock by her bed read 2:58.

  Had she been a little more awake, she would have already known what this was about.

  “Hey, it’s Amy.”

  “Yeah, hey. Sorry to wake you,” he said. The sheriff’s voice sounded funereal, bearing none of its usual cordiality.

  “No problem. What’s going on?”

  “We got a sexual assault on our hands. I think it’s your guy.”

  Amy swore, then blindly pounded the pillow next to her.

  “I was out driving around when the call came in,” he said. “We haven’t gotten the full story yet, but the victim told us the attacker was a guy wearing a mask who whispered the whole time. We’re about to take her to the hospital to get checked out, but I wanted to give you a chance to talk to her first.”

  “Where are you?”

  Powers recited an address in Mount Solon. It was in the northern reaches of Augusta County, at least a thirty-minute drive from Staunton. Amy didn’t want to wait that long for the rape kit to be administered. Speed mattered.

  “You think there’s physical evidence?” she asked. She didn’t need to get graphic with Powers about what she meant.

  “Might be.”

  “Then let’s get her to the hospital. You taking her to Augusta Health?”

  “That was the plan.”

  “All right. Why don’t you send her on down, then? I’ll talk to her after the kit is done.”

  “You got it,” he said. Then he added: “I think you’re really going to like talking to this one.”

  “What do you mean?” Amy asked.

  “You’ll see when you meet her,” he said, then ended the call.

  Augusta Health, the regional hospital, was only fifteen minutes away from where Amy lived. It had staff members who had been trained as sexual-assault forensic examiners. Amy could visit the scene in Mount Solon later in the day on Tuesday if she needed to. Right now, harvesting evidence mattered more.

  As she pulled on a pantsuit, then hurriedly ran a brush through her hair, Amy felt physically ill. This was what she had dreaded all weekend, really from the moment she got Warren Plotz to kiss that Sprite can.

  Plotz was so clearly due—overdue, actually. Sitting across from him, she had been able to feel the evil in him filling to the bursting point.

  She was already second-guessing everything about the past few days of her life. Had she really pressed on the lab director, Chap Burleson, as hard as she could have? She should have camped out at the lab and refused to leave until he gave her a result.

  For that matter, she could have had Plotz arrested. Yeah, so she didn’t have rock-solid probable cause. Once she got a DNA match, no sane judge—and certainly no judge in conservative-leaning Augusta County, Virginia—would have gotten overly picky with her.

  There was so much she could have done, should have done. She already knew it was one of those mistakes that would embed itself in her brain forever. It would sit there and slowly snack on her conscience, regurgitating its memory anytime Amy felt like berating herself for past failures.

  As she rushed toward the door, she made a promise to this victim, to future victims, and to herself: She wouldn’t rest until Warren Plotz was in custody, locked away in a place where he could never hurt another woman.

  Her last words to her husband were: “Don’t wait up for me.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Lilly Pritchett. That was the name of the young woman Amy would never forget.

  She was twenty-one, a student at nearby Bridgewater College. She had been living in a small rented cottage out in the country. It sat on the property of an elderly couple, who naturally hadn’t heard or seen anything from the main house. The rest of the property was in such a rural area, there were unlikely to be any other witnesses.

  That was the total of what Amy learned from a deputy while they waited for Lilly’s rape kit to be administered. No one had gotten the full story of the attack yet. At the scene, Sheriff Powers had decided he wanted to make the victim go through the incident only once, and Amy was the right person to hear it.

  Powers was still up in Mount Solon, collecting evidence, as Amy and the deputy waited outside the victim’s hospital room. The smells of the hallway were so sterile, so antiseptic, so at odds with the vileness of the attack.

  By the time the nurses had finished, it was after six o’clock. As the medical people cleared out, Amy went in.

  Lilly was sitting up in bed, a sheet pulled up to her belly. She wore clean pajamas, not a hospital gown, which showed someone at Augusta Health knew what they were doing. Her yellow hair was sleep-matted. But there was something in her green eyes that encouraged Amy—a light that remained, even though it could have easily been extinguished.

  “Hi, Lilly, I’m Amy Kaye. I’m with the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office.”

  “Lilly Pritchett.”

  Amy grabbed her extended hand. Her grip was still strong.

  “How are you?” Amy asked.

  “Tired.”

  “I’ll bet. I wanted to ask you a few questions. Would you rather I come back after you’ve had a chance to rest?”

  “No. Let’s get this over with.”

  “All right. Why don’t you just start at the beginning?”

  “Okay,” Lilly said, pulling the sheet up a little higher. “I probably went to bed around eleven or so. I was out cold when the guy came in my room.”

  “Do you have any idea how he got in?”

  “The front door was locked, if that’s what you’re asking. There’s a back door that you can kind of force open if you really lean on it, but . . . to answer the question: No, I don’t know how he got in.”

  “Okay, go on,” she said.

  “The door to my room was closed, but it’s an old house. It makes this urrrr noise when you open it, and I’m kind of a light sleeper. That’s what woke me up. And then he started with this . . . this whisper. It was so scary.”

  “What was he saying?”

  “He started by going, ‘Shh . . . shh . . . don’t scream . . . don’t yell . . . I’m not here to hurt you.’ And then he held up this, like, sword. And he goes, ‘I’ll only use this if I have to.’ By then I could see that he was wearing gloves and dark clothes and this black ski mask and . . . I guess that’s when I freaked out.”

  I’ll only use this if I have to was a phrase more than a dozen victims had reported hearing. Any question about whether there was a connection between this attack and the others had now vanished.

  “So he was wearing a mask,” Amy said. “How else would you des
cribe him? Did you get a sense of his height or weight or anything else about him?”

  “I tried. I sort of went into this mode where I knew I was going to have to eventually be a witness about this guy. I . . . I watched a lot of Law & Order SVU reruns when I was in high school, and I actually used to think about how if Mariska Hargitay ever came to interview me, I wanted to be able to give her a lot of stuff to go on. Does that sound ridiculous?”

  “Not at all,” Amy reassured her. “It’s quite helpful, actually. It means you kept your head about you. You’ll be really good at testifying when we catch this guy.”

  Lilly smiled a little. “You think you will?”

  “I feel good about our chances. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Keep going. We were just getting to height and weight.”

  “Yeah, so . . . I’d say about five-ten or five-eleven, pretty average. And weight . . . I’m not very good at guessing guys’ weights. It’s not like he was fat or anything. Maybe one seventy-five? Is that normal for a guy?”

  Amy knew Plotz was probably closer to two hundred. But twenty or twenty-five pounds certainly put it within an acceptable margin of error.

  “Could you tell what race he was?”

  “White.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not . . . not really. I’m sorry. I mean, it was dark, and . . .”

  “I understand. Don’t worry, you’re doing great,” Amy said. “We’ve gotten up to him coming into the room. What next?”

  “Like I said, he started whispering at me and telling me not to be scared and that he wasn’t going to hurt me as long as I cooperated. And he kept saying, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and he was . . . I mean, for a rapist, he was really polite, you know?”

  Amy nodded.

  “Anyway, I started crying, because I was so scared, and . . . And he actually tried to calm me down. He was like, ‘Shh, don’t cry, don’t cry.’ He said he was sorry he was doing this to me. And I was like, ‘If you’re sorry, why are you doing it? Why don’t you just stop? Don’t do this.’ And then he said, ‘Because I have to.’ And then he said he was sorry again and told me to take my clothes off. I told him I wouldn’t and then he brought the sword up and said something like, ‘It would be a shame if I had to cut that pretty face of yours.’”

  To Amy, this was evidence a power-reassurance rapist was progressing toward becoming what the profilers called a power-assertive. He still wanted the illusion of romance—because that was what excited him—but he was perhaps willing to use force to get it. It made him all that much more dangerous.

  “What did you do?” Amy asked.

  “I guess I . . . I knew he was going to do what he was going to do. And I mean, I’ve had sex with guys before when I didn’t really want to, so I told myself to think of this as just one more time I was having bad sex. And that sort of helped calm me down.

  “And then . . . I don’t know, I really got thinking about how I was going to get raped no matter what, and I wanted to be able to catch this loser when this was all over. And I thought, ‘Well, how am I going to take a better look at this guy so I can ID him later?’ Because he had that mask on and all that . . . Anyway, I told him I felt embarrassed being the only one naked, and I would only take off my clothes if he took off his.”

  “Wow,” Amy said, impressed by her quick thinking. “Did he do it?”

  “He told me it didn’t work that way. He told me I was the one who had to take off my clothes. But I was still thinking about Law & Order and what Mariska Hargitay would want me to do. And I was thinking about how she would want DNA or fingerprints. So I said, ‘Okay,’ and I took off my clothes and I let him . . . you know, get inside me. And then . . . You’re going to think I’m a total slut, but—”

  “You are not a slut,” Amy said immediately. “Stop that right now. You are a survivor, and a damn smart one.”

  “Well, anyway, I started acting like I was really into it, you know? Just to get him distracted. I went full-on porn star, with the whole, ‘Oh, yeah, baby, yeah, that feels so good.’ And the whole time I was like, ‘barf,’ but I was just waiting for the right moment.”

  “For what?”

  “To rip his gloves off,” she said. “He had his hands on the bed at first, so I couldn’t really get a grip on them. But then he put one of his hands on my boob and I just tore the glove off. He was like, ‘What the?’ But I was still in porn-star mode, so I was like, ‘I want to feel your hand on my skin.’ And he was like, ‘Give me the glove.’ And I was acting like I was in the heat of passion, so I was all, ‘Don’t stop. Come on, big boy. Harder! Harder!’ And then I sort of knocked him into some stuff. He definitely touched my bedpost. And I had some books on my bed that I had been studying before I fell asleep. He touched those too.”

  In nearly thirty previous attacks, they had never gotten fingerprints. It was a remarkable bit of cunning from a scared twenty-one-year-old college student.

  “You are incredibly, incredibly brave,” Amy said. “And you may well have given us what we need to catch this guy. I want to call the sheriff to make sure he knows about this. Would you mind if I made a quick phone call?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Amy went out into the hallway and dialed Powers’s number.

  As soon as he answered, Amy began the conversation with: “You are never going to believe this, but I think this asshole left prints.”

  Powers answered: “Well, you’re never going to believe this, but on her way out the door, your victim told us to dust like hell for prints. And I think we already got some.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I slept in the middle of the bed that night.

  This was my effort—pitiful, though it may have been—to assert control over my situation; over the husband who had left me, the brother who was back together with his drug-addict girlfriend, and the people who were trying to steal my baby.

  My attempts at self-empowerment (and self-delusion) continued into the morning. My five-day hearing wasn’t scheduled until 10:30, so I pumped, then showered and donned the most court-appropriate dress I had, a long-sleeved, belted maxi dress. I found it in a thrift store but had been told it made me look like Kate Middleton. Then I splurged and went into a coffee shop in downtown Staunton, where I sat with tea and a scone, busy with my phone, as if I were any other young woman with her act together.

  I did all of this because I knew where I was heading. Juvenile & Domestic Relations Court played a featured role in a number of my childhood memories. None of them were pleasant.

  Mostly, I remembered the women. There was such sadness about them. It wasn’t just that they had lost their pride, their self-esteem, or their looks; or that some of them had bruises or scars; or that they were overwhelmed by one aspect of the system or another.

  It was that, in every one of them, there was still this sense of surprise, like they didn’t belong there with all the other damaged women. They understood the choices that led them to this spot: the guy they never should have married, the drugs they never should have taken, the poverty they should have been clever enough to escape. But this still wasn’t who they really were. Or at least it wasn’t who they were supposed to have been.

  I can remember being angry with my father that he had turned my mother into one of these women.

  And now I was sitting in a coffee shop, nibbling at a scone, pretending I wasn’t one of them myself.

  Looking for a happier thought, I searched for some recollection of Alex that would restore some of the good mojo I was so desperately groping for. What I found, fairly quickly, was one from when Alex was about seven weeks old.

  It was toward the end of my first week back at work, and we were all struggling with the transition. Long days were being followed by long nights. The excitement of having a baby had definitely worn off. What replaced it was the reality that no one really tells you about ahea
d of time: New parenting was mostly just drudgery.

  I had picked Alex up from Mrs. Ferncliff’s and given him his evening feeding. It was about time for him to drop off for a slumber that, if I was lucky, would last until at least one or two in the morning.

  Alex hadn’t really been looking at anything—just doing that thousand-yard newborn stare—and then suddenly his eyes locked onto mine. The color of Alex’s eyes were still settling in, as happens with newborns, but they were showing signs of turning into this enchanting shade of blue-gray. They were the kind of eyes you could just get lost in.

  And that’s what I was doing, just staring into his eyes, when it happened: Like a fabulous new idea was slowly occurring to him, this huge smile spread across his face.

  There had been times when I thought maybe he was smiling before that. But it was already hard to tell if it was that, or if he was just passing gas. This was the first time it felt totally intentional.

  It was one of those moments that made his grip on my heart—which I had already thought was total—just a little bit stronger.

  And now here I was in a coffee shop, needing to see those eyes and that smile again almost as much as I needed to keep breathing.

  * * *

  • • •

  I made myself wait until twenty after ten to enter the courthouse building, if only because I didn’t want to get myself too worked up about my first appearance before the judge who would have such an enormous say over my fate.

  After passing through security, I made the familiar march toward Juvenile & Domestic Relations Court, which hadn’t changed much since I was a teenager. It was a narrow, low-ceilinged room with seven rows of benches that were a bit like church pews, except it had always struck me this was about as far from God as you could get.

  Up front, bantering with a woman who appeared to be another attorney, was Mr. Honeywell.

  This was my first time seeing him in person. He was older than he looked on camera—at least sixty-five, though he was so droopy he easily could have passed for seventy-five. His nose had the fine spider veining of a man who often found his escape in a bottle. He had ditched his wrinkled suit in favor of a blue blazer and gray slacks. His tie hugged the top of his rounded belly, then dangled off the cliff at the bottom by at least a foot.