“Detective Cargill, I asked you yesterday if I should continue to search for the man who assaulted me even though it will be difficult and painful and maybe I’ll never get any justice. You said that I should think about the life that I want from now on. You said I should decide if I need to know this man’s identity in order to live that life. I’ve thought about that. I do need to know. He took part of my life from me. Only he can tell me what was in those hours. I need to see his face before I can put this all behind me.”
Cargill shifted his gaze to the street and watched Raoul walk away. “I understand, Miss Conti. A person needs to see a face. That’s why they have open caskets at funerals.” He turned and looked her in the eye. “Now, you’ve got one more thing to think about. Are you strong enough to face the truth when you find it?”
“I have to be,” she replied.
Chapter 23
Detective Cargill’s ancient green Plymouth was parked in a loading zone in front of the café. “I’m giving you a ride to Cindy’s,” he said, touching her lightly on her elbow to steer her toward his car.
Startled at the touch of his hand, Grazia also felt giddy with relief. As she paid her breakfast bill, she had been screwing up her courage for the anxiety-packed walk down unknown streets to Cindy’s office. Grinning at the reprieve, she waited while Cargill wrenched open the sticky passenger door, then she climbed in.
At Cindy’s office, Grazia accepted the nettle tea and homemade sesame cookies. She no longer felt like she was relinquishing control. She was safe here. She could let panic surge through her, knowing she would survive. Today she would learn more about how to handle it. A new way of living lay ahead of her. She couldn’t wait to start.
Detective Cargill, however, lingered in the doorway. He refused the nettle tea and sesame cookies with a grimace.
“Take the weight off, Cargill,” Cindy ordered irritably.
Reluctantly Detective Cargill perched on the edge of a chair. He pulled a folded paper from his jacket pocket and stared at it. He put it on the table next to the teapot and stared at it. He cleared his throat. “I told you the medical examiner would have results by Tuesday and I was right. The DNA results came over this morning. I thought it would be better to give you the news while you’re with Cindy.” He picked up the paper, unfolded it, refolded it, and put it back on the table.
“The ME’s office found three male DNA identities. They were on your clothes, in your hotel room, and in the samples that Janine took at the ER. There’s no way to give this to you easy, so I’ll tell it straight. From your shirt, they found some hair clippings from a male. Like he had a recent haircut and the barber missed brushing off some clippings. They found the same hair clippings on the floor under the round table in your room. The DNA from those clippings did not match any of the samples Janine took, or any in the hotel employee files. They also didn’t match any in the police database.”
Detective Cargill picked up the paper again and read from it. “The medical examiner found one other male DNA identity in your room. Sperm. It was recovered from the surface of the round table.” He glanced up at Grazia. “Remember I said that your assailant put you across the table? This was validated. The sperm DNA on the table also matched DNA from the toilet handle. There was no match to the employee file or the police database.”
Grazia felt like someone else was listening to the test results of another person—not her. Detective Cargill’s voice was far away.
“From the samples sent over in the rape kit—what Janine got from you—the medical examiner got two sperm DNA identities. One matched what was found on the tabletop. Neither matched any in the employee file or the police database.”
“Two DNA identities?” Cindy demanded with a frown. She picked up the paper and read it. She looked at Grazia and spoke carefully. “Do you understand? There were three men in your room at some point. Two men left their sperm DNA. One DNA set was on the table or inside you. Another was only inside you.”
“What isn’t clear is if the men were present in the room at the same time.” Cargill continued looking at the floor. “In any case, unfortunately I have to tell you that we have no matches, and no suspects. I’m sorry, Miss Conti. I really am. I thought we could run this guy down. But we can’t.” He looked at Cindy.
Cindy was looking at Grazia’s white face. “Thanks, Cargill. I’ll get back to you if she has any questions.” She waited until the door had closed behind Detective Cargill. “Do you understand?” she asked gently.
Grazia’s lips had gone numb. “I was raped by two men. I’m going to throw up.” She ran for the washroom.
Another day, another person in the mirror, Grazia thought. She had vomited her breakfast into the toilet and was now gazing at a face in the mirror that was so pale it looked blue. Purple shadows hung under red eyes, the lips were dead white, and sweat beads hung on the brow.
“This is the face of a sexual tool,” she said carefully to the face. “You were the plaything of two men. Did one hold you while the other raped you, like what happens to women during wars? Did they change places? Did they talk? Did they laugh?” She had become two persons now, the one who was speaking and the one in the mirror who was listening. She filled her palm with liquid soap from the dispenser and began to smear it slowly over the face in the mirror.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t look at you anymore,” she said to the mirror person, adding more soap to her palm and thickening the layer over the face. “It’s not your fault, I know. But I can’t see your face. Someday I may be able to, I’m not sure. For now, you will stay here. I’ll come for you when I can look at you again.”
She added another layer until the blurred white shape had become a wall. She rinsed the soap off her hands and unlocked the door.
Cindy and the secretary were standing outside. The secretary was holding a set of keys. Grazia walked carefully down the hall. The floor didn’t feel like the floor. The armchair wasn’t an armchair. She had never seen such a thing before. She stared at it, uncertain what to do with it.
Cindy took her hands and held them tightly. She eased her into the chair. “This happens to other women, Grazia. You aren’t alone.” She waited, but Grazia didn’t speak. “With drug-facilitated, there are often two perpetrators. It doesn’t mean anything. You are still you. You are here, with me.” She waited, but Grazia didn’t reply. “You need to talk now. Tell me how you feel.”
“I don’t feel,” said Grazia. “These are not my hands. This is not my body. This didn’t happen to me.” Grazia looked at the hands that weren’t hers anymore. Cindy was holding them, but she couldn’t feel Cindy’s grip.
“Stay connected,” ordered Cindy, gripping her hands tighter. “Talk.”
“Ironic,” Grazia said, “that I get this news on the very day that my entire career is destroyed.” In precise detail, with an expressionless voice, as if she were presenting a case at her firm’s weekly Monday morning conference, she described the information leak and the possibility that she was the source. “Francisco has fired me twice in the last two days—once for drafting a contract he didn’t like and once for being an informant. Miranda Security Systems detectives will come to New York to find the leak and discover that I’m seeing a crisis counselor. They’ll find out I was drugged and raped. Francisco will get me disbarred.”
“Do you have someone who can stay with you tonight?”
“I see now that this is the result of a long series of mistakes I made in my life—my divorce, the affair with Francisco, trying to force Kourtis to follow a more honest path—so many mistakes. These mistakes have led me to being raped by two men and losing the career I have spent years building. I am being punished.”
Cindy rubbed Grazia’s cold hands. “If you look back at your life and try to connect it to what has happened now, you will feel hopeless because you can’t change the past. Do what you need to do today. Learn to handle these emotions that are taking you over. Other women have recovered from rape and led strong h
appy lives. You can too.”
“It’s futile,” Grazia continued calmly. “You make your life, and then someone comes along and tears it into a thousand pieces for no reason. You can give me advice about how to put these torn-up pieces back together again, but it’s impossible. Once a life has been shredded, it’s shredded.”
“It’s not shredded. You are alive. You are in a counselor’s office where you are getting help. Step-by-step, you will create new a life that you want.”
“Oh you Americans,” Grazia said bitterly. “You think that every time something bad happens, you just erase your old life and invent yourself a new one. Well, it doesn’t work that way. Old lives don’t just go away.”
“True, but old thoughts can be replaced by new thoughts that are positive and healthy. Control your thoughts and you control your emotions. Focus on doing that, Grazia.”
“I don’t want to,” she said. “I don’t care anymore.” Grazia pulled on her coat. But the arm that slid into the sleeve wasn’t her arm, and the hand wasn’t her hand. She went out the door, not knowing where she was going, only that she was leaving someone behind in the mirror she didn’t want to see, and if she just kept walking, she could leave her behind forever.
Chapter 24
Grazia stepped outside and crossed to Stuyvesant Square. She sat down on a bench. A nanny had laid out a picnic lunch on a nearby bench for her small charges who were dancing around with their sandwiches. Grazia’s previous longing for children had disappeared. She was not worthy of them. That was why she hadn’t found the right husband. Look what had happened to her instead.
The snow was too white. It was too clean, too pure. It made her feel dirty. She wanted to kick it, spit on it, bring it down to her level of filth. She started walking through the whiteness, swinging her legs to mar it, filling it with her footprints. Breathless, she turned to look at the mess she had made and felt satisfied with the trampled whiteness. She and the trampled whiteness were the same.
Her smartphone alarm rang. Time to eat. She turned away from the trampled snow and headed toward the Beth Israel Medical Center’s main entrance. She would eat in the cafeteria off the lobby. She wasn’t hungry, but eating was a gesture of indifference. To refuse to eat would signal interest in her condition. It would indicate protest over what had been done to her. She didn’t care enough to protest. The feeling part of herself was safely inside Cindy’s washroom, in the mirror behind the soap.
Her route passed the emergency room entrance. Looking up the dark, tunnel-like ramp brought only indifference. The crowded cafeteria and its loud chatter, however, made her nervous. Cindy had said that women who had been assaulted had difficulty handling noisy places. But she was here, so she might as well eat. She picked up a tray and selected the first foods she saw—a toasted cheese sandwich and a bowl of noodle soup.
She found a table in the corner and bit into her sandwich. No taste. She gave up after two bites and pulled out her Monet journal to record her session with Cindy. The problem was that her fingers wouldn’t move. They wouldn’t write the words “two men.”
A tray clattered down across from her, and a heavy arm came around her shoulders in a quick hug. “Cindy called me,” said Janine. “She gave me the news. She thought you might come here looking for me. You have somebody you can stay with tonight?”
“Detective Cargill is closing the case. No suspects. I also lost my job.”
“You can stay with me. My sister is at the apartment. She’ll let you in.”
“I let two strange men into my room, Janine. How could I do such a thing?”
“Maybe you knew them, like Cargill says. Or they were your kind of people—lawyers, professional people. Don’t let Cargill close the case. He needs it as much as you do. I’ll give him a call.” Janine bit into her sandwich and looked at Grazia thoughtfully. “You need to get active. You’ve got a brain but you’re thinking thoughts that lead to wrong places. It’s Tuesday. That means you’ve got Wednesday and Thursday here, right? Keep looking, even if Cargill quits. If you think you’re onto the right suspect, you can take samples of his DNA to a private lab. Saliva or sweat or hair, they’re all good for DNA. Once the private lab has the DNA identity, Detective Cargill should be able to talk the medical examiner into running a match.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s a website called 'Who’s Your Daddy?' for guys who want to know if they’re the father of the kid they’re raising. A mobile unit cruises New York City.” Janine pulled out her smartphone and tapped in the website. She handed it over.
Grazia read the description. “It says I need a doctor’s prescription for them to do a DNA identity in New York. And it says that New York doesn’t permit DNA identity tests on what they call ‘alternative specimens,’ like hair and clothes.”
“Call their Jersey City lab. New Jersey probably doesn’t have that law. Jersey City is twenty minutes on the Port Authority bus or the PATH train. Or take a taxi.” Janine’s pager went off. She made a face, then wrote down her apartment address on a paper napkin and heaved herself to her feet. “Go to my apartment if you don’t want to go back to your hotel. I’ll tell my sister you’re coming. And have faith in Cargill,” she added. “He’s short on the social graces, but he’s an excellent detective. And he’s got a big heart under that tough exterior.”
Grazia nibbled at her sandwich again. Still no taste, but she made herself finish it and her soup. She recorded in her journal what Janine had told her about the private DNA lab in Jersey City, leaving a page blank to write the medical examiner’s results. She couldn’t write that, not yet.
The cafeteria clatter seemed louder. She slid her tray in the rack and stepped outside, trying to relieve the short-of-breath feeling. She crossed First Avenue, not going anywhere in particular; she just wanted to move, walk away, put her back to something. On the other side of First Avenue, the sidewalk became a winding path leading under tall trees. Their bare branches revealed tall brick buildings between the trees, a housing development, Stuyvesant Town, by the names on the buildings. She passed Building 453, anonymous, like her, a number on a hospital record, a statistic on a police report.
She brushed snow off a bench, sat down, and watched the people passing her on the paths. They carried grocery bags and chatted cheerfully, their voices carrying easily since the buildings and the wintergreen shrubbery blocked the street noise. A few birds flitted among the branches. Nature was reorganizing itself under this blanket of white, burying the dead, resting up for spring. A kind of calm came over her, an ease in her heart. Something settled inside her, gathered strength.
She sat there until the cold made her knees ache, then she started walking again. She followed two women pulling the sort of two-wheeled cart she had seen many New Yorkers using to bring their groceries home. They crossed Fourteenth Street at Avenue A. Grazia consulted the map on her smartphone and kept walking south. She let her eyes slide along the narrow storefronts and small business establishments with apartments above accessed by steep stairways that she glimpsed as people keyed the worn doorways. First, the Horsebox Tavern, then a cleaners, then Best Stephanie Body Works with lurid red neon feet gracing the window. Then came Johnny Air Mart specializing in Filipino-Oriental products and services like sending money abroad. Fat Buddha, a bar next to Percy’s Tavern, was open for lunch and filled with young people having a beer and a sandwich next to doors open to the winter sun. The animal hospital had decorated its window with stacks of specialty dog food, reminding her of Jacky. Then came Good Coffee, whose aroma drew her into the open door. Grazia sat at a round table at the window and ordered a decaf latte.
The coffee was indeed good. It reminded her of Naples and cracked opened a door in her that had slammed shut Sunday morning when she woke up naked. Or maybe it was the sunlight slanting through the window and warming her arms. Or maybe it was New York itself outside the big window, forcing itself on her, making her pay attention, pulling her out of herself.
Outside again, her feet turned south once more. As the blocks passed, the blur behind her eyes slowly came into focus, and her numb thoughts stirred into life. She stopped to watch a big dog happily bite at snowballs tossed by its owner. She slowed to gaze at twins bundled in bright snowsuits in their double baby carriage. She stopped to smell the fresh bread aroma from a bakery. The haze of confusion began to fade along with the fear that had gripped her to the bone. The city came into focus. It formed itself around her, began to shape her direction, intrude into her thoughts. She heard the sweet lilt of jazz on a harmonica floating out of Tompkins Square Park, she saw a couple kissing in the wide pedestrian walkway leading into the park. Grazia turned away.
Below Twelfth Street was Au Za’atars Arabia and French Bistro, the crowded lunch tables out under heaters on the sidewalk. She passed the Cork and Fork Tapas and Wine Bar—really, these Americans and their imaginative names—the Horus Café and Tomkins Finest Deli serving panini wraps, whatever they were; Café Pick Me Up. A bent-over Chinese woman was pawing through a trash barrel and tossing aluminum cans noisily into a huge black plastic bag. New York didn’t permit indifference; there was too much to watch, too much to smell and taste. New York demanded that people go out and do their own thing.
Crossing Houston, she turned down Elizabeth Street with its tiny boutiques decked in designer clothes and jewelry. Elizabeth Street took her to Grand Street and dropped her straight into Chinatown. Abruptly, the sidewalks overflowed with Chinese women, men, and children all shouting their strange vowels, dragging carts piled high with odd-looking vegetables. Bodies bundled into snow jackets buffeted her, mittened hands reached for produce from sidewalk stalls filled with vegetables and fruit. She stared at silver fish wriggling in plastic buckets, at dark squid waving their arms in metal bins, at Chinese men hauling crates of green cabbages up steep stairs from dark basements. Chinese women, heavy-bodied under layers of sweaters, stood at cash registers overlooking the outdoor vegetable bins. They reached down to bag produce handed up to them, taking money, giving change. Their bundled arms were always moving, their dark eyes watching.
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