by April Smith
I offered family counseling at the Bureau’s expense. They said maybe.
I had to sit with Rick’s frustration because there was just no way in.
Kelsey Owen is going to have your ass,” Mike Donnato warned.
“What is she?” asked Barbara Sullivan, “his new flavor of the week?”
“Oh, he’s not sleeping with her,” Mike said wisely. “You know, Galloway’s in psychoanalysis—”
“No way.”
“That’s what I heard. Six in the morning. Four days a week.”
“How come he’s still depressed?”
“Wouldn’t you be, if you had his job? He’s a new convert to psychotherapy and I think, at the moment, he really believes it’s the Holy Grail. Kelsey’s an opportunist, and Ana is one big happy dope—”
“The golden retriever of agents.”
“Right, so it all works out. At least do something smart, Ana. When you’re close to an arrest, call the deputy DA, Mark Rauch, bring him in the loop.”
“The guy’s a vampire.”
“He’s ambitious. He can help,” said Mike. “You leave him out, he’ll suck your blood.”
These were my buddies, trying to cheer me up.
We were lounging around Barbara’s office. The place had not improved since the baby shower. Everything was curlicue cute — juvenile picture frames with snaps of infant Deirdre, figurines of angels (Barbara collected angels, I collected trolls — what does that tell you?), a haystack of pillows needlepointed by Grandma (Kiss the Princess, The Princess Is In). The personal coffeemaker, where you used to be able to get cinnamon-flavored brew, was silent; now she drank some kind of damn tea that was supposed to give you milk.
Luckily the walls were still covered with surveillance photos of bank robberies in progress, a reminder that this remained the bank robbery coordinator’s office, even if she did pump her breasts with a monstrous machine every four hours. Now there was no more sale hopping during lunch, no three-hankie “girl movies” on a weekday night, since Barbara went home to her hungry daughter on the dot of five. Although she had not lost her baby weight, Barbara still wore prim pastel suits with a single pearl on a chain around her neck; oldest of a sprawling Irish family in Chicago, she had been like a big sister until she became a mom. Gradually our lives had grown incomprehensible, and even uninteresting, to each other.
I did not realize how much I would give up by leaving the bank robbery squad and pushing over to C-1. In the old days, before the matrix, we used to have potlucks in the conference room and Mike Donnato and I would flirt outrageously, just because we knew it could never go anywhere. He was still as attractive and elegantly turned out as when he had been my senior partner and mentor. He had a law degree from Yale and wore three-piece suits and a well-barbered graying beard, even though he lived in Simi Valley. He and Rochelle moved the family out there because they were afraid of raising kids in the city. Donnato and I had a special claim to each other. We had put in a lot of miles in a crap brown Chevrolet. Barbara and I had a special claim to each other, too. Those claims do not expire. That’s the way it is in the Bureau family.
“You’re just fried because the case isn’t moving,” Mike said.
“I haven’t had time to go swimming,” I complained. “I don’t eat lunch until four in the afternoon. Everybody’s always on me, every minute of the day. Ana! Where’s this? Ana! They never called me back! Ana! Ana! Ana! I swear, it makes you want to change your name.” “To what?”
“Fritzy.”
“What?”
“I don’t know!” I was suddenly stupid with laughter, sliding off Barbara’s couch in a spasm.
They shook their heads.
“How about Ditzy?” Mike suggested, and that really put me away.
“Oh my God.” I was slumped on the floor, wiping my eyes. “I don’t know why I’m laughing. I don’t have enough to profile the offender so my criminal investigative analysis is basically nowhere, and Rick is upset.”
“What’re you missing?” asked Mike.
Certain people make you feel uplifted just by asking a question in a certain tone. By telling you with their hazel eyes, however lined and worn, there will always be enough to share: their acceptance of you, but rarer still, the willingness to see you clearly, to pause and sit with you through it, even if it’s small.
“I can’t get the victim statement. She was traumatized to the throat. It’s like he choked her into silence.”
“Was that his ritual?”
I nodded. “We’ve got the same MO on a case in Florida. You know he’s going to do it again. If he hasn’t already a dozen times.” And for a moment we fell silent.
Mike gave me a sad smile.
I smiled back. “Don’t you bozos have a robbery to solve?”
“This is still my favorite,” Mike said, tapping the wall.
Out of two hundred or so photos, he had unswervingly picked the one taken on the robbery where Andrew and I met. It was up there as a joke, and Mike had picked it because it was the most unflattering shot imaginable. As the automatic camera kept clicking away, Andrew and I had been interviewing the managers with our backs to the lens. We looked like a pair of dodoes. He had on the pretentious motorcycle jacket and his legs were awkwardly splayed like he was getting ready for a broad jump; my trousers were wrinkled and my ass looked enormous.
“Can I take this down now?” I asked.
“You can take it down when the case is solved,” admonished Mike as he left. Well, that would never be. Most bank robberies are never cleared.
“Nobody should ever see what their hair looks like from behind,” commented Barbara soothingly.
“Do you remember this?” I tapped the photo again.
It was a devilish question, since Barbara Sullivan, whom we used to call the Human Computer, has total recall of every job on the board. That’s her gift: matching new information with cold cases.
“It was called Mission Impossible,” she rattled off, “because he came through the roof, a two-eleven silent, an early-bird job that came into our office around eight-thirty in the morning, just before the branch was opening. It was in Santa Monica—” “I remember you saying right away, ‘This stinks.’”
“Well, yeah, because it was a new player who was operating. We hadn’t seen anything like it before, and when we looked at the loss, it had all indications of an inside job. Remember? He held the managers in the vault?”
“He ambushed them while they were doing opening procedures. They were toast.”
Then I recalled Andrew had trained those young managers during that bank security course he gave for the police department. When he showed up, they were so relieved to see a familiar face they fell apart in his arms.
“Definitely an inside job,” Barbara was remembering. “They cut the hinges and came down through a hatch in the roof.”
The first thing we did, Andrew and I climbed up there, through a utility room jammed with old files and air-conditioning ducts. We scaled a wooden ladder and stepped out into the fresh air, already slightly giddy from the unexpected height and the profound attraction we were simultaneously feeling.
The avenues below were lined with high spindly palms. Cars filled the dealerships and rooftop garages, cars moved at a reasonable pace through the blacktop town. Walls of high-rises blocked our view of the beach but the glittery swell of the sea rose to the farthest sight line. In the low commercial buildings — salmon, tan, lime and brick — there were tiny enclaves of calm: a hammock on a patio, miniature umbrella tables.
“Had a jumper over there the other day.” Andrew had indicated a shorefront hotel. “A woman takes a room, jumps out the window. Turns out, five years ago to the day, her daughter jumped from that same room.”
Andrew was simply saying it, in a tone that knew burglars who crapped on kitchen tables, grandfathers who molested their granddaughters, suicides who cut off their own testicles, killers who strangled pregnant women with electric cords or murdered
their girlfriends with table legs, kerosene or barbecue forks; a tone that comes of shaking the cockroaches out of your clothes before you enter your house at night, that knows there is no such thing as the bottom, knows there is suffering and concedes to all of it.
But doesn’t jump.
That’s what drew me to him. He knew things, and saw things, and had fashioned a way for himself to keep on looking at them, because he wanted to help. On one of our first dates, he took me to an Al-Anon meeting (his adoptive father had been an alcoholic) — not the meeting he regularly attended, because that was private to him, but a different one, in the back room of a deli, so I could see what he was about and the road he had traveled, and when we all held hands at the end and said the Serenity Prayer, it was like an aphrodisiac; I was so moved by the ability of this hard man to close his eyes in a group of people, and give in to it. I only wanted more.
The light up there on top of the bank was splendid and all-encompassing, the sun doing double flips between the pastel rooftops and the glossy blue sky, and an ocean breeze flapped Andrew’s tie and parted and reparted his black hair so I could see his scalp and the dryness of his lips, and then looking became shameful because he was looking at me, too, and I didn’t know what he could or could not see but feared he could see everything — my longing, misdirection, lonesomeness and rage — and tears gathered in the corners of my eyes, but I smiled and blotted them with fingertips as if it were the wind.
“Something new just came up on that caper,” Barbara was saying thoughtfully as she contemplated the Mission Impossible photo.
Some of us can recall that Reggie Jackson hit three home runs on three swings in the final game of the 1977 World Series; Barbara Sullivan can quote the take from every heist on the wall.
“They recovered a ski mask.”
“A ski mask?”
“The guy wore a ski mask, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, they found it — a janitor found it — kicked behind some boxes. About two months ago.”
“That branch was robbed half a dozen times,” I said. “Could belong to anyone.”
“But Mission Impossible went in through a door in the roof.” Barbara had moved to the computer. “Used a Makita drill with a diamond blade, like a knife through butter.”
“You’re amazing.”
“Then,” said Barbara, laughing at the audacity, “he climbs down a ladder to a utility room, goes out to the second-floor employee lounge and sits up there for a couple of hours watching TV until the bank opens. Life is good.” It summoned up the smell of enclosed waxy floors that had greeted Andrew and me when we cautiously entered the lounge — empty except for a TV set on a dusty Art Deco coffee table — and a stench I first made as sweat that turned out to be the dead meat aroma left by the McDonald’s the bandit ate for breakfast.
“The ski mask was found in the utility room where the ladder was, where you go up to the roof.” Barbara nodded toward the information on the screen. “Black nylon, standard-issue army surplus store.”
“You know this same guy, Detective Berringer, caught the Santa Monica kidnapping?” I said tapping the photo insistently. “We’re working together again, how funny is that?”
“How funny is that?” She had instantly picked up on my tone.
That was the devilish part. I had to tell someone. I wanted her to know. This is how we give ourselves away.
“We’re going out.”
“You’re going out with a detective?”
I nodded.
“On a case you’re both working?”
I nodded again.
Barbara, the Irish girl, said, “Oy vey.”
“Thanks for reserving judgment.”
“I’m not passing judgment. He looks pretty cute from the rear.”
“He’s hot.”
“Divorced?”
“Twice.”
“So when do I meet him?”
“Soon. Maybe. I hope. Things are a little shaky right now. But they can get better.”
Barbara was nodding, absently fingering a picture of Deirdre. Up, down, on, off. It wasn’t her game anymore.
“Tell him about the ski mask. His case, he should know.”
“I will,” I said, and forgot about it.
Ten
Since the night she walked out of the fog, we had been monitoring the use of Juliana’s home computer, thinking the suspect might try to contact her again. Or maybe in her personal communications she would reveal some sliver of the attack that had surfaced from memory. Juliana (JMM3) spent hours online, mostly in chat rooms that seemed to attract local kids. The following transcript, posted on Rapid Start, got my attention:
FD-823 (Rev. 8-26-97)
RAPID START
INFORMATION CONTROL
Case ID: 446-702-9977 The Santa Monica Kidnapping
Control
Number: 5201 Priority: Immediate
Classification: Sensitive Source: Internet Chat Room
Event time: 11:35 PM
Method of contact: Monitoring of personal computer belonging to victim, Juliana Meyer-Murphy
Prepared by: Diaz, Ramon
Component/Agency: Tech support, FBI
Transcript attached.
* * *
[email protected] 11:35 PM
YOU ARE IN CHAT ROOM TOWN SQUARE
MasterMynd: i am so fucked
LiquidFlo: what’d ur mom say?
MasterMynd: grounded don’t describe it
TruHacka03: u hear what happened to ethan?
MasterMynd: what?
Truhacka03: took his car
LiquidFlo: away?
Truhacka03: yeah, fool …
BlackStar01: be that bitch
MasterMynd: where is she?
LiquidFlo: she a ho on Hollywood Blvd
OoRaver4LiveoO: shut up you don’t know shit
OoRaver4LiveoO: is she coming back 2 school?
MasterMynd: if I see her I’ll kick her face
LiquidFlo: might help she damn ugly
MasterMynd: why would someone want to fuck that?
OoRaver4LiveoO: I’m out u guys r jerks
LiquidFlo: whining bitch
XxHipHopxx: they’re gonna expel 6 kids for weed
BlackStar01: no shit!!!
XxHipHopxx: true
MasterMynd: Who?
LiquidFlo: anybody out there know?
XxHipHopxx: Stephanie, Ethan, Kristin-??
BlackStar01: Nahid?
XxHipHopxx: yeah, the towel head
MasterMynd: and she gets off?
XxHipHopxx: she told everything on everybody
MasterMynd: we shoulda done her
BlackStar01: you first
TruHacka03: ugli people should be doomed to hell. ugli people should not go out in public
JMM3: why don’t I do you all a favor and go out and kill myself?Total online activity: 1.25 hours
An hour after reading the report, I was sitting with Juliana on the floor of her room.
“I didn’t mean it. It was just to shut them up. Please don’t tell my mother, she’ll trip.”
“I had to inform your parents, Juliana.”
“That my friends hate me?”
“These are threats.” I was holding up the transcripts. “Threats to hurt you or that you would hurt yourself. We have to take them seriously.”
“Like the school doesn’t know everybody’s smoking weed? They’re not too hypocritical? Because Nahid’s father is a Saudi prince and gave like ten million dollars for the new campus, and he drives to school in a stretch Hummer limousine?” “I didn’t know they had Hummer limousines.”
She grimaced at my grown-up ignorance, looked down at her bare feet, toyed with a flower toe ring, trying to hide her face inside the cascade of hair, wavy and dark like mine. She was cleaned up and dressed in a big white shirt and capri-length tights, and the hoarseness had mostly healed, but she was jumpy, hollow-eyed behind the rainbow glasses, like someone wea
kened after a bout of pneumonia. If Willie John Black’s condition were a monotone of gray, Juliana’s was a chronic spiking fever. You’re okay for a moment, an hour, half a day; then it knocks you flat.
“They don’t understand,” she said quietly. “You made me.”
“What?”
“Tell.”
“We already knew about Stephanie and Ethan. Basically they confessed, straight out. We got a warrant and found the stash in Stephanie’s locker. They brought it on themselves, you have nothing to feel guilty about.” I waited. “Is it hard at school?” She nodded silently.
“Kids say things about the attack? What do they say?”
“Mostly rude questions.” Her eyes rose warily. “Are you going to arrest those kids from the chat room?”
“We are going to investigate.”
“Don’t. Please.”
“They sent you on a fool’s errand. They did not have your best interests at heart.”
“Your point is?”
“There must be other kids at school you can be friends with. Kids who are worthy of you.”
She was picking at the rose-colored carpeting as if to pull it out in tufts.
“I just want you to know,” I continued steadily, “you have our protection. Nobody is going to hurt you, okay? Take my card again and call me if anything or anyone is bothering you. We have surveillance on your family, and that isn’t going to stop until we catch the guy.” Juliana started to gag. It was as if her throat closed up on her, an anaphylactic attack based on no invasion but the air. The impulse was to throw open the windows, flush her passageways with the sweet bright world.
“Can you talk? Talk to me. Talk!”
She shook her head. Heaved. Alarmed, I thought she had deliberately swallowed something.
But she was gasping. “I’m — okay.” So there was nothing stuck, it was the breath — a living thing, according to my lifeguard friend — being murdered again and again in some cruel posttraumatic replay of the offender’s script. He hadn’t had to kill her to bring suffering to the max; the repeated assaults had damaged Juliana’s brain so that now it triggered its own gag response. This was irony, not plan. A bonus. Anything could replicate the terror. A loud noise. Violent assaultive e-mails. Her sounds were wrenching. I was helpless to stop them, her mother downstairs would be helpless, too (only knowing these attacks would pass had kept me from calling 911), and as I rocked her with my arms around her slumping shoulders, my eyes were closed, and I was listening to a random fragment of the Serenity Prayer which had drifted into my mind—“To change the things I can … And the wisdom to know the difference”—and the image kept returning of the videotape, the contractions in the lacerated walls of the vagina, how like the fisting in her throat, this tightening animal aversion of the flesh had been Juliana’s only poor defense.