“Oh my God.” His voice was a whisper.
Was Josh still there? He listened. Heard nothing.
“Hello?”
Still nothing.
“Okay,” he whispered. “You’re okay.”
What if Josh came back?
A thought in his head, distinct from the voice that needed to whisper: You need to get up. You need to leave.
Nick swung his legs out of the bed and felt a sharp, stabbing pain as he stood; he heard himself whimper, and he felt like a child. The sensation dulled into an aching burn, and the pain in his head announced itself again.
Keep moving, the voice said, you need to leave.
There were his clothes on the floor—he grabbed his jeans and pulled them on, leaving his underwear on the carpet. Shit, he’d get blood on his jeans. How would he get blood out of his jeans? He pulled on his T-shirt inside out and snatched up his jacket. Nick could feel his wallet in the back pocket of his pants, but where was his phone? He fumbled for it in his jacket—the pockets were empty. He got down on his hands and knees, and his brain pounded on his skull, screaming at him not to tip so far forward. There it was, under the bed. Grab it and go. Nick reached, closing his hand on the soft leather.
There was a sound at the door behind him, and he yelped, bringing his head straight up and cracking it on the bed frame.
“Housekeeping,” a soft voice announced.
Nick pushed himself out from under the bed and onto his feet. Cover the blood. He pulled the comforter up, turned as the door opened. The thin woman in black startled and said, “Oh, sorry, hon, they said you checked out.”
“Sorry,” Nick said.
She moved out of his way as he passed through the door.
“Honey,” she said, “you forgot something.”
He turned to see her pointing at his briefs on the floor. A woman he didn’t know was staring at his underwear. Asking him to pick it up. Assuming—correctly—that he didn’t have any on.
“Sorry,” he said again as he grabbed them and folded them into his jacket.
Nick stepped into the chilled morning air and immediately spotted a cab parked under the motel 4 deluxe sign on the driveway to Route 1. Jacket clutched in his hand, Nick ran down the stairs and across the lot. His mind was still caught on the housekeeper. That poor woman. She’d see the blood. She’d have to strip the bed. Or would she—what would she do when she saw blood on the sheets?
The driver rolled down the front passenger window as Nick approached. Shit. He’d spent the last of his cash at Jimmy’s.
Nick gripped the window. “Do you take cards?”
“Uhhh, yeah, I’ll have to call it in, but I can take a card.” Cabdrivers almost always registered annoyance at this question, but this man seemed worried. “Get in, kid.”
Nick sat himself gingerly in the back seat. The blood. The blood might soak through his pants, stain the seat. He sat on a hand.
“You okay, kid?” The heavy man turned to face him. He was middle-aged and wore a newsboy cap.
“What?”
“Who did that to you?”
Nick felt himself flush deeply but said nothing.
“Your face,” the man said.
Nick looked above the man at the rearview mirror. His reflection was wrong. His lip was split and there was blood crusted above his eyebrow.
Give your address. “Eleven Spring Street,” he said. “Please.”
The driver looked at him for a beat longer and sighed. “All right.”
Would the housekeeper call the police when she saw the blood? Did the motel have his name? Check your phone. Nick pulled out his phone. The screen was loaded with texts. Chris had texted twice, apologizing just after midnight for getting “caught up,” and asking, this morning, if he could make it up to Nick. At 10:59 last night, Elle had started a group message with their roommates announcing:
NICK GETTIN IT AT JIMMYS.
This was followed by a poor-quality photo of Nick sitting at the bar with Josh and a dozen messages from Mary Jo and Elle, and one from Johnny this morning asking,
Wait, what did I miss last night?
Nick’s mouth flooded with saliva.
“Pull over,” he groaned. The driver obeyed, and Nick opened the door and leaned out. The fresh, dry air washed over him and the urge to vomit was suppressed. He took a couple of deep breaths. Stop thinking about it.
He sat back against the seat, shut the door. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” the driver said. “Rough night?”
Nick was silent, and the man drove on.
When they reached the house, the cabbie took his card and called it in. Handed it back.
“You should put something cold on that face.”
Whether Nick said “Thank you” aloud or just thought it, he wasn’t sure.
He got out and stood on the sidewalk in front of the house, legs locked. Maybe no one would be home to keep asking questions. But then he would be alone. There’s no right thing to hope for, the voice in his head said neutrally. You’ll just have to go inside.
As he stepped into the entry, he heard Elle’s voice carry down the hall from the kitchen. “Nick, is that you?”
“Uh, yeah,” he answered, horrified to find that tears had sprung up at the sound of her voice. It was like something inside him had disconnected at the motel, and her question—Nick, is that you—had snapped the piece back into place.
“What happened last night?” Elle asked gleefully as she burst into the hallway. Her face fell. “What happened to your face?”
A sob burst from his mouth.
“Nick, oh my God. Nick, what happened? What did he do to you? What did he do?”
They sank to the floor together, Elle holding the sides of his face.
“Johnny! Johnny!” Elle’s voice sounded strained and hysterical.
In a rush of chaos, Johnny crashed halfway down the stairs, ran back up, and came pounding down with his car keys. Elle and Johnny yelled nonsense at each other as they lifted Nick by the armpits back to his feet. He knew they were taking him to the hospital.
II.
MESS
This mess was yours,
Now your mess is mine.
Vance Joy, “Mess Is Mine”
5
Julia Hall, 2019
It took me a while to see just how badly Nick’s rape had hurt your family.”
Julia winced at the word. Three years gone and the sound of it still scratched at her ears. Detective Rice seemed not to notice that it had bothered her.
“Nick and your husband’s family were a little rough around the edges, but what you and Tony had, that was solid.”
She shifted a bit in her chair.
“Did you see it coming from the beginning? I certainly didn’t.”
“See what coming?”
“How bad it would get.”
Julia shook her head. No, she had not.
The detective held her eye for a moment, then looked down into his mug. “Now, I always sympathized with victim’s families. It’s a natural response to being around people going through something tragic, one, and two, it made people talk to me more, and tell me more, see? Made me better at my job.”
Julia nodded, a small frown forming.
“But in your case, well, I crossed a line. I sympathized a little more than I should have, with everything that was going on, and it made me unprofessional.”
Julia stared at him intently now. She’d played out endless scenarios in preparation for this day, but this featured in none of them. Where is he going with this? She felt herself cock her head as he went on.
“The way it all ended, with me and your family and the Ray Walker situation, I mean. I’ve never felt good about it.”
The skin on her neck prickled at Raymond Wa
lker’s name. She had known she would hear it today, and she’d heard it a thousand times before, but she still couldn’t suppress her reaction to hearing it spoken. She shifted her weight and crossed her right leg over her left. A feeling was stirring in the pit of her stomach: an emotion so palpable it nearly felt alive and separate from her—some nagging, gnawing monster she had finally lulled to sleep years ago. At Detective Rice’s phone call last week, the monster had cracked an eye open. Now, with a raised head, its tail swished in anticipation.
She raised her mug to her lips and sipped.
6
John Rice, 2015
Rice sat in his car looking over his notes and Nick Hall’s written statement. A cold cup of Dunkin’ sat in his cup holder, nearly full to the brim. It was Sunday, late morning. He’d gone to interview Julia Hall, read Nick’s written statement, checked in with the evidence technician who’d processed the motel room, talked to the Assistant District Attorney. He’d done what he could to give Nick a couple of hours of sleep, but Rice needed to conduct a recorded interview before too much more time lapsed.
He flipped through the notes he’d taken when he spoke to Officer Merlo and the nurses the day before. So far things were looking pretty good—no obvious inconsistencies or eyebrow raisers in Nick’s story. Sex cases often turned into a battle of he-said-she-said, or assailant-said-victim-said, in this case. A defendant would pick apart the various records of the victim’s statements (to police, doctors, anyone) looking for inconsistencies. It wasn’t always an effective technique, but on the right facts or with the right defense attorney, it could work to force a crap plea deal, a weak sentence, even convince a jury to acquit. But then, none of this mattered at all if Rice didn’t have a defendant; he didn’t even have a suspect.
The kid was consistent on a number of important points across the statements: Nick had a total of five drinks himself that night; he was confident he could identify his rapist, “Josh,” if he had the chance to see him again; Josh had two drinks that Nick saw; and Nick remembered being hit over the head just after they entered the room at the Motel 4 Deluxe. Nick said the rest was gone, until he woke up Saturday morning beat up and knowing he’d been sexually assaulted.
Nick’s memory lapse was a problem. Rice had already discussed it with the Assistant District Attorney who would be handling the case. She asked Rice to circle back to it during his interview of Nick. Make sure he couldn’t remember anything at all about what happened in that motel room.
And he’d been drinking—drunk victims always complicated these cases. People would question Nick’s ability to remember what the assailant looked like; question whether he’d consented on account of lowered inhibitions. But if they could find “Josh,” the fact that the prick had beaten Nick up so badly should make it easy enough to prove that this wasn’t a consensual situation. No one consented to having their face beat up during sex, did they? The choking—that was a sexual thing for some people, and Nick had been choked. But the SANE nurse had told Rice that her exam of Nick’s body would support a case of nonconsent. And they had physical evidence, bloody bedsheets. Thankfully, the cleaning woman at the motel had taken one look at the sheets and told management, so the room had been largely preserved.
A sedan pulled into the space next to him. It was Lisa Johnson, from a local victim advocacy center. He’d been glad to hear from Merlo last night that it was Lisa assigned to the case. All the advocates were good, but he’d worked with Lisa before, and she was a favorite of his. He held up his hand to her and shuffled his papers back into the manila envelope marked N.H. 10/2/15.
“You’re late,” Rice said as he shut his door.
Lisa looked at him wide-eyed and then down at her phone. “I am two minutes early.”
“Yeah but I was fifteen,” he said with a grin.
Lisa rolled her eyes at him and smiled wide. “You are bad, always trying to make me think I am bad!”
Rice led Lisa to Nick’s room in the BHU. She hadn’t seen Nick since he’d come over from the ER the evening before. Nick and his brother were watching TV with the door open. Facing the doorway together, there was a strong resemblance in the brow, mouth, and shoulder spread of these two men, and Rice imagined he could picture what their father might look like as well. Lisa greeted Nick and introduced herself to Tony.
Tony was convinced to step out easily enough, leaving the professionals alone with Nick.
“Cleaner this way” was all Rice had to say. Since his wife was a defense lawyer, maybe Tony understood why. Somehow Rice couldn’t see sweet-faced Julia cross-examining a victim about whether they were too embarrassed to tell the truth about a sex crime in front of a family member, though, so maybe not.
Nick had been lounging on top of his bed in sweats and a T-shirt. He switched off the TV and sat back against the pillows, suddenly looking pale.
“Sorry to have to ask you to talk about this again, Nick,” Rice said as he pulled a chair toward the bedside. “This should be the last of the interviews for a while.”
“It’s okay,” Nick said quietly.
“I just need to get a complete statement from you while your memory’s still good; it might fade with time, so we should get the details down now.”
Nick nodded.
Rice pulled out his recorder and set it on his chair’s thin armrest. If they’d been able to do this at the station the interview would have been video recorded, but with the kid in the BHU for the next couple of days, Rice didn’t want to wait.
Rice had Nick tell his story, starting with when he woke up Friday morning. Nick filled in the details of that day that had so far gone undiscussed: breakfast at home, a class called Business English, homework and lunch back at his apartment, Economics 101 class, then home again for the rest of the afternoon and early evening.
When Nick got into the part Rice already knew, he was consistent with his written statement and the shorter version he’d told Merlo when he first got to the hospital. Nick had planned to meet a guy named Chris Gosling at Jimmy’s Pub. His roommate Elle Nguyen had gone to the bar with him, and Chris had never shown up. Instead, Nick met Josh. After some time at the bar, they took a cab to the Motel 4 Deluxe, where Josh was staying. They stepped into the motel room, and Nick felt a blow to the back of his head. Fade to black until morning.
“Okay,” Rice breathed as he shifted to cross his legs. “Thank you, Nick. Do you need anything before I ask you some questions about your story?”
“Bathroom break? Water?” Lisa spoke for the first time in about twenty minutes.
“No.” The kid wanted this over with, that was for sure.
“Okay,” Rice said as he flipped back in his notes. “First, let’s go back to the bar with Josh. He never gave you a last name?”
Nick shook his head.
“Could you say yes or no out loud?” Rice pointed to the tape recorder.
“Sorry, no. No last name. Just Josh.”
“Can you remember anything he said about himself?”
Nick was quiet for a while and said, “He didn’t really talk about himself, but he seemed, like, kind of rich, maybe like a business guy or something.”
“How long were you together at the bar?”
“Well, if I could use my phone I could give you more specifics.”
“By all means!” This was good news. Anything with a timestamp would be helpful.
Nick produced a black smartphone from under his bed covers. These kids were never more than six inches from their devices; it was probably going to give them all cancer by fifty.
“First off, I know it wasn’t eleven yet when I went up to the bar to get two shots for me and Elle. I had been looking at my phone a lot waiting to see if Chris was gonna show up. He was supposed to be there at ten. It was sometime after ten thirty but not eleven yet.”
“Good,” Rice quietly prompted.
“And Jo
sh started talking to me within, like, a minute of me being at the bar. He might have been just getting there, but I’m not sure on that. And we were still talking at eleven forty-two, since Elle told me she sent this right when she took it.” He turned his phone toward Rice to reveal a photo of two men at a bar.
“Hold up, is this you and him?”
“Yeah,” Nick said, an unspoken Duh? hovering in the drawn-out h.
Rice took the phone in his hand. “You have a photo of him.”
“Yeah, I told that to the cop last night. He said you guys would get it from me.”
For fuck’s sake. Rice was going to chew out Merlo the second he saw that moron back at the station. What if something had happened to the photo? What if the kid hadn’t brought it up again?
“Can you email me this picture right this second?”
Nick raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Yeah, sure.”
Rice’s heart rate began to come back down when the email from Nick loaded on his phone. He forwarded it to the admin with the directive:
PRINT.
When he looked up, Lisa was looking at him with wide eyes and a tight smile.
“Well, okay,” Rice breathed. “So we have a picture.”
“Yeah, it’s a little dark and far away, but he’s the one facing the camera more, and I’m the one turned away. Elle took it from over near the dance floor.”
Rice studied the photo more carefully. The lighting wasn’t great, but the figures were clear: two men at a bar, one facing the camera, the other turned away. Rice zoomed in on the face. Josh, if that was his real name, looked like Nick had described him: Caucasian with dark features; older than Nick.
“So, sometime between ten thirty and eleven you meet, and at eleven forty-two you’re still at the bar, and he didn’t tell you where he lived, what he did?”
“No.” Nick looked crestfallen.
“Nick, I’m not blaming you. My point is, well, did he have you talking about yourself?”
The Damage Page 4