“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Gin said. “Did she live near here?”
“Yes, ma’am. It was just me and her. She didn’t have much family left—not that were speaking to her, anyways.”
“Red suits you,” Gin said, unsure what else to say.
“Our mascot was the Red Devils.”
“Oh, from Sturgeon? What year did you graduate?”
“2012.”
Gin did a quick recalculation; that meant the girl was only twenty-two or -three at the most, younger even than she had guessed.
Which also meant that she had been still a teenager when she met Morgensen.
“And you’ve been working since high school?”
“Yes . . . I’m hoping to start community college in a year or two, once I save a little. All my mom left me was this house, and I don’t earn that much in my job. That’s why I’m starting my online business. I’m going to sell vintage clothes, you know? There’s a big market for that.” Idly, Danielle touched a filmy orange print garment piled on top of an open box. “I’m going to specialize in the seventies.”
“That’s great,” Gin said. The idea wasn’t a terrible one, but it was clear that the girl had no idea where to start. Unchecked, the collecting could eventually force her out of her home. “I wonder . . . is there somewhere we can sit down to talk?”
“Oh, sure. Come on in the kitchen.”
Danielle dashed ahead and started unloading more junk from a chair so Gin would have a place to sit. The odors of rot, mold, and dust rose into the air, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Would you like a soda? I have some in the garage.”
Gin could only imagine what the garage looked like, and she quickly declined. “I’ve been thinking about something ever since we talked the other night. Danielle . . . I know I didn’t tell you this when we met, and I’m sorry to have misled you, but I have a medical background. I’m a physician, actually.” She waited to gauge Danielle’s reaction, but the girl’s expression didn’t change. “I’ve dealt with any number of people who’ve suffered serious trauma. Assault . . . abuse . . . rape. The effects can be devastating.”
At the word rape, Danielle flinched as if struck and then seemed to retreat into herself, crossing her arms tightly across her chest.
“And it seems to me,” Gin continued, “that you might have suffered something similar. That you were . . . taken advantage of by someone who you trusted, someone who you thought cared about you. I know that you spent a lot of time with Marvin Morgensen several years ago when you joined the reenactors.”
Despite her efforts to remain composed, Danielle’s mouth began to wobble, and tears welled in her eyes. She made a soft gasping sound, and her body began to tremble.
Alarmed, Gin rebuked herself for not bringing someone else along with her, someone trained in counseling victims of sexual assault. The last thing she wanted to do was deepen Danielle’s trauma. But her reaction proved that Gin was on the right track. If she could establish what had happened to Danielle before contacting the detectives, maybe she could help smooth the way to make sure that she was handled with sensitivity.
Gin leaned forward, keeping her body language as nonthreatening as possible. “I believe that Marvin Morgensen took advantage of that relationship,” she said, gently but firmly. “That once he was certain of your trust, he treated you in a most inappropriate way. That he . . . harmed you. Afterward, he may have told you that no one would believe you if you tried to tell what happened. He may have convinced you that somehow you invited his attentions. Maybe you even believe that what happened was your fault.”
“Nothing that happened was my fault!” Danielle said. Her face twisted up in an ugly rictus of rage and pain. “I wasn’t even there. I never asked for anything, ever!”
“You . . . of course not,” Gin said. Maybe Danielle had blanked out the traumatic events—maybe her mind had taken over to protect her psyche, revising her memories, blotting out those that were simply too painful to revisit.
It wasn’t uncommon, in horrific attacks, for the victims to bury their memories. Sometimes the events could be reconstructed through therapy, but the process could take months, even years.
And if Danielle had blocked the rape, perhaps she had blocked the rest as well—if she had killed Morgensen, she might honestly have no memory of it. Her mind’s frantic attempt to stay a few steps ahead of the painful truth could easily have been the trigger to begin hoarding, to try to fill the yawing chasm inside her.
Gin reached across the table and took Danielle’s hand. Her skin was waxy and cold, her muscles tense.
“Marvin Morgensen hurt you,” Gin said. “I want to help you.”
“He never hurt me,” Danielle said, a strange, grim smile twisting her lips.
“Oh, honey, it’s understandable that you have complicated feelings about the man who raped you.”
Danielle gave an anguished cry and flung Gin’s hand away with such force that it bounced off the table.
“Marvin Morgensen isn’t my rapist,” she sobbed. “He’s my father.”
24
Gin recoiled in shock. If Morgensen was Danielle’s father, then . . .
“Oh, my God, your mother,” she gasped.
“Marvin raped her. She was only seventeen years old,” Danielle said dully. “She was working at a dry cleaner. He worked at a car dealership down the street, and he always talked to her when he came in to pick up his shirts. She said he was always really polite—he barely spoke to her at all other than to say thank you. Until one night he waited for her behind the building. He knew she took a shortcut home—he’d been watching her.”
“Oh, Danielle. I’m—I’m so sorry.” The pitiful inadequacy of the words were not lost on Gin.
“Why?” Danielle glared at her, her voice suddenly sharp. “You didn’t do anything. It’s not your fault.”
“No, of course,” Gin stammered, thrown off by Danielle’s volatility.
“There’s one person on this earth who was responsible for what happened to my mom that day. One person who wrecked her life. You want to see something?” Danielle’s voice was growing increasingly angry and agitated.
“All right,” Gin said, as calmly as she could, trying to keep up. All along she’d been thinking that Danielle was Morgensen’s victim, which would have been an anomaly in the pattern of rapes, coming so long after the attack before it. Tuck had been right all along, but Gin—trained by her profession to draw conclusions from the evidence in front of her—had ignored him.
Danielle got up and went into the living room. Gin could hear her moving around; there was the sound of papers falling to the floor and boxes being pushed aside.
In a few moments, she was back. Clutched in her hand was a large fabric-bound yearbook.
“My mom was her class president,” she said, opening the book to a dog-eared page. There, in the center of several rows of senior portraits, was a picture of a beautiful young woman with an impish smile and hair styled in perfect nineties waves. “She had a scholarship to Penn State. She wanted to be a teacher.”
“What happened to her was terrible,” Gin said shakily. “But it doesn’t mean that you have to—”
“She almost didn’t have me, you know,” Danielle said matter-of-factly. “She said she thought she couldn’t stand to see his face every day in her baby, if I took after him. But she just couldn’t have an abortion. And she always said that I was my own person with my own look. But I had to resemble him at least a little, or else why would she have killed herself?”
“Oh, honey,” Gin said, her heart breaking for what the poor girl had endured. “I’m sure your mother loved you with all her heart. But she was ill, after what happened to her. She had a sickness, the disease of depression.”
“Oh, stop.” Abruptly Danielle raised her other hand, which she’d kept hidden behind her until now.
She was holding a gun.
“Danielle . . .”
“Just stop trying to
psychoanalyze me, okay? I hate that.”
“All right,” Gin said carefully. The muzzle of the small handgun was waving erratically, Danielle snuffling and wiping her face with her sleeve. “I’m sorry I brought up what must be a really painful subject. But Danielle, it doesn’t have to be like this. You don’t have to live with this kind of pain. We can get you the help that you—”
“Don’t judge me,” Danielle snarled, whipping the gun around to point directly at Gin’s heart. “Don’t you dare!”
“I’m not judging,” Gin said, a little desperately. Coming here had been one of the stupidest decisions she had made in the whole case. Tuck had warned her to step back, and Stillman had tried to keep her out since the whole mess began. Why couldn’t she have listened?
“Don’t lie. I see how you look at me. I see you looking at my house, my things. Not everyone has the chance to go to medical school. Not everyone has their whole life bought and paid for. I looked you up. I know who your parents are. You think that just because you’re rich you get to come back here and all the doors open for you.” She was sobbing now, rocking back and forth slightly and clutching her stomach with her free hand.
Gin had to keep her talking somehow, had to keep her from impulsively pulling the trigger. They were surrounded by mounded trash; next to the kitchen table were stacks of boxes filled with what looked like newspapers and old magazines. They might make a shield if she could get behind them, but there was nowhere to run to, no way to reach an exit without putting herself in the line of fire.
“It was you who tried to run me off the road, wasn’t it?”
“I watched you with those girls,” Danielle said. “I came to your practices. You never even saw me. All those girls with their expensive things. My mom couldn’t ever afford the fees for me to play sports.”
“You were there? In the gym?”
“I’ve been everywhere,” Danielle said, her voice going high and manic. “I never realized all the things I could do. The power I had.”
“The power you had . . . to do what?”
“Whatever I want. Whatever needs to be done. To make people pay for what they did.”
“You mean Morgensen . . .”
“Shut up!” Danielle snapped. “Don’t say his name; don’t keep saying his name.”
“But he was the one who hurt your mother,” Gin said faintly.
“My mom never told me it was him. All the years I was growing up, she wouldn’t say his name. She couldn’t go to the police because the police don’t care. They let rapists walk around free, and they do it again and again and again. That’s what happened with M—with him.”
She was crying so hard she could barely get the words out. Gin knew she was dangerously distraught but couldn’t think of any way to calm her other than to keep her talking.
“Your mother didn’t report the rape because she felt that no one would help,” she said, employing a basic technique of patient inquiry, repeating back what Danielle had said in slightly different words.
“And then he’d come after me, to punish her! That was her biggest fear—that he’d come for me if she ever said who he was. But I figured it out. I mean, there was only one dry cleaner in town and only one car dealership nearby. And all I had to do was pretend like I was looking for a car. They had these plaques on the walls. You know, with like top salesmen for every month, way back to when my mom was young. I wrote down the names, and then I just looked on the Internet, and it came up where he had been arrested for doing disgusting things, so I knew it was him.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police then?”
“She wouldn’t have wanted that,” Danielle said, shaking her head. “And they wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. Not after all that time passed. Besides, I didn’t even go looking until after she died.”
Gin took the opening that Danielle had provided; she knew that hoarding behavior often followed a traumatic loss. Just keep talking, she thought; the longer she could distract Danielle, the better her odds of figuring out some way to get the gun away from her. “Tell me about when your mother died,” she said gently.
Danielle shuddered, wiping her eyes with the back of her free hand. “One night she asked me to come into her room. She never let me go in there because that was where she kept her bottles. She didn’t want me to see her like that. But she wasn’t drinking that night. She wasn’t. And she asked me if I would be all right, and I didn’t know she was going to kill herself. I didn’t know!”
“Of course you didn’t,” Gin said, some part of her heart breaking for the girl. She would have been eighteen, barely graduated from high school, living a hell that no one knew about.
“I said I would, and then she said I should never trust any man who tried to talk to me. She said it would be better for me to keep to myself, to stay single. And I said I would. But what she was really saying . . . He took her from me, don’t you see that? He made her do what she did.”
“What your mother’s rapist did was . . . unconscionable,” Gin said, but hearing her own words, she knew they could never describe the magnitude of the pain he had caused.
Abruptly Danielle seemed to get control of herself. She angrily swiped away her tears and refocused her aim. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, smirking. “I took care of him.”
“You found out he was a reenactor,” Gin said. “You got to know him. Gained his trust.”
“It wasn’t hard,” she said. “And besides, I like the meetings. Everyone’s nice, and it’s not all like, you know, parties with people my age, where all the men just want one thing.”
Gin tried not to react to the strange mix of naïveté and suspicion that Danielle harbored. Had she ever had a close relationship with someone her own age?
“You made friends,” she said. “You enjoyed the socializing.”
Danielle nodded. “It made it easier, you know? I couldn’t be all obvious. I took my time, and after we were introduced, I would just make sure to end up next to him at the drills and meetings.”
“You pretended to be interested in him?”
“I went to his house. Not the first time he invited me, but . . . after I’d known him for a few months. By then I had a lot of friends in the group, so it wasn’t hard to make it seem kind of natural. I had asked to see his old uniforms, and he invited me over. I had my mom’s old car, so I drove myself. He went upstairs and came down wearing his best uniform. Then I asked him to let me see his guns. He had all this stuff, he said it was worth a lot of money, but I didn’t care. He let me hold this one that he said was worth thousands of dollars. I asked him if it actually worked, and he said he paid a guy to make sure it did; he bought real ammunition from him. It was so easy; he just stood there grinning at me thinking—thinking I was going to—oh, my God, that made it easy.” She looked directly into Gin’s eyes, and her voice went ice cold. “I shot him and I watched him die. I watched him fall down, and the whole time he was staring at me, I told him who my mom was, and that was the last thing he knew.”
Gin was trying to decide whether to make a grab for the gun, but she was afraid she’d lost her opportunity. She should have lunged forward when Danielle was distracted; now she seemed almost eerily calm.
“What made you decide to bury him where you did?”
“Mom and I used to go up there,” Danielle said. “We knew it was private land, but there was a back way where you could hike up. Mom used to say it was the best view in town, and it was free. We used to take picnics.”
“What about his teeth, Danielle?”
The girl rolled her eyes at her in disgust. “I was just being thorough. Mom always said that if you were going to do something, you might as well do it right. I did it right there in his living room. Went out to the garage and got a hammer. I had to put a plastic bag under him, but it wasn’t hard.”
Gin felt a faint wave of nausea, imagining the girl at her grisly task. She’d seen the fragmented skull; she knew the force Danielle would have had to put i
nto each blow, fueled by all the rage and pain that Morgensen had caused her.
“I took other things too,” she said, almost defiantly. “After I got rid of him? I sneaked back on foot to make sure I hadn’t left any evidence. I took a bunch of his reenactment gear—I have it in a box here somewhere. And I took his motorcycle.” She grinned. “My mom’s car was a pile of junk. And that motorcycle was almost new. He had so much . . . and she never had anything.”
“But how did you know how to ride it?”
“The boys that lived next door all rode dirt bikes when we were growing up. It’s not hard. Of course, I’ve had to keep it in the garage most of the time, since I couldn’t register it.” Her hand that was holding the gun twitched convulsively. “I guess I’ll never ride it again, though.”
“Because the police have it, you mean.”
“It would have been fine,” Danielle said angrily, “if you hadn’t showed up. The way they talked about you on TV, they made it sound like you could identify anyone.”
The news reports after the body had been found . . . the reporter had seized on the fact that the medical examiner’s office had brought in an expert, emphasizing—even exaggerating—Gin’s role in the toughest cases, her experience in the aftermath of the Bosnian war.
“Okay, enough talking,” Danielle said crossly. “I’m sorry about this, but you’re not going to mess everything up for me now. Look away, okay? I don’t want to have to look at your face when I do it.”
She was going to do it. She was going to kill Gin, just like she’d killed her mother’s rapist.
Gin took one last, desperate look around the kitchen, looking for something, anything, that she could use to stop Danielle. But there were only the walls of trash, the barriers that could never make the girl feel safe enough.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please don’t do this.”
“Turn around!”
Gin was frozen, unable to accept that these were her last seconds on earth. She thought of her parents, of the unimaginable loss they had already suffered; she thought of Jake, of how much they had endured together to come this far. It wasn’t fair.
All the Secret Places Page 25