The Other Side (3 page)

The form itself is simple: my name, the police records I am requesting, the case number, the dollar amount I am willing to pay for copying fees. These fees can be waived if the request in some way serves the public interest.
I was the victim in this case
, I write on the form.
I can think of no way in which this serves the public interest, but I would like to see the files anyway
.

A sergeant in the Public Relations Unit responds to my request within the week. After thirteen years the case remains open and The Sergeant needs to consult with the city legal advisor prior to making a decision,
Since, you know, it involves a serious active case
. Three weeks later, after speaking with the law department as well as the lead investigator, The Sergeant sends me a
PDF
file along with a polite offer of further assistance.

At first I decide I won't open it while I'm at home—not while there is laundry to be washed and folded, not while there is food to be cooked, and children to be bathed and fed. I'll wait until my trip to upstate New York in early summer. But then I spend whole mornings distracted by possibilities.
Is the cat alive or dead?
After two days, when my children are at school and My Husband is out of town, I open the file, thinking I'll look only a little bit. Just a little. Just a peek.

The evidence file contains eighty-five pages of police reports, including an inventory of items collected from the crime scene:
chain, brown envelope with handwritten notes, two leather belts tied together
, and
film neg
[
atives
]. It does not describe whether there are images on those negatives. It does not describe the results of any laboratory tests, or the e-mails or correspondence I sent to or received from The Suspect, though they are mentioned. There are no facsimiles or transcripts of conversations I had with prosecutors or the police. The file does not contain copies of warrants, though it lists the complete set of charges filed on my behalf.

The first half of the document reports the same events during the same time period on the same day, each report from the perspective of a different officer, each report in part relating the story I told to one officer or another. The writers do not reflect. They do not sympathize. They express no pity or outrage or disgust. Each report simply records my story, and yet it is not my story, though it is the same version of the story I would tell. Almost word for word.
Like something I memorized long ago and can still perform by heart.

And yet, as I read the evidence file, I see things I don't remember. Like how, according to the police reports, it was The Female Officer, not The Detective, who came out to meet me at the station, and The Female Officer also drove
me to the apartment I'd escaped, and then to the hospital, and then back to the station. But in my memory, this role is so clearly played by The Detective, the man who looks vaguely like my uncle.

I try to remember my two palms pressed against the glass where the dispatchers sat, the locked beige door to my left. I remember it opening, and I try to see The Female Officer's face instead of The Detective's face. I try to remember her dark-blue uniform, every corner pressed and in its place, the black belt with its gold buckle, the gold buttons, every hair on her head tied back into a neat bun. I can see the long hallway behind her. I can see the little notebook. And the office. And the black telephone. The carpet in the hallway is beige, darker in the middle than where it meets the walls at the edges. But when I try to see The Female Officer instead of The Detective the whole image starts to collapse, and then there is neither a female officer nor a male detective opening the locked beige door. There is no opening the door.

Until I looked through the police reports, I didn't know that while I was waiting in the unmarked police car outside the basement apartment, one of the officers called the landlord of the building, a man I knew as the bartender at our favorite dive downtown. He came to the apartment, maybe while I was waiting outside, and confirmed that he
owned the building, and that his tenant was a friend, the same person as The Suspect. After The Landlord refused to tell the police where they could find their suspect, and after he tried several times to call his tenant, he was arrested for obstructing a government operation. He was later processed and transported to the county jail.

I also didn't know that, in the early days of the investigation, one of The Suspect's former students showed up at the police department, admitting that The Suspect paid him one hundred dollars to help him build the soundproof room. They spent an entire weekend working on it together. The Landlord of the building let them use his pickup truck to haul supplies and stopped by periodically to check on the progress. At one point he brought fresh watermelon and cantaloupe for them to eat. The student said he remembered that his former instructor had paid for everything with an envelope full of cash.

Until I looked through the police reports, I didn't know that on July 5, the night of the kidnapping, The Suspect called the Mall 4 Theatres, asking if
My Handsome Friend was working that evening. My Handsome Friend had told his bosses and fellow employees that some psycho might come to the theaters looking for him, and asked them not to give out any information about him over the phone or in person, or to let on that he still worked at the theater. My Handsome Friend told police that for six months The Suspect had been following him, driving past his house and the building where
he worked, because he thought we were having an affair. My Handsome Friend told police he believed that The Suspect might harm him.

I also didn't know that, after the story was reported on the news, people phoned in to the Crime Stoppers hotline to offer information they had about the case. One woman, an employee at a big-box hardware store, had helped The Suspect select glue for the Styrofoam he would later use to build what he called a
sound studio
. One man, who worked at a sound-supply shop on the business loop, said The Suspect had asked him how to build a soundproof room insulated enough to muffle a woman's screams.
For making movies
, The Suspect had said.

According to the police reports, bank records reflect that sometime after 5:00
PM
on July 5, 2000, The Suspect withdrew $750 from his checking account at an
ATM
only blocks from the building where I worked. Which means he may have gone to the
ATM
as early as 5:01
PM
, moments before he approached me in the parking lot outside the building where I worked. Or as late as 11:59
PM
, after he returned to the apartment where he had built the soundproof room and discovered that I'd escaped.

Early the following morning, before I'd called my parents or returned to my apartment to shower and pack,
before The Nurse had finished searching the surfaces and cavities of my body for evidence, he withdrew another $750 from an
ATM
at a gas station at the intersection of two highways 150 miles away to the west and north by interstate. From that
ATM
he drove fifty-two miles south and parked his rental car on a street in the downtown business district of one of the few actual cities in the state, where it would be discovered by an officer from the Stolen Auto Division a month later.

On July 7, two days after the kidnapping, he purchased an airline ticket to León, Guanajuato, Mexico, at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. After arriving in Mexico, after passing without incident through immigration and customs, he walked to the ticket desk and purchased an airline ticket to Porlamar, the largest city on the Island of Margarita, just off the coast of Venezuela. He got off the plane in Santiago Mariño Caribbean International Airport that afternoon and withdrew $1200 from an
ATM
. That evening, just before the bank froze his account, just before I learned to accept the weight of my sister's gun in my hand, one final debit for $29.56 posted to his checking account, from a restaurant at one of the island's resorts.

One police report describes how, on July 12, one week after the kidnapping, at 9:10
AM
, The Suspect called his stepfather
at his farm in southern Missouri: a cabin just this side of a shack, the only building I remember now along the gravel road stretching across a heavily wooded hilltop, where it seemed a fresh buck was always swinging from a tree, the red gash of its belly gaping open. I remember eating stewed squirrel in the kitchen at a card table, loading the woodstove in the cramped living room, watching the clouds of my breath from a mattress on the floor in the only bedroom. I don't remember seeing a phone. But it rang three times, the report says, before The Stepfather picked up. He asked,
Where are you?
The Suspect wouldn't say. They talked briefly about the case.
Yes, I did get her
, The Suspect admitted, but he denied the allegations of rape.
If you want to call Lacy, go ahead
, he said. The Stepfather asked again,
Where are you?
The Suspect refused to say, but then started talking to another person near the phone in Spanish. At 10:00
AM
on July 12, The Stepfather called The Detective to report the call. He said The Suspect seemed very upset about the media exposure on the case.