Urgent Care (24 page)

“No one is accusing you of trying to hurt Narolie,” Gina said. Tank scratched more furiously, his nails digging into his forearms and palms. “But we all know you weren’t using your best judgment. You’re smarter than that, Tank.”

“Says you.”

Gina could take his itching no longer. He didn’t even seem to notice he was doing it. She grabbed one of his hands and stretched out his arm so she could look at his forearm. The rash he’d denied noticing yesterday was more prominent today—now scratched and scaling and with a definite pattern. “I thought you said it wasn’t itchy.”

He shrugged. “It wasn’t.”

“When was the last time you used marijuana?”

“Yesterday morning before class. The Nazis up in the ICU have smoke detectors in the bathrooms, and I gave Narolie the last joint I had on me.”

Gina held his hand palm up, spread his fingers wide, and scrutinized the spaces between them. She smiled. “I think I know what’s wrong with you, Tank.”

“Can you fix it? So then I can go see Narolie?”

“I can fix it. But I guarantee your mom’s not going to like it.”

He met her gaze and grinned. “Cool.”

Friday, 11:01 A.M.

“IF YOU TWO WILL COME WITH ME . . . ” JERRY Boyle’s voice broke through the white noise that filled Nora’s brain. She pushed back from Seth, swiped at her eyes with one hand, and stood up.

“Janet Kwon is waiting to speak with Seth.” Jerry led them through the secure doors and upstairs to the Major Crimes squad room. “We’ve finished interviewing the other two local victims. At least the other two that we know about.”

“Local?” Seth asked. “You mean there are more victims out there who aren’t local?”

“Looks like there could be. The FBI found three more cases—two in Baltimore and one in Cleveland. Same MO.”

Nora clutched at Seth’s arm. “Are—are they dead?”

“No. I’m waiting to get more information from the investigators working their cases, but sounds like the same actor. They were all redheads, all worked in health care facilities, all attacked in the last fourteen months. In the meantime, I was hoping that you could help out here. Talk with our local victims.”

“Me?” She couldn’t face those women—women hurt because of her cowardice.

“With all three of you together, you might come up with some detail that might help. Because right now we have nothing.” His shoulders slumped. She’d never seen him this tired. “Wait here. I’ll get Janet.”

Nora gripped Seth’s hand. “I can’t do it. How can I face those women, knowing that I might have prevented what happened to them?”

Seth pulled her to him, almost smothering her against his chest. Being close to him felt good, safe.

“You can do it. You can do anything.”

His words surprised her, with their simple faith in her. Seth ignored the past and focused on what was possible in the here and now.

He kissed the top of her head, his fingers ruffling through her hair before separating from her. “I believe in you, Nora. Never forget that.”

Jerry returned, accompanied by his partner, Janet Kwon. “You ready?”

“Can Seth come with me?”

“No. Sorry. Like I said, Janet needs to clear up a few things with him.”

Nora caught an unfamiliar edge to Jerry’s voice, but before she could say anything, Janet had separated Seth from her and was leading him into a small interview room down the hall. Jerry touched her on the arm. “Here we go.”

He led her through the door into a small room furnished similarly to the family lounge at Angels. Two vinyl love seats created the outside walls of a square with two more identical vinyl chairs at top and bottom. A low coffee table with two boxes of tissues and an assortment of sodas stood in the center of the square.

The chairs had already been taken. A woman with short, spiky strawberry-blond hair sat in one, legs crossed, top leg bobbing in time with her hand as she awkwardly tapped a cigarette free from a pack. The action was difficult because her left arm was in a cast.

“When’s it come off?” the second woman asked. She had no obvious injuries. Her hair was shoulder length and dyed onyx. But her eyebrows were lighter, almost the same shade as Nora’s own.

“Next week,” the smoker said as soon as she inhaled several puffs, stacking them one on top of the other, ignoring the NO SMOKING sign across from her. Her foot never stopped its motion.

“Ladies,” Jerry interrupted, easing Nora forward until she had no choice but to take a seat on the nearest love seat. “This is Nora. Nora, this is Meg and Amy.”

“Hi,” she said, nodding at each, barely catching that the strawberry blond was Meg, and Amy was the one with the bad dye job.

“Welcome to the club,” Amy said. “When did he get you?”

“Two years ago,” Nora answered, startled by her frankness. “Almost three, now.”

“I was fourteen months ago,” Amy feathered her fingers through her hair, “and she was—”

“Seven weeks ago.” Meg had already sucked her cigarette down to the filter, but she kept on inhaling, her lips pursed so tight that her lipstick bled into the skin around her mouth.

“Guess that makes you the first one. Lucky you.” Amy turned to Jerry. “How’s this going to work?”

“First, thank you both for agreeing to this. It’s not how we usually do things, but—” Jerry sank into the last love seat, elbows on his knees, leaning forward, mirroring the anxiety of all three women. “I know this is a lot to ask. And I appreciate your helping us. I’ve read your statements, but I thought that getting you three together, you might be able to fill in the gaps, maybe spark a memory—anything to help us nail this guy.”

“Uniontown cops said it couldn’t be done.” Amy interrupted him, obviously wanting to be in control. “Not without evidence.”

“That was when they thought they only had one victim. Now we have four in the area. And a pattern. What we call a—”

“Signature,” Amy put in. “Yeah, we get it. We watch
CSI
, you know. Is this legal, us talking together?”

“The fact is, that with no forensic evidence and no way for any of you to identify your attacker—”

“You can’t convict him even if you do catch him. Right?” Amy shifted her weight to the edge of her seat, planting her feet, ready to bolt. “So what are we even doing here?”

Nora wanted to tell the other woman to just shut up and let him talk, get this over with, but she didn’t. Instead, she opened a can of Sprite and sat back, concentrating on the way the condensation dribbled off the can and onto her hand. The bubbles scratched against her throat, felt sharp, and she remembered feeling that same tightness when she’d been taken, the rapist’s knife against her neck.

Jerry didn’t seem to mind Amy’s power play. He kept his voice low and steady, nonconfrontational. “If you can help me find him, maybe we can convict him for murder.”

“Murder?” Meg gasped.

“I’m afraid so. His last victim died.”

Silence swirled between them as each woman reluctantly settled back into her chair and met the others’ eyes.

“How’s this gonna work?” Amy asked.

“I thought we’d start from the beginning, each of you chiming in as you remember events. Amy, do you want to describe how he initially approached you?”

Amy pushed back in her chair, as far back as she could get without toppling it over. “Why doesn’t
she
? After all, she was the first.”

It took Nora a moment to realize that both Meg and Amy were staring at her, waiting for her.

She swallowed, the soda scratching and almost choking her. Coughing, she put the can down on the table. Swirling it around the smooth veneer, she traced wet spirals as she spoke.

“It was New Year’s Eve. My date and I were both a little drunk, so we took a cab. He dropped me off in front of my building, and I was walking up the steps.” One of the other women made a sharp, gasping noise, but Nora didn’t look up to see who it was. “He came up behind me; I never saw him. Put a knife to my throat, dragged me to his car, made me kneel down, put glue in my eyes so I couldn’t see, duct-taped my hands, and threw me in the trunk.”

“With me it was a gun.” Meg’s voice was raspy from more than smoking, Nora realized. She looked closer and saw that she still had red marks, thin like wire, along her neck. Maybe they were permanent; maybe he had damaged her voice box when he choked her?

“Me, too,” Amy said. “But after we got there, to the first place, it was always a knife.” She shivered, pushing up her sleeves, revealing thin lines of scars arcing over her arms. “He liked cutting. A lot.”

“He liked a lot of things,” Meg said, lighting another cigarette. “Cutting, pinching, choking, hitting. Talking. God, that made it worse—he wouldn’t shut up.”

Nora found herself nodding in unison with Amy.

“Tell me about his voice,” Jerry said in a low voice, now leaning back, keeping out of their way.

“Weird, mechanical.”

“Tinny—not a robot’s, but like the voice on the elevator that tells you what floor you’re on,” Amy added.

“Not human,” Nora said. Both women looked at her, making eye contact before quickly looking away.

“Could it have come from a computer?”

“It was like in surround sound, so yeah,” Meg said, eyes drifting shut, body rocking as she remembered. “And he had a headset or Bluetooth thingy on—I knocked it off once and it made a noise when it hit the floor.”

“After the car ride, the first one, can you remember anything about where he took you? Did he carry you from the car? Did you walk? How far was it? Any sounds, smells?”

As Jerry led them each through their captivity, it became clear that they had all been kept in the same place before being dumped elsewhere. But Nora’s experiences were quite different from the other women’s. The other two women hadn’t had the “date” at all, hadn’t been forced to pretend to make love with their captor, nor had he worked to pleasure them.

He had beaten them, used them, cut them, done unspeakable things to them, heaped verbal abuse on them, called them harlots, whores, sluts, bitches, had repeatedly strangled them using his hands, wire, plastic bags, and their own hair after he chopped it off, had carved words into their flesh along with spray-painting them with graffiti . . . the list of atrocities went on and on.

The only thing he didn’t do was actually have sex with them.

“Do you think that was because you fought back or because he couldn’t?” Jerry asked Amy when she finished describing her attempts to kick and head-butt the attacker.

“He couldn’t get it up,” Amy said triumphantly. “Maybe ’cause I kneed him in the balls hard enough to rupture them.”

“He couldn’t—er—perform with me, either,” Meg put in, her head turned to focus on a distant corner of the ceiling. “But I didn’t fight. I just lay there limp, let him do whatever he wanted. I just wanted it to be over.”

Nora felt Jerry’s gaze on her and knew he also was seeing a disturbing trend. Nora had been a love interest. She had been forced to be an active participant. Only with Nora had the attacker been able to perform sexually.

She’d been the first. The attacker hadn’t selected her at random, stalked her, and then attacked her as part of a pattern. He had wanted her. Chosen her.

Then when she disappointed, he had thrown her out like garbage and began to vent his rage on other women. Women who looked like her. Same build, hair in the reddish spectrum, same pale complexion, same upturned nose, same lips that her father called a Cupid’s bow.

Nora retreated to a corner of the love seat, curled up, knees to her chin, her chest heaving as she tried to stave off a panic attack.

Concentrating on her breathing, head rushing with noise that had nothing to do with the words the other women were saying, she felt herself drifting away in a sea of gray, until Amy’s voice cut through.

“He kept talking about how I needed to be taught a lesson, that I had no idea what love really was, that I was just a cheap whore. Acted like it was my fault he couldn’t get it up.”

“Yeah,” Meg said, pulverizing her cigarette against the bottom of the ashtray. “Same here. Over and over, about how he had sacrificed everything for love, and I wasn’t worthy. He used that word a lot.
Worthy.
”

Amy was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, it wasn’t with her previous strident anger. “He knew things about me. Where I lived, my boyfriend’s name. Where I worked. Said if I disrespected him again, he’d know, come back.”

Meg shuddered, looked away, and blinked hard. Her foot stopped bouncing for a long moment. “I still live in the same place,” she said in a small voice. “Don’t have money to move.”

“Is there someone who can stay with you the next few days?” Jerry asked. “Or somewhere else you can—”

“She’s coming home with me,” Amy said, standing up and brushing her hands against her jeans as if shooing away Jerry and the memories his questions dredged up. She walked around the coffee table and placed her hands palm down on Meg’s shoulders. “Come on, Meg. We’re done here.”

Nora heard the door shut behind them but didn’t turn her head. She sat there, arms hugging her knees to her chest, not blinking.

Jerry must have escorted the others out because the door opened again a few minutes later and he sat down beside her.

“You okay?” he asked without touching her. Like he was afraid she would shatter. She wondered if maybe he was right.

“It was me. He wanted me—something from me.” Her eyes were half shut, giving her a narrow view of her gray world. “Something I couldn’t give him. It pissed him off and he kept going after other women—” She stopped herself, resting her forehead on her knees.

Jerry was silent, merely wrapping his arms around her shoulders. Somehow it wasn’t as comforting as Seth’s embrace. But then again, nothing was.

“Why me, Jerry?” she asked, her voice shredded with tears. “What does he want from me?”