Archer Mayor - Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

That surprised me. “How?”

“He fixed lengths of rope to the bed frame and then rigged slipknots around each of her wrists. Not tight enough to wake her up, I guess, but enough to lock her up when she tried to get free.”

I frowned. Gail was a sound sleeper. There’d been times I’d gotten into bed next to her and the first she’d known about it was waking up in the morning. But she’d been unusually tired on those occasions, unlike last night.

Ron was still talking. “He tied her legs down the same way after he threatened her with a knife and warned her not to put up a fight.”

I rubbed my eyes with my fingertips, trying to visualize a generic victim instead of Gail. I noticed the nurse I’d spoken to earlier going back into the examination room.

Brandt interrupted for a moment. “Did he use the knife?”

Klesczewski glanced at me nervously. “He nicked her a couple of times to prove he had it. Pinpricks, really. They aren’t bad, Joe.”

I felt my heartbeat beginning to pick up speed, not wishing to ask where those pinpricks had been placed, and suspecting the worst.

“On the phone, you mentioned she had some bruises,” Brandt said. “How’d she get them?”

The door down the hallway opened again and the nurse gestured to me. With a sense of relief, I walked away from Ron’s descriptions. At some point, I’d get all the details and look at them critically, professionally, and categorize them as Brandt was doing. A rapist rarely attacks just once, and he rarely changes style from assault to assault. If we matched his MO to others already on file, we could probably identify him.

But right now I wasn’t interested.

Pleasantly, even supportively, the nurse blocked my way to the door, placing her hand gently on my arm. “Joe, Gail asked me to thank you but said she wasn’t up to a visit just now. It’s been quite an experience.”

I glanced beyond her, so wanting to just push her aside and barge in. In my gut, despite my earlier rational analysis, I couldn’t help feeling a simple hug would be of some help-especially in this sterile setting.

But I nodded instead, unhappily aware of who that hug was meant to soothe the most. “Okay.”

She steered me gently farther down the hall, toward another examination room. “We were wondering if you could help us out a little. We need a blood sample from you for the kit.”

I nodded again. My semen would still be in Gail and would have to be differentiated from that of her attacker. All part of the protocol-the gathering of evidence. It made me think of what Gail was going through now, giving urine and blood samples, having her thighs swabbed with moistened Q-tips, her pubic hair combed out with a fine-toothed comb, her wounds photographed-everything documented and confined in dozens of small and large aseptically clean white envelopes.

I looked down into the nurse’s warm hazel eyes, nestled in a fine webbing of sympathetic wrinkles. “Sure. Lead the way.”

She sat me down in a small room and had me roll up my sleeve, quickly and efficiently wrapping a tourniquet around my upper arm. Her voice was clear and bright, much younger than her appearance. “I’m new in town. One of the other nurses was telling me you’re the chief of detectives in Brattleboro.”

“That’s right.” She shook my right hand. “Elizabeth Pace. Pleased to meet you. I’m sorry about the circumstances.”

I understood she was trying to lighten me up a bit, perhaps help me over the rejection I’d received at Gail’s door. Her effort made me bite back my gloominess, although I refused to play along completely. “How’s she doing?”

Elizabeth Pace hesitated, pretending to be judging a vein the size of a small child’s finger-something she could have stuck with her eyes closed. “You’ve probably dealt with rape victims before.”

“Yes.”

She swabbed the spot with alcohol, making the vein glisten. “I came from Boston. We had a lot of them there. We ended up cataloguing them, among ourselves, from the off-the-wall hysterics to the dead-eyed catatonics. You probably do the same kind of thing in your work.”

She lanced the vein with a needle attached to a Vacutainer hub and quickly slid a vacuum tube in. A small squirt of blood quickly filled the tube. “Given that sliding scale-and the assumption that all those women are in some form of shock-I’d say your friend is taking it pretty well. She came here right away, told us to call the police and her friend Susan Raffner, who then contacted Women for Women. She’s been helpful and cooperative from the start.”

Raffner was the head of Women for Women, a high-profile crisis and counseling center that often worked with us on rape cases, and of which Gail was a founder and a board member. The two of them had been friends and allies through many a political battle.

Pace withdrew both the tube and the needle, released the tourniquet, and placed a cotton ball against the puncture wound. “Bend your arm to keep that in place a few minutes.”

She sat back and appraised me for a couple of seconds. “You’ve known her a long time?”

I appreciated her professional directness. This was obviously a woman of considerable experience in dealing with people, and she was paying me the courtesy of being honest.

“A lot of years,” I admitted.

“In my book, that makes you both victims, except nobody’s going to spend much time on you. Part of that’s as it should be-her needs are greater. But if you two are going to get on with things, you better not forget that you took a shot here, too. Get some help-it’ll benefit both of you, especially over the next few months. It’s not going to be easy-you’re going to be asked to put your feelings at the back of the bus.”

She grinned at me suddenly. “But you knew all that, right?”

“I’ve had a taste of it already.”

We stood up and she ushered me to the door, patting my back like a supportive parent, although we were probably close to the same age. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Treat her gently, okay? She’s a strong woman, but right now she’s got invisible Fragile signs stamped all over her.”

I shook her hand again. “Thanks. And welcome to town.”

I went back down the hallway, still passing Gail’s door with regret but feeling a little less isolated.

The lobby outside the nurse’s station had been abruptly transformed from a bland, overlit, near-empty patch of linoleum to a tension-filled convention of mutually distrustful people, clumps of whom were clustered in separate corners. In descending order of numbers, there were a half-dozen patrol officers, reinforced by several sleepy-looking off-duty people; three sharp-eyed representatives of Women for Women, including Susan Raffner; a growing number of curious hospital personnel; and three people whose presence there caused my heart to sink-Ted McDonald, from WBRT, the local radio station, and a reporter/photographer team from the Brattleboro Reformer .

I found Ron Klesczewski surrounded by blue uniforms, giving out orders to seal off Gail’s house and property and to start some fast preliminary street inquiries in the hope of glimpsing at least one ripple in the town’s social swampland before alibis and plausible denials smoothed the surface back over.

Tony Brandt, wearing his political hat, was standing with Raffner in the center of the room, speaking earnestly and quietly and occasionally glancing over to make sure the three media people were staying-as requested-temporarily out of earshot.

I waited for Ron to finish with one of the patrolmen and tilted my head in the direction of the reporters. “How’d they find out so fast?” He shrugged. “Don’t know, but considering the crowd, I’m not surprised.”