Neil McMahon - To The Bone

She was frantically trying to open it when someone slipped an arm around her from behind, pinning her own arms, and jabbed a needle into her shoulder.

She tried to plead, but she lost consciousness within seconds. Her last thought was that she was going to die.

But she awoke, slowly, groggy and in pain. It took her some time to realize that she was in the driver's seat of her own car – slammed into a highway underpass bridge abutment. The windshield above the steering wheel was spiderwebbed, as if her head had hit it. The dashboard and hood were littered with shards of glass. Her face was sticky with congealed blood.

But except for the laceration on her forehead, she was unhurt.

It was still night, and deserted. She recognized the place as a wooded area of San Francisco near China Beach. She had no memory of the accident – no memory of having driven at all, since arriving at D' Anton's house.

What Roberta did next, Monks thought, defined a fundamental difference between the culture that she had grown up in and the one that he had. She had found her way to a pay phone – but instead of calling the police, she called her mother. Then she hid until Mrs. Massey and her boyfriend – an ex-con named Jerry – came to pick her up.

They went to the hospital in Redwood City. No one said anything about D'Anton – only that Roberta had been in a wreck. Her mother stayed with her, while Jerry called the police and reported the car as stolen.

A young ER doc stitched up Roberta's cut, warning her that this was only a temporary fix, to stop the bleeding. The scar would need to be repaired by a plastic surgeon, the sooner the better.

But that had never been done. In the months that followed, Roberta thought more and more about the light that had appeared to her and saved her life. She began to understand that it had been a call from Jesus. She had gotten involved with a local church that was active with the poor, and now she worked there part-time. She embraced her disfigurement as a sort of stigmata – deliverance from the vanity of physical beauty.

"It was a gift from Christ to signify my salvation," she said. 'To share in His sufferings." She watched Monks, her face hopeful, as if pleading silently for absolution.

Monks said, "Why didn't you go to the police, Roberta?"

She lowered her eyes again.

"I was – you know. In trouble, drugs, mostly. On probation. I figured, if they found me in a wrecked car, fucked up – forgive me, Lord – I was done for. I'd already spent ten days in county. Those dykes in there-" She shivered again. "No way was I going back."

"But you decided to file an insurance complaint?"

"That was Jerry's idea. I didn't want him to do it, but he talked Mom into it because maybe we could get some money. He knew this lawyer and got him to go to the insurance company and threaten to sue Dr. D' Anton.

"Next thing we know, this big black shiny Mercedes pulls up outside, and this man gets out wearing, like, a three-piece suit. He told us he was Dr. D'Anton's lawyer. He looked at the place like he'd just stepped on a turd – wouldn't sit down or even come in. Just stood there in the doorway and talked for about ten minutes, telling us how he was going to bust our balls. It was like listening to the devil, man – he was so smooth, absolutely sure of himself. He said the lawyer we'd used wasn't really a lawyer; he'd lost his license. He said I was a known criminal and a druggie, and I was making up a filthy lie to get money out of this famous doctor, and I was going to go to prison, like, for twenty years.

'Then he says to Jerry, 'Attempted fraud, in partnership with a disbarred attorney, would be a rather serious violation of your parole, wouldn't it?' I still remember that exactly." She mimicked a cold, contemptuous voice. "'A rather serious violation.' Jerry was out of here pretty quick after that."

Monks's restless gaze scanned the room. A shelf of photos included a couple of a pretty, slender girl in her teens. There was no doubt that she was Roberta. She looked saucy, wearing low-cut blouses that thrust her young breasts forward proudly – ready for the world.

'That doctor who sewed you up," Monks said.

"Did he say anything about the cut looking unusual?"

She shook her head, surprised. "Why?"

Because lacerations from a broken windshield typically consisted of many shallow V-grooves, and a precise surgical incision that long would almost certainly have caught the attention of any emergency physician.

"Just curious," Monks said. "Did Dr. D'Anton say anything to you when you were in the operating room?"

"Nooo?" she said, drawing it into a question. Her eyes were starting to get wary.

"The more specific the things you can remember, the more weight it all carries," Monks said soothingly.

"I remember those hands," she said, and added, with unveiled sarcasm, "real specifically."

"What about his face, Roberta? What kind of expression did he have?"

"I didn't see his face."

Monks blinked. "Not at all?"

"Just his hands."

She did not seem to realize that this weakened her story even more. Monks decided not to point it out. He asked a few more questions, then thanked her, and promised her he would be in touch with her soon.

Roberta walked out the door with him. "It's not easy, living here," she said. 'There's a lot of sin around. I pray hard to keep from falling back in."

Monks glanced at the surrounding trailers, quiet, but brimming with the sense of secretive and illicit goings-on.

"I don't have any trouble believing that," he said.

"I pray for Dr. D'Anton, too. I haven't just forgiven him. I thank him for bringing me to Jesus."

"That takes a big soul, Roberta," Monks said.

Bigger than his, that was for sure.

Monks found his way back out through the trailer court's shabby maze to the endless strip of El Camino Real, then took Woodside Road toward Interstate 280, pondering this new pool of information.

He could accept that Roberta had not gone to the police because, in her world, they were even more frightening than someone who had tried to kill her. That nightmare was over. Being under the heavy boot of the law, unfairly or not, could last years, even the rest of her life.

But her story would still be worthless in court. Any decent defense attorney could convince a jury of exactly what D'Anton's lawyer had said – that Roberta had been drunk and drugged, had piled up her car, and had made up the incident in an attempt to get money. She didn't know where it had taken place. She hadn't even seen her attacker's face. The physician who treated her hadn't commented on the nature of the cut. And why had D' Anton let her live? He would have had to stage the accident, roughen the scalpel incision with glass. Had he abducted her in a moment of impulse, then come to his senses and realized she would be traced to the party? Regained a touch of humanity at her screams, or just lost his nerve?

Monks believed that Roberta thought she was telling the truth. He speculated about recovered memory – the kind of fantasy that abuse victims sometimes constructed, out of guilt, fear, the need to block out traumatic events. Surely she was familiar with rumors about girls who disappeared. Could she have incorporated that, in a drug-induced psychosis, into a rationalization for the accident and her behavior leading to it? Her religious conversion, soon afterward, indicated that guilt feelings were already present in her.

But it was so damned outlandish and, at the same time, grounded in real possibility. This was not about sex experiments on alien spacecraft, or human sacrifice at Satanic rituals. Even her admission of not seeing D' Anton's face added the ring of truth.

And then there was Katie Bensen. Who had been a patient of D'Anton's, and had modeled for Julia D'Anton. Who was also an attractive young woman of about Roberta's age, and also a free spirit who liked drugs and parties.