Stephen White - Cold Case

Sam got his cherished bear claw. Actually, I bought him two. They were out of plain bagels. Satoshi was going to have to settle for poppy. I went back and forth over the selection of teas. After a mental toss of the coin I chose Darjeeling.

She accepted the pebbled bagel and the cup of tea with grace.

I thought it resembled a pas de deux between an elephant and a doe. Over the years, Sam had often surprised me with his physical agility. In fact, a time or two, when I'd seen him dance with his wife, Sherry, he had struck me as peculiarly light on his big feet. But I'd rarely seen him dart and probe with the sensitivity and delicate touch that he demonstrated as he interviewed Satoshi about the ancient rape and the tragic days that followed.

The most glaring difference between a psychologist-interviewer and a cop-interviewer is that the cop treasures the facts more than the psychologist does. Facts for me, as a psychologist, are the smooth rocks I step on as I follow my patient across a riverbed. They are the treads I use to ascend a staircase behind her as she climbs toward a destination I cannot imagine. I try never to succumb to the trap of allowing the facts to masquerade for truth, for truth is a commodity that sometimes bears little resemblance to my patients' recall of the facts. But for a cop, like Sam, the facts are everything. They are the gilded riches in the hold of the sunken galleon. When Sam is in full cop mode, the facts are what he's diving for.

As he proceeded with Satoshi-guiding, prodding, probing-I spotted at least a dozen instances where I would have followed different paths from the one that Sam chose to pursue. A spark of anger that flared in the corners of Satoshi s mouth would have warranted a diversion to explore the source of the detonation.

The fingernails that she dug into the flesh of her thigh would have earned a soft "What is that about?" But Sam wasn't interested in reading the signs that were flashing about eruptions in Satoshi's underlying affect; his eyes were focused on the hard details of the ancient wreckage.

In the end-and the end didn't come until the clock in Sherry's office read 2:18-I was pretty certain Sam had learned a story different from the one that I would have learned.

The story of the rape itself didn't change much in the retelling.

Sam insisted on hearing much more than I would have about the setting where the rape occurred. He pestered Satoshi for detail after detail about possible witnesses who might have been nearby. Where were the closest houses? What was Joey wearing that afternoon? Did he remove any of his clothing? What color was it? Sam wanted to know exactly what she did after she returned home. When had she showered? What had she done with her own clothing? At one point he asked if she knew whether Joey had ejaculated during the assault. Satoshi tightened her lips and nodded in response before she turned away from him and faced me. I felt a plea in her eyes, as though she wished that I would rescue her from his onslaught of queries. I wanted to.

I didn't.

A moment later she turned back to Sam and said, "When it dripped down my thigh, I didn't know what it was. There was blood, too. Mariko explained to me what it was."

I couldn't imagine that those prurient facts or the innumerable mundane ones were actually important to Sam. His purpose, I guessed, was to try to goad Satoshi's memory to do some yoga. He wanted her to begin to stretch her mental muscles and find recollections that had disappeared under the weight of the dual pressures of time and suppression. Sam needed Satoshi to be limber for what was to come.

What was to come? At Sam's insistence, Satoshi recalled the details of the conversation she'd had with her sister, Mariko. Satoshi's memory of this event was quite vivid, as though it were a relic she had refused to bury along with her sister. She recalled that telling Mariko what Joey had done to her took only about as long as the rape had taken-a matter of only a few minutes.

Satoshi guessed three or four. In Sam's hands, though, the retelling of the conversation took most of an hour. What had Mariko wanted to do after she learned about the rape? Was she going to tell someone else? Would she break a confidence and tell their parents what she had learned? Did she want to go and confront Joey and cut off his nuts? What?

Satoshi's patience with Sam was admirable. She answered the questions, one after another, the best she could. Some she couldn't respond to because she couldn't find the memories; others she remembered like that morning's breakfast.

Sam permitted a few tangents. One was especially poignant to me. Satoshi wanted to talk about the friendship between Tami and Miko.

Her words were halting. She wasn't comfortable with the territory.

"She was Mariko's first American girlfriend. Tami was. Before coming to Colorado, our family had been in Switzerland for, I think, two years. And before that, of course, we were in Japan. Tami was something new for her. For both of us. I remember feeling jealous. Tami would lie for Mariko and they would go off on their own after school. At night, at home, they would whisper secrets on the telephone for hours and hours. I felt as though I was no longer the sister. Tami was more important to Mariko than I was-that's how it felt to me. For a long time, I tried to follow along. To be with them. To ski with them. To hang out with them in town.

"I wanted a friend like Tami. That was part of it. But I also wanted my sister back."

Sam stayed in her footsteps, always behind her, always filling her shadows with his mass. Occasionally he asked for a clarification. When she stopped speaking at the end of a long response to another in a series of questions about what she had told Mariko the night of the rape, Sam said, "Good, good. That's great." I mistakenly assumed he had concluded his questioning.

But he soon continued. He rubbed his hands together and rested his elbows on his knees.

"Let's do it again," he said.

"This time, though, we'll do it from some new angles."

The new questions came in sets, like ocean waves. Where were you sitting when you told Mariko about the rape? Where was she sitting? Or-maybe-she was standing? How did you bring it up? What were your first words? Did she believe you? What did she say?

Satoshi found answers for almost all of Sam's questions, surprising herself with the wealth of information that she could remember. Sam tried to stay impassive, but his eyes betrayed his enthusiasm. His subject, he knew, was warming up to her task. I was stifling yawns. I would have gone back out for more coffee but I didn't want to miss what might come next.

Sam said, "Okay, okay. Now we move on to the day that Mariko took you to see Dr. Welle. Do you remember that day?"

"Yes."

"What was the weather?"

For the first time Satoshi's voice betrayed some irritation.

"What? Why does that matter?"

"It does. Humor me."

She thought for a moment.

"It was a beautiful day. A storm was coming. The day had been warm and the sky was high. No clouds. Not even a thread. You know what it's like in the Rockies just before a big blizzard comes? It was one of those days. A September day in November." "I love those days before a storm," said Sam.

"One time-must've been Thanksgiving a couple of years ago-I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt when I was going into Ideal to get some groceries. I come out with maybe fifty dollars' worth of stuff and the air's suddenly freezing cold and the wind's howling and there's half an inch of snow on my windshield.

Don't know why, but I love those days when that happens. Its like weather chaos."

I loved those days, too. But I kept quiet.

Sam had an annoying little buzzer on his wristwatch that beeped on the hour. It tolled at two A.M." causing me to check my watch. Satoshi had just said, "You know what? There was a car there when we left Dr. Welle's house. It was down near the stable. We drove by it on our way out. I remember because Mariko mentioned it. She said she liked it-the car." Neither Sam nor I had reacted to her words as though they were particularly meaningful.