Good Morning, Killer

“Procedure,” Andrew explained. “They like having law enforcement in on the initial interview so the victim doesn’t have to go through the story twice. I do it all the time with rape victims, but Juliana requested a female.” I had an ungracious thought: Had he been trying to edge me out?

“I’m glad Ana will be with her,” said Lynn. “My daughter’s never even been to a gynecologist.” Her voice faltered. “And for this to be her first examination …”

“Listen,” said Ross, “we’re lucky she was only raped.”

Andrew and I exchanged a look. The guy was at the beginning of a long road.

“She did not sustain major injuries aside from the superficial cutting, but she has been sexually assaulted and brutalized,” Andrew stated emphatically. “We’ll find out to what extent in a couple of hours.”

He had my respect. He was patient but firm, and despite his often-repeated credo Bullshit makes the world go round, he was not bullshitting here. I wondered how many parents, husbands, siblings and friends of rape victims he had made this same speech to, in this same corridor, over twenty years as a cop, and if the competence and authority that went from the leather soles of his work shoes firmly gripping the floor to the priestly intertwine of his fingers resting like a bowl held out toward the family had brought any comfort at all.

“Detective? Can we talk?”

We moved aside, and I took a deep breath and asked where he was on the Arizona investigation.

“Just getting off the ground. Sent a bulletin to Phoenix, they’ll post it statewide. Why? Checking up on me?” he added, half kidding.

“No.” I smiled, glad he could joke. “This is not my idea, okay? I fought for you. But the SAC wants the Bureau to take the Arizona connection from here. He wants all the marbles, and it’s his game.” I ran a hand through my hair. “I’m sorry. I hoped we never had to bring this up again.” Andrew shrugged. “Doesn’t matter to me,” he said tonelessly.

I chose to believe him. “See you later?”

“You bet.” He nodded toward the doors. “Be with Juliana. Go.”

“How is she?”

“One tough cookie.” Andrew put his fists in his pockets. “He tortured her, you know.”

Juliana Meyer-Murphy, still wearing her own clothes, was sitting up beside a nurse-practitioner on a sofa in the Rape Treatment Center clinic at the Santa Monica — UCLA Medical Center. I expressed my joy and relief that she was safe, as we had been working very hard to get her back.

Many things were working on me in the first moments I met Juliana. Andrew’s caution not to identify with the victim had already gone by the wayside. She boasted none of the arrogance of her friend Stephanie Kent, but was, achingly, a child, whose first steps into the adult world had been slammed by a bully — not unlike my own experience, growing up without a father in a household dominated by my grandfather’s eccentric punishment of my mother and me, not by fists but by a kind of psychological enslavement to his authority, keeping us isolated in the one-eyed brick house on Pine Street. I still thought of the house that way: one of its two staring front windows was covered by a bush.

“A lot of people care about you,” I told the girl.

“That’s supposed to make a difference?” rasped Juliana in a strange, deep voice, like a person with emphysema.

The shock of that voice made me want to make this girl believe that somebody would care for her wounds, unconditionally.

“It does make a difference. It will.”

The nurse introduced herself. Nancy Reicher, RN, NP, it said on her tag. She was petite, with eyebrows plucked in two thin arches. She wore a knee-length white lab coat with a stethoscope in the pocket, small gold earrings and a garnet ring. Her manner was practiced without being cold. She explained again to Juliana who I was and asked if it was okay if I was present at the medical interview.

“Are you comfortable with that?”

“All right, whatever.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Everything you can tell us will help to track, apprehend and prosecute the offender.”

Juliana looked younger and less robust than in the enlarged school photograph that had been keeping watch over the command center. Here instead was a drawn, delicately featured girl whose quiet aliveness in this tranquil room struck me as one of nature’s most resounding miracles.

And again, something hopeful: we were, at least, in a rape treatment center of the kind that did not always exist, where the revolutionary message was that the hurts you cannot see are sometimes the most devastating, but that even inside the deepest hurt is the promise held, like the easy abandon of the redtail hawks, of a gorgeous liberty.

Juliana sat with head averted. She wore smudged eyeglasses with girly rainbow frames, dirt-encrusted jeans and a large zippered sweatshirt with a red wool plaid scarf (her mother’s) wound around her neck. Her brown hair was up in a careless twist that did not catch every greasy strand. Her hands and fingernails were filthy, too. I was greatly reassured that they had not allowed her to change or take a shower.

It was hard to see the expression behind the convex lenses under which her enlarged brown eyes seemed to stare, then drift away, as if they could not process such a suddenly disorganized world, even though the room had been designed to be an oasis from the impersonal passageways of the hospital, from phobias that might have been triggered by the attack. The light was low, provided only by table lamps, as in a normal setting. There was a poster of flowers above the oatmeal-colored couch, draped with a soft white woven afghan. Juliana’s body was living and breathing in this space, but her soul was folded up somewhere. In my imaginings I had invested her with sadness, loneliness, laughter, aggression, embarrassment, but now, as a person, dynamic, across from you, she projected only one wavelength, unremitting fear.

Nancy gestured. “Sit down, Ana.”

I had been unconsciously keeping my distance, as if Juliana were not a normal teenage kid but a brittle specimen that might become contaminated by human warmth and breath. Still I chose the opposite couch, to give her space. I noticed Nancy sat close, knees almost touching the girl’s. She held a clipboard thick with forms.

“I’m going to give you a complete medical examination to make sure you’re okay. But first, I’m going to ask some questions about what happened, so I know what to look for. Just tell me as much as you can.”

At this point all we knew was Juliana had been let out or escaped from a vehicle somewhere and had somehow made her way back to the M&Ms. She might have been released a block away. It might have been Van Nuys. It might have been the abductor. It might have been a friend.

Juliana said nothing. Nancy said nothing. We sat in silence for a very long time. I tried to make myself still. I looked at an orchid.

Finally Nancy tried again. “Whatever you can tell me is helpful. If you don’t remember, that’s okay.”

Juliana crossed her arms and legs.

“A few hours ago you got out of a car — was it a car?”

I could barely hear when Juliana murmured, “A van.”

Nancy said, “Okay, a van.”

“What kind of a van?” I asked. “Can you describe it?”

She shrugged. Her head was down.

We waited.

I offered some prompts without replicating Stephanie and Ethan’s description: Was the van old? New? Color? Did she notice the stereo, or some CDs lying around? It was very foggy tonight. Could Juliana tell where she was when she got out of the van?

“Can’t we just, please, get this over with? My parents are freaking out.”

Before I could respond Nancy silenced me with a look. She stood up and pulled a leopard from a shelf of stuffed animals.

“I love this guy,” she said. “He’s so soft.”