Good Morning, Killer

splotching, there appeared a glow-on glow, a ghostly memo, as if sent by the offender in almost-invisible ink.

“What?” Juliana asked, craning her neck. “Where is it?”

“On your lower back,” Nancy said.

“What’s the big deal? I can’t feel anything.”

“He left a partial imprint,” said the nurse matter-of-factly. “It’s pretty clear. It’s the sole of a shoe. At some point he must have stepped on your back.”

Stamped on her back, while Juliana lay on her stomach, unconscious. Stamped, she should have said, since she had promised to tell the truth, trampled or stamped, using the full weight of the boot with his body behind it, blunt-force heavy impact.

Juliana’s mouth turned down, and she emitted a series of guttural screams.

“Get it off me! Get it off!”

A Wood’s lamp is a coherent light that causes materials and messages to luminesce. This particular message was clear as day: the offender had declared that he was a powerful and commanding man and the rest of us bugs under his feet.

Juliana wanted the impression “off!” like a spider crawling up her back, “off!”—and her cries were hideous and freakish squawks; her twisting, flailing arms kept beating us away; the curtains buckled, the lamp, discarded, rolled upon the floor, spinning wild purple rays around the darkened room.

The lug-soled design of a size-ten boot floated in and out like a wondrous charm.

Nine

Something happened to Andrew and me that night. After Juliana was released, we came back to my place and drank enough tequila to shine our own black light on those illicit dungeon doors — the ones that appear only, under the right conditions, in total darkness. Once you find them and you enter, certain things are left behind that cannot be reclaimed between two people.

Most of all, after the physical ordeal of the case, I wanted comfort. I wanted us to bleach our sins with astringent soap and scalding water, and make love, and fall asleep like new puppies in a box full of clean sheets. I wanted the relief of knowing that despite the roughneck ride we were on, we could always return to the kind of private shelter we had discovered at the Sandpiper, the very first weekend we went away together, where, at dusk, on windswept Moonstone Beach, we had walked until our fingers froze, and came back and lit candles and lay in the bathtub in the steamed-up motel bathroom, hot as a sauna, and told our secrets. I remember resting my head against a sopping towel laid over the edge, and how we faced each other, my legs inside his, the strong heavy bones of his shins buffering mine against the cool porcelain, surrendering to our nakedness and the dissolving boundaries between us, the comfortable bubbly water, letting go inch by inch, until I was able to accept, at last, his enduring offer of safety. There is no deeper luxury.

In the canyon of those forgotten hours of the night, half senseless after bearing witness to the interminable rape exam, I craved that luxurious feeling of safety again, even ran a bath, as if Andrew and I could both fit inside the half-size plastic shower-tub of the apartment in the Marina. But we were too drunk, at odds, on the job, did not have time for luxury, had seen so many borders violated it seemed useless to defend them. He turned the water off. He wanted me to do it on my knees on the floor, like a hooker. I didn’t want to; he made it a challenge; so I did, as if wild submission were the same as wholehearted surrender, as if it could take you to the center of the labyrinth. I couldn’t find where we were on the bed, up, down or across. He wanted me to slap his face. He got up and came back with a belt. It had never been like this before. When I had an orgasm, I cried. I didn’t know what it was about. He held me, panting.

Now I see why I had been so desperate to be sanctified by water, by touch. Andrew and I had become profoundly contaminated by the materials we were working with. (The Bible talks about cleansing with blood; Andrew believed it, but I have never known true atonement to work that way.) Like a chemical reagent that causes evidence to glow in the dark, the alcohol had made that contamination observable for a brief period of time, but the kind of perversity that had acted on Juliana Meyer-Murphy, and therefore on the two of us, does not go away with daylight. You carry the toxins. Maybe he was angry at being reassigned from the Arizona investigation, had to put me in my place for a lot of reasons; but there was something about the purposeful way he took us to the edge that hinted he knew all about dark places, and savage unrestraint.

After Juliana went home, we withdrew from the M&Ms’, shut down the command center at the Santa Monica Police Department and initiated a nationwide manhunt for the suspect from a war room at the Bureau.

The war room consisted of a disused space near the lavatories: two old windowed offices with the dividing wall taken out and lined with metal shelving that held somebody’s collection of administrative operations in thick unreadable binders and textbooks called The Biology of Violence and Ransom, probably not cracked since some of the World War II vets were laid to rest in the VA cemetery across the way. In a contemplative moment your eyes could travel from those shaded white markers north to the lustrous Italian marble of the Getty Museum, perched like a mythical griffin over the mountain pass.

We had our own artwork going. A real exhibition. The tattered old timeline from the command center had been reinstalled upon the wall, beginning when the 911 came in and listing every event — when the police responded, when the Bureau was called, who was interviewed, when each polygraph was done — all the way up to “Someone is walking up the street” in the fog. There were aerial photos of the Promenade obtained from the satellite facility at headquarters and location shots of the storefronts. Posted also were my hand-drawn diagrams showing the true distance and relationships between Willie John Black’s doorway and the fountains and the bench where Juliana may have met the suspect.

Then, in the Purple Gallery, we had close-ups of the bruise patterns on Juliana’s neck and the fine cutting on her chest, and a series of photographs using reflected UV light that showed the lug-soled design of the boot taken from the skin of her back. For this expertise we had to wait an extra two hours at the Rape Treatment Center while a forensic photographer fought standstill traffic all the way from a private lab called Result Associates, out in Fullerton.

I had assigned young Jason Ripley as administrative case agent, which meant he was in charge of the paper, hauling cartons of printouts from Rapid Start, trying to keep the sub files organized. We were on our knees, hands deep inside the boxes, scraping our knuckles on bristly reams of paper, when I felt a presence behind me and heard Kelsey Owen say, “Congratulations on recovering the victim. That must have been incredibly exciting.” “We got lucky,” Jason, the voice of experience, replied.

I sat back on my haunches and rewrapped the scrunchie that held my ponytail, grimacing at the time. “Gotta go.”

“Where to?”

“Rick’s office,” scrambling up and wiping the fine cardboard dust off on my jeans.

“I’ll walk with you,” offered Kelsey.

I was aching to stop at Barbara Sullivan’s, my old pal from the bank robbery squad. They still had real offices on the south side of the floor and Barbara’s was still a sanctuary. I just needed to sit in there with the door closed for fifteen minutes, talking carpet installations and flu shots, easy muffin recipes and haircuts of the stars. But now I was late and saddled with Kelsey.

“What’s the meeting about?”

“A couple of distinctive things in the Santa Monica kidnapping match the cases that came up on VICAP.”

“Why didn’t they come up before?”