her throat closed up on her, an anaphylactic attack based on no invasion but the air. The impulse was to throw open the windows, flush her passageways with the sweet bright world.
“Can you talk? Talk to me.
She shook her head. Heaved. Alarmed, I thought she had deliberately swallowed something.
But she was gasping. “I’m — okay.” So there was nothing stuck, it was the breath — a living thing, according to my lifeguard friend — being murdered again and again in some cruel posttraumatic replay of the offender’s script. He hadn’t had to kill her to bring suffering to the max; the repeated assaults had damaged Juliana’s brain so that now it triggered its own gag response. This was irony, not plan. A bonus. Anything could replicate the terror. A loud noise. Violent assaultive e-mails. Her sounds were wrenching. I was helpless to stop them, her mother downstairs would be helpless, too (only knowing these attacks would pass had kept me from calling 911), and as I rocked her with my arms around her slumping shoulders, my eyes were closed, and I was listening to a random fragment of the Serenity Prayer which had drifted into my mind—
She moved away and found some tissues, and we each sat rigid in a denim beanbag chair. She wheezed quietly. I sat. With this child who was not my child. In the big house north of Montana, in the generous room with the sheer white curtains — and computer and clothes, boom box and stuffed animals — and the purple light encompassed us. We were alone together in a cone of purple light.
“What is this?”
I held a get-well card signed with smiley faces, twenty names.
“From the swim team.”
“I swim, too.”
Neighbors had been leaving things, her mother told me: a flat of strawberries by the front door.
“There
“Why did this happen? I keep asking the therapist.”
“What does she say?”
Juliana’s eyes lowered. “That it’s not my fault.”
I looked up at the dense foliage of a tree outside the window. I could see it was an avocado. The fruit would fall into the narrow space between the houses.
“The man who raped you was acting out his own scenario of power and control. It was all about him. He was brutal, overpowering, clever and deeply driven to do what he did. There’s no way you could have stopped him, he had it all planned out. You survived. Because you know something, Juliana? You have a sense of yourself. You’ve been through an experience your friends cannot ever conceive of.” “That’s not right.”
“What isn’t right?”
“Ray wasn’t like that.”
She said his name.
Eleven
I expected everyone to feel the urgency I felt, the surge of momentum that comes with a major break. There would be eager questions, and relief that someone like me, 110 percent committed, was in charge. Andrew and his lieutenant would be there, pumped. Galloway and his ASACs. I was ready for us to bear down and get this guy.
I did not expect to be ambushed.
The briefing was held in our state-of-the-art emergency operations facility. A row of clocks reported the time from the Pacific to the Zulu zone. There were banks of computers, TV screens, a radio console and one-way glass through which the proceedings could be observed. A situation board ran across the front of the low-ceilinged room, a row of chairs before it, facing the troops. It was from those chairs on that platform that Rick and I would address the investigative team.
By 8 a.m., fifty agents and support personnel were grouped around the urns of coffee and cafeteria doughnuts that had been placed on the window ledge, talking shop. To the south, beach cities and teeming flats were bleached by the bandit sun like an overlit transparency. The hot cityscape seemed to leap up and attack. It hurt your eyes, even through the tinted glass.
Everyone wore sport coats or dresses; I had on the slim black pantsuit. Andrew strolled by, unshaven, the open leather jacket over a midnight blue cowboy shirt, faded jeans and boots, wearing his resentment like the shield on his belt. Nobody but Barbara knew we were going out, but I felt embarrassed where I wanted to be proud. He’d looked pretty sharp for the briefing on
“Where’ve you been?”
“Caught a homicide.”
“Isn’t this your most important case?”
“Nothing’s more important,” Andrew agreed, deadpan.
“I’ve been trying to call you.”
“I called you back,” he said.
“Once.”
We broke it off as Lieutenant Barry Loomis came over and Andrew formally introduced me for a second time to his boss, whom you also could not miss in a room of clean-shaven straight guys — he’d be the one with the thick brush mustache and Tasmanian devil tie.
“Go get ’em,” Barry urged, as if I were some kid in Little League.
Rick and I took our seats, looking out at rows of attentive faces. Andrew, center section, gave me a lazy thumbs-up, chuckled at something Barry said. Galloway, wearing a snowy white turtleneck and holding a dead cigar, was reading from a sheaf of papers on his knee.
Projected on a screen above the platform was a yellowy composite drawing, gleaned from Juliana Meyer- Murphy, of “Ray.” It didn’t tell much: Caucasian, narrow eyes and high cheekbones, thick-necked, short matted hair. Suddenly I felt loose and coasting. After sitting with Juliana on the rose-colored carpet, writing at warp speed, I had been up until two in the morning integrating what she had been able to tell me about the assault and creating a profile of the offender, deep into the marrow of a violent sexual deviant. It seemed insane to be sitting here dressed for lunch, making eyes at my boyfriend in the third row.
“But yesterday, Special Agent Grey was able to obtain the victim’s narrative, included in your packet,” Rick was saying, “which you might want to take a moment to read. Would this be a good time, Ana?”
FD-823 (Rev. 8-26-97)
RAPID START
INFORMATION CONTROL
Case ID: 446-702-9977 The Santa Monica Kidnapping
Control Number: 5231 Priority: Immediate
Classification: Sensitive Source: Juliana Meyer-Murphy (Victim)
Event time: 2:00 PM
Method of contact: Interview in victim’s home
Prepared by: Grey, Ana
Component/Agency: Kidnap and extortion squad, FBI
Event narrative:
“The first time I met Ray was on the Promenade. I went there to get jeans. I was waiting for my mom to pick me up near Wilshire and some skaters were grinding on the fountain and this guy was taking pictures.
