“I don’t blame him. His daughter’s life has been irrevocably changed. She is going to need a lifetime of medical support. He can either go bankrupt trying to take care of her at home or he’ll have to turn her over to the state. You can imagine what that would look like.”
Jeffrey thought about all of the time they had wasted standing around while Beckey Caterino fought for her life. “Do you think thirty minutes would’ve made a difference for her?”
Sara’s face took on a diplomatic expression. “She was already exhibiting bradycardia and bradypnea when I knelt down beside her.”
Jeffrey waited.
“Her respiration and heart rate were dangerously low.”
He said, “I read your resuscitation notes. Three minutes is a long time to go without oxygen.”
Sara could’ve crushed him right now. Three minutes was a benchmark for serious brain injury. Jeffrey had looked up the information online, but she had learned it in medical school.
“Every second counts,” was all that Sara would say. Then she had the generosity to change the subject. “Do me a favor, though. Brock doesn’t know I’m making phone calls. He didn’t make it to the body, let alone assess her, but I don’t want him to think I’m stepping on his toes.”
Brock would have no problem with Sara stepping on his neck. “Did you smell anything on Caterino?”
“You mean intercourse?” Sara had brought up the possibility the previous day, right before they had gotten into a one-sided screaming argument, so he wasn’t surprised she had given it some thought. “If Rebecca was sexually assaulted, she was thirty minutes out. She was paralyzed, so she couldn’t move. But, her clothes were in place. There were no signs of a struggle, no signs of bruising or trauma from what I could see of her thighs. I didn’t smell anything at all. But honestly, I wasn’t going to stop and sniff her once we realized that she was still alive.”
He appreciated the we. “I asked Lena if she smelled—”
Sara barked a genuine laugh. “How did that go?”
“Fine. She’s a professional, Sara. You need to respect her.”
Sara looked around his office. She was giving herself space to back away from that line where they were at each other’s throats again.
He said, “Lena told me Caterino smelled clean. Like soap.”
Sara chewed her bottom lip. “Okay. Let’s walk ourselves through this. What would it mean if Rebecca Caterino was attacked?”
Jeffrey opened his desk drawer. He had no fear of the line. He tossed his calculator in her direction in case she needed help counting up all of the fucks she didn’t give.
All Sara said was, “That’s fair.”
The admission didn’t make him feel any better. “It’s been a year.”
“It has.”
“I want to know about your car.”
“It’s a BMW Z4 with an inline six.”
He had already tortured himself with the details. “Your Honda was four years old. You’d just paid it off.”
Sara looked around the office again. “When I bought the Honda, I was a cop’s wife. And when I walked out of the house that day, I knew I wasn’t going to be a cop’s wife anymore.”
“What I did, it was a stupid mistake.” He told her, “It didn’t mean anything.”
“Oh, wow, thank you so much, that changes everything.”
Jeffrey retrieved the calculator. He dropped it back in his desk drawer. “Rebecca Caterino. You go first.”
Sara leaned her head into her hand. He could tell she needed to do this as much as he did.
She said, “Let’s say Beckey was attacked. That would mean that someone followed her through town, into the woods, then attacked her. Maybe he knocked her unconscious with a branch or a rock. She falls. He rapes her. Then—what are we saying? He took out a bar of soap and scrubbed her down?”
“What about those wipes for babies?”
“There are other wipes with disinfectant. You can get unscented, but there’s still a scent.” Sara started to nod. She was seeing it now. “If he used a condom, that would make it very likely he didn’t leave sperm. And if she was unconscious, she wouldn’t be fighting back, so we wouldn’t find the typical defensive wounds on his arms and face.”
“You said he would’ve followed her from the school. It was roughly five in the morning when she headed out for her run.”
Sara picked up on his line of thought. “Which means he was waiting for her. Watching her. But did she always run in the mornings?”
Jeffrey thought back through the reports he’d just read. “It wasn’t normal, but it wasn’t unusual. There was a fight with one of the roommates. They didn’t say about what. Beckey went for a run to cool down.”
A visitor caught his eye through the window. Lena Adams was standing on the other side of the reception counter. She was wearing dark sunglasses and dressed in a pastel pink sweater, which was the only clue he needed to know that he was not looking at Lena Adams.
Sara had turned, too. “I volunteer with Sibyl at the Girls in STEM Club at the high school.”
“What’s she like?”
“You know how a mirror flips your reflection so that right is left and left is right?”
Jeffrey got her meaning. He shook the mouse on his computer to wake it up. He logged into his Gmail account. “I’ve got to go talk to her. If you want, you can wait for the email here.”
The offer earned him one raised eyebrow. “You’re giving me access to your computer?”
“Why wouldn’t I, Sara? I’ve got nothing to hide.” He double-checked the account to make sure it was the one that Sara knew about. “Do what you want. Wait here. Don’t wait here. I don’t care.”
The squad room had started to fill as Jeffrey walked toward the reception counter. He pushed through the saloon doors. “Ms. Adams?”
“It’s Dr. Adams,” Marla told him, her voice too loud for comfort because she apparently assumed Sibyl’s blindness equated to some kind of deafness as well. “She was on her way to school when Lena called
