Behind Closed Doors

Shaking his head, Tony said, “I’ve never known anyone as strong as you are.”

“Yes, you have.” Bobby’s reply was immediate and filled with conviction. “You’re sitting inside his skin right now.”

“I know this is going to sound pie-in-the-sky, but I honestly do not believe you need to have any immediate fears.” Detective Boyd’s voice had lowered, thickened with emotion as he took Laura’s hand at the door.

He was so convincing, so sincere, she almost believed him. Except that she couldn’t seem to get past the solid black wall in her mind.

Harry’s hand on her back was nice, comforting, but it couldn’t scale the blockade, either.

“I’ve been working these cases for five years and I was on the streets for fifteen years before that. In my experience, victims who don’t know their attackers are rarely, if ever, attacked a second time. I follow the statistics, and while the percentages aren’t entirely accurate because of the number of non-reported cases, I can tell you that the danger of repeat rapes on the same victim generally occurs only in instances of spousal abuse, acquaintance rape and date rape.”

Laura nodded, wishing he’d just keep on talking, filling her mind with his experience and reassurance.

Talking was good. She didn’t have to think if she could concentrate on his words—

“What a minute.” Stricken, she stared up at the detective, squeezing his fingers. “I just remembered something.”

Boyd’s gaze changed from compassionate to focused as he bent toward her. “What’s that?”

“When the…second one…you know…” She knew the word orgasm, but she couldn’t make herself say it. Not in the context of rape. Her rape. “Just now, when you were talking about how they probably won’t come back, I had a flash of them here and it was like Harry said. There…at the…end, he did whisper. Why wouldn’t I remember that and then suddenly have it come to me?”

“It happens that way,” Boyd said. His touch on her fingers felt like her hold on reality. Harry’s hand rubbing her back kept her upright. “Memories filter down slowly, when you’re ready for them.”

She frowned, closing her eyes as she struggled to forget and remember accurately at the same time.

“What did he say?” Boyd’s intensity wasn’t lost on her.

“White stays with white, just like Harry said. And maybe another word, too. I didn’t get it. Baby?” Harry’s hand froze on her back. Laura opened her eyes as her voice broke, hating her weakness. “I’m sorry I can’t remember exactly.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Detective Boyd said. “It’ll probably come to you later.”

His understanding felt a lot like approval. It helped so much.

She held on to his hand, not wanting him to go. And at the same time wishing he’d disappear and she’d forget she’d ever met him. Or his partner, Robert Miller. They represented safety. And they represented the fact that she’d been violated, damaged, irrevocably changed.

Harry walked Boyd out to his unmarked sedan, keeping Laura in sight as he did.

“Is there anything else you know about this case but didn’t want to say in front of Laura?” Harry asked.

There had to be. And Harry had to find out what it was. He couldn’t wait around for people to do their jobs. The attackers were on the loose twenty-four hours a day, meaning Laura was in danger twenty-four hours a day.

“I’ve told you everything I can at this point,” Boyd said.

“What about the fact that this is a hate crime?” Harry reined in his frustration with difficulty. This problem wasn’t Boyd’s fault. “Doesn’t that narrow down the suspects? Or at least give you a place to start looking for them?”

“We haven’t determined that it is a hate crime,” Boyd said, unlocking his car but not getting in. “Miller thought it was at first, too, but the more we talked, the more we aren’t sure. Haters usually leave some kind of calling card. They’re proud of their work and want to take credit for it.”

“The man whispered ‘white stays with white,’” Harry said, despising the emotion suffusing his words, raising his tone in spite of his effort to remain calm and controlled. “What else do you need?”

“You aren’t sure that’s what you heard,” Boyd said. “And Laura’s not sure she heard anything.”

“She just said she heard the same thing I did.”

Daniel Boyd stared him in the eye and Harry had a feeling the detective was trying to tell him something—communicating man to man. A personal message, one he’d be out of line actually putting into words.

“She heard you say the word ‘white’ in connection with that second incident.” Boyd’s tone was soft. “Right now your wife’s so busy trying to forget what happened, she’s probably confused about what she really remembers.”

“Just do me a favor and look into it, will you?” Harry asked, feeling more like a schoolkid than the college professor he was as he stood there sweating in the hot night air with his hands in his pockets.

“I already have.”

6

D ouble suction cups. What did they look like? How expensive were they? Where did you get them?

Laura stirred beside him and Harry smoothed a hand over her head, hoping she’d settle back into sleep. She’d finally given in and taken one of the sleeping pills the counselor at the hospital had recommended and the doctor had prescribed.

That had happened, after a difficult phone call to her parents. Harry cringed even now, reliving the moment Laura had told her mother she’d been raped.

From several feet away, he’d heard Sharon Clark’s Oh, my God, oh, my God coming over the line.

His in-laws had tried to insist on coming over, disregarding Laura’s pleas that she was too tired. Only when Harry had spoken to Len had the man seen that there’d be no benefit to Laura from another replay of the tragedy. The Clarks had relented when Harry and Laura accepted their invitation to dine with them after church the next afternoon.

Harry was dreading it.

More suited to Laura’s frame of mind would be dinner at their favorite neighborhood restaurant with Jim and Elaine, friends of theirs from college.

Harry’s hand stilled on his wife’s head as he considered telling their friends what had happened.

Was it necessary?

Better for Laura to have everyone know? Or to be able to regain her footing in the life she’d lived before Thursday night, without all the questions and concern?

The joint counseling session the hospital had scheduled for the following Tuesday couldn’t come too soon as far as Harry was concerned. He had far more questions than answers—about everything.

She lay inert, a twenty-six-year-old college graduate with boyishly short black hair and a body that she’d given away years before.

“God, that’s good,” David Jefferson said, his face inches from hers as he pumped his penis inside her. A penis she refused to look at—as though, if she didn’t see it, she could maintain some kind of distance. “So good.” His words were getting more breathless and she waited, knowing it was only a matter of seconds before he gave that final grunt and emptied his seed into her belly, intending to impregnate her.

Only seconds before his naked body would slide off hers and she could turn over and go to sleep.

To dream about her little boy, her son, the heart of her heart. The child she hadn’t seen in a year. He was three now, and as David slid in and out of her, she tried to picture that little face, to remind herself that while she owed David Jefferson her life, owed him this, she existed for an entirely different purpose.

One day soon she’d have her son back.

“Have you told Kelly?” Sharon Clark asked her daughter as they put the finishing touches on the vegetable salad they’d be having with their roast for dinner.

“No.” Laura took the dressings out of the refrigerator. Thousand Island for her folks. Honey mustard for her. Italian for Harry.