Behind Closed Doors. Tara Quinn Taylor
“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.
She was doing better today. Or maybe she was just more relaxed because she was with her parents, in the home where she’d grown up. The home where she’d been innocent and at peace.
“Isn’t she going to wonder why you haven’t been at work?”
Sharon had yet to look at her without obvious concern in her eyes, as though, if she just looked hard enough, she’d see the marks those men had left on her daughter’s soul.
“Harry told them I wasn’t feeling well. That’s enough.”
“But you and Kelly are so close…”
“I know, Mom.” Laura wasn’t sure she was making the right choices, only that she was doing what she had to. She was living her life solely on that level right now. She was protecting herself from the past—and the future.
Miller had done his research well. Two companies had installed windows within a five-mile radius of the Kendall home in the past two weeks. All the installers except one had an alibi for the previous Thursday night.
The remaining one was female.
Daniel felt the tension building within him, starting at his neck and traveling in both directions. If there wasn’t a break in this case soon, he’d be popping pills for a migraine—and sleeping flat on the floor in an attempt to ease the soreness in his back.
Staring at a list of suction-cup suppliers, preparing to get a warrant for all records of sales in Tucson over the past six months, Daniel heard his cell phone ring. He unclipped it from his hip.
“Boyd.”
“I did some reading last night,” Harry Kendall said after introducing himself. “I’m pretty certain that as far as the smaller guy goes, we’re dealing with a power-reassurance rapist. Enough of the profile fits. Non-violent attack in the middle of the night. Breaking into the victim’s home. No weapon. Lack of athleticism.”
Taking the phone away from his ear only long enough to switch sides, Boyd remembered how it felt to be powerless.
“It’s the other one I can’t place, and he was the one in charge,” Harry was saying. “My best guess is the power-assertive rapist. He definitely fit the athletic, macho image and was physically aggressive without being overtly sadistic.
“Neither of them appeared to feel any animosity toward Laura. The first one treated her more like a…machine. And the other acted as though he wasn’t quite sure what to do with her.”
Daniel murmured something noncommittal. He and Miller had already been through the profiles—various FBI standard descriptions of rapists that were used not only by law enforcement agencies throughout the country, but also by university psychology classes, women’s self-defense programs and so on.
Apparently by victims’ husbands, as well.
They’d been through them and more or less dismissed them. The profiles described single rapists—not teams.
“It’s eleven o’clock on Monday morning, Mr. Kendall. Have you been to bed yet?”
“Yes.