Close: A New Adult Thriller (5 page)

Fifteen

“You sure you don’t me to come in with you?” Kishani asked as we pulled up outside the police headquarters. This time she said it with the eagerness of someone who already knew the answer.

I was wearing jeans and a grey hoodie, my hair pulled back into a ponytail. Before we left, I had put on some eyeliner and lip gloss. It was only when I got into Kish’s car, a brand new Prius, that I realized that I’d put on makeup because part of me didn’t want to look like complete shit for Drew. It seemed so screwed up, but it was the truth, even though he’d already seen me at my worst.

“I’ll be fine,” I told Kishani. I leaned over and gave her a hug. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “I’m so sorry, Laura. You didn’t deserve this.”

I was going to tell her that I didn’t think
anyone
deserved this, but I knew Kish said things without thinking them through, so I let it go. I didn’t want to argue with her now.

I climbed out of the car. She waited at the curb. I took a deep breath and walked towards the entrance. At the doors, I stopped, turned round and looked back. Kish was giving me that same victim look. She waved. I waved back, and then walked inside.

There was a female officer on the desk. She was talking to a middle-aged woman who was jabbing her finger at her to emphasize whatever point she was making. The female officer looked past the woman, who was still in full flow.

“You here to see Detective Brody?” she asked me.

“Yes, but I’m early.”

She smiled at me. “I’ll let him know. Take a seat. He shouldn’t be long.”

“Thanks.”

She went back to being berated by the lady at the desk. “It’s completely unacceptable,” the woman was saying. “They ride their skateboards wherever they like.”

The female officer looked past the woman again and shot me an eye-roll. “Yes, ma’am, I understand your concerns.”

For the first time I was starting to see why cops could get pissy with members of the public. They had real crimes to deal with, like a rapist called Bentley Harper, and this woman was on a tear about kids skateboarding on her street.

Drew must have come out of a side door because I heard him before I saw him. “Here you can get some coffee,
and
a show.”

I turned round to see him holding out a cardboard tray with two coffees. He’d shaved off his stubble, but apart from that he looked the same; the same broad shoulders, and those same azure blue eyes. He was wearing blue jeans, a fitted grey marl t-shirt, and black Converse sneakers.

He nodded towards the woman, who was still in full flow, and whispered, “She’s a regular. To be fair to her, she does mix it up. Sometimes she complains about her neighbors letting their Pekinese poop in her front yard. I told them they should go get a Great Dane, but they didn’t want to listen.”

I tried hard not to laugh. Then I remembered what I was here for and my stomach tightened.

Drew held up a brown paper bag. “Got us some bagels too.”

“Thought cops ate donuts?”

He smiled. “I usually save those for lunch. Come on, I’ll take you through.”

I stood up and followed him through the side door and into a long corridor. We passed a small room with a photocopier, and a few other larger open plan offices. Some had officers in uniform but a lot of the people were dressed in regular business attire. It didn’t look that different from any other office in the world. People had pictures of their partners and kids tacked up or in frames on their desks. There was a pin board with a sign up sheet for a softball team. The only wanted poster I saw was someone looking to buy a car.

We turned right and I followed Drew down another corridor. There were less people here. We passed a room that had been painted in bright colors. There was a small kindergarten sized table and chairs and bunch of toys. It made me shudder. Was that where they talked to children who’d had something bad happen to them? I didn’t want to ask Drew, because I didn’t want to know. Now I just wanted to get this over and done with and get out of here.

Sixteen

“I managed to rustle up a female officer,” said Drew, introducing me to a slightly stern looking Hispanic lady in her mid-forties. “Hi, I’m Detective Vasquez,” she said, reaching out to shake my hand.

Drew handed out the bagels, switched on the recorder, and I began to tell them what had happened the night we ran into Bentley. For the most part I talked. Occasionally Drew or the other detective would ask me to clarify something like whether I’d ever met Bentley before.

There was a definite difference between how Drew spoke to me and how Vasquez did. The way she looked at me I got the impression that she didn’t believe everything I was saying. It wasn’t that she thought I was lying, she just came off skeptical.

I did my best not to add any details that didn’t matter, or to talk about how I felt. It was easier just to stick to what I remembered. I tried to keep talking too. About an hour in Drew asked me if I wanted a break but I said I’d rather not. I wasn’t sure if we stopped that I’d be able to stop myself from wanting to get the hell out of there.

I went as far as the moment I’d walked into the police station, two nights before. It could have been a year. That was how it felt. Time had twisted and distorted since I’d been attacked.

Finally, Drew said to Vasquez, “You got anything else you want to ask?”

“No.”

“Okay,” said Drew. “We’re done. Recording and interview concluded at twelve fifty seven hours.”

I started to get up. I was relieved. Like a lot of things in life it hadn’t been as bad as I’d expected. The waiting to do it, and the trepidation, had been worse than the reality.

“Laura, can you stay here for a few minutes. There’s something that I need deal with. Then I’ll come back and tell you what happens next.”

He didn’t smile. It sounded ominous. They got up and left, leaving me alone in the bare room with my cold coffee.

Seventeen: Drew

There was a crowd waiting in the Chief’s office as I walked in with Vasquez. The interview had taken a little over three hours. Laura had done well. There were still a lot of details she couldn’t remember. It frustrated the cop part of me, but the part that liked her was glad she couldn’t recall some of it. The most important thing was that she hadn’t contradicted herself once. That was the first thing defense attorneys looked for, inconsistencies or embellishment that they could use to undermine the witness’s testimony. As rape often came down to he said/she said, credibility was vital. It sucked that a middle class college girl was more likely to be believed than a black kid who worked in McDonalds, or that what someone was wearing mattered, but that was often what it came down to for a jury.

From the jump there was zero doubt in my mind that Bentley Harper had slipped something, probably GHB or Rohypnol into Laura’s drink. At some point after she and her boyfriend had fallen asleep, he had moved her into his room where he had sexually assaulted in a number of ways. The problem I had now was proving it.

A sea of expectant faces greeted my arrival, including the Chief, his Deputy, the head of the Investigative Division, and crucially for a case like this, an administrator who handled media and public relations. I brought them up to speed. They interjected with questions, which Vasquez and I answered as best we could.

The Chief, who had also come to SBPD via the much larger LAPD, eyed me across his desk. “Next move?” he asked, although it must have been partly rhetorical. There was a set procedure for a rape case.

“Pretext call,” I said flatly.

The Chief nodded. “Get your warrant ready too. Soon as he puts that phone down we’ll go take a look.”

“You don’t want to wait until the call’s been made?” I asked.

The Chief shook his head. “We can always stand down. I’ll see if I can pull in some extra bodies from County too. We have an address for him?”

I nodded.

“No time like the present then,” the Chief said, standing up.

If deployed properly, a pretext call, was the best weapon in a cop’s armory when it came to convicting a sex offender. It was used when victim and asshole knew each other, which was in the vast majority of sexual assault and rape cases. The premise was a simple one. The victim would call the suspect. The call would be recorded, and they would have been briefed by the police beforehand. They would open a conversation which would invite the suspect to discuss the crime. It was crucial that they were not confrontational, or that they didn’t arouse the suspect’s suspicion. It was often sickening to have to listen to a victim tell their attacker some of the things they had to in order to get them to admit what had happened. But it sure as hell beat the suspect walking away to do it all over again. I had been party to these calls a couple of times in my career, and, in a strange way, they were often more haunting than some of the more graphic testimony. The reason they were more troubling was simple. Very often the suspect would admit quite openly what they’d done. I had never been fully convinced that rape was about power and control more than a guy wanting to get his rocks off until I had listened, disbelieving, to my first pretext call. The asshole was a Sheriff’s Deputy who had raped a family member. He must have been so convinced of his own safety, and his attitude towards his victim so disparaging that he not only admitted to the rape, but stayed on the phone for an hour to talk about it. When he was arrested, he committed suicide in his jail cell. But there had be no hint of remorse or pity.

Those were the people, the assholes, who kept me awake at night. Especially when, for some reason, the DA still failed to secure a conviction. They kept me awake because I knew they would do it again. That out there somewhere their next victim was quietly going about their life. Those nights were the times that I told myself that the only way to work as a cop was to be able to let things go. But some crimes were easier to let go than others.

Laura’s hand betrayed a slight tremble as I gave her the handset. “You ready for this?”We had already gone over what she would say to Bentley. It was important not to over-rehearse it. If it didn’t seem natural, Bentley might sense something was wrong.

I punched in Bentley’s cell phone number, then put on her set of headphones to listen in. Via a USB cable which fed into a voice recorder and also a personal computer, the call was already being recorded and time-stamped.

After five long seconds, he answered.

“Hey, what’s up?” he said, casual.

“Nothing much. Just thought I’d give you a call, see if you wanted to hang out later?” Laura paused. I held up my hand, counting down with three fingers, before nodding to give Laura the go-ahead to move on.

Laura went on. “You know, like the other night.”

On the other end of the line, he laughed. “Oh yeah?” It was a laugh to make a skeleton’s skin crawl.

“You put something in my drink, right?” Laura asked, still managing somehow to keep her voice light.

He laughed again. “What’s with all the questions?”

“Nothing. I just want to know what happened. I mean, I know we had sex.”

This time there was no laugh. Only silence. I could hear the sound of waves breaking in the distance. He must be at the beach house. “We did?” he said.

“You know we did. You put something in my drink and then you moved me into your room and then you had sex with me while I was unconscious.” The words fell from Laura’s mouth in a tumble. This wasn’t part of the script. “You raped me.”

There was another long pause. I could see Laura’s face flush. I was just waiting for him to hang up. But he didn’t. Instead, he sighed, and then he said: “Don’t be dumb, Laura. Look at who I am. Then look at who you are. I could have had any girl in that club. No one’s going to believe you.”

Then he hung up.

I looked at Laura as she crumbled. My mind was racing. Part of me wanted to put my arms around her and tell her that everything would be okay. That was I going to make sure no one ever hurt again. The other part of me wanted to drive out to Bentley’s beach house and drown the smug, self-satisfied, rich boy asshole.

My second impulse would probably be the more acceptable among my colleagues. The first would get me fired. You didn’t get involved with vics. That was rule number one. So why did I want to break it for this girl? I so wanted to pull her to me and let her know it was all going to be alright. But I knew I couldn’t, and it was killing me.

I stood up. I had to get out of here. Get some fresh air and perspective. This was crazy. She’d just been raped, and here I was, a male officer, thinking of touching her. The only problem was that when she looked at me, I thought that she wanted it too.

“I’ll be right back, okay?”

I got up and got out of there. Before I said something, or worse, did something, that finished my career.

Eighteen: Laura

I walked outside into the California sunshine. People drove past, going to pick up their kids from school, or heading to business meetings, going about their regular day, while my world imploded around me. Standing there I wasn’t sure I would get Bentley’s voice out of my head. Because I’d been drugged, and only semi-conscious, what he’d done hadn’t seemed altogether real. Now it did. It seemed more than real. It was larger than everything else that everything else that had happened in my life, and that really scared me.

Drew trailed a few steps behind me as we walked. He had insisted on driving me back to my dorm, even though I would really have rather taken a cab. There was a chirp as he disabled the alarm and unlocked the doors with his key fob. He opened the passenger door for me and I got in. I wasn’t sure if he opened the door because he was a gentleman or because he was used to dealing with passengers who had their hands cuffed behind their back.

He got in the driver’s side, and we drove in silence, neither of us looking at the other. He felt guilty for persuading me to make the pretext call. He obviously thought I blamed him for having to go through with it. He was right. I did. I knew it wasn’t fair, that he was trying to do his best, but I couldn’t help myself. There was part of me, a big part, that wished I had never even told anyone. Perhaps it would have been better if I had just pretended that the whole thing had never happened.

Even as I was considering it, I knew I was kidding myself. Rape wasn’t something you could just ignore, like a bad hangover. But I couldn’t shake my feelings of anger and resentment at Drew.

We pulled up at a stop light. Drew glanced over at me. “I’m sorry, Laura. I really am. I shouldn’t have asked you to make that call.”

I could tell from the look on his face that he really meant it. His face looked drawn, his body was tense. For the first time he actually looked his age, and then some.

“I mean it,” he said. “I feel like I let you down. I just thought that if he admitted it on the phone, it would save you a lot of anguish.”

“It’s okay,” I said, immediately hating myself for saying it. It was a bad habit of mine. I always wanted to make people feel better, even when I was really pissed at them. The truth was it wasn’t okay. Nothing would ever be okay for me. Not for a long time anyway. I had a lot of anguish ahead of me; a lot of pain; a lot of everything.

The light flipped to green and we drove on. We kept driving through Santa Barbara. I could see the ocean beneath us. My mind flashed back to the beach house. The smell of that night was the smell of the ocean. It was another thing that he had taken from me.

My cell phone rang. John’s name flashed up. I could tell Drew was wondering if I was going to answer it but he didn’t say anything. I let it go to voicemail.

Drew must have seen the name on my screen because he said, “We’re going to have to speak to him. And your friend, Kishani.” He shrugged an apology with his swimmer’s shoulders. “It’s procedure in a case like this. We have to make sure their testimony lines up with your statement.”

Now I really was mad. “What?” I snapped, my face flushing bright red. “You don’t believe me?” My heartbeat skyrocketed, and this time it had nothing to do with his piercing blue eyes.

Drew made a turn onto campus. He pulled the car over to the side of the road. He put it into park, and turned to me. “Nothing’s changed. pretext calls maybe only work out half the time. If that. They’re a way of settling things quickly. If we can get the guy to admit to it, and present him the evidence then he usually takes a plea. It saves the...,” he stopped. “It would save you having to go to court and take the stand. I’m sorry, Laura, I truly am. He’s obviously not as dumb as he looks. Guys like him are usually pretty cunning.”

“So what does that make me?”

Drew blew air out of his mouth. “It makes you someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s all.”

I decided to change the subject. We weren’t going to get anywhere. I knew that logically he was right. It was worth a shot. I already had an idea what taking the stand would mean; being called a liar; having every single word I’d said picked over; being told that I had somehow led him on, that I was a slut, that I had somehow deserved it.

“When are you going to speak to John and Kish?” I asked.

“Soon. Tomorrow probably.”

I stared straight ahead. “I’d better tell John then.”

I opened the car door.

“Hey, where are you going?” Drew shouted after me.

“I can walk from here.”

Feeling angry, and ashamed, and stupid, I kept walking. A campus security car drove past, a campus police officer with salt and pepper hair staring at me. He pulled up next to Drew’s car and stopped. I could hear Drew talking to him.

I didn’t stop. I was hungry, and tired. All I’d done was sit in a room talking, and then made a call but I felt like I’d just finished running a marathon.

I could see my dorm building up ahead. When I looked back Drew was gone. The campus police car was parked, the nose facing me, the cop no doubt, at Drew’s request, making sure I got back safely.

It was all too late, I thought.