Trace (10 page)

    
Benton's eyes are steady on her from his safe position on the couch, the words on the legal pad unreadable from where she sits and well beyond her reach. He does not encourage her conversation. It is important that he be patient, incredibly patient, like a hunter in the woods who stands perfectly still and barely breathes.

    
"It came into the house. I don't remember."

    
Benton watches her in silence.

    
"Lucy let it into the house," she says.

    
Benton will not push her, but he will not allow misinformation or outright lies. "No. Lucy did not let it into the house," Benton corrects her. "No one let it into the house. It came in because the back door was unlocked and the alarm was off. We've talked about this. Do you remember why the door was unlocked and the alarm was off?"

    
She stares at her toes, her hands still.

    
"We've talked about why," he says.

    
"I had the flu," she replies, staring at a different toe. "I was sick and she wasn't home. I was shivering and went out in the sun, and I forgot to lock the door and reset the alarm. I had a fever and forgot. Lucy blames me."

    
He sips his coffee. Already, it has gotten cold. Coffee doesn't stay hot in the mountains of Aspen, Colorado. "Has Lucy said it's your fault?"

    
"She thinks it." Henri is staring past him now, out the windows behind his head. "She thinks everything is my fault."

    
"She's never told me she thinks it's your fault," he says. "You were telling me about your dreams," he goes back to that. "The dreams you had last night."

    
She blinks and rubs her big toe again.

    
"Is it hurting?"

    
She nods.

    
"I'm sorry. Would you like something for it?"

    
She shakes her head. "Nothing would help."

    
She isn't talking about her right big toe, but is making the connection between its having been broken and her now finding herself in his protective care more than a thousand miles from Pompano Beach, Florida, where she almost died. Henri's eyes heat up.

    
"I was walking on a trail," she says. "There were rocks on one side, this sheer wall of rocks very close to the trail. There were cracks, this crack between the rocks, and I don't know why I did it, but I wedged myself into it and got stuck." Her breath catches and she shoves blond hair out of her eyes, and her hand shakes. "I was wedged between rocks ... I couldn't move, I couldn't breathe. I couldn't get free. And nobody could get me out. When I was in the shower I remembered my dream. The water was hitting my face, and when I held my breath I remembered my dream."

    
"Did someone try to get you out?" Benton doesn't react to her terror or pass judgment on whether it is real or false. He doesn't know which it is. With her, there is so little he knows.

    
She is motionless in her chair, struggling for breath.

    
"You said nobody could get you out," Benton goes on, calmly, quietly, in the unprovocative tone of the counselor he has become for her. "Was another person there? Or other people?"

    
"I don't know."

    
He waits. If she continues to struggle for breath, he will have to do something about it. But for now, he is patient, the hunter waiting.

    
"I can't remember. I don't know why, but for a minute I thought someone ... it occurred to me in my dream, maybe, that someone could chip away at the rocks. Maybe with a pickax. And then I thought, no. The rock is way too hard. You can't get me out. No one can. I'm going to die. I was going to die, I knew it, and then I couldn't take it anymore, so the dream stopped." Her rambling rendition stops as abruptly as the dream apparently did. Henri takes a deep breath and her body relaxes. Her eyes focus on Benton. "It was awful," she says.

    
"Yes," he says. "It must have been awful. I can't think of anything more frightening than not being able to breathe."

    
She flattens her hand against her heart. "My chest couldn't move. I was breathing very shallowly, you know? And then I just didn't have the strength."

    
"No one would be strong enough to move the rocky face of a mountain," he replies.

    
"I couldn't get air."

    
Her assailant may have tried to smother or asphyxiate her, and Benton envisions the photographs. One by one he holds up the photographs in his mind and examines Henri's injuries, trying to make sense of what she has just said. He sees blood trickling from her nose and smeared across her cheeks and staining the sheet beneath her head as she lies on her belly on the bed. Her body is naked and uncovered, her arms stretched out above her head and palms down on the bed, her legs bent, one more bent than the other.

    
Benton examines another photograph, focusing on it in his memory as Henri gets up from her chair. She mutters that she wants more coffee and will get it herself. Benton processes what she says and the fact that his pistol is in the kitchen cabinet, but she doesn't know which cabinet because her back was to him when he tucked the pistol out of sight. He watches her, reading what she is doing in the moment while he reads the hieroglyphics of the injuries, the peculiar marks on her body. The tops of her hands were red because he or she, and Benton will not assume the gender of her assailant, bruised her. She had fresh contusions on the tops of her hands, and she had several reddish areas of contusion on her upper back. Over the next few days, the redness from subcutaneous broken blood vessels darkened to a stormy purple.

    
Benton watches Henri pour more coffee. He thinks about the photographs of her unconscious body in situ. The fact her body is beautiful is of no importance beyond Benton's consideration that all details of her appearance and behavior may have been violent triggers to the person who tried to murder her. Henri is thin but most assuredly not androgynous. She has breasts and pubic hair and would not appeal to a pedophile. At the time of the assault, she was sexually active.

    
He watches her return to the leather chair, both hands cupping the mug of coffee. It doesn't bother him that she is inconsiderate. A polite person would have asked if he would like more coffee too, but Henri is probably one of the most selfish, insensitive people Benton has ever met and was selfish and insensitive before the attack and will always be selfish and insensitive. It would be a good thing if she were never around Lucy again. But he has no right to wish that or make it happen, he tells himself.

    
"Henri," Benton says, getting up for more coffee, "are you up for doing a fact-check this morning?"

    
"Yes. But I can't remember." Her voice follows him into the kitchen. "I know you don't believe me."

    
"Why do you think that?" He pours more coffee and returns to the living room.

    
"The doctor didn't."

    
"Oh yes, the doctor. He said he didn't believe you," Benton says as he sits back down on the couch. "I think you know my opinion of that doctor, but I'll express it again. He thinks women are hysterical and doesn't like them, certainly he has no respect for them, and that's because he is afraid of them. He's also an ER doctor, and he knows nothing about violent offenders or victims."

    
"He thinks I did this to myself," Henri replies angrily. "He thinks I didn't hear what he said to the nurse."

    
Benton is careful how he reacts. Henri is offering new information. He can only hope that it is true. "Tell me," he says. "I would very much like to know what he said to the nurse."

    
"I should sue the asshole," she adds.

    
Benton waits, sipping his coffee.

    
"Maybe I will sue him," she adds, spitefully. "He thought I didn't hear him because I had my eyes shut when he walked into the room. I was lying there half asleep and the nurse was in the doorway and then he showed up. So I pretended I was out of it."

    
"Pretended you were asleep," Benton says.

    
She nods.

    
"You're a trained actor. You used to be a professional actor."

    
"I still am. You don't just stop being an actor. I'm just not in any productions right now because I have other things to do."

    
"You've always been good at acting, I would imagine," he says.

    
"Yes."

    
"At pretending. You've always been good at pretending." He pauses. "Do you pretend things often, Henri?"

    
Her eyes get hard as she looks at him. "I was pretending in the hospital room so I could hear the doctor. I heard every word. He said, 'Nothing like being raped if you're mad at someone. Payback's hell.' And he laughed."

    
"I don't blame you for wanting to sue him," Benton says. "This was in the ER?"

    
"No, no. In my room. Later that day when they moved me to one of the floors, after all the tests. I don't remember which floor."

    
"That's even worse," Benton says. "He shouldn't have come to your room at all. He's an ER doctor and isn't assigned to one of the floors. He stopped by because he was curious, and that's not right."

    
"I'm going to sue him. I hate his guts." She rubs her toe again, and her bruised toe and the bruises on her hands have faded to a nicotine-yellow. "He made some comment about Dextro Heads. I don't know what that is, but he was insulting me, making fun of me."

    
Again, this is new information, and Benton feels renewed hope that with time and patience, she will remember more or be more truthful. "A Dextro Head is someone who abuses allergy and flu remedies or cough syrups that have opiates. It's popular among teenagers, unfortunately."

    
"The asshole," she mutters, picking at her robe. "Can't you do something to get him into trouble?"

    
"Henri, do you have any idea why he indicated you were raped?" Benton asks.

    
"I don't know. I don't think I was."

    
"Do you remember the forensic nurse?"

    
She slowly shakes her head, no.

    
"You were wheeled into an examination room near the ER, and a physical evidence recovery kit was used. You know what that is, don't you? When you got tired of acting, you were a police officer before Lucy met you in L.A. this fall, just a few months ago, and hired you. So you know about swabs and collecting hair and fibers and all the rest."

    
"I didn't get tired of it. I just wanted time off from it, to do something else."

    
"Okay. But you remember the PERK?"

    
She nods.

    
"And the nurse? She was very nice, I'm told. Her name is Brenda. She examined you for sexual assault injury and evidence. The room is also used for children and was filled with stuffed animals. The wallpaper was Winnie the Pooh, bears, honeypots, trees. Brenda wasn't wearing a nurse's uniform. She had on a light blue suit."

    
"You weren't there."