Blindsighted

  Sara was quiet, then, “I hadn’t planned on putting that in my briefing.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Lena decided, opening her eyes. “Can you give me a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  Lena waited until Sara had left the room, then put her head into her hands. She wanted to cry, but no tears would come. Her body was so dehydrated she was amazed she still had spit in her mouth. She took a deep breath to brace herself and stood.

  Frank Wallace and Matt Hogan were in the briefing room when she came out of the supply closet. Frank gave her a nod, but Matt made himself busy putting cream in his coffee. Both detectives were in their fifties, both from a very different time than the one Lena had grown up in. Like the rest of the detectives on the senior squad, they operated by the old rules of the police fraternity, where justice at any cost was right. The force was their family, and anything that happened to one of their officers affected them as it would a brother. If Grant was a close-knit community, the detectives were even closer. As a matter of fact, Lena knew that every one of her fellow detectives were members at the local lodge. Except for the simple matter of her not having a penis, she imagined she would have been invited to join a long time ago, if not out of respect, then obligation.

  She wondered what these two old men would think knowing they were working a case to find out who had raped a lesbian. Once, a long time ago, Lena had actually heard Matt start a sentence with the words “Back when the Klan was doing some good…” Would they be as vigilant if they knew about Sibyl, or would their anger dissipate? Lena did not want to find out the hard way.

  Jeffrey was reading a report when she knocked on his open office door.

  “Sara get you straightened out?” he asked.

  She did not like the way he phrased his question, but Lena said yes anyway as she closed the door.

  Jeffrey was obviously surprised to see her close the door. He set aside the report and waited for her to sit down before asking, “What’s up?”

  Lena felt the best thing to do was blurt it out. “My sister was a lesbian.”

  Her words hung in the air over their heads like cartoons. Lena fought the urge to give a nervous laugh. She had never spoken them out loud before. Sibyl’s sexuality was something Lena was not comfortable talking about, even with her sister. When Sibyl moved in with Nan Thomas a short year after moving to Grant, Lena had not pushed for details. She honestly had not wanted to know them.

  “Well,” Jeffrey said, his voice indicating surprise, “thank you for telling me that.”

  “Do you think it impacts the investigation?” Lena asked, wondering if this was all for nothing.

  “I don’t know,” he answered, and she felt he was telling the truth. “Has anyone been sending her threatening mail? Making disparaging remarks?”

  Lena wondered about this, too. Nan had said nothing new had happened in the last few weeks, but she also knew Lena was not open to discussing anything that might bring up the fact that Nan was fucking her sister. “I guess you should talk to Nan.”

  “Nan Thomas?”

  “Yeah,” Lena said. “They lived together. The address is on Cooper. Maybe we could go after the briefing?”

  “Later today,” he said. “Around four?”

  Lena nodded her agreement. She couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Are you going to tell the guys?”

  He seemed surprised by her question. After giving her a long look, he said, “I don’t think it’s necessary at this stage. We’ll talk to Nan tonight and go from there.”

  Lena felt an inordinate amount of relief.

  Jeffrey glanced at his watch. “We’d better get to the briefing.”

  9

  Jeffrey stood at the front of the briefing room, waiting for Lena to come out of the bathroom. After their discussion, she had asked for a few minutes. He hoped she took the time to get herself together. Despite her temper, Lena Adams was a smart woman and a good cop. He hated to see her going through this alone. Jeffrey also knew that she would not have it any other way.

  Sara sat in the front row, her legs crossed. She was wearing an olive-colored linen dress that fell to just above her ankles. Two slits came up either side of her legs, stopping just below her knees. Her red hair was pulled up into a ponytail behind her neck, like she had worn it to church on Sunday. Jeffrey remembered the expression on her face when she had noticed him sitting in the pew behind her and wondered if there would ever be a time in his life again when Sara was actually pleased to see him. He had stared at his hands the entire service, biding his time until he could slip out without causing too much commotion.

  Sara Linton was what Jeffrey’s father liked to call a tall drink of water. Jeffrey had been attracted to Sara because of her strong will, her fierce independence. He liked her aloofness and the way she talked down to his football buddies. He liked the way her mind worked and the fact that he could talk about every aspect of his job and know she would understand. He liked that she couldn’t cook and that she could sleep through a hurricane. He liked that she was a horrible house cleaner and that her feet were so big she could wear his shoes. What he really liked was that she knew all these things about herself and was actually proud of them.

  Of course, her independence had a downside. Even after six years of marriage, he wasn’t sure he knew one damn thing about her. Sara was so good at projecting a strong facade that after a while he wondered if she even needed him. Between her family, the clinic, and the morgue, there did not seem to be a whole lot of time left for Jeffrey.

  While he knew cheating on Sara was not the best way to go about changing things, he did know that at that point in time, something had to give in their marriage. He wanted to see her hurt. He wanted to see her fight for him and their relationship. That the first would happen and not the latter still kept his mind spinning. At times, Jeffrey was almost angry with Sara that something so meaningless, something so stupid as a mindless sexual indiscretion, had broken up their marriage.

  Jeffrey leaned against the podium, his hands clasped in front of him. He pushed Sara from his mind and concentrated on the task at hand. On the card table beside him was a sixteen-page list of names and addresses. All convicted sexual offenders living in or moving to the state of Georgia were required to register their name and address with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Crime Information Center. Jeffrey had spent last night and most of the morning compiling this information on the sixty-seven Grant residents who had registered since the law was passed in 1996. Going through their crimes was a daunting task, not least of all because he knew that sexual predators were like cockroaches. For every one you saw, there were twenty more hiding behind the walls.

  He did not let his mind dwell on this as he waited to start the meeting. The briefing room was hardly filled to capacity. Frank Wallace, Matt Hogan, and five other detectives were part of the senior squad. Jeffrey and Lena rounded out this number to nine. Of the nine, only Jeffrey and Frank had worked in municipalities larger than Grant. Sibyl Adams’s killer certainly seemed to have better odds.

  Brad Stephens, a junior patrolman who despite his youth and lack of rank knew how to keep his mouth shut, stood just beside the door in case anyone tried to come in. Brad was a kind of mascot around the squad, and the fact that he still had most of his baby fat gave him a round, cartoonish appearance. His thin blond hair always looked as if someone had just rubbed a balloon against it. His mother often brought his lunch to the station. He was a good kid, though. Brad had still been in high school when he contacted Jeffrey about being on the force. Like most of his younger cops, he came from Grant; his people were here. He had a vested interest in keeping the streets safe.

  Jeffrey cleared his throat for attention as Brad opened the door for Lena. If anyone was surprised to see her there, they didn’t say. She took a chair in the back, her arms crossed over her chest, her eyes still red either from her recent binge or from crying or from both.

  “Thank you for coming on such short notice
,” Jeffrey began. He gave Brad a nod, indicating that he should start circulating the five packets Jeffrey had put together earlier.

  “Let me preface this by saying anything said in this room today should be treated as highly confidential information. What you hear today is not for general consumption and any leaks could greatly impede our case.” He waited as Brad finished his rounds.

  “I’m sure all of you know by now that Sibyl Adams was killed yesterday at the Filling Station.” Nods came from the men who were not going through the copies. What he said next made them all look up. “She was raped before she was killed.”

  There seemed to be a rise in the temperature of the room as he let this set in. These men were from different times. Women were as mysterious to them as the origins of the planet. Sibyl’s rape would galvanize them into action like nothing else.

  Jeffrey held up his copy of the list as Brad passed out the packets according to the names Jeffrey had written on the outside. Jeffrey said, “I pulled this list of offenders off the computer this morning. I’ve sectioned them off to the usual teams, with the exception of Frank and Lena.” He saw her mouth open to complain, but continued. “Brad will be working with you, Lena. Frank is with me.”

  Lena sat back in a defiant posture. Brad was hardly on her level, and her look said she knew exactly what he was doing. She would also realize as soon as she interviewed the third or fourth man on her list that Jeffrey was keeping her on a tight leash. Rapists tended to attack women in their own ethnic and age group. Lena and Brad would be interviewing every minority over the age of fifty with a sexual assault on his record.

  “Dr. Linton will give you the rundown on the specifics.” He paused, then, “My first guess would be that the attacker has some kind of religious leaning, maybe a fanatic. I don’t want that to be the focus of your questioning, but keep it in the back of your mind.” He stacked the papers on the podium. “If somebody comes up that we should look at, I want a call on my radio. I don’t want any suspect falling down in custody or accidentally getting his head blown off.”

  Jeffrey studiously avoided meeting Sara’s eyes as he said this last part. Jeffrey was a cop, he knew how things worked in the street. He knew that every man in this room had something to prove where Sibyl Adams was concerned. He also knew how easy it was to slip over that line between legal justice and human justice when you were out in the field, facing down the kind of animal who could rape a blind woman and carve a cross onto her abdomen.

  “That clear?” he asked, not expecting an answer and not getting one. “I’ll turn this over to Dr. Linton, then.”

  He walked to the back of the room, standing behind and to the right of Lena as Sara took the podium. She walked over to the chalkboard, reached up, and pulled down the white projection screen. Most of the men in this room had seen her in diapers, and the fact that they all had their notebooks out said volumes about Sara’s professional abilities.

  She gave Brad Stephens a nod and the room went dark.

  The green opaque projector whirred to life, sending a flash of bright light onto the screen. Sara moved a photograph onto the bed and slid it under the glass.

  “Sibyl Adams was found by me in the women’s bathroom of the Filling Station around two-thirty yesterday afternoon,” she said, focusing the projector’s lens.

  There was movement in the room as a Polaroid of Sibyl Adams lying partially nude on the bathroom floor came into view. Jeffrey found himself staring at the hole in her chest, wondering what kind of man could do the things that had been done to that poor young woman. He did not want to think about Sibyl Adams, blind, sitting on that toilet while her attacker slit her open for his own sick reasons. He did not want to think about what was going through her mind as her abdomen was being raped.

  Sara continued. “She was sitting on the toilet when I opened the door. Her arms and legs were splayed open and the cut you see here”—she indicated the screen—“was bleeding profusely.”

  Jeffrey leaned over slightly, trying to see what Lena’s reaction to this was. She stood stock still, her spine a perfect right angle to the floor. He understood why she needed to do this, but he could not grasp how she was doing it. If someone in his family had gone through this, if Sara had been ravaged like this, Jeffrey knew in his heart that he would not want to know. He could not know.

  Sara stood at the front of the room, her arms crossed over her chest. “She started to seize shortly after I established that she had a pulse. We fell to the ground. I tried to control the seizures, but she expired several seconds later.”

  Sara jerked the projector’s drawer out to replace the photo with another. The machine was a dinosaur, borrowed from the high school. It wasn’t as if Sara could send the crime photos down to the Jiffy Photo for enlargements.

  The next picture that came on-screen was a close-up of Sibyl Adams’s head and neck. “The bruise under her eye came from a superior position, probably early on in the assault to discourage a struggle. A knife was held at her throat, very sharp, measuring about six inches. I’d say this was a boning knife, probably common to any kitchen. You can see a slight cut here.” She traced her finger on the screen, along the middle of Sibyl’s neck. “It didn’t draw blood, but enough pressure was used to score the skin.” She looked up, catching Jeffrey’s eye. “I would imagine the knife was used to keep her from calling out while he raped her.”

  She continued. “There is a small bite mark on her left shoulder.” The picture of this came up. “Bite marks are common with rape. This one shows the impression of the upper teeth only. I found nothing distinctive in the pattern, but I’ve sent the…” Sara paused, probably remembering Lena was in the room. “The impression was sent to the FBI lab for cross matching. If a known offender on file matches the impression, then we could assume that he’s the perpetrator in this crime. However,” she warned, “as we all know, the FBI won’t consider this a high-priority case, so I don’t think we can hang out hats on this piece of evidence. A more likely scenario would be to use the impression as validation after the fact. That is to say, find a solid suspect and nail him with the dental impression.”

  Next, the screen showed a photograph of the inner sides of Sibyl’s legs. “You can see scrapes here at the knee where she gripped her legs around the toilet bowl during the assault.” Another picture came, this one of Sibyl’s bottom. “There are irregular bruises and scrapes on the buttocks, again from friction against the toilet seat.

  “Her wrists,” Sara said, putting in another photo, “show bruising from the handicap bars on the stall. Two fingernails were broken in the process of gripping the bars, probably to lift herself up and away from her assailant.”

  Sara slid in the next photograph. “This is a close-up of the incisions to her abdomen,” she narrated. “The first cut was made from just below the collarbone all the way to the pelvic bone. The second cut was made from right to left.” She paused. “I would guess from the irregular depth of the second cut that this was a backhanded movement by a left-handed assailant. The cut is deeper as it moves to her right side.”

  The next Polaroid was a close-up of Sibyl’s chest. Sara was quiet for a few beats, probably thinking the same thing Jeffrey was thinking. Up close, he could see where the puncture wound had been stretched. Not for the first time, he felt his stomach roll at the thought of what was done to this poor woman. He hoped to God she had not been conscious of what was happening to her.

  Sara said, “This is the final cut. It’s a puncture wound through the sternum. It goes straight through to her spine. I would guess this was the source of most of the blood.” Sara turned to Brad. “Lights?”

  She walked toward her briefcase, saying, “The symbol on her chest seems to be a cross. The assailant used a condom during the rape, which as we know is pretty common with the advent of DNA testing. Black lighting revealed no sperm or fluids. Blood on the scene appears to be only from the victim.” She took a sheet of paper out of her briefcase. “Our friends at the Georgia
Bureau of Investigation were nice enough to pull some strings last night. They worked up the blood analysis for me.” She put on her copper-rimmed glasses and began reading, “High concentrations of hyoscyamine, atrosin and belladonnine as well as traces of scopolamine were found in her central blood and urine.” She looked up. “This would suggest that Sibyl Adams ingested a lethal dose of belladonna, which belongs in the deadly nightshade plant family.”

  Jeffrey glanced at Lena. She remained quiet, her eyes on Sara.

  “An overdose of belladonna can mimic a complete shutdown of the parasympathetic nervous system. Sibyl Adams was blind, but her pupils were dilated from the drug. The bronchioles in her lungs were swollen. Her core body temperature was still high, which is what made me wonder about her blood in the first place.” She turned to Jeffrey, answering the question he had asked this morning. “During the post, her skin was still warm to the touch. There were no environmental factors that would cause this. I knew it had to be something in the blood.”

  She continued. “Belladonna can be broken down for medical applications, but it’s also used as a recreational drug.”

  “You think the perp gave it to her?” Jeffrey asked. “Or is this the kind of thing she would take on her own?”

  Sara seemed to consider this. “Sibyl Adams was a chemist. She certainly wouldn’t take such a volatile drug, then run out for lunch. This is a very strong hallucinogen. It affects the heart, breathing, and circulation.”

  “Nightshade grows all over town,” Frank pointed out.

  “It’s pretty common,” Sara agreed, looking back at her notes. “The plant isn’t easy to process. Ingestion is going to be the key component here. According to Nick, the easiest and most popular way to take belladonna is to soak the seeds in hot water. Just this morning I found three recipes on the Internet for preparing belladonna as a tea.”

  Lena offered, “She liked to drink hot tea.”