Behind Closed Doors

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“Yeah. AC refers to acromioclavincular,” Harry offered. “I’ve just been told it’s a medical term for shoulder joint. Whether he has medical training or not, the bastard was articulate.”

Miller and Boyd both wrote in their notebooks.

“Harry’s a professor at U of A,” Laura blurted, in case the detectives failed to take him seriously.

Boyd watched her for a long moment.

“And neither of them spoke again?” he finally asked, his forehead creased as he glanced from one to the other.

She shook her head. And held her breath to stave off her immediate dizziness.

“They each said one more thing,” Harry muttered. “The same thing…”

Blocking out the rest of her husband’s sentence, Laura watched him as though from far away.

“I wasn’t sure about the first time, but afterward, when I heard it again…”

Harry swallowed, and Laura couldn’t look at him anymore.

“Tell me about the first time,” Boyd said, his voice softer.

“When the smaller guy was approaching Laura, he paused, like maybe he wasn’t going to do it….”

Cold as ice, Laura read Boyd’s name tag again, wondering why only the Y had faded.

“…and the guy behind me says ‘white stays with white.’”

What? Laura raised her head, shaking inside all over again. What was Harry saying?

“You’re sure about that?” Detective Boyd asked, writing some more on his little pad.

“Yeah.”

“Did you hear it?” the other detective piped up.

Laura could hardly breathe as Miller looked her right in the eye.

“No,” she said as quickly as she could. She’d already answered his questions once.

“And the second instance?” Detective Boyd asked.

“When he’d finished with Laura, the smaller guy whispered the same thing.”

No. Laura didn’t want to talk about this anymore. She didn’t want to see the pointed glance the detectives exchanged, or think about what it all meant.

“We were targeted because I’m black,” Harry’s words were both a challenge and a cry of pain and tore at Laura’s already raw insides.

“Or it was a random attack by bigoted jerks who, when they found a white woman with a black man, used that to fuel their hunger for violence,” Miller said.

“You don’t think they picked us out ahead of time?” Laura asked him. Please, God, let that be so.

Shrugging, Miller said, “Chances are good they didn’t, but we’ll have a better idea after we go over what we’ve got here, along with whatever our team found at the scene.”

It wasn’t the absolute affirmative answer she’d wanted, but Miller’s words comforted Laura.

Boyd took over then, asking more questions, and she was able to answer him without losing her breath. He was kind, like the doctors and the counselor she’d already seen. Compassionate. Guiding her through the interview as unobtrusively and gently as possible—which was saying something, since he—and the doctors before him—had to intrude in the most intimate ways.

“You’re sure neither one of you noticed anything familiar about either one of them? Think of everyone you’ve seen in the past month. Maybe a gas station cashier? Grocery clerk? Anyone?”

As they shook their heads, Miller asked permission to access their credit card and cell phone records to follow up—just in case they’d missed something.

He really seemed to want to rule out the possibility that the men who’d violated them had known them.

Laura wanted that ruled out, too. Random violence was hard enough to deal with. If she had to fear every single person she smiled at through her day, how could she go on?

Harry got pretty agitated when Boyd reported that so far, they had a disappointing lack of evidence. Desert ground was hard and there were no obvious footprints, although they’d be investigating again in the light of day. The gloves precluded fingerprints. They were checking for similar crimes in the state, but the detectives didn’t expect much there. They’d already know if there’d been any. And since neither Harry nor Laura had noticed any telling characteristics about their attackers, other than approximate height and weight, which could describe thousands of men in the city, they had nothing.

Except a piece of leather glove with Harry’s saliva all over it.

“When you find them,” Harry interrupted and Laura stared at him, wondering if her husband had heard the near-hopelessness of their situation, “look at the larger one’s penis. He got it caught in his zipper and I’m betting he’ll have either a cut or a bruise.”

Eyes narrowed, Boyd studied Harry while Miller wrote. Laura squeezed Harry’s hand. God, she loved this man.

“This won’t help us find him, of course,” Boyd said. “But it could certainly help with a post-arrest identification.”

“Which we’ll need,” Miller said, pushing pen and pad into his shirt pocket. “Our chances of a clear rape kit reading are slim.”

Her holistic healing had destroyed the evidence.

Maybe, if they were lucky, there’d be a hair on the bedclothes, but while that could give them some identifiers—if there was a root—it wouldn’t point to an exact individual.

“We got fibers from under Harry’s fingernails,” Boyd continued. “But no skin. We can only hope there’s semen on the bedclothes that can be processed for a DNA sample.”

Harry’s face blanched at that last piece of information; his hands clenched into fists.

Watching her husband, Laura wanted to tell him it was okay. To let the attackers go and never see or hear of them again. She just wanted to know that she and Harry had been a random pick.

She most certainly didn’t want the intruders to have any reason to seek revenge.