It's One of Us(97)

“Hey, he caught you off guard. It happens.”

“Apparently,” she says, drily, and Joey is again impressed at her fortitude. “He bashed me on the head, and when I woke up, we were driving, so I don’t know how long I was out, but when I came to, I started counting. As best as I could tell, I was awake for at least thirty minutes before he got off the highway. And screaming as much as I could—I was hoping maybe someone in another car could hear me. That got him riled up, and he threatened me, threatened Cici, too. That’s something I should have mentioned. He knew me. He knew my name, he knew my wife’s name, he knew which gym I worked out at. I wasn’t a convenient opportunity. He targeted me.”

Joey knows this, though she takes notes as if it’s news. He had a whole list of women, with all the private details they thought safe to share. Their hearts, their lives. All for a lurking stranger to acquire through the guise of friendship.

“Do you know why? Did he tell you?”

“He thought I was friends with Olivia. He said Beverly was, and he wanted me to tell him all I could about her.”

“Are you friends with Olivia Bender?”

“No. I mean, I know who she is. She’s done design work for people I know. But I wasn’t about to tell him that. I made up a few stories and stuck to them.”

Joey is impressed and says it. “You kept yourself alive sticking to that lie.”

“Probably.”

“Did he blindfold you at any time?”

“No. Which is what scared me most of all. He was planning to kill me, so he didn’t bother hiding who he was. He kept my mouth gagged, and my hands restrained, drugged me enough to keep me low-key during the day, and at night...no, he didn’t hide who he was.”

“And when you got off the highway?”

“Another thirty minutes going slower, and then another ten over rutted, bumpy roads. He apologized for the rough ride. Can you imagine?” Jillian laughs. She actually laughs.

The combination of sedative, natural strength, an ebullient personality, and the adrenaline pump of rescue from a certain death is going to Jillian’s head. She’ll come down when her wife shows up, Joey knows. Break apart. When the depth of what could have been lost hits them. In the meantime, Joey needs to keep her talking.

“And he didn’t touch you, all this time?”

Jillian’s eyes cut away; her voice is low. “If he did, it was while I was drugged and asleep. I don’t have any memory of it. I’m not damaged. He was careful.”

Joey nodded. “Okay. Your memory may change as you come off the drugs. It may not.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t,” she says, shuddering a bit.

“We can run tests, see if there’s any semen or spermicide.”

“The doc already took samples, testing for STDs, but I really don’t know if he did anything. Not really. And with the baths—he let me take baths. The water was cold, but at least I was clean.”

“Interesting.”

“The doctor suggested Plan B.”

“Do you not want to take it?”

Jillian shrugs uncomfortably. “I need to talk to Cici first. I was gone a while.”

“If he raped you—”

“You don’t understand what it’s like. Building a family the way we have. It wasn’t easy. I have PCOS—polycystic ovarian syndrome. Bad. I miscarried a couple of times.” She searches Joey’s face. “I’m going to take it, I think. But I have to work it out in my head, and with Cici. If he did, and if I am...it’s just not as cut-and-dried as if he pulled me into an alley and forced me.”

Joey is repulsed by the very idea, but that’s her own experience speaking. She knows when to step away from a thread.

“Okay. So after you hit him, and you ran, what did you see? Forest? Lake? Pasture? Other farms?”

“Forest, mostly. I went past a lake. I heard the geese. There was a cemetery, too, on a hill. Not a big one, but at least twenty graves or so. It was sunset, getting dark, and I walked all night. Flushed a deer or two but didn’t see any people. I came out near a fence line and followed it, hoping I’d find the road.”

Joey tried to keep it less an interrogation than a re-creation of Jillian’s moonlit walk.

What did you see? What did you hear? How long did it take? Was there a path? Was the ground hard or soft? What did it feel like underfoot, damp, dry? How long were you in the brush before you hit the open road? Leaf-strewn or gravel? How long do you think it took to walk between the lake and the graveyard? Did you go over any fences?

They went on like this for several minutes, Joey gleaning everything she could, detail after detail. Jillian was fading by the time they finished, but Joey felt like she had a handle on where to start.

“I’m sure we’ll speak again soon, Jillian. I have to go look for your assailant now.”

She nodded, and her eyes grew distant. “I hope you find him. And I hope he’s dead.”

In the hallway, a trooper pointed her toward a staff break room, where she found Osley and Darden with a set of topographical maps. They were doing it the old-fashioned way, the trajectory being mapped with string and pencil to draw a hundred-mile radius around the spot where Jillian had been found.

Osley waves her over. “We’re figuring a trajectory that led her to State Road 13, just before the AES explosives facility. That site takes up thirteen hundred acres, and if she walked from sunset to dawn, and passed a lake, we think she came from the southwest. It’s pretty isolated back there. She couldn’t have covered more than twenty miles, tops, and that’s giving her a lot of credit. She’s in damn good shape, but she was barefoot, so it had to be slower going. Darden’s got his chopper ready for us to go do some flyovers looking for the landmarks she gave us. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”