The Broken Girls(72)

Fiona looked at him. Jamie: tall, broad shoulders, dark blond hair worn slightly long and brushed back from his forehead, scruff of gold on his jaw. She’d missed him—but when Jamie wore his uniform, he was less familiar to her, less like the man who had first said Hi to her in a bar on a Friday night. The uniform did that, made him a different man. “Do you know the name Helen Heyer?” she asked him.

“No,” he said.

“Think,” she said. “Assault case. Unsolved. She nearly died.”

Jamie put his hands on his hips, forefingers hooked over his hip bones, the classic pose of the cop pulling you over, and narrowed his eyes, thinking. “No, I don’t think so. When was this?”

“She was assaulted in 1993,” Fiona said. “She was twenty. She’s forty-one now.”

“I was eight in 1993,” Jamie said.

“But it doesn’t sound familiar?” Fiona persisted. “She was found just outside the back door of her parents’ home. She’d probably been on the back walkway, coming to the door, when it happened. Someone used a weapon on her, likely a baseball bat. Nothing stolen. She was nearly dead when her father opened the back door to take the garbage out, but her blood was warm. It was quick and silent.”

Jamie was staring at her. Behind his eyes, she could see him thinking, calculating. Going over the angles. He was telling the truth; he probably didn’t know the case she was talking about.

But he knew she wasn’t here for a random reason. He knew she was going somewhere. And he was trying to figure out where it was. There was no baffled confusion in his face, just a closed-off determination to figure out what angle she was going to come from, so he could put up a defense before she got there.

“Did she live?” he asked her. “You didn’t say ‘murder.’ ”

“She lived,” Fiona said, swallowing down the lump in her throat. “She’s in a long-term-care hospital in Bowfield. Her cognitive functions were damaged, and she can’t care for herself. She can barely form words, can barely do the most basic functions of life. She hasn’t spoken a complete sentence since the assault.” She held up the file folder she’d been carrying in her hand. “I went to see her this afternoon. No one was ever arrested, Jamie. No one saw the attack, and Helen can’t name her attacker. She was supposed to be dead.”

Jamie shook his head. “What does this have to do with me, Fee?”

She slapped the file down on the table, harder than she’d intended. Keep it under control, Fiona. Keep to the facts. “It’s interesting,” she said, opening the folder and pulling out the printouts of newspaper articles that she’d made at home in her apartment before coming here. “It was a big story at the time. The police went to the local media to ask for help. Anyone who had seen the crime, anyone who had seen a stranger in the neighborhood, was asked to call in a tip. It was tragic, a pretty twenty-year-old girl beaten nearly to death, her life destroyed on her parents’ doorstep, left for her daddy to find when he took out the garbage. Beaten while her parents were inside, eating supper and watching Jeopardy!” She spread the articles out. “But not one of these pieces reported what her brother told me this afternoon. Helen had a boyfriend—a new boyfriend. He was big, handsome, rich, and she was excited. His name was Tim Christopher.”

Jamie had been looking down at the printouts—the school photo of Helen Heyer on the top page, her lovely oval face, framed by dark hair that she had placed smoothly over one shoulder for the photograph, smiling for the camera—but when she said Tim’s name, he looked up sharply. “What?”

“Her parents didn’t know,” Fiona said. “The relationship was physical, and her parents would have been horrified that their daughter had given up her virginity—but her brother found out about it. She swore him to secrecy, begged him not to tell their parents about Tim. She was swept up by him. She thought Tim was wonderful, most of the time. According to her brother, there were occasions she was quiet and withdrawn because she and Tim had had a fight. But then she’d forgive him, and all would be well again.”

Except for the part about not telling her parents, it was Deb, her exact pattern with Tim, except further back in time. Deb had been so excited to be dating Tim. She was twenty, and thought that the world held bigger and better things for her than life in Barrons with her nerdy parents and their middle-class income. She’d seen wide horizons with Tim, probably because he’d promised them to her. And Helen was Deb, a year before Deb met Tim and died.

She watched the knowledge flicker across Jamie’s face. She read him closely. He hadn’t known about Helen, yet he didn’t register surprise or even shock. What settled into the corners of his eyes was a heavy kind of knowledge, as if he was hearing something he hadn’t known but could have guessed would happen. Still, his voice was tense, defensive. “Did they think Tim was a suspect?”

“When Helen’s brother told the cops about Tim, they questioned Tim. At his parents’ home, not at the station. One conversation, and then they dropped it.”

“Then he must have had an alibi.”

“He said he was at the movies at the time—alone. Nothing to back it up. He also claimed that he had never met Helen Heyer, had no idea who she was, and certainly was not dating her.”

“Maybe he was telling the truth.”