Whispering Rock (Virgin River #3)(27)

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Games. Dances. Movies.”

“Great,” he said. “That sounds great. I’ll give you a call one of these days.” And he thought, maybe this isn’t going to be such a boring place after all.

He called her that night. Why waste time?

Four

The fall air was crisp and refreshing and Mel, still troubled by a couple of her cases, wandered over to the bar in the afternoon as David napped in Doc’s care. She found Mike sitting on the porch, feet up on the rail, his hat, his Rio Concho, pushed down on his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun, taking in a relaxing autumn day. She sat in the Adirondack chair next to him, scooted forward on the edge.

“Looking for your man?” he asked.

“Actually, I was looking for you,” she said. “What’s going on in there?” she asked, giving her head a toss toward the inside.

“Preacher and Paige are getting dinner ready.”

“Are we alone?”

“Yeah.” He shoved his hat back, took his feet off the rail and put them on the wood planks of the porch, turning toward her. He rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. “What’s the matter? You don’t look too happy.”

“Let me ask you something. Just how much of a cop do you intend to be around here? What if I suspected a possible problem? Could you look into it? Maybe investigate?”

“Well, I have detective experience, but I’m used to having a crime lab to back me up.” He grinned. “I used to belong to the biggest gang in L.A.”

“Gang?”

“LAPD. Lotta backup there. Want to lay it on me?”

She took a breath. “Understand, I can’t give you names or evidence—just a real strong intuitive hunch. And I’ve been doing this awhile.”

“Shoot.”

She looked into his coal-black eyes. “I’m worried that we have a date raper. A kid, I think. I’ve had two girls who were clearly forced—neither willing or able to admit it. The scenarios were different, but there were some alarming similarities.”

“Go on,” he said, encouraging her to continue.

“The first came to me for emergency birth control. She said that she and her boyfriend of a whole two weeks had decided to have sex and at the last minute she lost her nerve, but he couldn’t stop. She was bruised. Held down. Her vagina was ragged and torn. She was visibly upset. But she absolutely insists she was not forced.

“The second one went to a kegger somewhere around town—her first drinking party, though she admits to having a beer or two before. She passed out and didn’t remember having sex, but missed two periods and took a home pregnancy test and told her mother what had happened. The kids at the party were all drunk, she said, and no one remembered anything….”

“Yeah, right,” he said.

“I explained that to her—that in order to have successful intercourse, it was very likely one of them wasn’t too drunk.”

“Very likely? I thought that was a law of nature,” Mike said.

“I thought it was, too,” she said. “It was obviously too late to detect damage or bruising—but she said she’d been very sore all over, especially on her chest.” She laid her hand on her own sternum. “As if hit in the chest with a basketball.”

“Possibly held down as she struggled,” he supplied. “What about bruising on the inside of her thighs?”

“She didn’t recall anything like that, but she was distracted by the fact she was real hung over and sick. The first one, however, had unmistakable finger and thumb prints on the inside of her thighs. Both tested positive for chlamydia. The pregnant one miscarried and, understandably, wants to forget the whole thing. If she can. Neither of them would give me a name or even an age of the boy or boys.”

He winced visibly, inhaled deeply and rolled his eyes briefly skyward. “Jesus,” he said.

“I can’t go anywhere with this. I don’t even have grounds to report it without at least one of them relenting and saying it could have been rape. In the second case, the girl didn’t remember drinking much—I’m wondering if there was a drug involved.”

“Roofies?” he asked. “GHB? That could have made her really sick.”

“She woke up covered in vomit.”

“She’s lucky she woke up. A side effect of GHB is a suppressed gag reflex. She could have aspirated and died,” he pointed out.

“This really eats at me, Mike. There’s nothing I can do. Well, I did do one thing—I got a vaginal swab from number one, but intercourse was a couple of days old and I’m sure she bathed a couple of times before coming in. Even if it turns out there’s DNA present, we might never get that far.”

“But still, good thinking. Any chance you got pictures of the bruising?”

“No. I have nothing. She was nearly hysterical and insisted she wasn’t raped. If she had relented, even once, and said that she’d been held down and forced, I would have reported it. As it stands, all I have is this big ache in my gut that tells me there’s a teenage boy out there who’s out of control.”

“Sounds like it’s time for me to get to know the youth of Virgin River.”

“Whew. I hoped I could dump this on you. I feel a little lighter already.”