The Night Swim(50)
“She did what?”
“I didn’t know that she was the type.”
“Of course she is. She’s a Stills, isn’t she!”
I was nine. I had no idea what they were talking about. I knew it was about my sister and I knew it wasn’t very nice. Beyond that, I knew nothing. Jenny stayed in the sea, treading water as the dark-haired boy returned to the beach, where he picked up his towel and left with his friends.
I watched him walk up the sand dunes with his friends. I could see them tell him something. When they reached the top of the dunes, he stopped and turned around to look in Jenny’s direction. There was something different about the way he appraised her.
When Jenny emerged from the water long after he’d gone, she was pink from sunburn and her hands were wrinkled from being in the water for too long. We walked home in silence. Just after the gas station, Jenny took a shortcut through the brush, even though she’d told me never to go that way on account of the copperheads.
29
Rachel
The waiting room outside the ER was half-full with people slumped on plastic bucket seats, looking clammy and ill. Rachel, who’d been sitting in the back row typing up notes from her day in court, moved away from the waiting area to answer a call from Pete.
“Have I caught you at a bad time, Rach?”
“Nope. I’m still at Neapolis General, waiting to interview Tracey Rice about Kelly’s rape kit,” Rachel said, pressing the phone closer to her ear as a toddler started screaming.
After going through a few podcast issues, she asked Pete if he’d managed to get a copy of Jenny Stills’s autopsy report. Rachel wanted to see if the cause of death was listed as drowning, as Kitty insisted was the case.
“The state medical examiner’s office said there’s no record of an autopsy on their database. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t done. Just that it was a long time ago and they’ll need to do a manual search in their files to find records. If there are any records,” said Pete.
“How long will that take?” Rachel groaned.
“That’s the problem. They have a staffing crunch right now. Won’t be able to look for the report for a few days. But even if they find it, they won’t give you a copy without permission from Jenny’s next of kin.”
“That would be Hannah,” said Rachel. “That’s just terrific. Another reason to find her.”
“Does it really matter, Rach?” Pete asked. “You don’t have time to follow up right now, with the Blair trial in full swing. By the time the verdict comes in, the ME’s office will have found the autopsy report and you’ll have hopefully met Hannah and have her permission to get a copy.”
It all sounded very reasonable, but Rachel was consumed by curiosity. She didn’t want to wait that long. When Rachel returned to her seat, the waiting room was quiet. The screaming toddler had gone through the doors into the ER to have his suspected broken finger x-rayed. Most of the other people who’d been waiting either had gone home or were being treated. Nurse Rice stopped by to reassure Rachel that she was almost ready for the interview.
“Is it always this busy?” Rachel asked.
“Sometimes. We’re down a doctor and two nurses right now. Summer flu,” she sighed. “That’s why I’m doing the night shift. I won’t be much longer. It’s always quiet around dinnertime.”
Within half an hour, as she predicted, the waiting room was virtually empty. Rachel was taken by an orderly to a treatment room where Nurse Rice was finishing off her dinner of homemade lasagna in a Tupperware container. Rachel explained that she wanted to find out what Kelly Moore would have gone through when she came in to be examined after the rape.
“I can’t talk about her specific case,” said Nurse Rice, “but I can tell you about the rape kit process. I’m one of three nurses who’ve been trained to do them at this hospital.”
She took out a sample rape kit and removed its contents: evidence bags, swab collection kits, and piles of forms. All with the same bar code. Everything collected had to be carefully logged and tracked, in case it was presented as evidence in court just as Kelly Moore’s rape kit was being presented by Mitch Alkins as part of the prosecution’s case.
“The body of a sexual-assault victim is a crime scene,” said Nurse Rice. “It’s my job to comfort the victim and treat her injuries, while at the same time methodically collecting evidence in a way that preserves the chain of custody and reduces cross-contamination. I think of it as half CSI investigator and half nurse. As you can imagine, it’s schizophrenic; the two jobs are polar opposites.”
She told Rachel that she was often the first person to question the victim about the rape and it was her job to document accurately every aspect of the sexual assault. If she made a mistake collecting evidence or taking down testimony, it could damage a potential prosecution. A defense attorney would look for any hole in the prosecution’s case, including perceived inconsistencies in a rape victim’s statements to the nurse and to police, to make the victim look like a liar.
“It’s not enough that the victim says where and how the perpetrator penetrated her. We need to know a whole range of quite graphic details, which we document as precisely as possible in these forms. After that, we move on to a physical examination.”