At Risk

5

Monique Lamont wears a hospital gown inside an examination room at Mount Auburn Hospital, but a few blocks from where she lives.

It is a nondescript room, white, with an examination table, the kind with stirrups, and a counter, a sink, a cabinet filled with medical supplies, swabs and specula, a surgical lamp. Moments earlier, a forensic nurse was alone in the room with Lamont, examining the powerful district attorney’s orifices and other very private areas of her body, swabbing for saliva and seminal fluid, plucking hairs, getting fingernail scrapings, looking for injuries, taking photographs, gathering whatever might be potential evidence. Lamont is holding up amazingly well, maybe bizarrely well, playing the role of herself, working her own case.

She sits in a white plastic chair next to the white paper-covered table, Win on a stool across from her, another investigator with the Massachusetts State Police, Sammy, standing near the shut door. She had the option of being interviewed in more civilized surroundings, her home, for example, but refused, made the rather chillingly clinical observation that it was best to compartmentalize, keep related conversations and activities to the confined spaces where they belong. Translated: Win seriously doubts she’ll ever sleep in her bedroom again. He won’t be surprised if she sells her house.

“What do we know about him?” she asks again, the prosecutor who seems to have no feelings about what just happened.

Her attacker is in critical condition. Win is careful what he tells her. It is, to say the least, a highly unusual situation. She is accustomed to asking the state police anything she wants and having nothing withheld from her. She is the district attorney, is in charge, is programmed to demand details and get them.

“Ms. Lamont,” Sammy says respectfully, “as you know, he had a gun and Win here did what he had to do. Things happen.”

But that’s not what she’s asking. She looks at Win, holds his gaze remarkably well considering that just hours ago he saw her nude, lashed to her bed.

“What do you know about him.” She poses it not as a question but a command.

“This much,” Win says. “Your office prosecuted him in juvenile court about two months ago.”

“For what?”

“Possession of marijuana, crack. Judge Let-’em-Loose Lane gave him a reprimand.”

“The prosecutor certainly wasn’t me. I’ve never seen him before. What else?”

“Tell you what,” Win says. “How about letting us get our job done first, then I’ll tell you anything I can.”

“No,” she says. “It won’t be what you can. It will be what I ask.”

“But for now…” Win starts to say.

“Information,” she demands.

“I got a question.” It is Sammy who says this from his remote position near the wall. “About your getting home last night.”

His ruddy face is grim, something in his eyes. Maybe it’s embarrassment. Maybe talking to the district attorney after she’s been through something like this somehow makes him a voyeur. Lamont ignores him, ignores his question.

“I had dinner with you,” she says to Win. “I got in my car and drove back to the office to finish up a few things, then drove straight home. Because I didn’t have my keys, I went around to the back of the house, put my code into the key box, got out the spare key, and was unlocking the back door when suddenly a hand clamped over my mouth and someone I couldn’t see said one sound, you’re dead. He pushed me into the house.”

Lamont does a fine job reciting the facts. Her assailant, now identified as Roger Baptista of East Cambridge, an address not far from the court building where Lamont works, forced her up to her bedroom, began yanking electrical cords from lamps, from the clock radio. Then her home phone rang. She didn’t answer it. Then her cell phone rang. She didn’t answer it.

Win calling her.

Her cell phone rang again and she thought fast, said it was her boyfriend, he was getting worried, might show up, so Baptista told her to answer the phone and if she tried anything he’d blow her head off and then kill her boyfriend, kill everybody, and she answered. She had the brief, peculiar conversation with Win. She says she ended the call and Baptista forced her to undress and tied her to the bedposts. He raped her. Then put his pants back on.

“Why didn’t you resist?” Sammy asks her as delicately as possible.

“He had a gun.” She looks at Win. “I had no doubt he would use it if I resisted, probably would use it, regardless. When he finished with me. I did what I could to control the situation.”

“Meaning?” Win asks.

She hesitates, her eyes cutting away from him, says, “Meaning, I told him to do what he wanted, acted as if I wasn’t frightened. Or repulsed. Did what he wanted. Said what he told me to say.” She hesitates. “As calm and noncombative as I could muster under the circumstances. I, uh, I said it wasn’t necessary to tie me up, I, well, I worked with cases like this all the time, understood them, knew he had his reasons. I, well, I…”

The small room echoes with the ensuing silence and it is the first time Win has ever seen Lamont’s face turn red. He suspects he knows exactly what she did to stall Baptista, to calm him, to connect with him in the remote hope he would let her live.

“Maybe you acted like you wanted a little,” Sammy suggests. “Hey, women do it all the time, make the rapist think it’s okay, they’re good in bed, fake an orgasm and even ask the guy to come back another time like it’s a date or…”

“Out!” Lamont fires at him, pointing her finger. “Get out!”

“I’m just—”

“Didn’t you hear me?”

He leaves the room, leaves Win alone with her, not his first choice. Considering he critically injured her assailant, it would be preferable and prudent to interview her with at least one witness present.

“Who is this piece of shit?” Lamont asks. “Who? And do you think it’s a goddamn coincidence he decided to show up at the house the same night my keys mysteriously disappeared? Who is he?”

“Roger Baptista…”

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

“When’s the last time you saw your keys?” Win says. “You lock up with them when you left for work this morning? Actually, yesterday morning.”

“No.”

“No?”

She is silent for a moment, then, “I didn’t come home that night.”

“Where were you?”

“I stayed with a friend. Left there for work in the morning. After work I had dinner with you, checked by my office. That’s the chronology.”

“You mind telling me who you stayed with?”

“I do.”

“I’m just trying…”

“I’m not the one who committed a crime.” She stares coldly at him.

“Monique, I assume your alarm was set when you unlocked the door with your spare key,” Win pointedly says. “Baptista clamps his hand over your mouth as you’re unlocking the door. So what about the alarm after that?”

“He told me if I didn’t disarm it he’d kill me.”

“No panic code that silently alerts the police?”

“Oh for God’s sake. And you would think of that if it were you? See what security precautions you revert to when someone’s got a gun to the back of your head.”

“You know anything about a can of gasoline and some rags found by your back door, in the bushes?”

“You and I need to have a very important conversation,” she says to him.

Sykes drives her personal car, a ’79 blue VW Rabbit, through the Old City, as Knoxville’s historic downtown is called.

She passes Barley’s Taproom & Pizzeria, the Tonic Grill, deserted and dark, then a construction site that was shut down the other day when a backhoe dug up bones that turned out to be cow, the site having been a slaughterhouse and stockyard in a long-ago life. Her uneasiness — the jitters, as she calls them — gets worse the closer she gets to where she’s going. She sure hopes Win’s insistence that she track down the Vivian Finlay case records immediately is really urgent enough to merit her waking up the Academy director, then the chief of the Knoxville Police Department, next several other people with the Criminal Investigative Division and Records, who couldn’t find the case, only its accession number, KPD893-85.

Last and most unpleasant of all, Sykes woke up former detective Jimmy Barber’s widow, who sounded drunk, and asked what her late husband might have done with his old files, paperwork, memorabilia, et cetera, when he retired and packed up his office at headquarters.

All that crap’s in the basement. What you people think he’s hiding down there, Jimmy Hoffla? The damn Da Vinshay code?

I sure am sorry to bother you, ma’am. But we’re trying to locate some old records, careful what she said, mindful that Win made it clear something unusual is going on.

I don’t know what’s got such a bug up y’all’s butt, Mrs. Barber complained over the phone, swearing, slurring, nasty. It’s three damn o’clock in the morning!

In what the locals call Shortwest Knoxville, the city begins to fray around the edges, disintegrating into housing projects before it improves a little, not much, about two miles west of downtown. Sykes parks in front of a small rancher, vinyl siding, the yard a mess, the only house with empty supercans haphazardly parked near the street because Mrs. Barber is too lazy to roll them back to the house, it seems. The neighborhood has very few streetlights and a lot of souped-up gaudy old cars — Cadillacs, a Lincoln painted purple, a Corvette with those stupid spinning hubcaps. The crapmobiles of dirtbags, drug dealers, no-account kids. Sykes is mindful of the Glock .40-caliber pistol in the shoulder holster under her jacket. She follows the sidewalk and rings the bell.

Momentarily, the porch light blinks on.

“Who is it?” a voice slurs from the other side of the door.

“Agent Sykes, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.”

A burglar chain rattles. A dead-bolt lock snaps free. The door opens and a cheap-looking woman with dyed blond hair and makeup smudges under her eyes steps aside to let Sykes in.

“Mrs. Barber,” Sykes politely says. “I sure appreciate…”

“I don’t get what all the fuss is about, but go on.” Her housecoat is buttoned crooked, eyes bloodshot, smells like booze. “The basement’s thataway,” she indicates with a nod, fumbles to relock the door, has a very loud voice with a very strong twang. “Rummage through his junk all you want. You can load it in a truck and haul it the hell away for all I care.”

“I won’t be needing to load it in a truck,” Sykes says. “I just need to look through some police files he may have had in his office once.”

“I’m going back to bed,” Mrs. Barber says.

Lamont seems to have forgotten where she is.

It crosses Win’s mind that she’s delusional, believes she’s in her big office surrounded by her big glass collection, maybe in one of her big-ticket designer suits, sitting at her big glass desk instead of in a hospital gown, in a plastic chair, inside a hospital examination room. She acts as if she and Win are doing their usual thing, working a high-profile case, a bad one destined for a lot of complications and press.

“I’m not sure you’re hearing me,” she says to Win as a knock sounds on the shut door.

“Just a minute.” He gets up to answer it.

It’s Sammy, pokes his head in, quietly says, “Sorry.”

Win steps out into the corridor, pulls the door shut. Sammy hands him this morning’s Boston Globe, the local section. The headline across the top of the front page is big and bold.

“Four things you should know,” Sammy says. “First, your name’s all over this thing, a damn road map for how you’re supposedly going to solve the governor’s whodunit. More accurate, her whodunit”—he looks at the shut door—“since he’s delegated it to her. Good luck if the killer’s still out there and reads all this shit. Second, well, the second thing’s sure as hell not good.”

“What?”

“Baptista just died. To state the obvious, now we don’t get to talk to him. Third, I went through his clothes, found a thousand bucks in hundred-dollar bills in his back pocket.”

“Loose, folded up, what?”

“Plain white envelope, no writing on it. Bills new-looking, you know, crisp. Not folded or nothing. I called Huber at home. The labs are going to process them right away, look for prints.”

“What’s the fourth thing?”

“The media’s found out about…” He again nods toward the shut door. “There’s like three TV trucks and a crowd of reporters out there in the parking lot and it isn’t even daylight yet.”

Win steps back inside the examination room, shuts the door.

Lamont is sitting in the same plastic chair. It occurs to him she’s got nothing to wear unless she can handle the warm-up suit she put on before he drove her to the hospital. After the assault, she couldn’t shower, he didn’t have to give her instructions, she knows the routine. She still hasn’t showered, and it’s not a subject he is entirely comfortable bringing up.

“The press has found out,” he says, sitting back down on the stool. “I need to get you out of here without them ambushing you. I’m sure you know you can’t go back to your house right now.”

“He was going to burn it down,” she states.

The gas can was full. It certainly wasn’t left there by her yardman.

“He was going to kill me and burn down my house.” A steady, firm voice, the DA working the case as if she’s talking about some other victim. “Why? To make my death look like an accident. To make it look like I burned up in my house. He’s no beginner.”

“Depends on whether it was his idea,” Win says. “Or if someone gave him instructions. In any event, disguising a homicide with fire isn’t very reliable. Most likely, the autopsy would have revealed soft-tissue injury, the bullet, and possible damage to cartilage, bone. Bodies don’t completely burn up in house fires. You know that.”

He thinks about the money in Baptista’s pocket, something telling him it’s not a good idea to give that detail to Lamont just yet.

“I need you to stay here,” she says, tightly gripping the blanket she holds around herself. “Forget the lady in Tennessee, what’s-her-name. We need to find out who’s behind this. Not just some little nobody piece of… maybe someone else who put him up to it.”

“Huber’s already getting the labs mobilized…”

“How does he know about it?” she blurts out. “I haven’t told—” She stops short, her eyes wide. “He’s not going to get away with this,” and she’s talking about Baptista again. “This is one case that isn’t going to be… I want you in charge of it. We’re going to bury him.”

He resists the obvious pun, says, “Monique, he’s dead.”

She doesn’t flinch.

“Justified or not, struggle or not, I killed him. It was a good shooting. But you know what happens. Your office can’t investigate it alone, will either have to transfer the case to another DA’s office or bring in the Boston Homicide Unit. Not to mention Internal Affairs doing its thing. Not to mention the autopsy and every other test known to man. I’ll be put on administrative duties for a while.”

“I want you on this right now.”

“Not even a mental-health day? That’s nice.”

“Go drink a few beers with the stress unit. I don’t want to hear about your so-called mental health.” Her face is livid now, her eyes dark holes of hate, as if he is the one who attacked her. “If I don’t get a mental-health day, I’ll be damned if you do.”

Her change in demeanor is startling, unnerving.

“Maybe you don’t grasp the magnitude of what just happened,” he says. “I see it all the time with other victims.”

“I’m not a victim. I was victimized.” Just as suddenly, she is the DA again, the strategist, the politician. “This has to be handled precisely right or you know what I’ll be known for? The gubernatorial candidate who was raped.”

He doesn’t reply

“Any crime, any time, including mine,” she says.