“No, I sure didn’t,” he said, and kissed his wife, before starting to draft a letter to the parents. He wanted to be careful how he phrased it. But he was grateful for Charity’s support.
The police waited until eleven o’clock to talk to Vivienne again. She was awake by then, and had a headache from the hangover, but the doctors said she was able to speak to them, and her mother remained in the room while they did. She looked fiercely protective of her, and Vivienne looked like she’d been hit by a bus, exhausted, hungover, and upset. Drunk or not, she’d been through a terrible experience for any woman, and she was only a young girl.
“Do you remember anything about last night, Vivienne?” the senior detective asked her and she hesitated before she answered.
“Some of it. Not much.”
“Can you tell us what you do remember?”
“I went drinking with a group of girls after we left the haunted house in the gym.”
“Do you remember their names?”
“No, I don’t,” she said quietly. “They weren’t in my grade, and I didn’t know them very well.”
“Can you tell us how many there were?”
“Two…four…maybe six…”
“Do you remember what you were drinking?” Vivienne nodded.
“Tequila.”
“That’s a pretty stiff drink for girls.” He looked surprised, although he knew it already from the bottle they had as evidence and were checking for prints. “Did you bring the tequila?”
“No. One of the girls has a fake ID and she bought it in town. It was supposed to be kind of a Halloween party.” That much was true, but not much else, and the detective sensed it.
“And what happened after you drank with the girls?”
“I don’t know. I remember being on the ground with a man on top of me. And then I passed out. And I woke up here this morning.” She looked all innocence, and had on her Alice in Wonderland face.
“And you don’t remember who the man was? Or anything else about the rape?”
“Nothing in detail, I just remember him on top of me, and then I passed out.”
“Did you know him? Had you ever seen him before? Was he a student you’ve seen at school?”
“No.” He could tell from experience that she was lying, but didn’t call her on it.
“Was he drinking with you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Is he a student here?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember what he looked like. He pushed himself inside me and then I passed out.” She looked troubled as she said it and the detective watched her face.
“Did you see any men or boys lurking around while you were still conscious?”
“No, it was just the girls, I think.”
“You’re not giving us much to go on, to find who attacked you,” he said gently.
“It’s all I can remember,” she said, leaned back into her pillow and closed her eyes as though she was in pain, and then opened them again. “I never saw anyone, no men or boys at all, just the one on me when I passed out.”
“All right.” The detectives stood up, thanked her, and left the room. The senior detective in charge waited until they were in the elevator before he spoke to his partner with a chagrined look.
“She’s lying through her teeth. She’s protecting whoever did it. Maybe a boyfriend. And if I asked her about a boyfriend, she’d deny that too. I’m going to leave her to the Boston team. They’re pros at this. I can never get a damn thing out of teenage girls, not even my own. I want to make one stop on the way back to the office.”
“What’s that?” his partner asked. It was rapidly becoming a difficult case. With no cooperation from the victim, they were going nowhere fast.
“I have a yen for a shot of tequila to start my morning off right, don’t you?”
“While we’re working?” He had never known his sergeant to drink on the job, but he didn’t say anything while they drove into the town nearest Saint Ambrose, and stopped at the only liquor store in town. He walked in and asked where the tequila was, and the clerk shook his head. “I had one bottle, and sat on it for four years. Nobody drinks tequila around here. I think it’s more of a West Coast thing. I haven’t carried it in years.”
“Sorry to hear it,” the detective said with a smug expression.
“Can I help you with anything else?”
“Not today, but thanks.” When they left the store, he looked at his partner. “She’s lying about that too. Wherever they got the tequila, it wasn’t here with a fake ID. I don’t think there’s a single word of truth in what she told us. She wasn’t drinking with girls, or not only girls. She didn’t pass out and wake up in the hospital this morning with a headache. I think she knows what happened to her, and she isn’t going to tell us. She’s either afraid of the rapist, or she’s protecting him because she knows him. There’s a lot more to this than meets the eye.”
They drove back to the office then and the first computer runs were on his desk. They had run the prints on the empty bottle. There were seven sets of them, and one of them was hers. She’d been fingerprinted at the hospital the night before when she was unconscious. The other six weren’t a match with any known convicted felons or sex offenders nationally, in the state of Massachusetts, or any of the New England states. So it wasn’t a known con, or a serial rapist who had wandered into the area. Six people had shared the bottle of tequila with Vivienne, and the sergeant was almost sure they weren’t girls. His best guess was that they were six male students, one of whom had raped her, and they went to her school. They were going to have to fingerprint every student at the school, and maybe faculty members too. They had their work cut out for them. After lunch, they were going back to the school to talk to Tommy Yee, the owner of the violin they’d found under the tree at the scene of the crime. He was the only boy they could tie to this event so far, and even if he hadn’t raped her himself, the detective was hoping he knew who did.
* * *
—
When Tommy Yee woke up the morning after their drunken binge, he had a blinding headache and still felt a little drunk. He made his way unsteadily to the bathroom, as scenes of the night before darted through his mind like a horror movie he had seen. The memories were disjointed and all of them were equally upsetting, and as he stared at himself in the mirror, wondering how it could have happened, a wave of panic rushed over him. He darted back to his bedroom, glanced around the room and knew instantly what was missing. His violin was gone and he knew where he had left it. In their haste to leave the scene and flee before they were discovered, he had left it in the clearing. So whoever found Vivienne eventually would find his violin, and the case had a tag with his name on it.