Chapter 1

Janet Whitecoff's first inkling of the trouble that invaded her semi-happy suburban home came when she saw the laundry compartment. It was 6:30 Wednesday morning and she had just trudged blearily downstairs of her four-bedroom house, purchased when she had still been a married woman with hopes of one day having a large, happy, storybook family instead of the single daughter and ex-husband she now had. Her mind, though primarily focused on getting a strong pot of coffee brewing in order to help blast her into another twelve hour shift at the hospital, noted immediately that the two French doors which guarded the laundry cubicle were standing wide open. That was odd. She had done a load of laundry before retiring last night and distinctly remembered closing them. Chrissie, her sixteen year-old daughter, habitually left the two doors open when she was washing something. It had been the subject of many a corrective lecture over the years but the action continued without fail. It was a learned behavior, she knew, picked up from her father who wouldn't close a cabinet door if his life depended on it. But Chrissie was not home this morning. Taking advantage of the first week of Christmas vacation, Chrissie had spent last night at her friend Lisa's house. She was not due home until well after noon today. Or so Janet thought.

Chrissie, in stark contrast to her parents, was a life-long introvert. Though her training was that of a trauma nurse, not a psychologist, Janet never-the-less knew that Chrissie's shyness had resulted both from the divorce of her and Jason when she was but six years old and by the subsequent sheltering that the two of them, both cynical emergency services employees who routinely dealt with humanity at it's worse, had bestowed upon her in a good natured attempt at protection. Though pretty and almost eerily smart, Chrissie had never made friends easily, had never had a boyfriend at all, finding solace it seemed, in books of poetry and literature, which occupied every available space in her room. It was only with the start of her sophomore year at Thomas Edison High School, only three months before, that she had started to socialize with her peers in any capacity. She still hadn't brought home any boys (much to Jason, her father and Janet's ex-husband's relief), but she had taken to hanging out with several of the school's cheerleaders and was even considering trying out for the squad when basketball season rolled around. Though Janet disapproved of cheerleaders and cheerleading, considering them to be female exploitation, and though she didn't particularly like Chrissie's friend Lisa, who was a gorgeous, blonde, airhead, stereotypical cheerleader, she was forced to encourage any endeavor that Chrissie undertook which involved interaction with people other than herself or Jason. For that reason she had given no resistance and only token interrogation when Chrissie had asked her the night before if she could stay at Lisa's. The alleged reason for the sleepover was that they were going to practice some cheerleading moves to see if Chrissie had the rhythm for it. Janet, who had almost twenty years of emergency room nursing, including five spent on the Medi-Flight helicopter and who therefore considered herself pretty wise to the ways of the world, knew that the two girls probably had some ulterior motive in the sleepover. Maybe they wanted to get drunk off the liquor in Lisa's parent's liquor cabinet. Or maybe Lisa was going to turn her daughter on to marijuana for the first time. Janet was not exactly thrilled with these possibilities but knew they were part of every teenager's life. She had to simply hope that she, and Jason who shared joint custody, had raised their daughter well enough that she would choose to stop these dangerous pursuits, if that was what she was doing, at the experimentation stage.

Had Chrissie, for some reason, come home in the middle of the night and done a load of laundry? She could not envision why her daughter would have done such a thing. Curious, but by no means alarmed, she padded over to the laundry cubicle and flipped on the light switch. The fluorescent bulbs flickered to life, bathing the two appliances and part of the hallway in light. It was then that she knew something was wrong.

The sparkling white surface of the silent washing machine was marred by a single red handprint on the lid, right where someone would grasp in order to open it. The red material that made up the stain was unmistakably dried blood. Another smear, smaller and less defined, stood out on the front of the machine. No longer groggy, Janet lifted the lid and peered inside. The machine, she knew, had been empty last night. Now she could see the blue pantsuit and matching sweater Chrissie had left the house in clinging wetly to the sides of the drum.

Her daughter had come home last night or early this morning, had been bleeding, and had thrown her clothes in the washing machine. These facts filled her with dread. What had happened? Where was Chrissie now? Her bedroom was next to Janet's and when she had walked by it less than two minutes before, the door had been standing open, the bed neatly made.

Stepping back away from the washing machine, Janet looked down the hallway towards the family room. Just inside the hall was a guest bathroom. Its door was usually open. It was now closed. She could see a sliver of light peeking out through the gap at the bottom of the door, illuminating a small, straight section of the brown Berber carpet. Stepping closer she saw something else; the ornate crystal doorknob was smudged with something. Already knowing what she would find, she flipped on the hallway light. Under the bright glow of the overhead fluorescent bulb she could plainly see that it was more dried blood on the doorknob.

Before she had time to fully consider the ramifications of this she heard a soft sob, unmistakably Chrissie's, from within the bathroom. It was accompanied by a delicate murmur of bathwater sloshing gently from one side of the tub to another.

"Chrissie?" she called carefully.

"I'm okay, Mom," Chrissie replied softly, though Janet hadn't asked if she was okay, and though her voice sounded worlds away from okay. Her voice sounded defeated, as if she was barely hanging onto control.

"Chrissie, what are you doing home? Why is there blood on the washing machine and the doorknob out here?"

There was nothing for a moment but another splashing sound.

"Chrissie?" Janet repeated, louder this time.

"Lisa and I had..." A sniff. "We had a fight and I came home early. I'm okay. I cut my hand a little on something."

All of Janet's maternal instincts were now screaming at her that something was dreadfully wrong on the other side of the bathroom door. Chrissie's voice, which sounded so un-Chrissie-like, the fact that she was taking a bath at 6:30 in the morning when she had never, even under the greatest stress, felt the need to do such a thing before. The fact that she was taking the bath in the downstairs tub, which was never used, instead of in the larger tub in her own bathroom. The blood on the washing machine. The blood on the doorknob.

"Chrissie," Janet said, reaching out and turning the doorknob, which was locked. "Let me in. What's going on?"

"Nothing, Mom!" Chrissie, who, since she was a toddler, had never raised her voice in anger to either parent, yelled. "I'm just having a bath. I'll..." A sob, cut off in the middle, "I'll be out in a minute."

"Chrissie, open this door right now!" Janet yelled back, nearing a state that could be called panic. What had happened to her daughter?

She heard the sloshing of Chrissie exiting the tub. "I'm okay, Mom," she called out. "I'll be out pretty soon. Don't come in here."

It was the last sentence, 'don't come in here', that prompted Janet into action. Her daughter's voice had said those words with such pitiful desperation. Directly behind her was a coat closet. She threw open the door to it and pushed aside a variety of winterwear, finally locating an empty wire hanger. She pulled it down and, in one swift motion, bent the top of it into a straight line. Turning back around she inserted this into the small hole in the crystal doorknob.

"Chrissie, I'm coming in!" she said, pushing on the hanger and turning the knob at the same time. The hanger worked just as it was supposed to. The knob turned to the right and the door sprang open.

"Mom, no!" Chrissie had time to yell, in full panic, before Janet saw what she was trying to hide.

Janet stared in disbelief, her mind trying desperately to cope with what she was seeing, to find a rational, safe explanation. The bathtub, which was rapidly draining with a gurgling, slurping sound, was half filled with water that was stained pink. There was blood on the porcelain of the toilet, some fresh, some dried, and blood on the side of the tub. Chrissie, standing next to the sink, was looking at Janet with an expression of hopelessness and guilt. An expression that only the damned were meant to wear. Her face was swollen on the left side and her lip was split open and purple. She had a pink bath towel wrapped protectively around her shivering body and as Janet watched in horror, two drops of blood pattered to the floor at her feet.

"Chrissie," Janet whispered, her mouth hanging open. "What happened to you? Where are you bleeding from?"

"It's nothing, Mom," Chrissie croaked. "It's nothing at all."

Then she burst into tears.

Sergeant Jason Whitecoff of the Marshall County Sheriff's Department had just pulled out of the north area substation into the perpetual winter fog that plagued the San Juaquin Valley when the Comm terminal in his patrol car began beeping, indicating an incoming message. He looked at it in annoyance for a moment, yawning, wondering what could possibly require his attention this early. He was the field supervisor for the day shift in Madison Park and as such, he was not accustomed to being sent to routine calls. He would of course handle one if it was pending and there were no patrol units available but currently only two of the ten officers under his command were assigned to anything. The other eight were all on "routine patrol", which, Jason knew, meant they were all sequestered behind various churches, closed down businesses, or county parks reading free newspapers and drinking free coffee obtained from neighborhood convenience stores and fast food joints. He could of course find them if he wanted to. He had worked nearly eight years as a patrol officer in this district before being promoted and had been the area supervisor for the last five. He knew every nook and cranny of Madison Park. But what would be the point? He could name several of his fellow patrol sergeants who took great pleasure in finding the troops doing what they weren't supposed to be doing but Jason had made a vow to himself seven years before when he had accepted the promotion that he would not forget where he had come from. So far he'd kept that vow, which hadn't exactly endeared him to the brass but that had accorded him the unofficial title of most-respected sergeant among the cops he supervised.

He pushed the "NEXT" button on his keyboard to bring up his message. Long experience allowed him to read the screen and continue navigating the green and white Crown Victoria through the suburban streets. It wasn't much of a message but its content was enough to get his heart pounding beneath the kevlar armor vest he wore: TURN ON YOUR CELLPHONE FOR EMERG INCOMING CALL FROM X-WIFE. The sender of the message was the dispatch sergeant.

Frowning, he reached down to make sure the dash mounted cell phone was turned on. It was. What could possibly be so emergent, he wondered uneasily, that Janet had gone through the trouble of calling the dispatch office and talking to the duty sergeant? In the nineteen years he had known her she had never felt the need to do such a thing before. Was it something to do with Chrissie? As unpleasant a thought as that was, it seemed the only logical explanation. They had shared equal custody of her since the divorce and his daughter was unquestioningly the most important thing in his life. All other aspects - career, girlfriends, money - paled in comparison to the love he felt for her. By the time the phone rang two minutes later, his mind had worked him into a state of anxiety more intense than anything his job could ever hope to produce.

"Hello?" he answered, cutting the phone off in the middle of the first ring. "Janet?"

"It's me," said the voice of his ex-wife. Her voice sounded controlled, but only barely so.

"What's going on?" he asked. "Is Chrissie okay?"

"She's in the hospital," Janet said simply.

"The hospital?" he said, thousands of evil possibilities running through his mind. "What happened to her? Is she okay?"

"Jason," she said, her voice breaking, then turning to a sob. "Jason she was..."

"What?" he demanded. "She was what? What happened to her?"

"She was raped," Janet managed to say.

Speechless, Jason's mouth hung open. Surely he had misunderstood her. Surely he had not just been told that his sixteen-year-old daughter had been raped. "What did you say?" he finally spoke.

"She was raped last night," Janet repeated, regaining a little control, "while she was out with her friends."

"My God," he muttered, trying to comprehend. "Is she okay? How bad is she hurt?"

"She'll be all right," Janet told him. "There was some... well some bleeding. And she was beat up a little but she'll be okay." She paused. "Physically anyway."

"Where is she at?" Jason wanted to know.

"We're at Tubman," Janet told him, referring to Harriet Tubman Memorial Hospital in downtown Maldonado. It was the facility where she worked. "Can you come down? Chrissie needs you. I need you too."

"I'll be right there," he answered, then, after a moment. "Does she know who did it?"

"Yes," Janet answered. "She knows. I'll tell you when you get here."

After hanging up with Janet he called his immediate superior, Lieutenant West, to tell him that he was returning to the office and leaving due to a family emergency. He half expected West, one of the more officious pricks the department employed, to give him trouble, not that he was going to let that stop him, but, as it turned out, West was much more accommodating than he would have believed.

"Family emergency?" he asked. "Is it serious?"

"My daughter had, well, an accident. She's in Tubman hospital."

"Your daughter?" he said. "Well don't even bother coming back to the office. Just take your patrol car down there. Leave all of your stuff in it. I'll arrange to have it picked up later."

"Thanks, Bill," Jason told him, already pushing the accelerator to the floor. "I'll do that."

The drive to Tubman took about twenty minutes under normal circumstances. Jason made it in slightly less than thirteen. He parked the patrol car in the restricted area next to the ambulance bay and nearly ran inside.

The triage nurse, a friend of Janet's who gave him a look of quiet sympathy but, thankfully, said nothing about Chrissie, directed him to one of the back treatment areas. He weaved his way through the crowded emergency department, dodging nurses and doctors going about their appointed rounds and finally located his ex-wife standing outside a closed treatment room. Though it had only been eight days since he had last seen her, when they handed Chrissie off according to their custody arrangement, Janet looked like she'd aged ten years since then. Her eyes were swollen and puffy from crying. Her red hair, usually stylishly set whenever she was in public, was a tangled rat's nest atop her head. She wore a pair of faded blue jeans and an old turtleneck that was wrinkled and stained.

"Janet?" he said carefully.

She turned and looked at him, her stare blank and devoid of emotion. "Hi, Jase," she mumbled and then began to tremble all over. Tears began coursing down her face and she broke down.

He went to her, putting his arms around her and holding her the best he could. He could feel the eyes of the emergency room staff, Janet's co-workers, silently appraising the two of them. By now they would all know what had happened. "It's okay," he whispered rhetorically into her ear. "Everything is going to be all right."

She sniffed loudly and then got herself back under control. "I'm sorry," she told him, pulling out of his grasp. "This is all just... just a little too much for me."

"Anytime," he assured her gently. "How's Chrissie doing? Is she in there?"

"Yes." She nodded. "She... they gave her some Demerol for sedation and pain control. The doctor is stitching her up right now."

"How bad is she hurt?"

She trembled on the edge of control for a moment but managed to maintain. "Oh God, Jason, she's..." She took a deep breath. "She's got a huge tear on her perineum from that... that animal. Six stitches at least. She's lost a lot of blood. It was all over the bathroom and in the bathtub. She came home last night and I didn't even wake up. She'd been in there for hours, bleeding and I was in bed, just..." She began sobbing again.

"It's okay," he told her, putting his left arm around her again. "It's not your fault. You can't blame yourself for this. When can we go in and see her again?"

"Not until they're done stitching her," Janet said. "And then they're going to do the EE."

The EE, Jason knew, was medicaleze for the evidentiary exam, a cold, impersonal, and somewhat ruthless poking and probing designed to collect forensic material for the district attorney. It had been known to traumatize the rape victim almost as much as the actual rape.

"I told them I want to be in there for that," Janet said. "I mean... well she's all doped up right now and not feeling much of anything, but I still want to be there for her when they're doing it."

"Of course," Jason said. He looked around, noting that they were the focus of attention of every staff member within visual range. "Look, is there anywhere we can go talk?"

She looked around, seeing for the first time all of the eyes that were upon them. "Sure," she said. "We can go to the nurse's lounge."

She led him through two hallways and to a door with a key-code box on the doorknob. She punched in a code, gaining access, and they entered. The lounge was a semi-large room with a wooden table, six or seven chairs, a television set, a coffeepot, and a microwave. It was currently empty. They entered, closing the door behind them and sat down in two of the chairs.

"Who did this to her?" Jason asked. "Where was she? What happened?"

"It took me a while to get the story out of her," Janet said. "At first she told me that she didn't remember anything. And then she told me that she'd fallen and cut herself somehow. But finally she told me the truth." She shook her head sadly. "She was afraid I'd be mad at her."

Jason nodded, not saying anything.

"Yesterday," Janet went on, "she asked if she could spend the night at her friend Lisa's. You know? The cheerleader she's been hanging out with."

"The one you don't like."

"Right." She nodded. "Well apparently my instincts were right on that count. It seems that the staying the night story was just that. A story. What they really did was hop in Lisa's boyfriend's car and drive to Fresno."

"Fresno?" Jason said, horrified. Fresno was more than forty miles away.

"Right," she replied. "You see, Lisa's boyfriend is a football player with Fresno State and they were having this fraternity party at their dorm house. Lisa talked Chrissie into going with her."

"A frat party," Jason mumbled, remembering with horror the frat parties of his own college days. Chrissie would quite literally be a babe in the woods at such a gathering. "Jesus."

"Uh huh. Once they got there Chrissie had a few beers. Although she didn't say so, I think she might've smoked a little grass. At some point she caught the attention of another one of the football players: Chad Buckingham."

"Chad Buckingham?" Jason asked. "The quarterback?"

"That's him," she confirmed.

"That motherfucker," he spat. Jason had heard of Buckingham's exploits before. Not only his impressive passing record, which for the last two seasons had led the CSUF football team to the divisional playoffs, but also the darker side of the all-American hero, the side that great attempts were made to keep from the public but which, within the tight circle of law enforcement, rumors were always circulating. He had heard tale of several sex scandals of various types, usually involving teenaged girls, usually involving violence.

"It seems," Janet went on, "that Mr. Buckingham was quite charming, eventually luring her to one of the empty bedrooms in the dorm house. There they began "making out", as she put it. She had gone along willingly up until then but then he started trying to take off her clothes. She tried to stop him at that point, wanting to get out of there but he threw her back down on the bed and ripped her sweater off of her. When she resisted, he slapped her around and punched her in the face. She's going to need a couple stitches in her lip from that."

Jason gritted his teeth, clenching his hands together. He could feel the blood rising in his face, making his head throb. "Go on."

"He ripped off her pants and panties and then raped her, you know, in the conventional fashion, for a few minutes. And then he..." She took a deep breath. "And then he rolled her over and..." She couldn't continue, instead, bursting into tears but Jason got her drift anyway.

"It's okay," he soothed, automatically using a calm voice though his mind was seething.

"No it is not!" she shouted. "That piece of shit did that to our daughter! How can you say it's okay? She's got a tear an inch and a half long on her from when he..." She broke into sobs again.

He slid his chair around the table until he was next to her and put his arms around her again. She buried her face in his chest, continuing to hitch and cry for the better part of five minutes before she was able to speak again.

"Afterwards," she finally went on, "he just left her in the bedroom and went back to the party. She was too ashamed to see anybody or do anything. She put the remains of her clothes back on and slipped out the back door. She walked down to a payphone and called a cab. The cab brought her all the way back home and she crept inside and got the sixty-five dollars it cost out of her little savings bank. The whole time she was bleeding from the cuts on her. She went in then and took a bath. That's where I found her."

"Have they taken a police report yet?" Jason asked.

"Not yet," she answered, sniffing. "I imagine they've been called but no one's showed up yet. How is that going to work since it happened in Fresno?"

"Maldonado PD will take the initial report and then when they find out it happened in another jurisdiction they'll forward it to Fresno PD's sex crimes division. The Fresno detectives will get all of the evidence and send a detective down to interview her."

"God what a mess this is. When will they arrest him?"

"Soon," he told her, though he was already starting to form other ideas about that.

A female patrol officer took the report. Young and cute as a button in her dark blue uniform, she looked barely old enough to have met the age requirements for law enforcement employment. Despite her appearance however, she was professional and kind as she took Chrissie's statement, eliciting details from her one by one until she had a complete synopsis of the events that had transpired in Fresno the previous night. After the interview she authorized an evidentiary exam to be performed at the City of Maldonado's expense (they would of course be re-embursed by the City of Fresno). The exam took about an hour. It was performed by one of the emergency room doctors and a nurse. Janet and the young patrol officer were present in the room during the exam; Janet to provide moral support, the police officer to take possession of any evidence that was collected.

After they emerged from the room, Jason pulled the young police officer, who's nametag identified her as RATHBONE, aside.

"So what do you think?" he asked her, referring to the exam.

Since he was a fellow law enforcement officer she spared him the bullshit lines usually reserved for the public and spoke frankly with him. "Well," she told him, "we took all the usual stuff. Vaginal swabs, hair samples..." She hesitated briefly. "Anal swabs. Maybe there are some sperm specimens on one of them but probably not. She bled quite a bit you know, both from her vagina and her anus and she also took a bath afterwards and douched several times. Can't really blame her for that, it's a natural reaction after being raped, but there's a good chance that we won't find any evidence."

He nodded sadly, already having suspected as much.

"As for hair samples from the perpetrator..." She shook her head slowly. "No chance at all. No skin samples under her fingernails either."

"Thanks," he told her mutely.

"I understand she washed her clothes afterwards too."

"That's what I understand," Jason replied.

"That's too bad," she said. "But again, understandable. She's a sixteen-year-old girl and her first instinct was to hide what was done to her. If it's okay with you, I'll have you take me over to your ex-wife's house so I can collect the clothes anyway." She shrugged. "You never know. Maybe something will turn up." She didn't sound very hopeful about this, nor did Jason expect her to be.

He nodded. "I'll get the keys from Janet."

Chrissie was released from the hospital later that day and sent home with Janet. Jason asked for and received an emergency leave of absence from the Sheriff's department for at least two weeks. He could tell, talking to Captain Blanely the patrol commander, that word of what had happened, by one means or another, had already leaked to the MCSD and was common knowledge. That was pretty much as he expected. There were no secrets in the law enforcement community. For the duration of the current crisis it was decided that he would stay at Janet's house, sleeping in the spare bedroom.

It pained both parents terribly to witness the state their daughter had been left in. Though normally shy and withdrawn to a certain degree she was now only a small step this side of catatonic. She wandered up and down the stairs in a daze, speaking only when spoken to, and only then in monosyllable responses. She would often have fits of sobbing which could last anywhere from a few minutes to two hours in duration. Her appetite was next to nothing. She spent nearly eighteen hours out of every twenty-four in a fitful, agitated sleep. The doctor had forbid her to take baths due to the stitches she had but she took no less than four showers a day trying to scrub clean an imaginary filth that stuck to her.

The case assignment had been transferred to the Fresno Police Department's Sex Crimes Division and given to Rick Clarkson, one of the senior detectives there. Jason didn't know what to make of Clarkson. He called him at least twice a day trying to determine the status of the investigation but was unable to pry a single detail of what was going on out of the man. Twenty years of law enforcement had conditioned him to expect a little professional courtesy out of other cops; not being cited when pulled over for speeding (or arrested when pulled over for DUI as a few cops he knew had been), a little extra investigation when one's car, house, boat, or recreational vehicle was broken into, the benefit of the doubt when involved in some physical altercation with another person off duty, and other such things as that. But when it came to the rape investigation, Clarkson gave him nothing that he wouldn't have given a normal member of the public. He let it be known that they were examining the physical evidence, that they had pulled Buckingham into their office and interviewed him at length about the alleged incident, that they had interviewed several participants of the frat party and several of Chrissie's friends that were there. Apart from that, he remained mute on the subject. In the ensuing week they could do nothing but wait and see what would happen, contemplating such things as sending Chrissie to a new school since everyone at her old one would know what had happened to her and taking her in to the doctor in thirty days to test her for pregnancy, venereal disease, and AIDS, as they had been instructed to do.

Finally, on the eighth day after the rape, they received a phone call from him. He asked if it would be convenient if he were to show up their house on the 28th of December at eight o'clock to discuss the status of the case. Jason knew his offer entailed the professional courtesy that he had so long been seeking. Clarkson would not have driven forty miles on a weekend day in order to update an ordinary member of the public in regards to a case. He also realized that Clarkson's offer probably did not mean that good news was forthcoming.

A short man in his early forties, Clarkson showed up precisely at eight o'clock on the agreed upon day. He wore a faded pair of blue jeans, tennis shoes, and an Oakland Raiders T-shirt that hung down below his waist to conceal the gun that was strapped there. His eyes, steely gray, had the cynical gaze that was common to career law enforcement officers and his nose had a variety of burst capillaries, also common to cops, which denoted a heavy drinker.