Mortification
Brianna Keen ticked up the pace on the treadmill another notch. Level fourteen. Twelve was usually all she could manage, but today called for something more. Something harder. Something that would reach in and carve out the bad inside her and make it clean again.
Her breath came in short harsh gasps and her vision darkened and clusters of black dots scattered behind her eyeballs. Her sports bra was drenched, sweat slicking the banded Lycra edges and rolling down between her shoulder blades. It dripped in her eyes, stinging, mixing with the traces of last night's mascara.
Brianna's running shoes slapped against the rubber surface of the treadmill and the machine whined in concert. It too seemed to be struggling with the pace, but it soldiered on, its mechanical heaving competing only with CNN turned down low on a TV hung from the ceiling, and the clank of free weights across the room—the only other soul here so early on a Sunday morning a lean, pale boy wearing a Moss Icon t-shirt.
Brianna glanced at the boy, but he was in his own world. He didn't look up the way they sometimes did and stare at her body in the tight top and shorts, her legs with the sweeping cuts of muscle in the calves and the thighs, her arms—they were getting too thin, but they were still defined—her breasts damp with sweat.
He wasn't one to look and that was good. Sometimes it was all right if they looked once she had gotten to the calm place. And some days it wasn't okay if they looked at all, and today was a day like that.
The pain in her lungs had a sound now, a wheeze that Brianna knew only she could hear, but she welcomed it and closed her eyes and willed it to bloom inside her. Her thighs were shaking a little, but that was nothing, you just kept picking them up and slamming them down again, like pistons, what the hell was a piston anyway but it sounded about right, a mechanical thing cranking with a power and unstoppability that could rip your arm off. Her ponytail was coming loose and some of her hair was plastered against her forehead. Her breath felt rotten in her mouth— everything she'd had to drink, when had they started, four in the afternoon, was it, in Tank's room no she couldn't think about that now she squeezed her eyes shut hard and gripped the handles tight and kept going.
The sound in her lungs drowned out the television and the clanking weights and sweat beaded on her top lip and Brianna licked it off and welcomed the salt. There...she was almost there. A little more. A little harder. And it would be all right.
Detective Joe Bashir took the elevator to the third floor of the women's dormitory and found Odell Collier standing in the hall looking more uncomfortable than usual. Odell's arms were folded across his uniformed chest, above his generous gut, and his legs were spread wide enough to give him a sort of Mad Max stance.
Through the wide double doors Odell guarded, Joe could see the girls, at least a dozen, and understood Odell's discomfort. Most were still wearing what they slept in, which ranged from baggy t-shirts and boxer shorts to thin camisoles which barely covered their breasts. They lay about the sofas and chairs of the dorm's lounge like women in an Ingres tableau.
Joe handed Odell the cup of coffee he'd brought him, the largest they had, four sugars. He'd finished his own on the twenty minute drive from his place to the UC Santa Bernardino campus.
"Morning, Odell."
"Mornin', Joe."
Odell took a swipe at his brow, beaded damp with perspiration despite the cool October chill. Lowering his voice, he muttered, "Them gals in there are a piece a work, the lot of 'em."
"Mmm."
Joe covered his amusement with a nod. Odell's thick Missouri accent gave him the affect of a bumbling dullard, which couldn't be further from the case. Women, however, were not his strong suit.
Seeing Joe, a girl got to her bare feet and padded over to the door. Her thin tank top read "Boys Suck." Her eyes were a beautiful clear green, the effect ruined by smudged black rims. It looked as though she'd lined them with a magic marker and a shaking hand.
"Are you in charge?" the girl demanded.
"I'm Detective Bashir. I'm working with Officer Collier."
"We just want to know if we can like take a shower or something. Or if we have to be stuck in here, you could maybe get some coffee sent up?"
She was clearly the leader, the queen bee. She looked into his eyes with a directness that Joe still found unsettling in people her age; his own niece and nephew, the second generation born in California, retained a trace of the bashfulness their parents cultivated: Madiha and Taj looked adults in the chin.
"I'll see if I can do something about refreshments," Joe said.
"But what if we have to pee?" a girl called from inside the room.
That was a bigger problem, indeed.
In the bathroom down the hall a dead man waited for Joe.
Joe could see the evidence techs at work through the open door to the bathroom, but that could wait for now. He followed Detective Trina Ash's voice and found her in one of the residents' rooms, which she was using as a makeshift interview room. One desk had been cleared, its contents pushed to the side, a closed laptop sitting on stacks of books and papers.
A petite dark-haired girl sat across from Trina, arms hugged across her stomach, looking faintly nauseous. "Excuse me," Joe said to the girl. "How are you doing here, Trina?"
She gave him a quick hello without taking her eyes off the girl. Trina was the best interviewer Joe had ever seen. The effect, he'd decided, was like a member of the cat family that had cornered its prey. She was silent and unblinking and willing to wait as long as it took for people to answer the questions she put to them.
"Odell's going to need a little help," he said. "We'll need someone to escort the girls to the bathroom on another floor, and so forth. Maybe get some bagels up here."
"Atley and Fiske are on their way," Trina murmured in her spooky interview monotone. She never broke character when she was with a subject.
Joe nodded. "Do we know who's missing on the floor?"
"Yeah, ask Odell. The RA's got a list. She's down there with the rest of them. Didn't he tell you?"
"No, actually," Joe said. "He had his hands full."
"Ha," Trina said softly. "He wishes."
Turning away, Joe suppressed a grin. He was fairly sure that Odell would be overwhelmed at the prospect of a handful of the ripe and yielding flesh of a UCSB co-ed.
In the bathroom, he greeted the crime scene techs, Edward Gervais and Paulette Huang, and Marty Huntsucker, the coroner. They ringed the body, which was slumped in an awkward curve as though the boy had been trying to contain the blood that leaked from the wounds in his chest and abdomen. Joe judged him to be about twenty, not a bad-looking guy, though the close-cropped haircut revealed a band of acne along his hairline. A vaguely Celtic tattoo wrapped around his bicep. Jeans like a girl's, Joe thought, tight and narrow and so new the denim still looked crisp, a style he had trouble adjusting to; during his own not-distant youth he'd argued with his parents about how baggy he wore his pants.
Gervais held up a plastic evidence bag containing a large pair of scissors with orange plastic handles, the blades crusted with what appeared to be blood.
"Impressive," Joe said. "That had to take a little power. Not the ideal grip for stabbing."
"Yeah." Marty Huntsucker, the coroner, looked up from his notebook. "Eighteen stab wounds and she managed to connect on every one of 'em, looks like."
"She?"
Marty shrugged. "Girls' dorm, guys aren't even allowed up here past midnight."
Joe didn't bother with the obvious: this one had found a way.
"Any ideas about time of death?"
"Yeah, between lividity and temp we're thinking between one and three," Marty said.
"And no one found him until six?"
Marty shrugged. "Saturday night, baby. Party hard and long, sleep in late. Good days, remember?"
Not really. During Joe's days at Berkeley, he hadn't had a lot of time for partying. It had taken most of his energy just to reinvent himself, to shed the earnest conformity cultivated by his parents: the careful manners, the academic zeal.
Back in the lounge, the girls looked even surlier, but Cabot Atley had arrived to help and Odell looked as though he felt a hundred percent better, helping himself to an onion bagel piled with pink cream cheese.
"Only one girl missing," Odell said. "Brianna Keen. And her friends say there's only one place she could be, the gym."
"On a Sunday morning?" Joe said with surprise.
"Yeah, I guess she does this just about every week. Army's gone to pick her up."
"That's some kind of dedication."
"Hey." Odell glared a little balefully. "You want to talk dedication, I'm here, ain't I?"
The girls had the television on the news, though no one was watching. Most sipped from paper coffee cups and sat in clusters of three and four. A few slept, their fuzzy printed throws making the room seem like one of Madiha's sleepovers.
"Do we all have to talk to you guys?" one of the girls demanded. "Even if we were, like asleep the whole time?"
"Detective Ash and I will speak with each of you," Joe said firmly.
"Can we at least go see the guy?" another girl asked. "You know, like to identify him?"
"It's Tank Nestor, isn't it?" another said, prompting all the girls to talk at once.
But Joe's attention was diverted. On the television they were showing footage of Shi'a Muslims in Islamabad observing the Day of Ashura by beating themselves with chains, some attached to razors and knives. It was the stock footage they ran every year during the Muslim month of Muharram, along with a few interviews with the faithful in the San Francisco bay area, sort of the Shi'a equivalent of the Charlie Brown Christmas special.
The casual way the media lumped it all together irked Joe. Only ten percent of Pakistani Muslims were Shi'a; most were Sunni, like his family. Matham—the ritual chest beating—was frowned upon. None of his parents' friends in Fremont had flogged themselves with anything stronger than a Swedish massage yesterday, he was willing to bet. Ah, well, the blending of cultures took time, even here in the shadow of one of the most progressive cities in the country.
He forced his attention back to the girls.
"One at a time," he said loudly, holding up a palm for emphasis. "Who is Tank Nestor?"
At this the girls fell silent, eyeing each other with what might have been complicity or merely a sudden shyness.
Before he could follow up on the question, Army Fiske came through the door trailing a thin, wet-haired girl in oversized sweats. Brianna Keen, no doubt.
Brianna pinched the skin of the soft underside of her arm, a practice she'd recently discovered brought her some relief. The room they had her in was nothing like the dim cinderblock rooms on cop shows; it was actually kind of nice, with a view of tree branches, and a table with a smooth, cool synthetic surface. Someone had brought her a Sprite, but Brianna intended to drink only water today.
She knew she'd think more clearly if she ate something, but she wasn't going to eat. Not today.
She'd taken some extra time in the shower, the water turned up as high as she could stand, scrubbing herself hard with the scratchy industrial fabric of the washcloth. Afterwards she hadn't bothered to dry her hair. She just wanted to get back to her room, but when she came out of the locker room, the police officer was waiting.
For one crazy minute she thought he was there to talk to her about Tank, about what he'd done to her. The problem was that—though she had a good idea of what had happened—she wasn't entirely sure. It was possible she hadn't protested enough.
But no: the cop, Fiske, was nice enough but it was clear that it was her they wanted to talk to. Hard enough to follow him meekly through the barely-stirring streets of campus; harder still to pass the open doors of the lounge. Everyone in there, staring. And now this. How long had she been sitting here waiting—ten minutes, ten hours, it was hard to know, especially with her head pounding and the sick feeling in her stomach.
"God damn it, you can't keep her in there!" The sudden and unexpected sound of her father's voice outside in the hall jerked her wide awake. Frank was loud. He used that voice to get what he wanted, around the house and presumably on the job too, though now that he was CIO or whatever it was, maybe he automatically got his way.
Brianna got up and went to stand by the door, but she couldn't hear anything more, so after a minute she sat down again.
Frank was here. That had to be bad.
Joe stared across the small table at Brianna. She looked sick, her skin shaded with gray, her hair hanging in limp waves. Odell was dealing with the father. There wasn't much the man could do, now that Gervais and Paulette had called to let Joe know what they'd found: bloody clothes and towels in Brianna's hamper. Bloody sheets on her bed. Blood on the floor of her room.
There was one thing he wanted to know, before he asked the rest: "Where's your mom?"
The girl's eyes flickered. "Rehab." The fingers of one hand skittered along the skin of her arm.
"Oh. You live with your dad, when you're home?"
Brianna watched him warily, her gaze jumpy and hair-trigger. "I don't know. I mean, I never have before. But now, maybe I'll have to."
Despite the circumstances, Joe felt the beginnings of pity for the girl. Early stats were in—she was an only child, parents divorced three years, both parents kept addresses in an expensive L.A. zip code.
"You mean, because your mom's not there?" he clarified.
"Yeah." Brianna regarded him curiously. "Why else?"
Joe placed his palms flat on the table in front of him and tried to decide how to proceed.
"What happened with Terrence Nestor?" he asked gently.
"That's his name? Terrence?" Brianna seemed genuinely surprised.
"Tank, I understand he goes by."
"Yeah, I never heard anyone call him anything else."
Joe already knew that Terrence/Tank had maintained a high profile on campus. He wasn't just big, and a starter on the football team, but he had a reputation for an undiscerning eye for female company. "He was hard to stop," one of the girls had told him, and her friends had nodded their agreement. "You had to watch yourself around him. But everyone knew that."
It was what one of the girls said after that, that had Joe uncertain about which direction to go: "Not that Brianna ever watched herself." The girls formed a defensive line when he pressed the point but it had been clear enough—Brianna went with nearly anyone who asked—and did whatever they asked. She'd already earned a reputation for being a slut, and it was only January of her freshman year.
"Did you know Tank well?" he finally asked.
Brianna shrugged and stared at her hand. The fingers trembled slightly; maybe that's what had caught her interest. "He was in my Bio class."
"Was yesterday the first time you...went out?"
She glanced at him briefly, then away. "We didn't go out. Me and some friends went to his fraternity for happy hour after classes."
"But you and he spent time alone."
"After a while, yeah. I mean, we all drank together. And we had pizza delivered. But later..." she shrugged.
"I don't mean to upset you," Joe said. And he didn't, though this was a tricky juncture; depending on which way this went, it could shift the course of the questioning. "I was just wondering what went wrong."
For a long time Brianna said nothing at all. Joe had to force himself not to glance at the wall of glass, where he knew Trina was watching.
Then she looked up, and he was surprised to see fat tears brimming in her eyes.
"I don't remember."
The decision was made to take Brianna to Monte Vista Regional for a psych eval. After Odell left to escort the girl to the hospital, Keen made a couple of loud and demanding calls that resulted in his assurance that his attorneys—plural, Joe noted with distaste—were en route.
Now seemed as good a time as any to talk to the man, if for no other reason than sweating Keen in an interview room seemed preferable to letting him continue to harass everyone in earshot.
"You have your daughter call you by your first name?" he asked.
Keen shrugged, looked over Joe's shoulder, out the window, anywhere, it seemed to avoid looking him in the eye.
"Before her mother became a Vicodin whore, she made it a full time job to keep me from seeing Brianna. When we did get together, you know, she was growing up, I liked to treat her like an adult."
"First name basis—that's treating her like an adult?"
Keen's gaze flicked briefly to Joe and then away. Joe figured him for mid-fifties, with an expensive if not naturally attractive presence. He had the build of a frequent flier at the gym; hair a bit too long and coated with shiny product, glasses a little too hip for a guy that age.
"Look, my wife and I didn't have a perfect marriage, and the divorce has been tough on all of us, but Brianna has had everything she could want. I'm not proud of losing touch with her, but I travel three weeks out of the month, and that's what's paying for her schooling and her mother's rehab and every other damn thing."
"You seeing someone else?"
Keen's face flushed angry red, and Joe knew he'd scored a direct hit. "There's a woman in my life, yes."
"Younger, by any chance?"
"What the hell business is that of yours?"
Joe wasn't sure of the answer to that question; it had been an intuitive query. "You can answer me now, or later," he said instead.
"Kat's thirty. She's a mortgage broker. She works very hard." Keen glared, challenging him to say something.
But Joe wasn't sure there was much more to say.
Weeks went by. Muharram came to end, followed in turn by the Islamic month of Safar, named for emptiness. In Montair, March arrived with its typical rains, and the foothills turned emerald green.
Joe went on a few dates with a woman on the music faculty at Berkeley. Traffic to Berkeley was tough, and the relationship fizzled out. He tossed a softball with Madiha to get her ready for the peewee season, and re-caulked the windows of his parents' condo with his brother Omar.
At work, he kept an ear to the ground, waiting for Brianna's trial. Even if he'd wanted to forget the case, Frank Keen made that impossible; he had taken on Brianna's cause with a vengeance. Frank had his lawyers and private detectives and evidence consultants working overtime, and Chief Fisch had made it clear that cooperation was in order.
Meanwhile, word was that Brianna refused to see her father at the jail. Joe wondered if that just fueled Frank's determination. The man who had barely bothered to see his daughter for the last few years had taken a leave of absence at work, and kept busy throwing money at every angle he could figure. There wasn't a whole lot to be done about all the crime scene evidence, especially when the prints on the scissors turned out to be Brianna's, but Keen's private detectives had managed to come up with three girls who were willing to testify to date rape at the hands of Terrence Nestor.
One rainy day in late March Joe ran into Dr. Marcia Coake in the courthouse up in Martinez, where he was due to testify in a fraud case.
Marcia was the psych consult who'd seen Brianna when she was brought into Monte Vista Regional. Joe had known Marcia since before he became a cop. She'd worked with Joe's father in the hospital years ago, when Osman Bashir had been brutally beaten after 911, a victim of enraged attackers who couldn't distinguish between an extremist terrorist and a retired accountant on his way to the grocery store.
Joe bought a couple of coffees and they sat on a bench outside the basement snack shop. When he turned the conversation to Brianna, Marcia hesitated for a moment.
"I'm only telling you this because it's already been in the paper. They've got her on a self injury alert."
"You mean suicide?"
"No, but that's how they're treating it. It's the same procedure either way. No sharps, no belts, no shoelaces, no bed sheets. Guard checks every fifteen minutes. But fifteen minutes is long enough, apparently."
Joe's heart sank. "What's she been doing?"
"Cutting." Marcia held up her wrists to illustrate. "There's an edge on the steel plate where the bed's bolted to the floor. She rubs her forearms on it. It's not sharp enough to cut deeply, but...she's also been pulling her hair out. It's called trichotillomania."
"These are new problems for her?"
"Hard to know for sure, but I'd guess yes. There weren't any scars when she first came in."
Joe remembered the girl's thin limbs, the way the sweatshirt hung on her body. How she glanced around her with fear and confusion in her eyes, shrinking back even from the girls who called after her as she was led out of the dorm.
"Do you know, does her mother ever come visit?"
Marcia wrinkled her brow in thought. "I think she's disabled. Or sick or something. Cancer maybe? Something serious. She's never come, that I know of."
Joe didn't bother to correct her. Thought of Brianna, trying to shrug off his attention that day in the interview room, looking as though she wanted to disappear into nothing.
Bits were coming back, but Brianna didn't tell anyone. They weren't complete thoughts, anyway, just little flashes and fragments.
She had tried to stop eating, but they'd caught on and now a guard stood over her at meal times and Brianna learned to eat just enough so that he'd go away.
Now, after lights-out, she couldn't sleep; her stomach was roiling in protest of the turkey sandwich she'd forced down for dinner. She tugged the special anti-suicide fabric, thick and stitched until it was barely flexible, over her shoulders and lay with her face against the wall.
Tank had said he'd noticed her the first day in class. She could still hear him saying it, a couple of six-packs in, after pizza, after everyone else had gone down to the lounge to shoot pool. He'd pulled her toward him on the couch and whispered against her ears, so close his chilly damp lips brushed against her lobe, "I've never wanted anyone as bad as I want you."
That was enough. It was the being wanted, it lit the spark in her and kept it humming. It was the being special.
More beer, a little weed for Tank, none for her, his hands under her top and she didn't mind; she was thinking Spring formal he'd take her to the dance she'd take it slow this time she'd learned, hadn't she, they didn't like it when you rushed things—but she wouldn't this time, she'd let him call first, and see how much he wanted her it would work out right this time.
The rest of it wasn't all that great, and Tank seemed to be getting distracted even before they were done. She started to worry when he didn't say anything as he went off to the bathroom after, pulling on his boxers and nothing else.
He was gone longer than she expected, so she had time to get her clothes on and fix up in the small mirror hanging on the wall and think up the right words.
"Hey," she said when he came back, making her voice bright, tossing her hair—"I should go. Walk me home?"
He didn't want to. She knew it and she ignored it. She should have just left. Should have been gone before he got back to the room.
Under the heavy cloth she pressed her fingers hard into the soft flesh of her palms, but they'd cut her nails so short she couldn't get to the pain.
This was the memory that had come back. He must have walked her home because they were in her dorm room, he had pushed her down and forced himself into her mouth and she remembered trying to shove him away her knees on the hard tile floor but he had her pressed against the bed her skull smacking the bedpost and he said:
"I walked you home, didn't I?"
and she gagged and struggled and realized there would be no dance no nothing just another Monday with everyone talking about what a slut she was—
—and that was all she remembered except that today when the guard was standing inches from her table she closed her eyes and raised that sandwich to her mouth, dry bread greasy turkey trying not to gag, and as she bit down it flashed in her mind, orange handles sharp scissors Tank in the bathroom.
Just that flash. And as Brianna ground her fingers into her flesh she knew there was just one way to stop the memories from coming. In the dim fluorescent light from the corridor she got out of bed and knelt on the concrete floor and put her wrist to the metal plate and went looking for strength.
-END-
