I got up and walked to Lucy, who stood up as I put my arms around her slender shoulders and squared her off to face me.
“That’s a whole lot of mumbo jumbo,” I said, urging her to look at me and listen. “A blood oath has no meaning in this day and age. It’s just superstition, and the kind of irrational belief a man like that would use to twist you into knots when you were most vulnerable.”
“He told me that it was a religious thing. Break it and my soul breaks with it.”
“Are you religious?” I asked.
“No,” Lucy said. “My mother gave up going to church when she found out that she was going to die and leave me all alone. I had no reason to believe in God after that.”
“Sit down, please,” I said to Lucy and then turned to Mercer. “Get in this with me, will you?”
The huge detective with the gentlest touch of any I knew walked forward and kneeled next to Lucy’s chair.
“The power of blood oaths is mythical, Lucy, not real,” Mercer said, talking softly, as though there was someone else around to hear him. “Princes and knights would shed their blood in ancient times, according to oral histories, swearing to protect their people from foreign conquerors.”
At first she ignored him, but that was hard to do with Mercer.
“Mafia mobsters used that term,” he went on, “to command the loyalty of new recruits, just like gang members still do. It’s the stuff of Samurai legends you see in movies—scenes that are meant to make you cringe when blood is drawn.”
Lucy tilted her head and looked at Mercer.
“It’s vampire stories and gothic novels—and even in the pages of those things, when the good guy is ready to shed the influence of the bad guy, he or she just renounces the oath.”
“Renounces it?”
Mercer stood up. “You abandon the covenant,” he said, brushing the palm of one hand across his other as though he was ridding them of dirt. “Mobsters and gang members and Samurai and vampires—it’s okay to be afraid of them. But you’re not bound by any covenant a rapist swore you to. Over and done, Lucy Jenner. Let’s us go bring this bastard to his knees.”
Lucy looked from Mercer’s face to mine. “How do I renounce a solemn oath I made?” she asked. “Will you help me?”
“There was nothing solemn about it,” I said. “You tell me you want to break it? Consider it broken.”
Mercer reached for a piece of paper on my desktop and grabbed a felt-tip pen.
“Write it out for me. That’s more formal,” he said. “That’ll work in court, if you want to show it to the judge.”
He had picked up on the childlike qualities Lucy exhibited, despite the street smarts she had been forced to develop by her lifestyle. He sensed that she needed something that was as visible to her as the razor cut on her hand.
She bent over the paper and wrote for a minute, then handed it to Mercer, who read it aloud.
“‘I, Lucy Jenner, break the covenant I made with my rapist on August twenty-third, the year I turned fourteen, in the John Wayne Motor Inn, in Iowa City.’”
“Is that okay?” she asked, placing her hands under her thighs and sitting on them.
“It’ll do fine,” Mercer said. “Let’s have Alex sign and date it.”
He passed the paper to me. I was already agitated. What business would I have making this a case if it happened in Iowa City?
“You sure that’s the name of the hotel?” I asked as I added my signature with the date and time. “John Wayne?”
“He was born in Iowa City,” Lucy said, smiling at me. “I know he got to be a movie star cowboy, but he was born in the Midwest.”
I had a legal pad in front of me. I was used to the balance of establishing rapport with the victim through eye contact and paying careful attention to the facts and details. But some of the specifics had to be noted contemporaneously so that they didn’t get lost in the bigger picture.
“I don’t want to keep calling him ‘the man’ or ‘the rapist,’” I said. “Are you ready to give us his name now?”
Lucy was warming up to Mercer. I think she liked the way he had given her the permission she had long wanted to abandon the oath that had silenced her.
She picked her head up, looking at him. “Later. I’m almost there.”
“That will help,” I said. “Do you remember the first time you met him?”
Lucy nodded her head. She had been a severely traumatized teenager when Austin and Buster were murdered, someone had come along to be part of her recovery team, and then betrayed her. Asking if she remembered how and when and where she first met her rapist was like asking me if I remembered my first root canal. I couldn’t forget if I wanted to.
“Let’s give him a name for now,” I said. “Just so we can refer to him.”
“Jake,” Lucy said. She hadn’t paused for a second to think about it.
“Jake?” I asked. “Is that what you actually called him—or did you just pick that to use with us tonight?”
“That’s what he wanted me to call him,” she said, seemingly attaching no significance to the name. “He didn’t want me to use his real name.”
“And that wasn’t his nickname?” I asked.
“It was his middle name. I mean, I didn’t know it back then, but one time a few months back, I Googled him and saw that his middle name is Jacob.”
Jacob. Jacob. Jake. Jake. I thought of the photographs of cops and FBI agents that Mercer had printed out for me. I didn’t want to stop Lucy now that she was talking. I could look up each one of them later, if she still balked at naming the man, to find the elusive “Jacob.”
I scribbled “Jake” and “Jacob” and “J.” on my pad, although there was no chance of my forgetting it.
“And you remember the first time you met Jake?” I prompted.
Lucy bit her lip and nodded again.
“Would you tell us about it? Would you tell us where it happened?”
She rocked her body from side to side.
“I met Jake here,” she said. “I met him in New York.”
Bingo, I thought to myself. I might have jurisdiction after all. I did nothing to give away the fact that her answer pleased me.
“What were the circumstances, Lucy?” I said. I wanted to draw her out and have her give us a narrative. I didn’t want to pick at and pull for every fact. “Why were you here and who were you with?”
“After Austin and Buster were killed, there was an FBI agent assigned to my case,” she said. “Assigned to me.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“Her name, actually. Her name is Kathy Crain,” Lucy said.
I wrote that on the pad. Lucy stretched up to see what I was doing.
“It’s Kathy with a K, not a C,” she said, correcting me. “She became, like, as close to me as anyone had been since my mother died. She sat on me like a hawk, watching me real carefully.”
“So you didn’t get hurt,” Mercer said.
“I guess so. It was like she didn’t want me out of her sight,” Lucy said. “I was at my aunt’s house part of the time, and in some different hotels and motels when we had to go to Iowa City to work on the case.”
“But Agent Crain—Kathy—was always with you?” I asked.
“Yeah. Always,” Lucy said. “Sometimes they sent a relief agent in when Kathy had days off.”
“But always a woman?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Kathy was bodyguarding me at my aunt’s house—my aunt really hated having an agent living with us—when we got the news that Welly Baynes had been caught.”
“That must have been a huge relief,” I said.
“It was. But it couldn’t bring back Buster and Austin.”
“Totally right. But it would stop Baynes from killing anyone else,” I said, and from trying to eliminate an eyewitness, like Lucy.
“That’s what grown-ups kept telling me, but it didn’t make me or their mothers feel any better.”
“What was the next thing that happened, after you heard Baynes had been caught?”
“That’s when I found out about the trip to New York,” she said.
“Why New York?” I asked. “What was the trip about?”
“There was this whole team, this task force,” she said. “You probably know that. They’d been going all over the country, all over to interview people to see which cases were the ones that Baynes did.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“They were from lots of places,” Lucy said. “All the cities where murders happened, but most of them were from New York. Detectives and federal agents.”
Mercer was still behind Lucy, off to her side, out of her direct line of sight. As he listened to us talking, he was looking through the pile of news clips that he was holding on his lap, beneath his pad.
“Agents,” I said. “Lots of FBI guys, I’m sure.”
Mercer nodded. We’d been looking for photos of cops, but maybe Jake was an agent. That could make sense, too. And the picture on the precinct wall might have had the task force teammates all together, including the feds.
“You and Kathy flew to New York?” I asked.
Lucy smiled at that memory. “That was the good part. I’d never been on an airplane before, and I’d never been to the city, so all of that was really exciting. Best of all is that the government paid for it—my plane, my hotel room, my meals, and all that. Kathy took me to a Broadway show and to the Museum of Natural History.”
“I’m glad you have good memories, too,” I said. “Where did you meet Jake?”
Lucy bowed her head and started swinging her legs back and forth. I had wrenched her out of the happy parts of her trip to get her to give us what Mercer and I wanted.
“He came to the meeting at FBI headquarters,” she said.
“Twenty-six Federal Plaza,” I said, staring at Mercer over Lucy’s head.
“I don’t remember the address, but it was a tall office building with a ton of security around it.”
“Sorry. I didn’t expect you to remember,” I said. “I was just trying to get some facts grounded. I can always reconstruct that. Actually, that building is just a few blocks away from here.”
I could see why I had made Mike so angry. It wasn’t that he didn’t want justice for whoever had hurt Lucy—cop or no—but I had jumped at the idea that the bad guy was a cop, when it just as easily could have been a fed.
“I spent an hour or so with the guys who had been assigned to my case,” Lucy said. “Kathy, too. They just wanted to separate me from the people from the other cases, so we didn’t mix up our stories.”
“I do that all the time,” I said, keeping my tone casual and friendly. “It’s a good policy. We all think we can remember things perfectly, but once someone else says, ‘Oh, she was driving a blue car,’ a lot of witnesses fill in the blanks of their own recollections without ever meaning to.”
“Yeah, Kathy told me that’s what it was about,” Lucy said. “Anyway, the main FBI guy was the one who began to ask me questions. Sort of like this, starting with my background and stuff, and then going on to—you know, to ask about what I was doing with Buster and Austin.”
“How many people were in the room?” I asked.
Lucy pulled her hands out from under her thighs and counted on her fingers, closing her eyes to re-create the scene. “Me, Kathy, the guy doing all the talking,” she said. “Actually, when he got to the day of the shooting, he made the other cops leave the room.”
We must have been getting closer to my target.
“That’s good practice, too,” I said. “The only one he needed in there with him was Kathy, because she knew everything you’d said up until that point.”
She was biting one of her nails. “That’s about when Jake came into the room.”
I was waiting for this moment, but I was still startled when she introduced him into the narrative.
“I stopped talking, because I hadn’t seen him before,” Lucy said. “Kathy knew him really well. She got up and they kissed each other on the cheek, and then she told me his name—his real name, like kind of formal—and said they were old friends.”
Mercer had put down his papers and was as riveted by Lucy’s words as I was.
Lucy paused and smirked. “Kathy told me I could trust him with my life. She told me how lucky I was that he was my team leader.”
“Then what hap—?” I began.
Lucy interrupted me. “The four of us talked for a few minutes, then he told them it was time to take a break, to leave us alone for a bit so he could get to know something about me. One-on-one. Things that weren’t in the police reports.”
“Did Kathy go?”
“Yeah, she said she’d bring us back some coffee,” Lucy said. “She said this work was all about trust. We’d have to get to trust each other.”
“And the man?”
“The first thing he said to me—Kathy was still there, so she can tell you it’s true—the first thing he said to me was how easy it was to trust girls with hazel eyes,” Lucy said, putting her hand to her mouth. “He had this great big smile, and he was just a foot away from my face. He said I had the most beautiful hazel eyes he’d ever seen, and that the two of us were going to do just fine together.”
Shit. The grooming began the moment he laid eyes on his victim.
“Did you say anything?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “He did all the talking at first. ‘Lucy, we’re going to be spending a lot of time together. And you can count on the fact that I’m going to be the best friend you’ve ever had.’”
She paused. “I didn’t have many friends, with Buster and Austin gone. I was sort of glad to hear him say that.”
I bet she was.
“That’s when he told me I could call him Jake. Not in public, not in court, but that would be our secret name when I wanted to tell him something private.”
This time I took a deep breath. “Jake. Okay, that’s his nickname,” I said. “What else did he say?”
“‘Call me Jake, Lucy,’” she repeated. Then she dropped the bombshell. “‘I’m going to be the prosecutor for your case.’”