Catherine texted me and the incoming alert interrupted my talk with Lucy. I stepped out to Laura’s desk to answer her, shortly after nine P.M.
“Spoke to Mike just now,” she wrote. “He asked me to confirm that Francie was on her way to Forlini’s to surprise you at our party.”
“Was she?”
“Yes,” Catherine responded.
“Any more details?”
“No. She was a no-show. Now we get why.”
“Talk to you tomorrow.”
I went back to my desk and apologized to Lucy for interrupting her. I wanted to move the story along. I could fill in Jake’s foreplay in the next interviews, but before we broke for the night, I wanted to see if there was criminal conduct.
“How long did you stay in New York on that first trip?”
“Three days.”
“Did you see Jake again that week?”
Lucy put her finger to her lips as she thought about the answer. “No, but I saw Mr. Palmer a few times, if you know what I mean,” she said. “I never saw him alone, so it was always ‘Mr. Palmer’ in front of the other lawyers and agents.”
“That’s good, Lucy. That’s really good that you can make the distinction between the personal interactions and the ones with the legal team. That kind of careful thinking is very helpful.”
She liked being told she did something well. She blushed a bit and smiled at me.
“Any other instances of touching while you were in New York City?” I can’t believe I found myself hoping that something inappropriate had happened within my jurisdiction.
“He hugged me is all,” Lucy said. “Mr. Palmer did. I mean, in front of everybody, in just a friendly way. Sort of each time the day was over.”
Lucy must have been starved for affection. No family around, no good friends, and now suddenly a cadre of people with voices—lawyers who spoke for the most vulnerable population—suddenly they were looking out for her, too.
“When did you see him next—Jake, or Mr. Palmer?” I asked.
“It was in Portland, Oregon,” she said. “Kathy and I flew out because the trial was going to be held in Oregon, for all the guys who were murdered by Welly.”
“What happened there?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all,” she said. “We were going to begin the preparation for trial, but then the judge did something that Mr. Palmer didn’t like.”
“What do you mean?”
“A ruling, is that what you call it?” Lucy asked. “The judge ruled against something the team wanted to do, so Kathy and I flew back to Chicago. There was never a trial set in Oregon.”
I made a note on my pad to research the background of the prosecution’s case, city by city, crime scene by crime scene. Media clippings would help me establish where Zach Palmer was at any given point in time.
“The next time?” I asked.
“I was going to all these places,” Lucy said, “even though they had nothing to do with my case. Next was Utah. Salt Lake City.”
As in Portland, a man jogging in a park had been gunned down.
“Mr. Palmer had a hearing of some kind,” she said. “He wanted me to be there—‘in the wings,’ he called it—in case the judge wanted to hear evidence of a similar kind of crime.”
“Did you testify?” I asked.
“Nope,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “But I did spend some time with Jake. Alone time.”
“Exactly what was that,” I said, “and where?”
“It was springtime, I know. May or June, I’m pretty sure,” she said. “Kathy and I flew out to Salt Lake City from Chicago and got in on a Saturday night, really late. I was supposed to get together with some of the agents at the courthouse on Monday morning.”
“Where did you and Kathy stay?” I asked.
“Same place as everyone else,” she said. “Some big hotel that gave government rates, Kathy told me. Anyway, on Sunday morning, Kathy wanted to go to church, which was the last thing I wanted to do. I remember a whole bunch of agents were going to go with her.”
“‘Mr. Palmer wants to spend some time with you,’ Kathy said. That was okay with me, ’cause I knew we had work to do,” Lucy said. “She told me to meet him in the lobby at eleven.”
“Okay, and—”
“Wait. Wait,” Lucy said, holding up her hand at me. “Kathy also said all that stuff you tell kids when you’re going out and leaving them with a babysitter, you know? ‘Do whatever Mr. Palmer tells you to do. Don’t talk back to him like you used to do with your aunt,’ she told me. ‘Just do whatever he wants.’”
Child abuse cases often started that way. So did situations with members of the clergy or with schoolteachers. The party placed in the care of the abuser was always told to obey his orders, often too young to understand the forbidden nature of the conduct. Do whatever he wants. I had heard those instructions more times than I could count.
“Did you meet with him at eleven?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Did you stay in the hotel, or go somewhere else?”
“I met him in the lobby, just like Kathy told me to,” Lucy said. “We sat on one of the sofas in the huge room and talked a bit, just about how I was doing back home and how I was dealing with this case hanging over my head.”
“That sounds like it was fine.”
“It was,” she said. “And I thought it was going to be even better when he told me he had a surprise for me.”
“Oh, what kind of surprise?” I asked.
“Now it was Jake talking to me, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded my head.
“He told me that he had rented a car so he could show me around the city, take me out to the Great Salt Lake. Let me be a kid for the day and not a witness, is how he put it.”
“Just you two?”
“Yeah. Just me and Jake,” she said. “We walked out to where the valet parking guy was, and when he saw Jake, he ran down to the lot and came back to the front of the hotel with a car—a Mustang convertible, a red one.”
When Lucy grinned at me, I couldn’t help but smile back.
“That was one of the best days ever,” she told me, emphasizing the word “best.” “Here was this really smart man who everybody respected and listened to, and it seemed like all he wanted to do was to let me have fun.”
Zach certainly had developed a gift for the perfect predatory setup.
“I was wearing jeans,” Lucy recalled. “In fact, we were both wearing jeans. He had ordered some food from the hotel and brought a couple of towels and said we were going to picnic.”
I hid my facial expressions well. I was used to doing that whenever survivors told me their stories. I couldn’t be judgmental of choices they had made. I knew that Lucy Jenner had just boarded an express train that would go off the rails and wreck itself before too long, but I understood what those hours of freedom must have represented to her.
“Did Palmer tell you to call him Jake that day?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t have to remind me,” Lucy said, trying to imitate him when she spoke. “‘Forget I’m the United States Attorney. Now I’m just your buddy Jake. We’re not talking about trial prep or learning about the law, we’re just hanging out and being friends.’”
She paused for a few seconds. “And you know what, Ms. Cooper? That worked for me just fine.”
“Was this supposed to be a secret, this day trip?”
“Jake turned it around on me. He said that he was the one who would get in trouble if all the church mice on his team thought he was goofing off,” Lucy said. “That made sense to me. He told me our picnic would have to stay between us so he didn’t make the agents mad that he was joyriding while they were praying for Welly’s victims.”
Another well-planned grooming device—each step gradual and each one completely calculated—by Zach Palmer. He let Lucy think she was protecting him rather than keeping her own secrets from Kathy Crain.
“I have to ask you, Lucy, whether there were lots of other things that you kept from Agent Crain before you started going places with Jake?”
She bit her lip and gave the question some thought. “I didn’t go to very many places or do many things without Kathy, or whoever was standing in for her when she was off duty,” Lucy said. “I kept a lot of my thoughts from her, a lot of the things I was feeling, but she knew everything that I did.”
“Were you dating anyone during that time, after Buster and Austin were killed, but before the trial?”
“Now, that’s a really stupid question, Ms. Cooper,” she said, laughing and wagging her finger at me. “Did you ever know a boy who wanted to put the moves on anyone who spent day and night with an armed guard? He’d have to be crazy.”
“One thing I can promise you is that before you and I are done, I’ll have asked a bunch more stupid questions,” I said, holding my hands up in the air, in surrender. “Fourteen’s a tough age. You must have wanted a social life?”
Zach Palmer would have relied on that fact in his approach to Lucy, targeting her isolation and her emotional neediness.
“I wanted a lot of things I couldn’t have,” Lucy said. “They weren’t any of Kathy’s business, as nice as she could be.”
“Tell me about the picnic, okay?”
Lucy described the ride out of town to the Great Salt Lake in the red convertible. It was such a unique experience in her young life that she recited specifics that left no doubt they were real. Jake’s conversation had nothing to do with the law and everything to do with eliciting personal information about Lucy’s interactions with family and friends—dead or alive.
I knew that I could retrieve all the data from those conversations on another day.
She talked about her reaction to seeing the vast lake. Although she had spent a lot of her youth in the general area of Lake Michigan, everything about this journey evoked different sensations.
“There are islands inside the Great Salt Lake,” she said.
“I’ve never been there,” I said. “Did you see any of them?”
“We drove to one called Antelope Island.”
“You drove to an island in the lake?”
Lucy grimaced and slapped her thighs with both hands. “Why do you doubt everything I say?” she asked. “What’s that about?”
I apologized again. “I’m not familiar with what you’re talking about. I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“There’s a bridge to the island. I think they call it a causeway,” she said. “If you don’t believe me, you can Google it.”
We were both getting tired and I understood that she had every reason to be cranky.
“I believe you, Lucy. And then?”
“There were beaches on the island. Lots of white-sand beaches everywhere, and the water really sparkled in the sunlight. We walked and we walked until we found one that had nobody on it, and Jake spread out the picnic.”
I waited while she cleared her throat.
“He had the hotel kitchen make all this delicious food,” she said. “Grilled chicken and coleslaw and an avocado salad—I’d never had an avocado before. I didn’t even know what it was. There were brownies and chocolate chip cookies. And we ate with real silver forks, and napkins made of cloth that had the hotel’s name on it.”
“Sounds really good,” I said.
But Lucy could envision that afternoon in her mind’s eye, and she was barreling forward without waiting for questions.
“It wasn’t like I needed another reason to stay close to Jake, but he gave me one,” she said. “He asked me how many black people I’d seen since I got to Salt Lake the night before. I thought about it and told him only two—one of the maids in the hotel and the kid parking cars.”
“How about the agents?” I asked.
“There were a couple of black guys on the team, but they hadn’t made this trip,” she said, “and the number two prosecutor was white, too.”
“But—” I said, trying to interject something.
“Jake just went on telling me how lonely it was for him on the road, traveling to all these places where there was still such prejudice and so many bigots, trying to prosecute crimes that were all about race and hate,” Lucy said. “And he told me that it was going to be lonely for me, too, even though my skin wasn’t as dark as his. That I needed to know I could always rely on him, I could always come to him, and we would get through this time together.”
It was impossible for me to speak to Lucy about race the way Jake had. I saw his point and couldn’t challenge it.
“Then Jake got to his feet and stretched out his hand to me,” Lucy said, with a lightness she had lost moments ago. “‘Come with me, Lucy,’ he said. ‘We’re going into the water.’”
“Really?” I asked.
“‘Jake,’” I said to him, “‘I can’t swim, Jake! We can’t go in the water!’”
Lucy was shaking her hands back and forth, like she was shooing the spirits away.
“But he pulled me to my feet and started running to the edge of the sand. ‘It’s okay, Lucy. I know you told the agents in your first interview that you didn’t go to the park that day to swim, because you didn’t know how. But nobody can sink in this lake. The salt will keep you on top.’”
Her countenance changed again, and she was somber. “‘You’ve got to trust me, girl,’ he said. ‘I promise you’ll be fine. Didn’t I tell you that relying on me was all I needed you to do? You trust me, and I’ll do the rest.’”
Lucy paused and took a sip of her soda. “Jake had me by the hand and I waded in the water up to my ankles. Warm water, but I was shivering with fear, just by the thought of sinking to the bottom.”
“I don’t blame you,” I said.
“‘You’re going to have to walk into where it’s deeper,’ Jake said. ‘Up to your waist at least, and then you’re going to lean back and I’ll hold you up with both my arms till you see for yourself that you can float.’”
Lucy put her elbows on my desk and rested her head in her hands. “I looked all around for other people—not for help or anything—but to see if they were really floating. But all I could see were the gulls—dozens of them—flying over my head.”
“Did you try to do it?” I asked.
“You’re not judging me, are you?” she said, looking up at me.
“There’s no reason for me to do that. You didn’t do anything wrong.” It was fourteen-year-old Lucy Jenner who wanted that answer from me. A fourteen-year-old on a semi-deserted island in the middle of an enormous lake, and in the stranglehold of a thirtysomething-year-old federal prosecutor.
“That’s when Jake stopped me,” she said.
I swallowed hard, relieved that Zachary Palmer might have come to his senses.
“I mean, he stopped me for a minute. That’s when he told me there was one more thing I had to do,” Lucy said. “He told me my jeans were too heavy—the fabric, I mean—and that I’d better take them off before I got in any deeper.”
“What did you—?”
“Jake said just to be on even ground with me, he’d take his off, too,” she said.
Now I was ready to put my head in my hands. The next step in cementing the predator’s grooming process—getting naked with his prey.
“So we both took off our jeans, Ms. Cooper, and threw them back onto the beach,” Lucy said. “I walked out a foot or two, till the water covered my knees, to where Jake was standing.”
“What were you wearing then, Lucy?” I hadn’t wanted to interrupt her narrative—there was really no need to at this point—but I also didn’t have the stomach tonight to hear what he did to this child. I was hoping to slow down the introduction of any sexual abuse.
“Panties. Just white cotton panties and my T-shirt.”
“A bra?”
“No. No bra.”
“And Jake?”
“Just his underwear,” she said. “White ones, too. You know, the kind that are tight, not baggy.”
“What happened then?” I asked.
Lucy looked up at the light fixture over my head. “Jake kept saying ‘trust me’—over and over again as I walked toward him. Five times, maybe six, he said it. He held out his hand and pulled me closer to him, then sort of cradled me in his arms until I was on my back, floating on top of the salt water.”
“And then?” I asked, waiting for something bad to happen.
“I floated, Ms. Cooper,” Lucy said, almost triumphantly. “I’d never learned to swim and I’d been afraid of anything deeper than a bathtub my whole life. But I trusted Jake, just like he told me to do, and there I was—in the middle of the Great Salt Lake in Utah—floating on my back for almost five minutes.”
“That must have been a great moment for you,” I said.
“Yes, it was.”
“And Jake,” I said, “he didn’t take advantage of you while you were in the water, with just your underwear and T-shirt on?”
“No, ma’am. We got back on the beach and I was kind of like giddy from my first swim—or whatever you want to call it. I was even over the embarrassment of being without my pants on.”
“He didn’t try to touch you, or kiss you?”
“Oh, he did kiss me,” Lucy said. “Just right here on the forehead, just sweet, not sexy or anything.”
“Nothing else you want to tell me that happened at the beach?” I asked, putting the first leg of an X through the word “UTAH” that I had scribbled on my pad as a possible site for the sexual abuse to begin. It looked like I was wrong, that Jake and Lucy were still in the state of foreplay. “Nothing sexual?”
Lucy leaned back in the chair and rubbed her eyes. “I’m not sure if he meant to do this or not,” she said, “but when I bent down to pick up my jeans, Jake held me by the waist with both hands, from behind me.”
She stopped talking, and I waited.
“It felt like he was rubbing himself against me—against my bum, my rear end. His penis was hard, Ms. Cooper. Real hard,” Lucy said. “I just froze and held still for like half a minute or so, maybe a little longer. Then Jake let go and he said something I couldn’t understand. I wasn’t even sure if he was talking to me or to himself.”
Lucy wouldn’t look at me again, but she seemed determined to finish her story. “I felt something running down the back of my leg. Something sticky and warm, that mixed with the salt from the lake that had stuck to me.”
“That sticky, warm stuff,” I said. “Did you know what it was?”
“Not that day, I didn’t,” Lucy said. “I didn’t know for sure until I met up with Jake again in Iowa City—until he raped me in the John Wayne Motor Inn.”