Love by Association

“If you think it’s that important, then, of course. I’ll do whatever I can.”

Chantel nodded. And started with first things first. “You know Leslie Morrison pretty well, don’t you?”

“Yes. But you know that already.”

“If you told her something and asked her to keep it to herself, would you trust her not to tell your brother, her husband, anyone?”

“Absolutely.” Julie paused, and then said, “There’s a bond between women who’ve been...mistreated. A level of trust that runs pretty deep.”

Julie seemed to be including her in that bond. Chantel didn’t want to accept it. She hadn’t been hurt as badly as Julie had been, as she expected Leslie had been. But...

Being included in that bond would help her help them...

She’d been about to ask about including Leslie in her plan. Having the evening’s organizer on board could greatly escalate her chance of success. Most particularly considering that she was going to need to change the script. She thought she’d have to work up to the other point she wanted to bring up—getting Julie to confide in her about Leslie’s home life.

Instead, she’d been handed the “in” she’d needed. Fate again.

“And you know for certain that Leslie has been mistreated.”

Julie nodded. Then she jumped up to grab a couple of throw pillows off a chair and sat back down, hugging one to her chest. Her glass of wine sat, mostly untouched, in a built-in holder in the arm of the couch. “I think you have, too,” she told Chantel. “I don’t mean to pry, but we’ve done all this talking about me and I don’t think I’m the only one who knows what we’re talking about.”

Whatever Chantel might have said stuck in her throat.

“My brother tends to think that I’m the only one who’s ever been raped,” she said, seeming to be able to talk more easily about her ordeal just in the ten days she’d known her. “He likes our world to revolve around me. He can’t seem to understand that sometimes his hovering just makes things harder. He makes me feel like a freak, like something’s wrong with me. I’m not the only one here who matters.” Her voice gained conviction at the end.

Chantel had to give her something, but telling her about her stepfather’s behavior didn’t seem like it was going to cut it.

She hadn’t suffered as Julie had. She hadn’t been raped. Not even close. She’d been neglected. The state had charged her mother with that on one occasion, between divorces. She’d been dating a lot and forgot to come home sometimes. She’d been touched. She hadn’t been raped.

Rape was something she couldn’t lie about. Most particularly not to a woman who had been.

“I watched my best friend die.” She heard the words before she’d made any conscious choice to say them. “We were out,” on a call. Jill and her partner had been first responders. Chantel and her partner had arrived on the scene in time to watch every detail of those last few seconds...

“A thug on the street...” A perp Jill’s partner had approached for a drug collar. “He pushed her down on the pavement right in front of me...” After she’d lunged for his gun just as he was getting a shot off at Jill’s partner. Her partner hadn’t been harmed. “He held her down with a boot on her chest. And while she was lying there on her back, looking up at him, he shot her right between the eyes.”

Jill’s partner shot him, too. But not in time. Chantel, who’d been running up to the scene among tourists and other pedestrians, had her gun in her hand but hadn’t been able to get a clear shot off in time, either.

“Was he arrested?” Julie’s eyes were wide and filled with compassion.

“No.” He was dead. Nothing to arrest. But she knew what she had to do to get Julie’s cooperation. Develop trust with your subject, she remembered from one of her investigative classes. Find a rapport. If his brother died, yours did, too. Your goal is to save lives. And in order to do that you have to get the confession. Or the information.

“And this is kind of what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said, hating what she was doing even as she said the words. “It eats at me, Julie. Every day. That he didn’t ever have to pay for what he did. I lie awake at night, or most often wake up in the middle of it, and all I can see is Jill lying there, with his foot on her chest, trying to get up. Looking at his gun. And that bullet hitting her...”

Tears came from somewhere, blinding Chantel to the vision that did still haunt her dreams. It would debilitate her nights, too, if not for the sitcoms she’d trained herself to concentrate on so she could sleep.