The Tenth Circle Read online

“You like poetry,” Daniel said, picking up the thread of conversation.

  “Well, Ashbery’s okay. But if you’ve read Rumi-” She broke off, realizing that what she really should have said, in response, was Yes. “I guess you probably didn’t invite me here to talk about poetry.”

  “It’s all bullshit to me, but I like the way your eyes look when you talk about it.”

  Laura put a little more distance between them, as much as she could while sitting on a bar stool.

  “Don’t you want to know why I invited you here?” Daniel asked.

  She nodded and forgot to breathe.

  “Because I knew you were smart enough to find the invitation. Because your hair’s got all the colors of fire.” He reached out and put his hand on her chin, trailing it down her throat. “Because when I touched you here the other night, I wanted to taste you.”

  Before she realized what he was doing, Laura found herself in his arms, with his mouth moving hot across hers. On his breath, there were traces of alcohol and cigarettes and seclusion.

  Shoving him away, she stumbled off her bar stool. “What are you doing?”

  “What you came here for,” Daniel said.

  The other men at the bar were whistling. Laura felt her face burn. “I don’t know why I came here,” she said, and she started to walk toward the door.

  “Because of everything we have in common,” Daniel called out.

  She couldn’t simply let that one pass. Turning around, she said, “Believe me. We don’t have anything in common.”

  “Don’t we?” Daniel approached her, pinning the door shut with one arm. “Did you tell your boyfriend you were coming to see me?” When Laura remained stone-silent, he laughed.

  Laura stilled underneath the weight of the truth: She had lied-not only to Walter but also to herself. She had come here of her own free will; she had come here because she couldn’t stand the thought of not coming. But what if the reason Daniel Stone fascinated her had nothing to do with difference…but similarity? What if she recognized in him parts of herself that had been there all along, underneath the surface?

  What if Daniel Stone was right?

  She stared up at him, her heart hammering. “What would you have one if I hadn’t come here today?”

  His blue eyes darkened. “Waited.”

  She was awkward, and she was self-conscious, but Laura took a step toward him. She thought of Madame Bovary and of Juliet, of poison running through your bloodstream, of passion doing the same.

  Mike Bartholemew was pacing around near the emergency room’s Coke machine when he heard his name being called. He glanced up to find a tiny woman with a cap of dark hair facing him, her hands buried in the pockets of her white physician’s coat. C. Roth, M.D. “I was hoping to talk to you about Trixie Stone,” he said.

  She nodded, glancing at the crowd around them. “Why don’t we go into one of the empty exam rooms?”

  There was nowhere Mike wanted to be less. The last time he’d been in one, it was to ID his daughter’s body. He had no sooner walked across the threshold than he started to weave and feel the room spin. “Are you all right?” the doctor asked, as he steadied himself against the examination table.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Let me get you something to drink.”

  She was gone for only a few seconds and came back bearing a paper cone from a water cooler. When Mike finished drinking, he crushed the cup in his hand. “Must be a flu going around,” he said, trying to dismiss his own weakness. “I’ve got a few follow-up questions based on your medical report.”

  “Fire away.”

  Mike took a pad and pen out of his coat pocket. “You said that Trixie Stone’s demeanor was calm when she was here?”

  “Yes, until the pelvic exam-she got a bit upset at that. But during the rest of the exam she was very quiet.”

  “Not hysterical?”

  “Not all rape victims come in that way,” the doctor said. “Some are in shock.”

  “Was she bleeding?”

  “Minimally.”

  “Shouldn’t there have been more, if she was a virgin?”

  The doctor shrugged. “A hymen can break when a girl is eight years old, riding a bike. There doesn’t have to be blood the first time there’s intercourse.”

  “But you also said there was no significant internal trauma,” Mike said.

  The doctor frowned at him. “Aren’t you supposed to be on her side?”

  “I don’t take sides,” Mike said. “But I do try to make sense of the facts, and before we have a rape case, I need to make sure that I’ve ruled out inconsistencies.”

  “Well, you’re talking about an organ that’s made for accommodation. Just because there wasn’t visible internal trauma doesn’t mean there wasn’t intercourse without consent.”

  Mike looked down at the examination table, uncomfortable, and suddenly could see the still, swathed form of his daughter’s battered body. One arm, which had slipped off to hang toward the floor, with its black user’s bruise in the crook of the elbow.

  “Her arm,” Mike murmured.

  “The cuts? I photographed them for you. The lacs were still oozing when she came in,” the doctor said, “but she couldn’t remember seeing a weapon during the attack.”

  Mike took the Polaroid out of his pocket, the one that showed Trixie’s left wrist. There was the deep cut that Dr. Roth was describing, still angry and red as a mouth, but if you looked carefully you could also see the silver herringbone pattern of older scars. “Is there any chance Trixie Stone did this to herself?”

  “It’s a possibility. We see a lot of cutting in teenage girls these days. But it still doesn’t preclude the fact that Trixie was sexually assaulted.”

  “You’d be willing to testify to that?” Mike asked.

  The doctor folded her arms. “Have you ever sat in on a female rape kit collection, Detective?”

  She knew, of course, that Mike hadn’t. He couldn’t, as a man.

  “It takes over an hour and involves not just a thorough external examination but a painfully thorough internal one as well. It involves having your body scrutinized under UV light and swabbed for evidence. It involves photography. It involves being asked intimate details about your sexual habits. It involves having your clothes confiscated. I’ve been an ER OB/GYN for fifteen years, Detective, and I have yet to see the woman who’d be willing to suffer through a sexual assault exam just for the hell of it.” She glanced up at Mike. “Yes,” Dr. Roth said. “I’ll testify.”

  Janice didn’t just have tea in her office. She had oolong, Sleepytime, and orange pekoe. Darjeeling, rooibos, and sencha. Dragon Well, macha, gunpowder, jasmine, Keemun. Lapsang souchong and Assam: Yunnan and Nilgiri. “What would you like?” she asked.

  Trixie hugged a throw pillow to her chest. “Coffee.”

  “Like I haven’t heard that before.”

  Trixie had come to this appointment reluctantly. Her father had dropped her off and would be back to get her at five. “What if I have nothing to say?” Trixie had asked him the minute before she got out of the car. But as it turned out, since she’d sat down, she hadn’t shut up. She’d told Janice about her conversation with Zephyr and the way Moss had looked through her like she was a ghost. She’d talked about the condoms in her locker and why she hadn’t reported them to the principal. She talked about how, even when people weren’t whispering behind her back, she could still hear them doing it.

  Janice settled down onto a heap of pillows on the floor-her office was shared by four different sexual assault advocates and was full of soft edges and things you could hug if you needed to. “It sounds to me like Zephyr’s a little confused right now,” Janice said. “She thinks she has to pick between you and Moss, so she isn’t going to be a viable form of support.”

  “Well,” Trixie said, “that leaves my mom and dad, and I can’t quite go dragging them to school with me.”

  “What about your other friends?”

  Trixie worried the fringe of the pillow on her lap. “I sort of stopped spending time with them when I started hanging out with Jason.”

  “You must have missed them.”

  She shook her head