The same guy who I’d dreamed of beating to a bloody pulp. The same guy I had murdered a million times in my fantasies, blowing a hole through the middle of his skull. The same one whose trachea I imagined crushing with my bare fingers.
My heart drummed so hard it felt like it might explode from my chest. I wanted to grab the tequila bottle and smash it against his skull or take one of the thick ceramic shards from the broken lamp on the floor and rake it across his throat.
I did nothing. I stood with my world still whirling and my pulse beating in my neck.
“Do you live here?”
Composure was difficult, but I faked it as best I could.
“No.”
“So, when you say he forced things, you mean he forced himself on you for sex?”
Leon gripped his key chain more vigorously. “Yes,” he said.
“What happened?”
He explained that Mark had ripped his jeans off, held him so tightly that he couldn’t squirm away, that Mark turned him around and continued to control him with one arm. With the other he penetrated him, with his hand first, then his penis.
Sophie flashed again. Her rapist holding her down on those hard pebbles. She’d shown me the blood spots on her jeans that had transferred when she got them back on, told me that he’d ripped her pants down and jammed his fingers inside her.
And Jess? I couldn’t even let myself go to those details. I shut my eyes, working hard to stay in the moment, my pulse knocking in my neck.
“I had my keys.” Leon held them up. Showed me. “I just ... I remember squeezing them so tight when he was on me.” He moved the keys from one hand to the other and fanned his hand out for me like he was going to show me a jewel. Red welts traversed the white, waxy flesh of his palm. “Eventually I squirmed enough and got turned around. I scratched him. With these. And these.”
Leon held up his fingernails from his other hand.
“We were both screaming. I swore I was going to call you and he said if I did, he’d hurt me worse. He couldn’t believe I’d scratch his face and arms like that. He was calling me names. And I was lifting up the couch cushions, thinking my phone fell down between them, and as I was doing that, he called 9-1-1 and had someone on the line. I tried to leave, but he blocked me, and we screamed at each other all over again. When he arrived”—he pointed at the room where Railes was—“I was holding one of those glasses. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was freaking out. I was scared. I guess I thought I’d throw it at him if I needed to.
“What’s going to happen?” Leon said. “I don’t want him to go to jail. I only want him to get some help or something.”
Jess’s voice echoed in my head. She’d said the very same thing.
“I mean,” Leon said. “We’ve been dating, so it’s not like it’s rape or anything.”
No!I wanted to scream as I snapped back to the situation at hand.Here we go again, the same old justifications.I was about to tell Leon to stay put so I could have a word with the other officer. Railes beat me to it, emerging from the bedroom with orders for me to cuff Leon.
“What?” Leon looked at me with terror in his eyes. “Me? Cuff me? I’m not the one ...”
“You fucking are the one.” Coleman followed. “Look at these.” He held out his forearms, crisscrossed with angry, bloody scratches.
“You,” I ordered Coleman, grabbing my cuffs. “Don’t move.”
Railes grabbed Coleman before I could get to him and pushed him back. “Stay right here.”
“I was protecting myself,” Leon said. Tears sprang from his eyes.
“I’m not cuffing Leon,” I said. “He’s not the primary.”
Railes glowered at me with a seething hatred. He wasn’t used to disobedience, especially from a woman. “The fuck you doing?” he said. He didn’t care about making a scene. “You trying to undermine me?”
“Leon’s not the aggressor.”
I said it with all the calm I could muster. Even with my camera off, I had a feeling that my feet were on eggshells.
“Coleman doesn’t have a record,” Railes said. “He’s all scratched up. Gouged.”
“Defensive wounds. That guy right there,” I said as quietly as I could, but my rage surged. The words came out louder than I wanted. “Is a rapist. We need to get Leon to theSaneSuite up at the hospital.”
