Page 108 of Long Way Down

“We’ll go on up, then,” Contreras said.

At the top of the stairs, Lynn’s bedroom door stood ajar. The last time Melissa had seen the room, it had been swarming with techs, filled with the flash of many cameras, the floor heaped with twisted-up, bloodied sheets that had been dragged off the bed.

The room looked now the way it was supposed to: with the art pinned up on the walls and the desk set up for painting. The soft-looking rug had either been replaced with an identical one, or thoroughly cleaned, so no blood remained. The bed was made, its head heaped with pillows, and Lynn sat cross-legged at the end of it, staring out through the gap in her sheer curtains, where early, silvery light poured in and filled the space with muted brightness.

For a moment, limned in silver, her hair half-shielding her profile, Lynn looked herself like a painting: a pretty, melancholy girl, utterly timeless. Melissa felt an instant, striking kinship, an unwanted one: that sense of watching the world beyond the window turn, while your own imploded, quietly and unnoticed.

Then Contreras stepped on a squeaky floorboard at the threshold, and she turned toward them, face a mosaic of healing bruises.

“Hi, Lynn,” Contreras said, oh-so-carefully, head ducking a fraction. “Can we come in?”

She stared at them a moment, mouth a taut, bloodless slash. Her eyes were those of someone living in the after; not merely haunted, but watchful in a way they weren’t in the photos pinned up on the wall. Melissa watched her come to the realization that she could tell them no. A shift in her gaze said she knew that she could refuse, and that they’d have no choice but to leave. Finally, she said, “Sure,” and they stepped inside.

Melissa went to the desk chair, pulled it out, and motioned Contreras into it. He frowned a moment, but caught on quick. Given what she’d been through, having a man as tall as Contreras looming over her during an interview probably wasn’t the best approach with Lynn. He sat, and Melissa went to perch in the window seat. With the light coming in behind her, she had a clear, spotlit view of Lynn’s expression…and the ugly, blue and yellow mottling along her brow, jaws, and beneath both eyes.

“How are you feeling?” Melissa asked.

Lynn regarded her another long moment. When she spoke, her voice had a hoarse quality to go along with the bruises that circled her throat. “Physically, or mentally?”

Melissa winced. “Sorry. Dumb question.”

“Your mom said you’re dropping your figure drawing class,” Contreras said.

“I am, yeah.” She reached as if to rub at her eye and halted at the last second, frowning at her hand. She set it back in her lap and said, “It’s too late to drop it, officially, so I’m just gonna take the F.”

“Won’t that bring down your GPA?” Melissa asked.

She shrugged, a fast up and down jerk of her shoulders fraught with tension. “Doesn’t matter. School’s bullshit anyway. You either make it on your own, or you don’t.”

Melissa traded a covert glance with Contreras. Often, the children of wealthy parents with high expectations rebelled, but nothing about Lynn’s school attendance, grades, or the orderly industriousness of her room indicated she was one of those. The rape, Melissa thought, was what had changed her outlook, and she couldn’t say she blamed her.

“Besides,” Lynn continued, “it’s someone in my class who did it, right? It has to be, if he got Lanaandme. That’s the only connection we have.”

“It’s a possibility, yes,” Contreras said. “But you two may have connections you don’t know about. That’s why we’re going to talk to both of you, now that you’re feeling better–”

She snorted.

“Now that you’re both out of the hospital,” he amended. “We can go over that day more carefully and see if there’s something me missed during the first interview.”

Lynn didn’t look thrilled, but said, “Fine.”

Melissa had her pad out. “First, let’s go over your usual schedule, week to week. Classes, restaurants or shops you frequent, friends you spend the most time with, that sort of thing.”

Lynn’s lip curled, but she said, “It’s not real exciting.”

Her routine was this: class four days a week for eight hours, preceded most mornings by a stop at a coffee shop near campus. Her classes were stacked back to back to back, with only time for a vending machine lunch in the middle of the day. After class, she usually grabbed food – “From all sorts of places” – with her friends, the names of which Melissa jotted down, along with those of the coffee shop and their favorite restaurants.

Weekends were devoted to catching up on projects or heading with her family to their beach house on Long Island. In an attempt to make a name for herself in the art community, she volunteered at a gallery in SoHo, and at a youth center, teaching painting classes one Sunday a month.

Melissa dutifully wrote it all down, already arranging it mentally on the whiteboard back at the precinct. “Okay. Now. The day of the attack.”

Lynn let out a deep breath. “It’s like I told you before: I left school, and I drove here. I parked, I let myself in–”

“The door was locked?”

“Yeah. When I got to my room, I opened the door, set my stuff just inside, turned to reach for the lamp” – she faltered, swallowing hard – “and he grabbed me from behind. I never saw him. He didn’t say anything. In that moment, he could have been the Easter Bunny, for all I could tell about him.” She shivered, and rubbed at her arms.

“Okay. Let’s go back to your figure drawing class.”