“We’ll see.”
“You sure you’re going to be okay?”
“Yup. I’ll be fine. I’m going to go for a long jog to burn off all that rich food we ate last night. I haven’t worked out the entire time we’ve been in the hotel. And then I’m going to spend the rest of the night doing research until you get home. I’ll keep the gun right beside the computer and put holes in anyone who steps foot in that door.”
“Then we’re stopping by the hardware store to get a security bar for that slider door. And we’re leaving all the lights on in front of the house. If someone walks up to the house, I want everyone to be able to see him.”
After checking out, they drove directly to The Spy Shop.
“I knew you two would be back. I could tell the way you were looking at that nanny cam, the one with the teddy bear, right? It’s one of the most popular items we sell. But that’s kind of old-school. I’ve got something a bit more state-of-the-art.”
The clerk walked them over to a tiny round disk with a lens in it.
“This is the perfect camera for any type of light conditions and the lens is only one and a quarter inches. It’s the smallest camera we make. The Night Observer Wireless B/W Camera System can ‘see’ in three times less light than the standard nanny cam, making it perfect for mounting in any darkened area around your home. Its small size makes it easily concealable. You could lay this sucker out in plain sight and no one would even notice it.”
“How much is it?”
“I can let you have the camera and the remote VCR for just about a hundred and forty dollars.”
“Why is it so much cheaper than the bear?”
“Because the bear is cuter.”
The guy winked at Sarah and Sarah scowled back.
“Does it have a motion detector?”
“No. Once you turn it on it’s just on.”
“But the teddy bear has a motion detector and it’s in color?” Josh asked.
“Yeah, and we’ve got it in a wireless version now.”
“We want something that will record everything that happens in the room. Or something we could put really close to someone, close enough to see their face, without them knowing it’s there,” Sarah said.
“If you like the concealment possibilities of the teddy bear, and the color recording features, we have a few other hidden cameras you might be interested in.”
The clerk walked them over to where the teddy bear camera sat amid a bunch of other seemingly innocuous household objects.
“We have a radio alarm clock with a camera in it.
This one has that motion sensor you asked about, and it comes in color.”
Sarah looked over at her husband and smiled. This would be perfect if she was attacked in her bed again. The camera would record everything. But if he raped her on the floor as the stain on the carpet would indicate he did at least once, this camera might miss it. Josh looked over at her and Sarah shook her head.
“What else do you have?” she asked.
“We have stereo speakers with a camera in it. We have fake plants. We even have toasters and wall clocks and, of course, paintings and pictures. If you want to get the entire room, this smoke-alarm camera mounts to the ceiling and will capture everything in the room from an overhead perspective. I don’t know how clear the details will be but it’s at least as clear as those old surveillance cameras they used to put in liquor stores, and they caught criminals with those. It has a ninety-two-degree field of vision and a seven-hundred-foot line of sight. If you mount it over your door you should catch the entire room. It’s wireless and can be hooked up to a wireless VCR to record everything it sees.”
Sarah looked at Josh and they nodded in unison.
“How much?” she asked.
“This one is three hundred and fifty dollars plus another sixty for the VCR.”
“Wow. That’s a little more than we were planning on spending.”
“But it’s perfect,” Josh said. “We’ll take it.”
Sarah couldn’t help but feel a little foolish as they left the store. They had already spent over $2,000 trying to prove she wasn’t crazy and protect her from her
phantom rapist. As confident as she was that she was being raped by the neighbor, she had just as many doubts. She couldn’t help but feel a little worried that she might turn on the VCR in the morning and see video of her leaving the bedroom in the middle of the night and then coming back and changing the sheets and scrubbing the walls and floor. She was even more terrified that the video would show her welcoming Dale into her bedroom while she was sleepwalking. If that happened, her marriage was over.
They drove to the hardware store and picked up the security bar and then drove straight home. The detectives were already at the house when they arrived, parked by the driveway in a black Crown Victoria. Their presence made Sarah even more confident. They were starting to take her seriously. They believed her. At least Detective Lassiter did.
Sarah stared hard at the closed blinds across the street. They did not move as she pulled up but she had little doubt that Dale was over there watching. His lawn was beginning to look unkempt, as if he had not mowed it since he moved in. Sarah couldn’t remember ever seeing him outside since the day he moved in.
The detectives met them on the driveway as Sarah and Josh parked their car and began pulling their bags out of the trunk.
“Would you mind if we went in first? We’d like to try to get as many prints as we can and you might smudge them.”
“Sure. We’ll wait outside.”
“You can come into the living room after we’ve dusted the front-door handle and the living room furniture, at least the surfaces that we can get prints from.”
“Don’t you have a team for this? A CSI unit? Like on TV?”
The detectives gave each other one of those looks, the kind people give each other when they’re sharing a secret and weighing the pros and cons of letting someone else in on it.
“We’re sort of doing this unofficially. That rules out the crime-scene unit,” Lassiter said.
“In the movies cops can just call up their buddies in CSU and they’ll do a job for them as a favor. In the real life there’s a shitload of red-tape bureaucratic bullshit involved,” Torres added.
“So, you’re saying this whole case is unofficial?” Josh asked.
“It’s not closed, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s our case and we’re keeping it open.”
“But your superiors aren’t committing any resources to it.”
“No. The lieutenant thinks there’s no crime or that we’d never be able to prove it if there was one because of your police statement. So it’s just the two of us.”
“Well, thanks. Thanks for believing us.”
The detectives started at the front door, examining the handle set with a flashlight. Detective Torres was twirling a brush, fluffing its bristles. He dipped the tip of the brush into a can of black latent-print powder, then lightly dusted the powder onto the door handle. The detective knelt down and gently blew off some of the powder. Then he pressed some clear tape onto the door handle and began smoothing it down with his thumb. He then transferred the tape onto a card and labeled and initialed it.
“I’d better sign it too,” Detective Lassiter said. “Chain of evidence.”
Detective Torres passed the card to his partner while he scribbled in his notebook. He took four more prints from the handle, labeling each one.
“The rest of the prints are too smudged. I think that’s all we’re getting off this.”
“I think that’s good. Most of them are probably from the Lincolns anyway. Let’s go inside.”
The detectives entered the house, leaving Sarah and her husband on the front porch.
“Do you think they’ll find anything?” Sarah asked her husband.
“I don’t know. But remember what they said about getting a print match. If he’s not already in the system, then the only way they can get a copy of his prints will be to arrest him.”
“Do you think they would?”
“You mean arrest him?”
“Yeah, they could probably pick him up for something even if it isn’t for rape. Maybe trespassing or something.”
“I don’t know if they would go that far,” Josh said.
Sarah looked across the street.
“That fucker. If they find his prints in our house I might just kill that bastard myself.”
“If they find his prints in the house they’ll arrest him and that will be the end of it.”
“Not really. I’d have to testify in court. Fuck, that would suck. Do you know what a terrible witness I would make? I don’t even really remember what happened.”
An hour went by before the detectives poked their heads out and told Sarah and her husband that they were okay to come inside.
“Sorry, I almost forgot about you. I’m going to fin
gerprint both of you while Detective Torres goes upstairs and dusts your bedroom.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Most of the prints are identical, from what I can tell. Those probably belong to you two. But there were some on the slider door handle and the dining room window that didn’t match the others. They may be from a houseguest or a visitor, a friend, the pest-control guy, just about anyone but we’ll run the prints anyway just to be sure.”
It took two more hours before Detective Torres came back downstairs.
“We’ll get back to you if we find anything.”
“Thank you, Detectives,” Sarah said.
Josh walked them to the door and then walked into the living room and collapsed onto the couch.
“Tired?”
Sarah sat in Josh’s lap and wrapped her arms around him.
“Exhausted.” Josh laid his head on her breasts.
“Let’s go upstairs and take a nap. It’s been a long day.”
“Let’s set up the camera first.”
Sarah carried the bags upstairs while Josh removed a stepladder from the downstairs closet. Sarah was already unwrapping the box, sitting on the bed reading the installation instructions when Josh returned.
It took them a moment to figure out how to sync the camera with the VCR but soon they had it installed in the ceiling where the smoke alarm had been.
“Well, let’s just hope there’s not a fire.”
“The other alarms are still working. The house isn’t that big. We’d hear the one in the hallway if there was a fire.”
They stripped down to their underwear and crawled under the covers. Josh turned on the television and they lay in bed together watching
Oprah Winfrey
and
Dr. Phil
, falling asleep just before
Judge Judy
. Sarah kept waking up every ten minutes and reaching under her pillow for the gun, just to make sure it was still there, just wanting to feel the comfort of its weight. She stared at the front door, expecting it to creak open at any moment and for Dale to be standing there holding his stumpy little cock.
She felt her eyelids begin to close and her head droop forward. She forced her eyes open but the weight of the day lay heavily upon them, slamming them shut. Soon she was dreaming about roller coasters and caviar.
Minutes went by before she opened her eyes again, feeling a moment of panic before she reached once again for her gun and felt it there, tucked into the pocket of her Kevlar pillow. Beside her, Josh was sleeping soundly. His snores were comforting. He sounded like a purring lion. As Sarah stared at the door, she remembered that Josh had never put the lock on the new security bar on the sliding door. She reached under the pillow and began to remove the Sig Sauer.
Pulling it from beneath the pillow, Sarah rose from the bed and walked across the room, stepping around the clean spot on the carpet as she made her way to the bedroom door and opened it. Sarah had been prepared to scream. She had not been prepared to be struck over the head with a hammer. The gun tumbled from her hand and bounced across the plush carpeting with the upgraded padding. It barely made a sound. Sarah could still hear her husband snoring as Dale stepped over her limp body into the bedroom. Everything began to go
black as she heard the hammer whack into bone and Josh grunt once, then fall silent.
It wasn’t over when she woke up. Dale was still there. Josh was alive, bleeding from his head, one eye closed, the other one dilated, duct tape over his mouth, around his wrists and ankles. It was still light outside.
How did Dale know we would be sleeping? How was he watching us?
The questions came and went. There was too much going on to dwell long on them.
Seeing Josh helpless like that, big, strong Josh who had always been her protector, who had always made her feel safe, turned her world upside down. It was more terrifying than the realization that she too was bound and gagged and would soon be raped and murdered. Seeing that helpless, frustrated, terrified look in his eyes made her ache deep inside. It broke her heart. She knew that he would have helped her if he could and that not being able to was killing him. Being helpless in the face of this anemic little scarecrow of a man whom he would have murdered in a fair fight, if the guy hadn’t caught them both by surprise.
And how is he doing it? How is he able to ambush us both and overpower us before we know he’s here? How does he know when we are sleeping?
Josh began to scream against the tape as Dale turned toward Sarah. Sarah winced as Dale smacked her husband with the butt of her gun, the gun she’d bought to defend herself.
“Okay, Mr. Big Man with your big muscles. Think you’re so fucking tough? You come to my house and threaten me? You send the police to arrest me? Well, who’s in control now? We’ll see how tough you are after you watch me fuck your pretty little wife.”
Sarah wept as she felt Dale’s hands on her breasts. She closed her eyes when she felt the hands pry her legs apart and tried not to show her fear or her pain, for Josh’s sake. She could still hear Josh screaming against the duct tape, roaring in impotent rage. When she felt Dale’s lips and tongue slathering her nipples in saliva, felt him bite them and twist them as if he was trying to tear them right off her chest and then felt his tiny cock begin thrusting inside of her, she wished with everything she had that Josh had been strong enough to rip through the duct tape and save her. She wished that she could have watched Josh tear this pervert’s head off his fucking shoulders with his bare hands. Part of her was disappointed when it didn’t happen. Part of her hated Josh for not defending her. She tried to ignore the thoughts going through her head, telling her that Josh could have broken the tape if he really wanted to. It was just tape not rope or chains or something. She tried to ignore the thought that Josh was just too scared to help her, that he would have rather let her get raped than risk getting shot or stabbed or hit over the head with the hammer again. She hated herself for feeling that way. She felt guilty and ashamed but she couldn’t help it. This skinny little bitch of a man was raping her while her big, strong husband sat helpless two feet away on the same bed and just watched.