Leigh made another note. She had seen more than one jury hang up on the fact that a woman had been too terrified, or too overwhelmed, to forcefully say the word no.
“I don’t remember if—” Tammy swallowed a breath. “He took my clothes off. His fingernails were long. They scraped—I felt them scrape my—”
Leigh watched Tammy ’s hand go to her right breast. She hadn’t noticed Andrew’s fingernails. If he was still keeping them long at the start of the trial, she certainly wasn’t going to tell him to clip them.
“He kept telling me that—” Tammy’s voice cut off again. “He told me that he loved me. Over and over. That he loved my—my hair, and my eyes, and that he loved my mouth. He kept saying I was so tiny. He said it, like—your hips are so slender, your hands are so small, your face is perfect like a Barbie doll. And he kept saying that he loved me and—”
Burke didn’t rush in to fill the silence, but Leigh saw him clasp together his hands in his lap, as if he needed to keep himself from reaching out to reassure her that everything was going to be okay.
Leigh felt the same need as she watched Tammy Karlsen rocking back and forth, hair falling into her face to hide her expression, as she tried to disappear from this cruel world.
Callie had done the same thing the night Buddy had died. She’d rocked back and forth on the floor, sobbing, repeating the line from the operator in a mechanical tone.
If you’d like to make a call …
There was a pack of Kleenex in Leigh’s desk drawer. She used one to wipe her eyes. She waited through the silence as Tammy Karlsen shook with grief. The woman was clearly blaming herself, trying to think about how she had messed up, what stupid thing she had said or done that had put her in this position. She should be at work right now. She had a job. She had a master’s degree. And now she had fleeting memories of a violent attack that had completely devastated her carefully planned life.
Leigh intimately knew that self-blame, because it had almost happened to her in college. She had been sleeping in her car, trying to save money, and woken up with a stranger on top of her.
“I’m sorry,” Tammy apologized.
Leigh blew her nose. She sat up in her chair, leaned closer to the monitor.
“I’m sorry,” Tammy repeated. She was shaking again. She felt humiliated and stupid and completely out of control. In the course of twelve hours, she had lost everything, and now she had no idea how to get it back. “I can’t—I can’t remember anything else.”
Leigh swallowed her own self-loathing and made a tick on her notepad. That was the fifth time Tammy Karlsen had said that she couldn’ t remember anything.
Five points for Andrew.
She looked back at the screen. Burke remained motionless. He waited a few seconds before prompting, “I know that his face was covered, but with a ski mask—now, correct me if I’m wrong—you can see the eyes, is that right?”
Tammy nodded. “And the mouth.”
Burke kept gently pushing her toward the obvious question. “Did you recognize anything about him? Anything at all?”
Tammy swallowed loudly again. “His voice.”
Burke waited.
“It was the guy from the bar. Andrew.” She cleared her throat. “We talked a long time. I recognized his voice when he was—when he was doing what he did.”
Burke asked, “Did you call him by name?”
“No, I thought—” she stopped herself. “I didn’t want to make him angry.”
Leigh knew from her earlier reading that Andrew had been compelled to participate in an audio line-up along with five other men. Their voices had been recorded as each one repeated phrases from the attack. When the detective had played all of the samples back for Tammy, she had immediately picked out Andrew.
Burke asked, “What makes the man’s voice distinctive?”
“It’s soft. I mean, the tone is soft, but the register is deep, and—”
Burke’s supernatural composure showed a crack. “And?”
“His mouth.” Tammy touched her own lips. “I recognized that, too. It went up on the side, like he was … I don’t know. Like he was playing a game. Like, he was saying he loved me, but he was enjoying that—that I was terrified.”
Leigh knew that smirk. She knew that voice. She knew that frightening, dispassionate look in Andrew’s cold, dead eyes.
She let the video play out. There were no more notes to take, except three more ticks to the running count of Tammy saying she couldn’t remember. Burke tried to tease out more details. Trauma or Rohypnol had ensured that her recollection was shaky. Everything Tammy relayed came from the beginning of the attack. She couldn’t remember the knife. Getting cut on her leg. The violation with the Coke bottle. She didn’t know what had happened to her purse or her car or her clothes.