“You sound relieved when you say that.”
She didn’t answer except to nod her head. I could see she felt like crying, but she held it back. I want to work now. Can we start?
The human desire not to be alone in the world is powerful. More powerful, perhaps, than reason or conscience or fear.
I should want to take it all back, to support Tom Kramer in his objections and reconsider my plan to put Sean and Jenny in the same room. I should want that. But I don’t. That image of Jenny, of the hope, the life rushing back inside her, is not something I would ever wish to be gone.
I started the memory-recovery process with Jenny soon after she met Sean. He had shared with her the small progress he had made and how he believed he was going to remember more. Jenny came into the process with high expectations, which I tried to mitigate to some extent. I had no idea what we were going to find.
Still, we forged ahead. First, we focused on our plan, on how we were going to collect our data from every source we could find. Her friends. The kids at the party who saw her, spoke to her. The couple who found her in the woods. And, of course, the forensic report. We discussed how we would walk through the night, starting with the parts she did remember. We would get the playlist from the kid who hosted the party and we would play the music. I would let her smell the drinks she consumed, and we would get the exact ingredients. Vodka, we knew, had been in all of them. She would bring the body spray she wore that night, and the cosmetics and even the clothes. And then we would walk through each stage. From the party to the lawn. From the lawn to the woods. And then, the most difficult part, each stage of the assault. The report was quite detailed. And there was a trail of blood and clothing.
I know this sounds morbid. You must get over it. The process is no different from what I did with Sean. It’s no different from searching for your car keys.
Jenny was scared but eager. Her parents were terrified. But on the day we got the first memory back, they could all see I was right.
Chapter Sixteen
This is how that day unfolded.
Detective Parsons called me that morning. Cruz Demarco had finally been assigned a public defender and had his arraignment. Bail was set at fifty thousand dollars, and he was in the process of getting the money together with a bondsman. He had nothing to offer as collateral, and his mother was done with him. Two arrests in two years. She couldn’t find it in herself to get back on that horse. Very sensible. Of course, it would have been more sensible to consider this twenty years earlier, when she was shooting heroin in front of a seven-year-old.
Forty-eight hours had passed since my drive back from Somers. My wife and I had met with Attorney Brandino. We gave him a five-thousand-dollar retainer, in exchange for which he agreed to speak with Jason and appear at any interview he might have with the police. He said he would instruct Jason on what to say and what not to say and stop him in the interview if he crossed any lines that could not be uncrossed. He was representing two other boys who had been at the party, and we had to sign a conflict waiver. One of them had already had the interview. They were looking for confirmation that Demarco was there that night, and nothing beyond that. I felt relieved. He was very reassuring.
Something else had transpired in these two days. The kid who’d bought the drugs from Demarco just before he was arrested (his name was John Vincent, if you recall) had been brought in for an interview. Parsons had used the leverage from that day to get the kid to identify Demarco from the night of the rape. Once he had that ID, he went back at Demarco.
Demarco has a story, and he didn’t mind telling it to a point. After the Vincent kid gave him up for the night of the party, he admitted to being there. Said he was “invited” by a senior he’d met at some club in New Haven. Said he came to “hang out.” Wouldn’t cop to selling drugs, but there was some indication he might be willing to give up some of Fairview’s self-entitled punks in exchange for a deal. I didn’t tell him yet that wasn’t what we were looking for. Didn’t tell him he was being looked at for a rape. And the idiot PD didn’t put those pieces together until it was too late.
Parsons danced around the subject. Said he needed verification Demarco was really there so he could nail Vincent—made it seem like a favor that might be the start of some quid pro quo on Demarco’s charges. Asked him to describe the party, where he was parked, what he saw and heard. Told him they needed to make sure he wasn’t bullshitting about being there that night.