High Country- Pigeon 12 by Nevada Barr Page A

rid of it?"
     
    Nicky's face screwed up but she didn't give in to the urge to dissolve into tears again. Anna thought better of her for this small act of courage.
     
    "Afterward I came to the room-"
     
    Anna made a mental note: the girls' cache was not hidden within these four walls. They were cleverer than she'd given them credit for.
     
    Battling another attack of emotion, Nicky stalled out. Patiently, Anna waited till she recovered in her own time. Telling was, in a very real sense, reliving.
     
    "I came to the room and the door was shut. I didn't think anything. I mean, me and Cricket might even have shut it for all I know. We were pretty high when we left."
     
    She looked up at Anna through strings of hair fallen again in front of her face. There was that about her that put Anna in mind of a caged and cowering puppy. A desire to inflict great bodily harm on whoever had abused her hit hard. The emotional tidal wave evidently changed the open, interested expression she'd adopted. Nicky's chin dropped and her hair closed over her face in a curtain.
     
    Anna wasn't ready for the show to be over. "Sorry," she said. "I wasn't listening. I got to thinking about killing whoever put that bruise on your shoulder."
     
    As Anna hoped it would, the hard edge of truth in her brutal confession reassured the battered girl that she was not the one in trouble. Nicky found the courage to continue.
     
    "So I came on in, not thinking anything, you know. Just walked in like always. The light was off and there were these guys with flashlights, two of them I think, and they'd torn the room apart."
     
    Anna's first thought was how could you tell, but she kept it to herself.
     
    "One of them said, 'fuck,' then a big one-not fat, big but tall big-grabbed me and pushed me down on Cricket's bed. He mashed my face into the pillow and I couldn't breathe." Here she stopped and looked at Anna, expecting something.
     
    "Bastard," Anna murmured sympathetically.
     
    "He sat on me and the other guy kept on. I could hear him throwing things around."
     
    Nicky stopped. Anna waited. When it became clear the girl wasn't going to continue on her own, Anna asked: "What then?"
     
    "The one on top of me got funny."
     
    In her years in law enforcement Anna'd heard her share of rape stories. It was one form of violence she'd never become inured to. There was something about the using of a person's body as if it were a thing, an object to be exploited, played with, degraded then left as one would leave a dirty diaper or soiled Kleenex that shriveled her soul.
     
    "Did he rape you?" she asked bluntly.
     
    "No . . . It wasn't anything like that or anything. You know how you can feel guys when they start heating up toward something crude? Well these guys had no heat. Like it was business. I was part of a job. Like a glitch, you know. This one that held me down, keeping my face in the pillow so I couldn't see or anything, he's sitting on me, his knees on my arms and he starts pulling my head back. I thought my neck was going to snap but this other one says: 'We don't need that kinda shit.' "
     
    Anna was surprised to find herself relieved. It hadn't been attempted rape, God forbid, but merely attempted murder. Why that seemed cleaner, more decent, she wasn't sure. Certainly a woman had a much better shot at recovering from rape than from death. Anna realized her gut reaction was based not on her feelings for the victim, but her feelings toward the crime, the criminal. Murder wasn't usually about dehumanizing, making an "it" of a living, thinking person. Murder was most often about removal, revenge or perceived gain. The victim lost his life but not his personhood.
     
    "Then they left."
     
    Nicky wanted to be done.
     
    Anna sympathized but had a few more questions. "They left right away?"
     
    "Not right away. Maybe five minutes after."
     
    "Did they say anything else?"
     
    "No. Yes. Wait." Nicky thought a moment. "One said 'Nothing.' Then the guy on