Free Trace by Patricia Cornwell Page B

free. And nobody could get me out. When I was in the shower I remembered my dream. The water was hitting my face, and when I held my breath I remembered my dream."
         "Did someone try to get you out?" Benton doesn't react to her terror or pass judgment on whether it is real or false. He doesn't know which it is. With her, there is so little he knows.
         She is motionless in her chair, struggling for breath.
         "You said nobody could get you out," Benton goes on, calmly, quietly, in the unprovocative tone of the counselor he has become for her. "Was another person there? Or other people?"
         "I don't know."
         He waits. If she continues to struggle for breath, he will have to do something about it. But for now, he is patient, the hunter waiting.
         "I can't remember. I don't know why, but for a minute I thought someone ... it occurred to me in my dream, maybe, that someone could chip away at the rocks. Maybe with a pickax. And then I thought, no. The rock is way too hard. You can't get me out. No one can. I'm going to die. I was going to die, I knew it, and then I couldn't take it anymore, so the dream stopped." Her rambling rendition stops as abruptly as the dream apparently did. Henri takes a deep breath and her body relaxes. Her eyes focus on Benton. "It was awful," she says.
         "Yes," he says. "It must have been awful. I can't think of anything more frightening than not being able to breathe."
         She flattens her hand against her heart. "My chest couldn't move. I was breathing very shallowly, you know? And then I just didn't have the strength."
         "No one would be strong enough to move the rocky face of a mountain," he replies.
         "I couldn't get air."
         Her assailant may have tried to smother or asphyxiate her, and Benton envisions the photographs. One by one he holds up the photographs in his mind and examines Henri's injuries, trying to make sense of what she has just said. He sees blood trickling from her nose and smeared across her cheeks and staining the sheet beneath her head as she lies on her belly on the bed. Her body is naked and uncovered, her arms stretched out above her head and palms down on the bed, her legs bent, one more bent than the other.
         Benton examines another photograph, focusing on it in his memory as Henri gets up from her chair. She mutters that she wants more coffee and will get it herself. Benton processes what she says and the fact that his pistol is in the kitchen cabinet, but she doesn't know which cabinet because her back was to him when he tucked the pistol out of sight. He watches her, reading what she is doing in the moment while he reads the hieroglyphics of the injuries, the peculiar marks on her body. The tops of her hands were red because he or she, and Benton will not assume the gender of her assailant, bruised her. She had fresh contusions on the tops of her hands, and she had several reddish areas of contusion on her upper back. Over the next few days, the redness from subcutaneous broken blood vessels darkened to a stormy purple.
         Benton watches Henri pour more coffee. He thinks about the photographs of her unconscious body in situ. The fact her body is beautiful is of no importance beyond Benton's consideration that all details of her appearance and behavior may have been violent triggers to the person who tried to murder her. Henri is thin but most assuredly not androgynous. She has breasts and pubic hair and would not appeal to a pedophile. At the time of the assault, she was sexually active.
         He watches her return to the leather chair, both hands cupping the mug of coffee. It doesn't bother him that she is inconsiderate. A polite person would have asked if he would like more coffee too, but Henri is probably one of the most selfish, insensitive people Benton has ever met and was selfish and insensitive before the attack and will always be selfish and insensitive. It would