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29
Rachel
The waiting room outside the ER was half-full with people slumped on plastic bucket seats, looking clammy and ill. Rachel, who’d been sitting in the back row typing up notes from her day in court, moved away from the waiting area to answer a call from Pete.
“Have I caught you at a bad time, Rach?”
“Nope. I’m still at Neapolis General, waiting to interview Tracey Rice about Kelly’s rape kit,” Rachel said, pressing the phone closer to her ear as a toddler started screaming.
After going through a few podcast issues, she asked Pete if he’d managed to get a copy of Jenny Stills’s autopsy report. Rachel wanted to see if the cause of death was listed as drowning, as Kitty insisted was the case.
“The state medical examiner’s office said there’s no record of an autopsy on their database. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t done. Just that it was a long time ago and they’ll need to do a manual search in their files to find records. If there are any records,” said Pete.
“How long will that take?” Rachel groaned.
“That’s the problem. They have a staffing crunch right now. Won’t be able to look for the report for a few days. But even if they find it, they won’t give you a copy without permission from Jenny’s next of kin.”
“That would be Hannah,” said Rachel. “That’s just terrific. Another reason to find her.”
“Does it really matter, Rach?” Pete asked. “You don’t have time to follow up right now, with the Blair trial in full swing. By the time the verdict comes in, the ME’s office will have found the autopsy report and you’ll have hopefully met Hannah and have her permission to get a copy.”
It all sounded very reasonable, but Rachel was consumed by curiosity. She didn’t want to wait that long. When Rachel returned to her seat, the waiting room was quiet. The screaming toddler had gone through the doors into the ER to have his suspected broken finger x-rayed. Most of the other people who’d been waiting either had gone home or were being treated. Nurse Rice stopped by to reassure Rachel that she was almost ready for the interview.
“Is it always this busy?” Rachel asked.
“Sometimes. We’re down a doctor and two nurses right now. Summer flu,” she sighed. “That’s why I’m doing the night shift. I won’t be much longer. It’s always quiet around dinnertime.”
Within half an hour, as she predicted, the waiting room was virtually empty. Rachel was taken by an orderly to a treatment room where Nurse Rice was finishing off her dinner of homemade lasagna in a Tupperware container. Rachel explained that she wanted to find out what Kelly Moore would have gone through when she came in to be examined after the rape.
“I can’t talk about her specific case,” said Nurse Rice, “but I can tell you about the rape kit process. I’m one of three nurses who’ve been trained to do them at this hospital.”
She took out a sample rape kit and removed its contents: evidence bags, swab collection kits, and piles of forms. All with the same bar code. Everything collected had to be carefully logged and tracked, in case it was presented as evidence in court just as Kelly Moore’s rape kit was being presented by Mitch Alkins as part of the prosecution’s case.
“The body of a sexual-assault victim is a crime scene,” said Nurse Rice. “It’s my job to comfort the victim and treat her injuries, while at the same time methodically collecting evidence in a way that preserves the chain of custody and reduces cross-contamination. I think of it as half CSI investigator and half nurse. As you can imagine, it’s schizophrenic; the two jobs are polar opposites.”
She told Rachel that she was often the first person to question the victim about the rape and it was her job to document accurately every aspect of the sexual assault. If she made a mistake collecting evidence or taking down testimony, it could damage a potential prosecution. A defense attorney would look for any hole in the prosecution’s case, including perceived inconsistencies in a rape victim’s statements to the nurse and to police, to make the victim look like a liar.
“It’s not enough that the victim says where and how the perpetrator penetrated her. We need to know a whole range of quite graphic details, which we document as precisely as possible in these forms. After that, we move on to a physical examination.”
Nurse Rice explained how the victim’s clothes were put into evidence bags, much like the clear plastic evidence bags containing Kelly Moore’s clothes that Alkins had presented in court earlier that day. After that, a sterile paper sheet was put under the victim to capture trace evidence such as hairs, fibers, and body fluid.
“When that’s all logged and bagged, we examine every inch of the victim, from the tip of her head to her toes. We document eachbruise, scratch, and abrasion. We remove any foreign pubic hairs, semen, fibers. Anything we find. And we take swabs and samples of the victim’s own pubic hairs for comparison purposes.”
“Do you photograph the victim as well?” Rachel asked.
“If the victim agrees, we photograph all scratches, scrapes, bruises. We use a camera called a colposcope to photograph internal injuries. Lacerations on the genitals. Anything that might be evidence of a sexual assault.”
She explained that once the evidence was collected, medical issues were treated. The victim was offered the morning-after pill if there was a risk of pregnancy, or medications for HIV, syphilis, and other STDs if needed. After answering a few more questions, Nurse Rice checked her watch.
“I have to get going. I hope you have what you need,” she said to Rachel, packing up the sample rape kit and putting it back on the top shelf of the examination room cupboard.
She walked Rachel out through the swinging doors of a back entrance to the ER, which led to the ambulance bay and then the car park. There were two ambulances parked in the ambulance bay. A paramedic was wiping down a stretcher alongside the ambulances. He greeted Nurse Rice and they chatted for a moment.
The sight of the ambulances reminded Rachel of the newspaper article on Jenny Stills’s death. It said that Jenny was brought to the hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. She wondered if the original ambulance crew was still around. Maybe they’d be able to shed light on what happened that night.
“Do you know the paramedics well?” Rachel asked Nurse Rice. “I’d like to speak to someone who was on the job in the early nineties? It’s about another case that I’m investigating.”
“I don’t think any of the paramedics go back that far,” answered Nurse Rice. “They’re all young. In their twenties, or thirties. Theburnout rate in that job is high so they generally quit after a few years and do something else. What do you want to ask them about?”
