Monster by Steve Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

indicated the male paramedic. He nodded and moved to the front of the ambulance; the way this girl looked, he didn’t blame her for not wanting any men nearby.
    It was a ten-mile drive to the medical center, during which Mary did her best to answer the police woman’s questions. The pain seemed to start at her head and go down to those areas the monster, as she thought of him, had violated. She wondered if she was going to die and tried to concentrate on the questions, hoping that by helping the police she would remain conscious and therefore alive. “He drove a pickup,” she said. The pain shot through her, and she cried out again, “And he used a hammer.”
    The ambulance was met at the medical center by Dr. James Bachman. Mary resisted his attempts to examine her. Smith had to calm the hysterical woman, saying, “He has to look at you to find out about your injuries.” Finally, Mary relented although she continued to sob and whimper from the pain.
    Bachman couldn’t believe one human had done this to another; the girl looked like she had been in a head-on car accident. Her head was swollen to the size of a basketball; her left eye was a slit and she was bleeding out of her ears. He feared skull fractures and a concussion, possibly brain hemorrhaging. Just how bad, he couldn’t tell—that sort of equipment was in Denver. But X-rays revealed that the young woman’s assailant had broken the C-7 vertebra at the base of her neck, either from a blow or perhaps when he choked her—the purple bruises from his fingers were already evident around her neck. Another blow might have killed her or left her paralyzed. One of her fingers was broken, as if he had tried to tear it off. And she had been severely lacerated vaginally and anally in a manner that made it clear what she meant when she cried about her assailant using a hammer.
    Worried that her injuries might be life-threatening, Bachman left to contact a life-flight helicopter from one of the big Denver trauma hospitals. In the meantime, the police contacted Linda Batura, the county’s rape victim counselor. She arrived at the clinic and hurried into the examination room as the doctor was wrapping up his initial evaluation.
    A half hour later, Batura, obviously shaken, emerged from the room to talk to Detective Snyder. Mary Brown had begun to calm down, with the help of a sedative, and was able, though brokenly, to relate the events after she got off the bus. The offer of a ride. The sudden, unprovoked blitz attack. The rage. The hammer.
    The girl, Batura told the detective, had been assaulted in a dark, possibly green, pickup truck with firewood in the back. The suspect had light brown hair, blue eyes, and would have scratches on his face because the girl had used her nails to fend him off. “She said the front windshield will be cracked where he pushed her head into it,” Batura said.
    In the past two years, much of it at a similar job in Denver, Batura had worked with more than 200 rape victims. “The only other person I had seen that looked so bad and seemed so injured was a female sexual assault victim in the Denver city morgue,” she wrote in her report that morning.
    “I am amazed that she is alive. I have seldom seen such injuries sustained by a live victim. She literally ‘fought for her life!’ ”
    High winds prevented any life-flight helicopters from flying to Summit County that morning. Brown was loaded into an ambulance for the ride back down from the mountains less than six hours after she arrived.
     
     
    After Mary Brown was taken away, police officers spread out in the neighborhood to locate any evidence. One found the duffel bag at the empty home across the street; others followed a trail of blood that led to snow-tire tracks in the snow. As a detective left the housing area about 4 A.M. , he saw a car driving slowly down a street two blocks away. He pulled the car over. Inside were three young women.
    “We’re trying to find a friend of