Children of the Sea 01 - Sea Witch

a look at you.”
     
    Maggie stiffened, but she allowed the doctor to palpate her skull and shine a tiny penlight into her eyes.
     
    Caleb caught himself leaning forward and settled back deliberately in his corner. For months now, he’d been trying to feel a part of things.
    Connected. Now he had to struggle for his professional detachment.
     
    “Hmm,” Donna said.
     
    Fuck detached.
     
    “What’s wrong?” Caleb asked.
     
    “Her pupils are enlarged.”
     
    “Is that bad?”
     
    Donna made another noncommittal noise. “They are responsive to light. And the reaction is symmetric.” She flashed, peered, flashed again.
    “It’s just . . . odd.”
     
    Maggie blinked. “There is nothing wrong with my eyes.” “No blurring?” Caleb asked. “No double vision?”
     
    “No,” Maggie said.
     
    Donna shot him an annoyed look.
     
    He shut up, jamming his hands in his pockets, as the doctor continued her examination. Mouth. Throat. Wrists. Arms. Breasts.
    Thighs. Every part he had touched and taken and caressed . . . He looked up at the stained acoustic tile on the ceiling. Forced himself to look back at Maggie on the table.
     
    The doctor had reached her feet. She spread her toes, as if checking for needle marks, and paused.
     
    Maggie pulled her foot away.
     
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    Donna allowed that, making another note on the chart. “Good motor responses. Now I want you to scoot to the end of the table and lie down.”
     
    Caleb pulled in his lower abdomen, instinctively protecting his crotch. He knew what was coming. Hell, he’d provided the rape kit from his trunk.
     
    Maggie looked at Caleb. “Why?”
     
    He would rather have faced an alley full of blind windows than that dark, wary gaze.
     
    “I need to do a vaginal exam,” Donna explained.
     
    “To assess your injuries,” Caleb said.
     
    Like that made the violation of her body and her privacy all right.
     
    “This is to help me?”
     
    He wanted to believe that. Had to believe it.
     
    “To help you,” he said evenly, “and to help me catch whoever did this to you.”
     
    Maggie tilted her head, keeping her gaze on his face. “You want this?”
     
    No, he didn’t. He didn’t want anybody touching her. Nobody but him.
     
    He fisted his hands in his pockets. “Yeah.”
     
    She lifted one shoulder in a shrug before lowering obediently to the table. The paper crinkled under her as she moved.
     
    The rape kit was open on the counter, vials and slides in a neat row.
    Caleb had never been in the room during a pelvic before. His ex-wife, Sherilee, had never even discussed her appointments with him except to complain. “ Men have it easy ,” she’d said. “ You have no idea .”
     
    She’d been right.
     
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    He had worked rape cases in Portland, always waiting outside the curtained cubical to take possession of the evidence and question the victims. Not that he didn’t care about them. He did. But he’d never been forced to witness this second assault on their bodies and their dignity, to imagine how it must feel to lie on your back with your feet in metal stirrups while some stranger sat between your open thighs.
     
    Increasingly uncomfortable, he watched as Donna swabbed and combed and probed. Maggie endured the exam in stoic silence, her eyes veiled.
     
    Maybe he should have taken her to the hospital on the mainland, he thought now that it was too late. She was stabilized. There would have been somebody, a trained nurse, a victims’ advocate, to comfort her. To hold her hand. To do all the things he couldn’t do.
     
    She inhaled sharply and grabbed his forearm.
     
    Stunned, he stared at her grip on his arm, her slim, pale fingers, their nails short and shining as shells on the beach. Her wrist was mottled purple and red.
     
    She had fought him, Caleb remembered. On the sand, writhing and clawing under him. He had to hold her down.
     
    Guilt burned under his breastbone.
     
    Cautiously, he covered her small hand with his much larger one.
    How could she bear for him to touch her? But she didn’t pull away.
     
    With his thumb, he gently stroked her bruise over and over.
     
    “All right now.” Donna turned from the sink holding the speculum.
    “I want you to try to relax.”
     
    Relax ? Caleb’s belly tightened again. Jesus .
     
    Maggie took one look at the gleaming metal implement and bolted upright on the table. “No.”
     
    Hell, no , he agreed silently.
     
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    Which was stupid. He was thinking like