Mortal Danger

house.
    “That’s when I stumbled across the knife. And I began to think about the neighbor next door—Traia—and about raping her. I went over and circled the house and I peeked into her windows. I could see that she was alone.”
    Then Luis had gone around to the front door and knocked. Traia had looked out the peephole and recognized him, and she’d opened her door with a smile.
    “I asked her if she’d like to watch the fireworks from my house, and she was happy. She asked me, ‘Yes, that would be nice. Where are they—out in back?’”
    For some reason, Traia had begun to shut her door—maybe to remove the chain from its slot, maybe because she wanted to change clothes.
    “But I pushed it open,” Luis said. “And I pulled out theknife and slipped inside. She was shocked and asked me what I was doing and if I wanted money.”
    Traia would have been shocked: This was the kid next door, from the family she’d done so much for—from bringing day-old doughnuts home from the bakery for the kids to giving them odd jobs when they needed money. She had tried so hard to welcome them to the neighborhood and avoided arguments at all costs. She’d felt kind of sorry for the recent widow with so many kids and so little money.
    “So she asked me did I want money,” Luis said. “And I told her I wanted sex.”
    She saw that he meant it, but it was, of course, unthinkable. Traia had tried to talk Luis out of having sex with her, and she’d offered him money if he would just leave.
    “I told her I meant it when I said we were going to have sex. I held the knife close to her and told her to take her clothes off.”
    Trembling, Traia had taken her clothes off and placed them on the couch in the living room.
    “I told her to go into the bedroom. She was really scared and she started to cry, but that didn’t change my mind. Then she said her boyfriend was coming over at eleven thirty.”
    At that point, Traia Carr may have sealed her doom. She had feared something like this, as she’d sensed someone watching her—always—but she had never been able to explain, even to herself, what it was that terrified her. And she had no idea who it was who watched her. She just knew that someone was.
    “That changes things,” Luis recalled saying to her. “Ifyour friend is coming over, we’ll have to get out of this house and go somewhere else.”
    “No…no,” she said, weeping. “He’s not coming over. I was just saying that, hoping you would go home and forget this.”
    “But now I can’t believe you,” Luis had told her, playing sadistic mind games. “I can’t believe anything you’re saying, so you’ll have to come with me.”
    Traia had pleaded with him to be allowed to dress first, and Luis had finally agreed to let Traia wear her robe. “She threw that on, and some pink slippers, and she grabbed her purse.”
    Her phone line was cut, there was no one next door, and it seemed as though the whole town was someplace else, watching the fireworks that lit up the sky and boomed in the dark night. As Luis led Traia out to her car, she must have looked around frantically for someplace to run, for someone to call out to.
    But there’d been no help around.
    “I drove out behind the Thunderbird Drive-In to the Indian reservation,” Luis said. “Then I parked and told her to get in the backseat.”
    And there, in the pitch black of the night on the lonely reservation road, Luis Berrios Jr. had raped Traia Carr, still holding the sharp Buck knife to her flesh so that she dared not struggle or fight him.
    When he had finally finished with her, Traia asked, “Can we go now?”
    “I told her, ‘Yes. Yes, we can.’”
    She believed that the ordeal was over and that she wasgoing to live, after all. Luis was going to let her drive home. She bent over to turn the key in the ignition.
    Luis had been standing by the open driver’s side door. He seemed to be back at the scene of Traia’s death as he continued to describe what happened in the woods on the Indian reservation.
    “I knew I had to kill her so she wouldn’t say anything to anyone,” he said. “I stabbed her in the back, all the way in. She was quite surprised. I pulled my knife out and stabbed her again. She fell out of the car onto the ground and started making a funny noise. I panicked, I guess, and I just kept stabbing her. Then she stopped making noise. The knife got caught in her robe, and it made me angry, so I just cut it off her and