…”…got away. So will you, if you do exactly what I say.” That wasn’t Mark speaking. It was a voice from my coat pocket. My phone. Still on a call. The woman from the bus stop had slipped her number into the note. I’d called her on the way to his apartment, just in case, and never hung up.
Mark heard it too. He froze. For one second, his face went completely blank. That second was enough. I grabbed the knife off the cutting board, backed toward the door, unlocked the deadbolt behind my back, and ran down three flights of stairs barefoot.
The woman was waiting on the sidewalk with two police officers. She’d called them the moment I mentioned the deadbolt. “My name is Julia,” she said, wrapping her coat around me. “Four years ago, I was the one in his kitchen.”
She told me while the officers went upstairs. Mark had kept her in a small room painted blue for three days, until she escaped through a bathroom window. The police didn’t believe her. He had no record. He was charming. He moved apartments. She’d been looking for him ever since, watching bus stops near every address she could find. “I saw you two together at a café last week,” she said. “I knew his laugh. I followed you to your stop.”
The police found the blue room behind a locked door in his apartment. A mattress. A lock on the outside. And a box of IDs belonging to two other women, both of whom had reported him and been told there wasn’t enough evidence.
This time, there was. Julia’s testimony, my phone call, and that room put him in prison for a very long time.
Julia and I still meet at the same bus stop sometimes, on purpose. We sit on the bench and drink coffee and watch people go by. Every now and then, she sees a woman with a man who’s a little too attentive, and she watches very carefully. She says somebody has to.
