The Surgeon: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel: With Bonus Content by Tess Gerritsen Page B

goal is sleep, the room would be perfectly sufficient. But as the door swung shut, Moore was acutely aware of how small the space was, and he wondered if the forced intimacy made her as uncomfortable as it did him. They both glanced around for places to sit. At last she settled on the bed, and he took the chair.
    “I never actually
met
Elena,” said Catherine. “I didn’t even know that was her name. We belonged to the same Internet chat room. You know what a chat room is?”
    “It’s a way to have a live conversation on the computer.”
    “Yes. A group of people who are online at the same time can meet over the Internet. This is a private room, only for women. You have to know all the right keywords to get into it. And all you see on the computer are screen names. No real names or faces, so we can all stay anonymous. It lets us feel safe enough to share our secrets.” She paused. “You’ve never used one?”
    “Talking to faceless strangers doesn’t much appeal to me, I’m afraid.”
    “Sometimes,” she said softly, “a faceless stranger is the only person you
can
talk to.”
    He heard the depth of pain in that statement and could think of nothing to say.
    After a moment, she took a deep breath and focused not on him but on her hands, folded in her lap. “We meet once a week, on Wednesday nights at nine o’clock. I enter by going on-line, clicking the chat-room icon, and typing in first
PTSD
, and then:
womanhelp
. And I’m in. I communicate with other women by typing messages and sending them through the Internet. Our words appear onscreen, where we can all see them.”
    “PTSD? I take it that stands for—”
    “Post-traumatic stress disorder. A nice clinical term for what the women in that room are suffering.”
    “What trauma are we talking about?”
    She raised her head and looked straight at him. “Rape.”
    The word seemed to hang between them for a moment, the very sound of it charging the air. One brutal syllable with the impact of a physical blow.
    “And you go there because of Andrew Capra,” he said gently. “What he did to you.”
    Her gaze faltered, dropped away. “Yes,” she whispered. Once again she was looking at her hands. Moore watched her, his anger building over what had happened to Catherine. What Capra had ripped from her soul. He wondered what she was like before the attack. Warmer, friendlier? Or had she always been so insulated from human contact, like a bloom encased in frost?
    She drew herself straighter and forged ahead. “So that’s where I met Elena Ortiz. I didn’t know her real name, of course. I saw only her screen name, Posey Five.”
    “How many women are in this chat room?”
    “It varies from week to week. Some of them drop out. A few new names appear. On any night, there can be anywhere from three to a dozen of us.”
    “How did you learn about it?”
    “From a brochure for rape victims. It’s given out at women’s clinics and hospitals around the city.”
    “So these women in the chat room, they’re all from the Boston area?”
    “Yes.”
    “And Posey Five, was she a regular visitor?”
    “She was there, off and on, over the last two months. She didn’t say much, but I’d see her name on the screen and I knew she was there.”
    “Did she talk about her rape?”
    “No. She just listened. We’d type hellos to her. And she’d acknowledge the greetings. But she wouldn’t talk about herself. It’s as if she was afraid to. Or just too ashamed to say anything.”
    “So you don’t know that she
was
raped.”
    “I know she was.”
    “How?”
    “Because Elena Ortiz was treated in this emergency room.”
    He stared at her. “You found her record?”
    She nodded. “It occurred to me that she might have needed medical treatment after the attack. This is the closest hospital to her address. I checked our hospital computer. It has the name of every patient seen in this E.R. Her name was there.” She stood up. “I’ll show you her