Mercer and I exchanged glances. “When, exactly?”

“Not when it happened. Not for more than a month. But the whole thing had a much more profound impact on her than she had anticipated. It began to affect her work, even her relationships with other people here.”

“And that’s why she discussed the rape with you?”

“In confidence, yes. Because she was conflicted about what to do. I’ll walk you through the areas she spent time in, Ms. Cooper. These buildings are a series of chapels and gardens and arcades. As beautiful as they are, they’re rather foreboding, with statues of grotesques and effigies of the dead all around. We don’t get the heavy foot traffic that the main Metropolitan museum gets. It can be fairly-shall I say-haunting up here on our hilltop, especially late at night when there’s no one to keep you company. I believe Katrina was attacked about a year ago, am I right?”

“In June.”

“Well, one night in August, while she was working alone on a sketch of a stone monster in the vault of the Langon Chapel, she was startled by one of the guards who had come in to do a routine security check. She hadn’t heard his footsteps, I guess, and she looked up to see him standing over her. She let out a scream. She scared him as much as she scared herself.”

“Didn’t she know him?”

“That’s just it. He had changed out of his uniform to go off duty, and came back to check out everything one more time. Katrina had never seen him in jeans and a T-shirt, with a baseball cap on. She didn’t recognize him. The next morning, she was in at the crack of dawn, waiting for me, to explain what had happened.”

“Why?”

“She wanted to quit. She felt horribly guilty. The guard was an African-American, and she knew she had insulted him terribly by responding to his appearance with fright. That’s the day she told me that she had been sexually assaulted.

“And she told me how ashamed she was, because she kept reacting with fear every time she saw an unfamiliar black face, anxious that it was the man who attacked her.”

That kind of response was all too common. Victims whose assailants were unapprehended had a generalized terror, irrational even to them, that the next stranger they encountered, if he was the same race as their rapist, might be the person who was responsible for the crime. They knew he was out there somewhere, and they started at the sight of any person they didn’t know.

“Did she tell you whether she could identify her rapist?”

“According to what she toldme, he’d been wearing a ski mask. That’s what had her so strung out. Katrina had no idea if the rapist was someone she’d ever seen before or not. His black hands and neck were all she saw clearly. So here was poor Lloyd, who’d just gone back into the chapel one more time to make sure she was okay that night, and she jumped out of her skin when she saw him.”

“Did she quit?”

Bellinger answered softly, “I wouldn’t let her. I asked her to tell me the story of the attack, and she did. I spoke to Lloyd about it that very same day, and he sought her out to try to calm her. Told her he understood completely.

“Quite frankly, I thought a lot of it had to do with the fact that she was raised in South Africa. Katrina tried very hard to convince herself that she had no prejudices or racial bias. Her family had been in Cape Town for generations, and she talked from time to time about the horrors of apartheid on a society. I’m not sure she could ever have been responsible for testifying in a case that would have sent a black man to jail, no matter what he had done to her.”

“But she did resign eventually?”

“Several months later, just around the Christmas holidays. I found her note in the file,” he said, walking back to his desk. “She was anxious to get out of town before the New Year. If I remember correctly, there was a big ice storm predicted right about the time she was supposed to leave. It didn’t surprise us that she wanted to get out before it stranded her here.”

Mike Chapman rolled his eyes at me. “Yeah, Ms. Cooper decided to hibernate during that one, right? It was a killer.”

I had tried to put the images of last December’s frigid encounter with a greedy murderer out of my thoughts. Mercer got us back on track. “Between August, when she told you about the rape, and the end of the year, did you notice any change in her behavior?”

“Everyone I knew had a change in behavior, Mr. Wallace. After September eleventh.”

I breathed in and bit my lip, remembering the devastating aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

“Maybe that’s why I minimized Katrina’s distress. We were all so incredulous. So frightened and self-absorbed. She just never pulled out of it. Things like that episode with Lloyd. And her lack of spirit, her general malaise.”

“What malaise?”

“I suppose I don’t have to tell you three investigators about what occurs. The rape changed Katrina’s whole life. She didn’t trust anyone after that. Wasn’t able to stay here late and work. Had trouble getting to the Cloisters, because she didn’t want to walk or bike through the park, yet she didn’t have the money for cab fare every day. What is it called? PTSD?”

Post-traumatic stress disorder. Many victims of violent crime suffer from it for months or even years after an attack. Symptoms vary widely, from sleeplessness and eating disorders to weight loss and dysfunctions of every kind. There are scores of survivors whose recovery is fast and full; they never forget the attack but have the emotional and physical resources to move forward. There are far too many others without the support system to regain the stability of their former lives for months or even years after the occurrence of the crime.

“Who told you about that?”

“Her counselor, actually. As soon as Katrina told me, I asked her whether I could speak with the woman who was helping her deal with the rape.”

“Do you know who she is? Her name, I mean?” The medical record in the file Mercer had seen had a check mark next to the box that said Katrina Grooten had refused an appointment for follow-up psychological care.

Bellinger was still standing at his desk, flipping through his Rolodex cards. “Loselli. Harriet Loselli. Would you like her number?”

“I got that,” Mike said. “What I’d like is to hear her talk for once without that miserable, whiny, you-cops-are-all-insensitive-bastards recording that goes off from her weaselly little mouth whenever one of us hits the emergency room with a victim.”

There were superb rape crisis counseling units at hospitals all over the city, run by experienced psychologists and social workers, staffed with volunteers who went out on cases at all hours of the day and night. How did Katrina wind up with Harriet? The most obnoxious, ignorant, and self-centered of the crew, she was unlikely to have dealt with the depth of Katrina Grooten’s problems and concerns.

“Did you actually speak with Loselli?”

“Yes, Katrina gave her permission to talk with me.”

“About these psychological reactions?”

“Not really. My main concern was her physical condition.”

Mercer put down his pen and we all focused on Bellinger. “What do you mean?”

“From the time she disclosed the rape to me in August, I began to keep an eye out for her. When I knew she was going to be working late, I sent her home in a car. If I noticed she wasn’t eating, I’d bring an extra sandwich for lunch. By midfall, I’d certainly say by October, I didn’t think she looked very well at all.”

“Did you speak with her about it?”

“I don’t know about your office, Ms. Cooper, but we’ve got pretty strict institutional guidelines about sexual harassment. Puts a supervisor in kind of a catch-22 position. ‘You’re not looking very well today, Katrina. Seems to me like you’ve dropped a few pounds. That old spark I used to see fly when we discussed the one-point-three-million-dollar purchase we expected the museum to make on a tapestry from Bordeaux, it just isn’t there in your eyes anymore.’ Uh-uh. Only gets a guy in trouble. I talked it over with my wife and she told me it was none of my business. Leave it alone.”