“Neither one. She's scared and shaken up, but she's lucid. Very much so. I want her to go to the hospital today, for an exam, now in fact.” She didn't want too many hours to elapse before they did it.

“What for? Drug screen?”

“If you like. I don't think that's the issue here. I want a pelvic.”

“Why?” He looked surprised. “What are you after?” He knew Dr. York and she was usually pretty sensible, though every now and then she went off the deep end, when she got carried away over one of her patients.

“I've got a couple of theories here. I want to know if she was defending herself. Seventeen-year-old girls don't usually go around shooting their fathers. Not from homes like this one.”

“That's bullshit, and you know it, York,” he said cynically. “What about the fourteen-year-old shooter we had last year who took out her whole family, including grandma and four younger sisters? You gonna tell me that was self-defense too?”

“That was different, Stan. I read the reports. John Adams was naked and so was she, and there was come all over the sheets. You can't deny it was a possibility.”

“Yes, I can, with this guy. I knew him. Straight-arrow as they come, and the nicest guy you'll ever meet. You'd have liked him.” He gave her a look, which she ignored. He loved to tease her. She was very good-looking, and she came from a pretty fancy family in Chicago. He loved to accuse her of “slumming.” But she never fooled around on the job, and he also knew that she had a regular guy who was a doctor. But it didn't hurt to razz her a little. She was always good-humored and pleasant to work with. She was smart too, and Dooley respected her for it. “Let me tell you something, Doctor, this guy would not have been fucking his kid. He just wouldn't. Trust me. Maybe he was jacking off. What do I know?”

“That's not why she shot him,” Molly York said coolly.

“Maybe he told her she couldn't have the keys to the car. My own kids get nuts when I tell them that. Maybe he hated her boyfriend. Trust me, it's not what you think here. This is not self-defense. She killed him.”

“We'll see, Stan. We'll see. Just do me a favor, get her over to Mercy General in the next hour. I'm writing an order.”

“You're terrific. And we'll get her there. Okay? Happy?”

“Thrilled. You're a great guy.” She smiled at him.

“Tell that to the chief,” he grinned at her. He liked her, but he didn't believe a word of her self-defense theory. She was clutching at straws. John Adams just wasn't that kind of guy. No one in Watseka would have believed it, no matter what Molly York thought, or the hospital told her.

Two women officers came to pick Grace up in her cell half an hour later, handcuffed her again, and drove her to Mercy General in a small van with grilles on the windows. They didn't even talk to her. They just chatted to each other about the prisoners they'd transferred the day before, and the movie they were going to see that night, and the vacation one of them was saving up for in Colorado. And Grace was just as glad. She didn't have anything to say to them anyway. She was just wondering what they were going to do to her at the hospital. They had a locked ward they took her to in an elevator that went up directly from the garage, and when they got there, they uncuffed her and left her with a resident and an attendant. And they let Grace know in no uncertain terms that if she didn't behave herself they would handcuff her again and call a guard to control her.

“You got that?” the attendant asked her bluntly, and Grace nodded.

They didn't bother explaining anything to her. They just went down a list of tests that Dr. York had ordered. They took her temperature first, and her blood pressure, checked her eyes and ears and throat, and then listened to her heart.

They did a urine test, and an extensive blood test, checking for illnesses as well as drug screens, and then they told her to undress and stand naked in front of them, and they checked her over carefully for bruises. She had a number of them that caught their interest, there were two on her breasts, several on her arms, and one on her buttocks, and then in spite of her efforts to conceal them from them, they discovered a bad one on her inner thigh where her father had grabbed her and squeezed her. It was high up, and led to another that surprised them further. They took photographs of all of them, despite her protests, and wrote extensive notes about them. She was crying by then, and objecting to everything they were doing.

“Why are you doing this? You don't have to. I admitted I shot him, why do you have to take pictures?” They had taken several graphic ones of her crotch, but there were two bad bruises hidden there and some lesions, and they told her that if she didn't cooperate they would tie her down and take the pictures. It was humiliating beyond words, but there was nothing she could do to stop them.

And then, as they put the camera down, the resident told her to hop on the table. Until then, he had scarcely spoken to her. Most of the directions had been from the attendant, who was a very disagreeable woman. Both of them ignored Grace totally, and referred to various parts of her as though they were looking at them in a butcher shop, and she weren't even a human being.

The resident was putting on rubber gloves by then, and covering his fingers with sterile jelly. He pointed at the stirrups and offered Grace a paper drape to cover herself with. She grabbed it gratefully, but she didn't get on the table.

“What are you doing?” she asked in a terrified voice.

“Haven't you ever had a pelvic?” He looked surprised. She was seventeen after all, and a good-looking girl, it was hard to believe she was a virgin. But if she was, he'd know in a minute.

“No, I …” Her mother had gotten her birth control pills four years before, and she'd never been to a doctor for an examination. No one knew for certain that she wasn't a virgin, and she didn't see what difference it made now. Her father was dead, and she had admitted that she had shot him. So why put her through this? What right did they have to do this? She felt like an animal, and she started to cry again as she clutched the paper drape and stared at them, as the female attendant threatened to tie her down. There was no choice except to agree to do it. She got up on the table, with shaking legs, and she pressed her knees tightly together, as she lay back and put her feet in the stirrups. But given everything that had happened to her, it wasn't the worst thing that she'd ever been through.

He made a lot of notes, and put fingers into her at least four or five times, shining a light so close to her that she could feel it warm her bottom. Then he in-serted an instrument into her, and did all the same things again. This time he took a smear and made a slide, which he set carefully on a tray on the table. But he said nothing to Grace about his findings.

“Okay,” he said indifferently to her, “you can get dressed now.”

“Thank you,” she said hoarsely. She had no idea what they'd found, or what he'd written, but he had made no comment on whether or not she was a virgin, and she was still naive enough not to be entirely sure if he could really see the difference.

She was dressed and ready to go five minutes later, and this time two men ferried her back to her cell at Central Station, and she was left alone with the women in her cell until after dinner. Two of them had been released on bail, they had been there for drug sales and prostitution and their pimp had come to get them, and of the other two one was in for grand theft auto, and the other for possession of a large amount of cocaine. Grace was the only one being held for murder, and everyone seemed to leave her alone, as though they knew that she didn't want to be bothered.

She had just eaten a barely edible, very small, overcooked hamburger, sitting on a sea of wet spinach, while trying not to notice that the cell reeked of urine, when a guard came to the cell, opened it and pointed at her, and led her back to the room where she had met with Molly York that morning.

The young doctor was back, still wearing jeans, after a long day at the hospital where she worked, and then in her office. It was fully twelve hours later.

“Hello,” Grace said cautiously. It was nice to see a familiar face, but she still felt as though the young psychiatrist represented danger.

“How was your day?” Grace shrugged with a small smile. How could it have been? “Did you call your father's partner?”

“Not yet,” she said almost inaudibly. “I'm not sure what to say to him. He and my father were really good friends.”

“Don't you think he'll want to help you?”

“I don't know.” But she didn't think so.

Molly was looking at her pointedly as she asked the next question. “Do you have any friends at all, Grace? Anyone you could turn to?” She suspected long before Grace spoke that she didn't. If she had, maybe none of this would have happened. Molly knew without asking her that she was isolated. She had no one in her life except her parents. And they had done enough to ruin anyone's life, or at least her father had. At least that was what she suspected. “Did your parents have any friends you were close to?”

“No,” Grace said thoughtfully. They really didn't have any close friends, they didn't want anyone to get too close to their dark secret. “My father knew everyone. And my mom was kind of shy …” And she had never wanted anyone to know that she was being beaten. “Everyone loved my dad, but he wasn't really close to anyone.” That in itself made Molly wonder about him.

“And what about you? Any real close friends at school?” Grace only shook her head in answer. “Why not?”

“I don't know. No time, I guess. I had to go home and take care of my mom every day,” Grace said, still not looking at her.