Unbelievable (Movie Tie-In) by T. Christian Miller & Ken Armstrong

Author:T. Christian Miller & Ken Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2019-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

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IT WAS THE strangest case that Lakewood detective Aaron Hassell had ever been assigned. He had been called out to an attempted rape at a home in a nicer neighborhood. The caller, a woman named Lilly, reported that a man in a black mask had attacked her while she was sleeping. When she called out for help, the man had gone to another room to check if anyone was home. Lilly seized the chance to escape. She dove out a window above her bed. She fell seven feet and landed headfirst, cracking her ribs, breaking a vertebra in her back. In intense pain, she’d staggered next door to her neighbors’ house and banged on a door to wake them.

When police arrived, though, they found no signs of forced entry at the house. No pry marks on the doors. No windowpanes smashed. The doors were all locked. So, too, the windows. Hassell talked with four neighbors, none of whom had seen or heard anything unusual. Technicians recovered no DNA. “There’s no evidence anywhere,” Hassell thought.

That wasn’t quite true. Shimamoto had turned up the shoe and glove prints. They didn’t match anything that belonged to Lilly. But neither did they point to any suspects—or even confirm that an attack had taken place. A gardener took care of Lilly’s yard. Workmen came to the house every now and again. And she had an elderly male friend who occasionally stayed at the home. Any of them could have left the prints.

Lilly presented her own mystery. She was a free spirit. She made all sorts of unusual requests. She called Hassell to report that since the attempted rape, her cat had scratched at people wearing black boots. Perhaps the police should be looking for someone with black boots. “She felt this was information that could be useful to the investigation,” he wrote. She had a Russian artist friend draw a sketch of the attacker based on her description and asked Hassell to distribute it to the press. The drawing was of a man with a mask covering his face, except for a slit showing blue eyes and blond eyebrows. There were no other features that would help a person recognize the man in the sketch. Hassell declined to hand it out. On another occasion, she asked Hassell to canvass gyms around Denver in search of a well-built, six-foot-tall white man with blue eyes. “That’s going to be a lot of guys,” he told her. More than two months after calling police, she suddenly remembered that a strange wireless network had popped up on her computer before the attack. It was named “Pure Evil,” she said.

Finally, she asked Hassell for a hypnotist to interview her in a trance state. Hassell contacted an investigator for the Jefferson County district attorney’s office who was a licensed hypnotherapist. The trio met on a windy day in October at the Lakewood police station, some three months after the attack. The investigator began the session with a common technique to induce hypnosis.

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