Ten years earlier...
8:13 am. A police cruiser is double parked in front of the twenty-two-story Marriott hotel at Broadway and Market Streets in downtown St. Louis. From my fourteenth-floor office across the street, I can see two tiny figures emerge from the car and walk with purposeful strides toward the entrance. The officers disappear into the hotel lobby. I raise my head and look into her room, less than 70 feet away. She is still on the bed, mostly nude and in a fetal position. The man is gone. My hands are shaking. I drop the binoculars.
Eleven minutes earlier, I had walked into my office, closed the door, set my briefcase on the desk, and took a sip of caramel macchiato. I walked to the window overlooking Broadway and Market and scanned the high-rise Marriott hotel for early morning activity. Typically, by 8 am on a Monday, most hotel guests have already left their rooms. Open curtains usually reveal vacancies with unmade beds. Other rooms are shielded with closed curtains or are obscured by the shadow of my building. Sometimes, usually in the afternoon, I can see children jumping on beds or standing on the windowsills, faces pressed to the windows. (I wonder what it would be like to be here at night. The lighting would be perfect.) My office is in a building that is twenty-four stories of mirrored glass—two-way mirrors really. Many guests at this hotel apparently do not think this through. A twenty-four-story mirrored building is all windows. You can't see me, but I can see you. If hotel guests realized this, I wouldn't see women and men standing in the windows, nude, looking at the St. Louis skyline, taking photos of the Gateway Arch.
At 8:03 I saw movement. A white man, long brown hair (dreads maybe), beard, dirty plaid shirt, pushing a woman to the bed, ripping off her robe. He turned her over, doggy style, holding her arms behind her, thrusting violently, mad with lust. She struggled against him, screaming, shaking her head wildly, beautiful red hair whipping back and forth. Then, apparently giving up or going into shock, she went limp. The rapist is unfazed. His rhythm does not change. I look down and begin counting from the concrete patio on the third floor. "Three, four, five," I whisper. "Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, fourteen. . ." I count over from the left. "Fourteen sixteen, fourteen seventeen, fourteen eighteen. Room 1418. Oh my god."
I pick up the phone on my desk. I dial 9-1-1.
"Emergency nine-one-one. What is your emergency?" The dispatcher's voice belongs to a woman. A smoker, I think. She seems irritated. I pause. She speaks again, this time putting a stress on the word is. "What IS your emergency?"
"Yes. Hello. A woman is being raped at the Marriott hotel on Broadway. Fourteenth floor."
"Sir, how do you know this?"
I pause again. "I can see it from my office across the street. Please send the police."
