by Mike Markel
“You read up on him. Is he dirty?”
Ryan sighed. “Can’t really say.”
“Why not? You said he had some NCAA violations at his old school, right?”
“Every program has some violations. And most of them can occur without a coach’s knowledge—certainly without his consent.”
I stopped climbing. Ryan turned to face me. “But you did the research. You know what the NCAA did, don’t you?”
“I do.” He nodded. “I took notes.”
“Well, what kind of shit was he into?”
“There are a lot of minor violations. Failure to report recruiting expenses properly, contacting prospects at the wrong times. That sort of thing.”
“Anything major?”
Ryan pulled his skinny notebook out of his inside jacket pocket and thumbed through it for a second. “The athletics department at Baxter’s former university was accused of paying housing security deposits totaling over twenty-thousand dollars for student-athletes. That case took three years to resolve. The team received two years of probation, lost three football scholarships and twelve recruiting days the next year, and had to vacate the wins in those games in which those student-athletes competed. And the school was fined ten-thousand dollars.”
“Anything else?”
“Fourteen players were found to be ineligible because they were not in good academic standing.”
“Lousy grades?”
“Worse than that. A professor set up these special courses that only the football players could take. The NCAA said the courses were phony: no work, high grades.”
“The coach admitted all that stuff?”
“He admitted it happened, not that he was responsible.”
“He was the boss. How could he not be responsible?”
“It’s called plausible deniability. The lower-level guys read the signals he’s sending out—about what he’ll tolerate and what he won’t. Then they do what they think he’s okay with. But they don’t tell him what they’re doing, so if they get caught, the coach can say—honestly—that he didn’t know about it. I’m not saying that happened; I’m saying that’s how it could have happened.”
“In other words, he can cheat but still be honest, at least technically.”
“That’s right.”
“The program got dinged bad for those violations?”
“Yes, they did,” Ryan said. “But the biggest penalty, from the coach’s point of view, at least, was that the president lost faith in athletics, decided to focus more on academics.”
“Which was why Coach Baxter decided to leave?”
“We’ll ask him.”
“All right.” We started back up the stairs. “If we get into technical stuff, I need you to take the lead. I have no idea how football works.”
“I got it.” He smiled. “I’ll get him to talk.”
We reached the third floor and entered the football office, where Helen, the secretary, looked up at us. “Let me see if the coach is in.” She picked up her phone and started talking in a voice so soft I couldn’t make out what she was saying. “The coach will be right out.” She pointed to a couch and a couple of chairs.
It was less than a minute before Coach Andy Baxter greeted us in the reception area. “Pleased to meet you both.” He gave us a boyish smile, but his dark, intense eyes were anything but carefree. His dark hair was thick and wavy, brushed straight back. He was a few inches over six feet, with a slim build. He wore a navy sport coat with an open-necked yellow knit shirt and tan chinos. When he shook my hand, I noticed his fingernails were bitten down severely, with dried blood in the corners. “Why don’t we head back to my office?”
We followed him down the hall, and he invited us in. His office was a good twenty feet square. The far wall was a window overlooking the practice facility. One side of the office was dominated by a large oak desk with two wide computer screens. On the screens were game videos, paused. On the other side of the office sat a conference table, a small couch and some soft chairs, and bookcases full of game balls and a dozen trophies. Coach Baxter gestured for us to sit. We took the couch; he took one of the soft chairs. He lifted his right leg and rested the ankle on his left knee. The left foot started tapping.
“Thanks for making the time to see us, Coach Baxter,” I said. “We won’t take up much of your time. We’ve got some bad news about one of your former players: a man named Lake Williams.”
Andy Baxter nodded. “Carl Davis called me, just a little while ago.” He shook his head. “It’s a terrible thing. Just terrible.”
“You recruited him, is that correct?”
He nodded. “I had tremendous hopes for that boy. He had a rare talent. He didn’t understand football when he got here—his films from junior college were a mess. But he had a sense of where the ball was going to be, which way to look back to pick it up, what the defender was going to do. You can’t coach that. You can coach technique, but not that kind of instinct.”
I said, “Max Thomas told us he rushed the ACL rehab.”
“Yeah, he did.” Coach Baxter’s foot tapped quickly. “You have to remember, he was twenty-one, twenty-two. He was playing beautifully. He already had it all planned out: the Combine, then an early draft, a signing bonus. He wanted to put up some more numbers. I did everything I could—all of us did—to help him understand why he needed to go slow. But slow wasn’t in his vocabulary.”
“What can you tell us about the rape allegation against him?”
“Very little,” he said. “I was informed, of course, that an allegation had been made. That’s policy. Unfortunately, we’ll get an allegation almost every year.”
I think that last sentence was meant to suggest the allegations were bogus. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t meant to say his players were rapists. “Did you know the student who made the allegation?”
Coach Baxter exhaled and shook his head. “I don’t remember who it was.”
“It was a cheerleader.”
He nodded. “That’s right. I remember that now.”
“How did that case ever resolve?”
“I think she withdrew the allegation. Something like that.”
“Did you kick Lake off the team because of the rape allegation?”
“Not at all. I believe he had academic issues. The scholarship was withdrawn for his academics, I think.”
“Coach Baxter,” Ryan said, “had you seen Lake Williams recently?”
“Not since he left the team.” He picked repeatedly at the corner of his right thumbnail with his index finger. He glanced quickly at his thumb, then wiped away a drop of blood with another finger.
“Do you know anyone who would want to hurt him?” Ryan said.
“No, I … Why are you asking that? Do you think someone might have killed him?”
“It’s early in the investigation,” I said. “We don’t know yet.”
“I can’t imagine anyone associated with the team—players or staff—would want to hurt him. He was a good guy. Everyone would have wanted to help him.”
His phone rang. “Do you want to get that?”
He brushed it aside. “It’ll go to voicemail.”
I glanced at Ryan to see if he wanted to ask some questions, like he said he would, but he shook me off. I stood, and Ryan did too. “Okay, Coach Baxter.” I extended my hand to shake. “Thanks very much for talking with us.” Then I handed him a card. “Please get in touch with me if you have any more information you think could help us.”
“Of course, Detective.”
Ryan turned on a medium-strength smile and pointed to the big window overlooking the practice field. “This is quite a setup you’ve got here.”
“It’s the best in the state.” Coach Baxter returned the smile, glad to get onto a happier topic. “You should see the faces of the recruits when they get inside—when they see the whole complex, in fact. If we can just get the kids on campus, we’re halfway home in signing them.”
Ryan said, �
��Coach Baxter, if you can give us another minute. I’ve been reading up on the NCAA—the divisions, all the technical information. It’s way beyond my understanding; I’m just a casual fan. Can you help us understand your decision to come to Central Montana?” Ryan took his notebook out, opened it up, and flipped some pages. “You used to coach at Arkansas Southern, which is FBS—have I got that right?”
Coach Baxter put on a friendly expression. I could see he would be good with non-football people. “Yes.” He smiled indulgently. “I see you’ve done your homework.”
“FBS is like the major leagues, if I understand it correctly. And you had a strong record there. You were really building up the program.” Ryan put on a quizzical expression. “Now, CMSU is FCS.” He glanced down at his notebook again. “FCS is less prestigious than FBS, correct? More like Triple-A in baseball. Can you help us understand why you wanted to come here?”
I didn’t quite get what Ryan was doing. He knew college football inside and out, but for some reason he was pretending to be as clueless as I was.
Coach Baxter nodded. “Fair question. I got that a lot when Pat and I made our decision eight years ago.” He ran his hand through his neatly trimmed hair. “You’re right, we were making good progress at Arkansas Southern. But they had a new administration there, and the president wanted to go in a different direction.”
“Which direction was that?” I said.
“Down in Arkansas, football is a religion, but the president decided not to make the changes that would have enabled them to become truly competitive—”
I said, “Such as?”
“They weren’t willing to do what it took to be an FBS powerhouse or to ever make it to a stronger conference. They wanted to put the money into academics, which I totally respect. So, we decided—my wife and I—that we weren’t going to be able to pursue our own professional goals there.”
“Did she work in the program, too?” I said. Halfway through the question I realized he might see it as obnoxious, which it was, so I put on a wide-eyed, ditzy expression.
Andy Baxter looked at me for a moment, not sure how to take my question. “No. Not officially, at least. Coaching a college football team is too big for one person. For me and most other coaches I’ve known, the spouses do a heck of a lot of work. There are so many PR responsibilities that go along with coaching—if I spoke to every group that invited me, I wouldn’t have a minute to coach. So, from my point of view, without my wife’s support and encouragement—and about thirty or forty unpaid hours a week of work for the team and the university—I couldn’t do the job.” He wore the self-satisfied smile that some guys wear when they praise their wives. He put his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels. “We’re partners in this, all the way.”
Puke-inducing comments like that don’t necessarily mean he’s cheating on her. Not necessarily. It could just be the sort of thing that local bigshots say at donor dinners, and he thought he’d use it on me and Ryan.
I noticed that Ryan was wearing a bland, approving smile. I’d have to talk with him about why he had decided not to lay out chapter and verse on this guy’s NCAA violations. In the meantime, however, I thought I’d give the coach one last chance to tell us about them.
“Coach Baxter, I do know football is real big down South. Why do you think the college decided to focus on academics rather than make a big push in football? Did you have any problems with the NCAA?”
Andy Baxter shifted his weight and waved the idea away with his hand. “Every program … do you know much about the NCAA, Detective?”
“Almost nothing,” I said. “My husband’ll talk your ear off about it, but I don’t follow the game.”
“Well, it’s quite a complicated relationship—between the college and the NCAA, I mean. The NCAA has a rule book—more than four-hundred pages—describing what a school can and cannot do, I mean, with recruiting, eligibility, financial aid, amateurism, benefits, practice-season limitations. The list goes on and on. The vast majority of the violations are just oversights, slip-ups. The school self-reports the violation, then the NCAA reads the report and imposes a penalty, usually a nominal fine. A few hundred bucks, most of the time.”
I said, “So it’s no big deal, you’re saying.”
“That’s right. Most of the time, it’s nothing. For instance, if a prospect comes to town and we pick him up at the airport and drive him to campus, we have to report the value of the ride in from the airport. If the prospect couch surfs at one of the student-athlete’s apartments, we have to report the value of that overnight accommodation properly.”
There are two ways to approach a guy who’s bullshitting you. One way is to signal that you know he’s doing it. You lose the element of surprise, but you might throw him off his rhythm so he implicates himself or gives you another angle to follow up. If Coach Baxter cheats on the NCAA rules—and you show him you know it—he might reach out to the staff members who help him cheat, and one of them might slip up and do something stupid.
The other way to deal with a bullshitter is to seem dumber than you are, then hope he’ll underestimate you and make a careless mistake. For some reason I hadn’t yet figured out, Ryan wanted to go dumb. So I was going to follow his lead. “Wow,” I said, “that’s kinda petty, isn’t it?”
He smiled. “That’s the NCAA.”
“Coach Baxter.” Ryan smiled. “Can you get us the game films for the years Lake played?”
The corner of Baxter’s mouth tightened up, but he covered it up almost instantly with a smile. “Why would you want them?” He picked at his right thumbnail.
“I’d like to see Lake Williams play. I never saw him.”
“How can that help you?”
“I’m not sure yet. Can you get them? They’re all digital, is that correct?”
“Yeah, they are.” Coach Baxter paused. “I’ll have them copied to a drive for you.”
“Thank you,” Ryan said. “We’ll arrange to pick them up. One other thing: your injury reports. Can we look at the reports for the years Lake played?”
Coach Baxter shook his head. “We’re not required to submit them to the NCAA. We don’t archive them. They’re discarded after five years.”
“Okay, thanks, anyway.” Ryan nodded.
I turned to Ryan to see if he had any other questions. He shook his head.
“All right, Coach Baxter.” I gave him a professional smile. “Thanks again for your time.”
He nodded, and Ryan and I left his office and walked silently toward the staircase.
“What just happened?” I said to him.
“A lot of things, Karen.” He wore an innocent smile. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“Why were you such a little girl in there?”
“I find gender-based stereotyping highly offensive, Detective.” Decent people like Ryan are especially good at faking righteous indignation. “I’d already figured out he’s a liar.”
“How’s that?” I said.
“That business about Lake and his ACL surgery. How Lake rushed the rehab? A head coach decides whether the player is ready to come back. He decides whether the player is ready to even practice. He decides everything. For an elite player like Lake, the coach is going to work closely with the medical staff to monitor the player’s status.”
“But if the player wants to get back in, he’ll lie to the coach and the docs.”
“That’s right, he will. But the fitness staff, the coaching staff, the doctors—they know the player is going to lie. So they don’t rely on what he says. They can tell from looking at the leg’s range of motion as he walks or jogs around the practice field. They know that if the player comes back too soon, he could risk catastrophic injury. It doesn’t matter whether they like the kid. Even if they’re even one percent unsure he’s ready, they’re not going to let him play.”
“So the coach is a liar?”
“Way I’d put it,” Ryan said, “no matter what went wrong down in Arkansas, it w
asn’t the coach’s fault. If someone paid for the players’ rooms inappropriately, it was someone in Housing or on the football staff. If the players were taking phony courses, it was on the instructor. It wasn’t the head coach. You noticed he said Lake flunked out?”
“Yeah.”
“You remember what Mary Dawson said?”
“Uh …”
“She said he lost his football scholarship. So the coach isn’t even taking responsibility for throwing him off the team. Lake just flunked out—it’s not the coach’s fault. That’s what I mean. So I just decided not to confront him.”
“Okay,” I said. “We didn’t have any reason to confront him now, anyway.”
“That’s the way I figured it. We’ll just hold onto that card. When it comes time to play it, we will.”
“So why do you want to see the game films and the injury reports?”
“If Lake was playing hurt,” Ryan said, “I’ll see it, and we’ll know the coach wasn’t looking out for his players.”
“And the injury reports—is he telling the truth that he tossed them?”
“No. All of that would be archived. What the coach was saying is since the NCAA doesn’t require that schools submit them, he can tell us they no longer exist. What are we going to do? We can’t subpoena them; there’s no probable cause.”
“Which means you really want to see them.”
“I really do.”
Chapter 12
My phone screen read, Harold Breen, Rawlings Police Department. I hit Talk. “Harold.”
“Karen, we’re ready to talk to you about Mr. Williams.”
“Did a guy named Max Thomas come in and ID the body?”
“Little while ago.”
“You posted the autopsy report?”
“Yes, I did. But I want to show you something in the lab. Can you stop by?”
“Ten minutes?”
“See you,” the medical examiner said.
Ryan and I made it back to headquarters and down to the basement. We walked into Harold’s cold, creepy lab. There was a new corpse on a steel table, wheeled off to the side. Robin, the evidence tech, was looking at some notes on a clipboard. A woman I didn’t recognize was seated in front of a microscope on the desk that ran the length of the wall. Harold was standing next to her, his hands on his hips, talking softly to her.