Closer Than You Know

by Brad Parks

  Dansby still didn’t understand that it wasn’t considered a leak when the media outlet was either quoting you by name or putting you on camera.

  He also didn’t realize that by diving in front of the cameras—consistently upstaging Sheriff Jason Powers and his deputies—Dansby was sowing discontent in the ranks that would be harvested someday. Amy had close working relationships with several of the deputies. They were all waiting for the day when the guy they derisively referred to as “Dapper Dansby” got his.

  “That’s not even the best part,” Dansby continued, and Amy cringed, because there was no “best part” about a criminal conspiracy to distribute narcotics. “The woman who had all this stuff, she’s a mom. The guys at The News Leader are already calling her ‘Coke Mom.’ I think this thing is going to have some legs. It’s got viral potential on social media. And TV will love it.”

  “I’m sure,” Amy said, eyeing her own TV, wondering what she had already missed. “But after you get your face time, don’t you think we should give this thing to the feds? That’s a lot of coke.”

  There was no specific amount of drugs that automatically made a case federal. It was up to the local commonwealth’s attorney. But half a kilo was usually more than enough. Larger amounts of product indicated larger distribution networks, which almost always crossed state lines.

  “I know,” Dansby said. “But I want to keep this one. I think this is going to end up grabbing a lot of eyeballs, and I want us to get points for it.”

  Dansby was constantly referencing “points,” as if the electorate kept a giant scoreboard somewhere. It made Amy want to hit him with a frying pan.

  “Plus,” he added, “she’s white.”

  Amy felt her eyes bulge. “What does that matter?”

  “Well, after Mookie Myers, you know.”

  Demetrius “Mookie” Myers was the biggest bust of Dansby’s three-plus-year tenure, the largest cocaine dealer the Shenandoah valley had seen since the bad old days of the late ’80s. The case was now in the early stages of the appeals process, but it had been a solid win for the prosecution and had clearly enhanced young Dansby’s reputation.

  “No, I don’t know,” Amy said.

  “There’s talk in the black community we only go hard after the black dealers,” Dansby said. “I want to make an example out of this woman, show everyone we’re equal-opportunity hard-asses. Grand jury meets on Friday, right? What do you think of going for direct indictment?”

  Direct indictment was a kind of prosecutorial shortcut. If a suspect was arrested on a normal warrant, the case first went to General District Court for arraignment, counsel determination, and a bond hearing. Two months later, it got a preliminary hearing, where a judge certified it to a grand jury, which then handed down an indictment.

  Direct indictment skipped all those steps. Often used in drug cases, it took the matter straight to the grand jury. The clerk of court then issued a capias, which resulted in the defendant’s arrest.

  The only risk was that until the grand jury met, the defendant was not in custody. For that reason, Amy preferred to use direct indictment only when suspects didn’t yet know the law was onto them—not after a search warrant had already been executed.

  “You’re sure you want to give this woman two days to take off?” Amy asked. “I’ve got to think anyone with that much cocaine lying around has enough cash stashed away to disappear for as long as she needs to.”

  “She’s not going anywhere,” Dansby said with his usual breezy certainty. “She’s got a kid. Social Services grabbed him already. She’ll stick around as long as we’ve got the kid.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “Don’t worry. We got this. Anyhow, I told Powers you were going to start working on this in the morning. If we’re going to put this before grand jury on Friday, we’ve got to get cracking.”

  Amy felt her spine straighten. “I can’t. I’ve got that interview with Daphne Hasper tomorrow morning.”

  “Daphne Hasper?”

  “I sent you a memo about her,” she said. “She’s one of the whisper victims.”

  This was Amy’s other obsession, the one that actually mattered: a series of unsolved sexual assaults in the valley over nearly two decades. The link between them was that the perpetrator only ever whispered at his victims. There were at least eight cases but perhaps as many as twenty-five or more. No one really knew because no one, besides Amy, had ever dug into the case that hard.

  Dansby usually reacted to Amy’s mentions of the case with anything from apathy to antipathy, depending on his mood. This time it was the former.

  “Oh, that,” Dansby said. “That can wait.”

  “No, it can’t. Not until we get that bastard in prison.”

  “This is more important right now.”

  “You getting a quick scalp for the TV news and some more of those mythical ‘points’ that only you seem to be counting is more important than incarcerating a man who breaks into women’s houses at night and rapes them?”

  “Don’t be overdramatic.”

  “Don’t be an asshole.”

  He paused. He preferred conversations that stayed on script and speeches he could read off a teleprompter.

  The force of Amy’s words had caused Butch to lift his head, which was now tilted.

  “I think,” Dansby said in a measured tone, “Coke Mom is more of a priority.”

  “I’m glad you think so, but I’m not going to cancel this interview.”

  “Except when you say ‘interview,’ you really mean ‘reinterview,’ yes? This is a woman who has already talked to the cops.”

  “When the incident happened, yes. But they didn’t know about the other cases then. And no one has talked to her in years.”

  “If it’s been years, then you can put it off a few days.”

  “No, I can’t. This woman moved out of town a long time ago. She’s only back for a few days visiting family. I have to get her while I can. You have no idea how hard it was to track her down and then convince her to meet with me.”

  “I’m sure you can put her on the shelf for a little while.”

  “For the twelfth time: I can’t,” Amy said. “And I won’t.”

  “I told Jason you would be talking to one of his deputies in the morning.”

  “Great. Jason’s deputy will still be available to me in the afternoon. This woman might not be. I’m not postponing the interview.”

  Amy was nearly yelling into the phone. Butch, who was a notorious conflict avoider, looked at her nervously.

  Dansby finally started fighting back. “You know you work at the pleasure of the commonwealth’s attorney, right? I could fire you anytime I wanted. I’m . . . I’m ordering you to work on Coke Mom tomorrow morning.”

  “You’re ordering me, Aaron? Oh, that’s rich. That’s really rich. Let me ask you something: When’s the last time you prosecuted a DUI?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “Oh, that’s right! Never,” Amy said. “So how about this: We’ve got a bumper crop of drunks scheduled for General District Court on Thursday. Three or four, as I recall. How about I let you prosecute them instead of doing your job for you? Because I think at least two of the defendants have private attorneys and you can be sure the moment they see you, they won’t even think about pleading it out. They’ll smell blood, and they will pick apart every morsel of evidence you try to put forward, if you even know how to present it properly. You’ll lose your Breathalyzer test so fast it’ll make your head spin. Would that pleasure you, Mr. Commonwealth’s Attorney?”

  “Stop . . . stop being—”

  “Oh just wait, I haven’t even told you what you might call ‘the best part.’ I’ll make sure to tip off The News Leader—or, sorry, ‘leak’ it to The News Leader—so they know to have a reporter there. Th
ey usually get those things online pretty fast. By Thursday afternoon, everyone will know Aaron Dansby lets drunks walk free. How does that sound?”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “I would. And I will. Try me.”

  Amy could practically hear Dansby’s butt smacking the wall she had backed him up against.

  “You’ll call Jason tomorrow morning. If his deputy can’t meet with you until tomorrow afternoon, well, whatever,” he said, trying to save face. “And you better damn well be ready on Friday. This thing has to be airtight.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  Then she hung up.

  * * *

  • • •

  Butch was still staring at her.

  “I know, I know, I shouldn’t let him get me that upset,” she said. “But he’s a jerk.”

  Butch licked his nose.

  “I should really stop propping him up the way I do,” she said.

  Except they both knew she never would. She placed the sanctity of the law far above whatever satisfaction she would get from watching a show pony like Dansby get mud on his ribbons.

  Butch put his head back down. He wanted to get back to snuggling. Amy glanced toward the television, where the title sequence was still frozen, beckoning her to cast off her worldly burdens.

  “Sorry, boy,” she said. “I’m just not feeling it.”

  She rose from the couch, eliciting a groan from Butch, and walked into her home office, where several drawers of a filing cabinet were now packed tight with material from this case.

  It had started with an offhand comment from a young sheriff’s deputy a few months after Amy had arrived in Augusta County. There had been a sexual assault in Weyers Cave. A young woman had been attacked by a masked, knife-wielding assailant. His entire monologue—which included a lot of “please,” “thank you,” and “I’m sorry”—had come out in a whisper.

  “Huh, that’s weird,” the deputy had said. “There was another guy in Stuarts Draft a few months ago who whispered at a girl. You think it’s the same guy?”

  Amy checked on the Stuarts Draft case but hadn’t been sure there was a connection. The assailant was described as being both older and larger.

  Nevertheless, Amy filed it away. When a whispering rapist struck again a few months later, she started asking around. One of the older detectives told her he could remember three or four such cases. When she asked why he had never looked into a connection between the cases, all he could say was, “Don’t most rapists whisper?”

  So Amy dove in. It was her good fortune that Jason Powers had been sheriff for seven years and that his father, Allen, had been sheriff for twenty-four years before that. The records were all there. So was the evidence.

  Amy went through every unsolved sexual-assault case she could find, battling dust mites and brushing away cobwebs during long hours in the file room. She worked at night, when her husband, who was a chef at one of Staunton’s many restaurants, was gone anyway. It was a long process. But slowly, methodically, she unearthed evidence of a serial rapist on the loose.

  The first case she found involving a man who whispered to his victim was in 1987, but she dismissed that as an outlier, unconnected to the current-day cases. There was also one in 1997. She wasn’t sure about that one. He was described as talking in a “low voice,” which may or may not have been the same as a whisper.

  There was nothing the next five years, but then there were three hits during a nine-month span at the end of 2002 and early 2003. Then nothing until 2005. Then there was one in 2007 and another in 2008. Just when it seemed the man was picking up steam again, there was nothing until 2010.

  Then he began to strike with more frequency. The cases were separated by a measure of months, not years. She had come up with twenty cases over the previous seven years, plus the seven that came before 2010, not counting the 1987 outlier. They fit roughly the same pattern.

  A masked, glove-wearing white male who was described as being somewhere between five foot nine and six foot two and anywhere between his late teens and his mid-forties—the age had crept up through the years, but it still varied widely—had broken into the home of a woman who lived alone. His assaults mostly took place in the early morning. He threatened her with a knife or gun until she acquiesced to undress and let him penetrate her. Yet he was also unfailingly polite, speaking to his victims in a voice that was later described as a hush, a murmur, or a whisper; and he never actually used either weapon.

  To the profilers, this made him a classic case. He was a power-reassurance rapist, sometimes known as the gentleman rapist, who operated under the delusion that these encounters were somehow romantic. For him, stalking a victim was a twisted kind of courtship, the beginnings of what he saw as a relationship. If the victim resisted or found a way to shatter that romantic spell—by vomiting, peeing on him, or screaming—the power-reassurance rapist often broke off the attack.

  Some power-reassurance rapists were actually caught because they couldn’t resist contacting their victim later. After all, in the bizarre worldview of the power-reassurance rapist, she was like a girlfriend.

  This one was too cagey for that.

  Amy had, so far, uncovered eight cases where the DNA matched one another. That had been a long, hard slog. Forget the television crime dramas, where DNA test results were as readily available—and as quickly produced—as items on the McDonald’s Dollar Menu. In the real world, DNA tests took time. The state lab in Roanoke, where Amy sent evidence, usually returned results in five or six months.

  Many of the earlier cases did not have DNA associated with them, because DNA tests were even less readily available back then. Amy was slowly trying to correct that.

  There were also cases where no DNA had been recovered. The rapist never used a condom but frequently ejaculated on—not inside of—his victims. He was then careful about cleaning up, often taking their bedsheets and clothing with him. Other times, the victim had been unable to resist the urge to take a shower after the assault, or had waited a day or more to report the crime, at which point the physical evidence was gone.

  The other chief obstacle was that if the DNA didn’t match someone already in the system, there was no mechanism in place that automatically compared the DNA in otherwise disconnected unsolved cases. It had to be done by hand, case by case. That’s how the perpetrator had been able to go undetected for so long.

  Based on the scattered pattern of the assaults, Amy’s theory was that the assailant only occasionally visited Augusta County at first, then decided to move there. Perhaps he was a traveling salesman. Or a construction worker. Or a long-haul trucker.

  After she had gotten her third DNA match, Amy had presented the case to Dansby, saying they should take it to the media. If there was a rapist on the loose, the citizens of Augusta County had a right to know about it. Besides, the publicity could help them crack the case—someone might come forward with information or a better description of the assailant.

  Dansby had calmly listened to Amy talk, until he finally realized she not only couldn’t definitively ID the perp, she didn’t even have a suspect. At that point, he had a toddler-like meltdown.

  “Are you trying to ruin my career?” he asked. “We can’t leak it to the media unless we already have the guy.”

  To Dansby, it was the sort of thing that reflected poorly on law enforcement generally, and him specifically: a major menace to public safety at large, mocking the authorities’ inability to apprehend him.

  This resulted in a huge fight, and eventually a compromise. Amy could keep working on the case as long as it didn’t interfere with her other responsibilities, she kept it away from the press, and she didn’t tell any of the victims that they were possibly part of something much larger. As far as the public was concerned, there was no serial rapist terrorizing the Shenandoah valley.

  Amy hated the thought that,
because of this, there were doors being left unlocked, or women leaving themselves unwittingly vulnerable to attack, or evidence going uncollected because she couldn’t appeal to citizenry for help. All because of Aaron Dansby’s political ambitions.

  It was the sort of thing that could make even the most hardened addict forget about Dancing with the Stars.

  FIVE

  As I sat on the ground outside Shenandoah Valley Social Services, my mind was a forest thicket of thoughts, all of them from my tangled past.

  My first contact with the system came when I was two years old. My father, in one of his drunken rages, had grabbed me by the arm and thrown me across the room, giving me a greenstick fracture.

  I don’t actually remember it. A caseworker told me about it, years later. It helped me understand why my arm sometimes hurt when it rained.

  My mother once told me my father wasn’t always a violent man, that being a father had “brought it out of him.” They had met in the navy, when they were both stationed in Norfolk. She described her first interactions with Chief Warrant Officer William Theodore Curran—Billy to his friends—in fairy tale–like terms. They were Billy and Betsy. They both came from small towns in Pennsylvania. He was tall and broad-shouldered, romantic and charming, and so on.

  That seems to be at least somewhat at odds with his dishonorable discharge from the navy, which he earned via a series of infractions committed while drunk or hungover. My mother was already struggling to balance working for the navy with raising my half sister, Charlotte, who came from a brief-and-failed marriage to another seaman. When her enlistment was up, Dad packaged her departure from the navy with a marriage proposal. She eagerly said yes.

  The new Mr. and Mrs. Curran moved to Northumberland County, which was tucked away in a rural part of Virginia known as the Northern Neck. They liked having a small house in the middle of the woods, without any neighbors nearby.