“The same place you always meet him? Well, that’s great. How many times has he raped you, Katherine?” Father and daughter both gasped, but for completely different reasons.
“Never! It’s not rape when it’s love. He makes love to me.”
“You’re fourteen. He raped you. You’re not old enough to give consent.” Cam felt terrible for Chuck, who had collapsed into a chair at his daughter’s answer.
“I’m sorry Chuck. If it turns out she’s not pregnant, you might want to get her on the pill. We have a whole bunch in storage. She’ll be a grown-up long before we run out or they expire. You might as well take her home for now, though. I don’t think there’s anything else she can tell us that will help us catch him.”
Chuck looked like he’d aged twenty years in the last ten minutes. He ran a shaky hand over his face and hair, stood up, and finally led his daughter down the stairs. Nobody said a word until they heard the door downstairs open and close again.
“Holy shit!” Gilles’ comment pretty much summed it up for all of them.
“I know. I wasn’t sure at first, but because her comment about him calling her pretty pissed me off so much, it sort of stuck in my head. After a while I realized there was no way he could have been that close to her without someone knowing about it. So, the only person to blame for Mike’s escape, aside from Mike himself, is the little girl who fancies herself in love with him. Ugh.”
“Chuck is going to want to cut his balls off when we catch him again. And if I’m honest I’d have to say I wouldn’t mind holding the sick fuck down to make it easier for him,” Gilles said. Billy nodded in agreement.
“I’m only nineteen, and it really freaked me out just to have her flirting with me. I can’t imagine doing anything with her, and not just because of Chuck. She’s basically still a little kid, and she acts like one, too.”
“That’s because she’s spoiled,” Cam put in. “Doesn’t matter, though. I don’t care what she did, or how she acted. What Mike did was rape, which is a whole different crime from stealing food. We all knew he was bad news, but now that he’s acted on it we’re going to have to do something about it. We can’t allow anyone to rape a fourteen-year-old.”
At least catching him should prove to be pretty easy, now that they had all the information about his van’s location. Cameron thought there was a very good chance Mike would show up where Katherine offered to meet him. After all, in his eyes Katherine was more than willing to be alone with him and let him do whatever he wanted. And even if he wasn’t a first-rate pervert, the food alone would probably be enough to convince him to show.
The real difficulty was now going to be finding a way to deal with a rapist. One that would satisfy Katherine’s dad. Of course, there were lots of things they would all like to do to him for it, but everything she could think of was on the extreme edge of violence and cruelty. What would they become if they went to those lengths to punish someone?
Cameron tried to compare their current situation with the laws that used to be in place for rapists, but couldn’t find a way to connect them. Rapists were supposed to go to jail, but there was really no such thing as a jail anymore. They couldn’t take him up to Parry Sound, or over to Huntsville. Either Chuck or Gilles could get access to the holding cells there, but someone would have to drive there every single day to make sure the prisoner was fed. The only other option for keeping him imprisoned was to build their own jail on the farm.
They had no court-like system set up to hear charges, or allow anyone to present evidence of a crime. The closest they had come to that was listening to Mike tell them what he’d been doing. They had no impartial judges, and no one to defend or try a case against an accused person. When they had been planning the farm, not once had she or her mother considered the possibility that they would have to punish anyone for a crime. The closest thing to that had been the agreement that they would run people off the property with their guns.
Cam dropped into the chair that Katherine had so recently vacated, propped her elbows on the desk, and put her head in her hands. She was in way over her head here, and she knew it. Now was the time to rely on people like Chuck and Gilles. They were the ones who had been trained in law and order, and right now they were the last people who could help her. Suddenly her head snapped up.
“Kelly!” Her sudden shout startled both Gilles and Billy. She was a little startled herself, since she had completely forgotten until then that Kelly was a Justice of the Peace. Cam had no idea what sort of training that involved, or how much she knew about the law, but it was something anyway. If she couldn’t let Chuck or Gilles handle this, she should at least talk to someone who had worked in the legal system.
“Okay, here’s where I’m going with this so far. We’ll do the patrols as planned, but there’s a good chance we’ll catch him if we surround his van. In the meantime we have to figure out what we’re going to do with him. I’m going to talk to Kelly about it because she was a JP. She’s the one who married Neil and my mother. She’s got some legal training, and was given the legal right to do certain things, though I don’t really understand what those were.
“I’m just going to get some advice from her, or maybe some suggestions, and we’ll see what we can come up with. The thing is, we’re all going to have to agree on how we’re going to deal with this sort of thing in the future. If we start going crazy, cutting off men’s balls, there’s no telling where we’ll end up with that kind of thing. Next thing you know someone is going to accuse someone of rape just because they hate them, and by the time we find out it’s a lie we have a eunuch on our hands.
“And saying that, it occurs to me that we have no idea whether or not Katherine is lying. Maybe he hasn’t touched her, but she knows he’ll get in trouble if she says he did. Maybe he hurt her feelings. Any number of things could have happened. Or the kid could be crazy, and she’s created a whole fantasy in her head that he’s proposed marriage to her. She’s fourteen after all.
“We can’t go around punishing people just because someone says they did something. It’s probably true that he took advantage of Katherine, and he most likely deserves whatever fate we want to dish out, but what if it’s not?”
“Shit,” Gilles said succinctly.
“This is so fucked up,” Billy chimed in. “What the hell are we going to do?”
“Well, whatever it is, we can’t leave it up to Chuck to decide what to do with this guy. He’s not blindfolded justice right now. He’ll just be in a blind rage,” Cam said. “For now, let’s figure out how we’re going to catch him tomorrow, and make sure that little security weakness with the river is dealt with. People can’t pass through because of the bridge there, but if Katherine can get a canoe across the property line in the other direction, without triggering a sensor, we need to move those sensors.”
When Chuck came back through her mother’s bedroom, and climbed the stairs to the security room, Cam realized she was going to have another problem.
“Chuck, as hard as this is going to be for you to hear, your daughter is a teenager who is angry and sulking, and there’s a possibility she’s lying about Mike. He might have hurt her feelings, and so she’s saying things that will get him in trouble. She has to know every one of us, and especially you, will be itching to punish Mike for touching her. She might have already been aware of the whole thing with his niece. She might think that saying she was with him because she loves him will keep her from getting into trouble, while still putting him in a world of hurt.
“I’m not saying she is lying. I’m saying there’s a possibility of it. We have no way of knowing the truth right now, so we can’t just go cutting his balls off. There was a reason we had court systems in place. People can lie, and we have to do our best to find out the truth. Right now we don’t have anything like that.”
“I don’t know, Cam. Do you think maybe she was asking for it?” Chuck’s question made her angrier than she could ever remember being.
�
��I don’t care if she was sitting in his lap and grinding against his cock. She’s fourteen fucking years old. She can’t ask for it at that age. It’s rape. It’s our job as adults to protect teenagers from whatever self-destructive behaviour they exhibit, not take advantage of it. Any man who can’t keep his dick out of a fourteen-year-old girl has no business walking the fucking streets. Would you fuck a girl your daughter’s age?” Her question had him hanging his head.
“Never in a million years.”
“So how can you even ask a dumbass question like that?”
“Isn’t that what everyone else is going to be saying? That she asked for it?”
“Some, maybe, and they can bloody well get their asses the fuck off this farm if they’re going to talk like that. She made some bad choices, and sadly she’s probably going to pay a price for that. If nothing else she’s going to realize the kind of slime that Mike is.
“Anyway, the point is, you can’t be there to bring this guy in. We need to do this without you. It would be like having a doctor operate on their own family. That means no patrol, and no being there at the van for whatever day he might show up. He’s got a bit of a walk to get back here, so it might not be until the day after.
“We need to do this right. This is really serious, and I don’t want to start off on the wrong foot. Maybe we’ll never have to deal with something like this again, but we probably will. If not rape, then theft. Maybe murder, maybe child abuse, or maybe someone beating up their spouse. The more people we get together in a group, the more likely those things will start happening, and even if it’s not one of us, outsiders cause problems, too. Like Mike.”
Chuck was still hanging his head, but he didn’t argue with her. He wasn’t a violent man, and Cam had a feeling he was relieved that the decision wouldn’t be his. That didn’t help her, since she was still stuck with it, except for the fact that she wouldn’t have to fight with Chuck over it. Hopefully that would make things a little bit easier.
They brought everyone together who would be surrounding the van to try to catch Mike, and talked about strategy until everyone agreed that they had planned it as well as possible. There was always the chance something could go wrong, but with input from Chuck and Gilles for the more complicated parts, they managed to settle on a plan that would probably work. As soon as they were finished deciding how best to confine him after he had been caught, Cam went to find Kelly. It wasn’t hard. She was standing outside, staring up at the stars just in front of the ferret building, which also happened to be the building she lived in with her girlfriend.
“Hey Cam. How’s it going? I heard there was some excitement tonight,” she said, obviously wanting to hear some of the details. Cam didn’t blame her. They all had a right to know what was happening.
“Yeah, the guy who was stealing from us managed to jump out of the truck about twenty minutes from here. He had help,” Cam told her, still disgusted with Katherine for that. She filled her in on the rest of the details.
“I actually came over here to ask for your help. Or maybe just your advice. You were a JP when we still had a legal system, and you have some familiarity with our courts. We have two former cops, but they never really had to go to court. Maybe if someone fought a speeding ticket, but that’s about it. Now we’ve got a guy who might have raped a fourteen-year-old girl, so we have to figure out what to do with him once we catch him. Of course, I have no idea what a Justice of the Peace does, or did, so I don’t even know if you can help me.”
“Believe it or not, JPs aren’t that different from judges in Ontario. We just didn’t hear big criminal cases. I used to issue warrants and hear minor cases like by-law and Highway Traffic Act violations, as well as deal with bail hearings. True criminal cases were heard by judges, who had to be lawyers. I just needed lots of volunteer experience and a college diploma. So, I can definitely explain to you how the system used to work, and maybe give you some advice on your current problem. Not that I have any real say on things anymore, since I don’t have a provincial government to back me up now, but I’ll help if I can,” Kelly offered.
“How would you feel about being a judge then?” Cam’s question wasn’t a joke. They needed someone to handle this kind of thing, and Kelly was the only one who had a clue what she was doing.
“Well, why don’t we see what sort of system we can come up with? We’re such a small group of people that we’re going to need to take everyone’s opinion into account, but I think you’re doing the right thing by not engaging in some form of vigilante, wild-west justice. I’m sort of surprised, actually. It’s very easy to fall into that trap when you’re talking about the possible sexual assault of a teenage girl. It’s very hard not to want to string the guy up by his testicles.
“I’ll have to set aside my own bias, for that matter, but I had to before, too. As a JP I wasn’t allowed to be politically active once I was appointed. When I started the whole application process, I had no idea how involved it all was. I just wanted to be able to marry two of my friends, but it turned out to be a great thing for me. I enjoyed what I was doing, and there wasn’t as much stress as there would have been as a judge. Not that I could have been one anyway.”
“What about now? Will you have a hard time with hearing these kinds of cases? I don’t think we’re going to have to deal with a lot of this kind of thing, but we also need you to look after the ferrets,” Cam said.
“Cam, I did the JP thing in addition to running my own shelter, with very little volunteer help. The small amount of cases I would need to deal with here on the farm won’t be a problem. We can get more people involved with the ferrets if necessary. Plenty of people here love them, so I don’t think it would be hard to find help. I can also train someone to take over as a JP or judge, for that matter. It’s not like we have to worry about real legal requirements anymore. We’re just trying to set up a fair system so people don’t get hurt.”
With Kelly agreeing to hear cases, Cam felt like they were heading in a good direction. They would need to get a confinement area set up for Mike. One that a fourteen-year-old couldn’t break him out of, of course. And they would have to organize some sort of trial or hearing. That meant everyone on the farm should know about it, and be allowed to attend.
She decided it might be a good idea to have some sort of notice board to announce things like that. It could be used for all kinds of things. Cam’s head was nearly spinning with all the possibilities. She didn’t think she was much of a community-type person, but whether she liked it or not the farm had become exactly that. Eventually people would start having get-togethers, playing sports, having dances. When she realized the sorts of things her mother was going to be coming home to, she started to grin. Her poor mother was going to end up mayor of this crazy town, and Cam knew she would sit back and laugh her ass off when she figured that out.
She was walking around the yard, looking for the best location to confine Mike, as well as for putting up a notice board, when she saw her dad heading toward his cabin. Thankfully he’d come back faster than usual this time, because she had a lot of things to say to him right now, and she’d been hoping to get it out of the way before her mother got home.
“Dad!” Her voice carried across the yard enough for him to hear, though she tried not to be so loud she woke anyone up. Most of the people on the farm still preferred sleeping at night, even though they no longer had to keep a regular schedule other than on their chore days. And now Mitch would be getting up early to deal with the animals.
“Hey, kiddo! How ya doin’?” His casual greeting irritated the crap out of her, considering what she had to discuss with him.
“I saw you with Geraldine, dad. Do you have any idea who she is?”
“What do you mean?” He was trying to be nonchalant, but his face turned ruddy.
“I mean, aside from the fact that you’re obviously fucking a married woman, do you know who her son was?”
“I knew she had a kid, yeah. Of course. She d
oesn’t like to talk about it, so I haven’t really asked.”
“Jesus, dad. You’re sleeping with the mother of the guy I killed! How can you be so blind that you haven’t figured that out? There are so few people left alive, and his parents are two of those people. It’s not that big a stretch to think that anyone you meet right now could very well be connected to that family. Hell, damn near everyone is connected to one another here!”
“She makes me happy, Cam. We’re consenting adults, and it’s not like she can get a divorce, so what else can we do?”
Cam’s jaw just dropped. His complete lack of understanding of the true problem made her wonder if there wasn’t something seriously damaged in his brain.
“You mean you’re getting laid, so what the fuck do you care if she might be a danger to me and everyone else on this farm, don’t you? I was already suspicious because she seemed to be just a little too nice about the whole thing. And now I find out she cheats on her husband. When I saw them together there was absolutely nothing to indicate that they weren’t happily married. I don’t know what she’s been telling you, but it’s probably flat-out bullshit, and you’re probably quite happy to believe it, because you’re getting something out of it.
“I do not need this right now. You’ve been away, yet again, and aren’t aware of the fact that we have an escaped rapist on our hands. Now we have to catch him and hold some sort of a trial, because we can’t even be sure what he’s guilty of unless there’s actual proof of his guilt. Now you’re off banging some woman who could very well be another serious problem, but you just don’t give a shit because you’re getting laid.”
Cam could see he was getting angry, but there was also shock on his face when she brought up the rapist.
“Who?”
“Are you asking who got raped, or who did it?”
Tipping Point (Book 2): Ground Zero Page 23