by Scott Pratt
Sheila nodded.
“Anything else you can remember about the guy that pulled you in? Long hair or short hair? Anything about his face? How big was he?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. Maybe it will come back to me later.”
“The others?”
“Not really.”
“When did you realize you’d been raped?”
“In the back of the police car, I think.”
“So that’s why you didn’t report it, correct?”
“I was drugged. Somebody had to drug me.”
“Ms. Self, it would help me a lot if I could get your consent to look at the toxicology screen.” He decided not to tell her that some of the blood they’d drawn from her was already headed for a lab.
She shook her head vigorously.
“You can’t. I’m on probation.”
“But if you took the drugs involuntarily, your probation—“
“I didn’t take the ecstasy involuntarily.”
“Your probation officer doesn’t know that, and I won’t tell him.”
“Her.”
“Okay. I won’t tell her. You can say the ecstasy was in the same drink as the other drug, whatever it turns out to be. Will any heroin show up on the tox screen?”
“No, I’ve been clean.”
“Okay, there you go. I’ll back you up on your claim that it’s probable that the ecstasy and whatever else they found were mixed in the same drink. No probation violation. You give me consent to look at your tox screen and it ups your credibility as a witness a ton. What do you think?”
Sheila looked at the ground, then up at Riddle. Riddle was again taken aback by her sexuality. To him, she had a strange kind of vibe going, very sexy. The kind of woman you wanted to protect and ravage at the same time. She reminded him of a teenage girl he knew, a close friend of his daughter’s. He’d been divorced from his first wife for ten years and didn’t see that much of his daughter, but sometimes, when she came over on a weekend, she brought this friend named Lisa with her. Lisa was a sixteen-year-old version of Sheila, although she came from a wealthy family and would be going to college instead of a foster home. But Riddle always found himself wanting to protect Lisa as much as he wanted to protect his own daughter. He’d also fantasized about Lisa, sexual fantasies that had awakened him at night. He knew he shouldn’t be fantasizing about this teenaged girl, but Riddle didn’t feel guilty. It was what it was. He was old and horny, she was young and sexy, and his daughter kept bringing her around. It wasn’t his fault.
Finally, Sheila nodded her head.
“I guess I don’t have any choice,” she said. “Once this gets out, and I’m sure it’ll get out, I guess my probation officer will get the records anyway.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Riddle said. “Investigator Riddle will take care of you.”
“Just promise me you’ll get the people who raped me,” Sheila said.
“I’ll do my best, ma’am,” Riddle said. “I give you my word. But you need to come to the station and give me a written statement. Can you come after you get out of here?”
“I need to deal with my kids.”
“Okay. After lunch, then. Let’s exchange numbers, and I’ll see you this afternoon.”
SUNDAY, AUG. 25
“Coffee?”
Johnson City Police Chief Gene Starring looked up at Investigator Riddle from his kitchen table. It was Sunday morning, 9:00 a.m. Riddle had called and said he needed to talk to him right away, face-to-face. Starring was a twenty-five-year veteran of the police force and had been chief for nine years. He was lean and handsome, salt-and-pepper hair, well known for his self-discipline. Riddle knew the chief ate two thousand calories a day, got up at four every morning, ran five miles, spent another hour in the gym, and abstained from alcohol, tobacco, and anything else that Riddle might consider fun. Starring was fifty, but he looked like he was in his late thirties. He had an impeccable reputation for integrity, and was respected by the employees who served with him. Even Riddle respected him, albeit grudgingly.
“Thanks,” Riddle said. “I could use a little shot in the arm.”
Starring got up, poured a cup, and handed it to Riddle.
“My only vice,” Starring said.
“What, coffee?”
“Caffeine. But I only drink one cup a day, at nine o’clock in the morning.”
“Some people would say that’s weird,” Riddle said.
“It is weird,” Starring said. “I’m weird, but it doesn’t make me a bad person, does it?”
“Guess not.”
“So, what’s up?” the chief said. “You sounded a little rattled over the phone.”
“The watch commander had me go to the hospital to interview an alleged rape victim this morning,” Riddle said. “I called you as soon as I finished. The whole thing is strange. I thought I better run it by you because you might want to run it by Armstrong before we do anything.”
Riddle was referring to Mike Armstrong, the interim district attorney general who served four counties in Northeast Tennessee: Washington, Carter, Unicoi and Johnson.
“What’s so strange about it?” Starring said.
“Might be a gang rape, might be a complete fabrication. There might be race involved, at least one black guy on a white woman. And if what this woman is saying is true, it happened at a party thrown by the ETSU football players last night, which is going to bring a lot of attention. The players hired a stripper, and she claims at least three guys pulled her into a bathroom and raped her. But there are some serious problems.”
“Such as?” Starring said as he sipped his coffee.
“She says she was drugged and remembers very little about it, and her tox screen bears that out. She had a mixture of alcohol and ecstasy in her system, but the tox screen doesn’t detect date rape drugs, and I think maybe some GHB or Rohypnol might be involved. She said somebody gave her a drink at the party and that’s when she blacked out, so the drink may have had one of those drugs in it.”
“Did we get a blood draw for a DFSA panel?” the chief asked.
“Actually, Officer James was on top of it. She woke up Judge Tinker and got an order. It’s on its way to the lab. But she might have put the drug in the drink herself. She might be faking the whole thing. Who knows? The biggest problem is that she can’t positively identify her attackers, although she thinks she remembers a black hand pulling her into the bathroom. She has a history of serious sexual abuse, which means she most likely has some psychological problems. She’s on probation for heroin possession and she has two young children, both of whom were with her cousin last night while she was out stripping. She said she had sex with her boyfriend before she went to the party. She didn’t call anybody after she left the party because she says she was too intoxicated. In fact, she didn’t mention she was raped to anyone until she got picked up around 1:00 a.m. for refusing to leave a convenience store and found out she was going to Woodlawn for a mental evaluation.”
“What did they say at the hospital?” Starring asked.
“That there were signs of sexual abuse. That it was within the realm of possibility that she was raped. Swollen vagina, a couple of bruises, but not serious bruises. They collected sperm samples and hair and did scrapings, the whole ball of wax.”
Starring shook his head and stared down into his coffee.
“You’re right, this could be a powder keg,” he said. “Football players, strippers, race, the university. Damn, Riddle, it’s Sunday morning. This is supposed to be my quiet time.”
“You have to dump this on Armstrong,” Riddle said. “He’s the politician. He’ll either think he can get something out of it or he won’t, and that’s how he’ll make his decision. Won’t have anything to do with the girl. She’ll either be a pawn or a throwaway.”
“That’s a terribly cynical view of the criminal justice system, Investigator Riddle.”
“It’s what happens when you mix politics and crimin
al justice,” Riddle said. “So...are you going to pack this off on Armstrong or make the call yourself?” Riddle said.
“Oh, I’m going to pack it off on Armstrong, no question. I said you were cynical. I didn’t say you were wrong. I’m going to call Armstrong right now. I’ll probably wind up going over to his house, and you’re coming with me.”
SUNDAY, AUG. 25
District Attorney General Mike Armstrong opened his front door and said, “This better be important. I don’t like to miss church.”
“I’m sorry,” Police Chief Gene Starring said. “I wouldn’t have called you if it wasn’t important. In fact, I think I’d call this one a little more than important. It could be explosive, Mike. You’re going to have to make a tough decision.”
The two men, along with Investigator Bo Riddle, walked into Armstrong’s modestly decorated den inside his home in one of the older neighborhoods in North Johnson City. His wife had gone on to church, and his two girls had just gone back to Knoxville, where they were in college at the University of Tennessee, a hundred miles to the southwest.
“Sounds ominous,” Armstrong said. “And ominous isn’t good right now. There’s an election next year. The primary is in April and only one person has made any noise about running against me. I don’t need something that could blow up in my face.”
Starring looked at Riddle and said, “Tell him what you told me.”
As Riddle spoke, Starring watched Armstrong closely. Starring knew Armstrong was a lifelong prosecutor. He was roughly Starring’s age—maybe a few years older—but unlike Starring, Armstrong looked his age. His hair was thick and snow white, and he was grossly underweight. Starring would have guessed his height at five feet, ten inches, and his weight at about a buck thirty. There was a large, brown mole in the middle of his forehead that Starring had to force himself to ignore.
Armstrong had come to Johnson City from Michigan only three years earlier because Armstrong’s wife’s mother, who had been a professor at the Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy at ETSU for five years during the school’s infancy, had developed Alzheimer’s disease and was in a long-term health care facility in Johnson City. Armstrong’s father-in-law had left his wife fifteen years earlier for a much younger woman, and his mother-in-law had never remarried. Armstrong had told Starring when they first met that he’d never cared for his mother-in-law and didn’t want to make the move, but his wife had made him feel so guilty that he’d eventually given in to her wishes and moved to Tennessee.
Because of Armstrong’s experience, the prior district attorney, Tanner Jarrett, had hired him and immediately placed him in Criminal Court prosecuting felony cases, many of them serious, violent cases, and from everything Starring had heard, Armstrong was a competent prosecutor. Nothing spectacular, but competent. He didn’t try a lot of cases, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. About ninety percent of criminal cases were resolved through plea bargains. But when he did try a case, Armstrong was, from everything Starring had heard, a good salesman. He related well to juries and got along with the judges. Even the defense bar seemed to like him.
One thing that puzzled Starring, along with many others in the law enforcement community, was how Armstrong managed to get the interim district attorney general job in the first place. Tanner Jarrett, whose wealthy father had served in the state senate and had moved to Washington, D.C., had resigned six months earlier and followed his father to the nation’s capital. He was now practicing law in one of D.C.’s prestigious firms. Armstrong was outgoing and jovial, a glad-hander who seemed to never have met a stranger, but Northeast Tennesseans didn’t usually trust outsiders, especially outsiders from the north who talked with hard, Midwestern accents.
Nonetheless, Armstrong had somehow managed to get three of the most influential members of the county commission to start lobbying the other members on Armstrong’s behalf, and within a month of Jarrett leaving, the county commission voted to appoint Armstrong to finish out Tanner Jarrett’s term. The move hadn’t sat well with several people in the district attorney’s office, and it had angered a fair amount of law enforcement officers as well, but Armstrong seemed not to notice. He stepped into the office with a smile on his face, as though he was meant to be there and had been there all of his life.
“So that’s about it,” Riddle was saying, “warts and all.”
“Just to summarize,” Armstrong said, “just to make sure I have my facts straight, we have a gang rape that may or may not have occurred. We’re not even sure where the house is yet, but that’ll be easy enough once we talk to the escort service. We have black on white rape allegations coming from what I would describe as a victim who is iffy at best, totally unreliable at worst. We have evidence and information from the rape nurse and doctor who performed the exam that suggest a rape may have occurred. We have a rape kit that contains quite a bit of material, including semen. But the victim has a history of sexual abuse, and she takes drugs. Not only is she not pristine, she had ecstasy and alcohol in her system, and maybe gamma hydroxybutyrate or Rohypnol. Plus she’s been a stripper and a hooker for about three years. Am I doing okay so far?”
Both Riddle and Starring nodded their heads.
“So the question is whether we launch an investigation that will rock this town or tell this girl that because of the circumstances—her past, the drugs and alcohol, the fact that she can’t remember anything and didn’t report it as soon as she got out of there, the fact that she can’t identify her attackers—that we would be hard pressed to get a conviction if we moved forward.”
“That’s what I recommend,” Starring said. “Just for the record. I think we should tell her we’re sorry, but there just isn’t any way to make this stick.”
“What if the semen inside of her comes back and contains DNA from one or more of those players?” Armstrong said.
“They’ll say it was consensual,” Starring said. “Like Bo said, she’s a stripper and a hooker. It isn’t too far-fetched to think that if they did have sex with her, it was because they slipped her a few more bucks. That’s what the defense will say. Besides, they’d have to be fools to have sex with her without using a condom. From what Investigator Riddle says about this girl, the chances of them getting an STD would be about a hundred percent. My guess is there won’t be any semen from a football player.”
“I’ll draft a search warrant application myself tomorrow,” Armstrong said. “In the meantime, you guys find out where the house is and get all the information you can from the escort service. Tuesday morning, take your forensics people and your warrant and haul whoever you can in and interrogate them. I take allegations of rape very seriously. Not only that, if word of this gets out and people find out we had an allegation of a gang rape at a football party and sat on our hands or swept it under the rug, we’ll get crucified. College football programs all over the country are getting a lot of attention when it comes to rape and sexual abuse. Did you see what happened at Baylor? Hell, they fired Ken Starr for goodness sakes. Do you remember Ken Starr?”
Starring had heard the name but couldn’t place it.
“He was the special prosecutor that dogged Bill Clinton for years,” Armstrong said. “After he quit prosecuting, he became the president at Baylor. There were several allegations of sexual abuse against football players, and the powers that be down there in Texas said Starr wasn’t ‘sensitive’ enough to previous allegations and sent him packing. The coach and the athletic director went along with him.”
“I still don’t think it’s a good idea,” Starring said. “It’s just a rotten case. I mean, this victim is not someone I want to get out in front of.”
“Your reservations are noted,” Armstrong said. “That’s why you’re here, to put the decision on me. All it would take would be one call from the rape nurse or the doc at the hospital or somebody from the escort service or even the girl herself. One call to the newspaper or a TV station, and all hell breaks loose. All hell is going to break loose anyway, so let’s g
et in front of it and stay in front of it. We do it by the book.”
“You’re the boss,” Starring said. “Get us a search warrant and we’re on it. Are you going to call the TBI?”
“Not yet,” Armstrong said. “Let’s wait and see what you guys come up with.”
TUESDAY, AUGUST 27
Investigator Riddle looked at the monitor on the desk. It showed a strapping, handsome, young black man sitting in the wood-paneled interview room. He was wearing a gold East Tennessee State University football T-shirt. His hair was clipped closely to his scalp. His chin was resting on his hands. He didn’t appear nervous, he didn’t appear to be frightened. He was just sitting there, almost uninterested, as though being picked up for questioning in a gang rape was a part of his every day routine.
Riddle’s blood pressure was up more than a little. He could feel his heart pumping and his fingers were trembling just a bit. He thought about walking in the room and getting a confession, no matter what it took. The chief was gone—he’d conveniently left for one of the many schools he attended each year—and Riddle was feeling like a stallion who’d just been unbridled. God, how he would love to get this kid to confess.
Riddle had hated jocks since junior high when he was cut from the football team because the coach said he just didn’t have the mental and physical toughness required of a football player, and the guy in the interview room was ETSU’s quarterback. Riddle hated ETSU because they’d fired his father, who’d worked on their maintenance staff for twenty years, for insubordination and repeated tardiness. And finally, he had no love for black people. Riddle was an unapologetic racist. He didn’t wear it on his sleeve because he wanted to keep his job, but he came from a long line of racists who had taught him that black people didn’t belong in America; they belonged in Africa. They’d been brought here involuntarily, forced into slavery, finally freed at a tremendous cost of white lives, and now they were angry, intolerant, and entitled. Riddle had been taught, and still sincerely believed, that black people thought the United States owed them because of what had happened hundreds of years ago. As far as Riddle’s grandfathers, uncles and father were concerned, every black person in the U.S., male, female or mixed, should be shipped out to the African continent, and Riddle agreed with them. Riddle didn’t care what country the deported blacks wound up in, as long as it wasn’t his.