Aftershock (33 page)

“I do,” T.D. said, with a thin smile.

“Never mind that I got better grades than her by a ton, even with all the play they give jocks.”

“ ‘They’?”

“The teachers. Everybody knows, if you’re on a team, that’s like adding an extra point to your GPA. More, if you need it.”

“Did MaryLou need it?”

“She might have, for all I know. I mean, when your best pal’s a retard …”

“She was in Special Ed?” T.D. asked, pretending to misunderstand.

“Not her,
him
,” Danielle said, exasperated at the psychologist’s slowness.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘oh’ is right. Look, I’ll save you the walk around the block. MaryLou was bigger than almost all the guys in school. If she and her boyfriend, Bluto, ever got together, they could probably take on the whole senior class.”

“Bluto is …?”

“The retard. Stop interrupting, okay? I’m almost done. MaryLou is a big, stupid, lame jock with a retard for a best pal. And she’s gay. Gay, and she can’t even find a girlfriend, what does that tell you?”

“It doesn’t tell me anything, not yet. What does it tell you?”

“It tells me that I’m everything MaryLou isn’t. And not only that … Oh, I’m not supposed to say anything.”

T.D. didn’t bite. And Danielle was too smart to expose herself by volunteering the information she wanted to have coaxed out of her.

“There’s a bottom line to all this,” T.D. finally said.

“Which is?” Danielle asked, lighting another smoke and blowing a jet stream over toward T.D., then making an “Ooh, I’m going to get it now!” face. Very cute.

“MaryLou is facing at least a life sentence, maybe even the death penalty.”

“And …?”

“And perhaps, talking with you, I’m thinking there’s a way for her to get help instead.”

“Help?” You could see Danielle struggle to not say, “For what?”

“Well, for example, if the court finds she was temporarily insane when—”

“Jealousy isn’t the same as insanity.”

“I understand,” T.D. said patiently. “But if you noticed certain … cues that MaryLou was mentally ill—and who would be in a better position to notice than you?—that might just save her life.”

“I never saw anything.”

“I understand. Still, if you were to say that—”

“I’m not lying for her. You just don’t get it, do you? She killed my boyfriend!”

“But … help me with this, Danielle. It says here that you were … a rape victim a couple of years ago. And that you—”

“Now,
that
is crazy. Rape victim? Me?”

“That’s the information we have. In a murder case, the District Attorney’s Office has to turn over any and all material that could possibly be exculpatory.”

“Exculpatory?”

“Ah. I don’t know why I keep speaking to you as if you were
a grown woman. I apologize. ‘Exculpatory’ means anything that would either help the defense prove innocence, or, in your sister’s case, mitigate the guilt.”

Danielle didn’t ask for a definition of “mitigate.” She’d fellate a Shetland pony to get a part in a movie, but when it came to saving her sister, she wasn’t licking
that
plate. “How could some nonsense story ‘mitigate’ anything?”

“Well, let’s say it wasn’t a nonsense story. Let’s say what the DA’s Office turned over is at least partially true. Let’s say you were raped. Not only by this Cameron Taft—the boy who was killed.”

“That’s a lie!” foamed out of Danielle’s mouth as if she’d just caught rabies.

But T.D. just kept talking right through it, as if Danielle hadn’t made a sound. “Let’s say you were raped, not only by this boy, but by several others. Gang-raped. A jury might go much lighter on a girl who thought she was defending her little sister—”

“You better not try that,” Danielle warned, her voice icy enough to hurt your spine. “You try that and I’ll just tell the truth. The truth. I wasn’t ‘gang-raped,’ I was
initiated
. Tiger Ko Khai is the most exclusive society. Not just in school, not just in this whole town, but all over the world! They can only have men as members, but anytime a member claims a woman as his own, he has to prove to the others that his woman is for real. If I hadn’t had sex with those other boys, it would have shamed Cameron. And he was the leader! Not just of one chapter, of the whole state.”

T.D. did no more than shift his weight slightly, and Danielle was already blocking the punch she expected.

“Look, I know sex isn’t love. I only loved Cameron, of course. But I had to show the others that I’d do anything for him. I had to do that, don’t you understand?”

“I don’t think I—”

“They would have excommunicated him!” Danielle said, forgetting all about flirting, putting everything she had into her deadly method acting. “If Cameron’s own girlfriend wouldn’t do what he
asked her to do, he’d lose his whole position. Do you know how they do that? He’s got the same tattoo they all have. On his arm. But over his heart, he’s got one only a leader can have.

“They’d cut that tattoo right off his body! He could die! And he was willing to risk all that for me. Me! How could I not back up a man who put his own life on the line? What kind of a person would that make me?”

We watched the tape as T.D. carefully talked her down. It was another hour of babble before Danielle was convinced she’d convinced him, and another half-hour before there was any way to end the “interview” organically.

W
e waited until Debbie got back so we could all watch the tape together. We did that in Swift’s new “overflow” office. It wasn’t fancy, but there wasn’t a chance anyone would overhear. And Rascal was lying down at the top of the staircase, better than any motion sensor.

“All young girls need to individuate from their older sisters, but this is beyond anything I’ve ever seen,” Debbie said.

“The hospital records say she was brought in bruised; with torn tissue, both vaginal and anal; semen from several depositors still in her underclothes,” Dolly recited from memory. I’d warned her against carrying any report she wasn’t willing to hand over to Swift. If Swift wondered how Dolly had gotten her hands on hospital records, he didn’t show it.

“Well, I guess that’s one witness we’ll never be calling,” he said.

T.D. stood up. “Hoss, I don’t often make a diagnosis based on a single sentence, but if you don’t plan to call that girl to the stand, I’m ready to write you up as clinically insane right this minute.”

“But she’s only going to exonerate—”

“She can’t exonerate anyone,” I said. “Even if every word out
of that filthy little slut’s mouth was true, they’d still all be guilty of statutory rape. And if she’s lying—”

“If?”
Dolly cut me off. “The medical records alone are enough to end that discussion. And there’s seven other girls who had a similar … experience. Only,
they
all tried to get the perpetrators prosecuted. And they were all slapped across the face for it.”

“She’s no slut,” T.D. said, holding up his hand for silence. “I’ve spent my life working with the dregs of humanity: serial killers, baby-rapers, torture fans, you name it. And that girl is the most amoral sociopath I’ve ever met. Utterly relentless. She’ll do whatever, to whoever, whenever. All that matters to her is what she wants. You get between her and whatever that is at any given time, you’re cooked.

“You put her on the stand, the jury is going to see a horror story worse than any movie. Imagine sacrificing your own life for a person who’d kick you under a falling safe if you were late driving her to an audition. But that’s exactly what MaryLou did.”

“Danielle can refuse to testify, can’t she?” Debbie asked.

“No,” Swift said, slowly and thoughtfully. “If we can convince the judge that her testimony is not only relevant but necessary, she could be ordered to testify. The Fifth Amendment only protects her if her own testimony could possibly incriminate her. And her testimony might damn her soul, but it couldn’t send her to prison.”

“MaryLou should have shot her, too,” Dolly said, white blotches of anger on her face.

“No, baby,” I said, putting an arm around Dolly, telling her we were in my arena now. “We need her alive. She’s MaryLou’s best chance now.”

W
hen Danielle called Miss Rontempe late that afternoon, she was told that “recent revelations” had caused A.A. to defer the project
until after the verdict came in. And that calling back before the verdict would be
very
ill-advised.

I
ghosted past the section of parking lot behind the day-care center that Tiger Ko Khai had marked as its own territory years ago—my best guess was a short while after a guy named Ryan Teller had been kicked out of the military and come “home.”

It was empty. I made three more passes: one more in daylight, the other two at night. But the place stayed empty. So either Ryan Teller had faded away and wasn’t coming back, or he realized he had to make some show of force to keep all his followers from deserting.

But what kind of show of force could he make? He’d built a squad of empty-core nothings: tough guys when they held all the cards, but worse than cowards inside. Cowards just run. You have to be a much lower breed than that to attack only prescreened victims.

If he came back, I’d find out, and I’d kill him. He knew this—I’d sent him the head of one of his tribe on a stake—but he didn’t know who I was. If I’d pulled it off, he’d think I was part of a whole gang.
He’ll just move on
, I told myself.
Set up shop in some other place. But maybe he’s too old for that now. Convincing high school boys is one thing—there’ll always be kids who’d listen to the kind of promises he’d make—but men his own age?

I put it out of my mind, and locked it down. There was no time for that anymore. Ryan Teller couldn’t come back quietly. I didn’t have my ear to the ground, but I didn’t need to; I knew the one person he’d be sure to contact.

Danielle wasn’t fat. She wasn’t ugly. She wasn’t stupid. She’d be a prize for any high school kid, no matter what grade. So she chose
Cameron. Not the captain of the football team, not the kid whose parents had the most money—Cameron.

It hit me then. Hit me in a place I wish I didn’t have. That tiny detector that went off every time I was near one of those creatures who’d watch the enemy torture a comrade while keeping
very
quiet in his own safe hiding place.

Danielle was smarter than any of them. They hadn’t lured her into that gang rape. Even if they
had
told her some nonsense about an “initiation,” she would have laughed in their faces. She couldn’t parade Cameron around school, so there was only one place she could really be the kind of “star” she needed to be. Danielle was the Queen Bee of Tiger Ko Khai. And her stinger was pure poison.

If Dr. Joel hadn’t made that speech about how valuable she’d be to MaryLou on the stand, I would have had Patrice Laveque give her a call to meet her late one night. And scattered her ashes in the nearest toxic-waste dump I could find.

T
he lawyer told me how it works in this state. When they start a trial, the prosecution goes first, then the defense. And when they end it, the prosecution gets the last word
twice
, sandwiched around the defense closing.

“So they get the last word, before and after?”

“Yes. But that’s not always as good as it sounds.”

“You mean it could end up like tossing a grenade around in a circle after the pin’s already been pulled.”

“I guess so,” he said, giving me a funny look. I’d already said too much to this guy. He didn’t need to know that they’d made us play that game when we were recruits—it wasn’t until even the dumbest of us realized the pulled-pin grenade was a dummy that they all broke out laughing. That is, unless one of us had panicked
and screamed or run away when the grenade was tossed in his direction. Then they wouldn’t be laughing. And one less man would be around the next morning.

Much later, when we were all legionnaires in the same squad, some played it for real. The same ones who liked playing Russian roulette, to show their courage.

T
.D. saw MaryLou. After that, he promised us that if any state psychologist said she wasn’t in her right mind T.D. would leave pieces of him all over the wall.

Debbie kept on with her interviewing. All seven of the victims had varying degrees of reluctance, but none of them had pulled out from their promise to testify. Not yet, anyway.

Dolly tightened her team so taut T.D. could have used them for banjo strings.

Danielle kept going back and forth with Miss Rontempe, who explained to her that things always move slowest in the summer months—surely she was aware of this? Besides, had she
not
been told the “project was on hold” until the verdict?

Danielle couldn’t have been holding a summer job, not with her making-the-rounds schedule, but she was never at a loss for a new outfit.

Spyros told me Franklin “had the touch.” I knew what he meant, even though I’d never heard that term applied to anyone whose skill was in keeping things alive.

I asked Swift to check. He told me Ryan Teller was “off paper.” To my look, he answered, “There’s no authority holding him. Not parole or probation. He’s not on any registry, so he doesn’t have to report in. He could be anywhere, doing anything.”

“I
don’t like all this waiting,” Dolly said late that night. She’d snuck down to the basement, where I was supposed to be sleeping. She hadn’t been any more surprised to find me awake than I’d been to see her show up.

“It’s nothing.”

“Not for you, I know. I’ve seen you wait for … well, I don’t know how long, exactly, but I know you can go hours and hours without even moving.”

“It’s just my training.”

“Your training? No, Dell. That may have helped. It may have taught you some techniques. But this … stillness of yours, it’s as if you were born with it.”

“I don’t know.”

She burst into tears.

“What, baby?”

“You think I was trying to probe into your …”

“ ‘Childhood.’ You can say it; I’m all right with hearing it.”

“But
I’m
not.”