Chapter 27

I walked into the house and obviously hadn’t looked at the cars on the street because DA Forbes was sitting on the couch with Principal Peterson and Mom was sitting in her chair chatting with them.

“This can’t be good,” I said with a sense of foreboding. “Patrick or Marlene?” I asked as I took off my coat and hung it up.

Mr. Forbes smiled a little and nodded. “I’m actually here to update you in very general terms about the case,” he said calmly. He waited until I took a seat on the love seat before continuing. “We’ve been interviewing Patrick Waterman all week, as you know. What you probably don’t know is that we executed a search warrant at the Garrett home this week. When you initially told me to get a warrant for the house, I had nothing to go on, but Patrick’s statements gave us enough to convince a judge to issue a warrant for the whole house and property. We made a major find and issued an arrest warrant for Marlene on Friday afternoon. She’s in custody already. She’ll be arriving back in Boston tomorrow where we’re going to crucify her. We found a treasure trove of evidence. Marlene liked to keep records. She wrote out a list of who paid for which girls and how much they paid. She also had enough drugs to put her away for a long time and she had pornographic images that were made that weekend. I’m sorry to say that those images were already shared to the internet.”

“Are you charging her with child pornography?” I asked, fighting the urge to be sick.

He nodded. “Manufacturing and distributing,” he confirmed. “I can safely say she won’t be getting out of prison ever.”

“Can you do me a favor and let me know what prison she’s going to when the time comes. I want to send a few preemptive thank you notes to her fellow inmates,” I said, feeling more and more like I wanted to hit something.

“I’m sure that the inmates will know what she’s in prison for,” he said somberly. “We’re also expanding the warrants on the other people who were there that night. We’re seizing any and all electronics right down to the TV remotes until they can be stripped, searched and confirmed to be clean of any pornography.”

I nodded. “You should include family computers,” I suggested. “Is there any other news?”

“We’re going to make the rest of the arrests at school on Tuesday. We could do it tomorrow, but I argued that school was a centralized location where we could easily apprehend all of them at once. I also felt like it would give their victims some measure of comfort to see them humiliated and led out of the school in handcuffs.”

I nodded. “I sincerely hope they all die in prison after about six months of brutal rape and torture,” I said with a hard edge to my voice.

“On that, we agree,” he said. “Off the record, of course.”

I nodded. “Of course,” I said in complete understanding. “In your line of work, you have to believe that justice occurs in a court room.”

“You still feel differently?” he asked.

“Justice would be for Marlene to go to a men’s penitentiary and live through what she masterminded putting those girls through,” I said. “That’s considered cruel and unusual punishment though.”

He nodded. “We’ll continue to disagree on what constitutes justice,” he said gently.

I nodded. “I’ve witnessed how shattered some of those girls are in the wake of what happened,” I told him sadly, thinking of Cheryl. “I can honestly say that there’s no justice for the hurt some of them are going through. There’s only closure. I really appreciate you coming to update me about this,” I told him. “I hate that it happened at all, but at least we’re seeing them punished somehow. How many arrests are planned for Tuesday?”

“Forty-two,” he said sadly. “Patrick and Marlene will make it forty-four.”

“And Vance would have been forty-five,” I finished with a sigh.

“He would. We also found a lot of physical evidence at the Garrett house. There was semen and blood that we’re still DNA typing. There were bodily fluids spilled and sprayed in every room of the house.”

I nodded. “How are the Garretts handling the news that their baby girl hosted a three day rape rally?”

“They’re understandably distraught,” he told me.

“I think they knew,” I said evenly. “Maybe not beforehand, but certainly after the fact. There’s no way Marlene could have cleaned up everything before they got home if they were just away for a weekend. They sure as hell sent her across the country in a hurry after Mom called them to threaten a lawsuit. They might not have known they were drugging and raping the girls, but they HAD to have known she’d thrown some kind of bender.”

“What lawsuit?” he asked.

I told him about the rumor that had started the whole thing for us, including the damage to our family.

“You still could sue,” he pointed out.

I shrugged. “Her parents are ruined. They’ll lose their house paying for lawyers to try to defend their precious daughter. What am I gonna get out of suing them? Marlene’s work-program stipend? Thanks, but I can do without the pocket change.”

He shrugged. “You want justice? Punishing them to the full extent of the law does that for you.”

“Just put her in jail for the rest of her life and send me her autopsy photos after they kill her. That’s what’ll satisfy me.”

He nodded. “I can promise the jail, not the photos.”

I nodded. This conversation had been the ultimate mood crash. “Thanks again for keeping me in the loop. I wish you luck with the convictions.”

The two of them got up to go and I remembered something else. “Principal Peterson,” I said suddenly. “I’ve been made aware that some of the girls at school are still being harassed. They told me several members of the athletic teams have been involved and that they’re also getting religious harassment. ‘You’re going to Hell’ and things like that. They named Justin Phillips specifically. I intend to talk to him, but if that won’t work, the next words I use may be in the form of a book swung at high speed. Off the record, of course.”

He nodded. “Off the record, Justin Phillips could use a dose of humility,” he said with a hint of irritation in his voice. “I hope your talk is persuasive, but if it’s not, I’d advise you to leave any violence off of school property.”

I nodded. “That’s totally understandable,” I said. “Is there any chance that you could arrange for a school assembly about rape for sometime this week?” I asked. “Once the arrests are made, I think that talking to the students about rape and all the different forms of it would help put things into perspective for the rest of the school.”

The both nodded. “I can ask for some members of the police force to speak and provide informational pamphlets,” Mr. Forbes offered.

“That would probably be helpful,” I admitted. “Would you be able to speak or does the ongoing investigation bar you from saying anything?”

“I can’t speak, but I know a couple of officers that would be willing.”

“Why don’t you speak?” Mr. Peterson asked me.

“I wasn’t raped,” I said. “Why would anyone listen to me?”

“Those girls do,” he pointed out. “I know you turned down being a student counselor, but you’ve become very influential this past semester.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said, surprising Mom.

“Just like that?” she asked. “You usually dig your heels in until the bitter end.”

I shrugged. “I have a few things that I want to say to the general population. Some of them are a little uncomfortable, but they might get the message across.”

“How does Friday sound?” Mr. Peterson asked.

“Right after late lunch?” I asked and he nodded. I shook his hand and was already engrossed in what I was going to say.

They said goodbye and Mom gave me a funny look. “What do you have up your sleeve?” she asked suspiciously.

I shrugged. “Nothing really. I intend to talk about rape in as many of its different forms as I can, talk in very vague terms about the party in September and tell everyone that these girls aren’t sluts, they aren’t easy, they aren’t dirty or damaged or unworthy of respect. I think it’s time that someone shone a light on how they were treated and I can’t ask them to climb up on stage to talk about what happened to them.”

She looked at me, obviously suspecting I was up to something else.

“What?” I asked, challenging the look she was giving me. “I’m not about to out those girls or say anything to damage the cases against those boys.”

“You’re not gonna talk about Vance Waterman?” she asked.

“Is THAT what you’re worried about?” I asked. “No, I don’t have any intention of naming ANY names while I’m up there except to introduce myself.”

She finally nodded and I went downstairs, taking out my phone and calling Tricia.

“Hi,” she said, subdued.

“Hi,” I said, frowning at the tone of her voice. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said awkwardly. “I’m just at Cheryl’s right now.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’ll let you go then. I love you. Call me later, okay?”

“If it’s not too late,” she said vaguely. “Later.”

I looked at my phone and shook my head. That conversation made my skin crawl. She’d been so distant and hadn’t told me she loved me back. I tried not to read too much into it.

Dawn came into the room and came over to rest her head in my lap with a whine. I stroked her fur gently, smiling at her. “You wanna go for your walk, girl?” I asked. Her tail started wagging happily at the mention of a walk so I took her upstairs and got ready to take her out.

“Dinner’s at six,” Mom told me. “Patty said she’s coming over to cook and we’re eating here.”

“I’ll be back in plenty of time,” I promised and clipped Dawn’s leash on before I took her out in the crisp air.

Dawn was extra frisky today, probably because she hadn’t gotten her walk this morning, so I decided to try to jog a little so she could run some of her energy off. I felt good, REALLY good. We ran a tight circle, staying close to the house so that we could make it home if I ran into a problem, but my leg held out, the running didn’t aggravate my abdominal incision and even my arm didn’t feel weak today. That last was probably wishful thinking, but I had some hope that I was turning the corner and getting back to normal. Dawn was beside herself with glee, running with her tongue lolling out to one side as she strained against the leash, encouraging me to run faster.

We ran until it was almost completely dark and then we slowed to a walk and turned toward home, both of us breathing hard. Dawn walked with me, but her tail was still perky as ever, telling me she wasn’t feeling bad. I walked up to the house feeling a little better than I had when DA Forbes had delivered the news about Marlene. I opened the door and we stepped inside, Dawn taking off for her water dish as soon as I turned her loose.

Dan was sitting at the kitchen table talking to Patty and Mom as they bustled around the kitchen. “Hi,” I said. “Where are the girls?”

“The three of them are downstairs, watching a movie,” Dan told me. “So I hear you’re going to give a seminar about rape this week.”

I looked at Mom and rolled my eyes. “How many other people have heard this news?” I asked pointedly.

“Just Patty and Dan,” Mom said. “I waited until the girls went downstairs to bring it up.”

I nodded. “Good. I want to be the one to tell them about it. I agreed to talk at the assembly. It’s really the least I can do since I asked the principal to hold the assembly to talk to the students about rape. There’s gonna be cops there and they’ll have some handouts for people to read.”