Chapter 8

Sometime Thursday, maybe, I had no windows in my room so I had no clue if it was day or night outside, they eased me off the pain meds and after I’d been awake for an hour or so, and after a doctor and pair of nurses had fussed over me while removing temporarily my jaw harness and removing a few facial bandages, it was deemed that I was capable now of answering a few questions. Even moving my jaw a little bit really hurt, even with the meds.

The state BOI minions now had me at their tender mercies ... but at least they were quite tender about it and unlike the locals, knew how to keep their hands to themselves. Some nurse always hovered nearby in the room and would cut off the questioning after about an hour or so when I started wincing badly. Then I’d get a rest, some oral pain meds, followed by another nice nap. Repeat cycle three or four times.

I was quite willing to talk and didn’t utter the magic word ‘lawyer’ even once, but I couldn’t (even if I had wanted to) tell them who had murdered the sinister trio, or also their female ‘guest’. I was told at some point that she had been identified as a younger student, someone from the sophomore class and was just barely sixteen. I honestly didn’t know her and couldn’t even recall her face or name, at least under my present condition. Much later, I’d make a slight connection with this girl from one of Amy’s past emails, mentioning a friend of her sister who was ‘always willing to fuck, ever since she’d started growing tits in middle school’. Collateral damage, I suppose ... but not my direct doing.

Friday, I’m quite sure it was Friday, the interrogations became longer and the nurse left me to the mercies of the junior investigators with hardly a break all day and well into the evening. It was every variation of examination and cross-examination in the book; they tried good cop/bad cop, then bad cop/bad cop, then just good cop, but my story was too well rehearsed. I had a set of very limited facts that I was comfortable with imparting and tried very hard during periods of annoyance, pain and copious medication to casually relate facts I wanted them to know and keep safe behind a mental firewall a lot of other facts that I never wanted them to learn about. It was quite trying ... and the state investigators weren’t clueless morons like our locals.

Friday evening, sometime after my supper time of pureed veg, applesauce and jello and a short nap afterwards, the big boss enchilada, Captain Rodgers himself, sat down in person for nice long private chat, after first unlocking my handcuffs. As awful as I still felt, I wasn’t bashing anyone to try and escape anywhere. I met before most, if not all, of his minions, but this is the first time I’d now seen him face to face.

“This will come as a complete shock to you, or not,” he began with a deep sigh, “but about an hour ago, someone walked into the Hutchins drug store on Main Street, almost right at closing time, and unloaded two shotgun shells into Amy Hutchins, a girl that I’m certain you know. One in the chest and another one afterward in her face to make sure. Very, very messy. Several people heard the sound of the shots but there were no actual witnesses to the event. A block away, a woman walking her dog remembers hearing the sound of shots and then a dark, maybe older model sedan driving by fast, running the traffic light near her and turning at the next corner. Probably heading out to the county road east, going out of town. Or else it was kids driving reckless and it’s unrelated. You pick.” It was a calm statement but I could tell he was watching my face, and eyes. The swelling had gone down on my left one and I could sort-of use it again now.

If I gave away anything, it was honest shock. I had sort of expected that something might happen, unpleasantly, to Frank and the gang, but yet more additional collateral damage in the very deliberate murder of the conniving, and quite thoroughly evil, Amy Hutchens hadn’t figured anywhere in my wildest calculations. The Law of Unintended Consequences was biting my ass hard! It was time to start emptying the bag, perhaps a little more. Maybe not entirely, but enough so to let the chips start falling where they may.

“Fuck me...” I eventually muttered, the shock of this revelation helped to clear out my head and even making moot the throbbing pain my jaw made, if moved more than fraction. “I hope then, that no one with an ounce of common sense is going to blame this incident on me too? You have to have already realized, since you’ve uncuffed me, that these two events have to be interconnected ... and by something much, much more significant than some victims of the school bullies getting back some petty revenge of their own. This is all much, much more serious and significant than that!”

Not bad for a teaser. My bag of swag might be (almost) fully opened, but I was only going to dole out the tasty loot to be savored one little morsel at a time. After a few hours I’d hand-sliced and served up on a pretty tasty platter every single speck and crumb of knowledge that I ever intended to have ever leave my lips, at least willingly. I didn’t think anything that I’d done fell into the category of a state felony – and the captain clearly didn’t about misdemeanor occurrences not directly related to these murders. They wanted the person or persons who pulled the trigger, not me.

It took a while to unload the bag, about the extensive local history of corruption and the deeds of the younger generation now trying to emulate and even surpass their sires, and the good captain dutifully took pages of notes, but I wouldn’t let him record my statements on a voice recorder. Deep background only, or I’d plead my rights to silence, I said. It covered pretty much the complete gamut of vice and general slime that we sloshed about in here daily, the teenaged prostitution (possibly forced), the local drug production and distribution via a bloc of the female students, and the use of drugs (usually roofies) that the senior girl ringleaders would use to punish girls who weakened or became a threat, who were then passed over to the male members of the gang (Frank, Reggie & company) to be gang raped, with plenty of video evidence recorded for later blackmail to keep everyone inline.

“Don’t you get it?” I snapped with near exasperation, after Capt. Rodgers tried to steer the conversation back to the lads and the threatening photographs for the third time. “None of this, the deaths or the seriousness of what has been happening has anything to do with maladjusted teenagers ... whomever they might be ... seeking revenge against bullies that the school authorities willingly ignored, except to gleefully punish their victims if they spoke or stepped out of tune. This, the killings, is adult levels of retribution ... you’re not dealing with guys with pimples who have never been kissed by a girl. Note the keyword here, retribution. Focus entirely on that sole motive alone – this is serious vengeance for a crime done to someone that time alone won’t ever heal, like ... well, exactly like a parent that has lost a child, not from an accident, but from deliberate malfeasance. I know for a fact that the school bullies, male and female, directly caused at least three teen suicides to occur, with numerous other nervous breakdowns and even more young lives ruined by rape.” Yes, I really used that exact word ... retribution. Words have meanings and it’s sometimes best to use the exact right word, if it can make a difference.

I could see the light bulb turning on, inside the captain’s head, and bless his round, slightly pudgy face, there was a decent brain under that thinning scalp. He closed his notebook and just thought quietly for a good fifteen seconds, and I could sense that the gears were turning at last in the right direction.

“So, if I were to just ask you, as a local who knows and supposedly understands most of the people involved, what I should do next, if you were in my shoes ... just what stones would you try and lift up first? I’m sure you have a thought or two.” He asked with a smile. I’m pretty sure he already knew what I was about to suggest.

“Sure, if I were in your shoes then, just my opinion mind you,” I said with a grin, “I’d already have a good search team turning over the four houses where those murdered kids lived. Not the other younger gal victim at the cabin, since I’ve never even heard of her before, so she’s probably just a young beginner party girl at the wrong place and at the wrong time. Speaking purely from local knowledge, as a fellow student, I’d suggest to you that Reggie Sawyer and Amy Hutchens were the actual top ringleaders to focus on. They were the smart ones, you see ... the leaders, the kids that tended to tell all of the other kids in school what to do and when to do it. Sure, the head jock, Frank and head queen bee of the school, Lorena Hall were involved too, probably right up to their eye teeth, but there’s no way that either of them gave out the important orders, giving the gang their marching orders. I’d focus on Reggie and Amy first and hardest, and strip their computers and houses down to the studs if necessary and I’m sure you’ll find something.”

“Already in progress. I sent a search team to the Hutchins house the minute after the state judge faxed me the warrant. One of my sergeants already reported back soon after he got there that he’s found a stash of potential evidence and her laptop is already enroute to the lab boys. They caught her mom in the early stages of trying to scrub it, but it looks like there is no permanent data loss. She and Amy’s father are in custody right now too as material witnesses, ‘helping our enquiries’. A state pharmacy oversight team should be here tomorrow to conduct a complete forensic investigation of the family drug store, but we can already tell at a glance that there’s going to be irregularities ... probably a lot of them. At least two stashes of illegal drugs have already been found there and I’ve still got a crime scene team working the whole building, basement to roof. We didn’t find much at any of the dead guy’s houses, but if you think Reggie deserves very special attention, I’ll send a bigger and smarter search team in to do it right this time. And what then next, after that?”

“Check school records and talk to every homeroom teacher about their regular students. I wouldn’t trust the official school records one bit, so really lean on the teachers as hard as you have to. You’re looking for reports of students that had significant personality shifts from being once cheerful, or as cheerful as teenagers get, to then having obvious severe suicidal depression. Ones that seemed to totally withdraw from everything and suddenly stopped caring about anything. You’re looking specifically for a kid that either had severe drug issues, possibly OD’ing, or one of the numerous girls that had been raped and then told by all of the Authorities here to shut the fuck up about it. Sure, teenaged girls have the highest suicide likelihood, statistically, but we had a couple of pretty shocking cases last year ... like the Huddle girl. I knew her, and she took herself out hardcore, drinking a mix of pesticides. I’ve heard that her parents, who live out pretty close to me, on the eastern side of town, took her loss really hard.”

There ... I’d dropped down Patricia’s name, and not entirely as casually as I had originally planned to. The captain told me that I’d given him quite enough ‘background’ information for one session and that he’d see me again tomorrow. Odds were that I’d be pronounced fit enough to be released by tomorrow morning, but he would ‘most appreciate it’ if I stayed accessible for further, later questioning. Assuming that he required any further ‘unofficial’ opinions about other local folks of interest.

I took this as a hint that I was no longer a prime suspect, so with something of a smile I rolled over and went back to sleep ... and probably dreamed about being able to eat solid food again soon. That dentist had done a great job reattaching all of my knocked-out teeth and I could honestly say that after the ache went away a few more days later that they didn’t ever cause me any trouble afterwards.

I was discharged as expected the following Saturday morning and I spent the rest of the weekend resting my various aches at home and catching up on the local gossip that my dad relayed to me, as he heard it. I didn’t even need to read the local paper to quickly learn that the entire County Sheriff’s department had been shut down by the state police. The terse newspaper story cited significant organized crime and civil justice violations, and that a number of senior law enforcement officers and ‘other persons of interest’, both county and prominent town citizens, were now assisting the state BOI with their various ongoing investigations. The senior adult rats were already being pulled out their holes or had already gone rapidly and suspiciously missing, with warrants now out for their apprehension.

A bit of news I heard on Sunday, after my father returned from a quick trip to the neighborhood Quik-E-Mart for beer (one of which he shared), was that state police cars had been seen since Saturday camped out at the Huddle family farm. The bodies of Patricia’s parents had been found in the same barn where their daughter had taken her own life. Murder-Suicide, was the local whispered rumor. One parent had shot the other and then themself, the exact order of events was never made clear to me, and I suppose that those facts really didn’t matter now to me or anyone else. Like Patricia’s, their own pain was now over.

Also, never reported to the general public, would be the fact that an office file box with a binder and computer discs of some exceptionally incriminating evidence would be found there in their barn loft (after a very short and unremarkable search effort), that would give the decent state BOI Captain more than enough evidence to keep the state judicial system busy for years to come.

Supposedly, the shotgun pellets the Huddles had used would forensically match those extracted from Frank, Reg, and Mo’s burnt bodies ... and also of course Amy Hutchins. It was never reported (and I never asked) so I just took it for granted that the Huddles, seeing video evidence of their daughter being drugged by Amy and then raped, repeatedly for hours by Frank and a half dozen of his pals, had snapped their last thread of sanity.

The poor Huddles were already dead but still walking about, and I think that they would have topped themselves eventually, even without this evidence of why their daughter had gone finally mad and killed herself ... and just who was responsible. The conversation I heard while in their barn that evening could never have been spoken by reasonable sane individuals. They were already cracking hard and perhaps my one little push caused their final break and gave them some closure for their family pain and suffering ... or they’d planned to check-out from life soon anyway, regardless of how much I’d pushed them ... or in which direction.

Perhaps, I could have handled all of this differently, but I put this decidedly into the win column for greater society, when all of the final score’s pro and con were tabulated. I admit feeling a good degree of guilt, though, even years later, but never quite enough to say, even to myself, that I was sorry and that I was wrong to get revenge for Porky Patty. They murdered her, all of them, and quite deliberately ... and now maybe she and her family could finally rest together now in peace in some happier place.

I tried pretty hard to try and feel some sort of guilt for how and why things came about the way that they did, but in my heart I just had the final pragmatic sense that everything, no matter how messy, did perhaps end for the best. Amy wouldn’t be poisoning half of her classmates anymore with drugs, or whoring out about three dozen under-aged teenaged girls. Nor would Frank’s merry band of jock rapists roofie, rape, and ruin any more lives, ever again.

The ‘Why’ of the whole situation bothered me greatly for a few years, though. “Why was I so compelled to get revenge ... and not just for Patty, for the honest men and women of our town, that needed fair, honest, justice, and rarely ever saw any of it. Eventually, in something of a revelation, I decided that perhaps, just maybe, the ancient Greek Furies, or their agents the Erinyes, had decided that I was the most suitable person for handling their need for vengeance. Hubris, in matters great and small, was one of the greatest of the crimes that offended the gods, and was always punished in creative and nasty ways. Just read some classical era literature – hubris was a crime even greater than murder ... and punished in far greater ways. The Authorities of this town, both young and old, had probably been living on borrowed time for years ... until I was pushed by something to ‘do something’ about it.

So, not too long ago, I decided to hold no regrets ... and avoid any hint of hubris in my own life from then on!

The next Monday, I returned to school to find that both everything and nothing really had changed. I was still (mostly) a pariah and that situation didn’t improve, even as more and more students were pulled out of class to assist with the growing on-going investigations over the next few weeks. I saw Captain Rodgers once in a school hallway and he gave me a subtle nod and returned his attention to his catch of the day, a pair of the mid-ranked Mean Girls, who had certainly been involved either with the rapes, drug distribution, the Daddy-Daughter Club, or the teenaged prostitution ring. Likely all of the above.

A lot of students were officially checked out of school that week, and not a few teachers were suddenly missing also. All of the top administrators, the principal and both assistants were quickly gone. Reassigned, in theory, with a temporary new principal who looked and sounded like a real hard-ass, was now put in charge of this frantic lunatic asylum. The dyke bitch of a girl’s phys-ed teacher and the cheer coach were both notably absent, having been pulled out of the gym on Monday morning in handcuffs. They certainly knew about a lot of the dirt that was going on and probably had been paid by the parents to keep their daughters’ records clean.

I had to assume as the state BOI was casting out its net ever wider, dragging in suspects and potential witnesses alike, that the small fry (at the urging of mommy & daddy’s lawyers) were trying to cut deals as fast as possible and naming all of the names that they could. The weaker links of some of the slightly less guilty parents, and those wanting to limit their legal culpability for screwing underaged teens, were apparently talking in interrogation rooms as fast as the state boys could plug in fresh blank recording tapes.

Oh, and yeah, the kind-of cute chick who was a preacher’s daughter, Elaine, did want to spend some quality time that next Friday night with the school’s #1 worst rated ‘Bad Boy’. My dad, relieved that all of the shit was mostly now over, even volunteered to loan me the keys to his old beat-up-to-fuck Buick sedan for the evening. It meant wheels to go places and do things ... and a surprisingly large back seat big enough for two willing young adults to do things only discussed in biology textbooks ... and internet porn. It was magical ... and almost as good as our next date the following Saturday night when she first gave me oral in the car (and swallowed) and then we fucked for two hours afterward in the loft of my former lair. Someday, I decided, I’d need to check Amy’s records a bit closer to see if this ‘preacher’s girl’ had in fact been a very bad girl herself ... but I wanted to keep my memories of her happy, and never looked that gift horse in the mouth. You know what they say about preacher’s daughters, and often it’s true.

I ought to have tried to keep in touch with her, well ... afterwards, but the circumstances soon subsequently didn’t lend themselves much to nostalgic romance. I meant to write to her, when I was in Basic Training, but didn’t get around to it then, or later in Goat School getting my Army medic certs. By the time I was in Ranger School, the moment had rather passed too far into the rear-view mirror. That didn’t mean I didn’t think about her sometimes, though ... very, very fondly. I was just barely home, now out of the service, at the time of my ten-year school reunion, but I saw no sense in going. I did mean to attend her reunion, the next year, to see if she was still single, or at least available ... so we could pick up where we left off, but I had a work issue with a job and couldn’t take vacation at the time to return back home. I hated that job anyway, so I ought to have just quit and gone to see her anyway.

The following Monday, I’d barely sat down into homeroom when I was passed a note by my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Belinda Harvey. She was cool to deal with, in a semi-elderly early sixties sort of way, complete with the white Grannie Clampett bun hairdo and the thick spectacles with librarian chains on them. She was always a hoot, and I think one of the few teachers that knew me well enough to realize that I was neither stupid, nor ever looking to really make anyone any trouble. ‘Ms. Bee’ also taught both history and civics classes, which was scheduled to be my next, second period class, before the message arrived. It was from the Colonel (a Lt. Colonel, to be precise) who was the adult OIC of our junior ROTC program here. Retired Army Corps of Engineers, with 25 years of service and he’d then been here for almost another twenty years. He’d also been the senior instructor for my brother, when he was here, also taking ROTC.

If anything, the Colonel could see through me even better than Ms. Bee could. Not that I ever tried, but you never got away with anything around him. His sergeant (retired thirty years Army Artillery) you could sometimes fool, especially if it involved a joke, but never the top brass.