Jernigan sucked on the stem of his dormant pipe. Apparently he didn’t smoke it, even in his own office. I settled into a comfortable chair in front of his desk. He pointed the pipe at me and said, “I have never lost an acquaintance rape trial.”
“You must be very proud.”
“Are you giving me attitude, Taylor?”
“Sorry. It’s starting to be a long day.”
“Most rape cases, like this one, never even go to trial,” Jernigan said. “Do you know why? Skeptical jurors. For a long time I would challenge women thirty-five and older during voir dire. I would try to keep them off the jury because research claimed they’re the toughest demographic when it comes to rape cases. That was until I learned that they’re also the toughest judges of victims. They’ll tell themselves that if the victim was drunk or even had just a little bit to drink, she was putting herself out there. They’ll tell themselves that she was at least partially responsible for what happened to her. Now I just load up the jury with older white women.”
“There’s nothing that justifies a rape,” I said. “Ever.”
“Did I say there was? I’m just trying to tell you that rape cases are notoriously difficult to try because the burden of proof is on the victim. If there’s a lot of physical evidence, if she was beaten, if there are rope burns on her wrists, if the assailant gained entry through a broken window, that makes it easier. If there isn’t any evidence of coercion…”
“Coercion?”
“For lack of a better word. If there’s no physical evidence, then the defendant can argue that the sex was consensual, which is what we do most of the time. We make it an issue of he said, she said.”
“From my own experience as a cop, the vast majority of women who report a rape are telling the truth,” I said. “Something like ninety-eight percent.”
“There’s that two percent, though, isn’t there? It’s called reasonable doubt, Taylor. Now, that percentage might shrink a bit if there’s an outcry witness. Someone who saw the victim soon after the incident who can testify that the victim was hysterical, shaking, trembling, and afraid. Someone who can not only tell a jury what the victim told her but can testify to the victim’s demeanor, how she was behaving.”
“Did you have that here?”
“Yes. The victim’s sister. But the fact that she was related to the victim actually worked against her credibility, and having to testify that she had been drinking, too—she wasn’t doing her sister any favors. Juries are judgmental as hell, Taylor. Besides, I was perfectly willing to have a forensic evaluator take the stand and testify that, from a clinical perspective, if a woman perceives that she was victimized she may develop symptoms similar to those that occur when someone is actually victimized.”
“What?”
“If a woman perceives that she was powerless to stop a sexual encounter, then she may develop symptoms that mirror those exhibited by women who were actually raped, such as feelings of betrayal, fear, embarrassment, guilt, or depression and even symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. We argue that she might mistakenly believe she was raped even though the sexual encounter was consensual.”
“How do you get away with this bullshit?”
“I told you, Taylor—juries. Lawyers are blamed for every little thing people believe is wrong with the judicial system, but really it’s the juries. They’re the ones who make the decisions, not us.”
“What happened in this case?”
“Rachel Rozanski and Todd Kendrick were students at the same college. They met at a party just before Valentine’s Day. They had a few drinks. They danced. Todd walked Rachel to her off-campus apartment, which she shared with her younger sister. They kissed at the door. Rachel said Todd forced her inside. Todd said Rachel invited him inside. Rachel insisted that she was an unwilling participant. Todd referred to Rachel’s alleged resistance as mild protestations that he interpreted as a sign that Rachel was excited about the sexual contact. He claimed that they actually kissed good-bye before he left.
“Something else. Rachel also said that when Todd forced her facedown on the living room sofa, she heard the metallic sound that a camera makes when it’s taking photos. She said Todd took selfies as he raped her. She said she saw a cell phone. Later, she said that she didn’t actually see the phone, only heard it. The police confiscated Todd’s cell phone. No photos. Nor did it make a clicking sound when taking pics.
“Taylor, you know how this works as well as I do. The victim will meet with uniformed police officers; she’ll undergo a forensic sexual-violence exam in a hospital; she’ll talk to detectives, county prosecutors, a judge, the defense attorney, and eventually a jury. By the time her case is heard, usually eight to fourteen months after reporting the incident, she’ll have told her story from beginning to end a dozen times or more. If there’s any discrepancy at all in any of the accounts, an attorney like me will clobber her on the witness stand.
“Now add that to the fact that Todd was squeaky clean. No convictions, no arrests, not even a parking ticket. A good student from a moneyed family who’s never had a whiff of scandal attached to his name. Even his ex-girlfriends liked him. All said, if you were the Ramsey County attorney, would you have prosecuted?”
“How moneyed?” I asked.
“Enough to afford me.”
“Any relationship to the Guernsey family?”
“None that I’m aware of. Why do you ask?”
“Just a thought. Going back to the camera. There was one, wasn’t there?”
“How did you know?”
“The hacker stole something that was incriminating.”
“Pics that were sent to me,” Jernigan said.
“Sent to you?”
“Todd didn’t use his cell phone. He used a camera that belonged to a friend of his. Tiny sucker. Fits in the palm of your hand. He returned the camera to his friend as soon as he realized that not taking no for an answer might get him into trouble.”
“He gave incriminating evidence to his friend?”
“Dumb, right? The so-called friend emailed sample pics to me after he learned that I had been retained by the family.”
“Why?”
“Why d’you think?”
“How much did you pay?”
“I didn’t pay anything.” Jernigan pointed his pipe at me for emphasis. “No. Hell no. I didn’t even think about it. Accepting evidence of a crime, and then what? No, no, Taylor. I would have been aiding and abetting an offender after the fact. I would have been guilty of a criminal offense. That wasn’t going to happen.”
“What did you do?”
“I replied to the email. I told Todd’s friend to go to the police. I told him to take the camera, the SD card, and anything else he might have to the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office. I told him not to contact me again. Afterward, I deleted his email and the attachment. Unfortunately, it’s been explained to me that deleting something from your computer doesn’t actually delete it. It was those pics that the hacker recovered.”
“Deleting the pics, isn’t that the same as destroying evidence?”
“I didn’t actually see what was in the attachment. I never opened it. Only an idiot opens attachments sent by unknown sources. So I didn’t actually know if it was evidence or not. At least, that’s my story. Prove it isn’t true.”
“At the same time, though, you never told the prosecutor that Rachel was telling the truth, that her rapist did take selfies while he assaulted her?”
“Now we’re in that gray area of an attorney’s obligation to the court and his obligation to his client.”
“Did Todd’s friend try to blackmail the family after you turned him down?”
“I don’t know. We never discussed the matter.”
“The pics never surfaced, though.”
“No.”
“How convenient.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“Charges against Todd were dropped.”
“Insufficient evidence.”
“If the pics surface now—”
“He’d be recharged.”
“Wouldn’t anything stolen from your office still be considered privileged information and inadmissible in court?”
“It wasn’t privileged. Todd didn’t tell me about the pics or email them to me, a second party did.”
“Do Todd and his family know that you’ve been hacked?”
“I told them immediately.”
“What about the friend?”
“What about him?”
“Do you want to tell me who he is?”
“He can’t be our hacker, Taylor. If NIMN uploads the pics, he’ll lose his leverage. There’d be no reason to pay him.”
“Is the family still paying him?”
“I don’t know.”
“He might have bragged it up some,” I said. “Might have told a friend what a clever SOB he is. Someone might have overheard him.”
“His name is James Cowgill.”
Like most people his age, James Cowgill had Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Pinterest accounts. I knew what he looked like in about 10 seconds and where he lived in about 130 more. I knocked on the door to his apartment located just off Snelling Avenue in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood of St. Paul, so-called because it included Hamline University and was halfway between the downtowns of St. Paul and Minneapolis. No one answered, so I retreated to my Camry. I drove to a side street and settled in an unobtrusive spot that provided clean sight lines to both the building’s front door and rear parking lot.
I waited.
I turned on my radio and hit the SCAN button. The receiver searched through God knows how many stations playing every kind of music you can imagine plus news and a lot of talk. Twice. I lingered on a jazz station for a song and then a golden oldies station. I used to like that kind of music, but somewhere along the line I lost interest. I don’t know why. I turned off the radio.
And waited some more.
Traffic was very heavy on Snelling Avenue. There were a lot of pedestrians and bicyclists on the street and sidewalks, too, mostly college-age kids, mostly coming and going from the coffeehouse on the corner. A couple of times I thought I had my man only to discover that I was mistaken.
About an hour passed before I saw him. Cowgill had actually ridden his ten-speed Raleigh within inches of my parked car, slowed at the intersection of the four-lane street, and started riding through it toward the apartment building.
He managed to get halfway across before the car hit him.
It was a blue car, bigger than most, and caught him square.
There was no squeal of brakes and no lurch right or left to indicate that the driver was trying to miss his mark.
Rider and bicycle flew up and out of one lane of traffic and into the next.
A Ford F-150 hit its brakes, but not fast enough, crushing first the bike and then the rider under the front tires.
The blue car kept going.
That’s when I screwed up.
I jumped out of my own vehicle and ran toward the accident scene.
I stopped before I reached it.
You should be chasing the blue car, I told myself.
Only by then it was too late.
I closed my eyes and tried to conjure the vehicle in my mind’s eye.
It was hopeless.
I had been so startled by the hit-and-run that I didn’t take note of the vehicle’s make or model. I hadn’t seen the license plate number and for the life of me couldn’t picture the driver.
At least a dozen people had gathered around the pickup and the bicycle and Cowgill’s body. The way it was twisted, I couldn’t imagine that he had survived.
The sound of multiple sirens grew louder.
I told myself that I should hang around and tell the police that I saw everything, which amounted to nothing. I would also have to explain what I was doing there, though, which would have put my clients at risk.
I returned to my Camry and pounded the steering wheel.
An ambulance and two police cruisers arrived.
I hammered the steering wheel some more.
“Goddammit,” I shouted.
I started up the car and drove off.
I was back in my apartment, puttering in the kitchen, when my cell rang. By then the local evening news had been on for twenty minutes.
“This is Taylor,” I said.
“It’s on TV.” Jernigan was shouting so loud I decided he didn’t need a phone. He could have just opened a window in his house and I would have heard him plain. “Did you see it? It’s on TV.”
“What?”
“Are you being coy with me, Taylor?”
My response was to sigh heavily into the phone transmitter.
“Please tell me that you didn’t do it,” Jernigan said.
“Are you asking me that?”
Jernigan took a deep breath and exhaled slowly as if he were attempting to calm himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Of course you didn’t. But Jesus Christ.”
“I saw it, though.” I explained, adding, “I couldn’t identify the driver or his vehicle. I missed the opportunity.”
“Cowgill was murdered.”
“Not necessarily. Hitting a guy with a car, that’s amateur night. You’re sure to hurt the guy, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll kill him. It could have been a real hit-and-run accident.”
“That’s what the TV is calling it, but what do you think? I mean, what do you think the chances are?”
“All things considered? About three percent.”
“Cowgill was murdered,” Jernigan repeated.
“Do you know anyone who might have had a motive?”
“This is terrible.”
“I’m sure Cowgill thinks so.”
“I don’t know what to do about this, Taylor. If I go to the police with what I know, I’d be compromising my client. If I … Actually, I do know what to do. Nothing. I’m not going to do anything.”
“The police will investigate the crime as a hit-and-run.”
“I know.”
“There’s a lot they can do. Interview witnesses at the scene to see if anyone can ID the make, model, color of the vehicle. They’ll examine the footage taken from traffic cameras if there are any in the area, plus cameras in businesses that face the street. They’ll gather forensic evidence, glass from headlights or the windshield, paint, metal parts, brush marks and impressions left on clothing—anything that’ll help them get a profile of the car. They’ll check with local auto body shops, too. Honestly, though, the last year I worked as an investigator for the St. Paul Police Department, we had three hundred and thirty-something hit-and-runs. I think we solved six, and that was always because someone came forward.”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“The detectives won’t even think to check Cowgill’s bank account or ask who his friends were. Unless somebody—”
“No, Taylor. The answer is no. You’re a licensed private investigator in the state of Minnesota. You have legal obligations to keep quiet as well.”
“Are you sure about that, Doug?”
“I’m sure. Listen, I don’t like this any more than you do, but we have to think about the higher moral good.”
John Kaushal used the same phrase yesterday, I told myself. The higher moral good. He was protecting a murderer. Jernigan was protecting a rapist. What’s the greater good in that?
“Is that your professional advice?” I asked.
“It is.”
“Maybe I’ll call a lawyer and get a second opinion.”
“Taylor, please. Don’t do anything we’ll both regret.”
Someone knocked on my door, so I opened it. Amanda Wedemeyer walked in. She was wearing blue shorts and a red jersey with blue piping and her name stitched across the back. She made a big production out of crumbling to the floor and lying flat, her arms and legs outstretched as if she were making snow angels. She sighed like a martyr giving up her last breath.
“Hi, Mandy,” I said.
I left the door open and walked back to the kitchen area. Ogilvy bounded into the room, paused when he saw the girl, sniffed around her as if looking for food, and nudged her arm when he didn’t find any.
“Tough day?” I asked.
“First game of the season. We got—what’s the word Coach used? Oh yeah. Crushed. Hear that, Ogilvy? Crushed.”
The rabbit kept ramming Amanda’s hand until she started to stroke his fur. The gesture made her smile. Apparently some rabbits know just what to do.
“Crushed happens,” I said. “Although not always in the first game.”
“Did you play soccer when you were a kid?”
“No.”
“It’s hard.”
“A lot of running around, anyway.”
“You played baseball, though,” she reminded me.
“A little.”
“Do you still play?”
“Just the game of life.”
A voice came from the hallway.
“How’s that going?” Claire asked.
“Sometimes I get crushed.”
Claire stepped into my apartment and looked down at Mandy. She was also wearing blue shorts and a red jersey with blue piping and her name stitched on the back. A soccer mom, although I had to admit the uniform looked damn good on her. I wondered if Alex Campbell had a soccer uniform.
Claire poked her daughter with the toe of her sneaker.
“Are we going to go through this every time you lose?” she asked.
“I hate getting beat,” Amanda said.
“Why do we play the game?”
“We play to win,” I said.
Both mother and daughter looked at me.
“I wasn’t supposed to answer that question, was I?”
“We play the game for the fun of it,” Claire said.
“Yeah, that too.”
Amanda didn’t remind me of my daughter; she was at least seven years older than Jenny when she died. Claire didn’t remind me of Laura, either. They were very different people, different ages, different looks, with different perspectives on life. So it wasn’t like I saw them as replacements for the family that I had loved and lost. Yet having them around often made me ponder what my life would have been like if John Brown hadn’t run that damned red light. Would I be happy? Probably happier than I was, anyway, I told myself.
Brown was murdered shortly after he was released from prison, and the cops, including some very old friends, were convinced that I did it right up until the true killer was revealed. Make no mistake. It didn’t break my heart to see the sonuvabitch in the ground, and I felt no animosity toward his killer. His death didn’t make me feel any better, though. Now I wondered what was going to happen when Claire’s ex-husband was released from prison. He was doing time for embezzling to support a gambling addiction. Would it change the dynamic between the girls and me? Claire had divorced him, true. He was still Amanda’s old man, though, and would probably be allowed visitation and at least some parental rights.
“You okay?” Claire asked.
“Hmm? Sure. I just have a lot of things on my mind.”
Claire nudged her daughter again.
“Homework,” she said.
“Haven’t I suffered enough?”
“Go.”
Amanda crawled off the floor and retreated to the apartment across the landing as if she were marching off to meet a firing squad, and not too bravely. Claire stayed behind.
“Are you okay?” she asked again.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look it.”
“I’m okay, Claire. Trust me.”
“You know, when I was going through all that upheaval with my ex-husband, I never spoke to anyone about it. Not when he bankrupted us, not even after our home was foreclosed on. Who could I tell? It felt so much like—like losing. I realize now that not having someone to talk to only made it worse.”
“I understand.”
“Do you understand that you can always talk to me?”
I don’t know why I did it, but I wrapped my arms around her and hugged so tightly that I heard her groan. I didn’t let her go, though, and she didn’t push me away.
Eventually I released her and stepped back.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No. It was nice.”
“Good night, Claire.”
“I should come back later.”
“You shouldn’t. You should leave. Go away, Claire, before I forget how much I like you, how much I like you both.”
She did, but as she was closing my door she said, “You and I are going to have a long, long conversation, and soon.”
The door closed, and I said, “Why? So you can learn for yourself how much of a soulless jerk I am?”