Due Process (Joe Dillard #9)(10)
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 get 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.
His work as a police officer had done nothing to change his attitude towards race. He’d arrested dozens of young black men for selling drugs, for domestic assaults, for robberies and for homicides. He’d dealt with the Crips and the Bloods and their seemingly endless game of senseless violence. He’d dealt with crackhead mothers who bore children by several different men and then dumped them onto grandparents—usually grandmothers—who had neither the means nor the desire to care for them. He’d seen the worst kind of behavior from them, and although he’d seen the same from whites, he just didn’t stomach the behavior the same when it came to blacks. He perceived them as defiant, unrepentant and ignorant.
The kid in the room was named Kevin Davidson. Riddle knew virtually nothing about him other than he was a senior at ETSU, twenty-one-years old, had a Collierville address on his driver’s license, and had no criminal record of any kind. But Riddle had convinced himself that this kid had raped a woman three days earlier. A white woman.
Riddle went into the bathroom and slapped himself in the face a couple of times, just to get his blood boiling a little more. As he washed his hands, he looked into the mirror at his shaved head and angry, chocolate brown eyes. His second wife had left him three months earlier and he’d put on fifteen pounds, most of it from sitting at home alone and drinking vodka when he was off work. The lines in his forehead had grown deeper and his skin had an ashy tone.
“You need to start working out again, fat ass,” he said out loud to himself.
They’d executed the search warrant at 6:00 a.m. sharp at a house on Pine Street near the ETSU campus. The house was owned by ETSU and was occupied by three players, all seniors and all captains on the football team. Kevin Davidson was the only one of them who was awake when Riddle and the other officers arrived. He opened the door and seemed genuinely surprised to see the police. Riddle noticed some books and papers and an open laptop on a table in Kevin’s room. It appeared he’d been studying before the police showed up. All three of the players had been cooperative and had agreed to ride to the police station to be questioned.