Due Process (Joe Dillard #9)(13)
“So what do we do?” Riddle said.
Bingham looked at his most seasoned investigator. Riddle’s cheeks were flushed, which meant he was angry. Bingham had known Riddle was a hot head for years. He might even have been a racist, but if he was, he hid it well. He hadn’t been caught stepping over any lines, hadn’t done anything that would allow Chief Starring to get rid of him. There had been a couple of excessive force complaints, but those were routine and usually were resolved when a camera revealed—or a fellow officer gave a statement—that a suspect was resisting.
“This could blow up in our faces,” Bingham said, “so everything is by the book. We let Chief Starring and the district attorney handle the press. We let the lab people do their thing. I want every one of you back over there in that neighborhood and I want it canvassed. I’m going to call the football coach myself and find out how many players are willing to talk to us. If something happened, somebody will speak up.”
“And if they don’t?” Riddle said.
“Then maybe nothing happened. Maybe it was just a bunch of testosterone-filled young men who hired a stripper and things didn’t go as planned. Keep in mind we’re in the business of proving cases, not manufacturing them. That’s it. Let’s get to it.”
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28
As had been my habit for years, I walked barefoot up the driveway wearing only my boxer shorts and pulled the newspaper out of the box. It was 5:15 a.m., still dark, and our German shepherd, Rio, and our teacup poodle, Chico, had veered off into the yard to relieve themselves. Caroline was sound asleep in the bedroom. The slight breeze out of the west was warm. It promised to be a hot, humid day in Northeast Tennessee.
I walked back down the driveway, through the garage, and into the kitchen. The dogs went back to the bedroom to stretch out and get some more sleep while I dropped the paper on the table and poured myself a cup of coffee. I walked back over to the table, sat down, and did a double-take at the headline above the fold of the Johnson City paper: “Football Players Allegedly Rape Stripper at Party.”
“Wow,” I said as I began to read. The story was lurid and shocking, but as I read through it a couple of times, the lawyer in me began to realize that the story was also full of what could turn out to be unsubstantiated accusations. If the facts alleged in the story were true, there would be dire consequences for East Tennessee State University and its football program, which had only been re-established two years earlier after being disbanded for ten years due to tight budget conditions and general lack of fan interest at the state-funded institution. But there were things about the story that bothered me, not the least of which was that the stripper who reported the rape supposedly didn’t do so until hours after the rape, and it took the police almost three days to execute a search warrant on the home where the party took place. The three players who lived at the home were there when the police arrived, according to the story, and they gave statements and even helped the police search the house.
Basically, what the story said was that a group of more than sixty players had held a party at an off-campus house that was owned by the university and occupied by three senior captains of the football team. The three seniors weren’t named in the story, nor were any of the other players, but it said football players were the only people in attendance. I found that hard to believe. Who can keep a lid on a college party where a stripper will be performing? The party was held on a Saturday night, a week before the season was supposed to begin. According to the story, the police were alleging—which meant the stripper was alleging—that three unidentified members of the football team had dragged her into a small bathroom and raped her over a period of about twenty minutes. When the stripper was finally allowed to leave the bathroom, everyone else had left the party. It was the kind of journalism I’d grown to hate over the years, but it was becoming more and more prevalent. No sources were quoted directly, citing either an ongoing investigation or the privacy rights of college students. Unsubstantiated allegations were presented as though they were fact. It was as though the newspaper reporters (two of them contributed, one male and one female) were trying to incite something rather than simply report the news.
I was sitting there fuming over the incompetence of the journalists when I heard Caroline plodding toward the kitchen.
“How can you stand to be up so early in the morning?” she mumbled as she went to the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of orange juice. I knew it was time for her pain medication that she took for the cancer in her bones.
“How can you stand to be in bed so late?” I said.
“It’s easy,” she said. “Whenever I think about getting up, I just close my eyes and go back to sleep. Is there anything in the fish wrapper this morning?”
Caroline didn’t care much for the Johnson City paper. The old ownership had sold out to a large conglomerate and they’d fired more than half the staff, some of whom Caroline and I had known for years.
“There’s actually a sensational, front-page story about football players and a stripper at a party,” I said. “There may or may not have been a rape. Maybe even a gang rape.”
Her eyebrows lifted as she lowered the glass of orange juice and took a couple of steps toward me.
“Anything to it?” she said.
“Hard to tell. A bunch of anonymous sources and unconfirmed information.”