Due Process (Joe Dillard #9)(9)
Starring looked at Riddle and said, “Tell him what you told me.”
As Riddle spoke, Starring watched Armstrong closely. Starring knew Armstrong was a lifelong prosecutor. He was roughly Starring’s age—maybe a few years older—but unlike Starring, Armstrong looked his age. His hair was thick and snow white, and he was grossly underweight. Starring would have guessed his height at five feet, ten inches, and his weight at about a buck thirty. There was a large, brown mole in the middle of his forehead that Starring had to force himself to ignore.
Armstrong had come to Johnson City from Michigan only three years earlier because Armstrong’s wife’s mother, who had been a professor at the Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy at ETSU for five years during the school’s infancy, had developed Alzheimer’s disease and was in a long-term health care facility in Johnson City. Armstrong’s father-in-law had left his wife fifteen years earlier for a much younger woman, and his mother-in-law had never remarried. Armstrong had told Starring when they first met that he’d never cared for his mother-in-law and didn’t want to make the move, but his wife had made him feel so guilty that he’d eventually given in to her wishes and moved to Tennessee.
Because of Armstrong’s experience, the prior district attorney, Tanner Jarrett, had hired him and immediately placed him in Criminal Court prosecuting felony cases, many of them serious, violent cases, and from everything Starring had heard, Armstrong was a competent prosecutor. Nothing spectacular, but competent. He didn’t try a lot of cases, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. About ninety percent of criminal cases were resolved through plea bargains. But when he did try a case, Armstrong was, from everything Starring had heard, a good salesman. He related well to juries and got along with the judges. Even the defense bar seemed to like him.
One thing that puzzled Starring, along with many others in the law enforcement community, was how Armstrong managed to get the interim district attorney general job in the first place. Tanner Jarrett, whose wealthy father had served in the state senate and had moved to Washington, D.C., had resigned six months earlier and followed his father to the nation’s capital. He was now practicing law in one of D.C.’s prestigious firms. Armstrong was outgoing and jovial, a glad-hander who seemed to never have met a stranger, but Northeast Tennesseans didn’t usually trust outsiders, especially outsiders from the north who talked with hard, Midwestern accents.
Nonetheless, Armstrong had somehow managed to get three of the most influential members of the county commission to start lobbying the other members on Armstrong’s behalf, and within a month of Jarrett leaving, the county commission voted to appoint Armstrong to finish out Tanner Jarrett’s term. The move hadn’t sat well with several people in the district attorney’s office, and it had angered a fair amount of law enforcement officers as well, but Armstrong seemed not to notice. He stepped into the office with a smile on his face, as though he was meant to be there and had been there all of his life.
“So that’s about it,” Riddle was saying, “warts and all.”
“Just to summarize,” Armstrong said, “just to make sure I have my facts straight, we have a gang rape that may or may not have occurred. We’re not even sure where the house is yet, but that’ll be easy enough once we talk to the escort service. We have black on white rape allegations coming from what I would describe as a victim who is iffy at best, totally unreliable at worst. We have evidence and information from the rape nurse and doctor who performed the exam that suggest a rape may have occurred. We have a rape kit that contains quite a bit of material, including semen. But the victim has a history of sexual abuse, and she takes drugs. Not only is she not pristine, she had ecstasy and alcohol in her system, and maybe gamma hydroxybutyrate or Rohypnol. Plus she’s been a stripper and a hooker for about three years. Am I doing okay so far?”
Both Riddle and Starring nodded their heads.
“So the question is whether we launch an investigation that will rock this town or tell this girl that because of the circumstances—her past, the drugs and alcohol, the fact that she can’t remember anything and didn’t report it as soon as she got out of there, the fact that she can’t identify her attackers—that we would be hard pressed to get a conviction if we moved forward.”
“That’s what I recommend,” Starring said. “Just for the record. I think we should tell her we’re sorry, but there just isn’t any way to make this stick.”
“What if the semen inside of her comes back and contains DNA from one or more of those players?” Armstrong said.
“They’ll say it was consensual,” Starring said. “Like Bo said, she’s a stripper and a hooker. It isn’t too far-fetched to think that if they did have sex with her, it was because they slipped her a few more bucks. That’s what the defense will say. Besides, they’d have to be fools to have sex with her without using a condom. From what Investigator Riddle says about this girl, the chances of them getting an STD would be about a hundred percent. My guess is there won’t be any semen from a football player.”
“I’ll draft a search warrant application myself tomorrow,” Armstrong said. “In the meantime, you guys find out where the house is and get all the information you can from the escort service. Tuesday morning, take your forensics people and your warrant and haul whoever you can in and interrogate them. I take allegations of rape very seriously. Not only that, if word of this gets out and people find out we had an allegation of a gang rape at a football party and sat on our hands or swept it under the rug, we’ll get crucified. College football programs all over the country are getting a lot of attention when it comes to rape and sexual abuse. Did you see what happened at Baylor? Hell, they fired Ken Starr for goodness sakes. Do you remember Ken Starr?”