Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(38)

17

I was disoriented when I woke. I had been stirred from a deep sleep by the sound of a leaf blower outside. I checked my phone for the time but it was dead, having spent the night in a jail property room rather than on a charger. I had no doubt slept through my allotted thirty minutes. I didn’t wear a watch since I usually carried the time on my phone. I got up and stumbled into the kitchenette, where I saw it was 4:17 on the oven. I had been out more than two hours.

I had to plug my phone in and wait for it to get enough charge for the screen to activate. I then texted Myron and Emily on a group text and explained my delay. I asked if it was too late to meet and the response was immediate: Come to the office.

Twenty-five minutes later we met.

The text Emily had sent Myron earlier was correct. She had gotten good stuff on William Orton down at UC–Irvine. We met in the FairWarning conference room and she laid out what she had found.

“First of all, none of this is on the record,” she said. “If we want to use it we need to find independent verification—which I think will exist at the Anaheim Police Department, if we can find a source there.”

“How good is your source at the school?” Myron asked.

“She’s an assistant dean now,” Emily said. “But four years ago when all of this went down she was the assistant to the coordinator of the Title IX unit. Do you know what Title IX is, Jack?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s the sexual violence and harassment protocol for all schools that get federal money.”

“Correct,” Emily said. “So my source told me off the record and on deep background that William Orton was suspected of being a serial abuser of his students, but they never got the goods on him. Victims got intimidated, witnesses recanted. They never got a solid case against him until Jane Doe came along.”

“Jane Doe?” I asked.

“She was a student—a biology major—who took classes from Orton and claimed he had roofied her and then raped her after a chance encounter at a bar in Anaheim. She came to naked in a motel room and the last thing she remembered was the drink with him.”

“What a creep,” Myron said.

“You mean what a criminal,” Emily said.

“That too,” Myron said. “What happened? Jane Doe change her mind?”

“No, not at all,” Emily said. “She was solid. And smart. She called the police that night and they got a rape kit and took blood. Orton used a condom during the assault but they got saliva off her nipples. They were building a solid case against this guy. The tox on Jane came back with flunitrazepam, better known as Rohypnol, the date-rape drug. They had a solid witness in the victim and they were good to go with a case. They were just waiting on the DNA.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“The DNA typing was done by the Orange County Sheriff’s Lab,” Emily said. “The saliva came back as no match to Orton.”

“You’re kidding,” Myron said.

“I wish,” Emily said. “It killed the case. It cast doubt on her story because she had said under questioning that she had not been with another man for six days. An investigator with the District Attorney’s Office down there then dug up a number of prior sex partners Jane Doe had been involved with. It all added up to the DA passing. They wouldn’t touch it without the direct DNA link.”

I thought about what Jason Hwang had said about the DRD4 gene. The Orange County DA had dismissed Jane Doe as promiscuous and therefore not believable enough to support the case at trial.

“You said it was a chance encounter,” I said. “Was there any more on that? How did they know it was a chance encounter?”

“I didn’t ask that,” Emily said. “They just said it was random, you know. They ran into each other in a bar.”

“Did the saliva match anybody else?” I asked.

“Unknown donor,” Emily said. “There was a rumor going around at the time that Orton, being a DNA researcher, had somehow altered his own DNA to prevent the match.”

“Sounds like science fiction,” Myron said.

“It does,” said Emily. “According to my source, they ran the test at the sheriff’s lab a second time and it came back again as a negative match.”

“What about tampering?” Myron asked.

“It was suggested, but the Sheriff’s Department stood by the lab,” Emily said. “I think any indication that there was an evidence-integrity problem would endanger every conviction that relied on that lab for evidence analysis, and they weren’t going to go down that road.”

“And Orton walked away,” I said.

“To a degree,” Emily said. “There was no criminal case, but there was enough smoke because of Jane Doe’s unwavering story, even in the face of the DNA, for the school to go after Orton under the employee-conduct policies. Their mandate wasn’t criminal. They needed to protect other students at the school. So they quietly negotiated his exit. He kept his pension and a cloak of silence was dropped over the whole thing.”

“And what happened to Jane Doe?” I asked.

“That I don’t know,” Emily said. “I asked my source whom she dealt with at Anaheim PD and she could only remember that the detective who handled it had a perfect name for a detective: Dig.”