The Night Swim(34)

“Why would a teenage girl make these accusations if they were false?” Rachel asked Greg once they were seated by a glass table on the balcony, overlooking the sea.

“I have no idea. And I don’t need to know. What I do know is that he didn’t do it. Scott has so many girls coming after him. He doesn’t need to rape an unwilling teenager when there are plenty of attractive young women who are more than willing. Models. Actresses. It makes no sense,” he said. “It’s as if everyone is out for his blood. They hate his success.”

“Do you really think it’s all a conspiracy to cut him down to size?” Rachel asked skeptically.

“My son didn’t do it!” Greg said firmly. “Scott could spend the next decade or more in jail. Lose the best years of his life. For what? Because a girl changed her mind after the fact? He was a kid himself. Just eighteen. Drunk. Dumb. He should have known better than to get mixed up with a girl like that. With her family connections and all. Her grandfather was the police chief. The police take care of their own.”

He sat back and looked out at the panoramic ocean view while he collected his thoughts.

“Scott didn’t rape that girl. He didn’t. But he’s already being treated like a rapist.”

“In what way?” Rachel asked.

“Well, for one thing, based on this girl’s word alone, he is suspended from competitive swimming. He lost his college scholarship and his sponsorships. My fear is that he will always be known as the swimmer who was accused of rape. That it will be a permanent smear. Doesn’t matter that he didn’t do it,” said Greg. “I just hope the jury sees the truth and acquits Scott so he can still fulfill his potential and win those gold medals that he’s been working so hard for all his life. Scotty’s still young. He has years of swimming ahead of him. If we can only get people to see that he has been wrongly accused.”

He paused as the sliding door opened and a man wearing jeans and a navy shirt joined them on the balcony. His fawn hair was blowing in the wind.

Rachel knew Dale Quinn on sight. He was a rock-star lawyer who’d cut his teeth by successfully defending a husband accused of throwing his wife off their eleventh-floor balcony. Quinn managed to get the husband acquitted by convincing the jury that the woman might have jumped off the balcony after an argument.

“Do you know why I chose Dale to defend Scott?” Greg asked. “And it has nothing to do with the fact that we’re old high school buddies from when Dale lived here in his junior year, while his old man was posted at the marine base out of town.”

“I have no idea.” Rachel asked the question even though she could guess the answer. Juries loved Dale Quinn. He was good-looking, with a boyish charm and a virtuoso talent at playing heartstrings. She’d seen him in action in a courtroom when she was a newspaper reporter. It had been like watching a master class in winning friends and influencing people. Except in Quinn’s case, his specialty was winning over jurors.

“Six years ago, Dale defended a boy around Scott’s age. Similar scenario. Tell her, Dale,” Greg urged.

“My client and a girl had sex on the college quad during a party. Consensual. He takes her back to her room out of a sense of chivalry, where she bursts into tears and runs into the bathroom. He waits around to make sure she’s okay. Leaves his phone number before he goes,” Quinn said. “Next morning, he gets arrested for rape. During the trial, my private investigator finds out that the victim has done this before. Twice. False allegations each time. She was a minor. It was all sealed. The judge ruled it was exculpatory, so we can’t bring it up at trial. The only way out of this mess is for me to get her to admit some of this stuff in the redirect.

“I was nice as pie to her. Asked her questions every which way. Next thing you know, she’s telling the court that she had sex with him to spite an ex-boyfriend who was at the party. She admits on the stand that she never said no and consented at the time. Afterward, she regretted it. Claimed she wasn’t all that enthusiastic. Says he should have realized. Law doesn’t allow for retroactive withdrawal of consent.”

“It went to the jury,” Greg interrupted. “They deliberated for an hour and found him not guilty.”

“You got him off. That means the system works,” said Rachel, looking at her own reflection in Dale Quinn’s dark sunglasses.

“He jumped off a bridge onto a highway three days later,” said Quinn. He paused dramatically to let that sink in. “The stress, the depression, killed him. He knew he’d never get his old life back. That his good name was stained forever. He lost a prestigious internship. Had no hope of getting into a tier one firm when he graduated. His career was dead before it began.”

Rachel remembered hearing about the case. The boy’s parents had given a tearful interview on a current affairs program after he died. Before he was charged with rape their son had been offered a highly sought-after internship with a congressman. He lost the internship and he was suspended from college in the middle of the semester. His GPA free-fell. He was struggling with depression.

“What’s your point?” Rachel asked.

“What happens during a moment of intimacy is complicated and confusing. When we put it under a spotlight in a court of law we discover that, a lot of the time, there is no black and white. Just shades of gray,” said Quinn. “Juries don’t like gray. The law doesn’t like gray,” he said, standing up. “If I was Mitch Alkins, I’d be worried. It’s tough to get a conviction when all you can offer is gray.”