She sighed. “I guess the Postman doesn’t always ring twice.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, in that movie, The Postman Always Rings Twice, a guy gets away with murdering somebody. Then he gets sent down for a murder he didn’t commit. In this case, Michael got away with raping me and raping many other women. He didn’t get punished for that, so I really, really wanted him to be sent away for life for murdering his father-in-law.”
“Yeah, but he did it, though. Therein lies the difference between your situation and that movie.”
“True. Which makes it even worse. But, truth be told, I wasn’t even all that concerned that he pay for murdering his father-in-law, even though his father-in-law was a good man. I mean, he was a terrible husband - he maintained a second family that his wife never knew about - but he was a good, decent judge. Really cared about the common man, always tried to side with the little guy against the big guy. Found for the plaintiff more than any other judge in the circuit. I was devastated when he was murdered, but I really wanted Michael put away because of what he did to me, not necessarily what he did to that poor judge.”
I knew that the real reason why Harper was drinking was not just because Axel was leaving. It was because Axel was leaving and she was upset that her rapist still hadn’t paid for the things that he did in his life. He served time in prison after he was convicted for murdering his father-in-law, but he was currently out and free. He was acquitted after his second trial, and that meant that he was at large. His getting out probably served as a trigger for Harper.
I knew something about triggers. Sometimes you’re good for a long time. Mentally, physically, emotionally. But there are always scars from any past trauma. And, sometimes, there isn’t a scar, just a scab. When there’s only a scab over a traumatic mental wound, that scab can be ripped off pretty damned easily, and it can be ripped off by any number of triggers. A certain smell, a certain song, a certain color even - all can be something that can send a recovering trauma victim off the deep end.
She put her head on my shoulder. “When is he ever going to pay? When? He destroyed so many lives. He killed his own father-in-law. Yet, he’s free as a bird. I hear that he’s even gotten back with his rich girlfriend, Kayla Stone. Why is there no justice in this world?”
I took a deep breath and put my arm around her shoulder. “It’s because of people like you and me. Us defense attorneys are so adept at pulling rabbits out of hats that sometimes we do our job too well and guilty people go free.”
“Yeah, but it’s even worse for rape victims. We aren’t believed. We see powerful men get away with sexual assault, time after time, and it makes us want to stay silent and in the shadows. Then one of us comes forward and she gets pummeled publicly, and it just makes us think that there’s nothing that can be done. They want corroborating evidence before they can convict. Well, guess what? You’re not going to get corroborating evidence in a date rape. Period. If that’s the standard, then men are just going to continue to get away with it.”
“Well, it’s always going to be he-said-she-said,” I said.
“Right. And in cases like that, defense attorneys have eight ways to Sunday to make rape victims look bad. In my case, I was rip-roaring drunk when I met him at a party, and we were dirty dancing for at least an hour. That was going to be his corroborating evidence to show that I willingly had sex with him, and there was going to be no getting around that. There was no getting around that, so I never even reported it. It ruined my life, made me not want to date anybody for years, made me afraid of my own shadow and turned a drinking problem into an addiction. And he never paid. He never even thought twice about that night. It’s haunted me, night and day, ever since, and he just about forgot that it happened.”
“I’m so sorry, Harper,” I said. “I truly am.”
“Right,” she said, nodding her head. “You’re sorry, but I need to put this glass of bourbon down and get back into rehab. Or AA. Or call my sponsor, Crystal Warner, who told me that I can call her any time of the day or night. Well, I don’t want to do any of those things. I don’t want to. And I’m not going to.”
“Think of your kids. Of your career. Of your mom and dad and sisters and brothers who love you. Think about how you’re going to feel when you wake up in the morning with a hangover. Think of the puking, the headaches, the DTs, the depression. Just…think.”
She shook her head and pointed at me with her drink. “I’ll get right on that. In the meantime, you need to figure out exactly what went down with your mother.” At that, she stood up, went back into her house, and shut her door.
I was left out on the porch wondering what the hell was going on, and how I was supposed to help her. Because I needed to help her, clearly. She was my law partner and friend. She was open and trusting with me and I was grateful for that. I couldn’t just watch her fall without a word.
I suddenly realized that I had her on my plate, along with Nate and my mother.
I didn’t quite know how I was going to juggle it all, but I certainly was going to try.
Chapter 4
The next day, it was time for my mother’s initial appearance, which was just as it sounded - it was my mom’s first court appearance. Initial appearances were conducted in docket form by the associate circuit judge, and it was where the charges were read to the defendants and they were given a chance to get a bond.
As per usual, the initial appearance docket was a madhouse with about 50 defendants appearing in front of the judge, along with their lawyers. The defendants in custody were the first ones up, and that included my mother. She was brought into the courtroom wearing a baby blue jumpsuit that positively hung on her skinny frame. She looked at me and shook her head.
“Damien, you have to get me out of this joint. I’m gonna go crazy if you don’t. My roommate last night, she was talking all night long about nonsense. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk talk. She wouldn’t shut up. She told me that she was manic, and that she had that manic-depressive thing. She told me that if I waited a day, she would be crying in her cell and wouldn’t be able to stop. I don’t know, Damien, from what she tells me, I think I’m gonna prefer her mania to her depression. But I don’t want to deal with either of her weirdo personalities. I just want to go home.”
“Don’t worry, Mom, I’m sure that I’ll be able to get a bond for you.”
“Damien, I ain’t got no money for no bond. I ain’t talked to no bondman, either. I can’t afford no bond. Some of the girls in there, they tell me something about a signature bond. They say that if I can get a signature bond, I just gotta sign my name and that’s my bond. No money involved. Try to get me that.”
I rolled my eyes. “Mom, you’re up for murder. Murder. Sorry, but a signature bond isn’t going to be a possibility. Signature bonds are for people who shoplift, not for people who are accused of killing somebody.”
“Well, try, Damien. I can’t afford no bond.”
“Mom, I’ll pay your bond, whatever it is.”
She shook her head. “No, thank you. No, thanks. You pay my bond, and I gotta do whatever you tell me. I don’t want to give you that kind of power.”
“Okay, Mom, then I guess you’ll have to stay behind bars until trial. You’re just going to have to live with manic-depression girl and anybody else you’re going to be stuck with back there. You’re just going to have to live with freezing cells, hard bunks, clogged toilets and inedible food.”
She shook her head. “I guess I will, then, because you ain’t bonding me out. Get me a signature bond.”
“You’re not getting a signature bond.”
“Then I guess I’ll just stay behind bars, then.” She glared at me.
I decided to remind her of one more thing she was going to be giving up. My Ace in the hole, as it were.
“Okay. Guess you’re just going to have to live without your good friend Jack Daniels, and your other best friend, Mary Jane.”
I smiled as I saw h
er face. It seemingly just dawned on her that she wasn’t going to have ready access to her pot and alcohol until I said that.
“Okay, okay, go ahead and pay my bond. But I’m warning you, you can’t use that to control me.”
“I won’t.”
At that, Judge Rhidenour came on the bench and starting calling the names of the people who were on the docket. He got to my mother, and she approached the bench and I went up there with her.
“Olivia Ward, you’ve been charged by the state of Missouri with the Class D felony of one count of possession of a controlled substance, the Class C felony of one count of delivery of a controlled substance, and the Class A felony of Murder in the Second Degree. How do you plead?”
“Not guilty,” she said.
He nodded his head. “Your bond is set at one million dollars. The conditions of your bond are that you are to submit to random drug tests, you are not to associate with known felons and you are to wear an ankle monitor.”
“An ankle monitor?” Mom said. “I don’t want no ankle monitor. What kind of nonsense is that?”
“Ms. Ward,” I said to my mother. “It’s either an ankle monitor or jail. Your choice.”
Judge Rhidenour smiled at me sympathetically. He was used to outbursts from clients who had no desire to do this or that, so he paid my mother no mind.
“Dammit, I guess I’ll take that ankle monitor, but I’m not happy with it.”
I nodded at the judge. “Thank you, your honor.”
I escorted my mother over to the bailiff, who was tasked with taking her back to the jail, where she was going to be processed out as soon as I posted her bail.
I should have let her rot in jail.
Chapter 5
The next day, I got my answer as to how I could help Harper. There was an article in the newspaper that caught my eye. The headline said that a prominent physician, by the name of Carrie Blackwood, was found dead of a single gunshot wound to the head. As I read the article I saw that the reason that her mother gave for her killing herself, and this was apparently the reason that Carrie put into her suicide note, was that there was a viral video that was posted of her having sex with none other than Michael Reynolds. Her mother told the newspaper that her daughter was being raped on this video, which clearly added to Carrie’s pain and anguish. Once the video went viral, it was posted on many X-rated sites, but also it was posted on other sites where the general public could see it, and her career was ruined because of it. She was a pediatrician, and, one by one, she lost her practice. The parents of the children that she treated did not want her to be treating them any longer. She also lost most of her social group and friends.
I read further to see why it was that Michael Reynolds would rape this woman, and post it online. I was going to have to get ahold of the videotape and see what the deal was. I knew that at the moment, because this was apparently the cause of this woman’s suicide, it was not going to be easy to find the video.
I decided to go ahead and call Anna, our hacker. Harper used her quite frequently to hack into databases to find out information that she needed to know, and I figured that Anna would be able to get access to this video.
I had an idea on how I was going to finally bring this guy to some kind of justice. I thought that maybe if I could get some kind of justice and retribution, it would help Harper heal. She was having a tough time with the fact that this guy was out of prison, combined with the fact that Axel was being deported to Australia, so she lost his support.
I never knew how fragile Harper was. I always saw her as kind of a badass – I mean, after all, she was a criminal defense attorney. She defended the worst of the worst. She defended murderers, arsonists, robbers, everybody but sex offenders. She explained to me that she would never do that kind of thing, for the simple reason that defending accused sex offenders would just trigger her too much.
Now I knew that, underneath it all, Harper was really a marshmallow. At least she was when it came to the subject of Michael Reynolds, the man who ruined her life. The man who was apparently going to keep on ruining her life unless something happened to where he could be brought to justice.
I needed to know what was going on with this Carrie Blackwood case – specifically, I needed to know if any charges were filed against Michael for doing that to her, posting that video online, and if charges were filed for him raping her.
I called Anna, told her that I needed the viral video of Carrie Blackwood, and she said that she would have it for me within 10 minutes. Ten minutes later, she had emailed it to me. “It wasn’t hard to find. I mean, it was hard to find for an ordinary person, because obviously after this poor woman committed suicide, the sites took the video down. But it was still on the dark web. Which means that it’s still being accessed by people, probably a lot of people. But here you go.”
With a heavy heart, I brought up the video. I saw the reason why Michael was possibly able to evade rape charges. Carrie Blackwood seemed like she was not quite with it. I figured that maybe she was drugged up. She seemed like it, anyways.
I also wondered why it was that this video, of all things, would’ve gone viral the way it did. Why did anybody really care about a woman who was not quite there having sex with a man? Why was it such an important thing that so many people knew about it?
I decided to go ahead and call her mother. It was going to be fairly easy to make Michael Reynolds pay for this – we had grounds for a lawsuit against him on multiple levels. But the most expensive lawsuit for him, by far, would be a lawsuit for wrongful death. That would especially be true if Carrie was making a lot of money with her job as a physician. It appeared that she was fairly young – only 32 – when she died. An invasion of privacy lawsuit would be a given. All I had to do was show that he was the one who actually posted the video against her consent.
The wrongful death lawsuit was going to be a bit trickier – but I knew that I could probably win that one as well. I was going to have to talk to her mother, get a copy of her suicide note, and, hopefully, show that she was vulnerable. If he knew that she was vulnerable, that would make the wrongful death lawsuit that much stronger.
At any rate, I was going to have to find out all of this when I spoke with her mother.
I found out who her mother was, I called her, and I told her what I wanted.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to go through this,” Carrie’s mother told me when I called her. “My daughter just died. She just died because that man, that bastard, he took everything away from her that she cared about. She had a thriving practice, and she lost it. A lot of her social circle started to shun her. She tried to tell anybody that would listen that she did not willingly have sex with this man, that she went on one date with him, and he apparently put something in her drink. Something happened to her to where she really didn’t know what was going on so much. But nobody seemed to really care about that. Everybody seemed to think that somehow or another she was responsible for having that on the Internet. I just don’t understand any of it.”
I had a feeling that the mother was going to be resistant. “Mrs. Blackwood, here’s the thing. This is a man who has hurt a lot of people over the years. He somehow manages to always get away with it. He was imprisoned for killing his father-in-law. The jury found him guilty. But he won on appeal, and now he’s out. It seems like nothing can touch him, but you can. I understand he’s possibly still married to the woman who was his sugar mama. That means that he has enough money to pay a multimillion dollar lawsuit. That might break him, finally. At any rate, I really need to see that this guy is going to pay for something he’s done in his life. Even if it’s not something that means that he has to go to prison. Even if it’s just monetary, I want him to pay.”
I heard her sigh on the other end of the line. “I just don’t think it’s going to work. She tried to go to the prosecutor’s office after it happened. They wouldn’t file charges against him. They said that they spoke with him, and that he sai
d that it was all consensual, and that she had consented to having the video put online. They believed him. I don’t know why, but they believed him.”
I had a question for Mrs. Blackwood, and it was one I didn’t really want to ask, but I had to. “Is there any particular reason why this particular video would’ve gone viral? I mean, not to be too explicit, but couples make amateur porn all the time. They make porn, and then they put it online, and nobody really cares. I’m trying to figure out why it is that this particular video went viral, when others like it don’t. Is there anything special about your daughter that would have caused the Internet to really want to take notice?”
Mrs. Blackwood was quiet on the other end of the line. “My daughter was somewhat famous. She was a minor pop star about 15 years ago, when she was 17 years old. She had one hit. And, over the years, she still maintained a fan base. So I think that that’s the only thing that caused it to go viral from the very beginning. There was still an interest in her. I don’t know, I wish I knew exactly why it was that people were so interested in seeing this video of her and this guy.” I could hear her sniffling on the other end of the line. “I would do anything to have her back in my life.”
“Mrs. Blackwood, you have to believe me on one thing. Nothing can ever bring your daughter back, but there is a way to make Michael Reynolds pay for what he did to her. Even if the prosecutors have declined to file charges against him for invasion of privacy, let alone for raping her, we can still bring a cause of action against him civilly. We can still make him pay.”
Until Proven Guilty Page 4
