The Hate Crime

by Rachel Sinclair

  “He doesn’t want custody of Amelia. He simply wants to get to know her. That’s all.”

  “No, that’s not all.” I felt my anger rising inside me. “That’s not all, and you know it. You know it.” I felt like throwing up. “Admit it, Sarah. You and Baron are working together to take Amelia away from me. Admit it.”

  “Damien, you’re not her father. Baron is her father.”

  “You know as well as I do that because Amelia was born during our marriage, I’m the presumed father. She’s lived with me all of her life. There’s not a judge in this circuit who’ll allow you and Baron to take her away from me. There’s a little thing called the best interest of the child, and that’s the standard the judge has to use when deciding paternity cases. Any judge is going to decide that it’s in Amelia’s best interest to stay with me. You hear that? She’s going to stay with me.”

  “Damien, you’re being selfish. I know that you make a pretty good living, and you still have millions from that wrongful death lawsuit, but you can’t possibly give her the kind of life that Baron can. Amelia is a very bright child. I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up going to Harvard. Are you going to be able to pay for that college? Not to mention Nate? Baron can give her the kind of advantages that I could never give her and neither could you. Just think about that for a second.”

  “Listen, Sarah, my father was a rich man like this Baron person. He was a rich man, and he had no morals whatsoever. In fact, he was a sociopath. He hurt a lot of people. Money doesn’t buy sanity, it doesn’t buy love, and it’s not going to buy Amelia. Do you hear me? It’s not going to buy Amelia.”

  By this time, I was screaming and shaking with rage.

  “Damien,” Sarah said sweetly. “Calm down.”

  “You tell me to calm down? You’re gonna try to take my daughter away from me, and you tell me to calm down? And, listen, I’m not going take your word for it. I’m not going to believe you that this Baron asshole is Amelia’s father. I’m going to do a DNA test of my own.”

  I suddenly realized that I was going to be in for the fight of my life. Baron Wicker had untold billions of dollars, which meant that he could hire a team of lawyers to try to beat me down if he wanted to. I didn’t know how I would be able to fight that, but I knew I was going to have to try. Nobody was going to take Amelia, or Nate for that matter, away from me without a fight.

  Sarah was quiet. “Damien, I never wanted to hurt you like this.”

  “Oh, you didn’t? You didn’t? You apparently had at least one affair while we were married, with this Baron Wicker person, and then you had an affair with John Gibson. And now you’re trying to take Amelia from me. I won’t let you do it. I won’t let Amelia be raised by a rich bastard like this Baron Wicker.”

  “Okay, okay, calm down. I want Amelia to meet her father. That’s all. Just meet him. I haven’t said anything at all about trying to take her away from you.”

  “Oh, but that’s next. You know it’s next. You hate me, because of the way that I asked you to leave, and you’ll do anything to hurt me. You’ll do anything to hurt me, and you know that taking Amelia away from me would be like ripping out my soul. After all I’ve gone through with her, thinking that she was going to die, going through all those nights at the hospital and all those doctors’ appointments. All those nights when I listened to her cry in pain and because she thought that she was going to die soon – and now, after all that, you’re going to want to take her away from me.”

  “Damien –”

  “And if you have the best of intentions, you wouldn’t have said a word to her about this. You would’ve kept it to yourself. That is, if it is the truth that this Baron Wicker person is her father. There was no reason for Amelia to know the truth. That’s why I think that you and Baron are up to no good.”

  “Think what you want.”

  I hung up the phone. I had no desire to talk to her anymore. Plus, I had to go up and talk to Amelia herself. I was going to have to be straight with her. There was no use in lying. She was too smart for that, and she was going to have to find out the truth sooner or later anyways. I might as well rip off the Band-Aid. It was gonna hurt like hell, for both her and me.

  I went up to her room and knocked on the door. She opened it. As I looked at her, I knew that she had been crying. Her big blue eyes were red rimmed, and her face was stained with tears. Her nose was also running. “So, what did you find out? What did Sarah tell you?”

  “Amelia, honey, Sarah told me that your biological father is named Baron Wicker. He’s a rich guy. Lives in Dallas, Texas. He’s an heir to an oil fortune. Now, just because Sarah says that Baron Wicker is your father doesn’t mean it’s necessarily so. Sarah could be lying. But I thought that it was important for you to know that there’s a possibility that this is true.”

  Amelia crossed her arms in front of her. “Are you telling me my dad is somebody who’s involved in destroying the environment?” She shook her head. “That makes me mad. I don’t want a guy like that to be my dad. I want you to be my dad.”

  Her lips were quivering. I stooped down to her level, and tousled her hair. “Kiddo, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I am your father. No matter what, I am your father.”

  “I know you are. You’ll always be my dad. Why do I think –”

  She couldn’t say more. She wrapped her little arms around me tightly and I squeezed her hard. I held her as she cried. “You’ll always be my jellybean.” Jellybean was my nickname for her, both because I thought she was multi-flavored like a handful of jellybeans, and also because when I saw her for the first time on the sonogram, she looked just like a little bean.

  Nate came out of his room. “Hey, dad.” He looked over at Amelia. “What’s wrong with her?”

  I didn’t know what to tell him. He was already having so many problems with my divorcing Sarah, and now this. There was a possibility that he would lose his sister, and there was just no way to tell him the truth.

  Amelia looked at me, wondering if I was going to go ahead and tell him. I just shook my head at her. I wasn’t ready to deal with him.

  I wasn’t ready to deal with any of this, but here it was, coming at me like a freight train.

  Chapter 8

  I had to get back to Heather because Beck’s next hearing was coming up shortly. When he first came in front of the judge, for his initial appearance, he told the judge that he was going to try to find a private attorney. The judge gave him a two-week continuance to find an attorney, so it was almost time for Beck to be in court again. That meant that I had to make a decision soon on whether or not to take him on as a client.

  I specifically had to find out what Beck meant when he told me that Heather had killed a man. If that were the case, then Beck certainly could do damage to her if he wanted to. That was the last thing I wanted. I supposed that if Beck had something on Heather to where he could destroy her life if he wanted to, I would probably go ahead and take him on as a client. I had grown rather fond of Heather, and I didn’t want to see anything happen to her. If I had to take Beck’s case to protect her, I would do it.

  I would be kicking and screaming the whole time, but I would do it.

  Heather came to my office. She laid her purse down in front of her. “Okay, you wanted to see me? Did you go to see Beck? Did you find out anything? Are you going to take his case?” Her questions were coming fast and furious.

  “Slow down. One question at a time. Actually, strike that. I need to ask you a question.”

  Her eyes didn’t meet mine. I had a feeling, as I looked at her expression, that Beck probably was telling the truth. Heather probably did kill a man.

  “What do you need to ask me? Go ahead, I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “Beck told me that you killed a man. Is that true?”

  Heather’s eyes got big. “I can’t say anything to you about that.” She shook her head. “I can’t say anything to you about that.”

  I took a deep breath. I could
try to sign her up as a client, although that would end up being a conflict of interest in the event that Beck knew something about her and what she did criminally. I couldn’t represent Beck and her at same time. Yet, I also knew that if I were her attorney, and Heather told me something incriminating about herself, I couldn’t reveal it.

  I steepled my hands, wondering how to approach this. Heather had come to me for help. I had to know what was going on. That was the only way that I would know what to do with Beck. If he knew something serious about her, even more serious than what she told me, about burglarizing the jewelry store, then I would have to go ahead and do all I could to make sure that Beck kept his mouth shut.

  “Heather, I can’t become your lawyer. I believe that if I did, it would be a conflict of interest. But I will tell you one thing – you have to tell me what you did. I have to know what Beck has on you. As it stands, I don’t want to take him on as a client. I don’t want to have anything to do with that man. But, if your life depends upon my representing him and getting him off, then I’ll do it. You have to tell me if that’s the truth.”

  “It’s my mom,” Heather blurted out. “My mom, she worked for this creep. His name was Reverend John Scott. He was a horrible man. A truly horrible man.”

  “I know about him. That was how you came to know Harper, right? Your mother, your adoptive mother, was also involved in that church – right? And the Reverend Scott was the one who was brainwashing all of his congregants into killing gays, lesbians and trans - isn’t that right?”

  Heather nodded her head. “Yeah, that’s what happened. My mom went bat-shit crazy because she was going to that church all the time, and she was learning from that Reverend Cray Cray that we LGBT folk are corrupt and need to be killed. So my mom, she decided she was going to kill me one day, and came after me with a butcher knife. I killed her in self-defense.”

  “Okay, so what happened?”

  “Well, the crazy Reverend went to prison for a while. He was convicted of all those murders, the murders that happened in his church because he brainwashed everybody into killing their kids. He got some attorney who was apparently even crazier than him, and that attorney was able to overturn his convictions. He got out of prison, and he was awaiting a new trial.”

  I seemed to remember reading something about that. There was something in the paper about how the Reverend Scott was able to get his convictions overturned, because there was a lack of evidence that he was behind those murders. I wasn’t surprised, necessarily. It was kind of a novel theory to begin with – the man did not actually commit any murders, but he brainwashed people into doing so. It worked, of course, with the Manson trial, but that didn’t mean that it was a widespread theory that was accepted by everybody.

  “Okay, so the Reverend was out of jail on bail, awaiting a new trial. So what happened?”

  “Well, my mom, her name is Louisa Garrison, she used to work for the Reverend Scott. In fact, for the longest time, she admitted that she, too, was brainwashed by the crazy Rev. She thought that people like me were the work of the Devil. Satan. And, naturally, because people like me were the work of the Devil, we were to be wiped off the face of the earth. At least, that’s what that church believed. But, then she got away from that church, and she got into another faith – Unity. She learned in this church that Christ and Jesus were about love, not judgment. And she learned that we are all God’s children, even people like me.”

  I was a bit astounded that people could be so easily influenced to believe certain things. It was always something that fascinated me. I knew that it was human nature to want to believe the people who you looked up to, whether it was a priest or other religious figure, or leader, or teacher, or a parent. I didn’t necessarily believe that people were weak-minded, per se. At least not in the sense that it was some kind of an insult, because I believed that everybody was susceptible to persuasion. I knew that the reason why the Reverend Scott was so successful in poisoning the minds of the people who went to his church was that the people wanted to believe in him. And, if he was telling them that trans and gay people were the work of the Devil, then that was going to be accepted as gospel. No pun intended.

  Yet, when you get out of that environment, and you go to a different environment, an environment of acceptance, it’s a different story. You suddenly realize that people who are different than you are to be loved for who they are. No matter the color of their skin or their sexual orientation. That was something that I’ve always believed, but I came to that on my own. I was never a religious man, and I had never been exposed to some kind of environment that said that people who were different were somehow lesser. I was never a person who would fall victim to tribalism, but I knew that plenty of people were, even people who were highly educated.

  “Okay, so she got into another faith, and you and she have become close. Right?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, I never even knew that my mother who raised me was my adopted mother. I didn’t know that until I killed her in self-defense. What I did know was that she and I never got along. She never accepted me. She always tried to change me. It wasn’t just that she tried to kill me with a butcher knife, but she also tried to kill me with a pillow, earlier. Well, not really tried to kill me, but I woke up one day and she was standing over me with a pillow, like she was going to smother me. It was like that scene in the last Star Wars movie, where Luke was thinking about killing Kylo Ren while Kylo slept. Luke thought he had to kill Kylo because he thought that Kylo was evil, which he actually was. My mother apparently thought the same way about me – that I was evil, therefore she had to kill me. And that was all the work of Reverend Scott.”

  “Okay, so that was what happened with your mother. Now tell me about Louisa.”

  “Louisa’s pretty cool. I haven’t had the easiest time. I got mixed up with the wrong dude, and he had me run drugs for him. Charlie. And Charlie of course kicked me out, and I didn’t have a place to go, and Louisa took me in. She don’t have a lot of money, because she don’t really have a lot of skills. I mean, she worked for that church, worked for the crazy Reverend, doing bookkeeping and things like that, so that’s what she’s doing now. She’s a bookkeeper. For a small construction company out in KCK. So you know, she’s making about $15 an hour, which doesn’t go very far, but that didn’t matter. She still took me in, and made sure that I had what I needed. Then I started working here, and making some money, and I’m going to paralegal school. So it’s going pretty good. But I won’t forget that Louisa, my mom, took me in when I really needed to be taken in. So yeah, I’m a bit protective of her.”

  “How protective of her?”

  Heather crossed her arms in front of her. “Let’s just say that if somebody is going to come into our house and threaten her life, I’m not gonna take that sitting down. If someone’s going to threaten my mom’s life, I’m going to kill that mother fucker.” She looked away.

  “Is that what happened? Did the Reverend Scott come into your house one day, and threaten your mother?”

  “Yeah, that’s what happened. Me and my mom were out one day, at the grocery store. We come home, and there’s the Reverend Scott sitting right there in our living room. Just sitting there, waiting for us to come home.” She shook her head. “It was fucking scary. I mean, at my murder trial, my mom testified on the stand that the Reverend Scott was poisoning people’s minds, getting them to kill their children if they were gay or trans. She was incredibly brave, and she was the reason why I was acquitted. If it weren’t for her, I’d be in prison right now. I know that. So I owe her that too. Well, mother-fucking Reverend Scott was waiting for us to come home, and he had a gun with him.”

  “Heather, you do know that you have the right to shoot somebody who comes into your house, especially if they have a gun? The Castle Doctrine. All you have to show is that you’re the lawful resident of the house, somebody is there unlawfully, and you presumed that harm was going to occur. In this case, the fact that he was sitting there
with a gun meant that you could have shot him for sure. So, please tell me that you didn’t do anything stupid with the Reverend Scott.”

  Heather shook her head. “I did do something stupid with him. I didn’t know about the Castle Doctrine. I admit, I probably should have, since I’ve been doing legal research for Harper and some for you as well. But I didn’t know about it. And you have to understand, I’ve already been tried for murder that was self-defense. I thought that was gonna work against me. I thought that the prosecutor would be able to bring in my prior arrest for killing my mother, and show the jury that it was self-defense with my mother, and here I go again. Here I go again killing somebody in self-defense. I thought that the jury would have a hard time thinking that I was an unlucky person and a two-time loser. So yeah, I killed him. I rushed him when I got in the door and I saw that gun, and we struggled, and I shot him. I shot him, and then I panicked.”

  By now, Heather’s head was bobbing back and forth. Her hands flew up to her hair and pulled on it and then she brought them down and tugged on her spiked necklace that was around her neck. She looked a little green, like she was about to get sick.

  “Heather, the prosecutor couldn’t have brought in your prior arrest in a different trial. I think that you know this as well.” I had the feeling that Heather wasn’t telling me the whole story.

  “Whatever. It’s not like I’m doing legal analysis when I’m facing a motherfucker with a gun in our house.”

  I sighed. “Why do I have the feeling that somehow, someway, Beck helped you out with all this?”

  She nodded her head rapidly. “You’re goddamn right, he helped me with it. I shot that bastard, and I didn’t know what to do. All that I knew was that I was a two-time loser, and that the jury was not going to buy that I was going to end up in the same goddamn position twice in a row. Killing somebody in self-defense, twice in a row. So I panicked, and called Charlie. You have to understand that Charlie’s kind of a little fella. And he wasn’t going to help me out no-how anyways. Plus, when I called him, he was high. So he refused to come out and help me, but he sent Beck over to help me instead.” She sighed. “Beck came over, and, like with Charlie, he told me that if he was going to help me, I was gonna have to help him. I said sure, anything you want. So that’s the real reason why I burglarized the jewelry store. That part was true. I did burglarize it, and I did it for him. If I didn’t do it for him, he was going to kill me. At least, that’s what he said.”