by Andy Straka
Tell me about it, she thought, as their gazes locked a moment longer.
“Of course I understand what you’re saying,” she said. “I’m all-in just like you when it comes to this job.”
But was she? She couldn’t afford to let him see any differently, at least until she had more information.
“All right,” he said, draining the last of his mug of coffee. He pushed his chair away from the table. “Let’s get going and figure out what we’re doing this afternoon.”
12
The young woman’s name was Stacie Hutchinson. A junior majoring in business, she lived in an off-campus apartment complex called University Crossings. Standing next to Tye on the stoop of Hutchinson’s apartment, Raina felt a lump rise in her throat about how to break the news to the pretty coed that she’d been raped.
She and Tye had used facial recognition software to make a positive ID from the Kurn video. Stacie Hutchinson certainly had a distinctive appearance. The girl could have been a fashion model with her long brunette hair, slender figure, and slim face. Not to mention a thin nose with dark, narrow eyebrows, and her smooth, apparently suntanned skin. Completing the beauty package, Hutchinson’s bee-stung lips seemed to wink at the camera inquisitively in the photo from her Facebook page. Raina was curious to see if the girl looked the same in real life.
She couldn’t help absent-mindedly running her fingers along the scars on her neck, her gaze instinctively dropping to the oddly shaped end of her pant leg that draped over the top of the sneaker covering her artificial foot.
The garden apartments were tucked into a quiet neighborhood between a public park and a row of upscale stores. The tenants were mostly upperclassmen or graduate students. Tye and Raina were dressed like students as well–wearing blue jeans and casual shirts.
“It’ll be okay,” Tye reassured her.
How did he do that? They’d only really known each other for a couple of weeks, yet he already seemed to have the ability to sense what was going on in her head.
She smiled and nodded as he rang the bell.
They had argued over who would talk to Hutchinson. Tye thought she, as a woman, should go by herself, owing to the nature of the crime. She could see his point of view, but she preferred to stay with her computers and take care of intelligence and flying the drones, letting him do all the fieldwork. In the end, they’d struck a compromise. They would both go.
But since Raina spent most of her waking hours these days holed up behind a computer screen, she couldn’t help feeling like she was missing out on something not being plugged in to the Internet and her MAVs.
No one seemed to be coming to the door after the first ring, so Tye pushed the bell again.
“Just a minute!” A young woman’s voice sounded faintly through the heavy door.
“Your lead, rookie.” Tye whispered. He’d taken to teasing her about the fact she’d “only” been a pilot, not down with the ground grunts like him.
“Rookie, my–”
“Uh-uh.” He held up his hand. “Let’s watch the profanities. Remember we’re live and in living color.”
Even without the drones, they were still recording, forced to rely on a hidden camera for Tye and a simple sound wire for her. The audio and video twins, Tye had joked. Yin and Yang.
Was wearing such surveillance equipment without a court order legal in Virginia? Raina didn’t even know. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
They were definitely tracking under the radar. She doubted she and Tye were the only “operators,” as Williamson had started referring to them. She needed to start thinking about counter-measures in case they found themselves under remote surveillance. The bad guys in Iraq and Afghanistan were always trying to hack into drone control systems and the Iranians had even succeeded. Williamson had managed to reactivate her Top Secret clearance, so she had access to a treasure trove of encrypted files and potential MAV strategies. Whoever Williamson was plugged into these days, they had the right connections.
But she also liked knowing she and Tye were considered independent–even if it was an obvious move by Williamson to generate plausible deniability to protect himself and whoever else they were working for. She and Tye could refuse any mission for any reason they liked. That was sure different than any job she’d ever had working for Uncle Sam.
The door finally opened. It was Hutchinson.
“Yes?”
She wore a pair of baggy sweatpants bearing the college logo and a sleeveless tee. Even without makeup she looked stunning.
“Stacie Hutchinson?”
“Yes?”
“My name is Raina Sanchez, and this is Tye Palmer. We’re investigators and we wondered if you could spare a few minutes to answer some questions.”
Raina flashed her Virginia private investigator’s picture ID and Tye did the same. Williamson had provided them with official-looking, laminated cards made up for each of them, exact duplicates of the real thing. He’d even gone so far as to somehow get their names listed in the Commonwealth’s PI database.
“What’s this all about?”
“Derek Kurn,” Raina said.
“Derek?” Hutchinson stared at them for a moment.
“You know him?”
“Yeah. Sure. Everybody on campus knows who he is.”
“You were with him at a party last weekend.”
More staring. “Umm…yeah.” She ran her hand across her slender neck. “But what–?”
“Do you mind if we come in, Ms. Hutchinson? We just have a couple of questions and we really don’t bite.”
Hutchinson looked them up and down for moment, her gaze lingering for a moment on the slight ankle bulge in Raina’s jeans from her prosthetic foot, before making eye contact with them again.
“Yeah, sure. Okay.” She opened the door wider and stepped to one side as Raina stepped awkwardly across the threshold followed by Tye.
Raina’s first impression of the apartment was one of clean but chaotic housekeeping. There were some nice decorating touches to the place–a blue glass vase on a table and couple of modern paintings. But there were also baskets of dirty clothes lining the hallway wall.
“It’s my roommate’s turn to do the laundry this week,” Hutchinson apologized. “The machine’s just next door in another building, but she hasn’t gotten around to doing it yet.”
“Not a problem,” Raina said. She needed to do some laundry herself. “Is your roommate in?”
“No. She had a class.” Hutchinson closed the door and led them through the foyer into a small living room containing a threadbare but still serviceable couch, a couple of rocking chairs, and a credenza with a small flat-screen TV. Lacy, makeshift curtains framed the windows. Not bad for college students on a budget, Raina thought. Hutchinson put a hand on one of the rocking chairs and motioned for Tye and Raina to take the couch.
When they were all seated, Tye and Raina sitting forward on the edge of the sofa, Hutchinson said, “So you have questions about Derek. What did he do? Some kind of prank? He’s actually a pretty sweet guy underneath it all.”
“Really.” She glanced over at Tye. “Underneath all what?”
“Well, you know. Him being on the football team and his dad being such a celebrity and all…Sometimes he and some of the other guys feel like they have to put on this kind of front.”
“Sure. Have you been dating him long?”
“Oh, we’re not dating. I’ve seen him at a couple of parties and hung out with him.”
“Okay. What else do you know about him? He ever mention his dad?”
“Oh, yeah. He hates his dad. I mean, I think his dad treated him really badly growing up. Derek hardly ever saw Mr. Kurn while he was in prep school, his dad never even showed up to any of Derek’s games. But now that Derek’s on the team here at college and his dad’s this bigwig alumni, his dad’s started trying to talk to him and coming around more.”
Raina looked at Tye for a moment, who was nodding, before looking back at Hutchinson. “
You say you’ve hung out with him…Does that include having sex with him?”
“What?” The girl sat up a little higher in her chair. “No! I mean, I like the guy and he’s sort of cute and all. But we’ve never hooked up. Is that what this is about?”
Raina took a deep breath. “You can confirm you were with him at a party last weekend?”
“Yes.”
“I need to ask you something…How’d you get home from the party?”
Hutchinson stared at them for a long moment. You could almost see her mind trying to process what happened that night and the consequences of the leading question.
The girl’s demeanor turned serious. “I…I don’t remember, really. It was super late. I kind of had a bit too much to drink and I think I fell asleep. My roommate Karen was there, too, and when I woke up she was helping me out to another friend’s car.”
“Did you feel ill?”
“A little. But I never threw up or anything.”
“Where did she find you?”
“In the den at the fraternity. I guess I passed out on a couch. It’s pretty embarrassing, actually. But what’s any of this have to do with Derek Kurn?”
Raina felt a deep-seated anger rising up from within her. She glanced over at Tye before turning her attention back to the coed. “Ms. Hutchinson…can I call you Stacie?”
“Sure, yeah. Of course.”
“Stacie, I’m afraid we have something potentially disturbing to show you….”
Hutchinson’s eyes grew wide. “Okay…I guess.” She sat forward in her chair, biting her lip.
Raina turned to Tye, who pulled out his smart phone. They’d already cued up the video and she took the phone from him. She stood, a little awkwardly on her prosthesis, walking the phone over to Hutchinson so the young woman could hold it and watch for herself as it began to play.
Hutchinson palmed the phone, already beginning to look toward the screen. “What is this from?”
“Just watch, please.”
Hutchinson stared into the screen for several seconds. At first, she seemed to have trouble comprehending what she was seeing. But then her face turned white. “Oh, my God.” The hand holding the phone began to tremble as her other hand covered her mouth. “Oh…my God.”
“Can you confirm it’s you in the video?”
The younger woman nodded, tears filling her eyes and running down her pretty cheeks. She started to sob. Her hand was shaking so much Raina had to move in to sit beside her and take the phone from her, gently putting her fingers on the girl’s arm.
“I’m so sorry.”
“That bastard…he...”
They sat like that for nearly a minute. Stacie Hutchinson’s quiet crying seemed to fill the room. No one spoke. Tye kept a respectful silence and distance. Raina was glad now that she’d come.
As the girl cried, her sobs brought Raina back to one of the many scenes that continued to haunt her from the war. In this instance, she was in her Kiowa again, flying convoy recon with another chopper. Below where she hovered momentarily, the convoy was passing a stone wall, behind which a man and girl, who looked to be his daughter, were leading a donkey toward a field.
The girl must have said or done something her father didn’t like. In a flash like a snake the man came out with a cane and began to brutally beat his daughter about the head and shoulders. She slumped to her knees, but the father continued the beating.
The chopper was moving forward, so Raina couldn’t see what else happened, but she spoke to Skyles, who ordered her to circle back around over top of the stone wall, if nothing else to intimidate the beater into retreating. The father did just that, lowering his cane, turning away from the girl as she scrambled away, and raising his head upward to look at the chopper directly above.
Raina would never forget the look on the man’s face. He smiled and waved his hand at them in greeting, business-as-usual, everything a-okay. She couldn’t help wondering if Stacie Hutchinson was feeling a little bit like that girl had felt.
After the initial shock of the situation appeared to have washed over her, Hutchinson started to pull herself together. When she felt the girl’s sobs diminish, Raina took her hand off her arm and stood back up.
“I’m so sorry,” she repeated.
Hutchinson wiped tears from her cheeks. “I knew something was wrong, after the party, I mean. I just felt funny somehow. But I felt so sick and embarrassed I just wanted to push it away. I guess I just didn’t want to think about it.”
Again no one spoke. They waited until Hutchinson further regained her composure.
“But how do you know for sure this is Derek? I mean, I was with him that night and it looks like his room and all, but you can’t really see his face all that well in the video.”
“We know it’s him, Stacie,” Raina said.
The young woman nodded. “How’d you get this video?”
Raina glanced at Tye, who must have felt it was the right moment to enter into the conversation.
“That gets a little complicated,” he said.
“What do you mean? Who sent you? Do you work for the police?”
“No.”
“Who then?”
“We can’t say. But now that you’ve confirmed you’re the woman in this video, we can certainly talk to the police. For right now, at least, that’s going to be up to you.”
Hutchinson nodded. “Has Derek seen this video? Does he know you have it?”
“Not yet. But he will as of tomorrow night.”
“Okay…” She hesitated, rubbing her hands together before wiping them down her legs from her waist to the tops of her knees.
“What’s wrong, Stacie?” Raina asked.
“I don’t know. I just feel so…so dirty.”
“I understand.”
“I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of this getting out. Of what might happen. My name and his name in the papers and everything.”
“Of course. But you know, you may not be the first young woman he’s done this to…or the last.”
“I know, I know…But, I mean, I’m still not sure if I can go through with it….”
“You mean press charges?”
“Yeah…You know who Derek Kurn is, don’t you? His father–”
“We know who he is.”
“Then you know if I come forward I could just as easily end up being the one accused…It’s so embarrassing. I mean, I don’t know…the pictures and the stories will be everywhere.”
There was no denying that. Raina wondered if she herself could stand up under such scrutiny.
“But you saw the tape,” she said. “It’s pretty hard for anyone to argue with what’s shown there.”
Hutchinson nodded. “I need to talk with my parents.”
“Sure. Absolutely.”
Raina felt sick to her stomach. It wasn’t just the girl’s humiliation and the violation of her body the rape represented. Now Hutchinson and her family had to the weigh the prospect of accusing the son of a prominent public figure and the inevitable media circus that would follow. Whatever Stacie Hutchinson did, she and Tye would have to figure out a way to complete their overall mission.
Raina pulled out a blank business card with only her name and temporary cell phone number written on it in black ink. There was also a web address for a secure message board.
“Here,” she said, handing it to Hutchinson. “This is my contact information. The cell phone number won’t be any good after the next two days. Please call us and let us know what you decide by tomorrow. And if you ever need to reach me in the future, you can always leave a message for me on this web message board. Anytime, day or night.”
Hutchinson took the card from her. “So you’re planning to show what you showed me to Derek tomorrow, right?”
“Yes. And hopefully elicit a confession from him. You and your parents need to decide whether you want us to take this to the police.”
“Tomorrow’s Hallo
ween.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Some holiday, huh?” The girl rubbed at her red-rimmed eyes. “Trick or treat.”
13
It had already been dark for a few hours. Raina had to wait until Tye returned to his own apartment to go to bed before calling Lance Murnell at the number he’d given her.
“I thought you were going to leave me at the altar,” the scientist joked.
“Is it too late to start on some training?”
“Not at all. We’re open twenty-four/seven over here.”
Wherever “here” was. Raina had decided she owed it to herself, not to mention Tye and Williamson, to find out as much as she could about what Murnell and DHS were up to with their own MAVs. Murnell obviously knew about Williamson and the drones she’d been flying. For all she knew, maybe DHS was aware, if not intimately familiar, with their overall mission, although she doubted the department would ever officially be in favor of, let alone somehow involved, with what she and Tye were doing. Worse case scenario, she and Tye might even be on the wrong side of some sort of internal civil war. Either way, covering up a rape could never be justified–in anybody’s book.
Twenty minutes later, she sat in the darkened back of a government sedan with a hood pulled over her head again, hearing the sounds and feeling the vibrations of the car moving along a major highway, then smaller roads with turns, a few potholes, crossing what even seemed like several sets of railroad tracks.
She wasn’t fond of the hood, but her hands were free and at least she could breathe.
She felt little fatigue. She’d eaten dinner after Tye left, and was still raring to get some work done learning more about the technology Murnell had shown her that morning. But a part of her couldn’t help but feel like she was sneaking out on Tye after their confrontation earlier about her initial mysterious disappearance. She’d sensed a tension between them all afternoon that hadn’t been part of their relationship before. Was it because of her own doubts or because of his toward her? She wasn’t sure, but she owed to herself to at least follow things through with Murnell, to find what he and Homeland were offering. As exciting and attractive as it was working with Tye and Major Williamson, she still felt like she was out on a limb with the things they were doing. Exploring what Homeland had to offer couldn’t hurt, and maybe she wouldn’t have to choose one way or another. She could help Tye and Williamson complete the mission and maybe move on to something even bigger.
