Wild Justice

CHAPTER 41

On to the trial transcript, annotated in my father’s hand. And this was where I began to see the case break down. The job of the police is to accumulate enough evidence to make a case against the accused. It’s only when the case goes to trial that the holes begin to show. And here, they were bigger than I’d ever imagined.

According to the version I grew up with, my father and uncle had seen Drew Aldrich fleeing the scene. In truth they had seen the figure only from the back and noted build, clothing, hair color. At trial, three witnesses testified to seeing Aldrich earlier that evening. He’d been wearing a light T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers—as he was when he was arrested. The man running from the scene had been wearing a dark shirt.

“Why was it an issue at all?” I asked Quinn. “Aldrich confessed to killing Amy—he said it was an accident. Why not admit he was the one running?”

“The discrepancy bolstered the case against your family’s reliability.”

The next problem followed immediately after, with the standoff at his apartment. Witnesses said Aldrich did indeed threaten that he had a rifle. He even came to the door holding it . . . but he was holding it out, showing that he was surrendering. That’s when my father shot him.

Again, the prosecution could argue that it was night. The door was not well lit. All my father saw was a gun. But it still added to the defense’s story. My father overreacted, which was very uncharacteristic of him and therefore supported the idea that he was responding as a grieving uncle.

I knew from the journal that Amy had prearranged our meeting with Aldrich that night, but I’d never realized that had come out in the trial. There was even evidence of a phone call from Amy’s house to Aldrich’s apartment the day before, when apparently she’d given him the train number and arrival time; he’d jotted down the info on a piece of paper that had been found in his wallet. From there, it became much easier to say Amy willingly had sex with Aldrich.

Memory is a strange thing. I guess I should know that better than anyone. But now, reading the trial transcripts, I realized just how many holes my mind had filled in. Maybe that makes sense. My brain had intentionally made those gaps as it ripped apart my recollection of that night. To deal with that, I filled in the blanks and came to believe them as fact.

One of those false memories was right here, in my own statement. I said that I’d caught a glimpse of Aldrich strangling Amy and that’s why I ran. Except I hadn’t. I knew that now, from the nightmares and the fresh memories. Aldrich had raped me. When he left me, I’d gotten free of my bindings. I’d heard Amy. I’d known she was being hurt. I’d believed she was also being raped. So I’d run for help. But I’d never looked in that room because I knew if I had, Aldrich would realize I’d escaped and I’d never be able to get help for Amy.

Yet apparently, I said I’d peeked in. I’d identified Drew Aldrich as the man with his hands around my cousin’s throat. Had I believed it at the time? Or had I simply believed I had to say it to put him in jail? I don’t know.

Now I had to admit that to Quinn, without letting him know about the rape. Maybe I should have. But I couldn’t tell him and just move on. It would slam down a stop sign on the investigation while we dealt with that—he’d want to know how I found out, how was I coping, what he could do to help. For now I could only tell him that I hadn’t seen Aldrich killing Amy.

“I was tied up in the next room,” I said. “I got free, and I could hear her in trouble, so I ran for help. I don’t know why I said I looked in.”

“Because you wanted him caught and punished.”

“I guess so.”

“No.” He caught my gaze. “I know so, and I’d have done the same. Hell, there have been times I’ve wanted to lie under oath to put a bastard away. If I don’t, it’s only because, as you’ve told me many times, I can’t pull off an act.” A wry smile. “But that doesn’t mean I’ve never fudged the truth, when I knew I could get away with it. You said what you thought needed to be said. Unfortunately, it didn’t work, and I can see why.”

I bristled a little at that, and he laughed.

“No,” he said. “I’m not insulting your acting ability.”

“That’s not—”

“Oh, yes, it is.” He shot a smile my way. “You might ethically worry about having told the lie, but you’d be insulted if I said you didn’t do it well enough. You’re a web of contradictions, Nadia, and that’s what I—” He stopped and the smile vanished. “Dee, I meant. There was nothing wrong with your statement. It’s just that it . . . Well, again, it only added fuel to their theory. The defense painted you as the good girl. The police chief’s daughter. A straight arrow. Fiercely loyal. Loves her family and worries about her cousin. Smart and sensible but sheltered, too. The kind of girl people want thirteen-year-olds to be.”

“The kind of girl Amy wasn’t.”

“Exactly. So your much more worldly cousin tricks you and you end up at some cabin with a guy, and there are drugs and booze and you’re completely out of your element. Confused and terrified. You don’t understand what’s going on, because you’d never think of willingly doing drugs or having sex, so you presume your cousin wouldn’t, either. You certainly wouldn’t understand anything about breath-control play. When you saw him seeming to strangle her during sex, you drew the obvious conclusion and panicked.”

“And by saying I saw Aldrich, that gave the defense the excuse to say that Amy panicked. That she spotted me and fought, and, in trying to defend himself, Aldrich accidentally killed her.”

That’s where both theories hit a rough patch, one that only made sense to me now. Aldrich had scratches, which he used as proof that Amy attacked him. Except there was no skin under her nails, so the prosecution claimed he’d been scratched by branches while fleeing the scene. He hadn’t. I’d attacked Aldrich during my rape. That’s how he got the scratches and I got the knife cut.

But the biggest shock in the file? There was absolutely no forensic evidence that Drew Aldrich raped and killed Amy. No skin under her nails. No fingerprints. No traces of semen. No blood, either, despite proof that Amy had coughed blood at some point. As I read that I began to wonder if there may have been a valid reason Aldrich left nothing behind at Amy’s murder scene: if he wasn’t the one who raped and killed her.

When I even thought that, my stomach lurched and my brain threw on the brakes. Of course he’d killed her. I’d been there. No one else was in that cabin. I was sure . . .

Or was I? How was I sure if I’d never looked in the other room as Amy was being attacked?

What if Aldrich did have a partner? And that partner killed Amy? It would explain the lack of evidence. It would explain the dark-shirted man seen fleeing the scene. It would explain, too, why there was nothing about her murder in the journal, why Aldrich had seemed to dismiss her and focus on me. And it would explain one last piece of evidence, something both the prosecution and defense had ignored.

A small note on the autopsy report said the pressure of the marks was consistent with a right-handed attacker. Aldrich was left-handed. That was in the file, too. Yet in regards to the strangulation report, neither side made anything of it.

“Because they weren’t arguing whether or not Aldrich killed Amy,” Quinn said. “Also left-handedness doesn’t always mean you do everything left-handed. If one side argued, the other would bring in experts, and it just wasn’t worth it if Aldrich had confessed to strangling her.”

“But it does mean . . .”

“Yeah. Someone else might have killed Amy.”

Quinn pushed the laptop away. Then he reached over and tugged my chair to face him. He leaned forward, gaze on mine, his eyes dark with concern and I felt . . . I felt terrible. A spark of grief for what we’d had, and a full-blown flame of guilt over Jack and because I hadn’t been what Quinn wanted.

“You okay?” Quinn asked.

I nodded.

“Aldrich was still involved,” Quinn said. “He still lured you girls there and he probably did more than that.”

Oh, he did. And even if he didn’t kill Amy, I don’t regret the fact that he’s dead. I was ready to kill him, not for what he did to me but for luring her to her death and for all the other girls he raped. Whether he killed Amy doesn’t change that.

But it did change everything I thought I knew. Everything I’d been damned sure of, for twenty years, one of the few constants in my life, that kernel of rage blaming Aldrich for killing my cousin. And maybe more important that confusion and internal struggle over him being set free, not wanting to blame my family but, in a little way, doing exactly that.

Now that I saw the file, I knew Neil and Koss were both right. It was a fair trial. Even if Aldrich did do it, it was hard to convict him of murder based on this. Statutory rape? Definitely. Manslaughter? Probably. If they’d bargained down, he’d have gone to jail. But the prosecution must have thought their murder case was sound and Aldrich hadn’t tried to bargain. If he didn’t do it, that gave him all the more reason to be sure he’d be acquitted. So why say he’d accidentally killed her? That I didn’t know.

At a noise beside me, I turned to see Jack.

“You got something?” he asked.

“We do,” I said. “And you?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me.”