Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
The next day, wearing my best pencil skirt and blazer, I waltzed into the courthouse with one goal on my mind. We hit the jackpot with this information, and I couldn’t just sit back and allow someone to get away with a crime as heinous as this. A guy in my economics class told me how this strait-laced guy from his frat house was having problems with the law. A college student with an excellent future ahead of him was being charged with rape. I didn’t like to immediately jump to assumptions without all the facts, so I looked into it.
The further I dug into the case, the more disgusted I became with the whole situation.
Since I was younger, I made it my prime objective to know what was going on in my city. Part of that included investigating major and minor crimes, no matter what it was. Never in a million years would I assume that someone would see us as the good guys. I most definitely wasn’t an angel in disguise. Coming to us was the grey area. The same associate I trusted to deal with my money was also responsible for creating a program that I used daily. Through the multiple algorithms I instructed him to include, I received a daily summary of what was going on in the city, as well as elsewhere, to negate the butterfly effect.
When I saw the victim’s name pop up in my system, I was immediately angered. I took one look at her background, and I knew exactly why her story was under question. At the age of ten she went into the foster care system when her mom overdosed on drugs. From there she bounced around from home to home, until she aged out of the system.
She didn’t have any money and was attending the university on scholarship. Instead of working at the local coffee shop to cover her other expenses, she found work as a stripper. Unfortunately, there was an automatic stigma attached to the profession. People assumed all strippers were unstable drug addicts who had sex with men for money.
Which was complete and utter bullshit.
I made it a point to follow the case.
Just as it was going to preliminary hearing, I made a surprising discovery. It turned out this wasn’t the first time the defendant had been accused of rape. In fact, this asshole had made it a habit of going to parties and picking out some unsuspecting girl. Each time, the accused’s parents paid an extravagant sum and made the victims sign a non-disclosure agreement.
The most outrageous part of this was that he continued to go to this university, while his victims often dropped out. Thankfully, I had never experienced the type of trauma that his victims had, but I had no doubt their lives had been changed. From what I had learned over the years, trauma affected people. I considered myself to be a very strong and resilient person. I had to be in my line of work.
Sink or swim.
Bend or break.
It took me a couple of days, but I found all the documents linking cases together. I had Liam track down the other women who had accused him of rape. The common factor with all of them was that they came from broken homes. After what they went through, they eventually dropped out of school or went to another institution.
There were seven women all totalled over a span of four years.
When I spoke with them, each of them gave me the same story. They had never gone to a party at the university before. During their first week, he approached them in the cafeteria and struck up a conversation. He then invited them to a party off campus. Each of them recalled arriving at the party, which I had learned through research was owned by him. To disguise his ownership, he had a numbered company that his roommates would send their rent to. None of his past or present roommates knew he owned the house.
Yet another red flag for me.
Each of the women I could track down stated that sometime during the night, he handed them a bottle of water and invited them to his room. They declined the offer to go upstairs, but thanked him for the water. They explained how right after they finished their water they recalled stumbling as if they were drunk, and then nothing. The next morning, the woke up to an empty bed, not remembering how they got there. Knowing enough about their bodies, they knew something had happened. When they reached the bottom of the stairs, their fears were confirmed when they
Each of the women were so distraught they couldn’t remember, but they knew it hadn’t been their decision to go to his room.
From there, they exchanged money for silence; they pushed the case under the rug, and everyone went on with their lives.
Only they didn’t, really. One woman committed suicide because she was a devout Catholic. I talked to one of her friends and they told me she was a virgin and had planned on waiting until she was married, or at least in a serious relationship, before she took the next step. The consensus was that none of them could live with what had happened to them. It was a mixture of alcohol and drug abuse, followed by self-destructive behaviour.
Today was going to be my first step in retribution.
By the time I was done with this douche, he would rue the day he touched any of these women. Men like him used money and influence to his advantage. If only I had the time to slice and dice all the men in this world who treated women this way.
There were going to be times in your life when someone wanted nothing to do with you or was only looking for a friend. That didn’t mean you could take what they didn’t want to give.
Even if they changed their mind after saying yes.
Get over yourself.
There were two sides to the story, but not in this case. It saddened me to think that most women didn’t come forward because they were scared of not being believed.
The reverse of this situation happened to my brother Brandt. Shortly after he graduated high school, this girl who had basically gone all fatal attraction on his ass, accused him of having sex with her and tossing her to the side. He only knew her because he was the sister of one of his classmates. A couple times he had hung out at the guy’s house, but never once made any sort of move on her. I must have been nine or ten when it happened because it was four or five years after I had moved in with Erik.
Ana, my pseudo mother for all intents and purposes, ensured I knew all the sides of being a woman in a man’s world. Having so many brothers, it was difficult for me to not have heard something about sex. Whether it was them talking about a random hookup or just eavesdropping on conversations, I shouldn’t have heard. Then there was the clubhouse. As much as they tried to keep me shielded from everything, it was completely impossible for me to live my life in a bubble.
Anyway.
Brandt had just turned nineteen, so he had moved out and was staying in the clubhouse. She must have had a hard on for the bad boy biker fantasy because once she found out where he was staying, she started showing up at all hours. She even picked the lock to his bedroom and crawled into his bed. When he found her there, he called her brother to come and get her. He made it clear that we never wanted to see her on the premises and would arrest her for trespassing if it happened again.
It wasn’t until a couple of days later we were hit with the gravity of his situation.
She told her parents that he took advantage of her and had sex with her. Considering she was under the age of consent at the time, they wanted him charged with statutory rape. When the police came and put Brandt in handcuffs, Eddie went into the system and put everything together on a memory stick, and marched his ass over to the station. Our surveillance system was high tech even back then, so the video had sound. We wrapped everything up with a nice little bow. The night in question was completely caught on camera. It was a clear sign she had been the one to stalk him, not the other way around.
Once the police had the proof, they released him.
I only hoped what I held in my hands would be enough to get these victims the justice they deserved.
Just outside the courtroom, I waited for the prosecutor to arrive. I didn’t have enough time to get to his office before the hearing, so I volunteered to meet up with him here. Parker McBain was about to have his day made. The defendant’s case was going to be blown apart, and it would give him what he deserved. So, with a manilla envelope in hand, I sat on the bench and waited for him.
It didn’t take long for the crown counsel to show up. He stopped short when he spotted me sitting outside the assigned courtroom. I stood up, smoothed out my skirt and took a step towards him.
“Parker McBain?” I asked, even though I already knew who he was. Part of my research included a picture.
“Yes, that’s me. Can I help you with something?”
“Actually, it’s me that will help you.”
“Sorry?”
I handed over the manilla envelope. “You’ll find everything you need to win your case in this envelope. “Charles Warner won’t be a problem for women anymore.”
“Uh, thank you. And you are?”
“You don’t need to know my name. Just chalk it up to a concerned citizen.”
“What is this gonna cost me?” he asked.
“Do you think I did this for the money?” I asked him with my hands on my hips.
“Didn’t mean to offended you. Not every day a beautiful woman comes in off the street and hands you evidence to win your case. Especially without asking for a favour in return.”
“The only thing I need is to help you get this asshole into an orange jumpsuit and locked up where he belongs.”
“Thank you,” he told me, as he turned and walked down the hall, still shaking his head in disbelief.
I could afford to do a freebie or two. Besides, this one hit too close to home.
I was more than positive I would make bank on the next case, anyway. We each received a percentage of the fees we collected for our services. The rest went into the club. It paid for all the bills we had and funded a couple of our charities.
It was a win-win situation.
Except for the losers who ended up in my crosshairs.
For them, it was their worst nightmare coming true in the form of a nineteen-year-old girl.