Chapter 39 Kobe #3
How many times had Jesse dodged punishment?
Would the law have ever caught up with him?
How many people would he have hurt in the interim?
Malik had already been acquitted of the assault of an underage girl.
How empowering that must have felt. What would that have taught him?
What did he have to fear with a lawyer father backing him up every time he misstepped?
Navid was a lawsuit waiting to happen. Did he deserve the same fate as Jesse? I didn’t know.
Ford’s sudden spiral into depression made sense.
The timing lined up with Angelique’s assault.
Had it eaten at him? Had guilt swallowed him whole?
His actions were not forgivable, especially in the eyes of a grieving father, but he hadn’t let the rush of it take him away like the others.
In fact, it seemed to have broken him. Did that pardon his actions?
Should he go unpunished? I was not in a position to answer those questions.
Dominique certainly didn’t think him absolved.
“Yates,” I said, zeroing in on the only man of the group who was still alive.
“You knew he took off tonight. I told you. You knew Jolie was at the station, and your cover was about to be blown. You hunted Yates down. Were you…” I turned to him.
“I need you to be brutally fucking honest with me, Dominique. Were you trying to get ahead of what you knew I was about to discover?”
“Upon leaving my house, yes, that was my thought. I knew my time was up, and if I wanted to fulfill my promise to Angelique, I had to act. I found Yates at the pub and had every intension of getting him alone.”
“You were chatting when I showed up. You bought him a beer and walked out. You left him there.”
Dominique stared into the middle distance, deep crevices cutting into his forehead. “I’m so tired, Kobe. I couldn’t go through with it. He was different.”
“How?”
“I told him who I was. Flat out. No bullshit. He stared at me with the most devastated look in his eyes, and I could almost believe his pain was real. He didn’t run from me.
He didn’t deny his part. He didn’t reach for his phone or slap cuffs on my wrists and read me my rights.
Ari Yates ducked his chin and cried, telling me he was sorry. ”
“That’s all it took? Am I to believe Jesse didn’t apologize at the end?”
“Of course he did, but it was hollow. It was done from fear, not from his heart. There’s a difference.
Ari and I had a long conversation. He recounted the night he tried to interview Angelique.
He didn’t paint himself in a positive light.
His shame was palpable. He told me everything, from calling her a whore to his adamancy that she see a doctor, which she had already tried to do.
He recounted his search on campus. His discussions with the administration.
He told me how he tried to find the girls and the boy who had come to him for help, but they had given him so little to work with.
“I was wrong, Kobe. Ari’s search for Jesse happened over ten months before mine. Jesse was a new student that year. Three weeks into the semester, his name was not yet on people’s lips. No one had cause to fear him. His reputation was not developed. That’s why Ari couldn’t find him.
“Ari told me about his daughter and how desperately he wished he could go back in time and change things. How he will never forgive himself. How he prays every night for the girl whose name he never learned. He confessed to his wife, saying he wasn’t worthy of being a father.
He didn’t know how to make it right. So yes, Ari Yates looked me in the eye and told me he was sorry, and I forgave him. ”
Dominique sighed and shook his head. “I’m not a monster, Kobe.
I’m sure the world wouldn’t see it that way.
I want to believe he’s a changed man. He loves his daughter.
That moment in his life, when Angelique went to him for help, will remain a bruise on his conscience forever.
It will never heal, but it will fuel him to fight against men like Jesse.
Ari Yates will defend girls like Angelique.
He may not be a good cop or a great cop or an honest cop, but his heart is in the right place. You two are alike in many ways.”
I clenched my jaw, hating the accuracy of his observation.
“I hope,” he continued, “that by setting Ari free I can set myself free because I’ve been living in a prison for two and a half years. I can’t keep going. I’m tired.”
I shifted my weight, hunched against the wind as I watched Dominique, doing all I could to read him, to understand him. I was not a father, but I didn’t have to be to know his pain ran deep.
“Did killing those men make you feel better?”
“No.” He spat the word like it tasted vile. “God no. I hated it. It was ugly and awful, and it stole pieces of me I will never get back. It was a sacrifice I made for my daughter because they stole something from her that she will never get back. Her innocence, Kobe. Her life.”
“You were saving others like her.”
“I like to think I was setting Angelique’s troubled soul free so she could finally be at peace. So she could sing and dance and smile again, wherever she is.”
“She’s gone, Dominique.”
“No one knows that more than me.”
The storm raged around us. Snow battered our faces and stuck in our hair. The shells of my ears ached, and I couldn’t feel my toes.
Dominique sniffled and wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Everything I told you about her was true. She was a spark of life. She lit up a room. She wanted to be on stage. She dreamed of performing. She was an artist. On her first day of high school, she came home excited because she heard the theater group downtown was having auditions for a winter production of Moulin Rouge. I told her she was too young to audition for such a risqué show. She told me to stop being a prude, and they were looking for dancers for the ensemble. She had a month before auditions, but she didn’t waste a moment of it.
I never understood why she didn’t go. I see it now.
The crack between before and after. It makes me wonder how I missed it.
“The last three weeks of her innocence were spent in song and dance. She wore one of her old figure skating costumes, a red sparkly number that was borderline indecent. She borrowed heels from Jolie and did her hair and makeup, so it was stage-worthy.”
Dominique unzipped his jacket a few inches, enough to reach for the inside pocket. He withdrew a woman’s silk scarf with tassels. Scarlet red.
My breath caught.
For a long time, he stared at it, running his fingers reverently over the fabric.
“She used it as a prop. Danced with it. Twirled around the kitchen and living room.” A wistful smile touched the corner of his mouth. “She knew every word to every song in that ridiculous musical. Those men took away her dreams and her future.”
He held the scarf to his nose and inhaled.
Fresh tears spilled down his cheeks. His shoulders shook, and he clenched his fist around the fabric, holding it tight.
“I can’t smell her anymore. The perfume she wore is the only reminder.
It calls her back to me. It awakens the memories. I miss her every day.”
Dominique looked as though his knees might give out, like the weight of his emptiness threatened to crush him.
He was but fragments of a man. Spent. Exhausted from years of grief and pain and heartache.
Vengeance hadn’t cured his broken heart, and I suspected he would gladly lie down and die in the elements without a care if I commanded it.
“Will you arrest me?” he asked, trying and failing to pull himself together.
“I should.”
“I would not blame you. I anticipated you might. I knew it was a matter of time before you figured it out. I was prepared for this eventuality.”
“And what of Cosette?” The flame of anger in my core wouldn’t burn out. It flared with each new thought. Dominique’s complacency lacerated my heart. “Did you think of her in all this vigilante bullshit?”
“Of course I did. I look into her innocent face every day, and I see her mother. Angelique stares back at me. It’s uncanny.
They are so alike. I don’t want Cosette to know the pain her mother went through.
If I could scour the world of evil, I would, but I can’t.
The future scares me. Will I fail her like I failed Angelique? ”
“You didn’t fail Angelique.”
“I did. A better father would have seen the signs. He would have asked more questions. He would have dragged her to a doctor regardless of her protests. I didn’t even know she was pregnant, Kobe.
What kind of father does that make me? I sometimes think Cosette would be better off with someone else.
Don’t get me wrong. I love her with all my heart, but I don’t deserve a second chance. ”
“If I arrest you, she’ll end up in the system. Do you really think that’s better?”
“She wouldn’t. My parents would take her.”
“Your parents don’t know she exists.”
“Not yet, but they will. I left a document in case I was arrested. It explains all they need to know. The whole ugly story. No one knew Angelique had left a suicide note. Apart from me, Jolie, and Bastian, no one knows she was raped at all. At the time, I kept it to myself. When the police came, I told them what I knew. There was a baby to deal with, and I had to explain it somehow. I said I didn’t know about the pregnancy or who the father might be.
I described how her moods had been off lately and told them that she refused to talk about it.
Nothing but the truth. The story wrote itself.
Teenage suicide is sadly not uncommon. Under the circumstances… ”