Yates pressed his lips together, frowning. “I’m trying to do the right thing. Amend past mistakes.”
“Get to the point, Ari.”
“I am. This is going to paint me in a bad light. Honestly, if you were anyone else, I wouldn’t say anything because it’s probably useless information, and I could get myself in a world of trouble if the wrong people found out.”
“I don’t have time for cryptic.”
“A few years ago, when I was partnered with that jerk who finally retired, I was working a midnight here at the station. It was almost the end of my shift. About five in the morning. Two teenage girls and a squirrely teenage boy came in. The girls were young. Thirteen or fourteen. Dressed like… like theywere twenty-one and looking for…” He seemed unable to find the right word. Angry red blossoms colored his cheeks with his scowl.
“Looking for a good time?” I prompted.
“Yeah, except it was obvious they were still little girls under the costumes. Barely fucking teenagers. The boy was older, but not by much. Fifteen or sixteen. I don’t know. The one girl looked like she’d been crying: mascara smeared on her cheeks, her nose red, eyes bloodshot. She wore a tight mini skirt that barely covered her ass and a see-through top with a lace bra underneath. I could see her nipples. I’m not being a creep. The shirt was torn down the front. The other girl was more… put together. Still dressed… slutty. He was in normal clothes. Jeans and a tee.
“They wanted to make a report but refused to tell me their names, how old they were, or give me any identifying information like an address or where they went to school. I waved it off at first, figuring I’d listen and get it from them after.”
Yates diverted his attention to the ground, creases straining his eyes. “They were little girls, Kobe. Fucking kids.”
“Go on.”
“The one with makeup running down her face said she was raped by three guys at a party on the university campus. She thought she might have been drugged and confirmed she and her friend had been drinking. The girl making the claim said she felt queasy halfway through her third beer and stopped drinking it.”
Three beers in a girl that age could have easily rendered her drunk and queasy without drugs, especially if she had never had alcohol before and downed them fast.
“Raped by three guys? Did you get names?”
“She didn’t know them. The boy. He stayed by the door. He was this awful shade of green. He said he took them to theparty. A buddy invited him. They were shooting pool in another room, so he didn’t see anything. The girl, she said she overheard one of the guys call another one Jesse, but that was all she remembered.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. My impatience to leave evaporated. “Jesse? As in Jesse Vargas?”
Yates shrugged. “I don’t know. She couldn’t give a proper description of any of them. She claimed her memory was fuzzy. The other girl was apparently too busy making out with some other guy to notice what was happening to her friend. They claimed the incident happened much earlier in the night. As I said, it was close to five when they came into the station. I’m not gonna lie. I didn’t buy the whole story at first. If she was drugged, she wouldn’t be sitting upright in a chair and speaking in coherent sentences, right?”
That wasn’t necessarily true. Not if the spiked drink wasn’t fully consumed or the effects were purely from alcohol. If the assault had happened at eleven or midnight, five or six hours might have been enough time to sober up some. She would have still had alcohol or drugs in her system, sure, but she could have been alert enough to make a coherent report.
Yates wasn’t looking for me to confirm his theory, so I stayed silent.
“The boy gave me the address where the party took place,” Yates continued, “but that was it. That’s all I could get out of them. When I poked at her for details about the assault, the girl shut down and cried. I asked for their names again, but they wouldn’t tell me.”
I wanted to tear the folder from Yates’s hand and read the report, but he wasn’t done talking. The pained look in his eyes told me the rest of the story was not something he wanted to share.
“What?” I urged.
“I… I didn’t handle it properly.”
“What do you mean?”
“No matter how many times I asked, they wouldn’t tell me anything about themselves. No names, no ages, no home address. I asked about their parents, and that was another dead end. I was getting frustrated. When I told the one girl she had to get checked out at the hospital, she downright refused. I explained they would do a rape kit and blood test. It would be evidence. We needed those tests to form a proper case, press charges. Especially if she was going to take this to court and have any hope of winning. She just kept saying, ‘His name was Jesse. Why can’t you just arrest Jesse and his friends.’
“They wouldn’t sign the report. She wouldn’t consent to medical attention, and I told her a hundred times how important that was. The boy was freaking out, and the girls were getting hysterical and yelling for me to do something, but I didn’t know what the fuck they wanted me to do. I was tired. It was the end of my shift. The more they refused to tell me anything, the more irritated I got. They wanted me to chase down this Jesse guy on campus and arrest him. ‘For what?’ I asked. ‘Unless you make a proper report and see a doctor to prove you were drugged and assaulted, I can’t help you.’”
Yates pinched his eyes closed and sighed. “The boy yelled, ‘She’s not lying.’ The friend threw a hissy fit. The other one called me a useless asshole. Then…” Yates paused, looking like he wanted to vomit. “Then, I asked them what they expected going to college parties dressed like a pair of whores. I told them they were practically asking for it. They stormed out. I yelled for them to at least go to a fucking clinic to be sure she didn’t have an STI, but they gave me the finger, and I never saw them again. I couldn’t file the report because I had nothing. Not even a signature.”
With a trembling hand, he offered me the file. “I kept it. What I wrote. In case they came back and changed their minds. I felt like the biggest asshole on the planet. The next morning, I went to the university and tried to find a guy named Jesse, but it was impossible. The address they gave me for the party was wrong. The administration couldn’t help. Did you know there are over forty thousand students enrolled at that university at any given time? I had nothing but a first name. No age, ethnicity, height, or weight. I tried, Kobe. I tried for weeks to find him. It’s been eating at me for years.”
I took the file and opened it, finding one sheet of paper half-filled with barely legible chicken scratch. Nothing useful.
“I regret what I did,” Yates said. “I should have been more sensitive, maybe found a female officer to help them feel more comfortable. I should have done a hundred different things, but I didn’t, and they walked away. That little girl was fucking gang raped and came to make a report to the police, who she should have been able to trust, and I called her a whore and let her walk out the door. I’m so ashamed.
“My wife and I were watching the news last night, and they were talking about the recent death of Jesse Vargas, a former university student who was expelled for drugs. The reporter covering the story said there were rumors he’d repeatedly assaulted women on campus. I thought, fuck me. Are you kidding? What are the chances?”
