Sophie told that story to me that night while she was racked with fear, her breath hot against my cheek, the hiss of her voice against my ear making it itch. Myth or not, the story had come to her as Josh’s slobber trickled down the side of her chin. She had felt her spine grind against the small rocks under her sleeping bag.
I asked her if she told him to stop. She wasn’t sure, but she recalled telling him that the other tents were nearby and that this wasn’t a good idea, that one of the guys who was down at the lake might walk back up or even I might come out from the tent at any moment.
But Sophie had said she told Josh to back off. But he didn’t. He kept pulling and pressing. And she had wanted it all to cease, but she couldn’t fight back because she froze up.
Just as Jess had done a decade later.
Making it difficult to prosecute.
Making it possible for two rapists to strike again and again.
And now Leon—struck by the same monster who hurt my sister. But unlike in so many cases where the rapist goes free because it’s often too difficult to prove when there are no witnesses, Mark Coleman would not strike again.
“Do you have any bruises or cuts?” the nurse asked Leon.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t care anymore.”
My phone rang. Wallace again, likely wondering where I was and if I was coming over. I glanced at Leon and the nurse, the pit in my stomach growing larger, my rage at Coleman still ratcheting up even though I knew he was gone forever.
As upset as I was with Railes for pulling his weapon and lying, and even as the heavy cloak of guilt for not contradicting Railes’s story began to descend upon me for eternity, I was glad Coleman was gone.
“I’m tied up,” I told Wallace. “I can’t make it tonight.”
I walked out of the hospital into the cold, soggy night. Sweat trickled down my back. Drizzling rain fell on my head. My hands were wet and slick.
I kept picturing their pained and confused faces.
Leon.
And Sophie.
I pictured Coleman’s body crashing to the floor.
The knife skidding . . .
It all stopped me short. Jesus, what had I done?
I had covered for Railes. How could I have done that? How could I have thrown all my morals out the windowfor a piece-of-shit cop?
The answer was obvious.
I was no better than Billy Stinking Railes.
And if I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did.
Three days later, Leon hanged himself.
In a way, Mark Coleman’s murder took another life, too, when I locked arms and stories with Billy Railes.
When I told Jess, the day after the shooting, I only covered the bare bones: that there’d been a domestic dispute, that an officer shot Coleman because he was resisting orders, that he was aggressive and wouldn’t comply. I didn’t mention Leon. “But now, at least, Coleman’s gone, Jess. He’s gone,” I had said.
I saw it in her face then. Not relief. Not even surprise. Confusion. And something else—a deep disappointment. Even sadness. A slumping of her entire body, like a punctured balloon. She whispered, “Now I’ll never be able to talk to him.”
“But what on earth were you going to say?” I asked. “There’s no talking to men like him.”
But it fell on deaf ears. She had gone somewhere else in her mind at that moment, like she was listening and trying to make out some strange sound off in the distance.
Two long and painful weeks later, I quit. Railes and I were both already on a decompression leave for being involved in a shooting and taking the required two weeks off. But I knew then I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t tuck that shame away. Jess seemed worse by the day, and she wasn’t even aware of what had really happened, of how I had backed Railes. The scale of it practically knocked me off my feet, made me dizzy. Pains shot through my chest every time I thought of it. At times, I thought I was having a heart attack, but I knew it was anxiety.
