Darius nodded. “They did, though I could tell my mother doubted me. It’s a horrible feeling to have the two people you trust most in the world look at you and wonder—even if just for a second—whether you’re a killer.”
“Oh, Dare. I’m so sorry.”
“The lawyer was a piece of work.” Darius laughed, but there was no humor in it. “When I told him I hadn’t killed Becca, he said, ‘Of course, you didn’t.’ But I knew by the way he said it that he’d have said the same thing to a serial killer.”
“Did anyone support you?”
Darius nodded. “My father and my brothers. When I got a few minutes alone with my dad, he asked me point-blank whether I’d killed her. I swore to him I hadn’t. He promised to stand by me, but it wasn’t easy for him. He was a professor at the university, and his son had just been accused of murder.”
Sasha blinked back tears as Darius told her how the press and strangers on social media had hounded his family and the university.
“I was suspended pending the outcome of the case. Friends I could once count on dropped me. I felt like a pariah. For six months, the local papers covered the story every day, putting my face on the front page. Social media was even worse. I got death threats, and so did my brothers. People posted the worst things.”
Sasha could easily imagine. “That’s terrible.”
“When my parents retained an attorney, some took that as proof of guilt. When my attorney asked the judge to release me to house arrest because I’d gotten beaten up twice and threatened with rape while in jail, people laughed about how the rich boy didn’t like the pokey. Or they said I deserved everything I got. It was nothing but hate twenty-four hours a day.”
“Inmates threatened torapeyou?” Sasha couldn’t imagine a big man like Darius facing a threat like that, but he’d been much younger then.
“Oh, yeah. I was fresh meat in their eyes.” He caressed her hand with his thumb. “When the judge transferred me to in-home detention, assholes vandalized our house—spray-painted ‘murderer’ on our garage door, even threw rocks through the window. My father took a leave of absence, and my brothers left high school for homeschooling. My mother quit giving piano lessons. For six months, we lived under siege.”
“That’s terrible. What happened to innocent until proven guilty?”
“It died with the advent of social media.”
Furious on his behalf, Sasha didn’t hold back. “That’s fucked up.”
“The DA kept pushing me to make a plea bargain, but I refused because I hadn’t done it. They threatened me with the death penalty. They made up a story about how I’d raped her and stabbed her to death in a rage.” Darius met Sasha’s gaze, and she saw utter desolation. “I’ve never felt so completely helpless. When you tell the truth, and no one believes you…”
It probably wouldn’t make one bit of difference to Darius so many years after the fact, but Sasha said it anyway. “I believe you.”
Sasha’s wordsmeant more to Darius than she could know. He fought to hold it together, his soul lacerated, his mind spinning with unwanted memories. “Forensics found my DNA all over her. My semen was inside her.”
“But there were reasons for that. You were her lover. You’d tried to revive her.”
Darius nodded. “Believe me, my attorney and I made that argument. No one listened—until six months later, when another young woman was raped and stabbed to death in the same apartment complex.”
“Oh, God.”
“A part of me was relieved at the news. I wanted to shout, ‘See? It wasn’t me!’ But a young woman had died. I felt guilty for being happy when I heard.”
“No one could blame you for that.”
“This time, they couldn’t pin the murder on me. I was confined to my home and made to wear an ankle bracelet, so they knew I hadn’t done it. I hated that damned thing, but in the end, it saved me.”
“I’m so glad it did.”
“A different detective took that case. He was careful, precise, meticulous with details. He asked questions I’d already answered, but he saw different possibilities. Maybe I had just taken a walk. Maybe the killer had known that. Maybe that’s why he’d acted when he had. And if I’d hidden the knife, where the hell was it?”
“He’s why you became a detective, isn’t he?”
Darius nodded. “Because he followed the evidence, it took him only a month—one damned month—to tie both killings to an unregistered sex offender living in our building. The guy had been busted on DNA evidence before and was careful to use condoms on his later victims. He killed them so they couldn’t ID him.”
“I hope he’s in prison.”
“He’s dead—killed by inmates. It felt like justice to me, though I know it wasn’t.”
“In the end, you were exonerated.”
