“Yeah, I know,” Chase agreed with him. “Christ, my father will kill me if this ever comes out.”
“So will mine,” Jamie agreed. “Do you think Rick’s dad can really get him off with some big fancy lawyer?”
“I don’t know,” Chase said, “I think my dad would expect me to take my punishment for what I’d done.”
“I don’t know what mine would do, kill me maybe,” Jamie said. Protecting Rick now was a heavy burden for both of them, and went against what they felt they owed Vivienne too. It was an intolerable conflict.
Chase looked at him ruefully. “This would kill my dad. I hope it never comes out, for everyone’s sake. It sucks for Vivienne, though. I wish we could make it up to her.”
“Do you think she’ll be okay?” Jamie asked, as tears crept down his cheeks too. They were both crying silently as they sat there, but it felt better to be together than alone. They were in this together, and had been friends before, although Jamie knew he would think of that night now whenever he saw Chase. But he had no one else to talk to that he could be honest with. The memory of what had happened and their silence now was irrevocably intertwined with their friendship.
“I don’t know,” Chase said. “How could she be okay? She’ll probably be a mess for a long time. I keep thinking we should confess, but I don’t want to send all of us to prison, it’ll ruin our lives if we do.”
“Maybe we deserve that. Maybe that’s what justice is all about,” Jamie said softly.
“If she wanted us to be in jail, she’d tell the police what happened, and she hasn’t, or we’d be in jail by now, and they wouldn’t be fingerprinting half the world, including the headmaster and the maintenance guys. She hasn’t told them, and I don’t think she will.” Chase was almost sure, but not quite. And he was having a hard time deciding what was right. There were so many people involved who would all be impacted by any decision he made.
“Maybe she’s embarrassed too, for being with us and getting so drunk. But what Rick did is a hell of a price for her to pay for getting drunk. She didn’t deserve that. No one does.” Jamie was groping for understanding of something neither of them could explain.
“It’s not right for Rick to get away with it,” Chase said solemnly. “I wonder what my dad would do. He’s the most honest man I know.”
“We’ll always be a terrible memory for her now, and always will be. Why do you think she hasn’t told the cops?” Jamie asked him. He had wondered a thousand times.
“Scared to maybe,” Chase answered. “Even if it’s our fault, they could rip her to shreds in court, and make her look bad. The lawyers our fathers would hire would sacrifice her to save us. Or maybe she’s just a decent human being and doesn’t want to ruin our lives, although we ruined hers.” They were quiet again for a long time, thinking about it, and then Jamie stood up, he felt a thousand years old. “We’ll see what happens with the prints tomorrow,” Chase said, and Jamie nodded, and went back to his own room to lie on his bed and cry, thinking about her. He felt the weight of the world on his shoulders, and all the remorse Rick should have and had shown no sign of.
* * *
—
Detective Brendan called Taylor at nine o’clock that night.
“We’ve got the preliminary report on the seniors,” he said in a neutral tone.
“Any matches with the prints on the bottle?” Taylor asked, silently praying the answer would be negative, even if it was a futile hope. He didn’t want any student to be guilty.
“All six of them, and Vivienne’s,” Brendan said in a somber tone. “We need to bring them in for questioning, and we’re going to run them over to the hospital for cheek swabs, for DNA matches with the semen samples. We’re getting down to serious business here. We can call off the rest of the fingerprinting now. We have what we needed.” It was a very important first step and successful from a police perspective.
“Are you going to arrest them?” Taylor asked in a hoarse voice.
“It depends where we go from here, what they tell us, if one of them confesses to the rape, what the DNA match is. Right now we have them located at a crime scene, drinking tequila. That’s not a felony, they’re minors drinking, possibly at the wrong place at the wrong time. We have to take this one step at a time. If none of the DNA samples is a match, they’re your problem, as to how you want to handle the drinking. We’re not going to arrest them for underage drinking. If one of the DNA samples is a match with what we got from the victim, that’s a whole different story, and you know what comes next. We want to find the man who raped Vivienne. If these boys are her friends, that may be why she wouldn’t tell us anything, and cooked up a story about drinking with a bunch of girls she can’t remember. I have a hard time believing she’d protect a boy who raped her, unless she’s in love with him, but you never know with kids. They have strange loyalties for odd reasons, and a rape trial will be rough on her. The others would be tried as accessories if they were at the scene when she was raped, and obstruction of justice for not reporting it, and possibly lying to us in Tommy Yee’s case. It will also depend on what the boys say now, if they lie to us or tell the truth, and what Vivienne corroborates. They’re all minors, so we’d get a closed courtroom for a trial, but at seventeen, these boys may not be tried as minors, if it involves a rape case, and if one of them committed the rape, he may be tried as an adult and get an adult sentence and go to prison as an adult, that could mean five to eight years in prison. I know that some of these prep school rapes have gotten a lot of media attention, and the boys involved have had some pretty light sentences. I don’t think most judges are willing to do that anymore. It brings a shitstorm down on them in the media for giving hard sentences to ordinary folk, and six months’ probation to rich boys, and the public doesn’t like it. And the courts are taking rape cases very seriously these days, more so than ever. So if one of them is charged with rape, I don’t think he’ll get an easy ride on this. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We want to pick them up in the morning for questioning, and I’d like you and Miss Smith to be present in lieu of their parents when we question each one. I don’t want you to warn them before we come to get them. We don’t want anyone slipping through our fingers tonight.”
“Of course. I understand. Can you tell me now who they are?” Taylor could feel his heart pounding and was wondering if the stress was going to kill him.
“I’ll tell you if you treat it as confidential. I’d prefer if you don’t notify their parents until we’ve brought them in. We’ll have a better idea what we’re dealing with then, and after the DNA matches, but you’ll want to notify their parents tomorrow once they’ve been questioned.”