You see a little bit of everything, in our line of work, a lot of it that you want to unsee, too. Still, it takes a certain kind of person to be able to work sex crimes, and if I do say so myself, you won’t find two cops more dedicated than my partner, Detective Walker, and I. Still, this case, from the very beginning we knew it was going to be strange one, but let me go ahead and set the scene for you. It was a Saturday, which meant the precinct we work out of was pretty much empty aside from the usual weekend skeleton crew. Both of us had had a rough week, and were busy catching up on paperwork together. We’re both single in our early thirties–married to the job you might say, and dressed down a bit. Gotta look professional, you know? For the victims, but we’d discarded our coats and were just in our shirts and slacks, showing our suspenders, sleeves rolled up to our elbows, trying reports and shooting the shit, thinking about hitting the gym together after work. Both of us were in good shape–you had to be, to be a good cop, but beyond that, we were normal, middle Amercan guys, just trying to make the city better. That’s when an officer came in with Richard, claiming he’d been raped.
Now don’t get me wrong, I know guys can be raped, I’ve seen it plenty of times, but when Richard started telling us his story, well…it was a bit hard to believe. He was trying to claim that, the night before, he had been raped by every single fellow in his fraternity house, the whole night long–that he’d only managed to get out of the ropes holding him an hour ago, escape, and make his way here. It was obvious the guy had been through some kind of trauma, sure–that, or he had some of the best crocodile tears I’d ever seen working these cases. Towards the end of the story, he was sobbing so hard he could barely get his words out, so we parked him in one of the interrogation rooms to calm down, while the two of us discussed what he’d been telling us behind the observation mirror in the next room.
“So, what do you make of it? What he was saying about all that?” I asked, looking over at Walker.
“I don’t know, Bailey–something…something about him just rings a bit…off, you know?”
I did know, actually. Neither of us were new to sex crimes, and both of us had plenty of compassion for the victims we worked with routinely, but something about this guy, it was just…strange. I mean, the story he was trying to tell, about the entire fraternity raping him–what the hell? That was crazy all on its own. It wasn’t like I’d seen gang rapes before–hell, two years prior we’d busted a bunch of guys in one of those frats for drugging and gangraping a couple co-eds, but frats didn’t usually target men, you know? What would you have to do to get those kinds of alpha straight dudes mad at you enough for all of them to tie you down and rape you? There was something else to this story he wasn’t telling us, we both knew that. But then there was just the guy’s…I don’t know, there was something about him that just–look, it’s a detective’s instincts, you know? You can tell when someone is being straight with you, or when someone is trying to jerk you around, and both of us were feeling a bit jerked by him. At the time, I figured it might just be my exhaustion from the week.
We both fell quiet, looking at the guy. He was starting to calm down, and something else occurred to me–he didn’t quite fit the bill of a typical fraternity brother himself. Richard was considerably overweight–I mean, I might as well just say obese. A couple of chins, moobs, a bit gut stretching out his shirt. He had the right hair, he even had on the right, trendy clothes, but I knew that college, I knew what those frats were, and none of them were likely to let in someone looking like Richard. And yet, he’d been most distressed by the fact that he’d been raped by his “brothers and friends” as he’d called them. Was the guy delusional? Let’s just say I had plenty of alarm bells going off.
“Well, looks like he calmed down, at least.” Walker said, “How about we talk to him, see if he give us a more believable story.”
Obviously we’d come to the same conclusion–there was simply no way Richard was being totally straight with us. We went into the room together. Richard was sitting at the table. His eyes were still red from his crying earlier, but he was just looking…flat, at the moment. Stunned, maybe. Walker sat down across from him, but I stayed standing, by the door. This was our usual set up–normally when we had a victim come to us we’d try to find a more comfortable place for them to tell us what happened, but this guy–no, we needed to get the truth out of him, and if that meant making him a little uncomfortable, so be it.
“Feeling a bit better?” Walker asked.
Richard nodded, and let out a meek word that might have been, “Yeah.”
“Alright,” Walker said, leaning back in the chair, “Now, why don’t you tell us what happened last night. Start at the beginning.”
Bracken's Corner 