Tara Quinn - The Sheriff's Daughter

“You don’t drink?”

“Socially.” One glass of wine, if a host was serving her. And only if the circumstances were completely controlled.

“According to what I read, none of the men convicted remembered much about what happened, either. Or at least, that was their defense.”

That’s what she’d been told. She hadn’t been present to hear any of the testimony.

“Based on the number of bottles found at the site and how sick we all were the next day, I’d guess we were all somewhat to blame.”

But she hadn’t lost her freedom for it. She hadn’t been sent to prison at eighteen, to be God-knew-what by the hardened and deranged prisoners who were spending their lives behind bars.

And if it had been only statutory rape, if she’d been a willing participant in the sexual antics that night, she was at least somewhat to blame for their incarceration. They’d been sent up on charges of having sex with a minor and she’d told them all she was twenty-one. Dressed as if she’d been twenty-one, with a bra that had pushed up her breasts and a low-cut blouse that showed more than it left to the imaginations of a bunch of horny college guys.

“Do you know if any of you were checked for drug use?” Ryan sounded all cop.

“Did the papers say we had been?”

“It wasn’t mentioned.”

“If we were, I wasn’t told about it. I sure didn’t see or hear anything about any drugs at the party. These guys were there to drink, but that’s all. Why do you ask?”

He shrugged. “PCP, for instance, is a dissociative street drug that’s been around since the fifties and it’s still used by about two and a half percent of high school seniors today. One of its side effects is loss of memory.”

He was well-trained. And seeing things that weren’t there because he knew too much?

“I’m sure if my father suspected drug use, we were tested,” she told her newfound son. “But passing out from an overdose of alcohol can also result in loss of memory, and I know for certain that there was an ample supply of that on hand.”

“So you think you passed out drunk, and then they had sex with you?”

Her body temperature rising from her feet to her ears, Sara concentrated on taking long, calming breaths. Distancing herself, as she’d been taught in her counseling sessions all those years ago.

“I try not to think about it at all,” she told her son honestly. “I woke up, spent the day vomiting and crying, and six weeks later I found out I was pregnant.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“Afraid?”

He shrugged, looked down. “The papers, the trial transcript, said nothing about a pregnancy. I kind of hoped my conception was a separate incident.”

“I was sixteen.”

“I know. But you’d been to the hospital. They’d have taken precautions to prevent pregnancy.”

“There’s only so much they can do. It happens that way sometimes.”

“My folks said tests were never done to determine which of the three was my father.”

Since she had no memory of any of them, the three had kind of morphed into one in Sara’s mind.

“I’d say I was sorry, except that then I wouldn’t be here,” Ryan added.

“I’m definitely not sorry you’re here,” Sara told him, looking him straight in the eye. And she wasn’t. At all. She’d given life to a remarkable human being—given a son to a childless couple who’d clearly loved him well.

“You might be.”

That sounded ominous. “Why?”

“I haven’t told you what I’m doing here.”

He’d come out of a desire to finally meet her. Hadn’t he?

“So tell me.” Sara couldn’t imagine anything worse than what they’d just been through.

“First, I don’t think the story of that night ends with you having me and three young men going to prison.”

Of course it did. It was over, done.

“I think the whole rape thing was a cover-up.”

The idea was so ludicrous she couldn’t even consider it. Ryan was young. A rookie cop, overeager. Needing to put a different light on the night of his conception.

Because the facts as they were were unsatisfying—and ugly.

Because he felt the need to exonerate his birth mother? Or to pretend that he wasn’t the offspring of a rapist?

“A cover-up? For what?”

“Murder.”

“Whose murder?”

“I don’t know yet, but I intend to find out. Some bones were found on the other side of the lake later that year after a huge flood washed away much of the bank. The local coroner dated them to within a few weeks of the night of that party.”

In her mind, it was the night she was raped. The night of his conception. The night that changed her life forever. But if he wanted to refer to it as the night of the party, that was fine with her.

She remembered the flood. Had been glad to hear that the site of her foray into hell had been washed clean.

“Were the bones identified?”

“No. From what I can see, the townspeople were questioned and requests for information posted, but no one came forward. Apparently, there were not only no witnesses to the death but no one reported a missing person, either. You can’t match dental records without a possible identity to begin with. And Ohio has only been using DNA testing on a regular basis since the late ’80s. There were no matching missing-persons reports in the state during the three months prior, or two years after, the approximate time of death.”

She wasn’t going to ask him how he knew that. Maricopa wasn’t in his jurisdiction. But he was a police officer. He had ways to get access to information that most people wouldn’t even know existed.

Still…

“So how does this all tie in? You think someone was murdered that night at the lake? Surely someone would have reported a missing college kid.”

“The dead man was in his late thirties to early forties.”

Ryan’s earnestness, his conviction, was endearing. “And the tie-in?”

“That’s what I have to find. But think about it. The sheriff’s daughter, a conservative young woman, by all accounts, is suddenly having sex with three men—and all four of you have no memory of the incident. There’s ample physical evidence, and a baby, to prove what happened. This is a case that will consume every ounce of the sheriff’s attention, focus and energy. An open-and-shut case that won’t require digging into anything else that might have happened that night. You have to admit, it’s convenient.”

Not a word she’d ever associated with that night. “Too convenient, if you ask me,” Ryan continued. “Most cops don’t like coincidences, and I don’t like conveniences. Crimes aren’t usually that easy to wrap up.”

“And this…convenience…is what you’re basing your murder cover-up story on?”

He nodded, fingertips tapping together. “That, the unidentified bones, and…” he glanced away and then back, giving her a sheepish look “…I’ve read some of the police reports.”

“Did you find something unusual?”

“Not necessarily, but I’ve got some questions and am hoping to get the whole file. I’m studying to become a detective and I’ve asked to look over the case for practice.”

Just as she thought. A young cop playing sleuth. And where was the harm? If he needed to reshape the events that surrounded his conception, she wasn’t going to try to stop him.

“That’s actually not why I’m here,” Ryan said then, as if he knew she wasn’t buying his theory.

There was more? She wasn’t sure she had the emotional or physical resources to handle anything else at the moment.

She wanted to know how old he was when he took his first step. And whether or not he liked peas. Or if he had a girlfriend?