False accusations

CHAPTER 22

Brittany Harding was pacing back and forth in front of her coffee table, smoking a Marlboro. “What do you mean you don’t have enough evidence?”

Detective Coleman stepped to his right in an attempt to avoid the lingering cloud of smoke. “I mean we don’t have enough to charge the man with anything. We talked with him and he seemed pretty credible. It didn’t look like he had anything to hide. I even saw his calendar. There was nothing in there mentioning you on September eleventh.”

“Rape is a very serious charge, Miss Harding,” Valentine said. “We usually like to make it stick when we arrest someone. It’s painful enough for you to have to relive the experience, to go through it in public during the trial. We want to make sure we have enough to put the guy away. Right now, we don’t. It’s hard enough even when we have all the evidence we need.”

“Unless there’s some piece of evidence, someone who saw you there at his house that night,” Coleman said, “we don’t even have any proof that you were there, let alone raped. If you’d come in right after, we could’ve done a rape kit-”

“I told you, I was embarrassed. He’s a powerful, well-regarded man. I didn’t know what would happen if I went to the police.”

“How about the clothes you were wearing?” Valentine asked. “That’d be a start, if you haven’t washed them. They’d still have his semen on them.”

Harding took a puff on her cigarette. “I threw them out. They got torn when he ripped them off me. I could’ve had them repaired, but to be honest with you, just seeing them reminded me of what he did to me.” She took another drag. “But I’ve got the belt I was wearing that night. He touched it while unbuckling it. You can see if his fingerprints are on it.”

“You haven’t worn it since September eleventh?” Valentine asked.

Harding shook her head. “It only goes with two outfits-the one I threw out, and a pantsuit I haven’t worn since then.”

“We’ll take it,” Coleman said, “but we need something to prove that you were in his house that night. We might then be able to link the fingerprints on the belt, if there are any, to the fact that you were in his home.”

“It’s a reach,” Valentine said, “but you never know. It may give us enough to rattle him, at least get him to admit that the two of you were together that night and that something happened.”

Harding blew a puff of smoke toward the ceiling and watched it rise. “How about a couple of phone calls?”

“Phone calls?”

“Yeah. I made a couple of calls while I was there, before he attacked me. One was to my mother, and one to my sister. I’ll give you the numbers. Check his phone bill.”

“Now we’re cooking,” Valentine said. She pulled out her pad and made a note of the numbers. “We’ll be in touch in a few days.”

“Don’t forget the belt,” she said, the trail of smoke following her like a snake as she disappeared into her bedroom.