“Andrew’s right index print was found on the bottle along with Tammy Karlsen’s DNA. Aggravated sexual battery. That looks like fecal matter. Aggravated sodomy. Bruising on her thighs consistent with penetration. Rape. She was taken to a secluded place. Kidnap. They can’t prove she was drugged or the charge would be there. What about weapons?”
“A knife,” Andrew said.
Leigh turned around.
Andrew was leaning against the doorjamb. His suit jacket was off. His shirtsleeves were rolled up. The discussion with Sidney clearly had not gone well. He looked utterly exhausted.
Still, his eyes had not lost their unsettling emptiness.
Leigh could reflect on that later. Now, she skimmed through the rest of the photos. No other physical evidence was documented. Just the video at the bar, the tangentially connected Nike shoeprint, and the fingerprint on the glass Coke bottle. She assumed that Andrew’s prints had not been in the state database. In Georgia, only a felony arrest would garner that dubious honor.
She asked, “ Do you know how you were identified?”
“Tammy told the police that she recognized my voice from the bar, but that’s not—I mean, she’d just met me, so she doesn’t really know my voice, does she?”
Leigh pressed together her lips. You could just as easily say it was fresh in the victim’s mind, especially after hearing him talk for ninety-eight minutes. The biggest point in Andrew’s favor so far was the Rohypnol. Leigh had an expert witness who could argue the amnesia caused by the drug made Karlsen’s identification unreliable.
She asked Andrew, “When did the cops get your fingerprints?”
He said, “They came to my work and threatened to drag me down to the police station if I didn’t voluntarily go with them.”
Reggie said, “You should’ve called a lawyer right on the spot.”
Andrew shook his head in visible regret. “I thought I could clear it up.”
“Yeah, my dude, the cops don’t want you to clear shit up. They want to arrest you.”
Leigh turned back around in her chair. She paged through the case file. She found a warrant for the prints signed by a judge who would sign off on waterboarding if it got him onto the golf course faster. Still, the fact that they’d gotten a warrant rather than snagged his prints off a water bottle in the interrogation room told Leigh that the prosecutor had not been playing around.
Andrew said, “I used to think if you’re innocent, you’ve got nothing to hide. See where that got me? My entire life has gone to hell because one person pointed her finger at me.”
“Dude, that’s why we’re here,” Reggie said. “Collier can take down that crazy bitch with one hand tied behind her back.”
“She shouldn’t have to,” Andrew said. “Tammy and I had a good time. I would’ve called her the next day if Sid hadn’t shown up on my doorstep.”
Reggie’s chair squeaked as he leaned back. “Look, dude, this is war. You’re fighting for your life. You gotta play dirty because the other side sure as hell is. Don’t be sitting your ass in prison going all I wish. Tell him, Collier. This ain’t no time to be a gentleman about it.”
Leigh wasn’ t going to put herself between them. She pulled the laptop closer and returned to the VICTIM PHOTOS file. Her finger pressed the arrow key as she paged through to the rape-kit documentation. Each close-up was more devastating than the previous. God knew that Leigh had witnessed her share of brutality, but she felt a sudden vulnerability sitting in a small room with two loud men who were arguing about bitches while the horrific evidence of a savage sexual assault flashed across the screen.
The skin along Tammy Karlsen’s back had been clawed out. Bite marks riddled her breasts and shoulders. Handprint-shaped bruises wrapped around her arms, stretched across her ass and the back of her legs. The Coke bottle had ripped her open. Contusions and lacerations scraped up her thighs into the groin. Fissures sliced her anus. Her clitoris had been ripped, only a tiny piece of tissue keeping it connected. The wounds had bled so profusely that the impression of her buttocks was sealed in blood against the concrete of the pavilion floor.
“Jesus,” Andrew said.
Leigh suppressed a shiver. Andrew was standing right behind her. The photo on the laptop showed Tammy Karlsen’s mutilated breast. Bite marks dug into the soft flesh around the nipple.
He said, “How could anyone think I would do that? And how stupid would I be to follow her from the bar with all of those cameras?”