Better Off Dead Read Online Free

as a magic bullet in the mind of
juries. The fact that a rapist might wear a condom—and that pond
water might wash away external evidence—did not occur to the twelve
good people who were accustomed to one-hour episodes of intrigue
that ended with the discovery of a crucial dab of DNA.
    No one seriously disputed that Helen Mclnnes
had been raped—two broken ribs, severe contusions, the damage done
to her throat plus internal injuries that required reconstructive
surgery tended to put a damper on those doubts. But enough people
disagreed that David Brookhouse had done it to her to send him
packing, a free man now free to sue.
    "It was the cross-examination that did it,"
I remembered.
    She nodded. Her voice fell to a whisper. "I
told the prosecutor what would happen, that we'd had an affair. But
she said that I was being ridiculous, that courts weren't like that
anymore, that this was a new decade and women were protected from
becoming the accused."
    "Except women with the bad luck to have
slept with their rapists before the rape," I said. "I guess she
forgot that part."
    I live and work in a really modern, yet
still unspoiled, region of the South. And, like the song says, I
love calling North Carolina home. But a recent study by an
independent agency had found that close to seventy percent of all
sexual assault cases in N.C. result in acquittal. I don't know what
was going on in the minds of jurors around these here parts, but
something was rotten in this particular stretch of the Bible
Belt—and Helen Mclnnes had paid for it.
    Helen was struggling to finish her story.
She wanted to get it over with. "I wasn't going to lie. We'd had an
affair. But I had been the one to end it, not him. And I had ended
it months before the attack. He seemed fine with it. That's why I
was so... shocked when I recognized his voice during the attack and
realized it was him."
    "Is that why your marriage broke up?" I
asked. "Because of the affair?"
    She nodded. "I had to tell my husband in
advance what was going to happen if I got on the stand. So I warned
him the day before. He didn't know about the affair until then."
For the first time she looked me in the eye. "He went out later
that night to buy a pack of cigarettes and I haven't seen him
since."
    And people wonder why I've never
remarried.
    "That Atlanta lawyer got pretty rough with
you during the cross-examination," I said, remembering what a
Durham detective had told me: "shredded her," was how he put it.
"Annihilated her, destroyed her, made her sound like a vindictive
slut. Let's hope this shyster lawyer goes back to Atlanta soon." My
detective friend, like quite a few people on the force, was
inclined to believe that David Brookhouse had been guilty.
    "How long was the affair with Brookhouse?" I
asked, curious to know what she had paid so heavy a price for.
    "It only lasted a few months. But it was
long enough for me to..." She hesitated. "... to know that he was
the one who attacked me."
    "What do you mean?"
    She looked away. "It sounds crazy now, but I
was positive at the time."
    "He did something while he was raping you
that made you think it was him? Something besides his voice?"
    She nodded. "It was the way he... moved me
around." She flushed a deep red, still ashamed. "The way he would
roughly turn me over. He had... done that to me before." She
exhaled. "It was one reason I broke it off with him. He wanted to
try a lot of stuff I just wasn't into. That... and my husband. My
husband at the time."
    "Did the rapist speak much?" I asked.
    She nodded. "Yes. To call me... names.
Horrible things. I don't really want to repeat what he said."
    "Fair enough. I don't really want to hear
them. But you did recognize his voice?"
    She nodded. "He was trying to disguise it,
but I could tell it was him. And when he laughed, I knew it was
him. He has this sort of high-pitched laugh." She gnawed at her
lip. "It's hideous, really. The first time I heard it was when we
went to the movies and he