Set Free (10 page)

Day after day, side by side, we sat in that courtroom in silence, witnessing the judicial system do its best to bring Scott Walker to justice. Each night we returned to our quiet, dark house, prepared a simple meal, sat on the sofa in silence, and watched the talking heads on TV spout their opinions on the day’s proceedings. We found that sitting side by side, wherever we were—at home, in the courtroom, in the back of a cab—was the best positioning for us. It provided the illusion of intimacy without ever having to actually look at each other. To face each other, or have any sort of discussion beyond a word or two, was simply too difficult. Too many realities threatened to attack our well-being, our relationship, our sanity—each already dangerously precarious—and derail our ability to get up the next day and do it all over again.

The facts, sensationalized by the media, went like this: our neighbor, Scott Walker, had kidnapped Mikki. Walker, described by everyone who knew him as friendly and nonviolent—as many psychopaths are—was also being accused, by his own similarly-aged daughter, of abuse. My wife, unaware of any of this, had committed adultery with Walker. As for Mikki, she was most likely dead. Her body would be discovered one day: a Jane Doe skeleton in an unmarked grave.

Our lawyers were assiduously attempting to convince a hastily convened jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Scott Walker had done all of these heinous things: kidnap, abuse, adultery, murder. All we could do was sit back and watch. In silence. Side by side.

We were surprised when Anna Martens, Walker’s former girlfriend, was called to the stand as a witness for the defense.

“Good morning,” the lawyer began. “My name is Allen Krenshaw. For the court, would you please state your full name and occupation?”

“Dr. Anna Martens. I’m a surgical resident at Boston Children’s Hospital.”

“Dr. Martens, do you recognize the defendant?”

“Yes. Scott Walker.”

“What is your relationship with Mr. Walker?”

“Now? None. We have no relationship other than as acquaintances. But we did have a relationship in the past. For just under three years.”

“A sexual relationship?”

She raised an eyebrow at the description. “A romantic relationship. And yes, our romantic relationship included a sexual component.”

“Very good. Thank you.” He cleared his throat, then: “During the course of your
romantic
relationship with Mr. Walker, did you have opportunity to become acquainted with his daughter, Delores?”

“Of course. Because of where I worked, where he lived, and the demands of my career, Scott and I never chose to live together. But I spent a great deal of time at his home. As a single father, he was the sole caregiver for Delores, which meant she was often included in our time together. I cared…care…a great deal for her.”

“Last year your relationship with Mr. Walker came to an end?”

“That’s correct. It was a mutually agreed upon, natural end.”

“I see. What age was Delores Walker at that time?”

“She’d just turned twelve.”

“Objection, your Honor,” our side spoke up. “I’ve held my tongue longer than I should have. Mr. Walker’s daughter and her relationship with her father’s former lover is neither relevant nor of interest to these proceedings.”

“Your Honor, I must strongly disagree with Ms. Cope,” Krenshaw shot back. “It was the prosecution who first brought up the allegations, by Delores Walker, of ritual abuse. Allegations which, I must remind the jury, have not been proven in any court of law. Certainly we have the right to explore and present witnesses to refute these claims. Ms. Martens had an intimate relationship with both Scott Walker and his daughter throughout the period in question. As such, she is singularly—”

“Yes, yes, yes, I get your point,” the judge interjected. “Overruled. You may continue, Mr. Krenshaw. But I’m only giving you an inch, so don’t take a mile, or I might change my mind.”

I knew what was at stake here. Jenn claimed that when Delores walked in on the horrific scene of her slashing away at Scott Walker, instead of begging her to stop, she’d pleaded for her to kill him. Later, Delores professed to police that her father repeatedly abused her—not sexually, but by regularly losing his temper, at one point slapping her across the face. According to our lawyers, the jury had the right to know about this and Delores was put on the stand. The jurors were then expertly led to conclude that it wasn’t a big leap from physically hurting your daughter to rationalizing the abduction of someone else’s, so that you could do to another young girl what you wanted, deep down, to do to your own child. The jury needed to believe that Scott Walker was a very sick and twisted individual.

Cool and collected, Krenshaw turned his back on Cope and refocused on Anna. “You stated that Delores was twelve at the time your relationship with her father ended, is that correct?”

“Correct.”

“Did your relationship with the defendant end on good terms?”

Anna’s smile was lopsided as she shot a glance in Walker’s direction. Even from where I sat, I could tell that, although they were no longer a couple, there was little if any malice between them. “I wouldn’t say that,” she responded. “As I said, it was mutual. But that doesn’t mean it was easy. With time we got over it.”

Anna was an excellent witness. She was logical, likeable, relatable. I could see the jury empathizing with her. On the other hand, I could see our team getting antsy. They’d opened the door, and now there was little they could do but sit on their hands and hope they wouldn’t regret it.

“How would you describe Mr. Walker’s parenting skills?”

Anna Martens answered, “I think it’s important to know that Scott was not the kind of guy who ever pictured himself raising a child alone, never mind a soon-to-be teenage girl. The unexpected death of his wife foisted him into that position. They’d just moved to a new city. There were no grandparents or siblings, and few friends in a position to help. Scott had to figure it out by himself. By the time I came around, he’d done it. From what I saw, although he was strict and maybe at times a little inflexible, he was doing a good job. I witnessed him being affectionate with his daughter, protective, and,” she looked at the jury with a small smile, “as probably any parent can relate to, I suspected he was in a constant, low-grade state of terror as to what was coming next.”

More than a couple of the jurors smiled knowingly.

“So you would say Scott Walker was a good parent?”

“Yes.”

“During your three-year experience as part of the Walker family, Dr. Martens, did you witness any instances of abuse similar in nature to what was earlier described to this court by Delores Walker?”

Anna spent a few seconds studying the face of her former boyfriend. Then, in slow, evenly paced words, she said, “I did not. In my opinion, Delores Walker is a typical, rebellious teenager. She’s a daughter upset with a father who isn’t giving her the freedoms she believes she is entitled to. I believe Delores is too young to understand the importance and permanence of what is happening in this courtroom. I believe Delores doesn’t know the danger she has put her father in. I believe Delores will come to regret everything she has said about her father. I believe Delores Walker is lying.”

Anna Martens’ final words caused a mini uproar in the courtroom, particularly from the team of lawyers on the prosecutorial side of the room. While everyone was busy yelling at everyone else, I watched the faces of Anna and Scott. Hers, sympathetic; his, heart-wrenchingly sad, and earnestly grateful.

I could feel Jenn trembling next to me. Both of us could feel the same thing: the tide had begun to turn. The problem all along had been the amount of circumstantial evidence being packaged into a cannonball meant to blast Scott Walker into jail for a very long time. Everything the prosecution had presented before resting their case had been persuasive. But where was the irrefutable proof?

When it was revealed that Mikki
had
been in the Walker house the day she disappeared, that, for me, was the final nail in Scott Walker’s coffin. Until then, we had all believed that Mikki had left school and was walking home alone when she’d been taken. Normally she would have been with Delores, but she’d stayed home sick that day. In court, Delores revealed that Mikki had stopped at the Walker house to bring her homework. Walker, who worked in construction, had stayed home that day to care for his daughter.

The revelation was meant to be damning, but the defense team had done a respectable job of rendering it almost benign. Delores admitted that she never saw Mikki and her father interact during the time Mikki was in the house, and that it was possible he hadn’t even been aware of her presence. The prosecution accepted the admission with little resistance, instead biding their time before delivering the second and more powerful half of what was meant to be a devastating one-two punch.

“He raped a girl.”

Asmae didn’t understand. As far as she knew, I could have been whispering sweet nothings into her ear, sharing a recipe for crumb cake, or telling her my life story. As always, though, she listened intently, as if to pay respect to my words and communicate her hopeless, yet nonetheless sincere, desire to comprehend.

The first few times we lay together atop the pedestal in my rectangle, nothing happened. She’d slip into the spot next to me as if she’d always been there, and together we’d stare at the star-spangled sky without saying a word. It was as if we’d effortlessly shifted from one level of a predetermined recovery program to the next. She wouldn’t stay long—twenty or thirty minutes at most. Only when it would have become mentally intolerable and physically impossible for me to continue down our chaste path would she leave.

Until the night she didn’t.

Instead of moving away, she moved into me. I almost burst into tears at the invitation, my body so desperately yearning for intimacy that it ached. Lying against me as she was, her back to my front, our eyes did not meet, but the message was clear. I buried my face in her neck. Her hair smelled spicy, her smooth skin sweet and warm in the dying hours of a sweltering day. I could tell, by the puffing out of her cheeks, that she was smiling. Jenn might have let out a teasing laugh; Asmae never would.

Her clothes fell away as if they’d been nothing more than a temporary covering for a body meant to be naked. I ran my hands over every inch of the freshly exposed skin—first her arms and thighs, belly and back, and then moving, tentatively, to explore more intimate areas.

Still in our spooning position, I somehow managed to pull off my shirt, and then my pants. When I was undressed, I was surprised when she pushed against me with a fierce resolve, short, quick breaths escaping her scarlet-tinged lips. Unable to stand it any longer, I maneuvered her body until we were face to face, chest to chest, our skin glistening and wet, aglow in the moonlight. A battle of emotions raged in her deep, brown eyes: uncertainty, lust, fear, desire. She murmured something in her strange tongue—to me, forevermore, the language of love.

Only a careless man, an insensitive man, relies solely on the verbal tells of the woman he is with. Even in a debate of which kind of “no” means “no” and which means “yes,” nonverbal cues always provide the most vital information. Asmae and I didn’t need to understand each other’s words to understand each other. As almost any man in my circumstance would be, I was nearly overcome with desire to enter Asmae as quickly as possible. The language of her body, her eyes, her breathing, however, told me to wait, to tease, to make an attempt and then withdraw. The more I did this, the more I fueled her willingness and wantonness. Her body grew slick with sweat, allowing my hands to glide easily across it as I caressed—at first gently, then insistently, and then gently once more.

When she was ready, I knew it.

Every day after that one, she came to me and we made love. Afterwards, we’d talk. Both of us. We’d tell stories the other could never understand. Perhaps that was why they were so easily told. Secrets shared that would never be betrayed.

“He said it happened when both he and the girl were eighteen,” I continued my tale of Scott Walker’s past. “With his girlfriend. He claimed she accused him of rape because he broke up with her—a spurned teenager’s revenge. He was charged, but never convicted.”

I stopped there to let her take a turn. Although I was beginning to recognize the sound of certain words she used regularly, none of them meant anything to me. Still, as she spoke, I listened with patience, and wondered if she was sharing the same kind of confidences and admissions with me as I was with her. I stored the mysterious tales in a hidden pocket deep within my brain, for a day in the future when I might retrieve them, to be translated by a much wiser me.

Ultimately, Scott Walker went free. I got the feeling—undoubtedly the wishful thinking of a grieving father—that the jury really did want to find him guilty. But they’d taken their responsibility seriously. They found themselves unable to convict beyond a reasonable doubt on the evidence provided to them. Soon after, Walker and his daughter left our neighborhood—left Boston—for who knows where, never to be heard from again. Just like Mikki.

The generous, rational side of me hoped, for Delores’ sake, that the man Anna Martens described in the courtroom was the real Scott Walker. That, as Delores grew and matured, she would become sorry for how she had almost destroyed her father’s life with a lie. That Scott continued to be a good father and protect his daughter from harm.

The other side of me—the inconsolable father with a hole so big in his heart that it shouldn’t have been beating—wanted to hunt Scott Walker down, torture him until he admitted what he’d done and where to find our daughter, and then see him rot in jail for the rest of his life.

I don’t make these comments lightly. I am not a violent man—nor a vengeful one. I’ve never had fantasies of ramming my car into the guy who cut me off in traffic, or beating up a former classmate who bullied me in school. I like peace. I respect the rule of law. But then again, I’d never imagined a world where I would be a father who had lost his child. In the blink of an eye. Here today, gone tomorrow. No explanation, aside from a couple of sick ransom notes that really told us nothing. If, by the cruel quirk of some miserable fate, my child
had
to leave my life, even one last torturous goodbye would have been immeasurably better than this hell. Or so I imagined.

“Who are you?” I asked the woman in my arms one night: a woman who’d gone from stranger to caregiver to lover.

Asmae looked at me, her eyes quizzical. She knew I was asking her something. What she didn’t know was that she had made a grave mistake.

By making me strong again, Asmae had awakened in me the desire, the pull, the insatiable need, to return to my old life—ruined as it was. Now that I was able, now that an opportunity had presented itself when for so long I’d believed there to be none, the question I kept asking myself was:
What am I willing to do to regain my freedom?

Was I willing to risk my life? I had no idea what was outside the cement walls of my rectangle. It might be some kind of insurmountable physical barrier, or a line of armed guards ready to mow me down if I so much as stuck a toe outside the door.

If the answer was yes, an even more difficult question arose: was I willing to commit an act of barbarism to have that chance?

It was clear that Asmae was my way out of the rectangle. My
only
way. What was unclear was whether she would help me or hinder me. What if she was disinclined to let me go? What would I do? What
could
I do?

I gazed down at her kind, caring face, watching flickering bursts of starlight dance merrily in her eyes. Languidly, I ran a finger across her cheek, something I knew she drew pleasure from. Then, in an act of pitiful cowardice, I leaned down and kissed her. Did she—this sweet, benevolent, angel—know that the silent language of lovers can easily camouflage brutal betrayal...and an irony so horrible that I could barely admit it in my own mind?

Did she know that, by the act of saving my life, she had risked her own?