there was no evidence that thedriver had been aware of what had happened. The judge looked skeptical, but was forced to agree on the law. Not guilty. Jaywalker gathered up his papers, snapped his briefcase closed and strode out of the courtroom. The victory was a small one, but satisfying. If only they could all be so easy, he thought.
He reached Sandusky at 5:30 p.m. Dick Arledge had run the retest on Darren. Like Sandusky, heâd come up with an indefinite. But they wanted one final try, and had asked Darren to come back on Monday, at which time they would run him through it once more, together. Jaywalker said okay.
He hung up the phone, and settled back into his chair and his depression. The flush from the earlier acquittal was long gone. The weekend, with time to spend with his wife and daughter, took on a bittersweet quality.
Two strikes.
One to go.
Â
Strike three came on Monday.
Dick Arledge called at noon to report that he and Sandusky had tested Darren once more, with the same result: indefinite. âItâs unusual,â he added, âbut it happens.â
âDid you tell Darren?â Jaywalker asked.
âNo,â said Arledge. âI figured Iâd let you do that.â
Like a doctor afraid to tell his patient heâs got cancer and is going to die. Let the nurse do it, or maybe the receptionist.
âStrictly off the record,â said Jaywalker. âIf you had to make a guess, would you say heâs lying or telling the truth?â
âOn the basis of the tests?â
âYes.â
âI couldnât even take a guess,â Arledge confessed. âFor some reason, we simply couldnât get a pattern on him. The truth controls look the same as the lie controls. We start getting what looks like a meaningful set of responses, and then, wham! No response where thereâs got to be one. Or a response to his own name. No, on the basis of the tests, I canât tell you it so much as leans an inch one-way or the other.â
âAnd on the basis of anything else?â
âOn the basis of anything elseâ¦â Arledge repeated Jaywalkerâs words and paused for a moment. âI like the kid. Gene and I both like him. He sure as hell doesnât seem like a rapist.â
Jaywalker said he agreed. He accepted Dick Arledgeâs apology, thanked him for his efforts, and hung up the phone. The strikeout was complete.
So they liked Darren. Great. Jaywalker liked Darren, too. Maybe that was half the problem right there. Nobody could imagine this good-looking, quiet, sensitive, stuttering kid as a vicious rapist with a knife in his hand. But what did rapists look like, anyway? Would you recognize one if you passed him on the street? Sat next to him on the Number 6 train? Did he have a perpetual leer in his eye? Did he drool? Walk around with a giant hard-on?
Or did he look like Darren Kingston? Average height, normal weight, medium complexion. Soft-spoken, well-liked, absolutely ordinary on the outside. Yet deep inside was a whole different person that emerged like some werewolf in the full moon. Only in Darrenâs case, the full moon was times of stress and sexual frustration. His wifepregnant, his child crying, he himself home alone in the midday un-air-conditioned heat of August in the Bronx.
And what kind of person would get no meaningful responses to a lie detector test? A psychopath, that was who, someone for whom the line between fantasy and reality was blurred to the point of being unrecognizable. Someone who didnât know what was true and what was false. Someone who could look you straight in the eye and tell you that in his entire life heâd never hurt a soul, other than perhaps his wifeâs feelings, because in his mind he honestly believed that to be so.
Or better yet, suppose Darren was some kind of dual personality, a real-life Jekyll and Hyde. There was the normal, likeable Darrenâgood husband, loving father and
Sharon Kleve, Jennifer Conner, Danica Winters, Casey Dawes