Riley and I worked with General Orenson to develop a …” She stumbled, bit her lips. Whatever they had developed, it had probably been highly classified. “Develop something for them.”
He smiled. “The General was something else, wasn’t he?”
She smiled back. “He was. Tough but fair. Also a lightweight when it came to alcohol. We did a really good job and completed it the day before he was retiring. He invited the three of us out to dinner and Riley drank him under the table. It wasn’t hard to do.”
Luke laughed out loud. The General had been a good guy, very strait-laced. The thought of a female nerd drinking him under the table was good gossip. Next time he met with his Ranger teammates he was going to pull that story out. It would get him a couple of beers, at least.
Hope leaned forward on her elbows. “So —” she prodded. “You were a Ranger?”
“Yeah.” Luke nodded. “I liked being a Ranger. But my dad started having a few health issues. And then he had a heart attack.”
She nodded. “And you were close to your father.”
Ah … Christ. She wasn’t even aware of the longing in her voice.
“I was. He recovered but I knew I needed to be around him. So I resigned my commission and applied to join Portland PD. My dad had been a cop all his life. I knew the ropes already and hell, I grew up with half the force. My dad was really good friends with the Commissioner, Bud Morrison.”
She was watching him carefully. “You liked being a cop, too,” she said gently.
He bowed his head. “I did. A lot. I like being useful. After a few years on patrol I passed the exam and got my badge. Assigned to Homicide.”
“Homicide,” she said softly. “I’ll bet you were good at that too.”
He gave a half shrug. “I solved my fair share of cases. Had good backup at Portland PD, which is well run. And then I ran into a case that nearly broke me. A young college student, brutally raped and murdered, her body left under a bush in Washington Park.”
Hope’s mouth fell open. “I remember reading about that case! The Sigma Phi Five! That poor girl! What she suffered! And at the trial, it turned out the policeman —” Her eyes widened with horror. “You! You were the policeman!”
Luke couldn’t stop the spurt of anger. Still. He thought he’d gotten rid of most of it, but nope. “I was.”
“They — they crucified you on the witness stand. I remember that.”
He nodded. “We solved the case, thanks to quick DNA analysis. There were five of them, but we only found the DNA of four of them on the body of the young girl. The fifth was a bystander. He was guilty. He was there and he didn’t stop them. But he didn’t rape her. The other four had really powerful fathers. One a sitting Senator, two tech billionaires and a famous actor. The father of the fifth kid, the one who didn’t actually do anything but was just there, was just a high school teacher. The kid took the fall for all of them.”
“The four got off scot-free,” Hope said. “I remember that. And I remember that they were guilty in everyone’s eyes.”
“Except for the jury, because they hired the best legal muscle in America and they cast doubt in every direction, like some evil sorcerer’s dust. And some fell on me.”
She nodded. “I remember. It was in all the newspapers for a while. I don’t normally pay attention to true crime, but this was unavoidable.”
Luke’s back teeth ground. He should be over this. He was starting a new life, a new job, but it still burned. They’d gone over his military career with a fine-tooth comb and though there wasn’t anything to find, they’d manage to dig up a fellow Ranger from under a rock who’d testified that Luke had disobeyed orders once and had stolen arms from the armory. It wasn’t in any way true, but they made it sound true. Jacko’s father, Dante Jimenez, who was a former DEA investigator, found out that the Ranger suddenly had a hundred grand in his bank account.
The lawyers had dug up nonexistent dirt on the office that analyzed the DNA, on the coroner and on the chain of evidence.
But most particularly they came after him with everything that $700-dollars-an-hour lawyers could throw at him.
Luke had had to hire lawyers of his own and had exhausted his