“I’m sorry, Alex. Kenny Trimble. My dad called him Trouble. Kenny Trouble. It suited him just fine.”
Mike was texting the name to Peterson. The more info we could pull up, the faster we could move.
“What happened between them?”
“They’d been dating on and off since they were kids. I think Kenny was the first guy Chat got involved with.”
I needed to fast-forward from the high-school romance, but Faith had things she wanted to say.
“He was always way too controlling, even then. Jealous and possessive. I remember a time Chat got a ride home from another boy and Kenny was jumping all over her. Still, when she ran away from home, odds were you could find her with Kenny. Off to Oklahoma for two weeks with him, my mother scared to death that we’d never see her again. Texas the next time. Like that over and over again.”
“Tell me about recently, Faith. Tell me what Kenny did.”
Kenny Trouble had fathered kids with two other women. He’d been in and out of jail for stealing and for assaulting the mothers of his boys. The pattern was as familiar to me as Mike Chapman’s blazer and jeans.
“Chat started dating a man—a really nice man named Jonas—while Ken was in jail. He was put away for almost two years, so she had a good chance for some stability. We were all so proud of her because we thought she’d broken the cycle. Never visited him once in the penitentiary, wouldn’t accept mail from him. First time ever that she got an order of protection for herself. Turns out it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.”
If I had a dollar for each time I’d heard that expression, I could find a cure for every disease on earth.
“The day Kenny was released from prison—the very same day—he came back to town. Spent the night at his favorite bar,’cause neither of the women he’d been roughing up wanted him back. Someone told him about Chat.”
“Told him what?”
“That she was happy, I guess. That she was in a healthy relationship for the first time in her life. Had a job,” Faith said, and couldn’t help but smile. “She was even going to church.”
“And then?”
“Kenny drove straight from the bar to the little house where Chat’s boyfriend lived. At daybreak, when Jonas left for work, Kenny let himself in. It’s the kind of town where nobody locks doors, if you folks can relate to that. Chat got out of the shower and he was waiting for her right there in the bedroom.”
“They struggled?”
“No,” Faith said with a frown. “There was no struggle.”
I had violated my own strict rules, suggesting an answer rather than waiting for my witness’s words. But I was anxious to get on with the search for Chat.
“She thought she could reason with Kenny. She was in somebody else’s home, and she was mortified that she had brought Trouble—with a capital T—into it.”
“I understand.”
“So Chat calmly started to put her clothes on, trying to talk Kenny down as she did, telling him how well his kids were doing, how he could get himself a fresh start. But I think he knew better than believing he could get anybody in that town to stand behind him. That’s when the fighting began.”
“What did Kenny do to her?”
“He had taken a butcher knife from the kitchen on his way into the house. After letting Chat exhaust herself trying to make him go away, he picked up the knife from the bureau and held it against her neck. That’s when he made her undress.”
Faith stopped and took a sip of water from the glass on her desk.
“She refused at first, but then he pressed the knife against her. Not hard enough to leave any marks. There wasn’t a bruise anywhere on her body, which is one of the reasons the cops didn’t like her story at first. It’s one of the reasons they arrested her.”
“It’s good she wasn’t physically injured.”
“I’m not sure the jury agreed with that.”
“Jurors never do, Faith. Makes their job easier to see black-and-blue marks, to count the number of stitches and feel the scars.”
“The first time he raped her, he only put the knife down on his pillow long enough to lower his pants. He held it against her neck the whole time he—he, uh—penetrated. Then he stopped for a while. Used a necktie to bind Chat to the headboard. Kenny got up from the bed, found her cell phone,