The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,75

was too wide. The killing was not confined to the city limits. Was Charlie hiding a car somewhere?

A thought brought me to a screeching halt. Charlie was educated. An engineer or something scientific, so the rumors went. Charlie once had a highly functioning brain. He’d had a career, a family. Then the accident that had changed his life forever. And after that? Had there been a suit filed against the company whose truck very nearly killed him? Could that be Charlie’s connection to the justice system? Did he get a bad deal, hate those who had done well within that system? Could Charlie Ramsey, the guy who steals pansies just to see me smile, really be a killer?

I closed my eyes. My throat ached. I remembered Neil saying, “I did some checking around and, well, there’s some stuff you need to look at. I’m sending it now.”

I pulled out my laptop and began to open the links and attachments Neil had emailed. The first one reached out and grabbed me by the neck.

Star Player Charged with Rape. Community Shocked. Charlie Ramsey, Winston Upstate University star running back, was accused of sexually assaulting a fellow student Friday night at the Ramsey estate near Ithaca. Warrants were issued to search the property after a WUU cheerleader reported to local police that she had been given drugs and was incapable of having consensual sex. Two other players were named in the complaint.

The article, archived from the local newspaper, was more than twenty years old. I went to the next.

Ivy League running back guilty of assault. Rape charges expected to follow.

And the next one.

Star player leaves Orange Crush for biomedical engineering program with 4.0 grade point average.

This article had a photograph. It was not the Charlie I knew, but there was little doubt this was the young Charlie Ramsey, powerful and handsome, smiling, holding his orange helmet against his uniformed chest. There were other articles too, ones that detailed his troubled and sometimes violent career in college football, which included three rape charges—two settled out of court, one withdrawn—and two assault charges—one that stuck and earned him eighteen hours of community service for putting his fist through someone’s car window at a stoplight. Neil had included copies of court documents outlining a settlement between the university and a seventeen-year-old woman who claimed Charlie raped her when she refused sex with him at a university event. There was another settlement between the Ramsey family and another young woman a year later. Then a long gap in reporting on Charlie. Five years of no headline-grabbing at all elapsed after the Ramsey family settled the last lawsuit with a check from the family trust for $300,000. The next story reported Charlie’s parents had been killed in the crash of a private plane in upstate New York. Charlie was the sole heir to a considerable estate. He had told Neil he wanted to use my computer to email his folks. Another lie.

Local Football Star Blames Athletics for Derailment.

This article came eight years later and talked about his troubled past with drugs and alcohol, trouble with the law, his recovery, losing his parents and finally turning his life around. He’d flown through WUU’s master’s program and moved on to a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering. At the time the story was published, he was preparing to move himself, his wife, and two young children to Atlanta, where he’d been offered a job in biomedical product design. His specialty was tissue design, artificial skin. But the headlines were about his claim that the athletic programs there encouraged a culture of no responsibility, of drugs and violence, and that lawyers were on retainer to do nothing but get the players out of trouble for everything from breaking and entering to assault and rape. He was quoted as saying, “It doesn’t matter if you leave the university drug-addicted or mentally and physically broken by steroids. It doesn’t matter if you leave without an education or unable to function normally in society. All that matters is that you play well. It took me years to find myself and to find some calm.”

One tiny blurb surfaced a couple of years later. It was a human interest piece in the Living section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about an old friend from WUU searching for Charlie after hearing he’d been disabled in an accident and had come upon hard times. The article was two years old now, mentioned briefly Charlie’s college football career, but focused on his