Trent immediately went about seducing them, and from what they told Masters, Trent’s sexual appetite was insatiable. They had sex with him in the walk-in cooler, on the table in the kitchen where the pizza dough was rolled, in the bathrooms, on the counter and on the tables in the front after the restaurant closed, and his car in the parking lot out back. He wanted threesome sex, oral sex, anal sex, sex in bizarre positions-they even let him penetrate them with a catsup bottle a couple of times. And he insisted that the girls use birth control, because he refused to wear a condom.
Masters told me that at least ten girls were involved over a three-year period, although some of the girls refused to cooperate with the police. The big problem with the case, Masters said, was that he was a rookie when he first met the girls, that the district attorneys were all away at their annual conference in Nashville, and that he had made several early mistakes that Trent’s lawyer would undoubtedly bring up at trial.
“I probably should have waited until the DAs got back,” Masters said, “but I wanted to get him off the streets. It made me so mad I threw the freaking book at him. I charged him with forty-two felonies. About half of them were aggravated rape and aggravated kidnapping. I tacked on statutory rape, aggravated sexual battery, sexual battery by an authority figure, you name it. He was looking at about twelve hundred years in prison. But his wife posted his bail and they hired Joe Snodgrass from Knoxville. He made me look like a fool at the preliminary hearing.”
I knew Joe Snodgrass by reputation only. He ran one of the most successful criminal defense firms in the state. He’d been the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and president of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association. He had a good reputation as a trial lawyer, and he’d written books on criminal procedure and pretrial litigation in criminal cases.
“What was the problem?” I said.
“I didn’t read the statutes right. Hell, I’m not a lawyer. All of the aggravated rape charges and all of the aggravated kidnapping charges got thrown out after the preliminary. And Snodgrass made the girls look like trashy little whores.”
“What kind of evidence do you have?”
“Not typical rape evidence,” he said. “We don’t have any sperm or DNA, no bruises on any of the victims, no-”
“Wait just a second,” I said, holding up my hand to stop him. “Do you have any physical evidence at all?”
“Not really,” Masters said, shaking his head. “All we have are statements from some of the girls and a diary. Oh, and I got his payroll records so I could make sure the girls were working on the days when they say they had sex with him.”
“How many girls?”
“I think only four are still willing to cooperate.”
“Does Trent have any priors?”
“None.”
“What about the computer at the restaurant? Did you have a forensics expert check it to see whether he was really going to porn sites?”
“I did, but it came up empty. After we got it back from the lab, I had one of the girls come down to the office and she said it wasn’t the same computer. He must have gotten wind we were coming.”
I sat back and thought for a few minutes. Lee was asking me to prosecute what boiled down to a multiple statutory rape case with no physical evidence and victims who were, at the very least, young girls of questionable character. The two I knew about had both said they’d engaged in consensual sex with their boss for a long period of time. The man accused of committing the crimes was a father, husband, reputable businessman, active in his church and community, and had never been in trouble before. He was also obviously well financed. I had only a few weeks to prepare, and in the meantime, I was supposed to be helping with the most intense murder investigation in the history of the district. What was it Lee had said when I met with him before I took the job? Easy money?
“I’m sorry, Mr. Dillard,” Masters said. “I may have screwed this up beyond repair.”
“Call me Joe,” I said, “and don’t worry about it. It would’ve been better if you’d waited until the DAs got back, and it would’ve been a lot better if you’d had the girls wear a wire, but it was a rookie mistake. No sense beating yourself up about it. What charges are left that we can prove?”
“After the preliminary hearing went so badly, Lee got involved for a week or so,” Masters said. “One of the girls kept a diary, and Lee used it to convince the grand jury to indict Trent on ten counts of sexual abuse by an authority figure. We could have charged him with more than a hundred counts, but Lee didn’t want to spend six months at trial proving all of them. He said if everything went well, Trent would wind up with thirty years.”
“Did you say he used a diary to get the indictment?” I said.
“Yeah. Why?”
“Because we can’t use it at trial.”
“We can’t? Why the hell not?”
“It’s hearsay, and it doesn’t fall under any of the exceptions to the hearsay rule.”
“So what are we going to do? We don’t have shit other than the girls’ statements.”
“I’ll figure something out. In the meantime, I want you to go back and reinterview every single employee who worked there for the three years before he was arrested. If any of them will admit to having sex with him, and if they’ll come testify, we can prove a pattern of conduct. Once you get them lined up, I want to talk to all of them.”
“Done,” Masters said.
“When you did the preliminary hearing, did you get any sense of what the defense is going to be?”
“From the way the lawyer was questioning them, it looked like he was going to make them all out to be liars.”
“So Trent is going to deny having any kind of sexual contact with any of his employees?”
“That’s what he said when I arrested him.”
“Did he give you a statement?”
“Nope. Lawyered up five minutes in. Acted like he didn’t have a care in the world.”
“Go ahead and get started on your interviews as soon as you can,” I said. “Keep in mind that in order to convict him under the authority-figure statute, we have to prove three things. We have to prove there was sexual contact between him and the girls, we have to prove the girls were between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, and we have to prove that he had supervisory power over them by virtue of his occupation. The last two will be easy, but the first one will be the key.”
“You know something?” Masters said. “Even if these girls aren’t as pure as the driven snow, no grown man should be allowed to take advantage of them like that. They’re just kids. They were only fifteen years old when he started having sex with them.”
Masters slid the evidence box across the table towards me.
“All the statements, the payroll records, and the diary are in here,” he said. “You want to take a look?”
“Give the diary back to the girl,” I said. “Have her bring it when she comes in to talk to me. I’ll read it then. I’ll take the rest of it home with me.”