A Dish Best Served Cold

This is a bit different from my previous attempts at stories. It doesn't have any romance.

I write these for my own amusement and share them because this site makes sharing possible. I've been quite surprised at the compliments, positive feedback, and constructive criticism I've received from readers of previous stories. Thanks to all of you for that. For those of you who find some of the details beyond the realm of reasonable, I can only say that the stories are fiction. I'm trying to move the story along, which may require some suspension of belief. I occasionally skimp on details, although I'm working on that, thanks to some of your criticisms. And I'm fairly new at this. I'll try to do better with practice.

As always, the following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of a character in this story to a person living or dead is purely coincidental. All persons participating in sexual activities in the story are over the age of 18. There is, as nearly as I can tell, no Tau Kappa Delta fraternity. If there is such a fraternity, the only thing it shares with the organization described in this story is its name.

A DISH BEST SERVED COLD

PROLOGUE

I hate it when my cell phone rings at two in the morning. It's never a good thing. It's especially not a good thing when you've taken the following two days as vacation time solely to work on the most important current project regarding your marriage - getting your brilliant, beautiful, redheaded wife of four years pregnant because this is her most fertile time of the month and she and you both want a baby. When you've been trying for several months without success, largely because either your job or hers interferes with scheduling the necessary activity to achieve your goal at the most opportune time, having failed to turn off your phone before commencing the latest rounds of vigorous sexual congress will not improve your marital tranquility.

I was too slow in silencing the ringing phone, which meant that my lovely wife, Maddie, was awakened by its ringing. "Don't you dare answer that damn phone. You took the next two days off for one purpose only and it isn't to talk to anyone but me. And you should only be talking while you're recovering before we begin again. If I have to, I'll toss that thing out the window."

Knowing that I really enjoyed making love to my wife and wanted to continue to do so in the future, I silenced the phone and returned it to the nightstand. Two minutes later, I heard a loud pounding on our front door. "Who the hell is that at this time of night?" Maddie asked.

"I'll check." Picking my service pistol out of the nightstand drawer, I slid into my robe and slippers, then walked down the stairs, pulled the front window's curtain aside and looked out to see an unmarked city police cruiser parked in my driveway. Walking over to the door, I peered out through the peephole to see my partner, Jack Hahn, standing on the porch. I opened the door.

"What the hell, Jack? I'm off duty and on vacation. What's so important that it can't wait until I get back on Thursday?"

"We found another one."

I didn't have to ask what he meant. For the last year and a half, he and I had been chasing a ghost. And our ghost had just produced another victim.

"Come on in. I'll tell Maddie and get dressed. Just give me five minutes. And if you hear her shoot me, just remember she'll claim it was justifiable homicide and that you're responsible for my death."

With that, I went upstairs, informed my lovely wife that playtime was over, got dressed and climbed into the cruiser to go see the latest crime scene.

CHAPTER ONE

My name is Rick Coleman. I've been a city cop since passing the academy training course at age 21 after serving three years as an Army MP. I spent five years as a patrolman, then took and passed the exam for detective. For the last four years, I've been assigned to the sex crimes unit. My wife, whom I met while testifying in a robbery case, is an assistant district attorney, a county-wide position in our state. The city is home to State U, the largest state university in the state system, with more than 35,000 undergraduate and graduate students and thousands of faculty members and administrative and support staff. When school is in session, the city's population goes up by nearly 50%.

Like many large universities, State U has its own police force. And like many college towns, there is a certain level of animosity between town and gown, including between the city's police department and State U's. Because the State U police answer to a very liberal college administration, law enforcement sometimes takes a back seat to protecting the university's image and reputation, even when fairly serious crimes are involved. Cooperation between the two forces is frequently less than complete, particularly after the recent George Floyd riots and the rise of Antifa, both of which found far more support on campus than among the city's residents unaffiliated with the university or the members of the city's police force. The case Jack and I were working on was a classic example of how that lack of cooperation can hinder an investigation.

For the last year and a half, there had been a series of sexual assaults. We'd been assigned as the city's lead detectives on the investigations. The assaults were quite different from those we usually encountered. All the victims were male students at the U. Each had been found naked in a public place, bound into a fetal position with zip ties. In each case, the victim's mouth was stuffed with a ball gag and a dildo had been inserted in the victim's rectum. Each victim had been kicked or beaten in the genitals, resulting in considerable swelling and bruising. Two had lost a testicle because of the beatings. Next to each victim, an envelope was found containing a single page with a typed message: "Rape isn't nearly as much fun when you're the victim, is it? Tell your daddy how it feels. If you and he confess, it won't happen to you again." Within twenty-four hours after each victim was discovered, photos of the victim, including the text of the note, had been posted on the victim's social media accounts, in emails to everyone whose account was listed on the victim's cell phone, and the front page of the university's web site, although it was quickly taken down from the last site. The postings appeared to originate from servers in the Balkans, making tracking the poster next to impossible, despite both the university's and our IT people spending hours trying to track the computer from which the photos were posted.

Jack and I had started our investigation in a hole. The first two victims had been discovered on State U's campus, making the university's police the lead investigators. They had done a less than sterling job. Their initial approach had been to treat this as a prank or a fraternity initiation gotten out of hand. They had done all that was possible to hush the matter up to avoid embarrassing the U's administration and had done little to treat the first case as a crime. The second case got more attention, but not the kind of forensic study that the city's investigators generally provided. It wasn't until the third victim was discovered on a city recreational field that we were handed the investigation. And only after contacting the university to attempt to track the victim's movements did we discover this appeared to be the acts of a serial offender, not a one-off event. The victim who dragged me out of my wife's arms and shortened my vacation was number five.

The case was further complicated by the text of the notes. Each suggested that our victims might be criminal offenders as well as having been victims themselves. In addition, the notes suggested their fathers might also be offenders. None of the victims nor their fathers had criminal records, except for a few moving violations. Nor did any of them appear to be the subject of a criminal investigation of any type. None of women who had reported recent sexual assaults in the city had described their assailants in a manner that matched any of our victims. The U's police department denied that any of the victims were under suspicion for any kind of sexual assault, a denial we later would have reason to question.

The victims shared two common features. Each was a legacy admission to State U, a second or, in one case, third generation student. And each was also a second-generation member of the Tau Delta Kappa fraternity, the oldest and most prestigious fraternity at the U. Jack and I had begun exploring whether these commonalities might have something to do with the motive beyond the assaults but had made little progress in that line of inquiry. However, with the fifth victim sharing these two features, we would have to focus more attention on that line of questioning.

TDK had been founded at State U after World War I ended. It was housed in a fully restored former Gilded Age mansion having over 30,000 square feet of space and situated on a two-acre lot on the edge of the campus property. The mansion had been donated to the U at some point before World War I but allowed to deteriorate. According to its website, the fraternity's founders had been responsible for the restoration, which they had performed in return for a 999-year lease of the property from the U, renewable for an additional 999 years at the fraternity's option. TDK alumni played an out-sized role in our state's power structure. They included several former governors, a sitting U.S. senator, six current or former congressmen, numerous state legislators, several federal and state court judges, and senior executives in many of the state's leading businesses, legal and accounting firms. TDK alumni also were among the U's largest contributors. Several sat on its board of trustees. In short, TDK had the ability to bring considerable heat down on anyone who might create a problem for the fraternity. It had demonstrated willingness to do so on several occasions in the past. Its members had also demonstrated a willingness to apply political pressure on the city's leaders when such pressure might be required. Jack and I had already been informed that our bosses were feeling the heat from that pressure as the perpetrator these assaults remained unidentified.

The fifth victim, a 19-year-old sophomore named Walter Meany, had been found in a park not far from the U campus. He had been transported to the hospital, where he was sedated. Jack and I viewed the scene where he had been found. There was nothing immediately apparent, but our forensics team still had hours of work to do before they could determine what, if any, evidence might be found at the scene. Given the enormous number of people who used the park, we were not optimistic.

We did notice that there were no security cameras in or around the area where Meany had been deposited. This was consistent with the four prior scenes at which the victims had been found. The perpetrator (or perpetrators) was (were) either extraordinarily lucky or had a high level of familiarity with the campus' and city's security and traffic camera systems. Reviews of the traffic cameras in the areas of the four previous scenes had failed to reveal a common vehicle in or near the scenes. It truly was as if a ghost were committing these crimes, or at least delivering the victims to the locations where they were later found.

Since there was nothing more we could do at this point, Jack and I decided to head back to our respective homes for a shower, clean clothes, and breakfast. We'd start fresh at 10:00 A.M., by which time the forensics team was expected to have finished its collection process and, we hoped, young Mr. Meany would be ready for questioning.

CHAPTER TWO

Jack and I met at the station. We spent some time reviewing our investigation to date and formulating a new plan of attack before interviewing Meany. After an hour of reexamining our notes and rereading the forensics reports, we'd had no epiphanies. I said to Jack, "We are missing something here. This doesn't fit the pattern of any serial sexual predator I've ever seen or heard about. I keep thinking that the attacks are a form of revenge for something that happened years ago, back when the victims' fathers were students. Have we done a deep dive into our old files to see if there might be anything in the fathers' backgrounds that might have triggered these attacks?"

"We ran a criminal records check, but none of them had any arrests or convictions. Most of them didn't even have a parking ticket."

"But something's not right here," I replied. "We've been treating these five guys as victims. What if they're perpetrators as well? Perhaps of an assault that was never reported. Or one that our friends over on the U's police force buried because of the boys' connections. And we haven't gone through old U police records to see if there's something that ties all these people together. Or something that ties the fraternity to some crime that didn't get to the arrest or conviction stage. What if the fathers were the original 'rapists' and the sons are being punished for the crimes of the fathers? Is that beyond the realm of possibility, however unlikely it sounds? When were those fathers at the U? Were they all here at the same time? They were all TDK members, so if something happened when they all were here, it could be the cord that ties all this together."

Jack asked the obvious question. "So, how are we going to do that? We can find out when the fathers were on campus and when they lived at the frat house, but how are we going to get access to the U's police records? It's not as if we can just waltz in and tell their chief that we want to see if they buried a rape decades ago that might have been committed by some of the U's biggest current donors. And if word gets out that we're investigating long buried dirt on the fraternity, we're going to catch flak from so many different directions we'll think we're the targets in a shooting gallery. You and I could end up directing traffic on the midnight to eight shift in the middle of nowhere, assuming we don't just get fired. All that being said, do you have an idea how to get started?"

"Let me think about that for a bit. I have a connection, but I'll have to talk to him to see if he's willing to get us access on the QT. In the meantime, after forensics gives us whatever they've found, we should go talk to Meany. Let's treat him as a victim for this interview. Then, depending on what we learn from him, we can go back and re-interview each of the four prior victims. This time, we'll explore whether they might be hiding something that could have given someone a motive. After that, we should interview the fathers to see what they have to say. But first, off to forensics, then the hospital for a chat with Meany."

As expected, forensics had no more success with its investigation of the site at which Meany was found than they'd had at either of the two previous sites they'd investigated. As the U's forensics team had met similar results, we still had no physical evidence to tie anyone to the assaults. With that information in hand, Jack and I went off to see young Mr. Meany.

Meany was still in the hospital, although his doctor informed us that he would probably be released later that day. As with all the other victims, Meany claimed to have no recollection of the assault nor of his being dumped in the park. His drug and alcohol tests had both come back negative, but he'd been missing for almost a day before being discovered. It was possible that whatever drug the assailant had used to control Meany had been fully metabolized by the time the hospital ran the blood tests. Or maybe he had just sobered up. The doctors were of no help in answering that question.

Jack and I dug in, trying to track Meany's movements. The last thing Meany remembered was leaving an evening class and heading back toward the TDK house. No, he wasn't aware of anyone who might hold a grudge. No, he had no knowledge of any kind of sexual assault at TDK while he was a member nor of any prior to his becoming a member. He went on to state that TDK was the most careful fraternity on campus, especially because of the standing of the fraternity members' families. There was 24-hour security. Women were not allowed above the main floor common areas without registering with security and being accompanied by a member. Parties were strictly supervised. Professional bartenders were hired for parties and required to card attendees before dispensing alcohol. (Jack and I both had a hard time controlling our laughter at this particular statement.) Women who appeared intoxicated or under the influence of drugs were not permitted upstairs and the fraternity's security would call an Uber or Lyft to transport them home. (This also seemed doubtful, given the hookup culture on the campus.)

Jack and I had heard all of this from the previous four victims. The litany describing what good boys TDK members were was delivered in virtually the same words and in the same order as by each of the four prior victims. I was tempted to ask whether memorizing this spiel was part of the pledge process but refrained for the moment.

Meany then added two things none of the other victims had included in their response to our questions. "You can check the security cameras at the house if you don't believe me about how we handle things. They cover the first-floor areas and the hallways on the other floors." Jack and I looked at each other. This was the first inkling we had that TDK had a security system that recorded the comings and goings of fraternity members and guests inside the frat house. We would have to get copies of the security footage to see if there was anyone of interest who appeared on those recordings. Then Meany went on to say, "And when we hire professionals for parties, the party committee always vets the entertainer."

Jack asked, "When you say professionals, do you mean strippers or hookers?"

"Strippers. Or at least that's what we're told. I've heard rumors that some of the frat brothers may enjoy additional services after the party is over."

"But not you?"

Meany looked away. Jack continued, "Look, we don't care if you got your knob polished by a pro. We're trying to find out why you and your frat brothers are being assaulted. Were there times when things got out of control? Times that might have caused the stripper, or her boyfriend, or her pimp to want to get even with the TDKs or at least some of them?"

"Well, I don't know of any firsthand. But what goes on in the party room stays in the party room."

"Party room?"

"It's kind of swingers' clubhouse for frat brothers and occasionally for alumni who are TDK. It's located in the basement of the frat house. A lot of the more exotic stuff happens down there. You know, group sex, BDSM, kink, those kinds of things."

"Are there cameras in the party room?", Jack asked.

"I don't know. We have a pretty sophisticated security system in other places, so there might be."

Jack looked at me. Then he led me outside and whispered, "It would make sense to have those sessions recorded to preclude claims that a participant was forced or intoxicated."

I whispered back, "Maybe. But it also might create a record I wouldn't want available years later. Can you imagine the potential for blackmail?

"Hmmm. True."

Returning to Meany's room, I asked, "Who keeps the security camera recordings?"

"I don't know. I guess the security company could tell you. I'm sure not going to ask anyone at the frat. I don't want them knowing I told you anything about the party room or the cameras in the building."

"Who provides your security?"

"ABC Security Services. Or at least that's what it says on the little sign out front of the frat house."