“No, ma’am. I’m trying to save her.” He looked at Tina. “Tell your mom what you told me. Tell her what you’ve been hiding for six months.”
Tina’s face crumpled. “Mom, I… I can’t.”
Tina looked at me with terrified eyes. “Mom, Mr. Bradley has been… he’s been touching me. My tennis coach. For six months. He takes pictures. He threatens me. He said if I told anyone, he’d post them online. He said he’d ruin you. Your career. Everything.”
My world tilted. “What?”
“But that’s not the worst part,” Tina continued, sobbing harder. “Ashley Chen wasn’t killed by her father. Mr. Bradley killed her. She was going to tell.
She was six years old and she was going to tell her daddy what Mr. Bradley was doing to her at the tennis academy. So he beat her to death and framed Mr. Chen.”
I couldn’t breathe. “That’s impossible. The evidence—”
Robert spoke up. “The evidence was planted, your honor. James Bradley is a monster who’s been molesting kids at that academy for three years. He’s smart. Careful. He picks vulnerable kids. Single-parent families. Kids whose parents are too busy or too important to believe them.”
“How do you know this?”Continue reading…
