“I’m going to keep bagging him for a few seconds before I put him back.”
We stood and watched as Annette did that and then, rather expertly, in my estimation, switched Owen from manual ventilation to the automatic respirator.
Only after that, and a final check of his vitals, did she say, “And we’re good.” Annette was a pro, but even she sat on the bed and took a deep breath herself. Mallory stumbled into the bathroom, and I followed. I watched her take a pill container out of the medicine cabinet there and try to open the child-resistant cap. “God damn it,” she said.
I took it from her shaking hands. With mild detachment I noticed my own hands lacked their usual strength, seemed sluggish, as if my fingers didn’t belong to me, but I managed to wrestle open the container and took out a pill. “Water,” I said, reaching for a glass.
“Oh, give me that.” She took the container and bolted a couple tablets into her mouth, swallowed them dry.
“Shit,” Mallory murmured, almost to herself. She sat down on the toilet and put her head in her hands. “Shut the door.”
I did. I knelt before her and put my hands on her shoulders. “My dear friend. You could let him go. No one would blame you.”
“They wouldn’t have to. The night this happened? We’d been drinking at a fund-raiser in Phoenix. Two-hour drive home and Owen was asleep, okay, maybe passed out, while I drove. The car stalled on the train tracks. I jumped out when I saw the light in the distance. Ran around and unbuckled Owen. Pulled on him. He fell out of the car. I tried to wake him up. At the last minute I stepped away,” she said, and then openmouthed horror waved over her face. “But not that way. Not that way.” Staring at the door as if she could see through it to her husband, she said, “Do you ever pray?”
Whoa. It was my understanding that even in emergencies Episcopalians put prayer and oral sex in the same category: You might do it but you sure don’t talk about it. “Why?”
“Just a question I never asked you.”
“I’m not even sure I believe in God.”
She looked at me a moment as if she was seeing me differently, and I didn’t think it was with judgment. She said, “I pray. Oh my God, Brigid, sometimes I’m not sure how long I can take this and I pray that he’ll die. But then I know I should be the one.” Mallory pressed her hand against her throat as if afraid of what else might come out of her if she wasn’t more careful. “I’ve never said any of this to anyone before. I should lay off the wine at lunch.”
Her cell phone went off and she took it out of her pocket. I never thought to ask her why she had chosen “Some Enchanted Evening” for the melody, what meaning it had for her. This was not the time.
“Excuse me,” she said, and wandered out of the bathroom into the living room, leaving me temporarily with Annette, who had come in. I saw that I was still holding the pill container and read the label. Valium, ten milligrams.
I asked, “How is he doing?”
“He’s asleep,” Annette said, eyeing the pill container as I put it back in the medicine cabinet. She probably could have used one herself about now, but bad idea, working, I guess.
“What happened?”
“Sometimes when they’re like this they panic and start fighting the ventilator that does their breathing for them. We call it bucking the vent.”
“What caused it?”
“He’s on a Q4 regimen. That means I clean his trache every four hours, through the night, too. He can get anxious when I’m doing it, but you never know when it’s a ventilator malfunction. That’s why we were bagging him by hand, sorry, giving him oxygen manually. He should be in a hospital with full emergency care. I think she keeps him here to punish herself.”
I thought how my business had been similar to Annette’s, except that when I talked about bagging someone I meant something else. “What about you? It seems like you’re here all the time.”
“Oh, I get time off. Mallory can watch him for short periods and there’s another nurse who comes. I tell you, Brigid, I never let them know I’m thinking that way, but if I was like that I’d want to check out.” She nodded in the direction Mallory had taken. “But not them. They both have this incredibly upbeat attitude. You’re probably thinking how can I tell, but I just can. You get to know a person by their eyes. Maybe you get to know them even better when they’re like this.”
I nodded.
Mallory came back, and we stopped talking about her. She had pulled herself together again, and the Mallory I glimpsed gulping Valium in the bathroom was safely under wraps. “You’ve got an appointment with Neilsen tomorrow at ten. Will that do?”
“That’s fast,” I said.
“I’m sure he wouldn’t do it for anyone but me,” Mallory said. “Bit of a pill pusher, but they all are. Brilliant diagnostician. I told the nurse what symptoms I noticed at lunch.”
But she wasn’t thinking about me. She had turned to Owen, placed her hand on his heart, then on hers. She turned to Annette, and they discussed having a respiratory therapy specialist and a med tech come in to check the ventilator for malfunction, leakage, flow setting, trigger sensitivity, and other things I can’t remember. Once again I was impressed by how knowledgeable Mallory had become. That completed, she turned her focus back to me and said to Annette, “Darling, do you know where that lavender wrap is?”
Annette thought she did, and left the room.
Mallory watched her go. “Annette is so efficient.” Knowing Mallory as I did, the word didn’t sound altogether like praise, more like there was a dash of doubt thrown into the mix. I wondered what else Mallory would share with me about Annette when she was ready. I wondered what else I didn’t know.
“She seems to think you’re wonderful.”
Annette walked in with a boneless white rabbit. “There, I heated it up in the microwave.” She draped the rabbit around my shoulders. It was comforting and warm and smelled of lavender. It made me aware of the knots in my muscles as they relaxed. If only it could stop me from seeing things.
Despite feeling like hell, and jarred by what I had witnessed at the Hollinger house, something I would probably have seen before now if I lived there, I continued downtown to keep my appointment with Detective Sam Humphries.
He had his own small office in the Tucson Police Department. I sat down in the chair next to his desk when he went off to bring me some coffee, and checked out his room. It was neat, without any personal items or clutter, like he hadn’t been in it long. A thick manila file folder with a tab that had
NEILSEN
typed on it was on the desk. When he returned, with the coffee and a little chewy bar he said someone had brought in (nice touch), I found he matched the office.
Sam Humphries: Just out of a cop’s uniform and looked like he still felt odd moving about in the dress khakis he now wore as a detective. Sitting with his knees apart so he wouldn’t wrinkle the pants. The kind of kid you want to say “Hello, son” to even if you’ve never had one of your own.
I kept my voice soft with only a dash of suck-up so he wouldn’t think I was being sarcastic. The gentle grandmother persona. “Thanks for taking the time to see me, Detective Humphries. I used to be in law enforcement myself, so I know what it’s like on both sides. I’d so appreciate anything you’ll tell me.”
He paused, first savoring the sound of the word “detective,” before he said, “Call me Sam.”
“Brigid,” I said.
So far so good. I was fairly open about my conversation with Jacquie Neilsen. “I met her socially and we got to talking. She’s having trouble acquiring any closure on her son’s death.”
“She called me a few times. I felt bad, but there wasn’t anything more I could tell her. We had the same conversation every time, and then I stopped returning her calls. It’s a job for a psychologist, you know?”
I gave a deep nod.
You and I are sympatico, my friend.
“Not that you’ve been anything but professional. Jacquie has just been so addled about what happened that night, and any information she’s had she’s not satisfied with. Not your fault or anything. I’m just sort of reviewing everything so maybe I can put it in words she’ll accept, you know, woman to woman…” I let my words dwindle out in a vague way.
He was unpretentious about the case having been his first as a death scene investigator. Joked about having to take a laminated checklist with him that he kept in his pocket. “It was pretty straightforward,” he said. “All in here.”
I took the folder he handed me and tried to keep it from fluttering in my hands. There were photos taken of the patio area, and all the rooms upstairs and down, but no body. Sometimes you already know the answers, but you ask the questions anyway. Sometimes you’re surprised with a different answer the fourth time you ask. “You didn’t see the body at the scene?”
Sam shook his head. “They probably should have left it there, but it was taken in the ambulance.” He shuffled through the photographs and came up with one. “Here’s the body at the morgue. The medical examiner took it. I was just called in after that.”
“The same night?”
“Yes.”
“Did you go through the house?”
“Sure, here’s all the photographs. That was some entertainment center they have. Bigger than my whole house,” he said. “And did you see the fireplace?”
“Pretty impressive.” I looked impressed.
“I talked to my boss and found out the trouble with drowning incidents is that it’s hard to reconstruct what happened. I mean, you have water and no matter how hard the victim struggles, when it’s over it’s still just water, you know? And no mangled machinery or skid marks like in a traffic fatality. I even looked for blood trails like the manual said to, and didn’t find anything. Hell, with the low humidity even the flagstones on the side of the pool where the father tried to resuscitate him were pretty dry by the time I got there.”
“The father, Dr. Timothy Neilsen, he said you grilled him good.” I added a nod for affirmation.
He took it as a compliment. “Since he was the would-be rescuer I went over the whole thing with him several times, like, you know, ‘show me.’ We walked in the door together, and he tried to re-create all his moves, into the kitchen, turning on the patio lights because it was all dark except for what he had turned on in advance with his smartphone.”
I find that if I jump in with questions that are off track, to prevent an interviewee from delivering a canned message, sometimes I can get interesting information. So I asked, “No paraphernalia, no ligatures indicating some sort of autoeroticism…”
“Nothing like that. But if someone does want to do it, all they have to do is hold their breath underwater, right?”
The kid was learning fast. “Right,” I said.
Humphries studied the photo of the pool area upside down. “Who knows, maybe he was trying it for the first time and that seemed the best spot.”
I turned the photos until I got to a morgue shot. Joe’s jeans were unzipped but not pulled down from his hips, and his briefs were in place. What had happened between the time he pulled down the zipper and the time he drowned, that kept him from doing anything more? It seemed odd to me. “Did you ask whether anyone changed the scene? I mean, you know, not to cover anything up, just embarrassed, or wanting to preserve dignity. Say, pulling his pants back up.”
Sam looked pleased with the questions so far and his ability to answer them, as if I were administering a test. “The manual … I mean, yes, I did ask, and his father said no.”
“Stepfather,” I corrected.
“That’s right.” I tried to note in his voice if there was any doubt, any defense, but he seemed very relaxed. I, on the other hand, noticed my knees were bouncing a bit and put my hands on them to steady them without making an excuse for it.
I got back to the story. “I heard from the parents, but I’d really like to know the professional view of what happened that night.”
Humphries had to take a minute to review the report, apologizing that he’d forgotten much of it, it being so straightforward and all. Such a polite young man. He partly told me what he remembered and partly read it from the report he had typed up following the investigation. “The father, stepfather, being a physician he knew what to do. He tried CPR. Then he called nine-one-one but confirmed the boy was already deceased when he arrived home around eight thirty in the evening.”
“What’s the time of the nine-one-one?”
Humphries checked his crib sheet again. “Looks like eight fifty.”
“It took him twenty minutes from discovery of the body to placing the nine-one-one.” I raised an eyebrow.
“I know, I went over all that, too. He accounted for every minute. He showed me how he walked into the pool—”
“He didn’t jump? Like
Oh my God I have to get to the body
?”
“No telling what people are thinking at a time like that, but no, he showed me how he went to the steps, walked into the water. He said he took his sandals off then because they were slowing him down. He pulled the body, it was unresisting at that point, back to the shallow end, dragged it up the steps … he knocked the head on the edge of the steps and caused some bruising, but that was the only spot. Did CPR, but the lips were already turning black and a foam column was coming out of the mouth.”
“Sounds like Dr. Neilsen knows his drowning.”
“Sounds like.”
“So we got maybe ten minutes max so far. What about the other ten?”
“He said he went into the pool with his cell phone, panicked. When he tried to call nine-one-one it wasn’t working.”
“Did you check it?”
“Yep. They don’t have a landline. He went to a computer they keep on the kitchen counter and he texted the friend who had dropped him off at the house. That was the person who called nine-one-one. Emergency services were there in about seven minutes.”
“So time of death was…”
Sam checked his notes again. “Body temperature at the morgue guesses time of death around seven, seven thirty
P.M.
”
“Given the water temp.”
“That’s right, that was taken into account.”
“So even with the father delaying the nine-one-one call, the kid had been dead at least an hour.”