But Gail was already shaking her head. “Reggie McNeil’ll drag out the appeals process for years if he can. Plus, nothing says Owen will turn against Walter in any case. If Owen did kill Brenda for Walter’s sake, there’s no way he’ll squeal on him once he’s already convicted. What would he gain by it? He’d be labeled a stool pigeon in jail and probably get himself killed. But if we approach Reggie and offer a deal for Owen in order to get Freund, that’ll turn Reggie into an ally. It’ll be a two-for-one slam dunk.”
Derby began to respond, but Gail cut him off. “And I don’t think the case against Owen is that strong, anyhow. When we went into this, we were looking at life without parole. Now that his state of mind has been called into doubt—”
“For which we have you to thank,” Derby interrupted in turn, some of his earlier emotion returning. “My God, you’re sounding like his defense attorney, Gail. Have you forgotten what this man did? Do you have to look at those photographs again?” He grabbed another document from off his desk and waved it at her. “And this motion from McNeil to suppress the confession. You want to hand him exculpatory evidence going to intent on top of this?”
I noticed a vein throbbing in his forehead as his face reddened with barely suppressed anger. “I think you are right, by the way, that we probably won’t get life without parole anymore. Is that justice on behalf of the people? That we go gently with a stone-cold killer because he had a rough childhood, or we bend over backwards to help his defense because some bully told him to kill, and he went ahead and did it? I don’t think so.”
Gail’s expression was as tense and closed down as I’d ever seen it, but her voice, when she spoke, was level. “I’ll resign if you want me to.”
His eyes widened. “Resign? What the hell—” He stopped abruptly and studied her for a moment. “You’d quit over this?”
“Only because I think we’re ignoring the big fish so we can make a meal out of a minnow. We
could
have both.”
He scratched his forehead, peered at me, and asked, “She like this all the time?”
“Yes,” she answered for me.
I mentally tipped my hat to him and reconsidered my earlier harsh opinion. Instead of throwing us out, as he easily could have, he settled back in his chair and asked, “Okay—from the top. You have nothing solid linking Walter Freund to Brenda Croteau. So why couldn’t Owen have visited Brenda, thinking—for whatever reason—that she’d played a role in Lisa’s death, then gotten into an argument with her, grabbed a nearby knife on impulse, and killed her with it?”
“I think that’s what
did
happen,” Gail said. “What’s bothering me is that it doesn’t explain why all the lights were on in the house, why pages were torn from her journal, why the wounds were so numerous and savage, and why there’s no connection to Brenda living beyond her means. Also, when Owen was picked up and his possessions examined, why was there a single drop of blood on one shoe and a small smear on the cuff of his jacket, when Brenda’s injuries caused blood to spurt everywhere? And, last but not least, why was there a denim knee-print in Brenda’s blood when Judith Giroux claims her nephew never wore jeans and that the slightly bloodstained pants she now admits destroying were khakis?”
Derby was looking confused. “What’re you saying? He did it but he didn’t?”
“I have to believe he did,” she admitted. “The physical evidence is strong, he confessed to it, he knew where the murder weapon had been thrown. I would just like to know the answer to those other questions. Because I’ll guarantee you one thing,” she added. “If I’m thinking along these lines, with as little mileage as I have, Reggie NcNeil’s cooking up a storm.”
Derby stared at me sourly. “No one can say
you
don’t have mileage in this area. Did any of these questions occur to you? Are new ones occurring to you as we speak? I mean, much as I hate to give Gail any credit here, I need to know if you’re totally satisfied with this case.”
“I’d like to find the answers to some of her questions.”
He rolled his eyes. “Like the degree of frenzy reflected in the wounds? We know he acted out violently in the past. Hell—we know he killed this woman, for Christ’s sake.”
Gail wouldn’t concede an inch. “I got to know the difference when I worked with women’s counseling groups. Putting aside the possibility that Owen was trained to attack like some kind of vicious pet, the kind of acting out he’d done before was spontaneous, short-lived, and asexual—it fit a pattern. In the parlance, he’s ‘psychodynamically predisposed’ that way. That’s what Freund took advantage of, probably without knowing it. We found out that, as a kid, Owen would run out into traffic, or jump from heights and bust himself up, and as he aged he developed the sort of violent behavior we first used to explain his attack on Brenda. But I now think we misread the signs there. The difference is that Brenda was stabbed seventeen times—way beyond some spontaneous acting out—and that the wounds have a sexual connotation to them. All those slashes to the breasts. Owen used a weapon of opportunity, which is perfectly plausible for his type, except that the psychosexual pathology I see in Brenda’s wounds points to a man who came prepared to attack. A man with a past of sexual abuse of some sort, which Owen doesn’t have.”
Derby didn’t respond, but both his silence and his expression were enough.
Gail added, “Of course, I’m not qualified. This is strictly speculative, but I bet we’ll be hearing it again at trial from McNeil’s experts.”
He looked over our heads out the window for a moment, seemingly lost in thought, pondering no doubt things both practical and political. “Well, that’s great,” he finally said in a tired voice. “Between the two of you, it doesn’t look like I have much choice. What’s happened so far is bound to leak out. So, I better get the jump on Reggie, distract him with these exculpatories, and get our own psychological analysis done on Owen. After which”—and he pointedly addressed Gail—“I’ll issue a statement emphasizing our search for justice on behalf of
all
the people.” He shifted his gaze to me. “I want a plan of attack from you ASAP on how we’re following up what was said here today.”
In the stilted silence that followed, we both understood it was time to leave.
“One more thing,” Derby said, just as we were about to cross the threshold. “Part of my agreeing to this is because I know how the shit would hit the fan if I didn’t. That doesn’t make me very happy. I don’t want anything like this to happen again—ever.”
He wasn’t fishing for a response. I closed the door gently behind us.
The conference room was packed and the conversation at an unusually high pitch, given that the sun hadn’t even broken the horizon.
“You see this?” Willy asked, waving a copy of the
Reformer
at me as I entered.
“Haven’t had a chance yet.”
“The Senate passed the Reynolds Bill. Biggest crock I ever saw. They want to call us the VBI, like we were a bunch of G-men.”
“Who says you’d be one of them?” Sammie asked.
“Are you kidding?”
“They pass it as a cabinet-level agency?” I asked, moving through the crowd to the head of the table. I was impressed that Reynolds had met his deadline. Town Meeting Day—the first Tuesday in March—was next week.
“Yeah,” Ron answered. “They’d have a Secretary of Criminal Justice, which’ll probably go to Commissioner Stanton. The VSP, Fish and Game, the Alcohol guys, and everybody else will all be included, except the sheriffs and constables. They’ve been left out.”
“And how,” Willy added. “No one’ll admit it, but it sounds like the sheriffs are being reduced to a taxi service for cons.”
J.P. was sitting back in his chair, his own paper neatly folded before him on the table. “Even if the House passed it, it would never work,” he said quietly.
“Why not?” I asked, realizing I’d never once heard him speak on the topic, despite its popularity around the building.
“Simple economics,” he said. “The bill states that all officers will be brought up to the highest pay levels now currently available, which would be the state police. That was obviously just to buy off their union. But right now, the state police budget is around twenty-five million dollars a year, almost the same as all the other municipal agencies in the state combined. The state cops number three hundred, more or less. The municipals come to twice that many. You do the math. And that doesn’t include the costs of bringing all those people and all that equipment under one umbrella. They can talk saving money till they’re blue in the face, like Reynolds did in the Senate, but this thing’s one huge white elephant, whether you like the principle behind it or not.”
Willy finally threw his paper onto the windowsill behind him. “Well, I think the principle sucks. There’s no God-damn way this thing’s going to fly, and if it does, there’s no God-damn way I’ll be part of it.”
Sammie laughed. “Maybe the library’ll take you back.”
I rapped my knuckles on the tabletop to quiet them down. In addition to the entire detective squad, there were several uniformed officers attending, along with Gail and Tony Brandt.
“Okay, folks, this is going to be short and sweet. Turns out we might have gotten a little ahead of ourselves handing the Tharp case over to the SA’s office—understandable given the weight of the evidence. They’d like us to extend the investigation a bit more, based on a few inconsistencies they don’t want used against them in court later.”
Since most of the evidence against Tharp had been gathered under his supervision, J.P. was the first to react. “What inconsistencies?”
I tried putting him at ease immediately. “Nothing involving what we collected so far. If anything, we’ll be needing more of it. There is no doubt whatsoever that Owen Tharp used a knife on Brenda Croteau. Where questions have cropped up is in answering how and why.”
“What do we care about why?” Sammie asked.
“Because it runs to intent,” Gail answered. “Owen may have been misled about Brenda’s role in his girlfriend’s death. He was told Lisa Wooten died because Brenda spiked her dope with poison. We’ve recently found out Brenda didn’t sell her any dope, and that what Lisa used wasn’t poisoned to begin with. She died of a straight overdose, albeit a big one. Also, we need to dig deeper into what happened at Brenda’s that night. We all know a jury is detail-dependent. Those TV shows they watch make them eager for fingerprints and hair follicles and DNA, and—although it shouldn’t be our concern—motive. If, as we’re beginning to suspect, Owen might’ve been programmed to kill Brenda—which we can count on McNeil emphasizing in court—the jury might let him off unless we can come up with an alternate explanation.”
“Programmed by who?” Ron asked.
“Right now,” I answered him, “we’re looking at Walter Freund. We also think he was responsible for Lisa Wooten’s overdose.”
There was a ripple of conversation around the table. One of the uniformed officers, Ward Washburn, asked, “Does this mean the SA is going after Freund instead of Tharp?”
“No,” Gail said emphatically. “Absolutely not. Tharp is still on the hot seat. If it turns out he
was
manipulated by Freund or someone else, the charges against him might be amended, but only because we’d be dealing with two perps instead of just one. Please keep in mind that the quote-unquote
guided missile theory
is only that for the moment—no more.”
More generalized chatter followed, which I interrupted. “Owen’s on his way to the head shrinker right now, which may end up telling us a little more about what really happened that night. Our job is to pretend we never handed the case over to the SA in the first place—that the investigation is ongoing. Let’s forget about the confession, which might be thrown out anyway—”
“What do you mean?” Sammie jumped in.
“McNeil’s saying he was too cold, too freaked, and that I scared the shit out of him,” Willy answered.
“Also,” I said loudly, trying to keep things on track, “we need to reanalyze the hard evidence—see what else we can find.” I looked at J.P. “That means going over the blood samples, the knife wounds, whatever prints you collected—the whole ball of wax.”
“There was some tissue under one of her nails. We assumed it belonged to Tharp. Should I get that DNA’d? I hadn’t bothered because of the expense.”
“Yes. Go back over everything with a fine-toothed comb. Now remember, everyone, this means we’re back to running two separate investigations—Tharp and Resnick. Both have equal priority. We’ve made good inroads on the Resnick case. Billy Conyer’s little group of friends is feeling the pressure. We need to keep that up. Our advantage is that we no longer have to worry about stepping on the SA’s toes over Tharp. On the other hand, given the way some of the people we’re dealing with are popping up in both investigations, I have to stress two major points: coordination and documentation. I don’t want a single one of you to move a muscle without clearing it through Sammie or me, and I don’t want anyone to have a conversation, make an observation, or overhear a comment out there that isn’t immediately logged with Ron. We have got to know at all times what everyone’s doing. Is that absolutely clear?”
Everyone nodded. Willy, just as predictably, smiled enigmatically.
“I know,” I continued, “that Walter Freund’s name is familiar to most of you. He’s someone we’d all like to see put away for good. That’s another thing we have to watch out for. Our handing Owen Tharp over to the SA prematurely’s going to cost us with the press and some of the politicians. The race for the primaries will begin after Town Meeting Day. And even though things won’t get hot till May, after the Legislature calls it quits for the year candidates are going to be chasing every issue they can, especially our old pal James Dunn. So, one last request: Keep your mouths shut. Any reporter, any civilian you don’t know, asks you any question at all, tell them ‘no comment,’ and let me know who they are. You all know what happened to Cary Bancroft. Let’s not give him any company on the unemployment line.”
The rest of the meeting was devoted to dividing the workload and apportioning responsibilities and schedules. I let Sammie and Ron run most of it, given their dual leadership roles, except for wrapping things up with a few words of generic encouragement.