Authors: Cody McFadyen
“Makes sense to me. So, you want my impressions of the scene?”
This is all she says. She is not brushing me off. She is acknowledging me in her way. Telling me she understands, so let’s get down to business. I am grateful.
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“Please.”
“I got the call yesterday.”
I interrupt. “As in you, personally?”
“Yep. Asked for me by name. Voice was disguised, and told me to check my e-mail. I might have ignored it, but he mentioned you.”
“Disguised how?”
“It was muffled. Like he’d put a cloth over the mouthpiece of his phone.”
“Any notable inflections? Unusual use of slang? Hint of an accent of any kind?”
Jenny looks at me, a bemused smile on her face. “You going to work me like a witness, Smoky?”
“You are a witness. For me, at least. You’re the only person who actually talked to him, and you saw the scene fresh. So, yeah.”
“Fair enough.” I see her thinking about my question for a moment.
“I’d have to say no. In fact, I would say just the opposite. There was an absence of inflection. His voice was very flat.”
“Can you remember what he said, exactly?” I know the answer to this question is yes. Jennifer has an unusual memory. It’s as scary in its own way as my skill with a handgun, and is feared by defense attorneys.
“Yeah. He said: ‘Is this Detective Chang?’ I said it was. ‘You’ve got mail,’ he said, but then he didn’t laugh. That was one of things that got my attention, first. He didn’t push the melodrama of it. Just said it as a flat fact. I asked who this was, and he said, ‘Someone’s dead. Smoky Barrett knows them. You’ve got mail.’ And then he hung up.”
“Nothing else?”
“That was it.”
“Hm. Do we know where the call originated?”
“From a pay phone in LA.”
My ears perk up at this. “Los Angeles?” I think about it. “Maybe that’s why he needed three days. So either he’s a traveler, or he’s actually from LA.”
“Or he’s just messing with us. If he is from LA, then my guess would be that he came up here for Annie.” Her face looks strained and uncomfortable as she says this. I know why.
“Which would mean I was the person whose attention he wanted to get.” I have already accepted this possibility—no, make that probability—
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although I have not confronted it emotionally. The fact that Annie may be dead not only because of what she did but because she was my friend.
“Right. But that’s all conjecture. Anyway, so I go and check my e-mail—”
I interrupt her. “Where did he send the e-mail from?”
She looks at me, hesitant. “He sent it from your friend’s computer, Smoky. It was her e-mail address.”
This sparks a sudden, unexpected wave of anger in me. I know he did this not just to cover his tracks, but to show that what was Annie’s was now his. I push it aside. “Go on.”
“It gave Annie King’s name and address, nothing else, and there were four attachments. Three were photos of your friend. The fourth was the letter to you. At this point, we are taking it seriously. You can fake anything when it comes to photos these days, but it’s like a bomb threat—you evacuate just in case. So my partner and I gathered up some uniforms and went over to the address.” She sips her tea. “The door wasn’t locked, and after some knocking without any answer, we pulled our weapons and entered. Your friend and her daughter were in the bedroom, on the bed. She had her computer set up in there.” She shakes her head, remembering. “It was a bad scene, Smoky. You’ve seen more of that than I have, that kind of methodical, intentional killing, but I don’t think you’d have seen it differently. He cut her open, removed her insides, and bagged them. Slit her throat. But the worst of it was the daughter.”
“Bonnie.”
“Right. She was tied face-to-face with her mother. Nothing fancy. He just put them stomach to stomach, and wrapped rope around them both until she couldn’t move. She was there like that for three days, Smoky. Tied to her own dead mother. You know what happens to a body in three days. The air-conditioning wasn’t on. And the fucker had left a window cracked. There were blowflies.”
I do know. What she’s describing is unimaginable.
“The kid is ten years old, and the smell is already bad, and she’s there with flies all over. She’d turned her head so her cheek was resting on her mom’s face.” Jenny grimaces, and I get a hint of the horror she felt at that moment. I’m thankful, so thankful, I wasn’t there for that. “She was quiet. Didn’t say a word when we got into the room. Not while we
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were untying her. She was just limp, and stared. Unresponsive to questions. She was dehydrated. We got EMS over right away, and I sent her off with an officer. She’s fine physically, and I have a guard posted at the door of her room just in case. I got her a private room, by the way.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that. A lot.”
Jenny waves it off, sips her tea. I’m surprised to see the smallest of trembles as she does this. She is truly, deeply affected by the memory, as tough as she is. “She hasn’t said a word since. Do you think she’ll ever get over it? Could anyone?”
“I don’t know. I’m always surprised at what people can live through. But I don’t know.”
She gives me a speculative look. “I guess so.” She is silent for a moment before continuing. “Once we had her off in the ambulance, I shut the place down. I called CSU in, and I kicked their ass, hard. Maybe a little harder than I needed to, but I was just so . . . pissed. That’s not even a good word for how I felt.”
“I understand.”
“While all that was happening, I called and talked to Alan, and here we are. I don’t have much more than that. We’re at the dead beginning of it, Smoky. Evidence collection only. I haven’t had time to slow down and really look at anything.”
“Let’s step back a little. Let me walk you through it like a witness.”
“Sure.”
“We’ll do it as a CI.”
“Okay.”
By CI I mean “cognitive interview.” Witness recollections and accounts are one of our bugbears. People see too little, or don’t remember what they’ve seen, due to trauma and emotion. They can remember things that didn’t really happen. Cognitive-interview technique has been in use for a long time, and while it has a specific methodology, its application is more of an art form. I’m very good at it. Callie is better. Alan is a master.
The basic concept behind the cognitive interview is that simply walking a witness through from the start of the event to the end, over and over, does not, as a rule, lead to more recollection. Instead, three techniques are used. The first is context. Rather than starting from the beginning of the event, you take them prior to it. What their day was
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like, how it was going, what life worries/happinesses/banalities were running through their head. Get them to recall the normal flow of their life prior to the abnormal event you want them to remember. The theory is that this serves to put the event you want them to recall into context. By grounding them in memories prior to the event, they are more able to move forward through the event and will remember in greater detail. The second technique is to change the sequence of recall. Rather than starting them from the beginning, start them from the end, and go backward. Or begin in the middle. It makes the witness start and stop and reexamine. The last part of a good CI is changing perspective.
“Wow,” you might say, “I wonder what that looked like to the person standing by the door?” This shifts their inspection of the event and can jar more facts loose.
With someone like Jenny, who is a trained investigator with excellent memory, cognitive interviewing can be very, very effective.
“It’s late afternoon,” I say, starting. “You’re in your office, doing . . . ?”
She looks up toward the ceiling, remembering. “I’m talking to Charlie. We’re going over a case we’ve been working on. Sixteen-yearold prostitute, beaten to death and left in an alley in the Tenderloin.”
“Uh-huh. What are you saying about it?”
Her eyes get sad. “It’s what he’s saying. About how no one gives a shit about a dead whore, even if she’s just sixteen years old. He’s mad and sad, and venting. Charlie doesn’t do well with dead kids.”
“How did you feel at the time, listening to that?”
She shrugs, sighs. “About the same. Mad. Sad. Not venting about it the way he was, but understanding. I remember looking down at my desk while he was ranting away, and noticing that the side of one of the photos from her file was sticking out. It was a picture from the scene, where we found her. I could see part of her leg from the knee down. It looked dead. I felt tired.”
“Go on.”
“Charlie wound down. He finished spewing, and then he just sat there for a second. He finally looked over and gave me that silly, lopsided smile of his, and said he was sorry. I told him it was no big deal.”
She shrugs. “He’s listened to my ranting in the past. It’s one of the things partners do.”
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“How did you feel about him, at that moment?”
“Close.” She waves a hand. “Not lovey or sexual, or anything like that. That’s never come up between us. Just close. I knew he’d always be there for me and vice versa. I was happy to have a good partner. I was about to tell him that, when the call came in.”
“From the perp?”
“Yeah. I remember feeling kind of . . . disoriented when the perp started talking.”
“Disoriented how?”
“Well, life was—normal. I was sitting there with Charlie, and someone says ‘you got a phone call’ and I say ‘thanks’ and pick it up—circumstances and motions I’ve experienced and done a thousand times. Normal. Suddenly, it wasn’t. I went from the usual to talking to something evil”—she snaps her fingers—“just like that. It was jarring.” Her eyes are troubled as she says this.
This is the other reason I decided to use CI technique with Jenny. The biggest problem with witness memory is the trauma of the event. Strong feelings cloud recall. People outside law enforcement don’t understand that we experience our own trauma. Strangled children, chopped-up mothers, raped young boys. Talking to murderers on the phone. These experiences are shocking. They are filled with emotion, however well suppressed. They are traumatic.
“I understand. I think we have context here, Jenny.” My voice is smooth and quiet. She’s letting me put her in the “then,” and I want to keep her close to it. “Let’s move forward. Take it from when you are walking up to the door of Annie’s apartment.”
She squints at nothing I can see. “It’s a white door. I remember thinking it was the whitest door I’d ever seen. Something about that made me feel hollow. Cynical.”
“How so?”
She looks at me and her eyes seem ancient. “Because I knew it was a lie. All that white. Total bullshit. I felt it in my gut. Whatever was behind that door wasn’t white, not at all. It was going to be dark and rotten and ugly.”
Something cold twinges inside of me. A kind of vicarious déjà vu. I have felt what she is describing.
“Go on.”
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“We knock, and we call her name. Nothing. It’s quiet.” She frowns.
“You know what else was strange?”
“What?”
“No one peeked out their door to see what was going on. I mean, we were ‘cop knocking.’ Loud and pounding. But no one looked. I don’t think she really knew her neighbors. Or maybe they just weren’t close.”
She sighs.
“Anyway. Charlie looks over at me, and I look back at him, and we both look at the uniforms, and we all unholster our weapons.” She bites her lip. “That bad feeling was really strong. It was an anxiety ball bouncing around in my stomach. I could feel it in the others too. Smell it. Sweat and adrenaline trembles. Shallow breathing.”
“Were you scared?” I ask her.
She doesn’t answer for a moment. “Yeah. I was scared. Of what we were going to find.” She grimaces at me. “Want to know something weird? I’m always scared just before I get to a scene. I’ve been on homicide for over ten years, and I’ve seen everything, but it still scares me, every time.”
“Go on.”
“I tried the doorknob, and it turned, no problem. I looked at everyone again and opened the door, wide. We all had our weapons up and ready.”
I switch perspectives on her. “What do you think the first thing Charlie noticed was?”
“The smell. It had to be. There was the smell, and the dark. All the lights were off, except for the one in her bedroom.” She shivers, and I realize that she’s unaware of it. “You could see the doorway to her bedroom from where we were standing. It was down a hallway almost directly in line with the front door. The apartment was close to being pitch-black, but the bedroom doorway was kind of . . . outlined by light.” She runs a hand through her hair. “It reminded me of that whole
‘monster in the closet’ thing I had sometimes as a kid. Something scratching on the other side of that door, wanting out. Something awful.”
“Tell me about the smell.”
She grimaces. “Perfume and blood. That’s what it smelled like. The smell of perfume was stronger, but you could smell the blood under-
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neath it. Thick and coppery. Subtle, but kind of . . . aggravating. Disturbing. Like something you could see out of the corner of your eye.”
I file this away. “What then?”
“We did the usual. Called out to the occupants, cleared the living room and the kitchen. We used flashlights, because I didn’t want anyone touching anything.”
“That’s good.” I nod, encouraging.
“After that, we did what made sense—we went toward the bedroom door.” She stops and looks at me. “I told Charlie to put on gloves before we even entered, Smoky.”
She is telling me she knew, felt, that murder was on the other side of that door. That she was going to be dealing with evidence, not survivors. “I remember looking at the doorknob. Not wanting to turn it. I didn’t want to look inside. To let it out.”