The Yoga Store Murder (16 page)

“I would say he was Caucasian.”

She said Jayna’s attacker was taller, about six feet. “As far as the color of his skin, I have no idea,” Brittany said.

“Do you think he was white, black, Asian from the way that he spoke?”

“The same: Caucasian.”

As Brittany continued to speak to Drewry, the detective started getting an uncomfortable feeling. Something was bothering him about Brittany’s crying. It didn’t feel . . . real. Maybe the effects of the trauma, he told himself.

At the same time, however, Detective Ruvin was also feeling his earlier rush of emotion—the comment to himself:
We will find these assholes—
start to recede. It was Brittany’s detail about the bills that had started it for him. How would that have worked? Brittany just indicated her assailant left during the attack to go through her purse. Couldn’t she have made a break for it?

And the more he thought about how the guy pushed Brittany onto Jayna, the more it didn’t sit right. It was
too
evil. Brittany continued talking to Drewry, saying how her suspect called her a “nigger” as he raped her.

Drewry didn’t want to push with the questions. He moved to wrap up the interview, and asked Brittany if she’d told her family that the assailants knew where she lived.

“No, I haven’t told them. Should I?”

“We can’t tell you, but I think you should, because they have the right to know,” Drewry said.

The three made their way back upstairs to Marissa and her fiancé’s place. Family members gathered around. “I think Brittany has got something to tell you guys,” Drewry said.

“They know where I live,” Brittany told her family. “These guys know where I live. I think they found my bills. They were in my purse. They knew my name and my address.”

Brittany’s father, Earl, spoke up. “I guess the obvious question is what do we do?”

Drewry tried to put them at ease. In 99.99 percent of cases, he said, the suspects don’t return. But he added: “If you see anything suspicious, even if it’s something little or if you think it’s irrelevant, but if it’s suspicious, you need to call the police and express that.”

Drewry sought to assure them that the case would get solved. “We’re working every lead we can. We’re getting all kinds of tips. Our whole shift is working on it nonstop.”

As the detectives prepared to leave, Ruvin thought about the sneakers that his sergeant had found in the store the day before, in particular the pair of size-14 Reeboks that matched the bloody tracks. “Hey Brittany, can I ask you something real quick?” Ruvin asked.

“OK,” Brittany said, walking over to him.

“Do you guys sell shoes?” Ruvin asked.

“No,” Brittany said.

“Were there any shoes in the store?”

“Yeah, there were two pairs, men’s and women’s. The men’s are really big. And we use them for alterations.”

Alterations. The thought hadn’t crossed their minds. Who knew yoga pants had to fit so well? It sent their theory that one of the killers had brought the shoes inside the store out the window. But why would the killer put
those
shoes on? How would he know where they were in the first place? Ruvin’s head was starting to spin when Brittany’s brother Chris approached.

“Can I come down with you guys?” he asked.

“Of course,” Ruvin said.

The three walked down and stood on the sidewalk. “You know, I’m happy that my sister is alive. I’m thankful my sister is alive,” Chris said. He was cordial, then bluntly starting talking about the case. “But I just can’t get over the fact that like, why would they spare her? This girl was killed, and my sister only has a few injuries.”

The three stood in silence. It was certainly something the detectives had considered. But they’d worked off of the theory that only one of the masked men was totally deranged, or they’d been scared away by something before killing Brittany.

“Do you think your sister had something to do with it?” Ruvin asked, realizing after he’d done so that the question was too strong.

“No, no, I don’t think that,” Chris said.

Ruvin tried another angle. “What kind of person is your sister?”

Chris seemed to be both trying to help and worried about what he was saying.

“My sister is a very secretive person,” Chris said.

Then he told the detectives a story. When Brittany was six or seven years old, their dad once ran out of gas while taking her to a soccer game. He told Brittany to stay in the car while he went to a gas station, yet when he returned, she was gone—she had hitchhiked home. He didn’t add much more to the story, nor explain why he was telling it. Chris politely said good-bye and went back inside.

But that word—
secretive
—stuck in Ruvin’s head as he and Drewry walked back to the car. So did the strange information about the shoes, and the utility bills. There was only one good explanation: Brittany knew the killers. She had let them into the store for some reason, a robbery, perhaps, and things had gone terribly wrong. Whatever relationship she had with them caused them to spare her life. And most everything Brittany had done since was an attempt to cover up her involvement.

The two detectives climbed in the car. Drewry started driving to their station in silence, but the quiet didn’t last long, as Ruvin couldn’t ignore how quickly his mind had changed.

“Jimmy, something’s not right,” he said to Drewry. “You know, we have a store in the middle of Bethesda Avenue. It’s still busy. These guys go in there. They got no weapons. They rape and kill one girl. And now they’re like, sticking around? They threw Brittany on Jayna’s body, like to mess with her. You can find probably one guy that’s like this Hannibal Lecter. But to find two guys like that?”

He couldn’t bring himself to say out loud that he suspected Brittany. Instead, he kept repeating what bothered him, that two guys would choose to rob a store in Bethesda on a Friday night, when people are still around. They don’t have weapons, and they stick around—
to shove Brittany onto Jayna’s murdered body?
“They were so cool, calm, and collected that they stayed in the store to mentally torture Brittany?” Ruvin asked Drewry.

Something else didn’t square with Ruvin: Brittany’s assertion that the attackers had called her a nigger. Ruvin had come to the United States in 1995, enrolling in an integrated public high school. At thirty-one, he had plenty of white friends who adopted urban, hip-hop language—the very terms and phrases used in the video game
Grand Theft Auto
. “A twenty-year-old
Grand Theft Auto
guy, he’s not going to use that word,” Ruvin said. “He’s going to call her a fucking bitch.”

On this much, however, Drewry disagreed. He’d grown up in an America where white people used the term all the time to keep black people “in their place.” When he’d gone to visit relatives in southern Ohio, he’d seen the “Whites Only” drinking fountains. That was only one generation ago. And the term lingered on. After he became a cop, in 1979, people he arrested uncorked it, as did other cops. And although the term was fading in its use, the idea that two white guys of any age would call Brittany a nigger, particularly the kind of guys who would rape and kill, was hardly a stretch.

“I can see that happening,” Drewry said.

But the young detective still struggled to believe it. “I think the story is very exaggerated, and two guys are made out to be villains. They’re villains.”

As they drove, Drewry had a nagging feeling about where this case might be going—a place he didn’t want to follow, but one all too familiar for a detective in his shoes. He did not want to believe that this polite young African American girl—a presumed
rape
victim—was lying. In the United States, African Americans represented just 13 percent of the population but committed half the murders, a rate made to seem higher by decades of media portrayals. Every time there was a high-profile, unsolved murder case—and this one certainly qualified—African Americans held their collective breath. Drewry couldn’t help but do so as well, even if in his job he never made the distinction. Murder was murder was murder.

Drewry had barely slept six hours over the previous two days. He didn’t know if Brittany knew the killers or had anything to do with Jayna’s murder, and he wanted to continue giving her the benefit of the doubt. He wanted to believe that the odd parts of her actions and explanations could be some kind of trauma-induced confusion. Hell, the case was only three days old. He didn’t want to doubt the
Cosby
kid.

“Jimmy, something’s not right with this girl,” Ruvin continued.

Drewry’s anger and worry and exhaustion came to the surface. He decided to give himself this much: a suspension of the discussion for the next fifteen minutes, the time they had left before arriving at their station. Drewry held up his right hand. “Don’t go there,” he said. “I don’t want to hear that shit right now.”

The detectives rolled into their headquarters shortly after 9:30 P.M. They walked into the homicide unit and went to their cubicles. Another half-dozen detectives were there. Among them were Sergeant Craig Wittenberger and Detective Randy Kucsan, who’d both had early doubts about Brittany’s story; Detective Mike Carin, who’d talked to the Apple manager and seen her cry; and Detective Deana Mackie, who’d interviewed Brittany at the hospital and found her so believable. Just that afternoon, she’d fielded a question from a detective not involved in the case, who pondered if Brittany could have killed Jayna. “Absolutely not. No,” Mackie had replied.

Without support from Drewry, Ruvin feared he wouldn’t be taken seriously. The young detective sat down and quietly started typing notes into his computer, but the other detectives could sense something was up.

Drewry stood up and walked to Ruvin’s cubicle. Others needed to hear what Ruvin had to say.

“Just tell them. Tell them what you think,” he said.

Ruvin stood up. His head was spinning, not just from what he’d heard at Brittany’s apartment, but where his thoughts had gone since. Again, he hemmed and hawed—asking questions rather than making statements. He wondered aloud why Brittany’s attacker looked through her purse instead of making a quick escape. “Who does that?” Ruvin asked the others. “Who’s so calm, in the middle of Bethesda, ‘Let me go back and get her bills?’” Ruvin finally circled around to what he really wanted to say. It had come to him on the car ride from Brittany’s.

It wasn’t that Brittany was involved and knew the killers. It was that she did it all by herself.

It was the size-14 shoes that had convinced him—specifically, the fact the shoes were kept in the store. Why would one of the men have put them on? And even if he had, why then try to clean them up and put them back? No, it was Brittany who had stepped into those shoes, who’d walked in Jayna’s blood and then around the store to create the illusion of a big male attacker. “The shoe prints never left the store,” Ruvin said. “The killer never left the store.”

Mackie sat only a few feet away. “What do you mean? What are you trying to say?”

“I think Brittany killed Jayna,” he said.

Silence followed the assertion. The detectives looked at each other.

Wittenberger liked Ruvin’s bold accusation, even if it went beyond his own, earlier supposition that Brittany merely
knew
the killers. As the sergeant realized, trying to explain the abnormalities in Brittany’s story by saying she knew the killers hadn’t made them go away. But if
Brittany
was the killer—if she was the kind of person who could inflict hundreds of nonstop blows with whatever tools she could find—that rendered her subsequent actions positively tame: of course she could stage two rapes, of course she could cut herself and lie all night in the dark next to a mutilated corpse, of course she could patiently wait for the cops to come so she could tell an endless stream of lies. She could do all that, Wittenberger thought, if she was truly evil.

And with that, it was open season on Brittany. The detectives threw everything they had at her, some realizing for the first time that they hadn’t reviewed key evidence. Ruvin pulled out the report completed by the nurse who examined Brittany for rape injuries. “Patient vaginal examination revealed no tears or tenderness. Cervix had several white lesions.” That seemed kind of light for a wooden coat hanger. He read the account of what Brittany told the rape-exam nurse. “Patient says that was her last memory until this morning being in the ambulance.” Of course: Brittany’s bottom line excuse for all the holes was memory loss.

Wittenberger wanted to look at the photographs of Brittany’s injuries taken at the hospital. The sergeant called them up on his computer screen, clicking until he came to a photo depicting two long, superficial cuts across the small of Brittany’s back.

“Can she get to her back like that?” Ruvin asked. Wittenberger stood up and demonstrated so with his hand—showing the natural direction the blade would travel, the same angle shown in the picture.

The detectives pored over the photos of Brittany’s face when she came into the hospital. Yes, it was caked in dried blood from the cut to her forehead. But the blood flow was down and straight—covering the nose and lips and chin—indicating she’d been standing when she bled. That matched Brittany’s story of how she’d been struck, but was at odds with the idea that she’d then spent the night on the bathroom floor, on her back. “The blood flow would have shifted. It would have flowed to the sides, too,” Wittenberger said.

He and the others discussed where the wound came from in the first place—maybe a backswing as Brittany was pummeling Jayna with one of the weapons. They talked about the missing cash from the store—about $900. Brittany would have had plenty of time to ditch that to stage a robbery.

Kucsan, the tall detective who’d found the zipties, believed Ruvin’s theory but still struggled to picture it.
This little girl turned into the fucking Tasmanian Devil
, he thought.

Drewry worried they were moving too fast, blowing past the possibility that others might still be involved. No one had any forensic evidence attaching Brittany to the crime, let alone putting a weapon in her hand. Still, when Drewry finally went home that night around midnight, he couldn’t sleep. The more he played it through, the more he could come up with only one explanation for the holes in her story.