04.Die.My.Love.2007 (36 page)

Two days after Piper’s arrest, Stone had his initial meeting with the client. He and Janus formed a similar opinion.

“When you meet Piper Rountree, you think, this woman’s not capable of murder,” says Janus.

In Houston on Tuesday, Tina Rountree remained in jail, waiting to make bond. Meanwhile, Kelley heard that Mac had been on the news, talking about the Rountree case. Unhappy, 264 / Kathryn Casey

Kelley called Mac. “You wouldn’t talk to us, but you were on the news?” he said.

“I wasn’t on the damn news,” Mac said.

Later, Kelley found out it was actually Marty McVey who’d given the interview, but Kelley didn’t back down, cautioning Mac that he could have exposure on the case, that unless he cooperated they might consider charging him as an accessory.

That afternoon, Kelley and McDaniel sat down with Mac and his attorney, Matt Hennessy, a tall slender man with a mop of thick dark hair and a hawklike gaze, at his law office. Throughout the interview, Mac appeared nervous, as if not eager to help but not willing to lie to cover anything up.

The two officers prodded him, asking questions about his relationship with Tina and what he knew about Piper and the events of the preceding weeks.

“Piper said it would be fun to go to a gun range,” Mac told them. Mac had a concealed weapons permit, and he’d mentioned to Piper while they were working in Galveston on the Tuesday before the murder that he’d wanted to go to the fi ring range. She said she’d like to go with him. After work, she’d dropped him off at Tina’s house, where he picked up his handgun. Then he drove and met her, as they’d planned, at the 59 Gun Range, off I-59 north, between Houston and Kingwood. Inside, they’d signed in, rented a .22 and purchased a box of .22 shells for Piper, along with a box of ammo for Mac’s .40 caliber semiautomatic.

On the gun range, Mac helped Piper practice lining up her shots by using the gun’s sights, and they stood side by side, aiming and shooting at targets. Then, after Piper had shot half of the box of .22 shells, she suddenly left. When she returned, she had a different gun: a snub-nose .38. When Kelley asked where the gun had come from, Mac said he didn’t know, but he’d assumed she’d gone inside, returned the .22, and rented the .38. She also had a box of fifty .38 shells.

DIE, MY LOVE / 265

From that point on Piper fired the .38, working her way through two-thirds of the ammo. When she’d fi nished, Mac tried out the .38 and used up the rest.

The following day, Wednesday—the day before Piper flew to Richmond—Mac explained that he was at Tina’s house when Piper walked in complaining about being sore from shooting the guns the day before. Then, without explaining why she wanted it, she asked Mac for a bill with Tina’s address on it. He told her to take any she wanted; he had a pile of them on the table.

“She took the cable television bill,” he said.

That bit of information fit into what Kelley and McDaniel already knew from the investigators in Richmond: Piper had presented Tina’s Time Warner cable television bill as proof of address when she rented the Ford van at Eagle.

Although he’d been working with her earlier in the week of the murder, training as a landman, Mac didn’t see Piper either Thursday or Friday of that week. She’d told him she was attending a law conference in Fort Worth.

That weekend, Mac visited his parents in the Hill Country. When he returned to Tina’s on Sunday, she told him about the killing. It was when he went to McVey’s offi ce to pick up Tina, while Kelley and the other offi cers waited for her at the house, that Mac saw Piper for the fi rst time after the murder. He took that moment to offer his condolences over Fred’s death.

“I love you,” Piper whispered in his ear. Then she said,

“Please don’t tell the police about the firing range. It would complicate things.”

Throughout the interview, Kelley asked questions and Mac supplied answers.

Sometime during that week before the murder, Tina told Mac that she needed her passport to use it for identifi cation.

Her driver’s license and credit card were missing, and she said she thought Piper had taken off with them.

266 / Kathryn Casey

“Why?” Mac had asked her.

“I don’t know,” Tina replied.

As Kelley and McDaniel listened, Mac recounted the time, a year earlier, when Tina had a .38 caliber pistol she kept in her house. When he got ready to break off the relationship, he gave the gun to Piper and asked her to get it out of the house. He didn’t want the gun there, he said, because he didn’t know how angry Tina might become.

“Was it the same gun as the one at the gun range?” Kelley asked.

“No,” Mac said.

There was something else Mac thought they should know: Early in the week after the murder, Tina had called him from the Houstonian, wanting him to bring her computer to her. He had refused.

“I was uncomfortable with that,” he said. “I told her she could do anything she wanted, but I was not getting involved.”

Later the computer was gone from the house, and he believed Carol Freed had taken it to Tina.

“I told Cari to be careful. She told me, ‘I’m all lawyered up,’ ” Mac said. Then, assessing his situation, he added: “I was there while things were going on, but I made a point of not asking.”

Carol Freed hadn’t told Kelley and McDaniel that she’d removed Tina’s computer.

After the offi cers finished interviewing Mac, Kelley called Freed and inquired about the computer incident. Sounding nervous, she explained that Tina had called her earlier that week and asked her to take her personal computer out of her house. “There’s nothing on it you need to worry about,” Tina insisted, saying the hard drive held only personal matters, including her fi nancial files, but that she feared the police might come with a search warrant and seize it.

DIE, MY LOVE / 267

As before, Freed did as her friend requested. That day at Tina’s, the housekeeper helped Cari unplug the computer and load it into her car. Mac was there, she said, but refused to help, and told her, “Just don’t tell me what you’re doing.”

That night, Freed kept Tina’s computer in her car, but it gnawed at her, making her feel as if she were “getting in deeper and deeper.” She also mentioned that when Tina came to pick it up the next day, she was angry at Piper, who she described as drinking heavily. To Kelley, Freed remarked that she thought it odd that Tina was furious with Piper and yet risking everything to protect her.

Later that afternoon, Kelley and McDaniel checked on another of Mac’s accounts from the week of the murder, at the 59 Gun Range, a grim stone building off Interstate 59. On the lot next door, adjacent to the parking lot, dilapidated double-wide mobile homes sat as if abandoned, windows broken and the vinyl siding scarred by graffiti. On the gun range door was a warning sign: enter at your own risk.

Inside, it was cramped and cluttered. McDaniel and Kelley stood at the dirty glass-topped counter, where customers bought ammunition and rented blue plastic ear protectors and goggles, then walked through double doors into the range itself, where they shot in stalls the length of bowling alleys. The floors were covered with spent brass cartridges, and the paper targets hung from a rope line with clothespins were headless silhouettes of a human torso with a bull’s-eye drawn on the chest.

“Nice place to go to get ready to commit a murder,” Kelley whispered to McDaniel.

One clerk came over to help them, and soon a few had gathered, listening as they showed their badges and explained why they were there. When Kelley showed Piper’s photo, none of them said they remembered her, but one clerk looked through the rec ords and found the form Mac had fi lled out 268 / Kathryn Casey

when he checked in at 7:07 that evening. Only his Texas driver’s license was copied onto the form, but it was signed by both Mac and a woman, a woman who’d initialed the blanks
PR
and signed what appeared to be “Piper Rountree.”

One thing struck Kelley on the form: While it showed the rented .22 and the three boxes of ammo they’d purchased, he couldn’t see where anyone had noted that Piper had rented a .38.

“That’s because we didn’t rent her a .38,” the clerk said.

“It was her gun?” Kelley asked.

“I guess so,” the clerk said. “All I can tell you is that she didn’t rent it from us.”

It would turn out to be a good day for the investigators. First, they’d uncovered evidence that Piper had a .38 caliber weapon, like the one used in the murder, not only when she checked in at the airport but days earlier, when she’d practiced at the 59

Gun Range. Then, Kelley talked with Kevin O’Keefe, and Piper’s Volcano alibi sizzled out.

Earlier that day, Cheryl and O’Keefe had again compared notes. O’Keefe was by then certain he’d seen Piper on Saturday night, but that didn’t jibe with Cheryl’s schedule. She hadn’t worked that Saturday night. But then something occurred to Cheryl that settled the matter. Finally, it had all begun to make sense.

“Oh, I know what happened,” she said, explaining that although she hadn’t worked that Saturday night she had been in the Volcano that eve ning. She’d gone there to meet friends to go to a Halloween party.

“We must have both seen her Saturday night,” O’Keefe said, and she agreed.

When O’Keefe talked with Kelley, he explained what they’d discovered. “It wasn’t Friday, it was Saturday night,”

he said. “It had to be Saturday night.”

DIE, MY LOVE / 269

By then O’Keefe had remembered something else that made him even more certain: the patrons in the bar the night Piper came in were wearing Halloween costumes. In fact, he’d worked that Saturday and come in directly afterward, still wearing his overalls. Some of the other patrons had teased him, saying it was an odd Halloween costume. That meant it had to be the night before Halloween.

Kelley thanked O’Keefe then hung up.

Afterward, Kelley thought about what he’d just heard and how cold- blooded it was: Fourteen hours after her ex-husband’s murder, Piper Rountree had calmly walked into the Volcano to set up an alibi.

With Piper in custody and the evidence against her piling up, Kelley’s work in Houston was coming to an end. He and Jamison had shipped the evidence they’d collected—

including rec ords from the 59 Gun Range, the items they’d taken from Piper’s house with the search warrant, and the surveillance tapes from the

Houstonian—to Richmond.

Jamison wasn’t scheduled to leave until Thursday, but that Wednesday, eleven days after he’d flown in, Coby Kelley flew out of Houston Hobby to Richmond. However, that didn’t mean Breck McDaniel was off the case.

That day, while Kelley was in transit, McDaniel went to an Academy sporting goods store near Kingwood, on the hunch that he might be able to find out if Piper had purchased a gun. He came away empty-handed. Although the store filed the required federal forms, he was shocked to discover that they weren’t able to search the database by name, only the gun’s serial number. Without that, they had no way to access the federal rec ords.

Undaunted, McDaniel decided to play a second hunch and returned to Hobby Airport. Once there, he tracked down the office in charge of the airport parking garages. His hope 270 / Kathryn Casey

was that the facility had surveillance cameras near the entrances and exits. If it existed, he wanted a video of Piper entering or leaving the garage. Instead, he discovered that each day an attendant walked the garage with a computer-ized handheld wand, recording license plate numbers. The airport kept rec ords, documenting what days the cars were in the garage, to determine what to charge customers who’d lost their parking tickets.

“Will you look for this car for me?” he asked, handing them a description of Piper’s black Jeep Liberty with the license plate X54-JBJ. They agreed, and he left.

Later that same day, the parking manager at Hobby called.

He’d found a record of that license plate number. Piper’s Jeep, he said, had been parked at Hobby from Thursday through Saturday, the same days the Southwest Airlines tickets showed she was in Richmond.

In Houston on Tuesday, Tina was released from the Harris County Jail. Her friend, Glenda King, would later say that Tina emerged sobbing, saying over and over, as if in shock,

“I didn’t do anything, I didn’t do anything.”

Meanwhile, in Richmond, Owen Ashman had begun compiling the evidence to turn copies over to Murray Janus, all the bits and pieces they were pulling together. Discovery laws required that the defense be informed of the evidence against the accused, and Kizer and Ashman had no qualms about showing Janus just how difficult a case this was going to be. When the first folder arrived in Janus’s office, it was thick with bank and cell phone rec ords, along with witness statements. Still, the prosecutors didn’t have everything spelled out, and, even before Janus was able to decipher all the cell phone rec

ords, he learned from the
Richmond
Times- Dispatch
that Piper’s phone had been used in Richmond the weekend of the murder, and that witnesses would testify it was her voice on the telephone.

DIE, MY LOVE / 271

“This wasn’t going to be good for our side,” Janus says with a grimace.

Tina, too, it would later appear, was beginning to understand how dire the situation was. Telephone calls in and out of the Henrico County Jail were recorded, and when Ashman listened to the two sisters talking the week after the arrests, she had the impression Tina was beginning to piece together the evidence against her. Without naming her, Tina indicated she believed Carol Freed had turned against her.

“That’s great,” Piper said, apparently missing the point.

“No, that’s not great,” Tina countered.

In the Henrico court house, Coby Kelley combed through the three large file boxes of Jablin-Rountree divorce rec ords. What he found was that Fred had been meticulous, showing up at every hearing, filing every paper, supplying evidence that included Piper’s own e-mails for the court to show that she’d been unreliable with the children. Piper, on the other hand, although an attorney, had missed deadlines and not shown up for hearings. Throughout the rec ords, it was easy to see how acrimonious the divorce had been. If there were any doubt, the forty-two-page psychological assessment of Fred by Tina clearly showed the hate the two sisters had for Piper’s ex.