A Mother's Trial (22 page)

“Oh, by the way, thanks for the releases of your work records. They’ve just been delivered to me.”

“Anything you want, we’ll gladly give. We have been deeply involved in this community for nine years—not only our jobs but community activity, churches, schools, and everything else, and we have a flawless record, and suddenly our lives are filled with flaws,” Priscilla said.

“Okay, listen, I don’t mean to cut you off, but I’ve got to go. We’ll be talking again. I know I haven’t been able to satisfy you. I’m in the middle and I’m looking at it all, and I’ve tried to reassure you that I intend to come up with an inescapable conclusion. I feel that I personally have a moral and legal obligation—if I cannot determine the entire answer to this—to at least determine that Mr. and Mrs. Phillips are not responsible so they can go back to being the parents of Mindy,” Lindquist said.

“That’s all we ask. That’s the only thing that matters at this point,” Priscilla said in a high voice. Good-byes were exchanged and they hung up. Priscilla checked her watch, her head aching. They had been on the phone an hour and a half. They would be late for their appointment with the attorney.

At his desk at the San Rafael Police Department, Ted Lindquist turned off his tape recorder.

3

Mary Vetter’s office at Catholic Social Service was spacious, Steve noted. She headed the place and in her way was a damned impressive lady, sharp as a whip, really, he thought. But she played things by the book, and she was not going to leave them alone with Mindy, even if she did sit off to the side writing reports, her head turned away from them.

Priscilla had collected some of Mindy’s favorite toys, and when Mercedes Murphy brought her into the room, she squealed at the sight of them—seeming to recognize them and her family immediately. Priscilla swept her up and hugged her—they all hugged her. Steve blinked hard.

Mindy was doing well, Mercedes assured them. If anything her foster mother was probably spoiling her to death. Mindy had been gone a week now, and for Steve it was one of the longest weeks he could remember.

He dreaded the mornings, dreaded what they threatened to bring. Things just kept looking worse. Priscilla was increasingly anxious, and nobody was sleeping or talking to each other, but for the sake of the boys and their friends, they were all trying to pretend it was going to be all right.

Steve knelt on the floor and rolled the bright plastic ball they had brought to Mindy. She waved at it, her little face creased in two with her smile. Jason grabbed at the ball and sent it back to his sister.

“Not so fast, honey,” Priscilla told him. “She can’t catch it—”

“It’s all right. Relax, Pris,” he said. She gave him an irritated look. It didn’t take much to set her off these days, Steve thought briefly, with the tension so thick around their house you couldn’t see your way clear to the kitchen sometimes. If this damned thing didn’t break someway or other pretty soon, they all might crack.

People kept assuring them it was going to be just fine—that after the police finished their investigation they’d see how ridiculous it was to suspect Priscilla. Miss Vetter had made the point this morning when they arrived. Jim and Jan Doudiet were saying it, and the Schaefers—everybody. And Gary Ragghianti, their attorney, had been reassuring, too. While they were sitting in his office in downtown San Rafael, he had called Ted Lindquist to ask him about the status of the investigation.

“I know Lindquist,” he had told them. “We used to be neighbors. The guy’s straight and hardworking and not apt to go off the deep end. I think he’ll tell me what’s going on.” After he had hung up, he had turned to them.

“It doesn’t sound like you have a thing to worry about. You’re just a part of the whole investigation—not suspects or anything at this point.”

“Oh, that’s good—that’s great!” Priscilla said.

“The only thing is—I’d be glad to handle this as long as it doesn’t come down to some kind of a criminal charge against you. If charges are filed, I’ll have to drop out because my friendship with Ted could cause a conflict of interest,” Ragghianti said.

“That’s all right,” Priscilla said.

“But it sure doesn’t look like it will come to that. Meanwhile we’ll see what we can do about getting Mindy back. I’m not an expert on adoption matters, so if it becomes necessary to appear in court on this, I’ll refer you to someone who is. But I can handle the preliminary part.”

“Good enough,” Steve said.

“Now Ted just mentioned something about a consent to release the children’s medical records at Kaiser,” Ragghianti said.

“We’ve nothing to hide,” Priscilla said.

“Yeah. We want them to look at the records—all of them, not just the ones some doctors gave them.” Steve’s voice was heavily sarcastic. “The cops should have them all.”

“Well, if you feel that way, I think you should sign the consent,” Ragghianti said.

So they had done that, Steve remembered as he helped Mindy play with the push toy they had brought. Lindquist had come over that same afternoon to pick up the releases. He had been polite and formal. Who knew what the guy was really thinking, though?

That was the trouble with this whole damn thing, Steve realized. There was no enemy out there—nobody on the other side of the street wearing a black hat to shoot it out with. It wasn’t what he was used to. The threat was there, damn it, he knew that. And if somebody would just admit it, he could deal with it. He understood the face-to-face sort of confrontation he had at San Quentin or at juvenile hall. He could deal with the inmate who came up to you and called you a redneck and then stood and watched how you took it. He knew the rules of that game.

But here people were telling him there was no threat. Carte and Callas wouldn’t come out and say directly what they meant; they practically claimed they didn’t mean anything when the accusation lay right behind those cold eyes of theirs. Lindquist said there was nothing to worry about—him and his inescapable conclusions. So did Ragghianti and Jim Hutchison. Hell, it made Steve angry. There was a lie there—he knew it if no one else did. But you can’t gun down a lie, especially when everyone’s telling you it doesn’t exist. And he couldn’t handle these people who didn’t confront him back, who didn’t even look him in the face.

There were those railroad tracks again, being laid, tie by tie, right up to his front door. He didn’t know how to stop them. Except with the truth. That was all he had to fall back on, he thought as he cradled Mindy for an instant in his arms. It was time to go now, to leave her in the care of some stranger for another week.

Steve tensed until Mindy squeaked with the pressure of his arms. Damn it, though, this time he feared the truth might not be enough.

4

It was too bad he had to lie to Gary, Ted thought as he sat at his desk in the small room opposite Investigations. It was the one thing so far he really regretted. Even though it had been three weeks since that phone conversation with Ragghianti, he hadn’t stopped thinking about it. Gary was a good friend and had been Ted’s lawyer last year when he had worked out Ted’s divorce and custody settlements. One of the lousy things about police work was that sometimes he had to lie and mislead, all for the sake of some other, more important, truth.

He knew it was cornball but Ted was certain that there was some kind of great truth out there: a right way to behave, a correct and moral path. It wasn’t necessarily the path everybody followed; he wasn’t particularly conventional. And although he would admit to being highly moralistic, he would not accept a conservative label. He did believe in a standard of behavior, and he despised people who assaulted others, whatever form that assault took. If he knew about such a person, he tried to stop him no matter what the obstacles. For Ted Lindquist, the end justified almost any means, as long as they were legal. He considered it damned unfortunate that sometimes he had to smoothe around the edges of the truth. But it was often necessary: That was police work.

In this case lies had proved necessary: If Priscilla Phillips knew how close to an arrest they were, there was no predicting how she might react. She might injure herself or the boys. Ted couldn’t take that responsibility. At this point he knew it was only a matter of time before the lid blew off the case.

He had had some luck with the medical consents. Because the Phillipses had agreed to release the records, it hadn’t become necessary to return the search warrant, so no affidavit had been filed and the extent of the investigation had not been made public. But the investigative net was spreading, and although he continued to ask for confidentiality, it was inevitable that eventually someone would talk.

Ted lit a cigarette and pulled the Phillips files over; they were growing thicker by the day as the evidence mounted. He had interviewed over twenty-five people, some several times. He hadn’t worked on anything else since he had started the case, and it was taking up more than all his time. Thank God for Pam at home taking care of his kids, he thought. She didn’t have to do it—they weren’t her children—but she was taking up the slack uncomplainingly. He felt they had a damned good relationship. It was just fine as it stood, with no marriage in the works. Neither of them wanted that. Ted was soured on matrimony at the moment. He and Sue had married much too young, while she was still in high school. Her pregnancy made her senior year difficult, especially with Ted off at Arizona State trying to make the baseball team.

He had been a pretty arrogant lad then, he knew, thinking he could make the best college baseball team in the country when he hadn’t been offered a scholarship and had busted up his knee trying to cut up some eucalyptus the summer before. He hadn’t made the team. He had just ended up trying to support a wife and a child, then a second child, and attend school at the same time. Even with Sue working, he had been forced to take a year off just to keep them solvent. But he had finished and graduated with a major in Business Administration and Accounting because he thought that would be practical. But a year of boredom working an adding machine in an accounting firm in San Francisco had changed his mind.

He really had always wanted a career in law enforcement. His father had been a member of the CIA for years—in radio communications—doing secret monitoring in a shack in the woods somewhere. For security reasons, he had never talked to Ted about it. But Ted had been attracted and intrigued, and the unrest of the sixties had focused his attention on social problems. So he had chosen to concern himself with the one problem he thought he could help solve. First he had tried to join the FBI, but for reasons he could never learn, the bureau had turned him down. He was invited to reapply later, but instead, at the age of twenty-four, he had joined the San Rafael Police Department.

He felt at home from the beginning. Even when they had him working Graveyard, patrolling the streets alone, he had been happy, content to return home in the morning to play with the kids. Hell, he thought he had everything. But one day toward the end of 1976, his marriage blew up. He and Sue had grown up in different directions, he had been forced to see that, and suddenly Sue could no longer deal with family life. She had departed suddenly for a job as a police dispatcher in Alaska, and he had kept Teddy and Brenna; Sue had agreed to this unhesitatingly, knowing the kids were the most important thing he had going. They were nine and eleven now—not much older than the Phillips boys.

Ted stacked his files on the desk thoughtfully. Erik and Jason Phillips would be the real sufferers in all this, he realized that. It was always the kids who took the punishment.

Ted had first talked to the coroner on March ninth, nine days after he had been handed the case. He had spent those first days trying to discover who had mixed the contaminated formula. He had talked to the nurses involved and found that a conversation had occurred on February twenty-fourth around the time of the afternoon shift change—a conversation Priscilla Phillips couldn’t  seem to remember. The other nurses remembered it; Lesley McCarcy and Jan Bond—the nurses’ aide who had been on duty—both recalled a discussion about whether enough of Mindy’s formula had been mixed to last through the upcoming shift. They both remembered that Priscilla Phillips had come up and said yes, there was enough formula, that she had mixed it herself. That was four days after Dr. Carte had issued his order forbidding anyone but nurses to mix the formula. And it was one day before the contaminated formula was discovered.

Debby Roof had been present at this conversation, too. The first time Ted had phoned her, she had contradicted the other nurses. But she had seemed hesitant, hemming and hawing before finally saying that Priscilla hadn’t made any statement at all about mixing the formula. But the next day, when he had called her again to tell her he doubted her story, that it didn’t jibe with other people’s recollections, Debby Roof had changed her story.

“I don’t
recall
any such statement by Priscilla,” she said instead. It was pretty clear to Ted that the nurse was covering up. She had even admitted that she and Priscilla had become good friends after Tia’s death, that their families were close. And Priscilla Phillips’s response on the subject had been interesting.

Although her memory in other areas had been outstanding, she had hesitated when he asked her about the same conversation over the phone. She had suddenly become very vague. That telephone call had proved significant, Ted felt: Priscilla Phillips had certainly made an admission of sorts, confessing that she was the common denominator. And he had it on tape. It might be thought-provoking in a courtroom someday, if he could ever get her there.

By now Ted was sure that she belonged in one. Boyd Stephens had been unequivocal. Ted had sent him Tia’s and Mindy’s records, and Stephens—a real stickler for detail and hard work—had pulled the slides from Tia’s autopsy and talked to the doctors and really done his homework. He had spent several weeks on the case, calling in body fluid physiologists from all over the country. Then he had asked Ted to come to his office to discuss his findings.