Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (14 page)

While we waited on the coroner and crime scene guys, the victim's girlfriend decided she'd get dressed. But she didn't want to go into the bedroom, so I retrieved some clothes I found tossed on a chair and handed them to her through the bathroom door. A second later we heard a shriek so abrupt and piercing that we all jumped. Charlie put his hand on his gun.

“Ma'am,” I said, knocking on the bathroom door. “Ma'am? Are you all right; what's going on in there?”

She opened the door, mascara running down her cheeks, and handed me her bra. “It's got him on it,” she screeched.

I looked down at the bra. Bits of brain clung to one of the cups.

“Jesus. Sorry.” I hurried into the bedroom to get her a clean one from the dresser, horrified at my mistake.

When Charlie and I left an hour later, she was still crying, despite my best attempts to console her, and Barker and Cowan were getting ready to transport her downtown for a statement. Charlie and I drove to the Mister Donut a block away so he could pick up a dozen for his kids, and we sat there waiting for a fresh hot batch, drinking a cup of coffee, saying very little.

“Never fucking seen anything like that.” Charlie sat hunched over the counter, one foot tapping against the foot stop. He'd been in the department for over ten years and was about to make corporal. “Shooting himself in the bed while she lay sleeping beside him.”

But both of us went slack-jawed two weeks later when Barker and Cowan arrested the woman for murder. They'd followed routine procedure on a shooting: the Atomic Absorption Test, a fancy name for a simple test that checks for gunpowder residue on anyone who was at the scene. She'd tested positive; her boyfriend's hands had been clean.

“Get out of here,” Charlie said when Cowan told us. I couldn't say a word. I felt betrayed. I also felt stupid. I resolved then and there never to put myself in that position again. And for the next several months I played out my interactions with her over and over again,
trying to figure out what clues I'd missed, what I hadn't seen. I questioned Charlie and the detectives. They all shrugged, said you can't always read the truth.

But, I thought, that was an easy call after the Atomic Absorption Test came back positive. The evidence was irrefutable. Marjorie's case, on the other hand, was as murky as my husband's gumbo.

“You're looking at that file like it's going to start talking to you,” George said, startling me out of my reverie.

I put my palm up to my forehead and pressed hard. “I wish it would.”

“I'm headed over to Armed Robbery, then I'm going home,” he said. “You about done?”

“Just this last interview.” I grimaced and pulled Marjorie's file over in front of me.

“A hinky one, huh? Want to talk it through? I got a couple of minutes.”

I cupped my chin in my hand and looked at him. “Sometimes I hate this job.”

“That Ray's case?”

I nodded.

“I looked over it earlier today, quick, but I got the jist of it.”

“And?”

“He's not the man he used to be, Cathy.”

“Jesus, George, enough already. I know.”

He squatted down on his heels in front of me, concern deepening the lines in his face. “What I'm trying to say, but you keep taking my head off, is that Ray could have been wrong on this one. There's some compelling evidence to indicate she might have done it—lack of blood transfer and fingerprints, the polygraph, the psychologist's statement. On the other hand…” He shook his head slowly. “That's a hell of a wound to self-inflict, and I'm not sure I buy what Ray pinpointed as her motive. I need to spend more time with it, but it's okay to think that, you know? You aren't betraying the man you're married to now by saying he handled a case poorly six years ago. The worst that could happen is Cold Cases reopens the investigation, and he gets a letter in his file. It's an odd case. But there's no malfeasance, right?”

“Technically, no.”

“What does Ray say?”

“He won't talk about it.”

George stood, stretched his arms back behind his back, and shrugged. “No problem, I'll interview him.”

“It's just…hard,” I said.

“Go with your gut. You've got good instincts.”

“What if you don't trust your gut?”

He grinned and winked at me. “Then you punt it, girl. Let someone else decide.”

“That would be you,” I pointed out.

“Then it's me.” He slipped his shoulder holster on, then his suit jacket, and patted me on the back as he headed out the door. “You think too much.”

Why, I thought, do men always tell women they think too much?

I glanced at my watch and gathered myself up to go out to meet Marjorie LaSalle.

My first thought was that her hair was prettier: softer and lighter and longer. She looked happy, and younger than when I saw her last, if that was possible, comfortable in her skin despite a fluttery nervous tension as I said her name. Three bulging brown folders rested in her lap.

When she stood to face me, I struggled not to stare at her chest. She wore an olive-colored blouse, the first three buttons undone, and her scars, one long vertical line and two short curved ones, were visible and distinct, snaking across her tanned skin and trailing down into the V of her breasts. They were hard to ignore, those scars.

“I'm Officer Stevens.” I extended my hand. “Why don't you come on back to my office.”

“Don't I know you?” she asked, when we were seated at the small, round table George and I used for interviews. “Did you work on my case?”

“Sort of,” I said, smiling. “Victim Services.”

“
Oh my gosh
. Cathy, isn't it? Cathy Stevens.” She reached forward and gave me a hug. “Oh, I'm so glad it's you. I feel so lucky. Look at you, you look great. And you're married,” she said, picking up my hand, fingering the ring. “Who is he?”

“A cop.” I smiled slightly and hoped she wouldn't press for a name.

“I'm married, too. Just over a year.”

“Cesar?”

“Oh no. I met Eric a year after my stabbing.”

“Congratulations.”

“You too.” She ran her hands across the folders in front of her. “It's been a long time, hasn't it?”

“Yes.”

She grinned, and I found myself grinning back. The old admiration rose up, and I pushed it down. In another life, she and I might have been friends. And I guess we were once, in a way, briefly.

“So,” I said. “Your case.”

She nodded, and her face lost its softness. “I want it back in attempted homicide where it belongs.” She fingered a small necklace she wore around her neck, one with an intricate, delicate design that looked faintly religious and rested at the point where her three scars converged. “You're the one who decides?”

“I'm the one who makes a recommendation; other people will review it as well.”

“Do they take your recommendation?”

I nodded. “Usually.”

“Ah.” She leaned back and put her hand on her chest, closed her eyes briefly before she looked at me again. “So. You'll reopen it?”

“You've seen the police report?”

“I got copies of everything through my lawyer.”

“Then I'd like to hear your version, where you feel the police investigation was problematic.”

“Where it went wrong was Detective Ray Robileaux accusing me of doing this to myself,” she said firmly.

I nodded but kept my face impassive.

“You were there, after it happened. You know.”

I opened up the file and slid my notebook on top of it, picked up a pen. “Well, let's go through it again. I understand you have a list of points you want to cover. Why don't we start there.”

She looked at me intently, then shifted in her chair and sat straighter. She pulled out several typed pages and began reading off
them, glancing at me now and again to speak extemporaneously or when she wanted to stress a point.

Why, Marjorie wanted to know, had the police never fingerprinted her, Cesar, her ex-husband, or her children to match them up with any fingerprints found at the scene? And how could it be that the police never found any fingerprints? There was fingerprint powder residue in the house, she said, but not much and not in all the places she would have expected. Could it be that the police didn't do a thorough job dusting for fingerprints?

Possible, I thought, but not likely.

Why weren't neighbors questioned as to what they might have seen or heard? Marjorie had talked to her neighbors, and although Robileaux said the neighborhood was canvassed, most of her neighbors said no one from the police department had talked to them.

I nodded, thinking how funny it was that victims so often zeroed in on witness statements, not realizing that most witnesses are fairly unreliable, and canvassing is usually done only in homicide cases. Which, I reminded myself, this case had been. An attempted homicide. At least initially.

The report was wrong, she said; there was blood on the rug. Not much, but she had a copy of the cleaning bill. And there were inconsistencies about her purse. Robileaux said the contents were scattered across a backyard. Then why, Marjorie wanted to know, was every item precisely where she'd put it when it was returned to her? She always put everything in the same place, she was very organized that way, and she found it unbelievable that Robileaux or some other officer had managed to put the items back in exactly the same way. And about the lack of fingerprints on the purse: Robileaux told her they couldn't dust for prints because there was too much dew on it, which inhibits fingerprint detection. Yet his report stipulated the purse was picked up that night—and didn't I remember Robileaux himself brought it into the house—so it wouldn't have had time to collect dew.

I did remember, distinctly, Ray holding the purse in his gloved hand.

And her comment about being a Pollyanna? That was a ludicrous interpretation by Robileaux, that it was evidence she wanted attention. She
was
a Pollyanna, or had been, always believing the best of
people, believing the world was good, absentminded about locking her doors and windows. “And isn't that a joke now,” she said, “given how the police treated me, how Robileaux was?”

I kept my body language positive, open, and nodded.

“Do you remember how awful he was?” Marjorie said.

“Ummm.” I fought to keep my eyes from drifting from hers.

“He was biased from the first moment. He went looking for things that fit his bias.” She tapped her finger on the table.

I thought of Ray's incredible anger toward his first wife; manipulative, he'd called her, said she'd played all the emotional colors of the rainbow. How much of that had been projected onto Marjorie?

“Detective Robileaux can be challenging at times,” I said.

Marjorie looked at me, surprise and puzzlement clouding her face. “I seem to recall you didn't like him much either.”

“What I thought then, Marjorie, is really irrelevant now,” I said carefully.

“Really!?”

“I was just an observer, someone there to help you, that's where my focus was, not on the scene.”

“Oh.” She leaned back and her eyes narrowed. “That's right. You're a cop now.”

I shook my head. “I just want to hear your side. I'm not passing any judgments.”

“Please don't make this a waste of my time.”

“I hope you don't think that's what this is.”

For a minute I thought she might get up and leave, but after a long silent stretch during which she studied her list, she looked back up at me. “The 911 tapes.” Her voice was clipped.

She'd listened to the 911 tapes, had them right here with her, and she didn't understand why they weren't sent off to the FBI for electronic enhancement so they could pick up the sounds of the man talking or hitting her. Maybe he hit her first, the phone disconnected, and then he said, “Shuddup, or I'll kill you.”

I stifled my reflexive response: this was not the kind of case where we would ask the FBI to analyze a tape. The backlog of material they had already was dizzying enough. And dismaying. Our own fingerprint division had a six-month backlog of felony cases. But no com
plainant wanted to hear her case wasn't big enough or important enough. So I remained silent, nodding, as Marjorie continued.

Why was it so amazing to Robileaux, she wanted to know, pointing a finger stiffly at her chest, that she didn't remember the second cut on her breast; how could he see that as evidence of her guilt? She was terrified. And why was she supposed to explain the presence of the second knife; she wasn't a police officer, she didn't know why the intruder did the things he did. And he fled probably because he realized that she'd been on the phone, that she'd called for help, not because she asked him if he was wearing a condom. How was she supposed to explain the intruder's supposedly weird MO? And Robileaux saying that her story changed slightly each time he interviewed was ridiculous and a flat-out lie. She told it the same exact way each time; it was written down in his report wrong, another indication that either he wasn't listening carefully or was choosing to hear only what he wanted to hear.

I thought of the minor inconsistencies Ray had listed in his report and wondered how much he'd taken into account the emotional and physical stress she'd been under.

And of course there was no bruising on her legs. “I wasn't going to fight him with a knife in my chest. I just wanted it over with and him gone,” she said, her voice growing agitated. “In Robileaux's mind, it was up to
me
to explain the irrational behavior of an unknown psychopathic murderer-rapist on a given summer night, and in his mind, it was evidence of my guilt that I could not. The fact of my being asleep when having the knife plunged into my chest, and my awakening in an adrenalized and disoriented state of shock didn't seem relevant to Detective Robileaux.”