Don't Slay the Dragon (The Chronicles of Elizabeth Marshall Book 1) (9 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Shortly before I graduated from high school, Lisbeth was released from the state hospital, supposedly “integrated” and “cured” as long as she strictly followed her medication schedule.   She had moved back in with Barbara, who made sure she kept to the medication regimen, but it wasn’t a good environment for her.  She managed to get her GED and get accepted to a community college about thirty miles from her mother’s house, but the school loans only went so far and she wasn’t mentally capable of working and going to school at the same time.

Before long, she was dropping out, moving from
apartment to apartment, living the life of a vagabond.  Sometimes it was a small basement apartment, other times it was a cheap motel room.  Anywhere but going back to live with Barbara.

During that same time, I had met an up and coming junior executive at
an investment company.  He was charming and likable and moving up rapidly in the firm.  Lewis was well known and well thought of, and when he swept me off my feet I could hardly resist.  He was so much more romantic than the other high school and college guys I had dated.  When he proposed I said yes without hesitation and we began planning our life.

Everyone was thrilled at the match, everyone except Lisbeth.  I tracked down where she lived once and
brought Lewis over to meet her.  She was living in a tiny basement apartment and working part-time at a convenience store nearby.  For some reason, she and Lewis took an instant disliking to each other.  She didn’t hide her feelings either.  I assumed that this was the reason he discouraged me from contact with her.  He would always say how stressful and unhealthy it was for me to be around her.  I didn’t realize, at the time, that this was the first sign of his controlling behavior.

The wedding was picture perfect and I was naïve enough to believe we were going to have a wonderful future together. 
I had received an honor’s scholarship from the local university and we agreed that I would go to school and work part time and when I graduated he would go back to school and get his degree.  That was the plan until he was accused of embezzlement and having an affair with a co-worker.  He swore to me that he was innocent of both charges.  I had my suspicions, but he was so convincing.

The company didn’t have enough evidence to press charges, but his reputation was still in tatters.  He spent the next two years going from job to job, working anything fro
m fast food to retail.  Finally, he decided he needed a fresh start and joined the Army.  He enlisted without even telling me.  I wasn’t happy about leaving behind my family, friends and school, but he convinced me that I needed to be a supportive wife.  Before I knew it, he left for training and I was following him to his first assignment in Ft. Polk, Louisiana. 

This Army post was small and isolated.  Jobs for a civilian wife were hard to come by.  I tried to have a positive attitude about my life and my marriage, but it was a struggle.  Lewis became so involved in his military career and advancement.  I wanted to believe that it was to help us out financially
that he was so driven.   More often it seemed he was driven because it was a boost to his increasing ego.  He was gone all the time and always seemed to have an excuse for his absence.  But at the same time, he insisted on knowing everything I did and everywhere I went when he was around.  He discouraged me from having friends and communicating too often with either friends or family back home. 

Whenever
I brought up starting a family he would get moody and start an argument.  I thought he just needed a few more years to grow up, even though he was six years older than me.  There were phone calls that came up blocked on caller ID.   If I answered, the caller would hang up.  If Lewis answered, he’d go into the next room to have privacy and tell me it was just work related.  I wasn’t dumb.  I knew the signs, knew what was going on.  If anything, I was in denial.  If I tried confronting him with my suspicions he would turn it back on me and accuse me of not being supportive and trusting.  One time he even went so far as to tell me I was crazy for suspecting him of cheating on me, as crazy as my friend Lisbeth.  That really hurt. 

He broke down my self-esteem to such a point that I was just a shell of a person.  My education didn’t
matter.  My efforts towards a career were a waste of time because his military career was the only thing that was important. 

It might have helped if I had someone close by for support, but I was thousands of miles away from any friends o
r family.  When he received orders for Ft. Bragg, North Carolina a few years later, I seriously considered leaving him then and just coming back to Utah.  He convinced me that Ft. Bragg would be a great new start for us and a perfect place to start a family.  When we got there it turned out to be just more empty promises.  There were more women to choose from and he began to be less discreet.  He started drinking and hanging out with other soldiers.  Whenever I tried to talk to him about it, he would get more and more violent.  I learned to hide bruises and black eyes and to stay out of public as much as I could. 

Soon, I lived in constant fear and felt as though I was always walking on eggshells.  I hid it all from my family back home, ashamed to be thought of as a failure.  Finally, one night,
Lewis didn’t come home from work all evening.  He came stumbling in to our apartment at three in the morning, drunk, half dressed and reeking of another woman.  When he tried crawling into bed with me, I left the bed and fled to the other room to sleep on the couch.  He followed, angry at my “rejection”.

The thin walls of our apartment probably saved my life.  A neighbor called the police who arrived before he could do too much damage.  They took him into custody and took me to the military hospital where they treated my fractured hand and X-rayed my face.  I was lucky not to have any bones broken in my face, but a gash in the back of my head required several stitches
.  A kind nurse gave me some brochures on abuse and the phone number of a local shelter.  The police officer recommended I file a restraining order, as well as for divorce.  I followed his advice and did both.

He pleaded guilty to the abuse charges and was reduced in rank.  Ironically, he blamed me for the damage it did to his military career.  I stayed in North Carolina just long enough to finalize the divorce.  When I came back to Utah, I hoped to never hear from him again.

A change came over me at this time.  I didn’t want to be a victim.  I didn’t want to be controlled or taken advantage of.  I needed to be in charge of my own life.  I had planned on coming back to my family and familiar surroundings.  Originally, when I had left Utah and quit school, I had been just a few credits shy of my Associates Degree and hadn’t decided on a major.  Now, I was determined to get back into school and do something with my education that would help others. 

I found
a strength within myself that I never knew I had.  I had a purpose now and a focus.  Little did I know I would be tested so soon, and that there would be so much on the line.

Chapter Eighteen

Detective Sawyer agreed to meet me again, this time at a small diner not far from campus.  I hoped he wasn’t getting the wrong idea. I was only interested in this case, even though I had to admit, he was very attractive.  I couldn’t help looking at his left hand and noticing there wasn’t a ring.  That didn’t always mean anything these days though.  I ate a salad, he had a burger, and we both sipped bottled water.

“Were you there the day they brought Lisbeth in for questioning?”  I asked
once our food had arrived.

He nodded and swallowed a few French fries
.

“Hammond and I had been looking for her since the murder.  We’d followed several leads, went to most of her previous
ly known addresses, but had no luck.  From what we could find out, she had been living somewhat of a nomad existence. We finally got a tip from a landlord at a rundown apartment complex in Ogden.  We picked her up from the Ogden station and brought her back to our office for questioning.”

“How long after Barbara’s death did you locate Lisbeth?” 

He paused with his burger halfway to his mouth, thinking. 

“It was about a week.”  He took another bite. 
“Yeah, a week to the day.”

“What happened during the questioning?  Can you tell me about it?”

“It was pretty routine at first.  She was read her rights and brought into our interrogation room.  We immediately noticed the wound on her face.  We took pictures and documented the injury.  We already had DNA results back from the crime scene, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to connect the dots and guess that Barbara had given Elizabeth the injury.”

“What was her state of mind?”

“Scared.  Nervous.  Maybe in shock.  She didn’t talk much at first.”

“Did
she seem surprised at all about her mother’s death?”

He gave me a puzzled look. 
I guess from his perspective it was an odd question. He didn’t reply immediately. I could tell he was searching through his memory to make certain he gave me the most accurate answer.

“Come to think of it, she did seem very surprised.  I thought it was an act.” 

“What if it wasn’t?  An act, I mean.”

He finished the burger and the last of the fries
and pushed the plate aside.  He leaned towards me with his elbows on the table.  I was coming to know him well enough by now to know this meant he was very interested in the conversation.

“Where are you going with this, Caitlyn?”

“Bear with me here.  You picked her up a week after the murder.”  He nodded.  “So I would guess that you didn’t find any blood evidence on her.”

“No, not a week after the fact.
  We had a female officer examine her, but nothing.”

“What about her clothes?  Did you locate the clothes she wore that night?  Was there any blood splatter evidence on them?”

He shook his head.  “We got a warrant for her apartment, combed it from floor to ceiling.  Wasn’t an easy job either, I can tell you.  It wasn’t exactly the cleanest home we’ve searched. The entire investigation was a challenge. First of all, there were no eye-witnesses at the scene except for the deceased.  A neighbor verified that Lisbeth’s car was parked in front of the trailer that night, but no one saw Lisbeth enter or exit, no one saw what she was wearing.  We didn’t know what we were looking for exactly.  We never did find any clothing with blood on it.”

“Didn’t you find that odd?”

“Not really.  She could have disposed of any evidence after she left the scene.  It happens all the time.  Bundle the clothes into a garbage bag and toss it into a random dumpster somewhere.  Honestly, I would have been shocked if we
had
found some evidence after a week.”

“So the only real evidence was her fingerprints on the knife, DNA from tissue found under Barbara’s nail
s, hair samples, and the wound on Lisbeth’s face?”

“Isn’t that enough?”  His
dark eyebrows rose in question. 

“Did Lisbeth confess?”  I pressed.

“No, she didn’t.  In fact, we didn’t get much further than telling her that Barbara was dead.  At first she seemed to just sit there in shock, like I said.  I thought it was an act.  She wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t answer any of our questions no matter how much we interrogated her.  I have to admit, I’ve done my share of interrogations, and rarely have I met someone that tough to crack.  We didn’t seem to get any reaction from her at all until we decided to arrest her and Hammond officially read her the charges.”

He paused at this point and a shadow c
rossed his face. I thought he might be piecing something together.

“Now that you’ve told me about the multiple personality disorder, what happened next makes more sense.”

“Why?  What happened?”

“She went ballistic.  It was almost like another person took over.  It was as though a rabid animal jumped into her body.  She started biting and kicking, scratching and screaming.  We couldn’t control her no matter what we tried. 
We called four other officers into the room and still had a hard time holding her down. Finally, we decided to transport her to the hospital where they admitted her to the psych ward.   You know the rest.”

I nodded, visualizing the scene.  From what I knew about the family, I could imagine what would have happened if Vesper or Chad had been hand-cuffed and charged.  Even Maxine could be a force to be reckoned with if she were put into that kind of situation.  It was a good thing no one was seriously injured. 

“I still don’t understand where you’re going with this.”

“Detective Sawyer,” I began but he gave me a look telling me we were past formalities.  “Ok,
Logan, then.  I took your advice and went back to see Lisbeth.  We talked about what happened that night.”

Both eyebrows rose again.

“That’s further than we got.  What did you find out?”

“Lisbeth said that they had an argument.  She said that the argument was over and she was leaving when Barbara attacked her without notice.  She said that she ran out to her car and left.  She swears that Barbara was alive when she left.”

He let out a long breath and leaned back against the cushioned bench.  He ran his hand through his thick, wavy hair in what was becoming a familiar gesture.  He looked right into my eyes, an intense expression that seemed to run deep.

“You know, in the field we’re trained to trust facts and evidence.  After a while you start to see everyone as a suspect.  My question to you is: 
Can you trust her?” 

That was the real question at the core of all this.
  And I wasn’t certain if I had a clear answer.