Fruits of the Poisonous Tree
| Fruits of the Poisonous Tree |
| Joe Gunther [5] |
| Archer Mayor |
| USA : (1994) |
is raped, and the detective finds himself caught between the media,
local politicians, and a network of well-meaning victims' rights
advocates as he tries to put his own feelings aside and follow the trail
of evidence.
Every lead seems to point to a single, obvious suspect, but is the
evidence too perfect? Risking his friendship with Gail, the respect of
his peers, and his own life, Lt. Gunther keeps digging, hoping to find
out if the man they have in jail is rightly there, or if the evidence
against him is tainted—"fruits of the poisonous tree."
Archer Mayor
Contents
Preface
Excerpt
Biography
Bibliography
Author's Note
FRUITS OF THE POISONOUS TREE HAS
… dare I say it?… its roots from two primary sources. The title came from a late dear friend of mine, once a police chief, who, while discussing the details of an old intriguing case, referred to some evidence as being “fruits of the poisonous tree.” I was so enamored of the phrase—and its legal meaning—that I kept it in mind for years, waiting for the proper topic. That topic turned out to be rape, which is the primary crime addressed in this book. I chose it because at the time, it was my belief that sexual assault was being poorly portrayed in movies and on TV, with too much emphasis on its sexual aspects and not enough given to the psychologically traumatic devastation. Thus,
Fruits of the Poisonous Tree
became my only murder mystery in which there is no dead body. The rape detailed within it (which occurs before the book even begins) is the homicide, with the victim alive and in demand of an accounting.
I WOKE WITH A START
, muscles tense, my eyes darting around the darkened, familiar room. There was no sound, nothing amiss, no obvious cause for alarm. I was alone, in bed, in my apartment—as usual.
I pushed back the covers and swung my feet to the floor, wincing slightly as the cold hit my body. It was early fall, not even foliage season, but the nights were already yielding to occasional temperature drops, warning shots from an approaching winter.
I pulled on my pants and a flannel shirt and went into the living room, awash in the colorless half-light from the street lamps below. It was a large room, book-lined, indifferently decorated, with a few pieces of comfortable furniture that would have been Salvation Army-bound a long time ago in a conventional home, but which my bachelor’s habits had retained for decades, icons to their owner’s flair for fashion.
I settled into a patched leather armchair by the dimly glowing bow window, wondering what had woken me up. It hadn’t been a dream; my pager hadn’t gone off, nor the phone. I cupped my chin in my hand and stared down at the vacant street.
Whatever it was, it had blown me out of my sleep like a grenade.
The twin beams from a pair of approaching headlights slid along the sides of the empty cars lining the street. I instinctively checked my watch—4:10 in the morning. The car slowed before my building and stopped, not bothering to park.
· · ·
Tony Brandt—the police chief, my boss, and my best friend in the department—got out, glanced up at my dark windows, and crossed over toward the front door three flights below.
The same sense of alarm that had startled me awake rekindled with a jolt—more insidious, more real, and more frightening. Tony Brandt did not make predawn house calls.
I got up, tucking my shirt in, and returned to my bedroom for some socks and shoes, moving quickly, stimulated now by the sure knowledge that bad news, of a personal nature, was making its way up the staircase.
I met Tony on the landing, already buttoning my jacket. “What?”
He stopped on the stairs, his hand heavy on the railing. His eyes were sorrowful and his face drawn. Before he spoke, the dread inside me spilled over and caught fire. “It’s Gail. She’s been raped.”
· · ·
I sat in his car, not focusing on the passing blur outside, my brain in a turmoil as we drove through the silent, empty town. “I was just with her a few hours ago.”
I paused, unable to think clearly, and repeated the same question I’d asked him right off, feeling like I was acting in a play I’d been a spectator to a dozen times before. “How is she?” The nagging sense that this time I was the one under the lights, my performance being scrutinized, added to my anxiety.
Tony had told me she was okay. He went into a little more detail now. “She was knocked around some, but nothing’s broken, at least on the outside.”
“Did we get who did it?”
He shook his head. “She was at home. She never got a look at him. I haven’t talked to her yet. Ron’s on call this week—the hospital phoned Dispatch, Dispatch phoned him. He got hold of me when he found out who it was.”
I rubbed my forehead and tried to appear calm, knowing he was debating how best to handle me. He was already looking at this as an investigation, and wondering if he should let me be a part of it. I had worked with rape victims and their friends and families before; I knew the toll it took on them. I could see his dilemma, and how imperative it was for me to win his confidence. I didn’t want to be excluded from the one case where I would bring both my heart and mind most forcefully to bear.
“You were at her house?” he murmured, cutting into my thoughts and harking back to the comment I’d made earlier.
“She fixed dinner.” And later we’d made love—quietly, tenderly—as two people who’d known each other intimately for many years. “She had a lot to do in the morning. I left so she’d get a good night’s sleep.” As I often had before.
He glanced over at me, but I left it at that. No predictably emotional self-recriminations for not having been at the right place at the right time. Not out loud; not under scrutiny.
We pulled into the hospital’s parking lot and walked up the ramp leading to the emergency room. Countless times, I’d come here to gather preliminary statements from victims of domestic violence, or assault, or vehicular mayhem, or rape. But never before feeling like this. To me, rape is murder without a corpse—it kills a piece of the spirit, leaving the victim alive to haunt us all with the violence of the crime. But while always sympathetic in the past, I’d never before had such a vested interest in the survival of that spirit.
Ron Klesczewski met us outside the nurses’ station. Rarely the most self-assured of men, he was among the most conscientious, and the expression on his face spoke clearly of his distress. “I’m real sorry, Joe.”
I nodded. “Thanks. Where is she?”
He pointed vaguely down the hallway. “They’re doing the rape kit on her now—room 4. Shouldn’t be too much longer.”
I started down the corridor. The tension in Ron’s voice climbed a notch. “You going in there?”
I hesitated. Had I been the one in need of a friendly face, Gail’s would’ve been the first I’d have wanted to see.
But our roles weren’t reversed, and I realized with the chill of experience that in all probability, and despite the duration and intensity of our friendship, she would yearn for comfort from those of her own sex.
Standing there, my hand almost on the doorknob, I felt swelling up inside me the same combination of anger, sorrow, and frustration that I’d suppressed in Tony’s car. But again I was stuck, my colleagues discreetly watching me from a distance. For the second time since learning of the assault, I struggled to reverse my own emotional tide.
A gray-haired nurse opened the door to room 4 barely wide enough to slip out. I caught her eye as she was about to pass me with what looked like a urine sample in her hand.
“Will you be going back in there soon?”
She answered cautiously, a hint of suspicion in her voice. “Yes.”
“I’m Joe Gunther. Gail Zigman is a friend of mine. Would you tell her I’m here, that if she wants me, I’m available?”
Her face cleared and she smiled at me. “Sure.”
I returned to where Ron was filling Tony in on the details. Brandt held his hand up as I approached, interrupting him. “Better start from the top, so Joe can hear it all.”
Ron nodded, but I could sense his uneasiness. Rape was something we usually discussed in self-consciously clinical terms, occasionally lapsing into morbid humor to hide our own discomfort. Now, none of that applied. My relationship with Gail was no secret, and she’d been accepted as one of the department’s extended family.
Ron’s voice was conspicuously flat. “It happened two hours ago, about 2:13, according to her clock radio. She caught sight of the time just before he put a pillowcase over her head.”
I knew that radio well. At 11:16 last night, I’d been prompted by its oversized green numbers to leave Gail’s warm side, put my clothes back on, and go home. She’d laced her arms around my neck as I’d leaned down to kiss her goodnight, and I’d taken advantage of the gesture to give her breast a last caress.
“What was the very first thing she remembers about the attack?” I asked.
“That’s almost it. He must’ve been real quiet, or she was sleeping like a log, ’cause the first thing she knew, he was on top of her, pulling the pillowcase off the pillow to bag her. Her arms were already tied down.”
That surprised me. “How?”
“He fixed lengths of rope to the bed frame and then rigged slipknots around each of her wrists. Not tight enough to wake her up, I guess, but enough to lock her up when she tried to get free.”
I frowned. Gail was a sound sleeper. There’d been times I’d gotten into bed next to her and the first she’d known about it was waking up in the morning. But she’d been unusually tired on those occasions, unlike last night.
Ron was still talking. “He tied her legs down the same way after he threatened her with a knife and warned her not to put up a fight.”
I rubbed my eyes with my fingertips, trying to visualize a generic victim instead of Gail. I noticed the nurse I’d spoken to earlier going back into the examination room.
Brandt interrupted for a moment. “Did he use the knife?”
Klesczewski glanced at me nervously. “He nicked her a couple of times to prove he had it. Pinpricks, really. They aren’t bad, Joe.”
I felt my heartbeat beginning to pick up speed, not wishing to ask where those pinpricks had been placed, and suspecting the worst.
“On the phone, you mentioned she had some bruises,” Brandt said. “How’d she get them?”
The door down the hallway opened again and the nurse gestured to me. With a sense of relief, I walked away from Ron’s descriptions. At some point, I’d get all the details and look at them critically, professionally, and categorize them as Brandt was doing. A rapist rarely attacks just once, and he rarely changes style from assault to assault. If we matched his MO to others already on file, we could probably identify him.
But right now I wasn’t interested.
Pleasantly, even supportively, the nurse blocked my way to the door, placing her hand gently on my arm. “Joe, Gail asked me to thank you but said she wasn’t up to a visit just now. It’s been quite an experience.”
I glanced beyond her, so wanting to just push her aside and barge in. In my gut, despite my earlier rational analysis, I couldn’t help feeling a simple hug would be of some help—especially in this sterile setting.
But I nodded instead, unhappily aware of who that hug was meant to soothe the most. “Okay.”
She steered me gently farther down the hall, toward another examination room. “We were wondering if you could help us out a little. We need a blood sample from you for the kit.”
I nodded again. My semen would still be in Gail and would have to be differentiated from that of her attacker. All part of the protocol—the gathering of evidence. It made me think of what Gail was going through now, giving urine and blood samples, having her thighs swabbed with moistened Q-tips, her pubic hair combed out with a fine-toothed comb, her wounds photographed—everything documented and confined in dozens of small and large aseptically clean white envelopes.
I looked down into the nurse’s warm hazel eyes, nestled in a fine webbing of sympathetic wrinkles. “Sure. Lead the way.”
She sat me down in a small room and had me roll up my sleeve, quickly and efficiently wrapping a tourniquet around my upper arm. Her voice was clear and bright, much younger than her appearance. “I’m new in town. One of the other nurses was telling me you’re the chief of detectives in Brattleboro.”
