by Lisa Gardner
Phil set the box at the head of the table, away from Evie and Dick Delaney. He and D.D. had been playing this game for so long, they didn’t need to speak to know how to proceed. D.D. sat directly across from Evie and her lawyer, engaging them in small talk about best brands of coffee in Boston, black versus cream and sugar, and, oh yeah, having to give up coffee while pregnant, which D.D. had never thought she’d be able to do, but in fact had come quite naturally.
In the meantime, Phil unpacked the box. Slowly. File after file. The murder book. Binders of evidence reports. Stacks of photos. Pile here. Pile there. Pile after pile.
Evie lost focus first. Nodded at whatever asinine comment D.D. was making while her gaze drifted to the head of the table, the growing stack of yellowing papers, frayed photo edges, dirty manila files. Records were all supposed to be scanned and stored electronically these days. And yet, if the average bureaucrat ever walked through the warehouse, saw the full magnitude of the job . . .
Walking the stacks to manually retrieve an evidence box wasn’t going away anytime soon.
“That’s evidence from my father’s case,” Evie said suddenly. The woman was agitated. Not even bothering to sip her water but spinning the bottle in her hand.
“That’s right.”
“You have photos?”
Delaney spoke up. “I would like to go on the record that I don’t recommend my client be here today, taking these questions, Sergeant Warren—”
D.D. kept her focus on Evie: “Do you remember your statement from that day?”
“A little.”
“Let me read it to you, from my notes: ‘sixteen-year-old subject, female, white, appears in state of shock and/or traumatized. Subject states she had been in the kitchen with her father, Earl Hopkins, fifty-five-year-old male, white, after two thirty on Saturday. Father was showing her how to unload a recently purchased Model eight-seventy Remington pump-action shotgun. Father was standing in front of refrigerator when female subject, in her own words, picked up shotgun off the kitchen table and attempted to clear the chamber. According to female, shotgun discharged into her father’s torso from a distance of mere inches. Female states father fell back against the refrigerator, then sank to the floor. Female claims she set down gun and attempted to rouse her father without success. Female further claims she then heard screaming from the doorway, where her mother, Joyce Hopkins, forty-three-year-old female, white, stood. Mother claimed she’d witnessed the shooting. Detective Speirs interviewed independently.’”
Evie didn’t say anything while D.D. read, just kept staring at the box. D.D. set down her notepad. “Does that fit your memory?”
Evie finally looked at her. “What do the photos say?”
“Phil?”
Phil stepped forward with the first set. They were gruesome. A shotgun blast at close range did a tremendous amount of damage. Evie had sat through the real event. In theory, there was nothing here she hadn’t seen before, though in D.D.’s experience, memory had its way with things over time. Meaning the photos could look far worse than Evie had allowed herself to remember, or more likely, given the woman’s burden of guilt, far less awful than the images that replayed in her head night after night.
D.D. spread out the first three photos in front of Evie and her lawyer. Delaney inhaled sharply but didn’t look away. He’d been there that day, too. A friend of the family, summoned by Evie’s mom, who hadn’t thought to call 911 but knew immediately to dial the family lawyer. Said something about the woman’s mental state right there.
“Long guns are used in suicides more often than people think,” D.D. stated now. She kept her voice even but soft. No need to play hardball just yet; that would come later. “This particular shotgun, the Model eight-seventy Remington, comes in two different barrel lengths for the twelve-gauge. Your father had purchased the slightly shorter version, but even then, the barrel length is twenty-six inches, the full length of the shotgun forty-six and a half inches. In instances of suicide, the victim will generally press the tip of the barrel against his own body to stabilize the weapon while he reaches for the trigger. Hence, one of the most common indicators of suicide by long gun is a clear burn pattern against the victim’s skin from the heat of the barrel.”
Evie glanced up at her. “I don’t see a burn mark. It would be on his stomach, yes? I just see . . . soot.”
“Scorch marks,” D.D. provided, “indicating the shotgun was in close proximity to the victim at the time of discharge, but not actually touching the victim’s skin. In fact, the scorch marks are consistent with your initial statement, a scenario of someone standing mere inches away from the victim, pulling the trigger.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The second indicator of suicide by long gun is trajectory. It’s nearly impossible to hold a long gun level and pull the trigger, meaning inevitably the impact of the blast should be up and out. The projectiles enter lower on the body, travel in an upward diagonal until exiting higher on the body. In this case”—D.D. tapped a photo—“we can see the entrance wound was beneath your father’s lower ribs. But according to the ME, the shotgun pellets didn’t follow any diagonal path. Instead, they traveled nearly straight through the body, shredding his organs and intestines along the way.”
“Sergeant!” Delaney objected.
Evie, however, did not look away. “The gun was fired level. From someone standing directly in front of my father.”
“Which, again, would be consistent with the story you provided. You picked up the shotgun. You were trying to inspect the chamber, and instead, you pulled the trigger while standing directly in front of your father. Hence no burn marks, no upward trajectory.”
“Except I didn’t! We’d been out. Myself and my mother. We parked on the driveway. I’d just opened the car door and I heard a noise. We entered the kitchen. And there . . . I saw . . . There was my father.”
“The third thing we’d look at for a suicide,” D.D. continued relentlessly, “is the blood spatter. If someone else was in the room, if someone else pulled the trigger, that person would be subject to blowback, or spray from the impact of the shotgun pellets entering the body. Meaning we should have at least one person covered in spatter.”
She stared hard at Evie, who sputtered: “I walked in . . . the blood . . . it dripped down on me . . .”
“We’d also have a void in the spatter. A clean spot in, say, the floor or countertop, where the shooter’s body blocked any droplets from landing.” D.D. tapped a third photo, where, sure enough, bloody spray appeared above and to the sides of Hopkins’s body, but directly in front . . .
“Your father didn’t commit suicide,” D.D. stated firmly. “The evidence has now been reviewed several times by several different experts. There was someone else in the room, and that person shot him.”
Evie opened her mouth, shut her mouth. “You think I’m lying now,” she whispered at last.
“I think your story sixteen years ago is a better fit with the evidence than the line of bull you tried to feed me yesterday.”
“Sergeant,” Delaney started again.
“Why would I lie? I only did it back then to protect my father.”
“Your father, or your mother?”
“My mother was with me! We’d gone out shopping. Surely, you can find a witness, pull store security tapes. A credit card receipt. Something that proves we were together.”
“From sixteen years ago?”
“I thought he’d killed himself! He’d been . . . off. Not himself. And genius and suicide . . .” Evie shrugged, sounding genuinely distressed.
“Your father did not commit suicide.”
“I didn’t shoot him!”
“So you’re a liar, but not a killer. And Friday night, with your husband?”
“Sergeant! This line of questioning is over!”
“Not so fast, Counsel
or. Your client came to me yesterday, recanting her story from sixteen years ago. She’s the one who reopened this can of worms. Based on her new statement, the case of Earl Hopkins is no longer being considered accidental. We’re now treating it as an active homicide, and you know the statute of limitations on homicide—there isn’t one.”
“I didn’t do it!” Evie, still aghast, pounded her water bottle against the table. “I would never harm my father!”
“But your husband? The guy with rolls of cash and nearly half a dozen fake IDs?”
“We’re out of here.” Delaney was already on his feet, pulling at Evie’s arm. The woman, however, continued to resist. And it wasn’t the allegations about her husband that had her agitated. Clearly, she was still distressed about her father. Even sixteen years later, it was all about her father.
She was gazing at D.D. wildly now. “My hair. You took photos of my hair. Samples. I remember that!”
D.D. nodded slowly.
“Test it. Have it reexamined. You can, can’t you? I don’t understand it all, but I watch crime shows. You can prove directionality from blood spatter, right? Say, the difference between this blowback you’re talking about, versus contact smear from someone entering the room right afterwards.”
“I don’t know if we have enough evidence,” D.D. said, which wasn’t entirely untrue.
“Test it. Do whatever you have to do. I didn’t kill my father. I didn’t! All these years.” Her voice broke off. “I assumed the worst about him.”
“Him, or your mother?”
“She was with me. I’m telling you the truth. My mom is crazy, I know, but she loved him. They loved each other. I don’t know. Not all relationships are meant to be understood by outsiders—”
“Talking about your husband again?”
“My mom didn’t do this,” Evie repeated more firmly. She seemed to be pulling herself together now, allowing her lawyer to guide her to standing. “She, me, we didn’t do this. All these years, we thought he shot himself. That’s why we lied. Not to protect ourselves. But to protect him. If you’d met him, if you’d talked to him . . . My father was a great man. He deserved better than to go down in the history books as one more depressed genius.”
“Then who, Evie?” D.D. rose to standing. “Who would have motive to shoot your father? Did he have professional rivals? Failing students? Jealous husbands? Someone pulled that trigger. If not you, then who?”
“I . . . I have no idea.” Evie glanced helplessly at her lawyer. It was all he needed.
“This interview is over. You asked for answers from my client and she provided them. You want to learn anything else, Officers, I suggest you go out and—here’s a thought—do some detecting.”
Delaney guided his client around the table. But Evie’s gaze was still glued to the photos as she walked by. Fascinated. Fixated. Frustrated.
That she finally realized all these years later she’d lied for nothing? Or because she’d just discovered yesterday’s attempt at changing her story was never going to work?
D.D. still couldn’t figure it. But there was something about the way Evie looked at the photos that tugged at her, made her wonder if that woman hadn’t told her the truth yesterday after all.
Longing, she finally decided. Evie Carter looked at those photos like a woman who, sixteen years later, just wanted her father back.
It made D.D. wonder what other regrets the woman had, and how many might involve her husband and his own death just two nights ago.
Knock on the door. Neil poked his head in. He appeared nervous.
“Got something on the fake IDs?” she asked immediately, collecting her notes.
“Ah, no. You got a visitor.”
“I have a visitor?”
“A fed. SSA Kimberly Quincy from the Atlanta office. She’s here with Flora Dane and some other guy. Says she needs to talk.”
“No,” D.D. said.
“Too late,” a female voice drawled from behind Neil.
D.D. sighed. “Shit.”
CHAPTER 18
FLORA
MEMORY IS A FUNNY THING. There are moments that sear into our minds. If we’re lucky, it’s because we’re happy—first kiss, wedding day, birth of a child. The kind of experience where you both have it and stand outside of it because your brain recognizes this is something so special that you’re going to want to relive it.
I have some of those memories. Being asked to prom by the cutest boy in high school, practically floating home to share the news with my mom. The first time I got a baby fox to eat a piece of hot dog out of my hand. A particular bedtime ritual my mom used to have when I couldn’t get to sleep. And the nights my brother and I turned it on her, giggling hysterically as we pretended to tuck her into bed, but really ended up in a giant mosh pile of limbs in the middle of her mattress, a tangle of family.
I have other memories, too.
The moment I woke up in a coffin-sized box. The sound the first woman made, when Jacob stuck in the knife, followed by the look in her eyes as she stared right into me, knowing he was killing her, knowing she was dying, knowing I was doing nothing to stop him.
Now I have to face the fact there could be six more of her out there, six more girls who never made it home. Maybe Jacob made good on his promise and fed them to the gators. Maybe they’re buried on his property, if I could just help figure out where that is.
Memory. Such a fickle tool. And for better or worse, the best option I have left.
* * *
—
I DON’T SLEEP. After leaving Keith Edgar’s house, I return to Cambridge, then pace my tiny apartment until my elderly landlords politely knock on the door and ask me if I’m all right. After assuring them I’m just dandy, I give up on walking continuous circles and debate calling Sarah. She’s a fellow survivor who once held off a murderer by using the severed arm of her just-butchered roommate. She’s also the closest thing I have to a friend.
She understood bad nights. How the brain could spin for days, weeks, months at a time, an endless cycle of remembered traumas from falling off your bike at seven to being attacked by a knife-wielding maniac at twenty. Trying to sort out the experiences, Samuel had explained to me once. It felt like my brain was racing wildly, but really, it was searching for patterns, matches, order. Something that would give it context, so my mind could go, Aha—that’s what happened. Then, presumably, people like Sarah and me would sleep again. Except some experiences defied definition. So our brains kept spinning long after the horror had ended.
If not Sarah, then I could call Samuel, who most likely was expecting to hear from me after this afternoon’s discussion. Or my mother, who would be simultaneously honored and stricken to have me finally open up about what it’s like to be me.
But I don’t feel like talking. I pick up the clothes in my bedroom. I wipe down kitchen counters. I rearrange the four things I have in the fridge. Then, in a burst of inspiration, I try on my own to recall the original place Jacob had held me. The first coffin-sized box in a dingy basement of some house. Small windows, up high. Shit-brown carpet that I used to comb through with my fingers, marveling at how many shades of brown it took to make carpet the same color as dirt. I jot down notes. Ugly carpet. Moldy sofa. Stairs leading up. Pine trees. When he finally led me out of the house, I remember pine trees.
But my mind keeps ping-ponging, until I can’t be sure anymore if I was remembering the first place, or that second motel, or what about that place in Florida? I grow light-headed, can feel the edges of the panic attack start to build, when it’s been years since I’ve been humbled by such a thing.
Four A.M., sweaty, panting, and borderline feral, I opt for a different memory. The day I was rescued, an image that should be higher on the happiness scale. I force myself to sit calmly on the floor of my apartment, recall exactly the crash of the motel window. The canister of tear
gas bouncing into the room, then releasing an ominous hiss. My eyes welling, my nose running. Then the front door blowing open, and a horde of heavily armored men pouring into the tiny room. They scream at me, yell at Jacob. Scream louder when I pick up the gun. Fall silent when I’ve done what I had to do.
Then, Kimberly Quincy. The fed. She’d been the first to greet me outside the room, her arm around my shoulders, telling me over and over again I’d be all right. Everything was okay now. I was safe.
I remember her voice clearly. Clipped, firm, in control. The kind of voice that inspired confidence.
But what does SSA Kimberly Quincy look like? For some reason, that piece of the puzzle keeps escaping from me. I work on it for an hour. The sound of her voice. The feel of her arm around my shoulders. Me, turning my head, looking straight at her.
I had to have seen her. My eyes had been red and swollen, my nose a snotty mess, but still . . . No matter how much I try, I still can’t bring her face to mind. She remains a voice in the dark. Clipped. Firm. In control.
The kind of woman I’m going to need for the day ahead.
Five A.M., I give up on sleep completely and go for a run in the ice-cold dark, neon vest glowing, headlamp beaming. Then shower. Bagel. Black coffee. Still hours to kill.
I boot up my computer, check in on my new friend Keith Edgar, who, interestingly enough, has posted nothing from yesterday on his true-crime blog site. Trying to impress me with his restraint? Or just waiting for something more significant to share?
I decide not to worry about it for now. Instead, I cycle back to where I’d started my evening. Memory. Such a fickle tool.
I read anything and everything about how to handle traumatized minds, from EMDR to virtual reality simulations to old-fashioned hypnosis. Ten A.M., my phone finally rings. That familiar clipped voice: “My plane has landed.”
