Final Vows

by Karen Kingsbury

  Brian felt a surge of excitement race through his body. Someone else might have thought nothing of the blood spots, completely missing their significance. But Brian had just returned from San Bernardino where he had taken an extensive course on blood spatter taught by Detective Craig Ogino. If anyone knew the subject it was Craig Ogino. His reputation for unraveling murders by examining the angle and diameter of blood spots preceded him in crime-solving circles throughout the country.

  Brian had been fascinated by the course. Simply put, when a bullet enters the body, a certain amount of blood sprays backward toward the origin of the bullet. The objective, as Ogino pointed out early in the course, was to learn as much as possible about that bloody back spatter. In doing so, they had fired bullets into porous sponges soaked in a red bloodlike liquid. For hours they had examined the resulting red back splash, determining how the spots varied depending upon how far away the gun was fired and the size and speed of the bullet.

  When Brian returned to Burbank after three days with Craig Ogino, he had gained more knowledge about bloodstains, blood spots, and back spatter than he thought he’d ever be able to use. But that was before he discovered Dan’s bloodstained pants.

  According to Dan he had been outside the house that cool March evening when Carol was shot. Minutes later, after he had run into the house and himself been shot by the burglars, Dan knelt at Carol’s side to take her pulse and whisper words of encouragement. In doing so, he knelt in the blood near her head, picking up splotches of blood on his knees and the lower portion of his pants. For nearly a year now Dan’s explanation had gone unchallenged.

  As Brian scrutinized the pants, he didn’t need Craig Ogino in the room to tell him that Dan’s account didn’t add up. There must have been nearly fifty blood spots on the pant legs. Tiny, circular spots. Brian believed those spots told a truer version of the story.

  Firearms specialists and field evidence technicians had already determined that Carol had been shot from a range of no more than four feet. One of the bullets had pierced the major artery that ran along her spine. Brian’s newly acquired knowledge told him that when that happened, her blood would have splashed backward, spraying whoever held the gun.

  He stared at the pants for a moment longer and then snapped into action. He walked to the other end of the table and picked up a pile of photographs taken at the scene. Quickly, he thumbed through them until he found what he was looking for. Pictures of Carol’s body. Even though the pictures had been taken in a poorly lit room, they clearly showed that Carol’s blood had saturated the plush carpet in the hallway of the Montecalvo home. Her blood had been so deep that closeup pictures showed a crusty ring of dried blood around the perimeter of her face. The blood had been deep enough for her face to be submerged in it. If Dan had knelt anywhere near Carol’s head, as he claimed, the knees and portions of the lower pant legs would have been saturated with bloodstains. Brian put the photos down, walked briskly back to where the pants lay, and looked at them again.

  If Dan had been outside when Carol was shot, how did he wind up with what certainly appeared to be back spatter on his pant legs? Brian believed the answer was obvious. That afternoon Brian made a phone call to San Bernardino and the next day he was back in Craig Ogino’s office.

  “Craig,” Brian said. “What do the bloodstains on these pants tell you?” Brian carefully lifted the pants from a brown bag he was carrying and spread them out on Ogino’s desk.

  Ogino did not hesitate. “Looks like a clear-cut case of back spatter to me. Whoever wore these pants either fired the gun or stood alongside the gunman when the shooting took place. Want me to take a closer look?”

  Brian nodded. “I want you to be sure. The most accurate opinion you can give me.”

  Ogino did not need to be asked twice. After all, he was an expert in the subject. He had even set up a miniature laboratory in a room adjacent to his office, complete with microscopes and stations for experimentation. Ogino carried the pants to the nearest microscope and began analyzing the spots.

  “What’s the story behind the pants?” asked Ogino, as he carefully took some measurements.

  “Worn by a man I think killed his wife,” Brian answered. “He says he was outside when she was shot, came in to help her and knelt in blood beside her head. Presto: Blood spots.”

  Ogino looked closely at the pants. “I don’t think he was outside when she was shot. Unless the lady’s blood sprayed twenty feet straight through a stucco wall.”

  Thirty minutes passed in silence as Ogino performed painstaking tests on each blood spot. When he was finished, he set the pants down and released a deep sigh.

  “She was shot from a range of two to four feet,” he said. Brian recognized that the man was not asking a question.

  “Did I tell you that?” Brian asked, somewhat confused as to how this genius detective knew that detail about Carol Montecalvo’s murder.

  “You didn’t have to,” he said, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “The spots tell it all.”

  “What else do they say, Craig?” Brian leaned forward. This was the moment he had been waiting for.

  “If I hear them right, they say, ‘Well done, Brian. You’ve got your man.’ ”

  By 10 o’clock the next morning Brian was sitting in Sergeant Kight’s office explaining the battery of tests Ogino had performed before he concluded that the pants were worn by a man who had indeed pulled the trigger. The excitement in the room was palpable.

  “Of course,” Kight said, frustrated that they had missed the detail for so long. “Those pants have been here all the time. It’s obvious now. Here we’ve been running around trying to find some evidence to hang this guy and the best piece of all has been right under our noses.”

  A satisfied smile came across Brian’s face. Dan Montecalvo would be locked away for a long, long time. “Now, how ’bout getting this thing to trial,” he said, getting up from his chair and moving toward the door.

  Kight paused for a moment. “Well, that’s the thing. Because the Montecalvo case resembled the Anderson murder, sheriff’s department is still checking evidence for us. They’ve asked us to let them look at all the evidence. Let’s get the pants over to them, make sure they arrive at the same results.”

  Brian grimaced. “How long will that take?”

  “Not long.”

  One morning a week later Kight stuck his head through Brian’s open office door.

  “Got a minute?”

  Brian stood up and followed the sergeant into the hallway. “What’s up?”

  “Evidence technicians from the sheriff’s department just sent over a report. Seems they finished running tests on Dan’s pants.”

  The excitement was beginning to swell again. If the results were in, that meant the police were only hours away from making an arrest. Every instinct told Brian that this could be a tremendously satisfying day. In his mind Brian began making plans to celebrate Dan’s arrest later that night with Kathy. Not until he saw the frustration in Kight’s eyes did he snap back to reality. Kight’s eyes told him that incredibly they had hit another brick wall, that somehow a blood expert at the sheriff’s department had disagreed with Ogino’s findings.

  Brian knew that if the experts disagreed over what caused the blood spots on Dan’s pants, the conflicting testimony would be useless in court. The prosecution would bring Ogino in to testify that the spots were back spatter, proof that Dan had shot his wife. Then the defense would bring in the sheriff’s expert to say the spots had resulted from kneeling in blood. The autopsy had determined that Carol had been shot at close range. Without back spatter on his clothing, the defense could prove Dan had been nowhere near Carol when she was shot. This kind of conflict would likely be more damaging to the prosecution because at least one explanation for the spots would prove Dan’s innocence.

  Ultimately, if the experts disagreed, Brian knew he would be put back to square one. He waited a full fifteen seconds
before speaking. His voice was little more than a whisper. “What’d they say?”

  Kight shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Brian.” The sergeant lowered his eyes to the floor. “He disagreed with Ogino. Said it wasn’t back spatter.” Kight picked up a report on his desk. “The report says back spatter would have covered the length of the pant legs. In his opinion, since the spots are concentrated around the knee area, they were most likely caused by Dan kneeling in blood.”

  Chapter 16

  The utter quiet of the place was driving Suzan Brown crazy. There were no appliances, no records or tapes, nothing in the tiny rented apartment that made the slightest bit of noise.

  That spring 1989, she had become more dependent on drugs than at any time in her past. Since moving out of her house on South Myers Street, Suzan had not seen or heard from Ron Hardy. Occasionally, some part of her psyche continued to believe that she and Ron had somehow been involved in Carol’s murder. She could picture herself rummaging through the Montecalvos’ cash box just as Carol walked into the house. Carol had seen them, asked them what they were doing, and then they had fired two shots at her. Next, Dan had come running into the house and they had fired one bullet at him. Then they had left out the back door, jumping their neighbor’s fence and scurrying into their own backyard.

  Other times, she was equally convinced that she had not been involved, that she had been home when the shots were fired and had then heard someone running through her backyard knocking over her woodpile.

  The resulting confusion had sent her into a deep, dark depression in the midst of which she had moved three times. She had also made several plans to commit suicide, but had been unable to carry them through. Drugs seemed to be her only means of escape, even if they had left her nearly penniless. By then, she was spending nearly all her money on speed and junk food. Lately, she had been writing bad checks to pay for the drugs when her pension money ran out.

  On that April afternoon, more than a year after Carol’s murder, two days had passed since she had been able to get her hands on any speed. Suzan glanced down at her hands and held her fingers straight out. They shook violently until she could no longer stand it, and she drew her fingers into tightly clenched fists.

  At moments like this Suzan wondered if she hadn’t perhaps already died and gone to hell. If she had, she knew it was because she deserved it. As far as she was concerned, hell certainly couldn’t be any lonelier, any more frightening, than the horrifying quiet of her apartment.

  Suzan rolled her wheelchair into the kitchen for the sixth time that hour. Frantically she pulled out drawers and emptied containers. There had to be some speed somewhere. When her search proved fruitless Suzan heard someone release a shaky deep breath and then realized the sound had come from her own mouth.

  For a moment her eyes glazed over and she leaned back in her chair, almost willing herself to disappear, to no longer exist. She knew when this problem had started—or at least when it had gotten worse. March 31, 1988. The night Carol was murdered. The night she had witnessed Carol being murdered.

  Maybe the authorities would arrest her for writing bad checks. At least then, in the secure confines of a jail cell, she would have someone else to talk to, and someone to take care of her meals and remind her that she was, indeed, still alive.

  She wondered now, as she had hundreds of times each day since Carol’s death, what Carol would say if she knew that her husband was being unfairly treated like a suspect in her murder. Dan didn’t kill Carol. Suzan Brown shuddered, temporarily emerging from the trance she’d fallen into and glancing furtively about the kitchen counter for the drugs she so desperately craved. There were none.

  Her eyes grew foggy again, her mind slipping back in time. Her real problems had started years ago, even she knew that much. Back in Vietnam. Back when she still had a future in the medical profession.

  In the late 1960s, Suzan had just, become a registered nurse. Excited, she suddenly felt bold enough to tell her parents the truth about her personal life. She proudly laid out the facts. She was a lesbian, she told them, had been for years, and thought it was time her parents knew. There had been an agonizing moment of silence.

  “Is this some kind of a joke, Suzan?” her father had asked.

  Suzan had shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another. “No. It’s the truth. I thought you’d want to know.”

  More silence followed as Suzan’s mother moved to stand beside her father. When he finally spoke, Suzan knew he was speaking for both of them. “Get out! No daughter of ours would ever be so sick and twisted. We won’t have someone like you living under our roof.”

  Suzan knew then that she no longer had a family to whom she could turn. Later her friends would say that the confrontation with her parents had scarred her for life. She buried any pain she’d felt from the incident and quickly grew unfeeling toward the world. If her own parents didn’t want her, no one would. After that Suzan lived life with reckless abandon, as if she no longer cared who suffered as a result of her actions.

  With nowhere to live and no one to whom she could turn, Suzan enlisted in the United States Army and was promptly sent to Vietnam. She arrived in Saigon in 1968 to work at an army hospital where casualties from the Tet Offensive were being treated. Overnight Suzan found she no longer had time to think about her parents or her sexual preference, not amid life and death, blood and bandages, missing limbs and missing men. Her existence centered around the challenge of pushing herself to the limit to save one more boy from becoming another statistic in a war that made less and less sense.

  By the end of each day Suzan would take off her blood-spattered coat, scrub the smell of antiseptic from her hands, and barely make it home before dropping into bed exhausted. At first this endless routine made her feel better about herself. No matter what her parents thought of her, she had her life, her ability to make a difference. Those early days of treating patients brought Suzan as close to caring about others as she would ever come again in her lifetime.

  Eventually, though, she began to dread her patients, many of whom were heavily dependent on drugs. There were soldiers who used heavy amounts of marijuana to help ease their pain and others who were hooked on speed to take the edge off the depression that had settled over so many of them. There were patients who avoided drugs, too. Good boys from good homes, sent to Vietnam to stop communism from taking over the world.

  It began to seem to Suzan—even if it wasn’t the truth—that when she did treat such a patient, he rarely survived. Good always died, and in her life, evil always seemed to prevail. When a good soldier survived, too often both legs would be amputated, or else he would be paralyzed. Gradually, a bitter hopelessness began to make its way through Suzan’s psyche. A year later, when one of her patients gave her a tablet of speed, she no longer considered the ramifications of using the drug. She slipped into the hospital bathroom, took the tablet, and waited. For the next several hours she felt as exhilarated as she had when she first arrived in Vietnam.

  There was no turning back. In the hospital, certain patients made speed readily available. Before Suzan knew what had happened, the drug had not only become part of her daily routine, it had also become a part of her. Of course, after the first time she never again felt that same energetic feeling. In fact she seemed always to require more of the drug. But Suzan knew that without it her life would be unbearable.

  That had been nearly twenty years ago. Now, as Suzan blinked back the memory, it seemed like a vague piece of somebody else’s past. Could that really have been her life? A nurse in Vietnam? Saving lives? Suzan wondered sometimes if she hadn’t perhaps imagined the whole scenario.

  But then she sometimes felt that way about Carol’s murder, too.

  Suzan glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. It, too, was silent, the second hand making its incessant rounds without a sound. Two o’clock. She still had time.

  As if propelled into action by some
unseen force, Suzan suddenly stood up, grabbed her purse, and walked out of the apartment. It was 3 P.M. when she returned. The plan had worked. Another bad check passed off at another two-bit check-cashing joint. With cash in hand it hadn’t been that difficult to get hold of some speed, which she had popped immediately. Her twitching, cramping body had desperately needed its fix.

  Suzan walked to her wheelchair and sat down. The silence was even louder than before and now evening was falling. Somehow Suzan knew she could not tolerate one more night alone in that apartment. She wheeled her chair into the bathroom and reached into the medicine cabinet beneath the sink. Sleeping pills. Every speed freak needed them. She remembered the first time she had used them, after three sleepless days and nights of binging on speed. Speed had given her a paranoid feeling that sleep would never come again, but even that feeling hadn’t been this bad.

  She picked up a dirty glass near the sink and filled it with water. Quickly, she fumbled with the bottle of sleeping pills, recoiling as the sound of rattling pills broke the silence in the room. Nervously, she sifted nearly twenty pills onto the fleshy palm of her hand and stuffed them into her mouth.

  At that instant she remembered something one of the soldiers had said to her. Both his legs had been amputated and tears rolled down his face as he took Suzan’s hand in his.

  “You saved my life, Suzan. If you never do anything else again you can die knowing you saved my life.”

  But then his words became those of her father’s instead. “No daughter of ours would ever be so sick and twisted. . . . No daughter of ours would ever be so sick and twisted.”

  The words ricocheted off the bathroom walls. Suzan reached for the glass of water and in one swift motion put it to her lips, gulping enough water to wash the pills down. There. It was over. This time she had done it.