by Chris Culver
I couldn’t argue with that, so I nodded.
“Where can I see this video?”
“Public Safety Office. They watch everything.”
I didn’t know whether I believed him, but I nodded again.
“Go back to class,” I said. “I’ll check out the video.”
He left. I wasn’t sure what to think. Everywhere I turned with this case, I found smoke and mirrors. This was getting old. I walked to the Office of Public Safety and told the officer at the reception desk what I needed. She called one of the other officers to watch the front desk, and we walked to a small room with four television monitors mounted on the walls. Those cameras allowed them to watch every building on campus. I wondered whether the students knew how well the school spied on them.
I told the officer what I needed, and she spooled up the correct video. The Sigma Iota fraternity had security cameras on each of its four exits. The officer put one camera view on each of the monitors and gave me a paddle that allowed me to speed up, slow down, or stop the video.
It took almost two hours, but I reviewed every frame shot between 6 PM on Saturday and 10 AM on Sunday. As Logan said, he entered the building at a little after six and didn’t leave until nine the next morning. I pushed back from the table and rubbed my eyes.
Laura had strung Logan along and even sent him nude pictures of another girl to keep him interested in her. She’d manipulated him and used him to get something she wanted. More than anyone I had seen so far, Logan had a reason to want her dead, and he was the only person I had investigated so far who couldn’t have done it.
Every lead I found left me banging my head against the wall. I still didn’t know what was going on at Reid Chemical, but too many people had gotten hurt because of it. I needed to wrap this up and make some arrests. I just wished I knew how to do that.
35
After wasting the afternoon at Waterford College, I needed good news.
I didn’t get it.
I drove back to my station and parked in the lot. Almost the moment I opened my door, though, my cell phone buzzed. It was my vet. I closed my eyes as the strength left my arms and legs. He had asked me to stop by and talk about Roger, but I had forgotten. I ran a hand across my brow to wipe away sweat before answering.
“Dr. Johnson, it’s Joe Court. Sorry I didn’t call earlier. I’ve been busy at work.”
“That’s all right,” he said, his voice subdued. “Are you free to talk for a minute?”
I swallowed a lump in my throat. “Please tell me Roger didn’t die while I was at work.”
“He’s alive, but he’s not drinking or eating. We ran a blood profile and urinalysis on him. Roger has anemia, and his electrolyte levels are abnormal. We ran an ultrasound yesterday to check out his kidneys. They’re very small for a dog his size, which—along with his other symptoms—is indicative of chronic renal failure. I’m sorry, but we need to talk about his end of life, and the sooner we talk, the better.”
I blinked but said nothing.
“Are you still there, Detective?” he asked after a pause.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice a low rasp. It was all I could get out. “I’m here.”
“If you’d like to come by, he’s awake and alert,” said the vet. “This would be a good time to tell him goodbye. He’s in a lot of pain. We can talk about the procedure when you get here.”
Procedure. It was such a cold, clinical word. It didn’t convey what would happen.
“Can I take him home?” I asked. “I can give him a shot or whatever it takes.”
The vet hesitated. “It would be kinder if we did it here without moving him.”
I closed my eyes and nodded. My throat was tight, and my lip quivered.
“All right,” I said. “I’m on my way.”
I hung up and drove. When I got to the vet’s office, Roger lay on his side on a big pillow. He licked his lips and thumped his tail once when he saw me, but he didn’t lift his head. His eyes looked glassy. He didn’t seem to know where he was, but he recognized me. For the next hour, I held his head in my lap and told him how much he had brought to my life and how much I loved him.
And then I told him goodbye.
I didn’t cry in the office. For the moment, my case didn’t matter. I had other things on my mind. After the vet and his assistant wheeled Roger away, I drove home and grabbed a shovel. I dug until my arms and back ached and every muscle of my body screamed at me to stop. Then I kept going until my aches turned to pain and I couldn’t move my arms. As the moon rose and the stars appeared, I stopped digging.
The hole was about five feet deep and four feet around. It was big enough for Roger to rest in. I climbed out of it and sat on the edge. The tears came as I looked into the cold, dark earth. I drew from the silence around me and allowed the solitude to creep into my bones.
I didn’t like being alone. For years, I had pushed everybody away when they tried to draw close. In my mind, that had made me strong, but it wasn’t strength that had persuaded me to keep the world at bay. It was fear. Roger showed me I didn’t have to live like that. He loved me with reckless abandon even when I didn’t love myself. I could never thank him enough for everything he had brought to my life.
A big part of me wanted to drink until I stopped hurting. Booze helped me cope. Tonight, I didn’t want to run from the pain. I wanted to experience it. I wanted to remember my friend, but I didn’t want to be alone.
My hands trembled as I called my mom. She answered on the second ring.
“Hey, Joe,” she said, her voice light. “I didn’t expect to hear from you. How are you doing?”
“I’ve had a bad day,” I said. “I needed to hear a friendly voice.”
“Everything okay?”
I thought about Roger and about my empty house. Part of me wanted to tell her everything was fine and to cut the call short so I could get the vodka from my freezer and drink. I didn’t, though. Instead, I did something I hated doing. I let myself be vulnerable.
“No, it’s not okay. Do you have a minute? I need to talk.”
It was two in the morning when my phone rang. My eyes refused to focus, and my back and arms still ached from digging Roger’s grave. I rolled over and turned on a light on my nightstand before grabbing the phone. According to my caller ID, it was the front desk at my station.
I rubbed my eyes as the phone rang a third time. Then I ran my finger across the screen to answer.
“Yeah?” I said, my voice low.
“Sorry to wake you up, Joe,” said Jason Zuckerburg, our night dispatcher. “We’ve got a shooting at Waterford College. Delgado’s in charge, but he asked for you.”
“Okay,” I said, sighing. Jason wouldn’t have called me in the middle of the night for a normal shooting. Something was up. “Was Logan Reid involved?”
“No,” he said, his voice low. “This involved a young woman named June Wellman.”
My stomach crashed into my feet. I closed my eyes.
“He shot her, didn’t he?” I asked, my voice low.
“No, she shot a boy named Chad Hamilton,” he said. “You should get over there. She was asking for you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tell Delgado I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
My head sunk into my pillows after I hung up.
“Shit.”
I dressed and headed out. The college streets were empty, and I didn’t know where I was going until I saw the police cars outside the Sigma Iota fraternity. There were probably a hundred young people in pajamas on the front lawn of the dorm next door. I parked about half a block away and jogged toward the scene.
Bob Reitz and Tracy Carruthers, two of our uniformed officers on the night shift, were stretching crime-scene tape around trees to erect a perimeter. They must have just gotten there. I nodded hello to them both.
“Hey,” I said. “Is Delgado around?”
Bob pointed toward the police cruisers.
“Thanks,” I said, already turni
ng and hurrying away. As I approached the cruisers, Delgado stepped out of the backseat of one and walked toward me, a scowl on his face.
“Hey,” I said. “Dispatch called, so I’m here. What’s going on?”
“You tell me,” he said, crossing his arms. “Girl only wants to talk to you.”
“I know her,” I said. “What’s the story here?”
Delgado looked toward the fraternity house and pulled a notepad from his pocket. He licked his lips.
“Campus police received reports of shots fired in the Sigma Iota fraternity house at ten after one this morning. They arrived at the house within moments to find dozens of men and women running through the front doors. They corralled the students and called us for assistance.
“Bob Reitz got here at 1:14 AM. Tracy Carruthers got here at 1:16 AM. While campus security dealt with the crowd outside, Bob and Tracy cleared the building’s interior. They sent a couple more kids out before coming across the crime scene on the third floor. There, they found a young woman named June Wellman holding a Ruger EC9 pistol. A young man named Chad Hamilton lay on a couch. He had a gunshot wound to the forehead.”
A knot grew in my stomach, and I swore under my breath. Delgado cleared his throat.
“You got something to say?” he asked.
“Chad raped her a few days ago,” I said. “Let me talk to her. I’ll see what’s going on.”
“You sure you can remain objective?”
I narrowed my gaze at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Someone raped June, and she shot the guy,” said Delgado, blinking. “Someone raped you when you were a teenager, and you shot the guy. The parallels are obvious.”
My body ached, and my eyelids threatened to stay closed every time I blinked. I didn’t want to get in a fight, so I balled my hands into fists and counted to five in my head before responding.
“I see the parallels, and I understand where you’re coming from,” I said. “If you want me to talk to her, I will. If you want me to go home, I will. I’ll do my job gladly and to the best of my abilities, but you don’t get to call me to a crime scene in the middle of the night so you can question my professionalism in front of our colleagues.”
Officers Reitz and Carruthers looked away, both trying to seem busy. Delgado’s eyes narrowed as I crossed my arms.
“We’ll talk about this later,” he said. “For now, talk to the shooter. Get me a confession.”
“Will do, boss,” I said, walking to the cruiser he had just exited. June Wellman sat in the backseat crying. Since I didn’t know what had happened, I didn’t know how I felt about her at the moment. They had cuffed her hands in front of her. A hair tie held her brunette hair behind her head. She looked tiny in that car. I opened the door and sat beside her. “You okay to talk?”
She nodded, so I shut my door and sighed. I didn’t look at her as I ran a hand across my brow.
“So you shot him,” I said.
She nodded, and I closed my eyes and swore in my head.
“Okay,” I said, reaching into my purse for my phone. I opened a recording app and put my phone on the seat between us. “Before you say anything else, I need you to listen. June Wellman, you are under arrest for the shooting death of Chad Hamilton. You have certain rights. First, you have the right to remain silent. You don’t have to talk to anyone. If you choose to talk to me, the prosecutors can use anything you tell me against you in court. You have the right to have an attorney anytime a law enforcement officer interviews you. If you or your family has an attorney, I can call him now and have him come down. If you can’t afford an attorney, the court will provide one for you free of charge. Bearing those rights in mind, do you want to talk with me right now?”
I wanted her to say no, but she nodded again.
“I need you to acknowledge your rights aloud,” I said.
She nodded once more and cleared her throat.
“Yes,” she said. “I want to talk.”
I glanced out the window to see George Delgado talking to Bob Reitz on the periphery of the crime scene.
“In your own words, tell me what happened tonight.”
“I shot him in the head because he deserved it.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to think how I should best approach this. “Why did you shoot him?”
Her eyes locked onto mine. They almost pleaded.
“Because of you. I did it because of what you did.”
All at once, a heavy weight pressed down on my chest.
“Let’s take a step back. Tell it to me from the beginning.”
36
June’s story was simple and tragic. After she and I shared my dinner in front of the Waterford College entrance, she looked me up and read dozens of articles about what had happened to me. She learned that after he got out of prison, Christopher Hughes—my rapist—came to my house. He tried to kill me and might have succeeded had Roger not been there. Instead, I killed him. June thought that made me a hero.
She tried to move on with her life as I had told her, but it was hard to move on when she saw her rapist every day on campus—especially when she saw him with another girl. He had his arm draped across her shoulders, and he smiled at her the same way he had smiled at June.
When she saw that, she said, something within her broke. She said she knew he’d rape her, too. Maybe she was right, but it didn’t matter. Since I couldn’t put him in prison, she decided she’d take care of the problem. She went to a sporting goods store in St. Louis and bought a gun. Then, she took it to campus and snuck into Chad’s room at his fraternity. She told him she was sorry and that she wanted to make amends for lying to the police about him.
They watched a movie and had drinks. At eleven, she slipped three Rohypnol pills into his beer. Once he fell asleep, she shot him in the forehead. It was as cold-blooded a murder as I had ever seen. Once she finished speaking, I turned off the recording app on my phone and looked at her.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said, shaking my head. “You murdered him.”
“He would have raped his new girlfriend. I did the right thing.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said. “If his new girlfriend’s safety worried you, you should have called me. I would have spoken to her. Your sorority sisters could have spoken to her. You could have warned her about the guy she was dating. You had options. Instead, you shot him. Get a lawyer, June. You need one.”
I threw open my door and stepped out. My skin felt both warm and cold, and a pit had grown in my stomach. Muscles all over my body had grown tight. I wanted to run and run. Overriding all my anger and my disappointment, though, I felt a profound sense of wrongness.
Delgado came toward me with his eyebrows raised.
“Well?” he asked.
“I got your confession,” I said. “She picked up the gun yesterday from a store in St. Louis. Then she snuck into Chad’s fraternity, drugged him, and shot him when he fell asleep.”
“Tell me you recorded this confession.”
I nodded. “It’s on my phone. I’ll send you the file. Before letting her talk, I explained her Miranda rights. She acknowledged them and agreed to talk anyway. You should have everything you need to charge her with murder with special circumstances.”
Delgado opened his eyes wide.
“You think we should go for the death penalty,” he said, lowering his chin and smiling just a little. “This girl must have pissed you off.”
“She planned this,” I said. “She drugged him and murdered him in his sleep.”
Delgado nodded before holding out his hand.
“I owe you an apology,” he said. “You did good today.”
I shook his hand. “Thank you, but I was just doing my job. I’ll go by the Public Safety Office. The fraternity has surveillance cameras on every entrance to the building. We should be able to see her sneaking in.”
Delgado whistled and then shook his head before looking to the fraternity.
“This is
a bad place to murder your boyfriend,” he said.
“He wasn’t her boyfriend,” I said.
He wished me luck and then walked toward the fraternity. Waterford College owned several thousand acres around St. Augustine County, but its actual campus was small. It only took a few minutes to walk from the fraternity house to the Public Safety Office. The night air cleared my head, allowing the shock of the shooting to wear off.
I knocked on the office’s door before pulling it open and sticking my head inside. The man behind the counter wore khaki pants and a polo shirt with the college’s logo stitched across the breast. He was tall and had a medium build with gray hair swept to the right. Acne scars pockmarked his face, making him look older than he was. He stood up as I walked in.
“I’m Rusty Peterson,” he said, shaking my hand. “I’m the director of Public Safety.”
“Detective Joe Court. St. Augustine County Sheriff’s Department. Are you a sworn officer, Director Peterson, or are you a college administrator?”
“Bit of both,” he said. “I spent twenty years with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police. My badge says captain.”
“Enjoying your retirement?” I asked.
“Until tonight,” he said, drawing in a deep breath. “We haven’t had a murder on campus in forty years.”
“I need to see the surveillance footage from the Sigma Iota house tonight.”
He lowered his chin. “We don’t have cameras inside the building, so we didn’t capture the murder.”
“Not a problem,” I said, nodding. “I talked to the shooter, and now I’m trying to verify her story. She said she snuck into the house at eleven. Based on what I’ve seen of the surveillance cameras around here, it should be on video.”
He nodded and motioned for me to follow him around the counter.
“Chad Hamilton was a jerk, but he didn’t deserve to be shot in his sleep.”
“June didn’t deserve to be raped,” I said. “Nobody’s walking away a winner on this one.”
