by Nancy Geary
She turned to Jack. His eyes remained fixed on the door, and he seemed to ignore her. Instead he stood and repeated his command for what she knew was the final time. “Police! Open up! We have you surrounded!”
Then he kicked the door, heel leading, a singular thrust using all the power in his leg. The wood splintered. He kicked again and the door fell forward off its hinges.
“Go! Go! Go!” she muttered to herself through a clenched jaw. No matter how many times she’d stormed a home, it was never simple. Fear mingled with an acute sense of mortality. She was trained. She knew what she was doing, but it never got routine. She stepped inside, moving past Jack into the darkened entrance.
Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the sudden lack of light. The foyer was nearly empty but for an overturned bentwood rocker in one corner. Moving forward, spinning ever so slightly on the axis of her body with arms outstretched and gun raised, she made her way down a narrow corridor. She sensed Jack’s presence behind her, but neither said a word. As they progressed she was acutely aware of a pungent odor, a stench that grew steadily stronger as she approached a doorway. The door was ajar and she hesitated for a moment, her instincts warning her against glancing inside. A ray of sunlight through the tiny window, the glass of which had been shot away, illuminated the overflowed toilet. Pieces of glass lay in a brown fluid that covered the floor. Blood stained the small pedestal sink, and a toothbrush floated in the clogged drain. What appeared to be human feces were smeared over a good portion of the walls, making a collage of brown and crimson on the peeling paisley wall-paper.
She gagged and coughed once to clear her throat.
Jack grimaced, then nodded, indicating that he would continue forward away from the stench and she should follow. Since someone—probably Calvin—had fired on a police officer from this bathroom, they could leave it to the Crime Scene team. Let them identify the bodily fluids and figure out what in hell’s name had happened in a space no bigger than a closet.
They rounded the corner and stepped into a kitchen. It had a cracked linoleum floor, a stainless-steel sink, and a refrigerator with a door that hung slightly askew on a loose hinge. A small Formica table and two chairs, one of which had a tear in its plastic upholstery, were the only furnishings. On the table was a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter from which protruded the handle of a knife, and a tub of grape jelly. A meal interrupted undercut the seeming normalcy of the room.
An exposed lightbulb dangled from a cord. As it swayed slightly, it cast an odd shadow against the wall. Lucy surveyed the space, looking for signs of movement. It was then that she saw him. Tucked in one corner, hidden behind the shadow of a pantry door, was a person kneeling in a yogic child’s pose, his head on the floor as if in a prayer position. Jack, too, stared ahead at the figure.
“Move slowly, keep your arms in front of you, and stand up,” Jack directed.
Lucy could hear muffled sobs and saw movement as the man’s chest rose and fell, but he still didn’t look up. She took a step forward and spoke softly. “Calvin? Are you Calvin Roth?” Another step. She couldn’t see his hands. “Just do as we say. We won’t shoot. It’s okay.” She stopped. Her legs shook slightly and she felt perspiration run down her chest. Her bulletproof vest was too tight and her breathing was strained, but there was no time for adjustments.
Seconds passed as the three of them stayed immobile in their triangular configuration. Lucy could hear footsteps approaching but didn’t turn around to look. No one said a word. Finally, she spoke again. “Are you hurt?” She thought she saw his head turn, but couldn’t interpret his response. “Calvin, we have a warrant to search your home. Your psychiatrist, Dr. Morgan Reese, was murdered. If you know anything about that, we need to talk to you.”
His cry—a wolflike howl—made her spine tingle. The noise reverberated in the small space. He rolled onto his side and hugged his knees in a fetal position. With his bony thighs pressed into his slender chest she realized how thin and frail he was. Curled up in a ball, he seemed no bigger than a seven- or eight-year-old child. Could this possibly be their killer?
Seeing that his hands were empty, she stepped forward and grasped his wrist, which the fingers of even her own petite hand easily reached around. Despite his pathetic demeanor, in every state in the union his conduct was criminal. “You are under arrest for the discharge of a firearm within one hundred feet of a residential dwelling,” she said, reciting the formal language of the statutory violation.
Knowing that Jack still had Calvin in his crosshairs, she reached for the handcuffs in her pocket, snapped the loops around Calvin’s wrists, and squeezed them tighter. Then she pulled him to a standing position, and shoved him slightly to propel him forward toward the door.
“You have the right to remain silent,” Jack began. “If you give up that right, anything you say can, and will, be used against you in a court of law.”
Calvin displayed no sign that he was listening or understanding a word that was said, but Jack pressed on. “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed. . . .”
The words blurred. Virtually every American knew the familiar series of warnings that police had developed following the Supreme Court’s 1966 decision in Miranda v. Arizona. Pressure to talk in response to police interrogation would not be considered impermissible compulsion under the Fifth Amendment so long as a defendant was advised of his rights. Lucy remembered once arresting a drug dealer. A business card in his pocket contained his lawyer’s address and phone number, and a printed summary of the rights he should invoke. But rote recitation by either the defendant or law enforcement didn’t change reality. Cops said what they needed to say, and then did everything in their power to make defendants disregard those constitutional protections. As much as Jack or anyone else in the squad, she wanted Calvin to proceed without representation and confess to a murder. A lawyer would just get in the way.
As she steered Calvin from the room, Jack smiled, a silent signal that the warrant had been a good idea. They just might be able to close this case by the end of the day.
19
4:55 p.m.
The interrogation room was a little piece of hell on earth. Claustrophobically small and soundproof, with a single window that had been covered with industrial tape, it contained nothing but an unsteady table and two chairs. The paint had yellowed and peeled years before. The Homicide Unit had other priorities and allocating some of its precious budget to redo the interior was out of the question. Nonetheless, Lucy wondered whether the atmosphere was designed to be so uncomfortable, so stifling, that witnesses or defendants confessed simply in order to be taken elsewhere.
The adjacent room with its meager array of single-serving offerings—peanut butter crackers, Oreo cookies, cereal bars—doubled as the snack shop and audio and video room. Shelves along one wall held a dusty collection of recording devices. Lucy turned on the monitor. The camera, projecting from a corner behind the door, focused perfectly on Calvin. It was a grainy black-and-white image that, given the angle, distorted facial features somewhat, but not enough to cause identification concerns. Today featured a young Caucasian male, sitting erect in the chair, seemingly frozen, staring at nothing more than the discoloration on the wall.
She flicked the switch, and the monitor went black. According to standard procedure, no filming was to be done before a member of the Homicide Unit knew exactly what a suspected defendant was going to say.
Jack and Assistant District Attorney Nick Santoros waited just outside the interrogation room. They’d already decided on a strategy—Lucy would talk to Calvin first. He seemed scared, confused, but had responded to her initial display of compassion. Perhaps she could win his trust and get him to open up.
As they devised this plan, Lucy had raised what she feared would be a fateful question: Was Calvin so emotionally unstable that he was incompetent to waive his rights? If he confessed, or said anything at all that was incriminating, would a court later fi
nd that he lacked the understanding to have done so knowingly and voluntarily? How much was his psychiatric record going to serve as a shield to protect him? In other words, did they have to get a lawyer for him or risk forever jeopardizing their case?
“Crime Scene recovered part of a squirrel head clogging the drain.” In her mind, evidence of animal mutilation didn’t point toward mental stability. “I’m just concerned that we may not have covered our bases.”
“People do eat squirrels,” Jack had remarked. “You saw the condition of that place. He clearly can’t afford filet mignon.”
“But we were also hoping he owned a navy blue cashmere sweater,” Lucy had replied, reminding him of the forensic evidence gathered the night of Reese’s murder. The items sought in the warrant to search Calvin’s home had included any such quality apparel.
“Look, you two. We’ve got a mental certification that he’s fine,” Nick had reminded them. He’d clearly wanted the debate to end. “Nobody would doubt Reese’s qualifications to have made that judgment, and Roth’s already received the benefit of that medical opinion once. Now he just may have to suffer the detriment, too. If it was good enough for the Inspector Headquarters Division to issue a CCP, it’s good enough for me.”
Still, as Lucy turned the knob, stepped into the seemingly airless room, and saw Calvin start dramatically at the sound, she wondered whether he was entitled to a bit more protection than they were offering.
She pulled out the empty chair beside him, sat down, and rested her hand over his. His skin was cold and clammy. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just going to ask you some questions,” Lucy began, keeping her voice deliberately soft. “I urge you to cooperate. The quicker you can tell us what you know, the sooner this will all be over.”
He turned his head away, and she stared at his profile: a prominent cheekbone, pointed nose, full lower lip, and delicate chin. “You knew Dr. Reese, Morgan Reese, didn’t you?” He didn’t reply, just nodded ever so slightly and then repeated the gesture with more vigor. “She was your psychiatrist, isn’t that right?”
Again he indicated his assent without uttering a word.
“How long had that been the case? How long had you known her?”
Calvin met her gaze, and she noticed for the first time the intense black of his eyes. His lip quivered for a moment. He seemed to speak to avoid bursting into tears. “She’s been my doctor for as long as I can remember. Ten years maybe. Could be more. I’ve lost track.”
She knew from computer information that Calvin was thirty-one years old, but his age was deceiving. A decade seemed closer to half his life.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
He cocked his head to one side. His pause seemed endless. “Last week,” he finally said.
“And where was that?”
This time he didn’t hesitate. “At her office. It was my appointment.”
That Morgan continued to treat this man even after she’d obtained a restraining order meant that every time he’d appeared for his session, he’d been in violation of it, but there was nothing to indicate he’d ever been charged with that offense. Why would she simply disregard the protection she’d sought and obtained?
“How often did you see her?”
“Why do you care?” He set his jaw and, for a moment, she thought he might maintain his defiance, but then he slouched forward and mumbled under his breath, “Twice a week usually, sometimes more. It kind of depended.”
“On how you were feeling?” she suggested. She wanted to appear to be sympathetic, which she was finding she was. It was a feeling she had to resist. This was a suspect in a murder, not some ne’er-do-well adolescent, who had ducked school, hocked a family heirloom, or run a red light in his father’s sports car. But there was something about his posture—stooped shoulders, arms crossed as if for protection, a leg that jiggled nervously up and down—that was way too familiar. She struggled to concentrate even as images of Aidan—the same vacant stare, rounded shoulders, and pallid skin—filled her mind.
The winter before her brother’s fatal accident she’d been home for break and offered to treat him to dinner as a celebration of his early acceptance to Boston College. Lucy had linked her arm through Aidan’s as they sloshed through the snow in Central Square, chattering about her life as a college freshman, her part-time job at the campus bookstore, and the upcoming tryouts for women’s track. She hoped to run the 10,000 meters, but sports at the university level were a far cry from Somerville High School’s competition, where several of her teammates quit senior year because they were pregnant.
The Thai restaurant had been deserted. Most of the Harvard students who normally packed the various eating and drinking establishments around campus were home on midwinter break, and Lucy and her brother had their pick of tables. Lucy chose a spot by the window. Aidan seemed indifferent toward the menu so she ordered for both of them. But neither the cheery waitress nor the heaping plates helped to draw him out. Although he piled rice on his fork, he never took a bite.
Finally Lucy pushed several dishes and glasses aside and took both his hands in hers. “What’s going on?”
He didn’t respond.
“Please talk to me,” Lucy said, pushing the food out of the way. “I’m your soul mate, remember?” That’s what he’d always called her, and now she needed to believe him. “Besides, what could be so horribly wrong?”
He lowered his head. “I can’t go on.”
She could still remember the yellowish light casting a warm glow against the red walls, the smell of spices emanating from the ramen noodles, the sounds of a swinging door scraping the threshold and dishes being stacked in the kitchen.
“I feel like all my senses are gone,” he continued. “As if I’m sinking. Sometimes I punch out windows—the small panes between the mullions—and I can’t stop. About a month ago, I ended up in the emergency room because my hand was so cut up. But pain is the only thing that distracts me, makes me feel alive. You can’t possibly know what it’s like to be breathing, aware, and yet dead at the same time. Unless you crawled inside my head, you can’t possibly understand.”
The rapid jiggling of Calvin’s leg caught Lucy’s attention and brought her back to the present. She forced herself to focus on the interview at hand. “Since you began seeing Dr. Reese, was there ever a time you stopped? I mean, was your therapy continuous?”
“Does that matter?” he asked, although this time he barely mustered the inflection in his voice to transform the comment into a question.
He had to have known about the restraining order. He’d been present, and no doubt been given an opportunity to be heard, at the court proceeding in which the temporary order had been made a permanent one. Had he forgotten? Was he being coy? He was impossible to read.
“Excuse me one moment,” she said, rising abruptly to leave the room. She’d often found that breaking the rhythm of an interview was a way to make progress. Solitary time did things to people’s minds, and she wanted Calvin to have a moment to reflect on what was happening to him. She also needed a few moments to compose herself. Mental distractions were inappropriate at best. They could also be dangerous.
Jack stepped forward as soon as she shut the door behind her. He’d been waiting outside while she conducted the interrogation in order to follow up immediately on issues that arose during the course of discussion.
“I think we should bring in Nancy Moore, the therapist who shared the office with Reese, to explain why Reese kept treating this guy. It doesn’t make sense. And while we’re at it, let’s meet with Dr. Ellery, too,” Lucy said.
“I’ll see if I can reach them by telephone. As you know, I’m not about to leave this building.” He eyed her warily. Lowering his voice, he added, “Are you okay in there?”
She hesitated a moment, reluctant to confess that she was having difficulties. She was the rookie on this team and she didn’t want to let him down. Not for an instant. Not again. She reached for the doo
r handle. “I’m doing my best,” she said with forced confidence as she checked the safety latch on her 9 mm.
Back inside, she decided not to sit down. A change of tack, a different physical posture, it was part of the baiting and waiting game. “How did you meet Dr. Reese?”
Calvin looked up. “The clinic. You know, the one over by the stadium.”
She nodded. Although she wasn’t familiar with all the particulars of the Medical School—the University of Pennsylvania campus was large and she’d had little reason to trespass on the domain of the doctors-in-training—no doubt a free psychiatric clinic was part of it. The details could be ascertained later.
“I had a doctor. This ass. He thought he was, like, Mr. Smart Man. He wanted to be ‘friends,’ whatever the fuck that meant. But he managed to impress my parents ’cause he had all kinds of credentials and wore nerdy glasses. I can’t even remember his name. He took a vacation or did something, and Dr. Reese covered for him.” He leaned toward her, more animated now. “But she seemed different. She really cared.” He paused, and cocked his head. “I guess everyone says that about their shrink. But if you’re me, it helps a lot to feel that someone’s in your corner. As I said, it’d been a long time.”
“And you’ve seen her ever since?”
“You asked me that before, and I didn’t answer.” Calvin smiled, exposing his chipped front tooth, its diagonal edge menacing. “You figure you’ll ask your question another way. I get it.”
“Guess you got me pegged,” Lucy replied.
His tone changed. “What does that mean?”
“An expression, meaning you’ve figured me out, figured out where I’m going.”
“And you can’t say that for yourself, now can you?” he asked.
Lucy didn’t respond. She didn’t like when suspects tried to make an interrogation personal. It seemed to happen more to her than other cops, perhaps because of her unassuming physical demeanor, but it irritated her all the same. “Why don’t you just answer my question?”
