I have no doubt that the police are continuing to investigate; it is fair to say that their work has just begun. Now that they have a name to attach to the DNA, there will be many more leads to follow. I expect more discovery to stream in and therefore possibly more shoes to drop.
For now, and I hope something will happen to change my view, there is little chance that we can prove Matt did not commit this crime. We have no alibi; even he has no idea where he was that night. So we are going to have to demonstrate either that someone else did it, or at least that someone else might have done it.
But no matter what we learn, or what we can show, we are going to have to somehow deal with Matt’s blood being found on the hands of one of the victims. It’s pretty hard to come up with an innocent explanation for that.
The police did plenty of investigating back around the time of the murders and came up with a couple of “persons of interest.” This gives me areas to get into, though in each case the suspects were eliminated when their DNA did not match that which was on Charkin’s hands.
Faced with a situation like this, I would ordinarily take Tara for a walk. She is going to love Maine. No more boring walks to Eastside Park in Paterson; this area of Maine is like a dog-walking Disneyland.
Today I scout out a future walk by going to Dodge Point. It’s a scenic, easy walk, with no shrubbery and therefore no danger of winding up with ticks. And it’s flat; no uphill climbs. Exactly the kind of walk that I like. Tara will eat it up; these are sights and especially smells that she will be unfamiliar with. Her tail will not stop wagging from the time we get out of the car to the time we are back at the inn.
I wish she were here.
Unfortunately, even though this promises to be a great vacation for Tara and her two friends, I am here to work. I’ve got to do some investigating to earn the money I’m paying myself to handle the case.
It starts tomorrow.
My father used to say, “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.”
He certainly didn’t make the phrase up, but he was using it to teach me a legal and investigative lesson. He was saying that you need to have a game plan, a script to follow, that identifies everyone and their agendas. Only then could you weed out what was important from the clutter and noise.
My client has little to offer in this regard because his claim, his defense, is that he had nothing to do with the murders or the victims. It’s a consistent and logical position to take; how can he provide insight into something he knows nothing about?
To make matters worse, he is not even pretending to have an alibi. He has no more recollection of where he was on a particular night two years ago than I do, though in my case there’s a pretty good chance I was at Charlie’s Sports Bar.
My scorecard, such as it is, will have to be the police investigation. The murder book will tell me all the work they did before they came to believe, two years after the fact, that Matt Jantzen was the guilty party. They conducted a bunch of interviews and even identified possible suspects.
I will retrace their steps. A lot of it will be to no avail; witnesses are unlikely to tell me anything different from what they told the police. To complicate matters further, memories fade and become much less precise over time.
But maybe those conversations will lead me in other directions that might be productive. I won’t know until I know, but hovering over everything will be Matt’s blood on the victim’s hand.
My first stop is a small café attached to the bookstore in a building that houses the Lincoln Theater upstairs. Just down the block is the Skidompha Library; we are clearly in the cultural center of Damariscotta.
I’m meeting with Carole Peterson, who is Matt Jantzen’s ex-girlfriend. He had told me that their breakup was one of the reasons he left Maine in the first place.
I had reached Carole by phone, and she suggested the café as a meeting place. She said that she worked nearby, though didn’t say where, and offered to talk to me during her coffee break. This is definitely a good place to have a coffee break; their scones look fantastic.
“So you’re trying to help Matthew?” she asks, once we’re settled. It’s the first time I’ve heard him referred to in any way other than Matt.
“I am. I’m hoping you can help me do that.”
“How?”
“Just by telling me about him. About your recollections.”
“I don’t know how much there is to tell. We went out for a couple of years; we even talked about getting engaged. But we were young, and things changed.”
She talks about having been young as though it were decades ago. People don’t generally age that much in two years.
“I should say that Matt changed.”
“How so?”
“He got moody, very critical of everything, especially things I did. Looking back, I should have realized that he had a lot going on. Maybe I would have … could have … been more understanding. But at the time it just made me want out.”
“What was going on?”
“Well, for one thing, his mother had died a few months before. Then he lost his friend … our friend … Carl Blanchard … to cancer. Some kind of leukemia, I think. That was hard on him. But he also wasn’t getting anywhere career-wise. His job was okay, but he wanted to be his own boss.”
“So you ended it?”
She nods. “I did. I’m sure that just added to his depression, or whatever it was. We dropped out of touch, but I heard that he left town about a month or so after that. I can’t be sure of the timing.”
“When did the murders take place, as it relates to your breaking up and him leaving?”
“I think it was about two weeks after the breakup. I remember because I was so upset at hearing the news, and I had no one to reach out to. Matt could have been that person, but it was too late for that.”
“Why were you so upset about the murders?”
“Tina Welker was my friend. I used to work part-time at Augusta General, where she was a nurse. I worked in reception. We were pretty close; she was an easy person to talk to.”
This is jolting news, and not in a positive way. “Did Matt know her?”
Carole pauses. “I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t know if he ever met her; they were in different parts of my life. He probably did, but I can’t be sure.”
“Why do you say he probably did?”
“Because this is a small-town area. A lot of us went to the same high school, but there aren’t that many places for young people to hang out, you know? It would be weird if he never ran into her, but whether they were friends or not, I don’t remember that they were.”
“Would she have known you and Matt were going out?”
“Oh, definitely. I used to talk to Tina about Matt and our situation, and she was one of the people who advised me to end it. My friends were pretty much all saying that.”
Uh-oh. “Did you ever tell Matt what Tina said?”
She shrugs. “Probably. He certainly knew what my friends thought about it. I honestly don’t know if I mentioned Tina specifically.”
“You said ‘probably.’”
Another shrug. “I guess I should have said ‘maybe.’ I really don’t remember.” Then, “Why would they have arrested Matt? What makes them think he did such a terrible thing?”
I answer that with another question. “What do you think? Would he be capable of doing something like that?”
She shakes her head. “No way,” she says with conviction. “Absolutely not.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The Matt I knew is a good person. He had a temper, but if he was mad at you, you probably deserved it. And if you did something wrong, he would let you know it.”
“So don’t kick a dog in front of him?”
She smiles. “You definitely don’t want to do that. He loves dogs.”
We live in an interconnected world, but cops take it to a new level.
Cops just know other cops, whether they
work with them or not. And the cops they know always know other cops, and so on and so on. So if one cop wants to get in touch with another one, anywhere, he can do so with little effort.
Kevin Bacon needs six degrees; Sergeant Anyone can do it in three.
The same thing holds true for ex-cops; apparently club membership is permanent. Fortunately I have strong connections to two ex-cops. There’s Laurie, who I happen to be married to, and Corey Douglas, her partner in the K Team.
Between them they have arranged an appointment for me in Portland to talk to Captain Dustin Oliver of the Maine State Police, Robbery-Homicide Division. Oliver was in charge of the investigation that has ultimately resulted in Matt’s arrest.
I’m surprised that Captain Oliver agreed to talk with me so easily. In a similar situation, police officers in New Jersey would have avoided this meeting like the plague. Of course, police officers in New Jersey know me, while Oliver doesn’t. That would explain a lot.
“Lieutenant Collier said to say hello” is how I start, as I was instructed to do. Collier is a cop that Corey Douglas knew, and Collier in turn knows Captain Oliver.
He smiles. “How is Lieutenant Collier?”
I have no idea how he is; I’ve never laid eyes on him. So I say, “Fine. He’s the same as ever.”
“Is he? Then he must have changed some, because Lieutenant Collier is a woman.”
“Maybe she was undercover. But I did notice she was clean-shaven.” Then, “The truth is I never met or spoke to Lieutenant Collier, but I know people who must know her, because here I am.”
“No problem,” he says agreeably.
“I’m a defense attorney,” I say, getting all the bad news out at once.
“I’m not a huge fan of defense attorneys.” Then, “Come on, you think I would not have checked you out before agreeing to this meeting?”
“I assumed you had.”
“So with the understanding that I won’t discuss details about the investigation, ask your questions.”
“When was the first time you heard the name Matt Jantzen?”
“About three weeks ago, when we hit the DNA match through that website.”
“You have someone checking those sites?”
Oliver nods. “Yup. Second time we got a hit. Those things are fantastic; it’s like a confession hotline.”
“But he never came up in your investigation before that?”
“You got the discovery, right? Then you know he didn’t. He committed the perfect crime, until he didn’t.”
“What can you tell me about Sergeant Rojas?” Sergeant Anthony Rojas is the forensics officer who handled the case, which means he retrieved the blood from the victim’s hand that was determined to be Matt’s. Forensics will be everything in this trial.
“Tony? Good man. The best.”
“Can you get me in to talk to him?”
Oliver frowns. “That’s way above my pay grade. Tony died about six months ago. Heart attack.”
This is not good news, and I don’t just mean for Sergeant Rojas and his family. I’m likely going to have to attack the collection and chain of custody of the DNA evidence, and dead people are by far the most difficult to trap and embarrass on the witness stand.
“You’ve had some chain-of-custody issues up here.” I don’t know of any, so at this point I’m fishing. Maybe he’ll inadvertently point me in a right direction.
He seems amused. “Really? I’m not aware of any. But you should talk to Steinkamp about that, not that he’ll help you much. If I know George, he’s chomping at the bit to go head-to-head with you.”
Oliver’s talking about the prosecuting attorney, who I saw at the arraignment but haven’t spoken to yet. “Why is that?”
“Come on, you’re a famous New York lawyer.”
“New Jersey.”
“Whatever.”
I have some difficult questions for Captain Oliver, but since he is very much alive, I’m going to save them for when he is under oath in front of a jury.
“Let me ask you something,” I say. “Something that isn’t in the discovery. You stopped working on the case because you had nowhere to go with it, and—”
“I never stop working on cases. I put some to the side and come back to them. This one I came back to often; get my wife on the stand and ask her how many nights I’ve gone over that murder book. For some reason she doesn’t find it terribly romantic.”
I nod. “Fair enough. When you originally put it aside, that was obviously because you couldn’t get enough evidence to make an arrest. But at the time, who was at the top of the suspect list? Who did you think, down deep, was the most likely person to have done this?”
He thinks about this for a few moments. “I can’t give you a name because it’s a person I could never identify. I have my suspicions, but it’s the one piece of information I wanted to know but could never get.”
“You had a suspect in mind? Who?”
He shakes his head. “I’m not going there; I don’t name people unless I can back it up. But the truth is that Charkin was taking opioids; it’s highly likely that he was addicted or becoming addicted. All I can say is that I was never able to find out where he was getting the drugs. I never found his dealer.”
“Are opioids a big problem up here?” For some reason I don’t think of places like this having the same issues as big cities, but I’m sure they must have their share.
He nods. “Borderline out of control. Bigger than it was even two years ago, that’s for sure.”
“So you know more about the dealers now?”
“Definitely. I’ve personally put a few away, but there’s always someone to take their place. Drug-dealing teams have deep benches.”
“That’s because it pays well.”
“Yeah. But it’s just as well that I never found Charkin’s dealer.”
“Why?”
“Because if I had, he would have been suspect number one. But he would have been the wrong guy. Matt Jantzen is the right guy.”
“Tina Welker is Carole’s friend Tina?”
I’ve just told my client that Tina Welker, one of the murder victims, was the friend of Carole Peterson, his ex-girlfriend.
It’s the second time that I’ve seen Matt since I came back up here to Maine. I’ve only been here five days, but if feels like a month. Time moves slowly when no progress is being made.
“That’s the very one. Did you ever meet her?”
He thinks for a while before answering. “I can’t say for sure, but probably. Carole sometimes took me to parties her friends had, so if Tina was at any of them, then there’s a pretty good chance we met. But nothing stands out.”
“Did Carole ever tell you that Tina advised her to break things off with you?”
“No. That I would have remembered. Did Carole say that?”
“She thought so but wasn’t sure. By the time Steinkamp is finished with her, she’ll quote the conversation you had word for word.”
“He’ll get her to lie?”
“Think of it as memory enhancement.”
“So the theory is that I found out that Tina didn’t think Carole should stay with me, and I responded by shooting her and another guy in the head?”
“Basically, yes.”
“And there are people on the planet that will believe that?” Matt appears incredulous at the prospect.
“It fits the narrative. Juries will be inclined to believe you did it because of the blood on the scene. This just gives them a confirming reason, although they don’t need one. The state does not have to demonstrate or prove motive.”
“My blood could not have been on the scene. I know I keep saying that, and I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.”
“In the eyes of the world, and that world includes the future members of the jury, the blood was there. We will try to attack it based on various technical factors, but we won’t succeed.”
“So we’ve lost already?” He’s obviously and understandably frus
trated.
I nod. “That battle is as good as lost. We will fight the good fight, but that ship has sailed. So we will come at this from another angle, which happens to be the only angle available to us.”
“What’s that?”
“We will try to prove that someone else did it, and we will have to name that someone. If we do, then it won’t matter how your blood got there. Bleeding in a specific place is not a crime; if someone else is the killer, then you are not.”
“So you’re going to solve a crime that the police couldn’t for two years?”
“I said we would try. I didn’t say anything about succeeding.”
“That’s not really what I want to hear.”
“I know that. But if it’s any consolation, we have one advantage that the police did not have. Besides our brilliance.”
“What’s that?”
“They had the blood DNA. They were positive that it was left by the killer, so any suspects that they had were automatically eliminated by their DNA not matching. We come at it with the assumption that the blood is either not yours, or planted, or whatever. So potential suspects that were eliminated in their eyes are not eliminated in ours.”
“You keep saying ‘we’ and ‘our.’ Are you talking about you and me or are there some other people on our team?”
“My wife, Laurie, is a trained investigator, and she will be here in a few days. And we may bring up at least one other member of their investigative team.”
“This has to be costing money.”
I smile. “We’re in it for the glory. Did you prepare the list?”
“Yes.” He takes a piece of paper from his pocket and hands it to me. It’s a list of friends and associates he had back around the time he left Maine the first time, shortly after the murders. It gives us people to talk to; maybe one of them will remember that the night of the murder they were with Matt in Vegas, or Paris, or anywhere other than at the murder scene.
“This is everyone I can think of. Not all of them will remember me.”
I look at the list briefly before refolding it and putting it in my own pocket. “Okay, if you think of anything that might be helpful, you know how to reach me. If I’m not at the hotel, I’ll be sucking down lobster rolls somewhere.”
Dog Eat Dog Page 5
