The Cost of Betrayal

by Dee Henderson

  “No one saw Andrew go tumbling down the flight of stairs or they would have called for help. So she’s gambling no one can say it wasn’t Janelle who pushed him. And if Janelle can push him, she can stab him. Do it right, given the medication he’s on, he’ll bleed to death quickly. Janelle’s got a pink pocketknife with her name on it. Tanya needs tangible evidence Janelle did the crime. It doesn’t get more direct than if she uses that knife. With Janelle on a date, odds are good she’s carrying a clutch purse that matches her dress, and her handbag with the pocketknife will be hanging on the inside of her closet door. It means risking that no one finds Andrew in the thirty minutes it is going to take for Tanya to go fetch the knife and get back, yet it protects her from being blamed for his death.

  “So Tanya gets the pocketknife from Janelle’s apartment, also grabs a pair of her tennis shoes, and then rushes back to the beach. She stabs her brother while he’s lying on the sand at the bottom of the stairs, only once as she’s trying to sell stab-and-fall, and she’s afraid multiple stab wounds risk making it apparent he was lying down. She’s nicked his liver, and he’s bleeding steadily. She gets blood on the shoes. She takes his wallet and phone and ring so it can be argued a robber did this. She makes sure some blood drops get left at the top of the stairs where the so-called robbery happened. She then slips away from the beach and creates an alibi. She returns the shoes to Janelle’s closet, keeps the pocketknife as her insurance policy. If cops don’t buy robbery, if they don’t focus on Janelle and find the tennis shoes, then the pink pocketknife can turn up in the sand—with Janelle’s name on it and Andrew’s blood. She’s protected any way this moves forward.

  “The only thing that doesn’t work out for Tanya is that the cops don’t find him. It’s getting late with no officer knocking on the door. She’s worried if it goes past midnight with the cops not focused on Janelle. If so, she has to shut this down fast. So she goes back and ‘finds’ her brother dead. The ME report is inconclusive because of two critical points: that he’s stabbed while lying on the ground, and that the stab wound took place at a different time than the fall.”

  Paul thought it was an insightful variation. “It softens Tanya into being an opportunistic murderer, so it’s got serious merit. Why don’t you prefer it?”

  “It’s two trips to the beach—one to find the brother, the second to return with the knife and shoes. Then there’s getting the shoes returned to Janelle’s apartment. The timing is tight.”

  Paul thought about that timeline aloud. “After Andrew and Janelle break up at the beach, Janelle walked to the pizza place and called a taxi. She had to wait for it to arrive . . . then you add the drive time to her apartment. After she arrived home, she went back out again when she took her dog for a walk. Janelle is away from her apartment for a considerable amount of time after she has left Andrew. Tanya is driving, can eliminate those delays. So it is possible. I wouldn’t say probable. It’s doable, but tight.”

  Ann nodded. “But now add in the sum total of what transpires next. Tanya handled her reactions when the cops arrived, the interviews, without ever stumbling on what she wanted to say. She didn’t fumble and need to repair a statement in a later interview. What transpires is too neat for a plan put together in a matter of a couple hours. She was leading everyone right to the conclusions she wanted them to reach, from the detective at the beach that night to the jury at trial later on. She didn’t figure out those nuances on Friday night in the two hours she had to prepare for what would unfold. She had spent months getting ready for that performance.”

  He understood Ann’s point. “I agree. I’m reading interviews which on the surface are emotional sister-of-the-victim statements about her brother, her best friend. But then you take a look at the information she’s laying out, and it’s lining up like ducks in a row, everything cops would need to view Janelle as the guilty party. There was one recorded statement in particular.” Paul flipped back through the detective’s report. “Tanya mentions that pink pocketknife in her first conversation with the detective while still at the beach. Quoting her, ‘You think Janelle did this? That’s crazy. I know my brother was stabbed, but you said he was also robbed. Ask Janelle for her pocketknife. You’ll see she didn’t do this—she’s got it in her purse.’ The detective asks Janelle for it, she says ‘sure,’ reaches for her purse, and the pocketknife isn’t in it. That was a risky leading statement on Tanya’s part, but she sold it with the right emotion, defending her best friend while also driving the knife home—pun intended. Every statement Tanya gives after that is more subtle, nuanced, but she knew the core sentence she had to provide the detective that first night, how to set this unfolding in the direction she had planned. She’d practiced how to deliver it to get the job done.”

  Ann gave him a nod. “It’s calculated, Paul. Planned. Rehearsed. I concede it’s the fact I don’t like her that makes me willing to say she’s cold enough to plan the crime far in advance. The truth is probably kinder to her. She found her brother that night and said, ‘No, I’m not letting his fall ruin my life,’ so she came up with a way to kill him and keep attention off herself. She’s a selfish woman capable of killing her brother and framing her best friend to protect herself. But maybe she’s not so cold that she planned it months in advance.”

  Paul rested his head back against his office chair. “Does it matter?”

  “Not really. I simply want to understand her. Because if I’m right, for six years she’s let her best friend sit in prison.”

  “Friendships rupture. Even those who have been best friends since second grade have periods where they’re at odds with each other.”

  Ann shook her head. “Putting this kind of blame on a friend, it’s not normal behavior. You might do it under stress, but you feel guilty about it afterwards and try to fix it. That’s what bugs me the most. I see the betrayal, but it’s foreign to me how you get to that point. Friends protect friends. It’s the friendship code.”

  “Maybe Tanya lives with what she did by warping that friendship code to suit what she needs—she reframes this as ‘Janelle is protecting me. She doesn’t know that, but if she did, she’d agree to do this for me. She knows why I had to get free.’ People can justify anything to themselves.”

  “That’s true.”

  Paul shifted his focus. There were two people in this case, and he was still developing what he thought of each of them. “Let me see the interviews with Janelle again, the first night in particular.”

  Ann sorted out the case materials and passed them over.

  “Are we in agreement on one thing, Ann? If Janelle did this, it was spur-of-the-moment. She fights with Andrew, intentionally or not stabs him once, he tumbles, and she flees the scene. There’s no premeditation on Janelle’s part, no planning of what happened, just a bad breakup that she didn’t see coming. Andrew ends up hurt, and she runs away from the scene?”

  Ann smiled. “Our first full agreement. Even the DA wasn’t pushing any consideration that Janelle thought about this in advance. The two argued, she stabbed Andrew, he falls, she panics, ditches the knife, tries to cover herself and say she didn’t do it. But it’s all a breakup fight and its aftermath.”

  Paul felt something click as Ann spoke, something resonating with what he had read earlier. Finally. Just as Ann had her sense of when she had the right thread to pull, he had a point when something jelled, and it had just done so, deeper than his conscious mind. It would surface.

  “What time is it?” he asked idly.

  “Just after midnight.”

  “I could use some more ice cream if you were inclined to want some yourself.”

  Ann smiled. “Butter pecan?”

  “Is there any other kind worth mentioning? Thanks, Ann.”

  She squeezed his shoulder as she went past. The dog rolled to his feet to follow her.

  Good people committed murder. Paul had long since accepted that. He’d put a significant number of them in prison. But a good person didn’t often
plan the murder in advance, requiring rapid decisions on what to do afterward, leading to mistakes, panic. Janelle had not planned what happened that night. That was what had clicked. Paul leaned back to ponder that thought.

  Guilty people gave themselves away—sweating, minds racing, desperate to get rid of the evidence, establish an alibi, spin a story out to friends to cover the time period. Good people who committed murder were unable to walk away and show no signs of it. As an investigator, you didn’t make a decision based on behavior. You worked from the evidence. But the evidence backed up behavior. He had two people in this case file, and they were handling events very differently.

  He accepted the bowl of ice cream from his wife, waited till she was seated. “Ann, your best evidence that Tanya—or someone else—did this murder is Janelle’s behavior. The patrol officer found Janelle at home wearing sweats, eating chocolate ice cream out of the carton, and methodically taking apart a scrapbook full of pictures of her with Andrew. The search of her home yielded some things of Andrew’s: jacket, CDs, and books haphazardly thrown together in a box in the hall. Janelle had been purging her apartment of her boyfriend when the patrol officer knocked on her door.”

  He saw the surprise cross her face.

  “I hadn’t thought about that specifically.”

  “Character tells. It always does. Janelle isn’t guilty of this. The patrol officer knocks on her door, and she’s clueless that her boyfriend has been hurt, let alone is dead. If it was the detective who knocked on her door and saw for himself what she was doing, her shock and the tears, he would have kept pushing until he could find another answer.

  “But by the time Janelle has been driven in the back of a squad car to the beach, has seen all the flashing lights and cops and medical examiner vehicles, she’s quiet and wound tight and confused, desperately trying to sort out what happened to the man she loves after she left him. The detective sees someone saying she didn’t do it, but missed seeing the physical innocence, that clueless expression that would have told him she was telling the truth. He knows they had a fight, there’s blood on her shoes, the knife she can’t produce is consistent with what stabbed Andrew—he had to go with what was there in front of him. The detective bought the frame.”

  “You believe me?”

  “Yes.”

  Relief flowed across her face.

  “It’s here, Ann. It’s not just your theory. The murder weapon was in Tanya’s possession until the auction. That alone gets people willing to listen to this case again. You look at the money she had to gain, listen to the interviews and what she said about Janelle, with an ear for this, and it rings true.”

  Ann laid her head back against the sofa cushion. “I feel like I just climbed Mount Everest and back.”

  “I hit the summit a few days after you, but I’m looking at the same view.”

  “Thank you, Paul.”

  He understood the quiet emotion in her words. Independent climbs, but the same conclusion. Janelle wasn’t guilty.

  He gave her a minute to absorb it before he said, “We’ve got a problem, though. A new trial doesn’t help Janelle. She gets convicted by a new jury because we’ve now got the murder weapon. That pink pocketknife has her name on it, Andrew’s blood, and it is no longer missing. The jury can see it. That pink pocketknife is still wreaking havoc.”

  Ann grimaced. “Yeah, I’m there too. The knife that showed up in the auction box—leading me to conclude Janelle didn’t do this—is the same knife that solidifies Janelle’s apparent guilt. Tanya’s brilliant ace in the hole is doing its job.”

  “Tanya isn’t likely to confess, and we won’t be able to prove Tanya took that knife out of Janelle’s purse. Even if we can show Tanya made more than one trip to the beach that night, it doesn’t prove she actually caused her brother’s death. When Tanya ‘found’ her brother and tried to stop the apparent bleeding, she corrupted the crime scene. The fact she had that knife years after the trial is damaging to her, but the real power of the knife is its reinforcement of the conviction on record.”

  “Any good news?” Ann wondered aloud.

  “We’ll have some allies. The original detective—it’s not going to sit well with a good cop that he was manipulated like this. The DA too will have some strong feelings on the matter. There will be a concerted effort to take Tanya’s story apart. You’ve convinced me. We’ll convince others. But you and I both know that seeing it and effectively doing something about it are very different matters.”

  Paul dropped the report back onto the stack. “I hate to give Tanya credit, but she came up with a crime she could get away with. It reminds me of Psalm sixty-four—‘Who can see us? Who can search out our crimes? We have thought out a cunningly conceived plot.’ That could have been written with Tanya in mind. I don’t know how to convince twelve people on a jury, or even a judge in a bench trial, that Tanya is guilty. Convincing a judge there’s reasonable doubt Janelle is guilty has some merit, but even that would be hard to win. Getting her conviction overturned, that’s a moon shot.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  Paul thought long and hard about how to answer that question. “A new trial doesn’t solve Janelle’s problem. She just gets convicted again because the murder weapon has her name on it. We aren’t going to get Tanya to confess to a crime she’s ducked. There’s only one person who can help Janelle, and we’re going to have to convince him to do so.” He reached over and picked up his phone.

  Ann draped her arms around her knees. “He’s going to love having us as friends.”

  Paul smiled at her and then turned his attention to the answered call. “This is Paul Falcon with the Chicago FBI office. And I do recognize the hour. I need you to wake up Governor Bliss and hand him the phone.”

  He figured it would take them a few minutes to comply and briefly thought about fresh coffee. This was going to be one of the most difficult pitches he’d made in years.

  “A pardon,” Ann said.

  Paul nodded as he mentally did the math. “Janelle’s been in prison for six years, two months, and nine days. She’s innocent. Calling at this time of night says we both believe it. But he still might not agree to take the political risk. This is an unprovable truth where only one scenario is right. You just hope the person receiving mercy uses the rest of her life to demonstrate it was the right call.”

  “Thank you, Paul. This is.”

  He smiled. “I’m making the call because I agree with you. Janelle doesn’t fit what happened—Tanya does. That pocketknife smells of a setup, from the fact Tanya bought it for Janelle all the way through to the fact Tanya had it in her possession years later.”

  The music broke as the line was picked up. “I have Governor Bliss for you, sir.” Paul punched the speakerphone button so his wife could listen in.

  “Paul, it’s always good to hear from you when this month’s emergency code word isn’t the opening. What can I do for you tonight?”

  “I have a problem only you can solve. My wife found a murder weapon in a box of items purchased at auction.”

  The governor laughed and tried to stifle it. “Sorry. Not funny. But that is so Ann.”

  “She does indeed attract interesting problems,” Paul agreed with a smile and turned toward her. “Jeffery, I need a pardon for a woman named Janelle Roberts, who was betrayed by a friend and convicted of a murder she did not commit. On the face of it, everyone who looks at this case will tell you not to grant it. The new evidence is open to interpretation, and she received a fair trial. Both are true. But Ann and I are fully convinced she’s innocent. She’s been in prison for six years, two months, and nine days. She can’t get relief through the courts. Her only recourse is a pardon. Hence I’m waking you up. Ann convinced me in ten hours. I hope I can convince you in less.”

  “You already did.”

  Paul was staggered by the statement, and he and Ann looked at each other in astonishment.

  “Wake up the pardon attorney, tell him I�
��d like the papers on my desk by nine.”

  “Thank you, Governor.”

  “Let’s stay with ‘Jeffery.’ If a person can’t exercise power appropriately, he shouldn’t have this job. I’d trust either of you on a murder case. Tell Janelle she found mercy from the people of Illinois, and the governor wishes her a speedy return to a normal life.”

  “I’ll do that, Jeffery. Ann just started crying.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. Good night, Paul.”

  Paul slipped Black a piece of bacon while he waited for Ann to join them. Breakfast this morning was abbreviated, events stepping on their normal routine. “Don’t tell your mother.” The dog slapped his tail against the cabinet and looked hopefully at the rest of the bacon croissant Paul had stacked together.

  Ann joined them, ruffling the dog’s ears out of habit. Black leaned his weight into her knee in greeting, but his gaze stayed locked on the sandwich. Paul laughed and offered the dog another piece, then gave Ann the rest of his sandwich. “We can pick up the paperwork on the way. He’s signing it now. Your choice, we can call the warden in advance or deal with it when we arrive.”

  She considered the question while she ate. “Wheels turn faster when you’re standing there,” she decided. “I vote we see the warden, talk Janelle through what happened, and walk out of prison with her—take all the shocks in one wave before the press gets wind of this.”

  “She’s going to need somewhere to go. She has no close family. Her apartment has long since been leased to someone else. Her best friend is the one who betrayed her. That leaves possibly someone from her church or maybe a prior neighbor.”