“Okay, then,” Barney says finally. “I do need to set some ground rules because I’m filing appeals. This conversation is off the record and cannot be recorded. You are not to ask my client if he killed any of the women in question. You cannot ask him if he’s guilty. I don’t want you asking him any questions that might be self-incriminating. Understood?”
Hurley and I both nod as Izzy just sits there and stares at Barney, who doesn’t seem interested in Izzy’s opinion.
Hurley says, “You can stop us anytime you like and tell your client not to answer any questions you don’t like.”
“Right,” Barney says, narrowing his eyes thoughtfully. Then he slaps his palms on the table. “Let’s get to it then.” He gets up, walks over to the door we came in, and knocks on it. A guard looks through the window and Barney nods at him. Then he returns to his seat.
The four of us sit in awkward silence, trying not to stare at one another for the next several minutes. Hurley and I both squirm in our seats, and Izzy sits straight and still, staring at the wall. Barney seems right at home with the tension in the room. He sits in his chair, hands clasped behind his neck, a smile on his face. He lets his gaze wander around the room, focusing on the table, the walls, the door, the floor, the ceiling, and, on a few occasions, each of us.
Finally the door behind him opens and a guard ushers in our prisoner.
CHAPTER 10
Mason Ulrich is a hollow shell of a man dressed in a baggy orange jumpsuit. His dark hair is shaved close to his head, revealing several scars, some of which appear to be fresh. His face looks haggard; his cheeks sunken and hollow; his color pale, but for the dark stubble gracing most of his lower jaw and the bruise encircling his right eye and the bridge of his nose. His eyes are brown, yet somehow pale, as if some of the color has drained out of them along with his hope. As he walks, or rather shuffles, into the room, I see that his shoulders are rounded and slouched. His cuffed hands and spindly fingers hang limp near his crotch, a chain connecting them to the shackles around his feet.
He drops into his chair, and the guard who brought him in takes a position behind him.
Barney shifts around and eyes the guard. “This is a confidential session between attorney and client. You can wait on the other side of the door.”
The guard doesn’t look at Barney or in any way acknowledge that he heard him. In a low voice, but one carrying a degree of menace in it, Barney says, “Now.”
Five seconds tick by and then the guard pivots, takes two big steps, and exits through the door he came in. Not once does he look at any of us. My respect for Barney is growing.
“Now then, Mason,” Barney says, turning back to the table, “these people want to ask you some questions. I will tell you if they ask you anything I don’t think you should answer, okay?”
No response. Barney shrugs and gives Hurley a go-ahead nod.
“Mr. Ulrich,” Hurley says, using the more formal title as a show of respect. He does this a lot, I’ve noticed. At one time I thought it might create a wall of distance between him and the people he talks to, but his demeanor and tone of voice work to ease that formality, creating an atmosphere of cordiality.
Ulrich stares at the tabletop, his eyes lifeless and dull. If he heard Hurley, he gives no indication.
Hurley continues anyway. “My name is Steve Hurley. I’m a detective with the Sorenson, Wisconsin, Police Department. This is Mattie Winston, a medicolegal investigator for the medical examiner’s office in Sorenson, and her boss, Dr. Izthak Rybarceski, the medical examiner for our county. We’re here today because we’d like to talk to you about the women you’ve been convicted of killing.”
Ulrich doesn’t blink. He doesn’t move. I’m forced to stare at his chest to make sure he’s still alive and breathing.
“To start with,” Hurley goes on, “I’d like to ask you about the flower petals that were found in the women’s wounds. It’s my understanding that you’ve denied any knowledge of them, but I’d like to know if you ever mentioned them to anyone else. Maybe a family member? Or another visitor of some sort?”
We all stare at Ulrich, waiting, but he doesn’t answer.
“Mr. Ulrich, we have another dead woman who has the same pattern of stab wounds and the same flower petals stuck inside the wound.”
No response, but I decide to elaborate on Hurley’s comment. “She was killed just days ago, so we know you didn’t do it.”
Ulrich blinks. I count it as progress. And then, he slowly raises his head, shifting his gaze to me.
“Help us help you,” I say. “Talk to us. Please.”
Ulrich’s eyes do a slow slide toward Hurley, then to Izzy, and finally back to me. I hold his haunted gaze, even though every nerve in my body is screaming at me to look away. And then he speaks. “Don’t give me false hope.” His voice is heartbreakingly flat and dead.
“We can’t give you any hope at all yet,” I say. “We don’t have enough facts. What we have are some new questions. Obviously, you didn’t kill this latest victim, and yet the MO for her death is identical to the ones for the other women. Most of the details could have been picked up by reading up on or attending your trial, but the flower petals are a special situation. We’re trying to figure out who knew about them, since their presence wasn’t discussed at the trial or released to the public. What did your attorney tell or ask you about them?”
“Don’t answer that,” Barney says.
I give him a frustrated frown and he just shrugs.
“Let’s try a different tack,” Hurley says. “Can you explain to me how your fishing license ended up next to one of the bodies?”
Ulrich emits a weary sigh. “I’ve gone over this a million times already.”
“Humor me,” Hurley says.
Ulrich looks at Barney, who nods his okay. “Like I told the cops, I was in that area fishing in a gravel pit pond three days earlier. I had my license in my back jeans pocket, but I also had a pack of cigarettes in there. When I took the smokes out, the license must have fallen out and I didn’t notice it. I realized it was missing that night when I got home.”
“Did you try to get a replacement for it?” Hurley asks.
Ulrich shakes his head. “I was going to have to get a new one by April first anyway.”
“Okay,” Hurley says. “Talk to me about Caroline Helgeson. How many times did the two of you go out together when you were dating?”
Ulrich gives him a painful smile. “The only reason I can answer this question is because the cops who interrogated me told me how many times it was. I wasn’t keeping track. According to them, it was nine times.”
“How did you meet her?”
“It was at a friend’s house. She was throwing herself a birthday party, and Caroline was there. We got to chatting over the hors d’oeuvres and I asked her out for the following evening. We did dinner and a movie.”
“What did you do on your other dates?”
Ulrich leans back in his seat, looking weary. “We went out for dinner sometimes. In fact, other than one evening when we ate at Caroline’s place, we ate out every time.”
“Different restaurants each time?” Hurley asks.
Ulrich shakes his head. “Caroline liked the burgers at a place called Cully’s, so we ate there three times. We did fast food a couple of times, and one night we went to a play and ate at a steak house.”
“Who paid for the meals?” I ask.
Hurley shoots me a curious look, but quickly turns back to Ulrich to see his reaction. Ulrich’s eyebrows arch in mild surprise, making me think no one has asked him this question before.
“I paid for most of them,” Ulrich says. “Though on the night when we went to the play, Caroline paid for everything. The whole evening was her idea and she said up front that it was her treat.” Ulrich pauses and gives me a curious look. “Why do you want to know who paid for what?”
I shrug. “Sometimes people can get ideas about things owed to them.”
Ulrich
looks dismissive, then angry. “You think I expected Caroline to put out because I was buying her dinners?” His tone makes it clear how ridiculous an idea he finds this.
“Did you?” Hurley says, jumping on my bandwagon. “You wouldn’t be the first guy who got upset because he spent a lot of money on a woman with the expectation that there would be something in return.”
“That’s not me,” Ulrich says.
“What about the night when you had dinner at Caroline’s house?” Hurley asks. “It sounds like that was the first time the two of you were in a private location as opposed to out in public. Did things get intimate?”
Ulrich’s brow furrows with irritation. “That’s personal,” he grumbles.
“The lady’s reputation isn’t really an issue anymore,” I say, trying to sound empathetic.
Ulrich considers this and the wrinkles in his forehead relax some. “We kissed for a while, did some making out . . . you know.” He shoots me an embarrassed look.
“According to the police reports, Caroline’s friends said you tried to get it on with her and couldn’t,” Hurley says. “Your equipment didn’t cooperate. That had to have been awkward.”
This tidbit is a surprise to me, because I hadn’t come across it in the reports I scanned through earlier. Apparently, it’s a surprise to Ulrich, too, as he gives Hurley an appalled look and shakes his head in disgust.
“If that’s what she told her friends, she wasn’t being totally honest,” he says. “My equipment functioned just fine until Caroline’s cat sneaked into the room, climbed onto the bed, and tried to use my junk as a cat toy.”
I bite back a laugh, not only because of the image this triggers, but because of the look on Hurley’s face. He didn’t see this one coming, and Ulrich couldn’t have picked a better comeback to set Hurley off his game. I can still clearly recall a time when Rubbish, who was a kitten at the time, decided to climb the inside of Hurley’s pant leg all the way up to the family jewels. The look of utter terror Hurley had on his face still makes me smile, because at the time, it was so incongruous with my overall opinion of him as a tough, fearless, take-no-prisoners kind of guy. The expression on his face now resembles the one he had then, though it’s currently mixed with a hint of empathy for Ulrich.
Ulrich seems to sense a shifting in Hurley’s sympathies, and he cocks his head to one side and produces the barest hint of a smile. Then he continues with his explanation. “Caroline and I liked each other. We enjoyed one another’s company. At least I thought we did, though if what the cops told me about what she said to her friends is all true, I gather Caroline didn’t feel the same. But despite my liking to spend time with her, there was no romantic spark between us. I think we both realized that on the night of the cat attack. We’d just watched a James Bond movie, so we jokingly referred to the fiasco as Procto-Pussy.” He emphasizes the title with wide eyes and a deep, booming voice. “Sorry, ma’am,” he says to me, and then he huffs out a small laugh. “When Caroline called me to say she wanted to move on and see other people, I totally agreed with her. It was an amicable discussion and breakup. I had no reason to dislike her, much less kill her.”
I believe the guy. I’m not perfect when it comes to reading people, but I’m quite good at it, if I do say so myself. This is in part to living a good portion of my life with one of the best bullshitters I know: my mother. Mom has been a hypochondriac all her life: a well-informed and educated one. The woman possesses more medical knowledge than many med students, and when she is in the throes of one of her hypochondriacal episodes, she knows exactly what signs and symptoms she is supposed to have. As a child, I watched her either thrill to death or scare the bejesus out of many a provider as she slowly but steadily convinced them that she had some rare and exotic disease.
Aside from my mother, I spent six years working in a hospital emergency room. And hospital ERs have evolved into central station for bullshitters of all types: drug seekers, drug users, people with mental health disorders, and even simple attention seekers. Granted, it doesn’t take a whiz kid to figure out that the woman who arrives in the ER claiming to have ten-out-of-ten abdominal pain—while playing Candy Crush on her phone, eating a bag of chips, and drinking a soda—might have an ulterior motive. Some of the actors and liars are far more sophisticated than that, but over time it gets easier and easier to ferret out the charlatans. So, while practice may not have made me perfect, it has made me darned good at sniffing out a liar. And Ulrich doesn’t strike me as one. There is nothing artificial or disingenuous about him.
Of course I do have the advantage of my knowledge regarding the latest murder case to help me in my assessment of Ulrich. Could it be a copycat murder? Yes, it’s possible. But the deeper we dig into this case, the more convinced I am that Ulrich is just another victim in all of this.
Having gathered his wits again after the mention of the dreaded Procto-Pussy debacle, Hurley shifts the focus with Ulrich. “Caroline told her friends you didn’t take the breakup well, and that you kept after her to go out with you again.”
“That’s not true,” Ulrich says calmly. “I did tell her that I enjoyed her company and wouldn’t mind doing things with her in the future, but I agreed that our relationship was more of a friendship than it was anything romantic. I think she was expecting me to be more upset over her suggestion that we break up, because she seemed surprised when I agreed with her. I got the impression that she felt offended at first, like my ready willingness to part ways with her was an affront to her looks or sexuality or appeal or whatever quality it is that woman want to have.” He pauses and shrugs. “Maybe she told her friends a different version of the events to make herself feel better,” he suggests.
This sounds feasible to me. I can remember falling for a clichéd “I need to find myself” breakup line that a guy I dated in college fed me once. I was blind to the clues he’d been giving me—wrenching his head around so hard and fast to ogle other women’s derrieres that he should have been in a cervical collar, complaints about the way I chewed my food or fixed my hair, and mysterious meetings that kept coming up, causing him to cancel a date at the last minute. I honestly (and stupidly) believed the “find myself” line. I later realized it was nothing more than a chickenshit euphemism for “I can’t stand one more minute with you, but I’m too much of a coward to say so.” Oblivious to the true meaning behind his words, I thought there was still hope.
I caught the jerk making out hard with someone else a mere two days after I sent him off on his journey to find himself. I then realized two things: one, he apparently thought his self was either down the throat or up the shirtfront of the gorgeous girl he was with, and two, if he really wanted to find himself, he should have had a colonoscopy, because I felt certain that’s where he’d find his head.
Embarrassed by my naivete and vulnerability, I told a different version of these events to anyone who asked about our breakup. To this day, my sister thinks that I broke things off with that guy because he was too immature and flighty, and I’m fine with her believing that for the rest of her life. Given this, it seems perfectly reasonable that Caroline Helgeson might have told her girlfriends a slightly different version of the events that led to the breakup between her and Ulrich.
Hurley, who has probably never been dumped in his life, moves right along. After all, what reasonable, intelligent woman would ever dump a man who is gorgeous, loving, considerate, kind, smart, and romantic?
“Caroline also told her friends that you were stalking her. She said you followed her to work on several occasions. She saw you tailing her in your car.”
Ulrich chuckles, shaking his head. “Yeah, the cops mentioned that to me, and, I confess, it puzzled me at first. I couldn’t figure out why Caroline would have said something like that. I wasn’t stalking her, and she didn’t strike me as the kind of girl who would make something like that up. She wasn’t a drama queen or anything like that.” He gives us an ironic smile. “Then I figured it out. I was a substitute
teacher when I met Caroline. That meant my job site sometimes changed from one day to the next. While I got work at the high school most of the time, I occasionally got gigs at the middle schools, too. Caroline’s workplace was on the same street as the middle school, and I did an eight-week stint there to cover someone’s maternity leave right after Caroline and I decided to call it quits. My guess is she saw me driving to work and recognized me. For whatever reason, she thought I was stalking her.”
Ulrich makes a pained face and shakes his head again. “I don’t know why she wouldn’t have just called me or sent me a text about it if she really thought I was following her. I swear, we parted on friendly terms and she had no reason to be afraid of me, or to think I was angry with her. Or that I would do anything like that, for that matter. I don’t get it.” His body sags and his expression turns sad as he adds, “And I guess now I’ll never know why.”
Ulrich and Hurley stare at one another, each gauging the other, neither of them showing any emotion. It’s Hurley who finally interrupts this visual détente by looking away and asking another question.
“What about Linda Marie Elwood? You knew her, too?”
“So said the cops,” Ulrich tells him. “They said she was in some of my classes back when I was in college, but if that’s the case, I have no recollection of her. The name isn’t familiar to me, her face isn’t familiar to me, and the classes we supposedly attended together were basic required classes that were held in large classrooms with lots of students. Not to mention that it was nearly a decade ago.”
“Do you own a boat?” Hurley asks.
“I did. Just a little fourteen-foot jon boat that I kept on a trailer parked alongside my house. The police confiscated it as evidence.”
Hurley looks at Barney. “I haven’t had time to read through all the police reports yet. Did they find any evidence in the boat that tied him to any of these deaths?”
Barney raises his eyebrows. “They tried. They took a sample of some river grass that was stuck to the boat and said it could only have come from the area where one of the bodies was found. But that same grass was found in two other areas along the river, one of which is right by the boat launch my client uses.”
Dead Ringer Page 9
