Closer Than You Know

by Brad Parks

  By the time Amy broke for lunch, there was another update: Melanie Barrick was in custody.

  Still, it wasn’t until close to four o’clock Friday afternoon, when she was back in her office, that she managed to get Powers on the phone.

  “Heya,” he said.

  “Hey, sounds like you guys have been busy today.”

  “Yep. But it seems like everyone’s favorite drug dealer had an even busier night.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Amy said. “Now, look, I’ve been in court all day, which means you haven’t gotten your dose of prosecutorial precaution yet today. So I’m going to give it to you now: Are you sure it’s her? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I get why she has to be the lead suspect. But I was in Judge Robbins’s office on Wednesday when he told her that if anything happened to Coduri, he’d hold her personally accountable.”

  “Yeah, I already heard from the good judge three times today. I think if he had an electric chair in his office, he’d be ready to spark it up right now for her.”

  “Okay, so you know where his head is. But Melanie Barrick did too. Doesn’t that seem a little, I don’t know, brazen? To go killing a guy after a judge has laid down the law like that?”

  “Yeah, but criminals don’t respect the law. That’s why they’re criminals.”

  “I hear that,” Amy said. “And I know at the end of the day it’s probably her. I just want to make sure we’re at least looking at other suspects? Guys like Richard Coduri aren’t known to have great life expectancies. There are probably other people who would love to bash his head in. Could it have been someone else he informed on? I don’t want us to get tunnel vision here.”

  “Oh. You ain’t heard yet.”

  “Heard what?”

  “The ME called us a little while ago. Coduri had Melanie Barrick’s name and phone number on a piece of paper in his pocket, along with the words ‘midnight’ and ‘Thornrose.’”

  Amy digested this for a moment. It was the kind of evidence juries ate up with a knife and fork: The victim was practically reaching out from the grave to testify.

  “So what are we thinking?” she said. “Coduri gets a phone call from Melanie Barrick, a woman he’s informed on, to meet her in a cemetery at midnight, and he just goes out to see if she wants to swap recipes? Would he really be that dumb?”

  “You didn’t know Rick Coduri,” Powers said, chuckling. “Bless his heart, he was dumber than a bag o’ hammers.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  “So am I. It’s entirely possible he didn’t know it was Melanie Barrick he informed on. She probably used an alias when she was selling to him. Her real name wouldn’t mean anything to him.”

  “How could it not? She’s been all over the paper since then.”

  “Rick Coduri ain’t exactly a newspaper-reading type,” Powers said. “He probably thought it was some kind of business deal, and he couldn’t help himself. A guy like Coduri would sell out his mother for a hundred bucks. If he thought going out to a cemetery at night would get him a payday, he wouldn’t be too concerned for his personal safety. Especially if he was meeting with a woman. He’d think he could overpower her. He didn’t know she’d have a baseball bat.”

  “Was the murder weapon definitely a baseball bat? I hadn’t heard that yet.”

  “Oh, I’m just making that up. ME said blunt-force trauma—like we couldn’t have figured that out. He said if there were just one or two impact sites, he might be able to give us a guess on what did it. But Coduri’s skull was so busted up, we probably won’t be able to tell. Coke Mom sure got her licks in.”

  “If it was her,” Amy felt like she had to interject.

  “Well, come on, who else could it be?”

  “That’s the point. We have to not only prove it’s her, we have to jump through the hoops of proving it couldn’t have been anyone else—that we considered every possibility. If this really becomes a capital case, she’ll get two attorneys. And then as soon as she’s convicted, she gets an automatic appeal before the Supreme Court. From there, Virginia is full of clever anti–death penalty lawyers. One of them will find a way to make the thing federal, and then it’ll be more appeals. Our actions over the next two weeks are going to be scrutinized for the next ten years by people we can’t even dream of. We have to make sure we’re doing everything right.”

  “I know, I know. And I’ve got a whole lot of people doing the wild-goose-chase thing for just that reason. We went through the cameras at the cemetery, not that they showed us anything. We got our detectives and some city guys at the Howard Johnson, where Coduri was staying. They’re dusting his room for prints and everything. Plus we’re canvassing all around the cemetery, trying to find a murder weapon but also talking to folks who might have seen anything last night. If any other possibility comes up, I promise we won’t look the other way.”

  “Thank you,” Amy said. “Keep me in the loop, okay?”

  “You got it.”

  As she hung up, she still didn’t like what she was hearing from the Augusta County Sheriff. This had nothing to do with whatever suspicions about Powers and his office she had (mostly) rid from her mind. This was hard-won experience talking:

  Few things led to mistakes more than an investigation that was too sure of itself or an investigator who was acting like he already had all the answers.

  FORTY-SIX

  I was still in some kind of denial throughout the afternoon as a series of hard-eyed sheriff’s deputies shunted me from one place to the next.

  Even as someone who had been wrongly accused of a crime before, I retained this trust that something would soon emerge to clear me. They would find some physical evidence that pointed them to the real killer. A witness would step forward. Some smart person—like maybe Amy Kaye—would figure out what was really going on.

  Something.

  While I was still at Sheriff’s Office headquarters, I was allowed a brief meeting with Mr. Honeywell. I told him I knew nothing about how Richard Coduri met his end. I had been at home, alone and asleep, from about nine o’clock onward, which didn’t help my situation at all. I wished I had taken Marcus up on his offer for Thai food.

  I asked Mr. Honeywell if he could check with Bobby Ray Walters and secure the video of me driving up my driveway and then not leaving all night. Wouldn’t that confirm my story?

  No. Mr. Honeywell pointed out that a video capturing only a narrow slice of my driveway couldn’t confirm that I hadn’t left my house on foot or by some other means. Bobby Ray’s paranoia wouldn’t help me this time.

  Then Mr. Honeywell explained that even an iron-clad alibi would have its limitations in a case like this. The prosecution would simply argue that I was a drug dealer with an extensive criminal network, the kind of person who could easily order a killing to be carried out by someone else. The law would treat me the same whether I pulled the trigger or paid someone else to do it.

  The prosecution’s whole case would rest on motive: That I had such a compelling reason to kill Richard Coduri, I had to be guilty.

  I was soon swept off to the magistrate, who forwarded me without much delay onto the Middle River Regional Jail. It was a sad testimony to my state of affairs that I was starting to know their intake procedures so well: the surrendering of my personal effects, the signing of documents that I had no choice but to sign, the shuffling from one station to the next.

  Even the humiliation of the cavity search was starting to feel routine.

  When it was all done, when I was back in jailhouse orange, I was preparing to be packed off to the general population for more taunts from my fellow inmates, who would already probably know more about the circumstances of Richard Coduri’s death than I did.

  I was being herded around in handcuffs by a corrections officer, and we had reached the point in the labyrinth of hallways where I knew we were supposed to turn right.
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  Instead, he shoved me to the left.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Ad seg,” he said coolly.

  Administrative segregation. Also known as solitary confinement. I had already heard it being hung over inmates’ heads as their punishment for misbehaving. It involved being in a room by yourself for twenty-three hours a day, not seeing or talking to anyone else most of the time, not being allowed trips to the library or other liberties that made incarceration a little less intolerable.

  “Ad seg? Why? I didn’t even do anything,” I said, already feeling the panic rising in me.

  The guy chortled. “That’s not what I heard.”

  “No, no, wait,” I said. “That’s just an accusation. They haven’t proven anything. I didn’t do it.”

  The CO was still shoving me down this strange hallway.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” he said. “Look, all I know is, the warden said to put you in ad seg for protection.”

  “Protection? Who do I need to be protected from?”

  The guy laughed some more. “Not for your protection, sweetheart. For the protection of everyone else in here. You might as well get used to it. Once you’re convicted, they’ll put you in ad seg too. That’s what death row is.”

  That moment—when he said the words “death row”—was when the denial faded away. The blood seemed to leave my head all at once, and my legs went out from underneath me. The next thing I felt was the floor. Dimly, I could hear the corrections officer call for medical assistance.

  I was not “merely” a drug dealer anymore. I was something far worse: a violent murderer whose flagrant disregard for the law had put me on a straight-and-narrow path to the death penalty.

  This was no five-year sentence. This was spending the rest of my life—whatever remained of it—being treated like a feedlot cow on my way to slaughter.

  It would take a few years for me to exhaust my appeals. But not too many. I had read a story once about how Texas kills more people, but Virginia kills them quicker. It streamlines the appeals process, making it possible to go from crime to punishment faster than anywhere else in the country. I could suddenly see the time stretching out in front of me. It would be both incredibly long and all too short.

  The whole time, I would be Melanie Barrick, Notorious Murderer. If Alex learned anything about his mother, it would only be that I was such an awful person, a series of virtuous citizens—judges and prosecutors and jury members alike—determined the world would be a better place if I were exterminated.

  There would be no chance to reunite with him, even in some limited fashion as the biological mother whose rights to him had been terminated. Social Services would not permit a child to visit death row; and the Department of Corrections would not allow me to go anywhere else.

  I would go to my grave without ever getting the chance to hold Alex again.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  The ruling came down from Judge Robbins’s office first thing Monday morning.

  The motion to suppress the search warrant in Commonwealth v. Barrick had been summarily rejected. The judge had decided that, as a matter of law, it wasn’t of consequence whether the confidential informant was lying or, for that matter, whether he was still breathing. The warrant was based on sworn statements from the sheriff’s deputy. As long as the deputy was being truthful—and there was no allegation to the contrary—there was not sufficient grounds to overturn the warrant.

  There was no need for a hearing. The testimony of the late Richard Coduri had been deemed legally insignificant.

  Moments after Amy Kaye received the electronic notification of the filing, she also got an email from the judge’s clerk, reminding her that the trial was still scheduled for April 9. In case anyone didn’t get the message already, the judge was determined the case would proceed with or without Coduri.

  Amy was just digesting the implications of the ruling—and whether, in fact, it constituted reversible error that might later be appealed—when Aaron Dansby appeared in her office doorway, looking positively chipper.

  “Hey!” he said brightly.

  “Hi,” Amy said, shocked to see him on a Monday morning for the second time in a month.

  “Did you see the ruling in the Coke Mom case?”

  “Of course. Did you?” she said incredulously. She couldn’t remember the last time Dansby had even been aware of a ruling on a defense motion.

  “Yeah. I kind of knew it was coming,” he said.

  “How?”

  He closed the door to her office behind her.

  “I was at the club over the weekend, and I bumped into Robbins,” he said in a conspiratorial tone.

  “Bumped into him?”

  “Maybe I should say he bumped into me. Claire and I were there for dinner and he came over and said hi. He brought up Coke Mom. Everyone at the club was buzzing about it.”

  Dansby invited himself to sit down. Amy sometimes wondered if he really should have been a tabloid newspaper reporter. Gossip and intrigue seemed to excite him more than the law.

  “He might have had a few—you know how he loves his scotch,” Dansby continued. “He sat down with us and was just going on about how we had to make sure Coke Mom didn’t get away with this and how we needed to send a message that we weren’t going to let the criminals run things and all that. Then he told me he had already written up the ruling rejecting Coke Mom’s motion, and that he was just waiting for Monday morning to file it.”

  “Did anyone hear you guys talking?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Because what you’re describing is an ex parte communication between a judge and a commonwealth’s attorney, and it’s highly improper.”

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever. I haven’t even told you the best part.”

  Yes. Because there was always a “best part” about ethics violations.

  “After he tells me he’s rejecting the motion, he starts giving me advice about what we ought to do,” Dansby said. “He was going on about how, ‘When I was sitting in your chair, I would have blah, blah, blah.’ Anyway, he was saying we should keep on schedule and prosecute the drug thing first. That way, when Coke Mom comes up for trial for the Coduri thing, she’s already a convicted felon. He said that would make it more likely she gets the needle. What do you think? Can we do it that way?”

  “Uh, yeah, sure,” Amy said. She didn’t like how any of this felt: a judge and a commonwealth’s attorney colluding at a country club. Especially when the defendant had already asked for a bench trial.

  “Good. We’re still solid on the drug thing, right?” Dansby asked. “I mean, now that he’s rejected the motion, it’s full speed ahead, right?”

  “Yeah, sure. The warrant is lawful, so all the evidence gathered as a result is admissible. It makes things pretty straightforward.”

  “Good, good. What do you think? Should I send Robbins a bottle of Glenlivet for the free legal advice?”

  “Don’t you dare,” Amy spat.

  “Kidding,” he said, then he winked at her. “By the way, I’m thinking about doing this trial. When is it again?”

  “April ninth,” she said, trying not to show any reaction.

  “Okay. Got it. Keep up the good work.”

  He rapped her desk twice with his knuckles as he stood up, then left her office.

  Amy waited until he was gone to frown at him. When he said he was “doing” this trial, he meant he planned to sit first chair—which was his prerogative, as commonwealth’s attorney.

  For Amy, it would just mean more work. Getting Aaron Dansby ready for trial took, on average, about three times longer than if she had to prepare only herself.

  Amy settled back into her work, still pondering the strangeness of a judge telling a prosecutor how to do his job.

  Not twenty minutes later, her phone rang
. It was Sheriff Powers.

  “Hey, it’s Amy.”

  “Hey,” he said. “You got court or anything this morning?”

  “No. Not till this afternoon.”

  “Good. You’re gonna want to come up here.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “We got a guy who just walked in here and confessed to killing Richard Coduri.”

  * * *

  • • •

  As fast as her car and legs could get her there, Amy was seated in the conference room at the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office. Lieutenant Peter Kempe was there. So was Sheriff Jason Powers.

  Amy smiled awkwardly at them. They didn’t know about her pin map; or that, as she sat there, she still couldn’t completely rid from her mind the possibility—however slim—that one of them was the man she had been hunting for three years.

  Then her focus changed to the man being brought into the room. He was tall, somewhat gaunt in the face, with broad shoulders. Amy pegged him as being mid-fifties. He looked like he worked outside.

  She stood up, but the man wasn’t going to make it over to her side of the room to shake hands. Powers pointed to the nearest chair, across the long table from Amy.

  “Sit here,” Powers said, and the man lowered himself into a chair.

  The sheriff looked at Kempe. “You got the recorder?”

  Kempe waved a small silver digital recorder in the air, then set it in front of the man and pressed a button.

  “All right,” Powers said. “You sure it’s going?”

  Kempe gave the thumbs-up.

  “Good. Then let’s get on with it,” Powers said. “Sir, can you please state your name?”

  “William Theodore Curran, sir. But people call me Billy. Billy Curran.”