The tone of her voice and her body language answered the question. “Matt, why am I here? Do you think I had something to do with this? Is that what he’s asking? Do you think I helped Alex hurt those women? Look what he did to me. Why would I do that?”
Jamison had been carefully observing the back-and-forth between the detectives and Elizabeth. It was clear she wasn’t afraid. She was going on the offensive. “He kidnapped me. He came back after me just like he did before.” Her voice was raised but it was an assertion. She wasn’t pleading. “You heard it. He planned it. He made up an alibi.” She looked over at Jamison. “Do you think I’m lying?
Puccinelli cut in, repeating the question more forcefully. “Ms. Garrett, how did your fingerprints get on this can?”
Elizabeth met the question with silence.
Jamison knew it had already gone on too long. They needed to either read her her rights or end it. “Beth, you said you don’t know what happened after St. Claire stopped you that night by the cemetery. He came to the car. He had a knife. Then you remember waking up in a dark room. Is that right?”
“I’m not lying.”
Jamison was grateful when Ernie quietly interrupted. “I never said you were lying, Beth. I pulled you out of that bedroom, remember? We’re just trying to understand what happened. Could Dr. St. Claire have used this aerosol can on you? Do you have any memory of that?”
They were giving her an out, but they could sense the time wasn’t right, and he knew that they were dangerously close to an illegal interrogation if they hadn’t already crossed the line. They knew that if they read Garrett her rights, the discussion was going to end.
Elizabeth seemed to relax slightly. She was thinking, trying to choose the answer that would make them stop. Her eyes fixed for a few seconds on each man in the room. Her words came out in a measured cadence, precisely enunciated. “I don’t remember him using anything like that. If he did, maybe I grabbed it and that’s how my fingerprints got on the can.” She looked at Jamison. “I don’t know how they got on that can and I don’t know where those pictures came from either.”
Jamison would realize later that was the moment he saw behind her eyes. It was like seeing the eyes of a cat staring at him in the darkness.
She turned to level her gaze on Ernie. Her tone was measured. “You want to know about when Alex was shot? When Alex came toward me I didn’t know what he was going to do. I heard the shots. I saw the man with the gun running toward us.” Elizabeth paused before her next statement but she said it with deliberation so that there could be no misunderstanding. “It was dark, but for a second I thought I knew who it was, but I’m not absolutely sure.” She let the words “absolutely sure” linger for a second before continuing. “Do you want me to . . .” She hesitated, watching them carefully and then letting out the last word. “Guess? Do you want me to guess? He fired so quickly—before Alex—I don’t think Alex did anything. Alex called my name and was walking toward me.”
There was no mistaking the implication as she uttered her next words. “Maybe the man just wanted to kill Alex. If that’s what he wanted, then he did everyone a favor—especially me.” She let her words hang in the air before repeating herself. “Maybe he just wanted to kill Alex.” Her last words fell heavily on the silence in the room. She followed each of them with her gaze and finished, settling her focus on Jamison.
Jamison felt himself swallowing and sucking in air. She knew who shot St. Claire, and she knew they didn’t want to hear the answer.
He inhaled and then let his breath out slowly. “No, Beth, we don’t want you to guess. I think that’s enough. Maybe we’ll never know what happened. Ernie will take you home. I think that’s best.”
At that moment, Jamison couldn’t gauge what he saw in Elizabeth Garrett’s eyes. Maybe it was a hint of triumph. Maybe it was a hint of resignation. It was his decision to end the interrogation.
Jamison stood up and extended his hand. He could see it in her eyes; the defiance was gone. “Good-bye, Beth.” There was nothing more he had to say.
Ernie followed her out the door and Jamison returned to the chair. Whatever she had done, she was a victim too. That didn’t justify her conduct but maybe it explained it. He couldn’t prove what really happened between her and St. Claire, and most of all, Jamison knew that he didn’t really want to even if he could. Sometimes the truth was so layered by what a person wanted it to be that they would never know what it really was.
Jamison reached over for the manila envelope. He slipped open the flap and found the photographs of Dr. Alex St. Claire standing in front of her car with the background that Ernie had seen.
The cold realization that in court she had held the photograph of her in her hand and adamantly insisted she had never seen it before settled on Jamison. She had lied in court when she said she didn’t know that picture was being taken and he had defended her. Jamison ruefully recalled that he had even brought in a photographic expert to testify that her version was possible. One more explanation that so easily slipped off her tongue. That she could answer so quickly, without apparent guile, that was what made her words so believable.
When Ernie had pulled out the photographs, Jamison was surprised and then momentarily angry that Ernie hadn’t shared them with him first. But then he had realized that Ernie understood the photographs would make Jamison too angry to use them like the razor slash they could be in an interrogation. It was experience and cold judgment by Ernie. Ernie would apologize later for holding out, but there was nothing to apologize for. Ernie had been right and Jamison knew it.
Jamison was still staring at the photograph when the phone in Puccinelli’s office rang. When Pooch put down the phone he explained. “Matt, that was Andy Rhychkov down in the lab. They got the DNA results off the mouthpiece. Andy says it had DNA from Symes and from Ventana. He also said the mouthpiece has other DNA on it but he can’t identify it, at least not yet.” Pooch’s face showed fatigue seeping from every pore. “Andy says it’s consistent with the victims having this mouthpiece shoved up against their mouths.”
Jamison fingered the photographs and let Puccinelli’s words sink in. His eyes were fixed on the smiling face of Alex St. Claire, the same smug expression that St. Claire had when he walked out of court a free man. Jamison pulled open the flap of the manila envelope and placed the photographs back inside. Closing the flap on the images of Garrett, everything that had been clouding his own vision fell away, and his mind was suddenly piercingly clear. He knew who he cared about. Jamison made his decision.
O’Hara had said it to him time and time again, laughing every time somebody said a trial was a search for the truth: What was a lie and what was the truth? The truth was only what could be proven and it wasn’t a lie unless it could be disproved, and all the rest was for lawyers to confuse the issue.
The manila envelope sitting on the desk and the plastic bag with the metal canister appeared to Jamison as remains of the day, the final remnants of ruined lives. O’Hara’s words kept ringing in his ears. “If you can’t prove it’s true and if you can’t prove it’s a lie, then you got nothing, and sometimes nothing is the best you can do.”
Jamison stood up and spoke to Pooch. “Close the file.”
“What about her?”
Jamison waited for a moment before answering. O’Hara was right. Sometimes a prosecutor had nothing and it was the best he could do. “Close the file. Call O’Hara. Tell him I said he was right. Sometimes the truth is better left lost in the dark.”
Jamison walked toward the closed door, placing his hand on the doorknob. “And tell him one other thing. Tell him we have no idea who killed Alex St. Claire, but whoever it was did the world a favor.”
Chapter 47
After the questioning of Elizabeth, Jamison returned to his office, slamming his body into his chair. He needed Garrett to prove that St. Claire was a murderer, and he needed to prove St. Claire was a murderer to have any basis of proving Garrett was anything other than a
victim. He didn’t have St. Claire and he didn’t have Garrett. Besides that, he knew serving up O’Hara was the price that would have to be paid for going after Garrett, and that price he was not willing to pay.
Jamison stared out the window, his reflection staring back at him. As he thought about the consequences to Elizabeth Garrett of things done years before, he pondered whether people create the life they live or did their life create them? Perhaps for some people, the path they take is not a matter of choice. Did Elizabeth Garrett make actual choices or simply react to what she already was when St. Claire seized upon the flaws he saw in her?
As he watched Elizabeth during the interrogation, he had thought to himself that she didn’t have to choose St. Claire. She could have found somebody else. Now as he reconsidered it, he realized that perhaps St. Claire was the only choice she had. His reflection in the glass gave him no answer.
His mind began to touch upon the tangled web that had ensnared him, pulling him into the dark recesses of the lives of Elizabeth Garrett and Alex St. Claire. He had argued for the guilt of Alex St. Claire because he believed Elizabeth and because Alex St. Claire was a murderer. But whatever Alex St. Claire was, it had become clear that most of what he had said about Elizabeth was true.
Now drawn back from the heat of the trial, Jamison recognized that he had rationalized Garrett’s explanations because he could not accept that a murderer might be telling the truth. The twisting lies of Garrett and St. Claire were like a choking vine that strangles a tree until it becomes one with the bark and wood. Where the lies and reality began and ended was indistinguishable even in retrospect.
Who had really told the truth about what happened that night by the cemetery? Alex St. Claire said it was all a game between the two of them. And it was—even the trial. That St. Claire and Elizabeth Garrett had moved across the chessboard of this case like a king and queen left Jamison with the realization that St. Claire had looked upon him as merely a pawn in a private game.
It made no sense. There were still unanswered questions. When they found Garrett in St. Claire’s farmhouse, they had found no evidence related to the other victims. There was nothing either at St. Claire’s house in the city. There were just enough bits and pieces to the puzzle to tell him that St. Claire did everything and enough empty spaces to not make it clear at all. The lack of answers ground on Jamison.
That night, as he lay in bed, he knew himself well enough to know that sleep would not come to him until those answers came. He was right. He could not stop his mind from churning through the facts and contradictions. It was a sleepless six hours, but by morning he saw the vague outline of a missing piece.
Jamison rolled out of his sweat-dampened bed and grabbed the phone. Already at his desk, Puccinelli answered on the first ring. “Pooch, was there anything else in St. Claire’s car besides the aerosol can and the light? Anything at all?”
“There was the plastic bag with the bills in it that we removed from St. Claire’s console,” replied Puccinelli. “I have it right here. Let’s see. Just some tax stuff it looks like, and some utility bills and the car registration. Nothing that I thought was important. Wait—I don’t know if this means anything, but I’m reading the envelopes for the bills, and the bills went to a post office box instead of St. Claire’s address. They’re all addressed to something called the St. Claire Trust, care of Alex St. Claire, trustee, same trust that owned the car.”
Jamison felt his heart skip a beat. “I’ll be right over.”
Puccinelli was waiting for him when he walked into the detective’s office. He held up the bag with the bills. “Okay, St. Claire paid taxes like everybody else. So?”
Jamison took the bills and began opening them. He wasn’t worried about anybody’s privacy at this point. St. Claire was dead. The bills were all the same. Each of them was either a tax bill or a utility bill for an address nobody knew about. Jamison had pushed his trusts and estates class from law school to the back of his mind. It wasn’t something he used as a prosecutor. But he understood what the bills meant.
The reality of it struck him with the force of a hammer blow. There was another house that St. Claire had access to, and because it was owned by a trust it never showed up in the doctor’s name. Jamison shoved the bills in front of Pooch. “Do you know where this address is?”
Puccinelli laughed. “I’ve been doing this a long time. People dump bodies all over this county, so there aren’t many corners I haven’t been to.” He examined the address. “Yeah, it’s in the foothills about thirty or forty minutes away.”
Jamison was already moving to the office door. “Call Ernie and tell him to meet us at this address.” His decision not to call O’Hara was deliberate. He knew this time O’Hara needed to stay away and let others do what needed to be done.
Jamison and Puccinelli were parked in the gravel driveway of the house listed in the St. Claire Trust. The house was vacant. The windows were shuttered. What was immediately apparent was the isolation. There were no other houses in sight.
It wasn’t the house that interested Jamison at the moment, but the barn. They looked around back and found a small compact car, which Pooch ran and determined was a rental. The car had dust on it. Jamison knew when they checked that it would come back rented to St. Claire. The doors to the barn were locked. He turned to Pooch. “Break it,” he said firmly.
Puccinelli’s expression was unsure. “Do we need a warrant?”
“St. Claire’s dead. What we need are answers. Call for whatever you have to and break it.”
By the time Pooch got a deputy whose area included the vicinity of the house to come over with a bolt cutter, Ernie had arrived. The deputy snapped the lock and slid back the door. As soon as the fluorescent lights came on so did the answers. To the side of the large room was a steel table, just like the one that Dr. Gupta used, just like the one they found at the farmhouse, just like the one Elizabeth described.
“Call forensics. Get them up here.”
It was Ernie who found the loose board covering a space in the wall. After photographs were taken, he removed the box hidden inside. Jamison and Pooch peered over his shoulder when he opened the box. It held what must have been St. Claire’s childhood treasures, a shiny rock, a picture of a boy holding a fish next to an older man, a bird feather—the gleanings of a young life.
There was also a computer memory stick in a clear plastic bag. They would have to wait to find out what was on it. They picked up the laptop sitting on a nearby table. Jamison wouldn’t allow anybody to open it. He knew it was encrypted. St. Claire had gone to far too much trouble to make the mistake of leaving either his laptop or a portable memory stick easily accessible.
It was maddening; they were on the edge of unearthing something that could fill in the unanswered questions that had been eluding them for weeks. While they waited several days for a computer technician to break into St. Claire’s laptop, forensics tested traces of DNA found on the steel autopsy table in the barn.
The DNA matched that of Ventana, Johnson, and Symes, which explained why they had found nothing before at either the farmhouse where they found Beth Garrett tied to the bed or at St. Claire’s house in the city.
St. Claire hadn’t taken Ventana, Johnson, or Symes to either of those locations. He had brought them to the barn that nobody knew anything about. They also found trace DNA that they couldn’t identify. It came from a woman, but it wasn’t Elizabeth Garrett.
It took the forensic computer analyst two more days to break the password on the laptop and the encryption on the memory stick. As soon as Pooch called to let them know the computer could be opened, Jamison was back at the sheriff’s department. Ernie was with him.
The men stood watching as the computer analyst shoved the memory stick into the laptop, entered a password, and clicked on the icon for the encrypted thumb drive. It revealed an inventory list with women’s names and dates. Their eyes passed down the list of names, slowly, one by one. They saw the names of Ven
tana, Johnson, and Symes, but they weren’t first. There were more names ahead of them on the list. Names that they didn’t recognize.
Jamison reached down and moved his finger across the touchpad, tapping on the first name.
Photographs of a bound woman unfolded like the petals of a flower. The young woman’s face was etched with terror. And then as Jamison tapped, one by one, the photographs chronicled her last images of the world until her eyes were closed. There was no doubt that what they saw with the final photograph was her last moment.
Jamison scrolled through the gallery of names, pausing at each one, opening it with the reticence of someone who didn’t want to see beyond the closed door of a darkened room. With each name, photographs showed a young woman either tied to a bed or otherwise bound in various poses, her final moments meticulously chronicled and preserved.
Slowly Jamison touched Ventana’s name and they watched as her face revealed the shock of realization of what she knew was to come. Jamison relived in his mind what he had seen on that isolated road where her body was found, and he could only hope that what she thought was to come was not as frightening as what did come to pass.
As Jamison opened the images of Johnson and Symes, he looked at the dates inscribed next to their names. The photographs, like Ventana’s, were taken on the last day of their lives.
But one name remained—Elizabeth Garrett. Jamison hesitated and then moved the curser across the digital inventory, touching her name. The first image unfolded of the back of an unclothed woman, her hands bound to the headboard of a bed, her face turned away from the camera. Each image revealed more of her body as frame by frame she turned toward the camera, her hair shielding her face.
Fractured Justice Page 40
