by Alec Peche
“I would love to be a part of the interview of Michelle or to at least observe,” Jill requested. “As I know so much about the connected case in Wisconsin, I think it would be helpful to have me in attendance. One of the first questions I would like answered is where is Dr. Lewis? It would be nice to know if he was also in California and likely to come after me.”
“Dr. Lewis?” Davis questioned.
“Dr. Lewis was our prime suspect in the murders of Drs. Easley and Phillips, and the attempted murder of a woman named Helen. The Green Bay police has a warrant for his arrest after the attempted murder of my team two days ago. Angela Weber was grazed by a bullet and we have him on camera approaching us, rifle in hand. Michelle has some kind of relationship with him - we have yet to figure it out.”
“Let me check with my supervisor, but it sounds like if you were an observer that you could add to our interview questions,” Davis commented. “I’ll give you a call as soon as I know. I am going to walk your vineyard just to make sure no one is hiding in your vines, and that there aren't any cars filled with gun toting strangers.”
Nathan grabbed their lunch that he had dropped at the foot of the tree when the action began. The food was all in covered containers so fortunately no ants had joined their picnic. With nothing more to do outside, they headed into Jill’s lab to eat. Trixie had been barricaded inside the laboratory while all the activity was going on. The last thing that Jill had wanted was the dog shot. Once Trixie had seen and smelled the bag of food in Nathan’s hand, she had quickly lost the desire to assist Deputy Davis in her walk around Jill’s vineyard.
Fifteen minutes later they were working through the food on their plates when Davis returned. They offered her their selection of appetizers and finger foods but she passed.
“I walked to the top of the hill up your vineyard rows. There is a rental car parked with no owner in sight, it may be Mrs. Easley’s car. There is no indication that there was ever a second car parked there.”
“Good, hopefully that means that Dr. Lewis stayed behind in Wisconsin.” Jill noted.
“You are welcome to join us in the observation area during this interview. Right now, I’m heading back to the station and I plan to have a conversation with the two detectives in Green Bay. I estimate that we’ll get to Mrs. Easley’s interview at about three this afternoon. So far she hasn’t asked for an attorney, if she does this afternoon, then we’ll be required to delay the interview.”
“So noted, I’ll be there at three. Again, thanks for the rescue and let me know about the favor I can do for you.”
Davis nodded and left. Nathan stood up and cleaned up their lunch while Jill took a look around at her analyzers trying to decide what to do next.
Nathan asked, “I thought you had your property wired with loads of security and cameras. Why didn’t Michelle trigger any alarms?”
Looking chagrinned, Jill replied, “Because I forgot to set the alarms. I often don’t set my alarms during the day because I don’t feel threatened.”
“Can you set them from out here in this lab?”
“Yes, but with the crime scene folks coming, I’m afraid to do that.”
“Can you turn on pieces of the system; for example access to your laboratory and the cameras on the vineyard?”
“Good idea. I can do that. Give me a minute,” and she pulled up software on one of her lab’s computers. Soon she had a view of the hillside.
“I’m going to go back to my house and get some work done. Dinner at eight? Until they catch this Dr. Lewis I think we should stick together as much as possible. Don’t waste your breath by telling me you don’t want to inconvenience me.”
“Okay, I won’t. I appreciate your help,” she added with a smile.
Nathan left and Jill went back to work on her tests. The crime scene tech was still over at her house collecting evidence. She had additional test results in from Dr. Phillips’s autopsy, confirming her theory of suffocation by muscle failure. She emailed those results to Jane.
She took a few minutes to jot down some questions for the sheriff to ask Michelle. How did she find Jill? How did she travel to California? Where are her two teenage daughters? What was her motivation for killing Jill? Where was Dr. Lewis? Did she kill her own husband? Why did she want him dead?
When she was satisfied with the list, she printed it out and threw it into her purse to give to the sheriff. She checked in with the crime scene tech and put Trixie in a side yard where she could chase squirrels until she returned. She then drove down to the sheriff’s office where she was shown to an observation area. Jill had brought paper with her to write down questions to send in to the interviewer whom she didn’t recognize.
Deputy Davis joined her in observation,“That is Deputy Gibbs. He is our go-to guy for interviewing. We swear he could squeeze state secrets out of a spy without breaking a sweat. He’ll read her the Miranda Rights a second time and then pause to determine if she waives her rights. He has your questions as well as my own.”
The interview went on for two and a half hours, before the Deputy called it quits for the night. According to Michelle, she had woken up from a trance-like state while in the process of being arrested. She had no explanation of what had caused her to travel to California to kill Jill. She was shocked at her behavior and worse still, she was horrified at the harm her actions would inflict on her children. She asked to have her blood tested for drugs and wanted to take a lie detector test to prove she was unaware of her behavior. She was so visibly and vocally distressed that Gibbs decided to end the interview even though he had made little progress in understanding her explanation for her behavior. At the end, she had sobbed to be released to see her children. It was all very ugly to watch. She heard and felt the woman’s distress, but she had tried to murder Jill and she had cried so much during the interview that they didn’t have answers to their questions. Detective Haro was also on his way to California so he could interview her about her role in her husband’s murder.
Other than Michelle’s capture, Jill felt like they really had not made much progress that day in understanding Michelle’s and Dr. Lewis’s role in the murder of the two physicians. Michelle’s interview had been nothing but weeping and sobbing for over two hours. Jill had no sympathy for the woman. Her arrival on Jill’s property was not a single moment of insanity; rather it required planning to travel from the Midwest to the west coast. There was a ten day waiting period to get a gun in California, so she must have checked it into her baggage or somehow brought it with her. Even Nevada had a three day wait for a background check.
While she was at the Sheriff’s station she had received word that the crime scene tech had finished. It was closing on six when she made the turn into her driveway. Trixie was usually a pretty good barometer of whether a stranger was near-by. She did not get that read from the dog, so it would appear they were fine with no Dr. Lewis lurking in her area.
Jill had expected to pass an uneventful day in her lab. Instead she had lost several hours to Michelle’s capture and interview. She still had a week’s worth of mail to review, vacation clothes to be washed, and now a house that needed fingerprint dust removal. She passionately hated cleaning, so on the way home she called her cleaning service to find out if they were available for some emergency clean-up of her house. Fortunately, they had agreed and were due to arrive at any moment.
She had called her friends earlier and they were all sad at Michelle’s actions. No one was totally surprised, but still Angela had taken pictures of her twin daughters and they felt so bad for the kids. She had also put a call into the detectives and spoke with Van Bruggin. There were still no sightings of Dr. Lewis and so her friends’ lives were severely disrupted from being under police protection. They had agreed to leave the hotel and stay in Jo’s house. They had Jack on the inside for protection and cops on the outside. Living with Jo was better than being in a hotel, but Angela and Marie would have been happier in their own beds.
She took
stock of her own immediate future. She had no consulting jobs on the horizon and if called for one, she would likely have to turn it down until Dr. Lewis was captured. While she hoped he was still in Wisconsin, he could have crossed into California if he was driving a car, so she wasn’t safe yet. She had no thought of trying to fulfill the contract with Michelle after she tried to shoot her today.
It was time to start the washing machine and begin sorting her mail. Thirty minutes later she could hear the washing machine agitating, the mail had all been sorted and her recycling bin was now full of lots of junk mail, and she could hear the cleaning service cleaning up the black dust used for fingerprinting. She was happy to see that Michelle and her capture had not resulted in any damage to her walls or furniture.
Nathan would arrive in about an hour with dinner in hand. Now that there was some semblance of control, she could go back to her lab for an hour and perhaps finish the last of the tests from Dr. Phillips’s autopsy. It would be nice to get that done and a final report sent to his widow, the medical examiner, and the detectives. Nathan found her there an hour later.
“What are you doing out here?” Nathan asked.
“I lost so much time today thanks to Michelle’s arrival that I wanted to see if I could finish up the autopsy findings on Dr. Phillips. If you’ll give me another twenty minutes, I can send off a final report to all of the interested parties in Wisconsin.”
“I need some cooking prep time so that works. What is that other car in your driveway?”
“It’s my cleaning service wiping up the mess left by the crime scene tech. Next to my lack of passion for cooking is my lack of passion for cleaning. I called them up after the interview with Michelle and they agreed to do a special cleaning for me. You shouldn’t have to cross paths with them as I noted no crime scene gunk in the kitchen.”
“Great, see you in twenty then. Don’t lose track of time,” Nathan said as he kissed her and left.
As Jill predicted, she had completed her paperwork on the case within her projected time. There was no point in doing a final report for Michelle. After she tried to kill Jill, she lost all rights to whatever information Jill collected. From her perspective, the case in Wisconsin was complete. The police had enough information to convict Dr. Lewis of Dr. Phillips’s death and once they arrested him, they would have the right to search his properties for the weapon or any other evidence. As for motive, she hadn’t figured out how to direct the police to request hospital records on the doctor’s quality. That was probably her last loose end with the case. Now she would put aside the whole thing and join Nathan for a wonderfully cooked meal accompanied by a perfect glass of wine.
“Was Andrew upset that you rescheduled your visit by a few days?” Jill asked.
“I wouldn’t say upset so much as disappointed. Even though he has seen pictures of the wine glasses, he can’t wait to see them in person. You delayed his pleasure by a few days.”
“Whoops! I’m glad you moved the visit as I think that Michelle might have cornered me eventually in the lab. I don’t know if she would have looked for me out there when she didn’t find me inside the house. Your alertness saved me this afternoon. Thank you,” and Jill leaned in to give Nathan a hug and long kiss. He had to break off the kiss when he smelled something unpleasant coming from the stove they were standing in front of.
“Whoops again, now I am causing you to burn dinner!” said Jill with a laugh.
Nathan was making several quick moves with the spinach he had been sautéing. It looked like he was going to be able to save the vegetable.
“You need to make that up to me in your bedroom tonight. I haven’ burned a vegetable for twenty years. Your kisses are a big distraction to a chef!” Nathan added with a raised eyebrow.
“Seriously I’m sorry I’ve caused you problems with cooking dinner; I really love when you cook in my kitchen. As for later tonight, I’ll do my best to make you feel like you have reached out and touched a live electrical wire. That’s a promise!”
“We could skip dinner and just move on to playing electrician,” Nathan offered.
Jill scoffed at that and Nathan returned to completing the cooking of the meal as well as plating it such that it was a culinary work of art.
They enjoyed the meal and soon retired to play electrician and Nathan lived through the experience to awake to another day in glorious California.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jill felt a little creeped out the next morning as she didn’t know where Dr. Lewis was. With Trixie by her side, she was working diligently to enable each grape cluster, on each vine, to grow to perfection. She knew that the next time she added planted acreage of grape vines, she would have to hire someone else to help her with tending the vines. She was maxed out tending what she had.
She received a call from Detective Haro, asking if he could meet with her. She agreed and provided directions to her vineyard.
About twenty minutes later, he turned into her driveway and Jill left the grapevine she had been working on to greet him.
“Hello Detective Haro, welcome to California," said Jill greeting the detective. “Would you like a tour of the vineyard or my forensic lab?”
“Yes I would like a tour of both and thanks for meeting with me.”
“Your arrival at the golf course saved our lives a few days ago. Feel free to consult with me the rest of your career.”
“Wow, that is a generous offer, thank you.”
Turning around Jill pointed out her grapevines and said, “That’s a Muscat grape cluster. Those grapes make Moscato wine. Are you familiar with that wine?”
“No.”
“It’s grown in the central valley of California because of the hot and dry climate. It is a very sweet white wine and it needs the heat and sun to produce that level of sugar. I have about sixty-thousand vines and I am expanding at the present. In your average bottle of wine, there are four to five of these grape clusters and each vine in full production will give me four to six bottles of wine,” Jill said pointing to her grape clusters and vines while she provided the overview to the detective.
“I’ll have more appreciation for the next bottle of wine I share with my wife, now that I have seen your grape clusters and vines,” said the detective. “Let’s go have a look at your lab. I would love to understand where being a vintner and running a forensic lab intersect!”
“It’s about organic chemistry. I need the right mixture of grapes, fermentation, and sugar to create the perfect flavor. In forensics, we use a lot of chemistry analysis for either drugs, or natural substances that you find in the body like potassium. Much like my titration of grape varietals, I also have to titrate during an autopsy to see if the body has a natural level or an artificial level of potassium. I also use some of my analyzers to experiment with fertilizer and natural pesticides.”
“Got it and it makes sense,” smiled Haro appreciatively. “Can you show me the chemical process you went through to identify the paralytic agent found in Dr. Phillips’s body?”
“Sure. As you can imagine, in the body there are many things to sample - tissue, blood, urine, skin, hair, etc. I gathered samples of the tissue around the injection site, from the diaphragm, the intercostal muscles, and Mr. Phillips’s hair. As you may know, hair holds chemicals for the longest amount of time. I then specifically analyzed these samples for the presence of paralytic drugs of anesthesia. There are a limited number of those drugs which greatly accelerated the test results. If I suspected he died from respiratory paralysis, and really the only way to identify that is by the video feed, then I need to start looking at a fairly wide range of drugs and herbs that cause such an effect. Given I suspected Dr. Lewis, I focused on anesthesia drugs first and got a hit. If he had chosen a poison mushroom or say the botulism organism, I would still be testing to find the organic substance that was the cause of Dr. Phillips's paralysis.”
“I understand the process; that was a great explanation. Can you walk me through an actu
al tissue sample?”
“Sure. Here is a tissue sample from the area around the injection site,” said Jill holding up a large test tube containing a pink foam like substance with some type of a cork in it.“ This is a gas chromatograph which is used to separate and analyze compounds that can be vaporized without decomposition. So with this machine I can test the purity of a particular substance, or I could separate the different components that might exist, and determine what their proportion is of the mixture. I know through various reference sources what the different components are of the various paralytic agents used in anesthesia, so I am just using this machine to find a match for me.”
“Got it,” Haro acknowledged. “Seems fairly simple and our own lab in Wisconsin should be able to confirm soon.”
His cell phone began ringing. He looked at the caller ID then at Jill and said, “Pardon me but I need to take this call. Hello,” and Jill couldn’t hear any more of the conversation as he had walked a short distance away.
In a few minutes, his call ended and Haro returned to Jill.
“I appreciate the tour of your lab and vineyard. I also stopped by to tell you what happened during the interview process this morning. Michelle Easley is being evaluated by a Psychiatrist after we observed strange behavior during the interview process. I will admit to having interviewed many people with some form of mental illness in my two decades in law enforcement, but this is the first time, I have ever observed a split personality. One side of Michelle is horrified at her behavior and the other side of her personality is relishing planning the murder of anyone she doesn’t like. She confessed to killing Dr. Lewis. Detective Van Bruggin has just confirmed that Dr. Lewis was found murdered exactly where Michelle indicated we would find him.”
“Wow I didn’t see that coming, but it sort of makes sense,” Jill said, working her thoughts through what she knew about multiple personalities. “I couldn’t figure out her emotionally distressed self that was interviewed yesterday afternoon versus the killer of a few hours before. If she has different personalities directing different parts of her life, then I can see how disturbing and unbelievable the actions of that other personality are. She must have had an inkling of it last night. She cried and sobbed for nearly three hours. Did she say why she killed Dr. Lewis?”
