by Dan Morse
“Always fun to work with,” Brittany said. “Always energetic. I don’t know anything else, I mean, nothing personal with her.”
Drewry said he’d go get the fingerprint technicians and see about getting her home. “Let me go out and see if your family is here.”
In front of Brittany were the two tissues. She’d never used them.
* * *
It had been two hours since Brittany’s family dropped her off. Drewry wondered what Brittany might tell them on the way home. The detective kept making me go over the story. He asked me questions about Jayna’s car. Drewry wanted Brittany’s dad and siblings to counter Brittany by saying the detectives were just doing their jobs. He tracked one of the family members down on a cell phone. “Sorry it has taken so long. Where are you folks?” Turned out they were waiting up front, in the dumpy lobby. “Oh, okay,” Drewry said. “You guys want to come in and just talk for a minute?”
Drewry brought them all back to the homicide unit, walking the Norwoods past the open door of the interview room, where the technicians were deferentially fingerprinting Brittany. “They’re just finishing up, doing some elimination prints,” Drewry said.
He sat them down at a long table with Ruvin. The detectives tried to keep things light, and largely succeeded. One of Brittany’s brothers, a semiconductor-design engineer, joked at being directionally challenged by the area around the police department, a common ailment for newcomers navigating the looping roads that wound through the office parks. Conversation veered to how one of Brittany’s other brothers studied criminal justice, and whether the detectives liked their jobs. Drewry talked about his earlier career as a letter carrier: “It was either become a cop or go postal at the post office, literally.”
The Norwoods also wanted to know about the case. “You guys know anything new?” one asked.
“We still got a lot of tips,” said Ruvin, unsure what to add.
Earl Norwood asked about the murder three months earlier in the basement of Suburban Hospital, less than two miles from the yoga store. The detectives didn’t know how Earl knew about that case—maybe from one of his other daughters who lived in the area—but it seemed like he was grasping for a connection to what had happened in the yoga store.
“Can you be more specific as to what that one was?” Earl asked them.
“An arrest was made,” Drewry said. “So the guy is locked up.”
Brittany could hear the conversation, could hear her family’s concern and worries. She calmly cooperated with the fingerprint technicians, apologizing when she failed to lay down a clear print, even as the procedure stretched past thirty minutes.
Out around the table, conversation fell back to casual subjects. Earl spoke about living near Puget Sound. Drewry said he’d traveled to the area once. Earl said he hoped Drewry would return. “Look me up, and we can go fishing,” he said.
The detectives felt for the family. Every word the Norwoods had said since they’d met them had been gracious, cooperative, and even, where appropriate, humorous. If the detectives’ theory about Brittany was correct, the Norwood family had perhaps a week, maybe even less, left to their lives as they knew it. For now, of course, the detectives’ charade that Brittany was a victim continued. Ruvin could hear the technicians finishing up. He walked back into the interview room to get Brittany.
“Do you want to hang out with your family?” he asked her.
“Sure.”
As she stood up, Ruvin could see she’d taken off her running jacket for the fingerprinting, and was wearing a tight, athletic T-shirt. She was small, but only around the waist. Brittany’s torso extended upward in an inverted triangle to broad, muscular shoulders. Her arms were equally defined.
Brittany joined her family, but only for a few minutes. The technician reviewing the fingerprints announced they were all in order. Drewry walked the Norwoods out of the station. He returned and spoke to Ruvin, talking about Brittany’s family, repeating the offer that Ruvin had also heard. There was sadness in the detective’s voice: “He invited me out to Seattle to go fishing.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Thursday:
Tracking and Trailing
Detectives Jim Drewry and Dimitry Ruvin returned to the office Thursday, March 17, worried they’d spoken with Brittany Norwood for the last time but convinced more than ever she was the lone killer. It wasn’t just the holes in her story. No one was stepping forward who had seen men enter the store, heard men’s voices inside it, or seen men leave. The tipsters who were now calling increasingly lacked specificity and, in some cases, a connection to reality.
A local musician said she’d gone for a walk down Bethesda Avenue the night before the murder and saw a tall, muscular black man with a “criminal face” pass in front of her while wearing a dark polyester hoodie—possibly casing the store. “Didn’t fit in,” a detective wrote, taking notes of the call. “Hardened face, looked angry, walking in middle of street, criminal face.” An anonymous tipster suggested detectives look into a group seen one or two days before the murder, gathering a block from the yoga store in front of Barnes & Noble. “Caller stated the group was having a meeting before being sent out to go door-to-door to solicit magazine sales. Caller stated in their experience the people involved in those door-to-door sales are from outside the area.”
A performer from a well-known strip club in Washington, D.C., submitted a tip on one of the police department’s online-reporting forms. She offered the name, e-mail address, and employer of one of her more rabid fans, and recalled a recent conversation with him: “He said a lot of his women friends died, that he wanted to join the Army to kill people for the last war and he was serious.” The stripper said she practiced yoga in Bethesda. Her implication, seemingly, was that the fan went looking for her at the store and slipped into a rage. “I get a creepy feeling from him,” she wrote. If the police wanted to talk to the man directly, they could find him at the strip club. “He will most likely show up on Saturday morning right when we open.”
A psychic reported a vision that one of the yoga store victims suffered internal bleeding because she’d been raped with a knife. Another tipster said he had spoken to a psychic who saw the killer as a heavyset man, possibly named Raphile, who could be identified by his tattoo of a non-English word surrounded by a circle. And there was the person who called with simply a gut feeling: “The suspect might have a disease on the foot or bad odor on one foot.”
Drewry and Ruvin didn’t personally have to field many of the calls or sift through the tips, but their colleagues kept them up to speed on the more outlandish ones as a form of comic relief. A more serious pursuit, the detectives knew, was under way inside the store, where evidence was adding up in support of their theory that Brittany had killed Jayna while wearing her pink, size-7½ New Balance running shoes, then took them off, stepped into the store’s size-14 Reebok running shoes, and walked through the blood to create another set of tracks.
* * *
The pursuit was being led by David McGill, one of the crime-scene investigators, who was an expert in shoe prints. His wife constantly teased him during beach vacations for allowing his eyes to wander off at the sight of tracks left by shoe-clad tourists. He was an expert in the discipline, and had studied shoe prints in more than 500 cases.
Until now, McGill’s time in the yoga store had been limited to locating each shoe print. What he wanted to figure out now was the movements of the shoes. It wasn’t going to be easy; in many places, the shoe prints and partial prints crossed over each other in different directions. McGill’s plan was to lay down pieces of bright tape next to each shoe print, along with an arrow when he could establish a clear direction. He’d use yellow for Brittany’s sneakers, and red for the ones found in the store.
McGill wanted to study all four parts of the shop: main sales floor, fitting area, rear stockroom, and rear hallway exit. He wanted cleared-away, open spaces to lay down his tape and get clear photographs of any established tr
ails. By now, almost all of the scattered clues and evidence first encountered had been photographed, cataloged, and taken away to the crime lab. So he was free to roam, except on the main sales floor, which was filled in the middle with its normal assortment of merchandise tables and racks. So McGill and two colleagues pushed the displays into corners easily enough, since the displays were meant to be cleared out for community yoga classes. What a difference that scene must have been—a roomful of people on their mats, legs crossed, soft sitar music playing—versus a middle-aged crime-scene guy with a slight paunch, staring at bloodstains.
As McGill laid down his red and yellow tape and arrows, he encountered a challenge. In a small patch in the middle of the sales floor, there was a different type of bloodstain: drops that were not near any of the shoe prints. McGill didn’t know what it meant, but he wanted to encircle the drops with a different colored tape. Problem was, he didn’t have any other color of tape.
“Hey, Paula, I’m going to cut up one of these yoga mats,” McGill said, calling out to Detective Paula Hamill, a homicide investigator who was there to guard the place and help him while he worked. “Go ahead,” Hamill said. McGill had several colors to choose from, and quickly selected purple for its contrast to the floor and his tape markings. He marked off the drops using three-inch strips. As McGill completed his layout—the tape, arrows, purple strips—the store began to take on the look of some kind of inverted, macabre game of Twister.
When he was done, one thing was clear: how often the New Balance prints and Reebok prints crossed paths. It made things confusing but offered valuable data in the form of smudges and smears, which McGill examined closely. As far as he could tell, Brittany’s New Balance tracks were always made first.
The New Balance tracks were abundant in the rear hallway, where Jayna’s body was found, and the fitting area near where Brittany herself was found. In both locations, there was too much back and forth for clear direction. But coming from the fitting area, a track of yellow arrows pointed toward the front door of the store. They stopped just before an interior deadbolt lock, turned around, and headed back to the fitting area.
By studying how the tracks grew fainter, McGill surmised that at some point, the person in the New Balance shoes—most certainly Brittany—had returned to the rear hallway and got more blood on the soles. What she was doing back there wasn’t clear. But when she came out, according to the shoe prints, the soles were soaked. McGill’s yellow arrows led into the stockroom and toward a sink in the rear corner. It was in this area, he knew, that Windex, Formula 409, and a scrub brush had been found on the floor, and a drop of diluted blood had been found on the hot water handle. What McGill couldn’t locate was equally compelling—there was no evidence of the shoes walking away from the sink. Brittany, it seemed, had removed her shoes here and cleaned them.
McGill was thinking on two levels. On the first, he was documenting the clinical observations he needed to put together reports and testify to in court. On the other, McGill was drawing a mental picture of what Brittany might have done, one he would share with the detectives to give them ideas of how to question Brittany. And here at the sink, after she cleaned her sneakers, Brittany either slipped them back on or walked about in her socks—in either case walking around the existing bloody prints and making her way to the back fitting room, where she knew the Reeboks were kept.
McGill studied the red-tape patterns, representing the trail Brittany presumably made after putting on the Reeboks to create the illusion of a large male killer. One of the first things made clear by the tape was, again, where the tracks weren’t: no Reebok tracks in the front of the store. Just New Balance tracks. That meant that for Brittany’s masked men story to be true, she would have had to either walk up to the door by herself, which raised the question of why she didn’t open it and flee, or she had to have walked up to the front door in the company of a masked man who didn’t have blood on his shoes, which seemed unlikely given how much blood was on the floors in the back of the store.
As for the back portions of the store, the Reebok tracks appeared to go in and out of the rear hallway at least twice. McGill imagined that Brittany, having already killed Jayna, may have used the pool of blood around Jayna’s head as a sort of giant inkwell from which to soak the Reeboks to be able to make more tracks. In any case, McGill surmised, Brittany eventually walked into the rear stockroom and into the small manager’s office. Inside the office, McGill noted, the Reebok prints suddenly went backward and sideways, as if Brittany had literally walked herself into a corner. It wasn’t surprising, really, given all that Brittany must have had on her mind inside the darkened store: Could someone have heard the commotion? Were the police coming? How do I imitate the steps of a tall man? How do I do so in huge, unlaced shoes without them falling off? In any event, McGill would later write, the Reebok tracks in the office represented movements “inconsistent with normal biomechanical movement,” which was more evidence the tracks had been created as part of a cover-up.
Immediately outside the office, the Reebok trail appeared to halt in front of an orange chair. It was here, McGill thought, that Brittany took off the Reeboks, cleaned them in the nearby sink, and gingerly walked around even more bloodstains to return the sneakers to the table.
* * *
As 2:00 P.M. approached, Drewry and Ruvin still weren’t sure how to proceed with Brittany. She’d grown weary of their questions the night before, maybe even wary of their suspicions. The detectives didn’t want to start digging into her past—calling friends, coworkers, past employers—for fear that news of the inquiries would get back to Brittany and spook her. With the DNA test results still days, if not weeks, away, they found themselves in a stressful holding pattern.
Drewry’s cell phone beeped. It was Chris Norwood, Brittany’s brother. He told them that Brittany had withheld an important piece of information about the attack because she’d been so rattled by the whole thing: the men actually made his sister move Jayna’s car the night of the murder. And Brittany wanted to talk to the detectives about it, to give them the whole story.
Drewry reacted as calmly as he could to this new twist in Brittany’s story, as if the development was perfectly understandable. They made plans for Brittany to come back to the station either later that day or Friday. He and Chris chitchatted a little longer about Brittany possibly moving back to Seattle. Then Drewry hung up, walked over to Ruvin’s cubicle, and gave him a report. “This is going to be a good story,” Drewry promised.
It was clear to the detectives what had happened. Brittany had figured out why Drewry had asked her about being in Jayna’s car. She’d realized that she must have left blood there. The detectives updated Sergeant Craig Wittenberger. “What’s she going to say?” Ruvin asked, laughing. “‘The two masked men walked me out to the car on Bethesda Avenue.’ Maybe she’ll say they took their masks off, but told her not to look at them.”
Drewry realized that his car questions the day before had spooked Brittany. She must have felt she could still lie her way out of this bind. Drewry told Ruvin to be ready for anything, that there was no way to know what she’d come up with: “You’ll go nuts trying to speculate.”
* * *
Back at the store, McGill was finishing up his shoe-print and tracking work. But one thing remained a mystery: a series of what looked like worm-shaped bloodstains in the stockroom and the fitting area. The worms had ridges, like the side view of a scallop shell, such that McGill dubbed them “scallops.” He had first noticed the faint stains earlier in the week. Now he’d seen the scallops throughout the day. Some of them were next to shoe prints. Others were off on their own. The isolated ones had originally been faint, but became more noticeable after he sprayed the Leuco Crystal Violet agent. McGill made sure he had pictures of all the scallops before heading to his office at police headquarters.
Thirty minutes later, he was sitting in his second-floor cubicle. Like those in the rest of the building, his space was cramped�
��roughly five feet by five feet. If he moved too far to the left, he hit a wall. If he wheeled back more than a foot, he rammed into the refrigerator he and his colleagues used, a three-footer he’d bought in college. McGill pulled the scallop photos up on his computer. He and a colleague—Cheré Balma, who’d searched Jayna’s car and taken Brittany’s hair samples—took a look.
“Maybe they’re shoelaces,” she said.
Certainly some of the marks were positioned next to shoe prints. But what about the scallops off on their own, with no corresponding shoe prints? As McGill and Balma talked about it, he mentioned how Brittany had likely washed her own shoes—probably so that she wouldn’t make tracks outside to Jayna’s car when she moved it. What if Brittany had cleaned her shoes and soles well, but left diluted blood on the laces? McGill looked at evidence photos of Brittany’s shoes. Two things jumped out: the laces weren’t tied, and the laces had a stylish twist to them, so they effectively formed up-and-down ridges. Scallops, McGill thought.
This was getting complicated, but McGill was able to advance a theory: first, Brittany walked around in her New Balances, which had blood on the soles and the laces. That created the scallop images on either side of her shoe prints. Then she washed her New Balances, unwittingly leaving diluted blood on the laces. She put the New Balances back on, walking with clean-soled shoes but whose laces left faint scallop marks as she went to get the Reeboks. Put another way, this was the possible order of things: wear New Balances, kill Jayna, get blood on them, make tracks, remove them, clean them, put them back on, walk to Reeboks, put Reeboks on, walk through Jayna’s blood, make tracks, get trapped in office, take off Reeboks, clean Reeboks, return Reeboks to table. It was an amazing sequence, one made by someone who likely was either scared or calculating, or both.
