How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  “Yes,” he said.

  She didn’t look at him when she nodded.

  “Let’s go inside,” she said.

  He followed her. She’d already eaten dinner, but there was a clean plate and empty wineglass on the island, as if she’d expected him. The unspoken invitation that seemed to define her approach to their renewed relationship: Pull up a chair, if you’d like. She looked beautiful in the dim light, blond hair and bright blue eyes shining, her athlete’s grace and veteran’s confidence contrasting with a face that seemed impossibly close to that of the girl he’d met all those years ago.

  She poured some cabernet in his glass, and he tried not to focus on the label on the bottle: THE PRISONER. He’d always liked the wine, but tonight he wished she’d picked anything else. “Want to tell me about it?” she asked.

  “I want to,” he said, and it was true. He wanted to tell her about how Amy Kelly had thanked him and explain the way Howard Pelletier had made that gesture with his hand when he described the ascending staircase that awaited his daughter’s return and tell her how Kimberly’s throat had pulsed just before she threw up. He couldn’t, though, because she was a reporter.

  “But you can’t,” she said. “We check our jobs at the door. I’ll drop it.”

  The problem in their relationship wasn’t that Liz didn’t understand that situation but that she understood it too well.

  She was a local newspaper’s dream reporter because of her talent and work ethic and also because she seemed to know everyone along the waterfront in every little town on the Maine Midcoast. And when you knew the waterfront, you knew the towns. From itinerant fishermen to multimillionaire yachtsmen, from bartenders to bankers, all the people interacted with the waterfront in their own ways, and everyone seemed to talk to her. That was because she was one of them, a part of this place, her striking looks offset by hands that were almost always scraped or bruised from the daily work on the boat. Her father was remembered fondly in the area, and his death—he had been lost at sea—was memorialized in tattooed script that traced her collarbone and was visible along her neck when she had her hair up.

  “It’s fine,” he said, but suddenly he hated himself for coming here tonight. He shouldn’t be sipping wine with a lover when Howard was on Little Spruce Island alone and Amy and George Kelly were grieving in Virginia. Did he not owe it to those people to share some of their pain or, at the very least, hold his focus on it?

  “Maybe I should stay at my hotel room tonight,” he said.

  “Rob, relax. I’m not going to interrogate you.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not that, Liz. It’s just…” He set the wineglass down. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.”

  He almost made it to the door before she caught him. Her hand gripped his biceps with the soft strength that made him immediately unsteady, wanting her now as badly as he wanted to keep his focus on the day behind and the day ahead. As he stood with his hand on the doorknob, she wrapped her arms around his chest and spoke into his ear, her breath warm, voice low.

  “Stay. I’ll leave you alone, and I won’t ask questions. Tonight.”

  Tonight. That was their mantra. It had been his suggestion the first time, a hedge against pragmatic thinking, a twenty-four-hour commitment, that was all, no risk there. Of course, you could string months and years out of tonight. You didn’t ever need to look at the horizon unless you wanted to.

  “I told three people the way their children died,” he said without turning, “and I haven’t been able to prove it. Now I’m supposed to just have a drink, eat dinner, and wait to see what happens next?”

  She released her grasp and slid around him so that they were standing chest to chest, her upturned face studying his.

  “The evidence will come,” she said.

  He nodded silently.

  He didn’t sleep long. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty, and then he was wide-awake in the darkness, Liz warm against him, her breathing deep and steady, each exhalation pressing her breast against his arm and each inhalation drawing it back.

  I remember that when I looked up at where his head was, the plastic sucked in and moved out and then sucked in again, and I realized he was breathing. Trying to breathe, at least.

  He slid out of the bed and dressed in the moonlight. Liz stirred but didn’t wake. He watched her sleep for a few moments, wondering how homicide detectives handled nights like these over and over again. How did they balance their own lives, their own human needs, against the burden of caring properly for the victims and those left behind?

  Closing this case was the real-world success Roxanne Donovan had promised. This would move Rob Barrett, the law school graduate with the criminal justice PhD and the master’s in psychology, out of the classroom and into an investigator’s reality. A double murder solved. He’d wanted it, hungered for it.

  But what in the hell did you do while you waited for the sun to rise?

  There had been no class on that, no dissertation to read. In the absence of guidance or experience, he walked down the stairs alone in the midnight quiet, opened a beer, and sat down to review a case file he already knew by heart.

  12

  On the morning of their deaths, Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly had known they were bound for a graveyard.

  They’d intended to meet at what was known locally as the Orchard Cemetery because they viewed it as a romantic spot. Jackie had been painting the old graveyard for years, and her favorite time was sunrise. The manager of the restaurant where she tended bar had put one of her landscapes on display, and that painting had transfixed Ian Kelly on a June evening when he stopped by for a haddock sandwich and a beer, taking a break from his summer internship with an environmental law center. The manager had seen him admiring the painting and introduced him to the petite young woman with uncommonly dark eyes who’d done the work.

  Things had gone fast from there, the way they were supposed to with summer flings. With Ian due back in Virginia by September, and Jackie having no intention of leaving her beloved island, a fling was what it was supposed to be.

  However, they both realized early on that there might be more than a surface spark to the relationship, and Ian, at least, had been scared by the idea.

  I told my mother about this girl, he’d written in an e-mail to a friend back in Charlottesville. I’ve never talked to my mother about a girl, ever, and yet within a week of meeting Jackie, I’m calling internationally to talk to my mother about her? Tell me something wise about how summer love never lasts, would you?

  Rereading that on the night after he’d led the search team out to find their bodies, Barrett felt the eerie prickle that could come so easily when you looked at the last words of the dead. The living had a strange desire to believe the dead had sensed trouble in the air before it landed on them. He thought this was an almost primal response, a desperate hope that there was such a thing as precognition and that tragedy could be averted if you paid enough attention. With Ian and Jackie, though, you didn’t need to cherry-pick anything to build the tragedy—their relationship had begun with the image of a grave.

  E-mails, text messages, and witness interviews formed the timeline of Jackie and Ian’s story, and the records always left Barrett with a feeling of voyeurism, because the two had written intimately to—and about—each other almost from the start.

  On June 15, Jackie to a friend who’d gone to college in Florida:

  Two weeks with him and I am ready to say the unthinkable—I’ve already thought about leaving the island for him. Crazy, and I promise I won’t do it…but doesn’t it suggest something good that I could even let that cross my mind? Leaving this place seems unbearable, but having him leave without me might actually be worse. I want both. I want everything, all the time, is that so selfish? Ha-ha-ha.

  On June 19, Ian to his roommate:

  Sitting on the deck out here, watching the ocean and thinking about her and I realize that the damn house sits empty most of the year anyhow, and you
can finish law school anytime, what the hell harm would a year off be? I can’t get the idea out of my mind. And I can’t tell her that I’m thinking about it. Good ways to ruin things: say I love you on a first date…or propose dropping out of law school for her in the first month. Come up to Maine and talk some sense into me. We’ll party and catch fish, I promise.

  On July 12, Jackie to the friend in Florida:

  Five Fridays, five walks at sunrise. Who does that? I mean, seriously, outside of a Nicholas Sparks book, what guy does that?

  On July 12, Ian to his roommate:

  Head…over…heels. I’m doomed.

  By August, they’d made plans. Ian would go back to Virginia and complete the first semester of his second year of law school, Jackie would come down for prolonged stretches in October and November, and by December, Ian would be northbound again, transferring to the University of Maine.

  His roommate objected strongly to this plan, and Ian responded with polite firmness.

  I know you’re right. UVA law is a perennial top 10, and Maine is a perennial…top 200. Thanks for sending me those stats! Ha. I could make an argument that I’m going into environmental law, and Maine is more appealing in that arena than you’d think. I could make an argument that law school rankings are mostly bullshit. I could say a lot of things, but I honestly can’t muster the energy to even be concerned about any of that. I’m happier here than I ever was in Charlottesville, happier in one day with Jackie than I was in two years with Sarah, and I don’t think statistics and rankings and analytics should govern the choice. Life is short, love is rare, and time is easy to waste.

  He’d written that sentence exactly three weeks before his death.

  Life is short, love is rare, and time is easy to waste.

  Barrett read that and Ian’s words began to blur with Kimberly Crepeaux’s.

  I looked up at where his head was, the plastic sucked in and moved out and then sucked in again, and I realized he was breathing. Trying to breathe, at least.

  He looked at the clock: three a.m.

  At three a.m. on September 10, Ian Kelly would have been in his car, probably just crossing over the state line, paying the toll down at York. He’d left at five p.m. intending to drive straight through the night so he could meet Jackie Pelletier at her beloved Orchard Cemetery at sunrise. When police searched his car, they found a speeding ticket from a Massachusetts state trooper. At 2:37 a.m., Ian had been doing eighty-four in a seventy, hustling north. He’d no doubt dropped his speed after the ticket, and as a result, he’d been a little late. The sun was already above the water, and Jackie already walking among the tombstones.

  If Ian had laid eyes on her that morning, she was already dead, according to Kimberly Crepeaux’s depiction of events. The place where Jackie had been struck was below a rise, meaning that Ian couldn’t have seen her until he’d crested the hill.

  He was up above us a little bit. Standing there, staring. Jackie’s body was between us. It was like a standoff.

  If he’d regained consciousness in the truck, he might have seen her again. He would have seen her through milky plastic and a sheen of blood as the truck that carried them rattled over the rural roads. If he was coherent enough to register these things, then his final look at his rare love would have come as three strangers slid her body out of the truck and carried it toward a lonely pond where the water was dark.

  I never even saw him get the knife out. I just saw him lean over and stab him through the plastic, right where his heart had to be.

  Life was short, love was rare, and time was easy to waste.

  Barrett closed the old e-mails, poured his beer into the sink, and returned to the chair, this time carrying the digital recorder on which he’d stored the audio file of Kimberly’s confession and every other interview.

  In the days when he’d thought he might remain in academia, his focus had been on interview and interrogation techniques—and particularly on false confessions. He’d come in at a perfect moment, as new technologies in the field and in the courtroom were pressuring law enforcement agencies to change their old approaches. Groups like the Innocence Project were discovering wrongful convictions with appalling ease, and while DNA evidence was often the critical element in winning those cases, false confessions made regular, concerning appearances in explaining how the innocent had ended up behind bars in the first place. Of the first two hundred and fifty people the Innocence Project exonerated through DNA evidence, an astonishing 16 percent had at some point confessed to crimes they hadn’t committed.

  When you studied the way detectives were trained, that number became a little less stunning. For decades, law enforcement had taught techniques that were better described as intimidation than interrogation and that focused on nonverbal communication during suspect interviews. Rookie officers and veteran detectives alike were sent to seminars that encouraged them to watch confessions with the sound off in order to hone their ability to identify a lie without hearing the words.

  Barrett’s thesis had been devoted to the risks of the Reid technique, one of the commonly taught interrogation methods, and then journal articles had followed, and he was asked to testify as an expert witness in a few trials. His testimony went over well with the jury because the gap between what the public expected and what the police delivered was, in many cases, shocking. In an era of iPhones and cloud computing, the nation’s foremost investigative bodies had long refused to require recording of interviews, asking the courts to trust handwritten notes and memories from field agents. As more juries struggled with this and more false confessions made headlines and evening-news features, prosecutors and judges begged for a change. In 2014, the Department of Justice finally issued a mandate to record interviews, but even then there was some bitter resistance to it.

  Barrett’s argument was that the way a story took shape was of imperative importance, and the precise words mattered. Pay more attention to what the suspect said and worry less about whether he picked lint off his shirt or looked up and to the left while he talked. His crusade was academic, and he’d never expected his work to come to the attention of the FBI, but one day he got a call from an agent named Roxanne Donovan. She was on an internal review committee, and she wanted to discuss some of his thoughts. They’d had a good, if at times confrontational, talk, and when she told him that he might benefit from spending more time with the men and women who actually sought confessions, she’d hardly been encouraging him to apply to the FBI Academy.

  The conversation had planted a seed, though. Or nurtured one. Barrett’s history of curiosity about police work went back a long way and to more personal places.

  Now he sat with his feet up and his eyes closed and played Kimberly Crepeaux’s confession back once more, like a man relaxing to a favorite song.

  Be the truth, he thought as Kimberly’s distinct accent took him on the bloody ride. Please be the truth.

  13

  He was asleep in the chair when the call came in. He woke at the first ring but couldn’t find the phone before it went to voice mail. He needn’t have worried about that—the second call came immediately.

  It was Johansson.

  Barrett answered groggily, vaguely aware that Liz was awake and standing on the stairs, watching him.

  “What is it, Don?”

  “The bodies were found.”

  He couldn’t have come more fully awake if he’d been injected with amphetamines. He pushed himself out of the chair and stood up.

  “Who was still looking out there? Clyde?”

  “Nobody was looking out at the pond.”

  “Then where—”

  “Two hundred and twelve miles away,” Johansson said. “Buried in the woods near the Allagash Wilderness, wrapped in garbage bags and stuffed in barrels.”

  It took Barrett a moment to find his voice. Finally he said, “And we’re sure it’s them?”

  “Her rings and bracelets. His watch. No clothes. They’re badly decomposed, and the animals
have been at them, but they were both wearing synthetic clothes that day.”

  Barrett understood what he meant—synthetic fabrics took longer to decompose than soft human tissue did. If there were no traces of clothing, it meant they’d been stripped naked before they were buried. This was not part of the Kimberly Crepeaux story.

  “What about evidence that can help us?” he asked. “Anything?”

  “They pulled prints off the barrels,” Johansson said. “One was a full handprint, I’m told. Seven fingers in all, clear and clean. Should get matches quickly with that quality. The autopsy is moving fast too. Everyone wants a positive ID on this in a hurry.”

  “He would have worn gloves,” Barrett said.

  “Who?”

  “Mathias. If he went through the trouble of moving them, he would’ve had gloves on to do it.” He heard Johansson’s sharp inhalation but pushed past it. “The barrels are new to the story, but what about the plastic? Are they really garbage bags, or could it have been clear Visqueen?”

  “I was told they were garbage bags,” Johansson said, “but I’m not really worried about that.”

  “Well, you need to be. We’re going to have to establish how they were moved from that pond. This is where we—”

  “They were shot,” Johansson said.

  Barrett was silent. The room seemed to be growing larger and emptier, as if the walls were receding. Liz was still on the stairs, watching him. He walked to the door, slipped out into the cool night, and closed the door behind him so she couldn’t hear him when he repeated the word.

  “Shot?”

  “Yes. Two different weapons. Each body had a shotgun wound to the front of the torso, and a small-caliber bullet wound, probably from a handgun, maybe a rifle, to the back of the head.”

  “We’ll want the ME to try for an assessment on whether those were pre- or postmortem,” Barrett said. “Whether they were the cause of death or mutilation of bodies in order to conceal the cause of death. We’ll want to have them check Ian’s bones for knife wounds. The skull for a fracture. The—”