Two Parts Bloody Murder

by Jen J. Danna

  “Blood spatter on the kitchen wall, as well as one bullet casing in the kitchen, indicated that was the site of the initial shot,” Kiko interjected. She looked up from her report. “The second shot was in the hall.”

  Matt looked across to his father. “The chest shot in your photo is actually an exit wound. The entrance wound is in the back. She was in the hall trying to get away when the second bullet pierced the superior vena cava. She went down and bled out pretty quickly after that.”

  “That second shot had to have played into the sentencing,” Leigh said. “The perp … hold on, where is his name …” She ran a finger down her file. “Here it is. Santino Cabrera. He’s still in jail over thirty years later. I looked into that before leaving the unit.”

  “He murdered someone,” Juka said. “Wouldn’t we expect him to still be in prison?”

  “We would if it was first-degree murder. But most home invasion deaths are charged as second-degree murder due to the lack of planning and initial intent. Second-degree is usually life with the chance of parole after fifteen years. Now, maybe he hasn’t been a model prisoner. Or because the murder occurred during the commission of a felony and because of the shot in the back, it might have been bumped up to first.” Leigh stopped and tapped a nail beside an entry. “Or this could have done it too. It was his second home invasion charge. We’re serious about armed home invasions. Do it a second time with an illegal firearm—there are several firearms charges here as well—and kill the homeowner? That would be life with no chance of parole for sure. So, he broke in during the middle of the day when she was alone. I wonder if he’d been watching the house.”

  “Or he might have been trailing her from outside the home.” Mike held up a color crime scene photo depicting paper grocery bags tipped sideways on the counter, their contents spilled and rolled to the four corners of the room. Shattered pieces of broken glass and china littered the countertop. “Looks like she’d just come in from doing the groceries, and there was some sort of scuffle on this side of the room.”

  “According to the police report, there were two teacups on the table,” Kiko said. “There was also an ashtray with several cigarette butts in it. One of the lipstick prints on the butt matched a color Mrs. Kain wore but there were several more with a color that didn’t match anything she had.”

  “So a friend stopped by that morning?” Juka suggested. “Maybe unexpectedly? Before she’d had a chance to put away her groceries?”

  “Mr. Kain’s statement said his wife always did the groceries on Wednesday mornings,” Paul said. “It was just the two of them by that time. All their kids had grown up and moved out. She filled a lot of her time with charity work and often had ladies over to discuss projects. That was nothing out of the ordinary. But with her husband at work, the house would have been empty when she went out. It could have been a random attack, she could have been followed from the store, or maybe it was someone who knew her schedule.”

  “Do we have any idea who was inside the home first?” Matt asked. “Maybe it was someone who knew her regular routine and tried to gain entry while she was gone. Then she came home earlier than expected and it all went to hell.”

  “Looks like he got there first.” Kiko waved her report. “The back door was jimmied open. Back then, a lot of people would leave their doors unlocked if they were home. So this sort of implies the perp got in first while she was out. If she came in the front door, she’d never have known there was someone else in the house until it was too late.”

  Matt flipped through his file. “It looks like the guy only touched objects he then took with him. Either that or the cops were kind of lousy with the fingerprinting because all that’s here seems to be a few smudged partials.”

  “If there were only a few smudged partials, I’d lean toward someone wiping everything down and missing a couple of spots,” Leigh said.

  “Cabrera maintains they aren’t his prints.” Juka looked up from where he sat at the table. “I have the court transcripts. He pleaded not guilty. Said he was never there. Said those couldn’t be his prints.”

  “What other evidence did they have on him?” Leigh asked.

  “The few items reported as taken from the house—her wedding rings, a few other pieces of jewelry, and some cash—were never recovered. The murder weapon was a Walther PPK, also not recovered at the scene.” Juka scanned the page, flipped to the next, and kept scanning. “What they had was all circumstantial. There were a few prints in the house. The gun was found the next day, tossed into a dumpster a few blocks away. The serial number was filed off so it was deemed stolen.”

  “This is the ballistics report,” Matt said, waving a sheaf of papers. “The gun was a firm match to the bullets. No doubt at all there. It had some prints on it too. The prints matched those in the house that didn’t belong to either of the Kains.” He flipped further into the file. “Going forward in time, they don’t seem to be finding a match.”

  “I’m seeing that also,” Juka said. “There’s a huge time gap that seems to have complicated matters.”

  Leigh swiveled in her seat to face Juka. “What do you mean?”

  “The crime occurred in September of nineteen-seventy-five. Cabrera wasn’t arrested until February of seventy-nine. And then the case was tried in the fall of eighty.”

  “He was arrested four years later?” Matt asked. “Why so long?”

  “It looks like there wasn’t anything to connect him with the crime.”

  “Man, this cop was a bulldog.” Kiko flipped through her thick file. “At first he focused in on Kain himself, but the evidence just didn’t support it. Kain had a clear alibi that day. And then no one else presented as a suspect. But Trooper Bern just couldn’t let it go. I have years of reports here. The case went cold almost immediately, but he just didn’t give up. He tried to find the woman who Anna met with that morning, but without success. He figured that Cabrera must have wiped down the kitchen, and, in doing so, wiped away all traces of the woman Anna had a cigarette with. Too bad they don’t have the cigarettes still.”

  “Wait.” Leigh bent over and sorted through one of the boxes at her feet. “You mean these?” She held up a small plastic evidence bag. Four cigarette butts lay at the bottom of the bag.

  Matt snatched the bag from her hand, squinting at the butts through the plastic. “Yeah, those. We can run DNA on them and see who pops up.”

  Mike rubbed a hand thoughtfully over his neatly trimmed white beard. “You think it’s going to be important who a dead woman had tea with almost forty years ago?”

  “You never know,” Leigh said. “In a case like this you leave no stone unturned. What if this woman is the one person who might have seen something that day but didn’t realize it was important.” She turned back to Matt. “How fast can that be run?”

  “Within the next few days. We should only extract from half of each cigarette butt, though, just in case part of the sample needs to go to the state lab because we actually find something.”

  “That works. Of course, with our luck, it’ll be someone who’s been dead for thirty years, but still, it’s worth a shot.” She bent back over her file.

  Matt laid the evidence bag down on the counter before turning back to his own file. He was almost at the end of it when he found the piece of evidence that tied it all together. “This is it. I have what convicted Cabrera.” He slid the fingerprint report in front of Leigh. “It was a matter of making the match and connecting the dots. The bullets on scene to the gun and the fingerprints on the gun to the perp. He got arrested for a B & E and that brought him back into the system. His fingerprints were a perfect match to the old case.”

  “The B & E charge was dropped,” Juka said. “But by that time they had him on the murder of Anna Kain. The entire case was circumstantial. Cabrera swore he didn’t do it, but four years later couldn’t provide an alibi or eye witnesses proving his innocence. He said he was never there, but couldn’t prove it all that time later.” He flipp
ed another page. “Bern did a great job of burying the guy. Describing the scene of a middle-aged housewife trying to escape, only to be shot in the back by a coward. That was followed by testimony by Kain himself and the jury apparently bought it. The defense even put Cabrera on the stand, but clearly it didn’t make a difference. The jury returned the guilty verdict after less than two hours of deliberation.”

  Matt turned to Leigh. Her narrowed eyes were unfocused and one fist absently clenched and unclenched on her thigh. He touched her arm, drawing her gaze. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I’d like ten minutes with this Cabrera.”

  “You want to go interview a convict?”

  “Yeah, just to tie this whole thing up.”

  “Wasn’t it tied up over thirty years ago?”

  “You’d think.” She reached over to grab her cup and Matt could see she was buying time, her mind running a mile a minute as she swirled the coffee in her mug and took a long, slow sip. Then she set it down decisively and pulled her phone from her pocket, speed-dialing a number. “Hey, it’s Abbott. Can you give me a current location for a Santino Cabrera? He went up in nineteen-eighty for murder during the commission of a home invasion.” She tapped her fingers on the counter as she waited. Her fingers suddenly stilled and she whistled. “Okay, thanks.” She set down her phone. “He’s in the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center.”

  “Is that bad?” Matt asked.

  “It’s the only maximum security prison in Massachusetts. It’s where the most dangerous criminals in the state go. It only opened in ninety-eight, so he must have started somewhere else and been transferred there.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s in Shirley, so it’s only about an hour away.” She flipped her file closed. “I’ll contact the warden about heading out there this afternoon.”

  “Let me come with you.” Matt closed his own file and pushed back from the counter. “If you think something is off, a second opinion might be useful.”

  A battle waged in her mind for a long moment. “You can come with me, but you have to stay in the background. You have this habit of trying to stand in front of me occasionally. I know your intentions are good, but if you do that this time, you’ll undermine my credibility and I won’t get it back. This is a convict and I’m a cop. The hierarchy needs to be clear from the second he walks in the door. He’ll try for the upper hand; you have to leave it to me to keep it.”

  “Okay.”

  She pinned him with an icy glare. “Seriously, Matt. This is important.”

  He raised both hands in surrender. “Understood. Really. I’ll stay in the background.”

  “You’d better.” She turned to the room. “Okay guys, I’m going to set this up. I’ll try to buy an extra thirty minutes. Give me everything you have on the case. I need to know it all.” She glanced at Matt. “Then we’ll go hear Cabrera’s story and see if they line up.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: CLIP JOINT

  * * *

  Clip joint: a place of entertainment where customers are tricked and coerced into paying highly inflated prices for inferior or nonexistent goods or services.

  Thursday, 4:38 p.m.

  Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center

  Shirley, Massachusetts

  The room was sparsely furnished, with only a table and four chairs. The guard let Matt and Leigh in, and then silently withdrew.

  “Well, isn’t he a happy fellow,” Matt said, frowning at the closed door with a small square window in it.

  “This is not a happy job, especially in a maximum security prison like this. I’ve never been in one with this kind of tech.” Her gaze drifted up to the small black dome in the corner—one of the facility’s many security cameras. “The control center to monitor all the high-def cameras, gates, doors, lighting, etcetera must be pretty extreme. But they’ve never had a breakout, so something is certainly working right.”

  “It was hard enough to get in. I have to admit, I kind of thought you’d be able to manage it with a little less effort.”

  “You just didn’t like having to take off your belt and shoes and going through the metal detector. Even cops have to submit to their entrance requirements. Look at it this way—they had the option of a strip search they didn’t exercise. For instance, if they have any suspicion of contraband being brought to an inmate.” When Matt’s eyes went wide in horror, she laughed. “But you were with me, so there was never any worry.” She grinned when his whole body relaxed and he dropped into a chair.

  “I suppose I should have guessed they’d want you to turn over your gun.”

  “The last thing they need is a prisoner overcoming a cop, stealing a gun, and a riot starting.”

  “Good point. This whole place makes me …” His gaze darted around the room. “Uneasy. I may never speed again.”

  “You’d have to do a lot more than break the speed limit to end up in here. I’m just glad they squeezed us in. This isn’t their normal visiting hours, but the warden made an exception.”

  Their attention was suddenly drawn to the door as the muffled sound of voices filtered through the glass. The door opened to reveal a wiry older man in an orange Department of Corrections jumpsuit. His salt-and-pepper hair was buzzed short and a scowl split his white beard. Two guards held his handcuffed arms as he shuffled into the room. They led him over to a chair on the opposite side of the table from Matt and unlocked his cuffs before pushing him roughly into the chair. One of the guards left the room, the door slamming shut with a metallic clang, while the other guard took up his post beside the door, his gaze flatly fixed on Cabrera.

  Cabrera turned unusually light gray eyes on Leigh, his cold stare verging on arctic. “Who are you?” His deep voice carried a distinct north shore accent, even if his skin tone spoke of his Latino heritage.

  “Trooper First Class Leigh Abbott of the Massachusetts State Police.” Leigh sat down in the chair next to Matt, calmly folding her hands in front of her.

  “What does a cop bitch want with me?”

  Leigh sensed Matt tensing beside her, but calmly gazed back at Cabrera. “I want to talk about why you’re here.”

  For a brief moment, confusion flashed in those icy eyes, but it was quickly quenched. You can’t ever show weakness in a place like this, Leigh thought.

  “Shouldn’t you be talking to Trooper Bern? Isn’t he one of yours?”

  “He was,” Leigh said calmly. “He’s retired now. But I wanted to talk to you first. Your case has come up during the course of another murder investigation.”

  Cabrera swore viciously. “They trying to stick another one on me? I didn’t do the Kain woman in the first place.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Your case has fallen into my hands and there are some aspects of it that strike me as … odd. How did you know Mrs. Kain?”

  “I didn’t,” Cabrera snarled, leaning across the table. “Look bitch, I’m going to say it only once. I didn’t do it.” One clenched fist thumped down on the table.

  “Cabrera,” the guard snapped, pushing away from the wall.

  Leigh turned around, throwing up a palm to stop him. “Stop right there. I don’t need your help. In fact, I’d prefer it if you waited outside, Officer.”

  “I wouldn’t want to leave Cabrera here with a lady.”

  Leigh stood, pushing back her chair so quickly, it squealed across the tile floor. “I’m a cop, not a lady. Feel free to monitor by camera, but get out. This is a private conversation and this prisoner has rights.”

  The guard gave her an angry glare, but retreated from the room after pointing an accusing finger at Cabrera. A silent message—I’m watching you— and the door closed behind him.

  Leigh took her seat again and stared coolly across the table. “Now, can we start again? And how about this time we cut the bullshit attitude? Talk to me, Cabrera. I’m not here for my health, but to get to the bottom of something I have some questions about.”

  Cabrera looked suspiciously from Le
igh to Matt and back again. “Who’s he?” He jerked his head in Matt’s direction.

  “Dr. Matt Lowell from Boston University. He’s the scientist working on my cases.” In her peripheral vision she saw Matt give a single nod of acknowledgment, but remain silent. “Now, tell me about Anna Kain.” She held up a hand as he opened his mouth. “Something more concrete than ‘I didn’t do it.’ When did you become aware of the Kain case?”

  “When I was out on bail for a B & E I didn’t do either. I was seen leaving the scene of the crime. The only problem was I wasn’t involved.”

  “What was the B & E?”

  “Someone lifted some jewelry from a house down by the water in Lynn. I was down in the area, picking up some stuff, and someone tagged my license plate.”

  “What was the ‘stuff’? Were you into illegal drugs?”

  Cabrera clamped his lips tight and looked mulish.

  “That’s fine.” She stood. “Come on, Dr. Lowell, if he’s not willing to help us, we can’t help him.”

  She was halfway to the door before he stopped her.

  “Wait.”

  Leigh purposely paused for a few seconds before slowly looking around. “Yes?”

  Cabrera let out a long breath and drummed his fingers on the table, clearly struggling with himself. “I was getting secondhand baby stuff.”

  Leigh slowly returned to the table and sat back down. “Can you be more specific?”

  “I’d been out of work for a while at that point. No one wanted to hire an ex-con, you know? Even one that was trying to make things right. My woman and me, we had a kid and a second one on the way and we needed some things. Someone she worked with offered us some of their stuff they were done with.” The hand on the table curled into a fist. “I was just trying to provide, you know? I was down there picking up some rich lady’s cast-offs because her garbage was better than anything I could give my own kids. That’s all I was doing.”