Why, Marjorie wanted to know, had the police never fingerprinted her, Cesar, her ex-husband, or her children to match them up with any fingerprints found at the scene? And how could it be that the police never found any fingerprints? There was fingerprint powder residue in the house, she said, but not much and not in all the places she would have expected. Could it be that the police didn’t do a thorough job dusting for fingerprints?
Possible, I thought, but not likely.
Why weren’t neighbors questioned as to what they might have seen or heard? Marjorie had talked to her neighbors, and although Robileaux said the neighborhood was canvassed, most of her neighbors said no one from the police department had talked to them.
I nodded, thinking how funny it was that victims so often zeroed in on witness statements, not realizing that most witnesses are fairly unreliable, and canvassing is usually done only in homicide cases. Which, I reminded myself, this case had been. An attempted homicide. At least initially.
The report was wrong, she said; there was blood on the rug. Not much, but she had a copy of the cleaning bill. And there were inconsistencies about her purse. Robileaux said the contents were scattered across a backyard. Then why, Marjorie wanted to know, was every item precisely where she’d put it when it was returned to her? She always put everything in the same place, she was very organized that way, and she found it unbelievable that Robileaux or some other officer had managed to put the items back in exactly the same way. And about the lack of fingerprints on the purse: Robileaux told her they couldn’t dust for prints because there was too much dew on it, which inhibits fingerprint detection. Yet his report stipulated the purse was picked up that night—and didn’t I remember Robileaux himself brought it into the house—so it wouldn’t have had time to collect dew.
I did remember, distinctly, Ray holding the purse in his gloved hand.
And her comment about being a Pollyanna? That was a ludicrous interpretation by Robileaux, that it was evidence she wanted attention. She was a Pollyanna, or had been, always believing the best of people, believing the world was good, absentminded about locking her doors and windows. “And isn’t that a joke now,” she said, “given how the police treated me, how Robileaux was?”
I kept my body language positive, open, and nodded.
“Do you remember how awful he was?” Marjorie said.
“Ummm.” I fought to keep my eyes from drifting from hers.
“He was biased from the first moment. He went looking for things that fit his bias.” She tapped her finger on the table.
I thought of Ray’s incredible anger toward his first wife; manipulative, he’d called her, said she’d played all the emotional colors of the rainbow. How much of that had been projected onto Marjorie?
“Detective Robileaux can be challenging at times,” I said.
Marjorie looked at me, surprise and puzzlement clouding her face. “I seem to recall you didn’t like him much either.”
“What I thought then, Marjorie, is really irrelevant now,” I said carefully.
“Really!?”
“I was just an observer, someone there to help you, that’s where my focus was, not on the scene.”
“Oh.” She leaned back and her eyes narrowed. “That’s right. You’re a cop now.”
I shook my head. “I just want to hear your side. I’m not passing any judgments.”
“Please don’t make this a waste of my time.”
“I hope you don’t think that’s what this is.”
For a minute I thought she might get up and leave, but after a long silent stretch during which she studied her list, she looked back up at me. “The 911 tapes.” Her voice was clipped.
She’d listened to the 911 tapes, had them right here with her, and she didn’t understand why they weren’t sent off to the FBI for electronic enhancement so they could pick up the sounds of the man talking or hitting her. Maybe he hit her first, the phone disconnected, and then he said, “Shuddup, or I’ll kill you.”
I stifled my reflexive response: this was not the kind of case where we would ask the FBI to analyze a tape. The backlog of material they had already was dizzying enough. And dismaying. Our own fingerprint division had a six-month backlog of felony cases. But no complainant wanted to hear her case wasn’t big enough or important enough. So I remained silent, nodding, as Marjorie continued.
Why was it so amazing to Robileaux, she wanted to know, pointing a finger stiffly at her chest, that she didn’t remember the second cut on her breast; how could he see that as evidence of her guilt? She was terrified. And why was she supposed to explain the presence of the second knife; she wasn’t a police officer, she didn’t know why the intruder did the things he did. And he fled probably because he realized that she’d been on the phone, that she’d called for help, not because she asked him if he was wearing a condom. How was she supposed to explain the intruder’s supposedly weird MO? And Robileaux saying that her story changed slightly each time he interviewed was ridiculous and a flat-out lie. She told it the same exact way each time; it was written down in his report wrong, another indication that either he wasn’t listening carefully or was choosing to hear only what he wanted to hear.
I thought of the minor inconsistencies Ray had listed in his report and wondered how much he’d taken into account the emotional and physical stress she’d been under.
And of course there was no bruising on her legs. “I wasn’t going to fight him with a knife in my chest. I just wanted it over with and him gone,” she said, her voice growing agitated. “In Robileaux’s mind, it was up to me to explain the irrational behavior of an unknown psychopathic murderer-rapist on a given summer night, and in his mind, it was evidence of my guilt that I could not. The fact of my being asleep when having the knife plunged into my chest, and my awakening in an adrenalized and disoriented state of shock didn’t seem relevant to Detective Robileaux.”
She’d been precise and emphatic during her point-by-point recitation, but now she teared up, and I reached over, handed her a tissue.
She wiped each eye slowly several times. “It’s just hard, you know. Every time I go back there, my terror returns, and then the unbelievable accusations of Robileaux, and I’m just—”
“Let’s take a moment,” I said gently. “Can I get you coffee, water?”
“I’m just frustrated. And traumatized. Still, six years later. That’s why the polygraph wasn’t accurate. Every time I think about that night my heart starts thudding, and I’m back there, terrified. None of this is right. I didn’t stab myself. I wouldn’t do that to myself; I wouldn’t do that to my children. I have letters here from people attesting to that.” She pulled out several sheets of paper and slid them over to me. “There’s one from a doctor here that says based on my injury it was extremely unlikely I stabbed myself. Extremely unlikely. I don’t know where Robileaux got that the angle of the knife indicated I might have. And the fact that I have no history of self-destructive behavior was irrelevant to him. Statistics concerning self-destructive behavior clearly indicate that self-stabbing in the chest is not a female form of self-destruction and in fact requires substantial physical strength to perform. Given that it took such force to remove the knife that I was lifted off the surgical table, well, how could I have done that?”
I nodded. Exactly, I thought.
“And then,” she flipped through pages and pointed to the penultimate paragraph in Ray’s report. “He keeps saying my kinesics, my body language, clearly indicated guilt, even in that final interview, that interview that, I must add, was taped without my knowledge and done clearly to sabotage me.”
“That was—”
“But the only kinesics my body displayed was that of a woman with two fresh scars on my chest and back, still burning from thoracic surgery four weeks earlier.” She sat back, took a deep breath, and traced a finger along the scars on her upper chest.
I watched the movement, gestured slightly toward it after a moment. “I was surprised, the
scars,” I said quietly.
She looked down, and her face softened. “I covered them up for a long time. I hated them, thought they were ugly. Then a friend said they were like a necklace. My scar necklace. I haven’t tried to hide them since.”
“Your strength has always amazed me, Marjorie.”
She leaned forward, put her hand on my knee. “I did not do this to myself, Cathy. I need you to believe that.”
I nodded slowly.
“Do you believe me?”
“You’ve got a number of good points here.”
“But do you believe me?”
“There are troubling inconsistencies.”
She sat back, her face tight and shut off. “You aren’t going to answer that, are you.” It was not a question.
I recrossed my legs, spoke carefully. “It’s not my place to determine whether you’re telling the truth, only whether the case should be reexamined.”
“And what have you decided, can you at least tell me that?” A tinge of sarcasm colored her voice.
I gestured toward her file. “I need to look at that again, and my partner, George Donovan, will study it as well. If we decide to reopen it, investigate it as attempted murder, there is very little physical evidence for us to work with. But I need to check all the details, talk to the investigating officers, the witnesses. Our goal is to be fair and thorough.”
“If you talk to Robileaux, he’ll just say what he’s always said.”
“I know,” I said, and then cursed myself silently.
She leaned forward, her voice both eager and angry. “You’ve talked to him?”
I pushed my chair back slightly from the table, put my hands in my lap. “Marjorie, I simply can’t say anything more at this point. I’ll call you next week, the following at the latest, and let you know the disposition. I’m just very, very sorry for all you’ve gone through.”
“Well.” The word came out flat and quick and hung in the air between us for several seconds. “I suppose I’m grateful that at least you listened and seem to care. It’s more than I ever got from Robileaux or anyone else in this department. I suppose you can’t take sides, can you? You cops protect your own, and you’re not about to say Robileaux was wrong.”
“I’m not protecting—”
“No.” She held her hand out, palm facing me. “Don’t try to explain. It wouldn’t change anything.” She stood up, gathered the files in her arms. “Funny how inadequate words can be, isn’t it, given that all I have now is words?”
“Marjorie.”
She tilted her head and almost smiled. “You’re just doing your job. And I’m doing what I need to do. I’m thankful there could be some movement on this. It’s more than I ever expected from the police.” And then she did smile, a big crooked smile that suddenly showed her age. “I’m a brokenhearted woman with nothing to lose. And I won’t stop.”
I sat there a long time after she left, staring at her file, thinking about scars. About how some are so visible and some are hidden, even to ourselves, buried deep beneath tissue and muscle and bone in that ethereal place that makes us who we are. How both kinds mark us forever—knotty and twisted and painful to the touch even years later. But there’s something about a scar that is so boldly, even proudly, displayed that makes it beautiful, luminous—a testament, and an honorable one at that, no matter the cause. And I wondered about my own scars, what new white snake was twisting into being deep inside from my inability to say, “Yes, Marjorie, I believe you; I have always believed you. Ray was wrong,” as I scrawled Reopen across her file, tossed it on George’s desk, gathered up my badge and gun, and headed home to my husband.
SARAH
Don’t tell us
how to love, don’t tell us
how to grieve, or what
to grieve for, or how loss
shouldn’t sit down like a gray
bundle of dust in the deepest
pockets of our energy, don’t laugh at our belief
—Mary Oliver
KEEPING THE DEAD ALIVE
She had been a woman who looked good in hiking boots. In the picture on the scuffed pine dresser, she wore khaki shorts, a Guatemalan shirt, and boots laced tightly above the ankle, the edge of teal green socks just visible. Her calves were muscular and brown. Lithe, I think, is the word some might use to describe her. Hazel-gray eyes curved up slightly, thin lips rested on a wide mouth, nose sloped into a gentle bump with a spatter of freckles and faint sunburn. A mole lingered between her brows. Deep auburn hair fell well below her shoulders, thick and frizzy with curl, the kind of hair that probably distressed her in humidity, made her dream of straight and simple, something that whispered just above her collarbone. She would have wanted my hair in the same way I envied hers. She had a sharp jawline and prominent cheekbones—both long enough to work in her favor. She was smiling, an impish grin, head tilted left to avoid the sun’s glare.
From the picture I wouldn’t have guessed she was so short, but the body lying between the bed and the wall was 5'2" at the most. She lay on her back, naked. I was working on the assumption that this was the same woman as in the picture, although the only feature I could match for sure was the hair, and even that wasn’t a safe bet. This woman’s hair was clumpy with dried blood and matted across her face—if you could call the black, swollen flesh barely visible under the hair a face. Both arms were up in the defensive position, resting on her brow, as though her last moments were weary ones, not icy white terror, as though her hands and mouth had never been bound with duct tape.
Perhaps, I thought—a weak hope—perhaps she passed out early on before these last tortures. I couldn’t tell. I knew she’d been alive for most of it; there was too much blood. Blood everywhere on and around her swollen corpse, already coagulated into thick, leathery pools and blackened at the edges. Dead bodies don’t bleed.
She’d been alive. Shake that one out of your mind, go home and try to pay the bills, cook dinner, wash the laundry. She’d been alive when he took the pliers and tore off one of her nipples and yanked out two of her teeth. She’d been alive when he cut off her middle finger. She’d been alive for each of the five cigarette burns on her stomach and thighs. She’d been alive when he took the tennis racquet and jammed it up her vagina with such force that the handle was a purplish-blue hump just below her sternum.
In police work, just like life, “what-ifs” don’t really pertain. It’s already happened. That’s the beauty of a crime scene, of any crime. It’s pure fact. It’s done. Inarguable. You play what-ifs to find the angle that will take you down the right path to solve the crime, what-ifs to ferret out the motive; but a crime, in this case a dead body, is exquisitely simple: there are no what-ifs. All the nuances of other possibilities—a right turn instead of a left, coming home ten minutes later instead of five minutes earlier—are obsolete. The robbery has occurred, the blow has landed, the person is dead.
It’s one of the aspects I like best about my job. Wash away all the noise of motivations, clues that do or don’t add up, guilt or innocence, and what you still have is fact: a crime.
Yet life is full of other possibilities, slight dimples in the texture of our days that change the course, sometimes forever invisible even to ourselves, of what might have been. And when an event becomes visible, something to take note of for whatever reason, being human we rewind the tape—hoping to put some logic to chaos, hoping to find the cause in order to make better sense of the effect. We look for meaning in coincidences. We try to connect the dots and discover some larger pattern at work. This practice has no great benefit except to soothe our pain or curiosity. It makes what is essentially nonlinear, linear for a moment. And then we can play what-ifs if only to understand our own control—or lack thereof—over our lives.
In the long, fevered weeks that followed, despite my best intentions and deep belief that addressing the facts, and facts alone, was the best approach to living one’s life, I seemed incapable of stopping the what-ifs. And the p
lace I came back to again and again was that morning, the start of day shift, a Monday, just before I found her body.
We’d already had roll call, a joke on any shift but especially the day shift. No one’s totally awake at 6:00 in the morning; you wake up on your first call or on your fourth cup of coffee. Most of us that morning were somewhere between the second and third cup.
Despite how TV likes to portray roll calls with crisply dressed officers sitting or standing in tight rows listening to crucial information—or, even more amusingly, no roll call at all—roll call involves making sure you’re there and some degree of finger shaking about whatever the Captain and Lieutenant have up their ass for that day. The real information exchange takes place out on the back lot, when one shift is packing up to go home and the other is loading shotguns, performing radio checks, making sure the tires are inflated and the siren and lights work.
Bobby had already told us about the latest rape on Tulip Street, the McCollough kids terrorizing their neighborhood, and the rumor that the Lieutenant was, once again, on the warpath about officers not wearing hats on calls.
It was a very regular morning.
Several of us lingered near our units, discussing the latest developments in Steve Darcy’s case. Darcy had been fired recently for killing an unarmed burglary suspect. The department wasn’t keen on our shooting unarmed people. Darcy was appealing the ruling. The general consensus was that it could have happened to any one of us, and Darcy was getting screwed.
I had my unit started, waiting for a break in the radio traffic to put myself 10-8, in service, when Gwen stopped and said the Sergeant wanted to see me.
“What for?”
“You think I asked?” she said, raising both eyebrows so high her hat rose with the movement. “Sarah.” The way Gwen said my name, it had more than two syllables.
Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You Page 14
