At dinner, Kathy hung back, sensing that something was very wrong. She guessed it was Pikeville again. After the kids were in bed, they talked for a while in the screened-in porch outside the kitchen. Was everything okay? No problem, he said. Just work. He got up and went out for his run.
The night was muggy and warm, the dark sky streaked with milky clouds. He started out easily, feeling the energy build as he picked it up. He was at about the halfway point, two miles, on a stretch of county farm road, when a car full of teenagers roared by. Fucking asshole! he heard. An empty beer can sailed by his head and clattered onto the asphalt. He stopped, panting, and watched the taillights on the road. Joy-riding was just the kind of thing he had avoided assiduously as a teenager, so worried about his “record” as a youth that he ran like a rabbit even from a girl with a can of beer. Snorting, he circled back behind the beer can lying on the road. Picking up his pace, he kicked it in stride, watching it rise through the air and bounce ahead. Breathing evenly now, he quickened his stride, adjusting his step as he approached to boot the can again. It sailed away in a perfect arc and clattered down twenty feet ahead. The wind gathering force through trees on either side of the road sounded like the roar of a stadium. Again he approached the can, shifted stride, and met it with a powerful stroke of his right foot. The roar was deafening now. He could see the American flag on its staff high above the stadium, a postage stamp stuck on the corner of a bright blue sky. Again, he came up fast on the can and booted it in a fury. It sailed out of sight. He heard it clank to rest somewhere ahead in the dark.
Winded, he tripped and fell, sprawling nearly spread-eagle on the asphalt. He crawled to the side of the road and sat in the wet grass beside an irrigation ditch, scraped and bruised. He looked into the sky, lighter in the east with Miami’s cold glow, falling off to darkness to the west, where the Everglades swamped the land eighty miles wide.
He dreamed of Susan again that night. She was closer to him now. He knew that he had called out her name because the sound of his voice woke him. Kathy slept on gently. He looked at her beside him and groped for the right emotion. Was love even possible, with what he had done to her and what more was to come? Would remorse ever be enough? He kissed her arm lightly, careful not to awaken her, and slipped out of bed.
At work, he busied himself with papers on his desk, avoiding the phone, until he saw them come in. It was May 15. As he had expected, Richard Ray was there. Paul Maynard came in with him. Jim Huggins, whom he recognized from the Lexington office, led the way. Mark kept his head down and found a reason to leave the office on an assignment.
Mark’s immediate supervisor Roy Tubergen was astonished by the investigation.
“Did you know this guy in Kentucky?” Tubergen had asked Huggins.
“Not really. He wasn’t under my supervision, but I heard nothing but good things about him,” Huggins had replied.
“He’s one of the best agents I got down here, he works his butt off. You mean to tell me that you all suspect him of killing an informant? You’re crazy!”
“Well, Roy. We are not accusing him. We’re down here to talk to him because he is a suspect because of his relationship with this girl who has not been found. So all we need is for him to clear it up.”
The special agent in charge of the Miami office, Bill Gavin, called all the supervisors into a big conference room and introduced the visitors.
“Jim Huggins is here to conduct an investigation to determine if Mark Putnam had anything to do with a missing informant in Pikeville,” Gavin said.
There was vocal consternation. “Holy shit, are you kidding me?” one supervisor said.
Gavin quieted them down. “Look, I don’t want to hear any more discussion about this, all right? He’s got a job to do, it’s not a pleasant job and we’re going to get to the bottom of it one way or another. I don’t want any interference from anybody here; I don’t want to hear any rumors going around the office, and don’t discuss it with your squad until we get this resolved. Is that understood?” Gavin gave Huggins an office to work out of and a bureau car to use.
The next morning, at 11 o’clock, Mark was summoned into a conference room for the first interview with Huggins and the two state police officers. They each had file folders and a legal pad on the table in front of them.
Huggins cleared his throat and advised Mark of his rights as an employee of the Justice Department to answer questions voluntarily. Huggins nodded to Maynard, who looked directly at Mark and recited words that startled him with their familiarity from a far different place.
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in court. You have the right to talk to a lawyer for advice . . .”
Mark closed his eyes.
“You sure you don’t want a lawyer, Mark?” Huggins’s voice intruded into a serenity that had settled briefly over him.
Mark looked up. “Positive. I don’t want a lawyer. I’m ready.”
He was asked to provide a detailed day-by-day account of what he remembered about the week during which Susan Smith had disappeared. But Mark was not going to make it that easy for them. He would confess, but he had decided he would make them sweat for it. They wanted details? They’d get them, but let them show what kind of cops they really were. Gentlemen, he thought, make yourselves comfortable, because we’re going to be here for a while.
Speaking slowly in response to Huggins’s questions, Mark went over his career in Pikeville, incident by incident as it reflected his association with the missing woman. He described how Bert Hatfield introduced him to Kenneth Smith and Susan. From their first meeting, he explained, the relationship between agent and informer was dogged with “ridiculous” rumors that he was having a sexual relationship with Susan. Susan herself was one of those who spread the rumors, he said.
“How old is Susan?” Huggins asked at one point early in the questioning.
“She was twenty-eight,” Mark replied. Huggins felt a shock at Mark’s use of the past tense.
Mark kept responding in detail to Huggins’s questions about himself and Susan. The payments to Susan for informing on Cat Eyes and others. Susan’s clamoring for more money, for protection from threats. His and Kathy’s attempts to help her find a new life away from Kenneth. The gifts Susan pressed on him. The intimations about a drug operation she had resumed contact with involving the policeman in Cicero, Illinois, and Poole’s interest in that.
He recounted the 4:30 a.m. phone call in early February, in which Kenneth had told Kathy that Susan and Mark had had an affair. “He was extremely jealous of me because of the informant relationship with Susan,” Mark said, effectively highlighting the potential motive of another suspect.
“Just before Christmas, 1988,” he explained, “I got her a motel room at the Goldenrod Motel in Pikeville. I registered it in my name and told her she could stay there to get away from Kenneth . . . I paid in cash.”
Similar arrangements were made on two other occasions in January or February of 1989, he said. He didn’t need to add that haphazard utilization of informants, motels, and government money had become standard practice, actively encouraged by the bureau in its zeal to keep undercover investigations active and statistically fruitful, not to mention private.
As for Susan, “she had a reputation around Pikeville for telling people that she was having sex with various individuals in the Pikeville area.”
When had he first heard that Susan was pregnant? “Sometime around the middle of April 1989,” Mark said. He had received his transfer orders to Miami; Susan called to discuss her wretched personal problems; she was broke, strung out, battered, afraid, and forlorn. In that context, he said, she mentioned that she was pregnant. “I asked her who the father was, and she said it was none of my business.”
Later, in Miami, there were odd telephone calls from Poole, reporting on Susan’s despair and imploring h
im to call her and try to help. When he did, Mark said, “she started crying and told me that I was leaving her out in the cold. She told me she was feeling bad, and that she had been beat up by Sherri Justice. I asked her what I could do to help, and she said, ‘Fuck you. You don’t give a shit about me.’”
Two hours had passed since Mark started talking. Ray could sense the agent’s mind racing as the chronology moved inexorably toward that final week in June of 1989. He thought, This guy is going to slip up. He’s just too cocky.
Huggins pressed on with questions. Mark described his return to Pikeville, in June, and recalled his surprise at finding Susan at the motel when he checked in. How had she known he was coming? “I assume Poole told her,” he said. He said Susan came to his room to talk about her troubles. That was news to both Ray and Huggins. It was a detail that no one had turned up, relevant only, Ray knew, in that Mark had seen a need to mention it.
What did they talk about in his room? “Again, she never accused me of being the father of her child,” Mark said.
Ray watched him with hooded eyes, wondering if he had caught a whiff of panic.
“I got upset with her.” He stopped short. Upset? Mark couldn’t believe he had used such a stupid word! His heart beating fast, he went on evenly, and made another mistake. “During this conversation, I raised my voice and grabbed her by the arm, but did not in any way hurt her.”
The cops at the table, Mark included, registered this tactical blunder immediately. No glances were exchanged. Mark’s mind flashed urgent warnings about the “indicators of deceit” that every good cop knew to watch for in a suspect who was about to cave in. He took instant stock of how he was projecting his mental state. Body language: Do not shift position. Do not move. He glanced at his hands resting casually on the table and resisted the overpowering impulse to touch them together, form a blockade with his arms. Keep your voice at the same pitch. Do not lick your dry lips. Do not sigh or yawn. Do not swallow!
He imagined that he was on a small rubber raft, in fast water now, listening for the low thunder of the waterfall ahead.
He knew that if any one of them had stood up and pointed a finger at him at that moment he would have spilled his guts. He was ready to take his punishment and be done with the lies and the shame. The impulse to confess was crushing, yet the need to go on was overpowering. No one looked at him. No one rose to denounce him for murdering Susan Smith. With grim resignation he drifted on.
He explained that he flew into the airport in Huntington, West Virginia, “because it was closer than Lexington, which was the next-closest major airport, and I believed at that time that most of my work would be in Pikeville.” Eyes downcast, he took a breath, not wanting to meet a gaze at the table. “At Huntington, I rented a car—”
Huggins interrupted him: “Hold it, hold it. You rented a car? What kind of a car?” In fact, Huggins was well aware of the rental car already.
Mark shot an incredulous look at his fellow agent. Was this a bluff to knock him off-balance? How could they not have known about something as basic and obvious as the rental car? How the hell did they think he got around town that week, drove back and forth to Lexington? The question surprised and even exasperated him, but he tried to sort out the ramifications before answering. There were rental records, expense vouchers—easy-to check, routine stuff. Mark considered Ray a first-rate detective: methodical, perceptive, tenacious, smart. Had the FBI thrown that many roadblocks in Ray’s way? Was the state police brass that terrified of going against the FBI and being wrong? How hard had the cops really pushed here?
To a man who had thought he was cornered and was merely playing for time—Mark was calculating days, not even weeks, by this point—the implications were breathtaking. He paused for an instant, sifting possibilities, wondering almost playfully if the hole was big enough to kick a ball through. What else didn’t they know?
He had always believed that Susan would eventually be found, that he would be confronted, and that he would confess and put her soul and his to rest. It was only a matter of time. In the past few weeks, as they closed in on him, he had assumed that they had new evidence and that they had finally had the body. Now, looking around at his questioners’ faces, blank with the indication deliberately planted by Huggins, he knew for certain that they had not found her.
“Yes, I rented a car, a blue Ford Tempo,” he said calmly.
“Go on.”
He was thinking, Can I bullshit my way out of this? The prospect unsettled him deeply because it required more introspection and there was no time for that. In a weary voice, he went on, lying with confidence now about his activities on the day Susan disappeared and the days that followed. He felt like a man lifting a barbell, muscles trembling with tension and pain, desperate to put it down, determined to press just a few more.
Huggins and Ray detected the change in Mark’s tone and watched him carefully. Was that a glint of sweat on the man’s upper lip?
But Mark forced himself to keep going, methodically touching on each of the points of the chronology that he assumed they had already established. His talks with Charlie Trotter. His trips to Lexington, with arrival and departure times. His several encounters with Susan (he was careful to mention the phone message she said she received from Shelby about supposedly meeting her drug-dealer friend). The perplexing calls from Ron Poole checking on Susan. His routine on the night she was last seen. He went on, describing his trip to Lexington the next morning for another meeting with the assistant US attorney. Back in Pikeville, dinner at the Log Cabin, followed by the friendly talk long into the night with Myra Chico.
So far, it checked out as well as the evidence could support. But Mark was going too fast, layering in too much detail. He had passed over the critical time, the hours during which Ray believed he had killed Susan Smith, but there was something he seemed impatient to explain.
Mark said that on Saturday, June 10, two days after Susan disappeared, he left the motel at about 8:30 a.m. and drove out of town to serve a trial subpoena on a witness. “I returned to Pikeville around noon,” he said. “I then went to my old house, which still had not been sold and still had some personal belongings in the garage. I pulled my car in the garage, checked out the house, and went back to the garage to discard some old paint cans that were stored under a workbench. Reaching under a shelf, I cut my right hand on a nail that was protruding from the shelf. The wound began bleeding very heavily; I got in the passenger side of the rental car and started slinging my hand up and down, causing blood to splatter on the passenger seat and on the dash. I wrapped my hand in a towel to stop the bleeding.”
Mark paused. If they didn’t even know about the car, why was he blurting out something else that they never knew about? Besides, the blood was his, not hers! He thought about the cracked windshield and struggled mindlessly to explain it: “While sitting in the front passenger seat of the car, I was extremely angry over cutting my hand; in an act of frustration, I kicked the front windshield with my right foot. It caused the windshield to slightly shatter in the area of the middle of the right side between the mirror and the right post.”
If Richard Ray, for one, had had any doubts, he now knew for certain that Mark Putnam had killed her. Only a guilty man in his last shrieking ride down the chute would babble on, providing new information without prompting. Ray felt a strong urge to stand up and arrest the suspect immediately, not only for murder but also for insulting the intelligence of a police officer. But he remained silent as Mark went on and on: How he took the car with the cracked windshield back to the rental agency in West Virginia, blamed the damage on a chunk of coal flying off a truck, and got a replacement car. “I lied about the damage because I didn’t want to have to pay for the windshield.” How he had lent Susan his gym shorts and shirt. How Susan had told him about rebuffing Poole. How she “may have met up with the group from Illinois on a drug deal” and come to harm. Or how
“her ex-husband, Kenneth Smith, could have harmed her, since he had beat her up on numerous occasions in the past.”
He was exhausted, morally and physically. “I have no idea where Susan Smith is at the present time,” he said. “Both Ron Poole and I cared about her very much and are concerned as to what happened to her. I certainly did not kill her intentionally or accidentally, because I could never do anything like that.”
The signs of guilt were clear to the cops at the table. Mark had bowed his head. He was perspiring and seemed to be fighting back tears.
Huggins kept returning in his mind to the shock he had felt early in the interview when he had casually asked Mark, “How old is Susan?” She was twenty-eight, Mark had said.
It was a low-key interview for the most part, though it went on for more than six hours. Huggins was worried that Richard Ray in particular might intervene with strong-arm questions that would intimidate Mark into halting the interview to get a lawyer, but that did not happen. Hour by hour, Huggins’s sadness deepened as he realized Mark was steadily dissembling, and that his statement would begin the process of damning him.
“I treated him respectfully and we kind of just talked,” Huggins recalled. “I didn’t hear something I suspected to be untrue and scream at him, ‘That’s a damn lie, you lying piece of shit,’ the way, you now, you might treat a bank robber. So I just went on with one question followed by another, like a general interview, like, ‘Hey, Mark, how’d you find that house down there you and Kathy had?’ and he’d go on about that. But I could see that he realized I was leading him down the garden path.”
Before the interview started, Huggins had told Maynard and Ray that he knew that this was basically a state investigation. “I said look, guys, this is your case. If it turns out that Mark’s involved in this, then it’s going to be either a murder or a manslaughter and that’s a state case. So you guys feel free to jump in here at any time during the interview if you see something I missed or you want to expand on something.
Above Suspicion Page 25
