by Steven James
I’d been dreading this next part of the investigation ever since Margaret had told me about the crimes.
Viewing the body of the four-year-old girl.
Carefully, I stepped over Ardis. It wasn’t easy because of the narrow staircase and the position in which her body had fallen. Crossing over her like this felt uncomfortably intrusive, and I had the sense that I should apologize, even though there was no one to apologize to.
Still, in my thoughts, I did.
At the top of the stairs I noted the two bedrooms to my left. The door down the hall would be the master bedroom. I would check on that in a minute. The room closest to me was obviously Lizzie’s and looked just as you’d expect a four-year-old girl’s room to look—a pile of stuffed animals on the bed, posters of horses covering the walls, a Dora the Explorer play set in the corner, a stack of Dr. Seuss books on a shelf near the window. A small pile of little girl’s shirts lay folded neatly on the bedcovers, a dresser drawer still sat open.
Lizzie’s body lay in the doorway to the bathroom on my right.
She had blonde hair like her mother’s and wore pink tights and a flowery red dress that didn’t seem quite appropriate, considering the season. Lizzie lay face up, and the front of her dress was stained with blood.
I closed my eyes.
It’s always hardest when it’s children.
Over the years I’ve known more than one street-hardened cop who was assigned to a child homicide case and was never the same again. Some quit. Some ask for transfers to desk jobs. One FBI agent I knew took his own life. It affects you deeply and forever and you’re never the same again.
I took a breath, opened my eyes again, then forced myself to examine the position of Lizzie’s body. Based on the location of the doorway in relation to the stairs and the adjoining walls, the killer would have been on the far side of the landing when he shot her. He hadn’t posed or repositioned her.
The cold, calculated nature of the crime appalled me.
Did your father do this to you, Lizzie? Did he kill you?
Seeing the young girl’s body like this hurt so badly that I had to fight hard to keep from losing it.
A girl. A four-year-old girl.
Could a father really do that to his daughter?
You know he could. You know how often this happens all over the country.
I tried to shake that troubling thought, found it nearly impossible. Finally, I turned away from the girl and went to the far door, the master bedroom.
Staying in the hall, I peered inside.
The bed was neatly made, covered with a checkered quilt. Light purple walls brought a calm mood to the room. The closet door stood slightly ajar. On the bed stand: a Thomas H. Cook novel, and a cell phone charging beside a small lamp.
Closing my eyes again I tried to picture how things might have played out, but I was interrupted by Jake, who’d joined me on the landing. “So that’s the girl.” He spoke softly, with a reverence I wouldn’t have expected.
I opened my eyes. “Yes.”
He was looking at Lizzie. “I hate it when it’s kids.”
For the second time today we agreed about something.
“So do I.”
A small moment passed between us, and I sensed that neither of us could think of the right thing to say.
“All right,” I said at last. “Let’s reconstruct this, try to figure out what happened here at 1:48 this afternoon.”
9
Jake’s gaze moved toward the staircase. “Well, it’s pretty obvious Lizzie was leaving the bathroom and Ardis was on her way down the stairs. Probably fleeing.”
I nodded. “The killer was back here near the master bedroom when he shot Lizzie. I think Ardis was in Lizzie’s bedroom when he did. Probably putting the laundry away.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The shirt drawer is still open, there are folded shirts on the bed. Someone was interrupted putting them away. And if Ardis had been in the master bedroom and tried to flee, she would’ve had to get past the shooter and most likely would’ve been killed on the landing.”
“Hmm,” Jake reflected. “So the killer ascends the stairs, positions himself where you are, and the bathroom door opens. Lizzie appears. He shoots her.”
“That alerts Ardis”—I was thinking aloud—“who leaves Lizzie’s bedroom, sees her daughter lying in the bathroom doorway.”
It was possible that Ardis had been descending the stairs and the killer shot her first before Lizzie left the bathroom, but it seemed more likely that a child would be frightened by the sound of a gunshot and stay in the bathroom, hoping that her mother would come to check on her. For now, I proceeded as if the order of events was along the lines of what we were thinking. “What’s the first thing you do,” I said, “if you hear a gunshot and then find the body of your daughter?”
“Run,” Jake said. “Call 911.”
I evaluated his answer. “Before that you’d check to see if your child was alive, then you’d look around to see where the shooter is. To see if you’re in danger too. And if you are—”
“You’d run.”
“Or hide.” I was studying the angles of the staircase and the location of Lizzie’s body. Would you respond differently if you knew the shooter? If it was your husband? I imagined you would but thought the specific response would depend on the state of the relationship. At the moment, postulating any further bordered on trying to decipher motives, which is something I try to steer clear of doing. “Remember, it’s possible Lizzie wasn’t dead when Ardis found her.”
Jake looked at me questioningly.
“It seems probable that Ardis didn’t see the shooter or else she would’ve hidden in the bathroom or been killed on the landing rather than making it nearly all the way down the stairs.”
“Okay,” he said. “So the killer steps into the master bedroom, then hears Ardis descending the stairs. He rushes out and shoots her before she reaches the bottom.” He contemplated that for a moment. “So what about the bullet holes in the window?”
“The neighbor heard two initial shots. Those were the kill shots.”
He looked at me skeptically. “And how do you know the shooter didn’t fire the shots through the window first, then kill Ardis and Lizzie?”
“The angle of the first two bullets through the glass shows that they were fired from the first floor,” I explained, “but if the killer fired those before ascending the steps, it would have alerted Ardis and Lizzie, who would have hidden in a room since the only exit route is down the steps. Additionally—”
“He would’ve shot Ardis from the ground floor,” Jake said, tracking with me, “rather than from the landing.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Huh.” He gestured toward the plate glass. “You knew all this earlier, didn’t you? Just by looking at the trajectory of the bullet holes and knowing the position of the bodies? That’s why you were so concerned about the angles in the glass when we first got here.” He sounded impressed, but I noted a thread of contempt in his voice. “You knew it already back then.”
Well, I didn’t quite know it.
“I had my suspicions.”
When he replied I sensed that he’d taken offense, as if reconstructing the crime scene had become some kind of competition between us: “So then, after killing them, he fires the shots through the window.” Jake was pretending to take aim at the window, here from the landing.
“First he descends the stairs,” I corrected him. “The single shot fired from the landing was the final one to pass through the glass. He would’ve had to go to the ground floor and fire the two shots through the window first.”
“Why would he do that?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea. But I’m really wondering about that last shot the neighbor heard—the final bullet to pass through the window. The trajectory tells us it was fired from the landing. That means that after coming down the stairs, the killer would’ve had to return to the landi
ng—stepping over Ardis’s body as he did—before firing again through the window.”
Mentally, I played out a few other scenarios, but at the moment I didn’t come up with any other event progression that took into account the timing and trajectory of the shots as well as the location of the bodies and their position.
“When the shots were fired, where Donnie shot ’em from,” Ellory called from the base of the stairs, “what does any of that matter, anyway?”
“Everything matters.” I didn’t like that he was referring to Donnie as the killer.
I pressed the master bedroom door open the rest of the way and stepped inside.
10
I studied the carpet for any evidence that someone might have entered the room.
“What is it?” Jake asked.
“We have no footprints leading from the front porch to the side of the house where the snowmobile was parked, so, assuming the killer rode it from the scene, he exited the scene through the laundry room. The family left their shoes, not just their boots, near the front door. Neither Ardis nor Lizzie was wearing shoes, so it appears the family habitually—”
“Takes off their shoes in the house.”
“Yes.”
Jake went on, paralleling my thoughts: “And if Donnie was the shooter, he would’ve had his shoes off in the house.”
“It’s likely.”
“However, if someone else was the shooter, he wouldn’t have taken off his shoes. After all, why would he?”
“That’s right.”
“So, mud on the carpet?”
Or water stains or shoe impressions . . .
It was more likely we’d find mud or impressions by one of the entrances to the home or on the pristine white living room rug. “Maybe.”
I inspected the carpet but couldn’t tell if the shoe impressions I saw were the same size as Donnie’s boots in the mud room. Natasha should be here any minute to process the crime scene. I’d have her check it out.
I descended the stairs, stepping past Ardis’s body as reverently as I could. “We’ll want to check the neighbor’s clock,” I told Ellory. “See if it has the correct time. If we really are talking about 1:48 p.m.”
“I’ll have an officer do it.” He stared past me toward the landing. “You think he forgot something maybe?”
“Who?”
“The shooter. That he might have been on his way out, realized he forgot something upstairs, went back to the landing to get it, and then fired the last shot through the living room window when he got there.”
“I really couldn’t say.”
Jake, who was still on the landing, answered, “That would make sense.”
While Jake came down the stairs to join us, I questioned Ellory about some of the issues that the rather disappointing and incomplete police report had left unanswered.
“Were the lights in the house on or off when you arrived?”
“They were on. All of them, except the study.”
“Were the exterior doors locked or unlocked?”
“The doors were unlocked, but that’s not so unusual.” He said the next few words with uncertainty, as if he’d stopped believing them: “There’s not much crime around here.”
“Appliances. Which were on?”
“You mean like the oven?”
“Yes, and the computer, television, the washer, dryer, a cooking timer—anything.” All of these things tell us what was happening, where people were, what they were doing, or when they were doing it.
He thought. “Not the washer or dryer. Or the TV. We checked the computer for a suicide note; didn’t find one though.”
“The computer is in the study?”
“Yes.”
I retrieved my laptop from the mud room. “Do you by any chance know the last webpage that was opened?”
He was looking increasingly disappointed in himself the more we spoke. “I didn’t look.”
“It’s okay. Thanks.”
In the small office nook attached to the living room I clicked to the internet history while Ellory asked Jake, “You’re a profiler. What’s your take on this?”
The web history was password protected. The Bureau has ways past that, however. I surfed to the Federal Digital Database and entered my ID number.
“Rage,” Jake said. “Donnie’s—or whoever committed these crimes—their behavior exhibits uncontrollable rage. We find this type of thing with people who snap. Something pushes them over the edge—job loss, marital problems, the death of a child.”
I downloaded the program I needed, and a few seconds later, using a 32-byte MD5 hash, I’d cracked the password and I was in.
Jake continued, “Almost always in cases like this, we find what we call a trigger event or a precipitating stressor. Do we know if there was any sudden trauma in his life recently?”
“No,” Ellory answered. “If there was I don't know what it would be.”
The web history had been deleted, but the hard drive hadn’t been wiped. It wasn’t difficult to click into the terminal window, enter a few lines of code that Angela Knight, my friend in the Bureau’s Cybercrime Division, had taught me, and pull up the files.
Someone had been surfing through the naval archives of Ohio Class fleet ballistic missile submarine, or SSBN, deployment records from the 1980s. I could hardly believe the information was made available to the public, but then again, the data was three decades old. A few mouse clicks told me that the Cold War archives weren’t considered matters of national security any longer, and a Freedom of Information Act request had apparently been filed by a group known as Eco-Tech four months ago.
Interesting.
Following up on that, I discovered that Eco-Tech had done some consulting for half a dozen Fortune 500 companies and two foreign governments—Brazil and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Jake kept his questions coming to Ellory. “Did Donnie have any mental or emotional problems that you’re aware of?”
“Not that I know of.”
I checked the time the sub archives were last opened.
Just minutes after the murders.
After the murders.
Odd.
Donnie was in the Navy. Maybe he was searching the sites.
But why then?
I heard a car crunch to a stop out front, possibly Agent Farraday. After I finished downloading the web history and email records to my laptop, I headed for the front door.
“Job dissatisfaction?” Jake asked Ellory behind me.
“Nope. He works at the sawmill over on Highway K. Far as I know he had no problems at work. Nothing like that.”
Boots on again, I stepped onto the porch. The frigid air bit at me, and I tugged on my wool hat. Natasha Farraday exited the car.
Natasha smiled. Early thirties. Dark hair. Demure. Spot-on professionally. Even though we’d never dated, I’d sensed for a while that she had a thing for me. However, because of my relationship with Lien-hua, who also worked for the Bureau as one of its top profilers, I’d made sure to keep things with Natasha completely on the friends-only level.
After she greeted me, a stern-looking fiftyish man with shaggy, wolfish eyebrows followed her out of the car, stuck out his hand, and introduced himself as the county coroner. “Jeddar Linnaman, good to meet you.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard that right. “Jeddar?”
“Full name’s Jedderick, like Frederick but with an extra d. Everyone just calls me Jeddar.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Agent Farraday told me all about you, Dr. Bowers. It’s an honor to work with you.”
The PhD wasn’t something I liked drawing attention to. “Thank you. Just call me Pat.”
After filling in the two of them on what we knew, I asked Natasha to pay special attention to the carpet fibers in the house and prints on the laundry room doorknob. “We’ll also want to compare the boots by the door to the size and visible wear patterns of the sole impressions outside the laundry room.”
/> “Got it.”
“The computer was accessed after the murders, websites having to do with submarine deployments. I’m going to want to pull all the sectors to get a byte-level data analysis.”
“That’ll take time,” she said, mirroring my thoughts.
“Yes.”
Depending on the size of the files and the computer’s processing speed, it could take up to twenty-four hours to upload the entire drive to the Cybercrime Division’s FTP server.
“Go ahead and do a cursory review of recently accessed files,” I said. “I’ll get the emails and web history to Cybercrime, but I’d like your eyes on the registry as well; see what else you can find.”
She agreed, then, carrying her forensics investigation kit, she entered the house with Jeddar Linnaman.
Already there was a lot to think about, and I needed to sort some things through. Taking a walk helps me collect my thoughts, so I stayed outside, zipped up my jacket, donned my leather gloves, and stepped into the night.
11
The two state troopers who’d been stationed on the porch had left when Natasha and Linnaman arrived, and with no one else around, the night closed in on me, embraced me, stinging and cold and quiet and still.
I headed down the driveway, mentally evaluating the clues.
Every crime occurs at the nexus of five factors:
(1) offender desire
(2) target availability
(3) location
(4) time
(5) lack of authority figure or supervision
Take away any of the five and you have no crime. Entire schools of criminological theory have sprung up over the last 130 years focusing on how to eliminate one or another of the factors from the crime equation.
Some investigators, mostly profilers and forensic psychologists, focus on the first issue—the offender’s motivation: Why does he do it? What’s going through his head at the time of the crime? Personally, I’ve found it’s more helpful to just accept the fact that this person was motivated, for whatever reason—and probably for more than one—to commit the offense.