Rachel’s hand snagged the back of Gifford’s T-shirt, and she pulled hard to stop him. He turned around and took a swing at her. It was a wide, arcing punch, and she ducked it easily, then lunged forward and wrapped her arms around his waist, getting a better grip on his shirt.
“Get off me, you fuckin’ bitch!” he yelled. He was breathing hard. Frantic and powered by fear.
“It’s over, Dylan,” she said.
He screamed and rushed forward, and they both went down. Rachel was on her back with Gifford above her. She wrapped her legs around his torso and used her arms to pull his head to her shoulder, making it harder for him to get in a good punch.
“Aw damn, y’all better hurry up and get down here. This shit’s gettin’ real.”
Rachel glanced back and saw Jerry standing at the edge of the path, yelling into the radio.
“Dude’s on top of her, man. Should I jump in and help? Let me hit him upside the head with a rock or somethin’.”
“Stay back, Jerry,” she said.
Gifford was flailing and grunting, trying to hit her and break free, but Rachel had trained to be in this position. She waited until he tried to lift himself up and cock his arm back for a big swing, then she shot her left leg up and hooked it behind his neck. Her right foot kicked at his hip, breaking his posture just enough to bring his head back down. She reached up and pulled her left foot into the crook of her right knee, wrapping his head and arm in a technique that jiu-jitsu practitioners called a triangle choke.
“Dude, he’s tryin’ to punch her,” Jerry said into the radio. “But . . . but hang on, now . . .”
Rachel squeezed her legs and pulled on the back of Gifford’s head. His forehead started to turn purple. He tried to stand but lost his footing, then tried to claw at her face in desperation. His fingers found her cheek just as the life went out of them. She held him there for a moment longer, then released her hold and kicked him aside.
“I think he’s out,” Jerry yelled. “Holy shit, she done judo-choked his ass or somethin’. Dude’s out cold.”
There were heavy footfalls coming up the path. The rattling of tactical gear as Davis and his men jogged around the rock face.
“Rachel!” Davis shouted. “Are you all right?”
The team approached with their weapons trained on Gifford, who was starting to regain consciousness. They rolled him onto his stomach and bound his wrists behind his back with plastic flex cuffs.
“I’m good,” she said between panting breaths. She let her head fall back against the ground. “Just give me a second.”
Jerry punched Davis in the arm and said, “Dang, dude. Y’all didn’t know this girl was such a badass, did you?”
33
Braddock reached down and helped Rachel up to the road. When she stepped onto the asphalt, the circle of deputies gave her a round of applause. Braddock hugged her and lifted her up, then set her back on her feet and said, “What the hell were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t,” she said, feeling exhausted. She looked down and saw Davis, Jerry, and a deputy making the climb. The rest of the team had come up earlier, escorting Gifford to a patrol car. The Tahoe was stranded at the bottom of the hill. A truck with a winch had been dispatched to rescue it. “Sorry about that, by the way.”
“You could’ve been killed driving that damn thing down there.”
“Crazy, huh?”
They walked up to Gifford’s house as the last bit of daylight faded. Flashes of red and blue swept the hillsides. When they got to the driveway, Curtis met them with a crooked smile. He said, “That was quite a performance, young lady. You all right?”
“I’ll live,” she said.
“Well, good. We got the truck. I called and told my boys to move on it as soon as the shit hit the fan. Tina’s over there with ’em now. Wanna guess what she found in the glove box?”
Rachel gave him an impatient look.
“A lock-picking kit,” he said. “She also bagged a pair of leather gloves she found under the seat.”
“Nice,” Braddock said and patted Rachel’s shoulder. “This is turning into a good day. And they’re bringing the truck in?”
“Yep. Loading it on the flatbed as we speak.”
“Did the brother give them any trouble?”
“He put on a bit of a show. Almost gave us enough to arrest him with until Benny gave him what for. That calmed his ass down pretty quick. Oh, that reminds me . . .” He nodded toward a patrol car. “We arrested the mother. Apparently, she threw an ashtray at one of the SRT guys when he came through the door.”
Rachel could barely make out Linda Gifford’s silhouette in the back of the car.
“Must run in the family,” Braddock said.
“Hey, Chief, Rachel.” It was Fisher calling from the steps just outside the front door. He was waving at them with blue hands. “Carly’s found something. Y’all need to come look at this.”
* * *
Gifford’s bedroom smelled like old sweat and mildew, most likely from the soiled laundry that was piled in a corner by the closet. There was a dresser standing against the far wall, dark-stained oak with a missing drawer. A nightstand held empty cans of beer and soda. Carly was in the middle of the floor on her knees, taking pictures of something underneath the bed. She stood when she saw Rachel and Braddock come into the room.
“What did you find?” Rachel asked.
“Have a look,” Carly said.
Rachel knelt down, cocked her head to the side, and saw an aluminum baseball bat—a Louisville Slugger.
Braddock leaned over behind her and said, “I’ll be damned.”
“I haven’t touched it yet,” Carly said. “I thought about checking it for blood, but I wanted to make sure everyone’s okay with that. Bruce can’t be here till morning.”
Rachel glanced at Braddock and said, “You know what, Carly? I think you can handle it. Danny?”
“I think so too.”
“What kind of reagent do you have?” Rachel asked.
“Hemascein,” Carly said.
“Right. I remember now. And you have an alternate light source?”
“Yeah. Got a BLUEMAXX in my other kit.”
“That’ll work. Why don’t you get everything you need in here, and we’ll videotape the whole procedure.”
“Sounds good,” Carly said and walked outside.
As soon as she was gone, Fisher asked, “There won’t be any blood on it, will there?”
“Probably not,” Braddock said. “He didn’t rupture McGrath’s scalp. But he did handle the bat after he stabbed him, so if any blood got on his hands . . .”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I didn’t think about that.”
“It’s still a long shot, though,” Rachel said. “He was so damn careful . . .” She looked around and thought about how messy Gifford’s room looked. “Doesn’t this place look out of character?”
“What do you mean?” Fisher asked.
Carly came back in with her kit, and Rachel dismissed the thought.
“Shane, would you mind recording this?”
He took his phone out, opened the camera app, and switched the setting to video. “All right, Carly. You’re on.”
Carly took everything she needed out of her kits and used one of the lids as a table to mix the solutions. Once she had two spray bottles prepared—one with the Hemascein reagent and another with a hydrogen peroxide solution—she went to the bed and retrieved the Slugger. She laid it on the floor next to her kits and reached for a bottle.
“Why don’t you hit it with the light first,” Rachel said, “so we can have a negative control.”
“Right,” Carly said. The muscle in her jaw flexed as she admonished herself for forgetting a step. She picked up the BLUEMAXX, which looked like a flashlight with an orange plastic rectangle attached to the end, and turned it on. “Would someone mind getting the lights for me?”
Braddock flipped the switch on the wall, and the room went dark, save fo
r the bright blue beam from the flashlight and the glow from Fisher’s phone screen. Carly passed the beam over the bat, rotating it in her hand to make sure the light hit every square inch of it. “Huh,” she said.
“What is it?” Rachel asked.
“I got something here.”
She walked over to stand behind Carly, looked through the orange filter, and saw thin white streaks.
“Can’t be blood, can it?” Carly asked. “It wouldn’t glow with just the light. Has to be saliva, urine, or semen.”
“Ain’t that a pleasant thought,” Fisher said.
Rachel said, “Better get some pictures of it.”
Carly put an orange filter over her camera lens. “Would you hold the light for me?”
Rachel took the flashlight, and Carly snapped a few shots. When she finished, she checked the screen on her camera and said, “Okay, I got it. Lights, please.”
Braddock hit the switch.
“Do we still want to try for blood?”
“Yeah,” Rachel said. “Let’s see what we get.”
“Boss, would you mind holding it for me? I’ll spray a little bit above it. When the mist settles, rotate it some, and I’ll spray a little more. Don’t let it touch the ground or anything else until I tell you we’re done.”
“Got it,” Braddock said, taking the Slugger. Carly sprayed the Hemascein and the hydrogen peroxide solution a little bit at a time as he spun it in his hands. They waited two minutes to give the chemicals time to react, then Rachel turned out the lights.
Carly shined the flashlight, looked through the orange filter, and said, “We got blood.”
Rachel looked and saw that the white streaks were now glowing green. Carly took several photos, instructing Braddock on how to turn the bat so she could shoot it at different angles. When she finished, Rachel turned on the light and said, “So we have blood mixed with something else . . . most likely saliva.”
“Those streaks look like he tried to wipe it off,” Carly said.
“Hot damn,” Fisher said. “That’s how the blood got on the dishrag. He used it to wipe the blood off.”
“But how did he get blood on it to begin with?” Braddock asked. “There’s none on the handle. Do we really think he had it on his hands but only got it on one end?”
Rachel remembered that there had been no blood on the knife handle when she had seen it at the hospital. McGrath had been on his back. The blood had run down toward his shoulder and neck, not up the knife. So how would Gifford get blood on his hands? She closed her eyes and imagined herself approaching McGrath from behind.
She hit him on the head. There was no blood or saliva on the Slugger at that point. She dropped it and went for the knife, knelt down over McGrath, and stabbed him. But she left the knife in his chest. The only way she could get blood on her hands was if she touched a blood-soaked portion of the sweat shirt, but she couldn’t think of any reason she would do that. And even if she did, where would the saliva come from?
“I don’t think so . . .” Rachel said. She replayed the murder again and tried to think of every possible method of transferring blood. Then she remembered that McGrath’s lungs had been cut, and blood had gotten inside them. He might have coughed it up with his last breath, which would explain how it became mixed with saliva. But there would have been droplets on the floor. Perhaps even on Gifford’s clothes. And Gifford might have anticipated that. To prevent it, he would have covered McGrath’s mouth . . .
“With the dishrag,” she said.
“What?” Braddock asked.
“I know what happened. Gifford covered McGrath’s mouth with the dishrag to keep him from coughing blood all over the place. Then he used the rag to wipe down the end of the bat.”
“Why would he do that if there was no blood on it?”
“He was being too careful,” Carly said. “I bet he was worried there might be hair on it from hitting McGrath over the head.”
Rachel nodded. “And now we have a theory that accounts for every piece of physical evidence in the case.” She pointed at the bat. “You guys should send that thing to the crime lab and see if they can get DNA from it.”
“I’ll go ahead and bag it.”
“Nothing plastic.”
Carly looked offended.
“Sorry,” Rachel said. “Bad habit.” She turned to Braddock. “Think the ADA can get you a warrant to collect a sample of Gifford’s DNA?”
“Only one way to find out.” He was on the phone a moment later.
34
The sheriff’s office had two small interrogation rooms and a separate room for observing them on closed-circuit TV. Rachel and Braddock leaned against a table in the observation room and watched the live feed of Carly swabbing the inside of Gifford’s cheek. Fisher was in the corner beneath the camera. A deputy stood in the doorway in case there was trouble. But Gifford sat quietly and didn’t protest.
“He looks pretty calm,” Braddock said.
Rachel squinted to study his face. The resolution on the screen wasn’t great, but she thought she could read his expression. “He’s confused. He wants to believe that we can’t have anything on him. That he was too careful to leave any evidence. But he can’t understand how we found him.”
The door opened, and Pritchard came in, glanced at the screen, and asked, “Is he talking?”
“Not yet,” Braddock said. “But he signed the waiver after Shane read him his rights. And he didn’t complain when Carly took about a hundred pictures of him and swabbed his cheek.”
On the screen, Carly picked up her camera and her DNA collection kit and left the room. Fisher said, “All right, Dylan, just sit tight, and I’ll be back in a few. You want a soda or something?”
“That’s good,” Rachel said in a near whisper. “Be polite. Use his first name.”
Gifford shook his head, and Fisher walked out, leaving the deputy to watch him.
Pritchard leaned over, shook Rachel’s hand, and said, “By the way, that was a helluva job you did out there.”
“Thanks, Sheriff. Sorry about the Tahoe.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll just take it out of Danny’s check.”
“Damn, boss,” Braddock said.
Pritchard shrugged. “You gave her the keys.”
Fisher came in and said, “I gotta say, he’s playin’ it pretty cool.”
Rachel asked, “How does he look? Nervous? Angry? Dazed?”
“A little dazed, I’d say. There’s some defiance in him, though.”
“So what’s the plan?” Braddock asked Rachel. “Do we go at him old school? Or should we try some of your warm and fuzzy?”
The “old school” method was the Reid technique, a standard for police interrogations since the 1960s. An investigator would confront the suspect with the evidence against him, creating a narrative of the crime without allowing him the chance to deny the allegations. The narrative, or theme, as it was called, was meant to break the suspect down. Look at all this evidence we have. We know you killed him; the only question is why. When the suspect appeared to be softening, the investigator would try to minimize the severity of the crime, allowing the suspect to choose a motive that might appear to be more acceptable. Did you plan to kill him, or was it self-defense? You don’t seem like the kind of person who would plan to murder someone. If it worked, the suspect would grab onto the alternative motive like a lifeline, admitting guilt in the process. It was a good technique for extracting a confession, but if the suspect got defensive from the start, it might not produce any good information at all.
Rachel favored a different approach. She liked to build a rapport with her suspects to put them at ease while encouraging them to talk. They would create their own narratives, and she would listen, ask questions, make notes, all while searching for lies and inconsistencies. When she had collected enough of them, she would challenge their stories. It was like catching them in a snare, and the harder they fought to get free, the worse it got for them. They would dig t
hemselves deeper into a hole until she had them right where she wanted them. But it all depended on her ability to get them talking.
“You know my vote,” she said.
“What do you mean by warm and fuzzy?” Fisher asked.
Rachel explained, and Fisher said, “I’ve read about that. The FBI’s been pushing it lately. They learned it from the CIA, didn’t they?”
“Yep,” Rachel said. “Turns out, it’s more effective than waterboarding.”
“If I had my choice,” Pritchard said, staring at the screen, “I think I’d rather waterboard his sorry ass.”
“Me too,” Braddock said. “Not sure I’m feeling the whole rapport-building thing right now.” He looked at Rachel. “And it’s not like we can send you in there.”
“Well, I guess it’s settled,” Pritchard said. “I’ll go get the bucket.”
“I can try it,” Fisher said.
“You serious?” Braddock asked.
“Yeah. I think I can get him talking.”
Braddock turned to Rachel. “Give him some pointers, coach.”
“You’re doing good with your tone,” Rachel said. “Keep being polite, and don’t rush it. Just get him talking. About anything, doesn’t matter what. Try to find something the two of you have in common. Once he gets on a roll, let him talk as long as he wants until there’s a natural pause, then take a break and step out. We’ll see where it goes from there.”
Fisher nodded. “Roger that.”
* * *
Fisher went in and said to the deputy in a low voice, “Would you mind waiting outside for me?”
“Sure thing, Shane,” the deputy said and stepped out.
There was a table pushed into the corner. Fisher laid his notepad and pen on it and pulled out a chair. He sat directly in front of Gifford, who stared at the floor with his hands folded in his lap. The plastic restraints had been replaced by steel handcuffs. The chain clinked when he reached up to scratch his forehead.
Among the Dead Page 14