by Mike Markel
The three of them looked up, and the woman stood. She was about forty, tall and thin. Blue jeans, simple blouse and sweater. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She wore glasses, no makeup. A visitor’s badge hung around her neck.
Harold said, “Karen, this is Elizabeth Ouvrard. Liz, this is Detective Karen Seagate. And Detective Ryan Miner.” We all shook hands.
I turned to Harold. “What’s going on?” My version of “Who’s she, and what’s she doing here?”
“Liz is a biology professor over at CMSU. I asked her to stop by to take a look at something and confirm I was interpreting it correctly.”
I’d been on the force for eighteen years, but I couldn’t recall Harold ever bringing someone in to confirm something. Usually, he went out to confirm things that other docs or medical examiners asked him about.
Harold turned to Liz. “Do you mind if we walk the detectives through this first?”
“Not at all.” Liz Ouvrard answered briskly, her voice harsh and a little too loud in the tiled room full of metal. She seemed amped to be here with real cops consulting on a real case.
Harold said, “Robin, would you start?”
Robin nodded, tucking a strand of purple hair back behind her ear. “The heroin in the baggie was off the charts. Almost ninety-five percent pure. Only trace levels of adulterants.”
“Ninety-five? Are you sure?” I said.
“Tried it three times, with different brands of test kits.”
I turned to Ryan. “What do we usually see?”
“Fifty-percent pure is high in Rawlings. Twenty is typical.”
“Where is a local junkie gonna get uncut heroin?”
Ryan shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know anyone in town big enough to place a special order. We’ll need to ask around.”
“Harold, is that what killed him?”
“Mr. Williams died of heart failure.”
“From the heroin?”
“That’s my guess. If he shot up a standard load of this heroin, his BP would have dropped through the floor almost instantly. His heart would have stopped. He would have died within two minutes.”
“And the levels of morphine in his fluids?”
“The levels are consistent with a massive overdose. I checked the blood and the urine.”
“You said on the phone there was something you wanted us to see?”
“I asked Liz to stop by. She’s on an NIH panel that assesses grant applications for CTE research—”
I looked at him blankly. I knew the NIH was the National Institutes of Health. I didn’t know what CTE was.
Liz Ouvrard saw my expression. “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. CTE. Brain trauma from concussive and subconcussive hits to the head.” She turned back to Harold.
The medical examiner said, “I took a slice of the victim’s brain—standard part of the autopsy. When I saw the slide, I stained it and asked Liz to confirm what I was seeing.”
“If you two would step over here, please …” She led me and Ryan over to the microscope, then gestured for me to sit and look through it.
“What am I looking at?”
“You see those bodies shaped like pieces of popcorn? They’re individual nerve cells in the brain.”
About half of the popcorn pieces had brown areas in them. “Okay, what are the burned parts?”
“They’re not burned. That’s the stain Dr. Breen applied. The dark spots are tau deposits. Tau is a protein that helps the nerve cells communicate with each other. When the brain absorbs a lot of hits, the tau can start to clump up in the nerve cells. They’re called tangles because they look kind of like tangles of yarn. Once they get tangled up like this, they start to impede the communication between cells.”
I looked up at the professor. “Bottom line?”
“Bottom line: you’re looking at Stage 2 CTE.”
“Which means what?”
“Stage 1 is the onset of degenerative brain disease. Stage 4 is full-blown dementia. That’s what we generally see in autopsies of football players and boxers who die in their forties and fifties. At Stage 2, the patient has noticeable problems: CTE presents with impaired judgment, impulse-control problems, aggression, and depression. Eventually—it can be years or decades after the repetitive injury—progressive dementia. The damage tends to start in the midbrain, then it moves out toward the subcortex and the amygdala—the areas of the brain that control anxiety and stress response. Eventually, it moves to the cerebral cortex, which controls learning, language, and memory. ”
I turned to Ryan. “Lake Williams had violent episodes, right?”
Ryan’s expression was grim. “Maybe as early as college. Definitely in recent years.” He turned to Liz Ouvrard. “He could have had CTE symptoms in college?”
“We’ve seen it in high-school kids. We don’t have a good, cheap way to test it on kids when they’re alive, but we’ve seen it in a few autopsies of teenage football players. But college kids? For sure. In fact, we suspect that much of the damage occurs in high school. Kids that young don’t think they can get hurt, so they take more hits than they should. And the vigilance by high-school coaches and staff isn’t as good as it is in college or the pros.”
Ryan spoke. “College coaches and the NCAA know about this, don’t they?”
“Now they know quite a bit, and the NCAA has officially stopped denying the link, although they sometimes say stupid things. They’ve got pretty good concussion protocols in place. But when did Mr. Williams start college?”
Ryan said, “Counting junior college, about ten years ago. He played college ball about four years. Before that, we don’t know. Probably three or four years in high school.”
Liz Ouvrard shook her head. “Unfortunately, he could have been right on schedule to develop CTE. You have to remember, it’s not just concussions that can cause this; we know that repetitive subconcussive hits can be just as damaging—maybe even more so because the player doesn’t show any outward symptoms.”
I said, “You mean, he doesn’t get knocked unconscious, doesn’t get dizzy and fall down or throw up or anything?”
“That’s right.” Liz Ouvrard nodded. “The skull is a wonderful bone, but when the head takes a big hit, the brain gets pushed up against the inside of the skull with a whole lot of force. If that happens repeatedly, you can progress to CTE.” She paused a moment. “Do you know the position he played?”
“Wide receiver,” Ryan said.
Liz Ouvrard nodded. “So he took some hits.”
“I assume he blocked, too,” Ryan said. “Since he had good hands, he might have returned punts and kickoffs.”
She exhaled slowly. “He could have taken hundreds of subconcussive hits, maybe thousands.”
I looked around. Nobody seemed to have anything else to say. I addressed Harold. “So how’d you call the death in the report?”
“Immediate cause: heart failure. Underlying cause: opiate overdose. Manner: undetermined.”
Liz Ouvard said, “Why undetermined?”
Harold looked at me to answer. “If the victim didn’t know how potent it was, it was accidental. If he knew and wanted to die, it was suicide. If someone gave it to him without telling him it was uncut, it was homicide.”
Liz Ouvrard nodded.
Harold turned to me. “I’ll update the report when you tell me what happened.”
Ryan and I thanked Liz Ouvrard, as well as Harold and Robin, and headed back to our desks in the detectives’ bullpen.
“Okay.” We sat down. “Tell me how Lake Williams and Kendra get their hands on uncut heroin.”
“I have no idea.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Could have been a mistake. His dealer handed him the wrong baggie.”
“Or he asked for it. He wanted to die.”
“Where’d he get the money?” Ryan said.
“He used to sell the stuff himself.” I thought for a second. “Okay, let’s try to figure this out. Leave aside suicide for a moment. Start wit
h the simplest explanation: There’s only the two of them. They wanted to get high and screw. They’re dope buddies.”
“So how come he’s dead and she’s not?” Ryan said.
“She didn’t shoot up because she watched him take the first hit and flatline. She realized it was bad dope. She got scared, ran out of the tent.”
“Then it’s accidental death,” Ryan said.
“He brings the dope. He’s gonna give her some. In exchange, she’s gonna screw him.”
“I don’t like it.” Ryan shook his head. “She’s too gross to want to screw. And Robin said they didn’t screw.”
“We’re talking about the plan, not what happened. He was gonna screw her in exchange for some dope. He shoots up, dies. The plan changes. She makes sure we find the drug kit. She leaves. Simple as that.”
“So the death was accidental,” Ryan said. “Neither of them knew it was uncut.”
“It’s plausible. No crime committed at all.”
“What about suicide?”
“Okay,” I said. “His life has gone to shit: the CTE and everything else. He asks her to get him some heroin—”
“Or he gets it himself.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Doesn’t matter who gets it. He takes a big hit, dies.”
“So why are his pants down?”
“He wanted to go out with a grunt, but he died before he could get it up?”
“Kendra pulled his pants down? To keep us scratching our heads?” Ryan said.
“Why does she want us to scratch our heads? She’s not doing anything illegal. He wants to kill himself. He doesn’t want to die alone. She’s doing a nice thing, sitting there with him.”
“She doesn’t want us to put her at the scene,” Ryan said. “She pulls down his pants so it looks like he’s all alone and he’s going to yank it.”
“And the only reason that doesn’t work is we find her blood in the syringe. Which she wouldn’t have thought out.”
“All right,” Ryan said, “that brings us back to the main question: How come he’s dead and she’s sitting in Holding?”
“Shit.” I slapped my knees. “We’re gonna have to ask her.”
Ryan called Holding and asked them to deliver her to Interview 1. Three minutes later, we entered the room.
Kendra was awake now. Really awake. She was twitching, scratching at her bare arms and her thighs. Ryan walked over to the controls on the wall and turned on the recording equipment.
“Kendra.” I announced the time and the names of the people in the room. “We need to talk to you about what happened in the tent with Lake Williams.”
“Wasn’t me.”
“Listen to me, Kendra. We have forensic evidence putting you in that tent with Lake. Don’t waste our time here. You want us to go straight to charging you with murder?”
“What evidence you talking about?”
“Your blood and his blood were in the syringe.”
“Maybe my blood was already in there.”
“One more chance to start talking, Kendra, then we charge you with murder.”
“What can you give me if I talk?”
“If you cooperate, we’ll tell the prosecutor. That can make a big difference in the sentence.”
“Not gonna be any sentence. I didn’t do anything.”
“If you don’t start telling us the truth, there will be a sentence.” I paused. “You can count on that.”
“What can you give me now?” She scratched at her left arm repeatedly. Tiny drops of blood traced the long red marks.
“When you tell us the truth and we finish this interview, we’ll see what kind of medical assistance we can get you for the withdrawal.”
“I need to score. Give me my money and let me get the fuck out of here.”
“Talk to us and we’ll get you over to the hospital. Who brought the heroin: you or Lake?”
“Lake had it in his tent. I don’t know how he got it. We were gonna shoot up. That’s all it was.”
“Why didn’t you shoot up?”
“I did.”
“The heroin was uncut. How come you’re alive?”
“I just did a little.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t look too good.”
“Did you try to revive him?”
“Didn’t know what to do. I slapped his face a few times. Talked to him. I saw he was, like, unconscious or something. I got scared. Got the hell out of there. That’s what it was.”
“Why were his pants down?”
“We were gonna fuck.”
“But you didn’t?”
“He was passed out, whatever. He couldn’t get it up.”
“Did you have any reason to want to hurt Lake?”
“No, why would I want to hurt him? I just told you, we were gonna fuck.”
“Did he ever hit you? Beat you up?”
“Everybody’s got good days and bad days. He had a temper, but there wasn’t nothing wrong that day.”
“Here’s the problem we’re having with what you just told us: If Lake got the drug, he would’ve known it was uncut and he would be alive now. The fact that you’re alive now—and he’s dead—makes us think you’re the one knew it was uncut.”
“It happened just like I said. Give me my money and let me get the fuck out of here. Did you take my money?”
“We got your money and your candy bar and your filthy clothes. When we release you, we’ll give you all your stuff back. When we release you. We need to check out what you told us. But first we’re gonna get you over to the hospital, see if they can give you something to take the edge off. You’re gonna stay there, with an officer right outside your door, or here, in Holding.”
“Just give me my shit and drive me back to my place.”
“Can’t do that. You don’t understand what’s happening, Kendra. We got you and Lake in a tent. He shoots up some uncut heroin. He’s dead. We don’t know what happened in that tent, but until we rule you out for killing him, we’re not letting you go.”
“Well, how the fuck are you gonna rule me out? I gotta stay here forever?”
“We get forty-eight hours to enjoy each other’s company.”
“Detective,” I said to Ryan, “arrange to have Ms. Crimmons taken to the hospital.”
I announced the end of the interview, and Ryan turned off the recording equipment and left Interview 1.
A minute later, two uniforms and Ryan returned. The two uniforms—Gonzalez and Murphy—escorted Kendra Crimmons out.
Ryan sat down. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think we know a single thing now that we didn’t know ten minutes ago.”
“Well, we know Kendra’s got a pretty bad drug habit. But that she’s thinking clearly enough not to implicate herself in any way. She didn’t supply the drugs. She didn’t inject them into him. Hell, she didn’t even screw him. All she copped to is she shot up a little herself.”
“She knows we’re not going to charge her with that.”
“That’s right.”
Ryan said, “How are we going to verify her story about Lake getting the drugs?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea.”
It wasn’t until more than an hour later, when I was driving home, that I figured it out.
Chapter 13
I pulled into a gas station, parked off to the side, and shut down the engine. I fished around in my big leather bag, found my phone, and called Dispatch.
“This is Seagate. I need to get in touch with Gonzalez and Murphy. They’re transporting a suspect to the hospital. Can you connect me?”
In a moment I was talking to Maria Gonzalez. “Where are you now?” I said to her.
“We’re processing Kendra Crimmons at the hospital.”
“Have they given her any meds yet?”
“We’re not that far along.”
“Good,” I said. “Put her in the patrol car and bring her back to the station. I’ll be at Holding.”
“You mean, after they treat her?”
“No, don’t let them treat her. Change of plans. Thank the doctors or nurses or whoever and bring her back right now.”
“She’s pretty jumpy. What should I say if she asks what’s going on?”
“I always go with ‘no idea.’”
“Okay, Detective.”
Then I called Ryan, who was still driving. “Ryan, I’m bringing Kendra back to the station. She hasn’t gotten any treatment yet.”
“What happened?”
“I figured out how to get her to tell us the truth. I’m telling you in case you want to come back for that. You’re off shift. I don’t mind doing it on my own.”
“No,” he said. “I’m a big fan of the truth. See you back at the station.”
“Okay.”
Ten minutes later, back at police headquarters, I asked the officer in Holding to process Kendra Crimmons and get her to Interview 1.
I was sitting in the interview room with Ryan when Gonzalez and Murphy brought her in. I thanked them and apologized for being a pain in the ass.
Kendra said, “What the fuck is going on? You said you were gonna get me over to the hospital.” Both her arms now were red and raw from her scratching. Her eyelids were twitching pretty good, too. She wiped at her bloodshot eyes, which were tearing.
“Yeah, well, first we need to talk to you some more about Lake Williams.”
“I told you everything I know.”
“No, you didn’t. You told us what you wanted us to believe. Problem is, it was all bullshit.”
“What are you talking about?”
I turned to Ryan. “Detective, would you give us a few minutes? I’ll look you up when it’s time to begin the interview.” I had a dummy folder with “Crimmons, Kendra” written on the tab. I opened it up and studied the scrap paper for a minute so Ryan could get set up to listen and watch through the one-way mirror.
“Okay, Kendra, here’s where we’re at. I was driving home, and something you said got me thinking. Couple times, you mentioned how you wanted us to just give you your money back and let you get the hell out of here. Remember that?”