Who Killed My Daughter?

by Lois Duncan

  Although it supported the truck driver’s statement that the car that chased Kait had been a low rider, the reading seemed to indicate Vietnamese involvement. Twice Betty had made reference to Kait’s having recognized her killers, and the fact that one of them had fear of “Mexican energy” made it seem that he couldn’t be Hispanic. But, while many of the statements in the reading were insightful, others were bewildering. Why would Kait have consulted her watch throughout the evening with the time “nine o’clock” in her mind, when she didn’t leave Susan’s until ten forty-five? How could she have had “much to do in this time” and “exposed herself at every turn,” when she spent the whole evening with a girlfriend? And the part about someone moving “through water … very fast … leaving, departing … not to return” didn’t seem to fit anywhere, especially when it came in response to my question “Does [Kaitlyn] have a message for me?”

  I shared the reading with Don with trepidation. But despite his conservative nature he was surprisingly open to it.

  “It’s all that detail that makes it convincing,” he told me.

  Donnie, on the other hand, had no interest in reading it; he said he’d seen Kait “alive again,” and that was enough for him. I mailed copies of the reading to our daughters, who found it fascinating, but when Kerry tried to discuss it with her husband, he became so upset that it created a rift in their marriage.

  “I’ve never seen Ken so angry about anything,” she told me.

  Brett’s reaction was almost as negative as our son-in-law’s.

  “It’s like going to a witch doctor,” he said with disgust. “I can’t believe you and Daddy would buy into such a crock.”

  I phoned Steve Gallegos twice to find out about the numbers on Kait’s final phone billing. The first time he told me identification had arrived in the mail that morning, but was “buried in the mess on my desk.” The second time he said he had given it to his sergeant. I asked him if he could remember the names, and he couldn’t.

  In early November I was a keynote speaker at the “Courage to Write for Children” workshop in Santa Fe. Three longtime writer friends from other areas of the country were also on the faculty, and on the final night of the conference, as we lingered over dinner, I brought them up to date on the murder investigation and told them about my visit to Betty.

  All three of them took this seriously.

  “Have you given that information to the police?” one friend asked, and I told him that Betty had advised me not to.

  “She said they won’t act on leads from a psychic,” I said.

  “Then you need to find some other way of getting it across to them,” said a friend from New York state. “What about an anonymous phone call?”

  “I couldn’t pull it off,” I told her. “I’ve never been good at lying. Besides, Detective Gallegos would recognize my voice.”

  “Then write them a letter,” my third friend suggested. “That would be safe enough. Type it on a borrowed typewriter and misspell a lot of words.”

  “I could never do that,” I said. “I despise anonymous letters.”

  The truth was, I didn’t have enough nerve to play games with the police. I’d seen enough movies to know they had all sorts of sophisticated lab equipment at their disposal and could identify fingerprints on stationery and saliva on envelope flaps. For all I knew, they might even have specially trained dogs who sniffed such letters and identified the writers in lineups.

  I was horrified when, several days later, I had a phone call from Sergeant Ruth Lowe of the Homicide Department, telling me she had received an anonymous letter from an informant who seemed to know a lot about the murder. Even worse, she insisted on reading it aloud to me:

  KAIT ARQUETTE WAS NOT KILLED IN A RANDOM SHOOTING. SHE KNEW WHO DID IT. THERE WERE THREE OF THEM. AFTER THE SHOOTING THEY SPLIT UP AND WENT IN THREE DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS. ONE WENT TO STAY WITH FRIENDS OUT OF STATE. ONE WENT TO THE WEST COAST. ONE WENT SOUTH WITH THE CAR AND WAS SUPPOSED TO GET RID OF IT IN MEXICO, BUT MAYBE HE DIDN’T BECAUSE HE IS AFRAID OF MEXICANS AND DIDN’T LIKE TO CROSS THE BORDER, SO MAYBE HE DUMPED IT IN EL PASO OR SOMEPLACE LIKE THAT. IT WAS NOT A VW LIKE YOU THINK, IT WAS A LOW RIDER.

  Obviously the note had been sent by one of my writer friends. I didn’t know which one, and I didn’t want to know, but I felt as guilty as if I had written it myself. Did Sergeant Lowe suspect me, and was she trying to trap me? Was it a criminal act to send an anonymous letter? If I took a lie detector test, would it prove I hadn’t done so, or would “guilt by association” influence the results?

  But Sergeant Lowe sounded friendly and nonaccusatory. She said she was calling to see if the message made sense to me.

  “Kait’s boyfriend went to Kansas City to stay with relatives,” I said tentatively. “And the part about the man going west—if he were one of Dung’s friends, he might go there. Those Vietnamese men have connections in the L.A. area.”

  “What sort of connections?” Lowe asked.

  “That’s where they have the car wrecks.”

  “What car wrecks?”

  “The ones they stage to bilk the insurance companies.”

  As the conversation went on, I began to realize that Sergeant Lowe knew next to nothing about the things we had told Detective Gallegos. Was she too overburdened to keep track of the case? Or did people in the department rarely communicate? When I mentioned the calls that had been made to Santa Ana, she demanded to know why we hadn’t reported them to Homicide and then seemed surprised to discover the phone numbers in the case file.

  “We need to find out who those numbers belong to,” she said.

  “I thought that already had been done!”

  “I see nothing here to indicate that.”

  “But Detective Gallegos told me he checked them out! He said he’d received the names and given them to you!”

  “I don’t know anything about these calls,” said the sergeant. “They do seem rather suspicious. Maybe the men in the Camaro were Vietnamese, not Hispanic. It was dark, and the truck driver didn’t see their faces, and he could have been mistaken about the accent.”

  I acknowledged that this was a possibility.

  “Somebody out there must know who did this,” she said.

  I agreed that somebody must.

  “I bet this letter was written by a friend of Kait’s.”

  Or a friend of Kait’s mother’s, I amended silently.

  Sergeant Lowe asked if I would be willing to appear on TV again to try to “stir up some action.” I told her that I would be glad to.

  Despite the discomfort I felt about the anonymous letter, it did seem to have had a revitalizing effect upon the investigation. There was an update of the case on the six P.M. news along with an announcement that there was now over $5,000 in the Kate Arquette Crime Stoppers Fund that would be paid for information leading to arrests. Everybody got into the act. Sergeant Lowe, who turned out to be an attractive woman, appeared on television to say, “We have reason to believe there is someone out there with information to share with us.” A spokesman for Crime Stoppers added, “This person is probably afraid to come forth with information for fear that what happened to Kaitlyn will happen to him. I want to assure him it won’t,” and proceeded to explain how Crime Stoppers worked. I appeared as the mother-of-the-victim, begging that person to come forward “for our sake, for Kait’s sake, and for the sake of all the people out there who are afraid their own children will be shot.”

  The presentation aroused local interest momentarily. Then the case slid back into the woodwork. I called APD several more times in an attempt to find out about the phone numbers, but that information was never available.

  That year brought a short, strange autumn with no fall finery. The leaves must have fallen in the night without bothering to change color, because one day the trees were green and the next they were bare. Neighborhood children scuffed their way through the gutters on their way to the elementary school at the end of our street, and I wa
tched from the window, remembering how Kait, at their age, had loved to play in the leaves.

  Dung, now apparently fully recovered from his knife wound, returned to Albuquerque. I called him at work and told him we had his belongings stored in our garage and asked if he wanted to come get them. He told me he did and had his boss drive him over.

  He was polite, but distant, and I had no opportunity to talk with him alone, but I did stick a letter into one of the boxes. He was later to give it to the police as evidence of harassment:

  * * *

  Dear Dung,

  Do you remember the dream you had in our den the night Kait died? I have that same dream every night. In the dream Kait is crying. She says she is all alone in the dark and can’t get into heaven until we know what happened to her. She says, “You and Dung have to help me.” I love her so much, but I don’t know how to help her.

  You knew Kait better than anybody. You know the things she did that she didn’t want us to know about, and you know which people were mad at her. I know you didn’t shoot Kait, because you loved her too much, but I think you are smart enough to find out who did.

  If you find out, you won’t have to talk to the police. You can write me a letter saying who did it and why, and not sign your name. Or you can phone me, and I will pretend I learned it from somebody else. Or, if you want the reward money, you can call 843-7867 and tell the people at Crime Stoppers. You won’t have to give your name to them either. They will deliver money to you at a secret place, and no one will ever know you were the one who phoned them.

  I know you never meant for this terrible thing to happen. If you did have anything to do with it, it had to be an accident. I promise I will make sure that nothing bad happens to you, just the way I would if you were one of my sons. But if you love Kait, please, try to find out who did this. She is afraid and alone, and she needs us to help her.

  Love,

  Kait’s Mom

  * * *

  Soon after that friends of Donnie’s reported seeing Dung with a new white girlfriend, and I realized the groveling letter had been an exercise in futility.

  The end of November brought Thanksgiving, the first major holiday since Kait’s death. The Albuquerque Journal ran an article about the thirty-six-year-old transplant patient who had received her heart and lungs. I had no regrets about our decision to donate her organs; still, it gave me an odd feeling to see a photograph of a man I had never met and know that a heart that had been formed in my womb was beating in his chest.

  We made a great effort to have a traditional Thanksgiving. In keeping with family custom Don took responsibility for the turkey, and all day long we kept commenting about how wonderful it smelled cooking. When I went out to the kitchen to make gravy, I found a cold white carcass in the roasting pan. With the stress of the day Don had forgotten to turn on the oven.

  By now it had been three months since the Albuquerque Gang Unit had been alerted to the existence of the gold Camaro, and they still had not found it. Since the car’s description had not been released to the public, nobody else was on the lookout for it. Kait’s murder had long since been replaced in the media by stories of more recent atrocities, and it appeared that the case was now part of the annals of history.

  Crime Stoppers was a strong organization in our city, but for people who didn’t speak English well, the concept was difficult to assimilate. I decided to put out a simply worded flyer that would explain that tipsters could be paid without revealing their names.

  I tried to make it easy to understand:

  THERE’S OVER $5,000 REWARD MONEY IN THE KATE ARQUETTE CRIMESTOPPERS FUND!

  KATE WAS SHOT TO DEATH SUNDAY, JULY 16, 1989, AT ABOUT 10:30 P.M. ON LOMAS BLVD. NEAR BROADWAY N.E. SHE WAS DRIVING A RED FORD TEMPO. THE GUN MIGHT HAVE BEEN A SMALL CALIBER RIFLE OR AN UZI.

  CRIMESTOPPERS WILL PAY FOR USEFUL INFORMATION. YOU WON’T HAVE TO GIVE YOUR NAME. REWARD MONEY WILL BE DROPPED OFF IN CASH AT A SECRET COLLECTION POINT. NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW YOU MADE THE CALL.

  CALL CRIMESTOPPERS—843-7867

  Since some of Kait’s Vietnamese acquaintances might not have known her by name but only as Dung’s girlfriend, I wanted to use a picture of the two of them on the flyer, but for that I needed a black-and-white print, and the only photos I had of them together were in color. Then, I remembered the mistake I had made on Kait’s eighteenth birthday. After shooting a full roll of pictures I had been chagrined to discover that I had carelessly loaded the camera with black-and-white film. Kait was expecting color, and since Brett had been snapping pictures, too, I didn’t even bother to process the ones I took. That roll of film still sat on a shelf in my office, and I developed it in my small darkroom at home. It was too old to be good, and only one picture turned out, but it was the one I needed—Kait and Dung stood together, smiling into the camera lens.

  I first distributed the flyers by mailing them to gun stores, pawn shops, movie theaters, video stores, convenience stores, community centers, shopping malls, soup kitchens, and Oriental restaurants, and asking the owners to post them where customers would see them. Then, since Betty had told us the “female element” was on our side, I sent them to food stores, launderettes, child-care centers, and all the Planned Parenthood clinics. After that I visited middle schools and high schools throughout the city and spoke on the intercoms to students to ask for their help in getting flyers into teenage hangouts.

  A narcotics agent at a school in an area with a large Vietnamese population was especially sympathetic. As he toted boxes of flyers in from the car for me, he told me he’d never believed Kait’s shooting was “random.”

  “As soon as I saw her boyfriend on television, I said to myself, ‘I bet that guy’s got something to do with it,’ “ he said. “The Vietnamese gangs in this city are vicious as hell. They have their own people terrified, but the Vietnamese community’s a world of its own and the people don’t squeal on each other no matter how bad things get. The police don’t know how to deal with that, so they like to pretend the only gangs here are Black and Hispanic.”

  The printing shop Donnie worked for offered to print the flyers at cost, so I was able to get thousands run off. Friends and neighbors helped distribute them, and I spent my own days walking the streets with a staple gun, nailing them to trees and telephone poles.

  For the first time in our twenty-three years of marriage, Don was not supportive.

  “You shouldn’t be running around with those things,” he told me.

  “Why not?” I demanded, hurt and bewildered by his attitude.

  “You’re asking for trouble. It could be dangerous.”

  “Asking for trouble!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What are you afraid of—that I’ll be arrested for littering?”

  “Somebody might try to retaliate.”

  “For putting up flyers?”

  “It’s one thing to mail them to businesses, but it’s another to be out there in person, taping them to walls.”

  “Why shouldn’t I tape them to walls?” I shot back. “I’m Kait’s mother. And you’re her father, you ought to be out there helping me! How can you just sit there when we’ve got a whole city to be covered?”

  “I do not ‘just sit here,’ ” Don said with ice in his voice. “I put in a full day at work, and I’m trying my best to get my life back to normal. That’s a whole lot healthier than what you’re doing. You’ve gotten obsessed with this crusade. You can’t talk about anything else; you’re not able to eat; you can’t stay awake past eight-thirty; you’re totally losing it. If you need to see proof, just look at your hands!”

  “What’s wrong with my hands?” I glanced down at them and was surprised to find them covered with blood. The knuckles had been jarred through the skin by the jolt of the staple gun.

  “Kait’s dead,” Don said. “There’s nothing we can do to bring her back. We need to start rebuilding our lives. It’s up to the police to find her killers.”

  “The police aren’t doing
a thing now!”

  “There’s no way for us to know that. We have to have faith in the system.”

  “I’m going to put up flyers from now until eternity,” I said. “If you try to stop me, I’m leaving you.”

  I stomped out of the room and went upstairs to bed.

  It was, after all, eight-thirty.

  I’d once read that eighty percent of all couples who suffered the loss of a child were divorced within two years. At the time I hadn’t been able to imagine how such a thing could happen to a loving, compatible couple with a solid marriage.

  Now I understood perfectly.

  9

  DECEMBER 1989:

  She left her sister a watermelon bowl, because it went so well

  with her red-and-yellow kitchen.

  She had it put on layaway for her sister for Christmas.

  She left her father and me her unhousebroken cat,

  a tank filled with stupid goldfish, and a house so quiet we hear the fish making bubbles

  as they glide back and forth in the water.

  I want a watermelon bowl.

  I want to see the bowl in her strong, square hands, and to hear her laugh

  because we’ve been fooled into thinking

  it is truly a watermelon.

  No, in truth, I don’t want a watermelon bowl.

  If I could hear her laugh, I would settle for seeds.

  LD

  IF THANKSGIVING WAS AWFUL, Christmas was worse. We had long-established traditions that never varied, and Kait was part of all of them. It was Kait’s self-appointed job to decorate the tree, and Kait who baked the pies for Christmas dinner. It was Kait who set the table with her grandmother’s wedding china; Kait who dished the cranberry sauce into bowls; Kait who filled the celery sticks with cream cheese and arranged them on a relish tray.

  This year it was Donnie who put up the tree, tossing ornaments on so haphazardly that by Christmas Eve half of them were on the floor. We didn’t bother with a relish tray; the cranberry sauce made its way around the table virtually untouched; and I bought pies at a bakery.