Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  Harris looked at Gilbert without saying anything.

  Why the hell are you so preoccupied with this? And happy... this sort of thing makes you happy?

  Gilbert, on the other hand, couldn’t get her words out fast enough. She read the entire article aloud.

  “I have a theory about who did it,” Gilbert said after reading the article. “You want to hear it?”

  “Sure, Kristen,” Harris said, looking at her husband, who was rolling his eyes. “You’re probably going to tell me anyway, right?”

  “It was probably a former patient at the VA who wanted to sit by and watch. Some nut who wanted to see all the action. He probably called in the threat from right there at the Look Restaurant pay phone.”

  “Could be,” Harris said.

  In a frenzy, Gilbert continued to explain how she had seen fire trucks and police swarming the area around the VAMC. At one point, Harris had to tell her to chill out.

  “Take your time.”

  Then, as Harris and her husband got into their car and Gilbert went back inside her apartment, Harris recalled the conversation she’d had with Gilbert less than twelve hours before.

  If she had been doing her laundry, like she claimed, Harris thought, wouldn’t she have, at the least, had a basket of clothes with her?

  But there was one more thing: Why hadn’t Gilbert mentioned the bomb threat incident the previous night? If it had that much of an impact on her, why the hell didn’t she say anything about it?

  The following day, Gilbert knocked on Harris’s door. She said she needed to talk to someone. There had been more coverage in the newspapers about the bomb threat. Gilbert said she sensed that investigators would try to pin it on her. They had blamed her for everything else. Why not this, too?

  “Do you remember what happened at the Olympics when they were in Atlanta?” Gilbert asked.

  “No. But I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “That guy who got blamed for the bombing. You don’t remember?”

  Gilbert was referring to security guard Richard Jewell, whom the FBI named as an early suspect in the bombing of a Centennial Olympic Park tent during the 1996 Atlanta games. Someone at the FBI had leaked Jewell’s name to the press, and a feeding frenzy ensued. Jewell was later found to be innocent. But the press had already tarred and feathered him.

  “Yeah,” Harris said. “I think I remember something about that now.”

  “Well, I know exactly how he feels, Sami,” Gilbert said.

  “Why is that? No one’s accused you of anything, Kristen.”

  “I bet they rented an apartment across the way,” Gilbert said. Then she got up off the couch and went to the window. She pointed at the apartment directly across from Harris’s. “They’re watching me. They’re spying on me all the time. I can fucking feel it.”

  In fact, Gilbert’s sensibilities were accurate. But they weren’t in an apartment across the way; they were in a black surveillance van on the other side of Route 10. It wasn’t anything out of a spy novel, just a trooper inside the van who watched Gilbert come and go. When the trooper felt Gilbert went to bed for the night, the surveillance ended. If there was an available officer the following day, the surveillance continued.

  “You know what, Kristen?” Harris asked. “I bet you’re right. I bet they’re watching your every move.”

  Gilbert looked at her and smiled.

  “Bridget Fonda!” she said, waving her finger at Harris.

  “What, Kristen?”

  “The movie—I want Bridget Fonda to play me.”

  “What are you talking about now? You want Bridget Fonda to play you? What in God’s name are—”

  “When they make a movie of my life, she’d be perfect. Don’t you think?”

  CHAPTER 55

  Assistant US Attorney Bill Welch had plenty of reason to believe Gilbert was responsible for both the bomb threat and the murders up at the VAMC, but he didn’t yet have enough evidence to indict her on federal felony murder charges or even consider an arrest warrant for the bomb threat.

  He needed proof, not speculation.

  In the eyes of the law, the two crimes were separate. Yet it was impossible to believe they weren’t connected in some bizarre way.

  Concerning the deaths at the VAMC between the summer of 1995 and the winter of 1996, Plante was convinced of Gilbert’s guilt. He had been embroiled in the murder investigation since June and knew the particulars of the case better than anyone—and had been telling some of his sources that Gilbert could be responsible for as many as forty deaths.

  After hearing threads of the false bomb threat from various sources at the Northampton DA’s office, SA Plante phoned Timothy Reardon and asked him for his take on what happened. The two men discussed the calls in detail. Reardon said they had made several tapes. “Whoever it was,” Reardon noted, “had used some sort of electronically altered device to disguise his voice. A tape recorder or something. It was the strangest thing.”

  “Great,” Plante said. “We’ll come up and listen to the tapes.” Satisfied with what Reardon had told him, Plante and Detective Thomas Soutier then drove to the Northampton Police Department to interview the officers who had responded to the scene. After that, they decided to stop in town for a little shopping trip before continuing up to the VAMC.

  But something kept gnawing at Plante as they drove from one place to the next trying to piece together the previous night’s events: the call Glenn Gilbert had received from his estranged wife the previous day, September 26. So Plante made a mental note: The call she had made to Glenn was just an hour and a half before the first threatening call had been made to the VAMC. Electronically altered device, Plante kept repeating to himself.

  After spending about an hour at the NPD, Plante and Soutier took a walk around downtown Northampton, stopping in various electronic shops, hoping they could dig up some sort of electronic device Gilbert might have used.

  They went in and out of several stores, asking questions, looking at several different devices. But nothing stood out.

  When the shopping trip failed, Plante and Soutier went back up to the VAMC to see if they had missed something earlier.

  Plante spoke with Perrault first.

  The two men knew each other well by this point. Plante had been in and out of the VAMC during the past six months hunting down leads in the murder investigation. Perrault, he knew, could be helpful. He was cocky and sometimes difficult, but professional and cooperative, nonetheless.

  “I’ll be honest with you, Jim. I have a hunch it’s her,” Plante said.

  “It sounds like her,” Perrault agreed, nodding his head. “But it can’t be,” he added. “It was a man’s voice.”

  “Do you know where she was yesterday?”

  “I think . . . I think she went to the Holyoke Mall—some sort of Internet place . . . the Worldwide Café . . . something like that. I guess she logged on to the Internet for some reason. Who knows?”

  “Thanks,” Plante said. “That could help us out.”

  It was late Friday afternoon. Bill Welch had already left earlier that day to be with his family for the weekend, and Murphy had been working another case and was nowhere to be found. Plante wanted to be on the Mass Pike with a hot cup of coffee in his hand traveling back to Bedford for a long weekend with his wife and kids. Fridays were precious. All he thought about was seeing his wife and children.

  But Plante was a doer. He couldn’t leave things unfinished. Having an open lead on his desk all weekend would ruin the little time he had with his family. There was nothing worse than figuring something out, but being ninety miles away from the case when it hit.

  So he decided, on September 27, to visit the Holyoke Mall and see what he could uncover. There was something there. He could sense it. What Perrault said bothered him. Gilbert wouldn’t go to the mall unless she had something in mind.

  The Holyoke Mall at Ingleside was a fifteen-minute drive from Gilbert’s Easthampton apartment.
The town of Holyoke sits just below the mall to the east. The famous Mount Tom ski resort, where teenagers and families flock to by the bus loads during winter months, overlooks the mall to the north. A look to the south, and Springfield rises out of the mountains as if it were Emerald City.

  Plante visited the Worldwide Café first, which was located on the main level. He asked the manager if it was possible to search the computers to see who had logged on to the Internet the previous day.

  “Sure,” the manager said. “That’ll be easy.”

  They searched to see if Gilbert had been stupid enough to use her own name when she had logged on.

  Not a chance.

  Then Plante had him try Gilbert’s maiden name.

  “Strickland,” he said. “Try Kristen Strickland.”

  But again, nothing.

  Plante then pulled out a current picture of Gilbert.

  “You recognize this woman?”

  “No, sir. Sorry.”

  Another dead end.

  Plante was hoping to track Gilbert’s movements via her surf through cyberspace, but she had obviously used a bogus name. He was curious as to why she had browsed the Internet in the first place. What role did the Internet play in all of this? Although he believed it was definitely Gilbert who had made the threat, Plante didn’t believe she had actually planted a bomb inside the building. She was all about making threats; not carrying them out. Her kind of criminal, Plante had learned from experience, rarely went through with threats. The thrill was in the threat itself. Like poking an animal in a cage to see what kind of reaction she would get, Gilbert prodded and pushed people and then ran away to watch their reaction.

  Walking out of the café, Plante had a thought as he stopped for a moment and looked across the walkway.

  Why not check all the stores in the mall that sell electronic devices?

  Directly across the aisle from the Worldwide Café was Service Merchandise. But after a careful search through the electronics department, he came up empty-handed.

  Then it was on to Sears. But again, nothing. Then Brookstones.

  Nothing.

  By the time he reached KB-Toys, Plante realized he was probably on some sort of wild-goose chase. But maybe, he thought, he had been looking at it from the wrong angle all along? He had to try to piece together what Gilbert was thinking at the time she was at the mall.

  While he was in KB-Toys, Plante found a device that could change the tone of a person’s voice, but it was more of a microphone-type of device, similar to a karaoke machine. It was too big and bulky. There was no way Gilbert could have toted it around.

  But KB-Toys opened the floodgates: Toys. She had used a kid’s toy. Then he remembered Toys-R-Us was right around the corner from the Worldwide Café, back up on the main level.

  The manager of Toys-R-Us, Ann Millett, was all ears when Plante flashed his badge and asked her the question that perhaps blew the entire bomb-threat investigation wide open.

  “Do you sell a device that can change the tone of a person’s voice?”

  “Sure,” Millett said. “Come right over here, and I’ll show it to you.”

  Millett then lead Plante to the electronics department. There was a wide array of devices to choose from: everything from karaoke machines to tape recorders to large robot-type machines that a child could record different sounds on. It was overwhelming at first. But Plante realized he had hit the jackpot. Somewhere within this pile of toys was what he had been looking for all day.

  As he stood for a moment in deep thought, scanning each toy, Millett pointed out something specific.

  “It’s called a Talkgirl. It’s the most popular of all these types of toys,” she said.

  Plante looked at it and smiled.

  “Is it possible to find out if someone purchased one of these toys yesterday?”

  “Certainly. We can check the sku number on the package itself.”

  “Can you do that right now?”

  “No problem.”

  “How ’bout credit card receipts? Is there any way we can see if someone purchased a toy like this”—Plante held it up like a trophy—“with a credit card?”

  “Most certainly.”

  On September 5, at the request of a grand jury subpoena, Gilbert was ordered to give “handwriting exemplars” to the Northampton DA’s office, which she did without incident. That same day, Plante fingerprinted her and took several photos. It would be piece of cake to match her fingerprints and her handwriting with any evidence culled from Ann Millett’s search.

  Within a few minutes, Millett plucked a receipt from a pile, lifting it up in the air as if she had found a lost lottery ticket, and said, “Here it is right here.”

  Sure enough, Gilbert had used her VISA card to purchase a Talkgirl toy at two P.M. on the afternoon of September 26—the day of the bomb threat.

  CHAPTER 56

  While Plante made his way east on the Mass Pike to go home for the weekend, his new toy sitting securely in a bag next to him on the front seat, James Perrault was finishing up making his first two-hour sweep of the VAMC grounds. It was Friday night. For Perrault, the work week would be over in about six hours.

  When he finally sat down at the security desk to man the phones, it was just after five o’clock. Perrault was tired. It had been an emotionally draining couple of days.

  As soon as he got comfortable in his chair, the phone rang.

  This time, Perrault was prepared. NYNEX had been informed there might be more calls, so it was waiting to run a trace.

  “VA Officer Perrault speaking. How may I help you?”

  “You did very well during last night’s trial run,” the caller said, and hung up.

  There was no doubt in Perrault’s mind it was the same caller as the previous night. But this time he heard something familiar in the voice that hadn’t really dawned on him the day before. Earlier that morning, he had come to the conclusion it was probably Gilbert who had made the calls. Who else could it have been? Still, there was that one problem: It was a man’s voice. If it had been Gilbert, he figured, she had to have been using some sort of device that changed the tone of her very distinctive voice.

  At 6:38, one more call came in: “The next time you won’t get so long,” the caller threatened.

  Perrault phoned NYNEX to see if someone had been successful in “trapping” the call.

  “Sorry,” the operator said. The calls weren’t long enough.

  When Perrault returned to work on Monday afternoon, after having the weekend off, he wasn’t surprised to learn that the VAMC hadn’t received one strange phone call in his absence.

  Over the weekend, a kid playing with his friends out in the center courtyard of 182 Northampton Street kicked his ball into the bushes, reached down to grab it, and noticed a familiar-looking toy just sitting there.

  It was a voice-changing device—a pink Talkgirl—just like the one Plante had bought at Toys-R-Us.

  Samantha Harris, when she later found out that the kid had found the toy, asked him where.

  “Over there,” the kid said, pointing to the bushes.

  Gilbert’s window was directly above where the kid was pointing.

  A day later, something clicked in Harris’s mind. So she went to the boy’s mother and told her to call Plante or Murphy. “It could mean something,” she said. “Kristen’s window is right above where he found it.”

  The woman said she didn’t want to get involved. It was a kid’s toy. What kind of trouble could Gilbert get herself into with a child’s toy?

  Harris decided to call Plante and Murphy herself, just to make sure the toy didn’t hold any significance.

  The day the kid found the toy, he played with it, but couldn’t get it to work. It kept malfunctioning.

  On Monday morning, the boy took it to school and showed it off to some friends. They were impressed. They passed it around all morning—that is, until the teacher took it away because it was disrupting her class.

  She
, in turn, handed it over to the principal.

  By the time Harris had gotten hold of Plante and Murphy and they tracked down the boy’s mother and went to the school, the Talkgirl had gone through so many different hands that it was impossible to extract any fingerprints from it.

  On Monday night, September 30, around six o’clock, Gilbert returned to the Holyoke Mall and walked into the Toys-R-Us for the second time in four days.

  Combing the aisles, she found what she was looking for within minutes and headed up to the cash register.

  “Will you take a check?” Gilbert asked the clerk, Stephanie Lussier, as she placed her one item, this time a Talkboy, Jr., on the counter.

  The only noticeable differences between the Talkgirl and Talkboy are the size and color: The Talkboy is about the size of a paperback book and comes in more masculine colors of gray and blue; the Talkgirl, a little bit bigger than a pack of cigarettes, comes in pink and lavender.

  “As long as you have some ID,” Lussier said.

  “I’m concerned about the size of the batteries this thing takes,” Gilbert said. “What size batteries do I need?”

  The box clearly stated that the toy took four double-A batteries. Gilbert, undoubtedly worried that she might purchase the wrong size batteries and waste time returning them, asked Lussier to open the box to make sure. She wanted the toy to be in working condition the minute she walked out of the store.

  While she tore open the box, Lussier turned the carton over and pointed out to Gilbert that the toy took four double-A batteries.

  “See,” she said. “Right there. It says four double-A batteries. Those you have in your hand will do the job.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t want to get home and find out they don’t fit,” Gilbert said. She seemed frustrated. “Open it and make sure.”

  “They’ll fit, ma’am. I’m positive.”