Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  After letting everyone in, Gilbert asked what they were looking for.

  “We are looking for a recording device used to make calls to the VA. We’ll be here for a while. You can either stay here or leave, Ms. Gilbert. It’s up to you,” Soutier said.

  Murphy was a bit more impersonal. With his rough and overpowering voice, “We’re seizing the house,” he said, pushing his way toward Gilbert. “We have a warrant for your car, too. You can leave, but don’t touch anything!”

  Gilbert went for her pocketbook and began heading for the door.

  Murphy took a step to his right, blocking her from going any farther. “No. No. No. That stays here,” he said, placing his hand on Gilbert’s purse.

  A female trooper, Sue Cronin, then rushed over. “That stays with us, ma’am,” she said. “But you’re welcome to get your house keys out of it.”

  So Gilbert grabbed her keys and walked out the door. There were a few troopers standing outside, and they watched her as she headed straight for Samantha Harris’s apartment.

  “Perfect,” Murphy said after one of the young troopers came in and told him where she had gone.

  While they waited for a copy of the search warrant, one of the troopers made a video recording of the entire apartment. Murphy noticed right away that the light in the children’s bedroom upstairs wasn’t working. So he ordered a floodlight so they could have some light while they filmed and, later, searched. A video would be made at the end, also, to preserve the aftereffects of the search. This way, while they applied for an arrest warrant, Gilbert, who would be free to come back into the apartment, couldn’t accuse them of ransacking the place or, even worse, planting evidence.

  Downstairs, just inside the front door, was the living room. The walls were bare. It was unusual for a woman not to decorate her home. Most women, even single women, made it a priority to pepper their walls, end tables and coffee tables with knick-knacks and pictures. But not Gilbert. Except for one picture, her apartment was empty, as if she had used the place only to sleep in.

  Strangely enough, the one picture Gilbert kept in her home was that of her sister Tara. It had been blown up, framed, and hung on the wall above the sofa as if it were some type of homage to her younger sibling.

  Even more unusual, however, was that there weren’t any pictures of Gilbert’s children in the house.

  After the entrance video was made and Plante and Bill Welch showed up with the search warrant, the crew snapped on their latex gloves and got to work.

  Plante went upstairs, while Soutier took the living room, and Murphy the kitchen.

  In the living room, Soutier picked up a notebook that was sitting on the coffee table in plain sight. As soon as he opened it, he knew it was going to be a good night.

  “He wishes—he thinks he’s a real cop. He’s nothing but a rent-a-cop,” was scrawled across the inside page, alongside a few obscenities that Soutier guessed were in reference to Perrault, too.

  Participating in dozens of searches throughout his twenty-six-year career, Murphy knew exactly where to start in the kitchen: the garbage can. Digging like a possum in a Dumpster, he hit the jackpot right away: three empty packages of Energizer batteries, two batteries and a receipt from Thrifty’s Health & Beauty. A quick look at the receipt told him Gilbert had purchased the batteries just days ago.

  Sometime later, Soutier, now upstairs in the child’s bedroom where Gilbert had been when they showed up, standing inside the closet, buried knee-deep in clothes and toys and boxes, waded through several items and finally reached into a cardboard box and pulled out a Talkboy, Jr.

  He then walked into the master bedroom, where Plante was rummaging through Gilbert’s closet.

  “Whata ya got?”

  Soutier smiled. “Take a look at this.”

  They rewound the tape and listened. But it was mostly static, blank.

  Plante placed the Talkboy on the dresser and pointed to several items he had found lying on Gilbert’s bed: a book, pen, a few letters, telephone, a copy of the September 27, 1996, edition of the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and the jacket she had been wearing when Murphy fingered her at the Tasty Top just a few hours ago.

  “What do you make of this stuff?” Plante asked Soutier.

  “Check inside the jacket.”

  In the lefthand pocket, Plante pulled out the operating instructions for the Talkboy.

  Next to the jacket, an issue of the Daily Hampshire Gazette piqued Plante’s attention next. It was soft and worn. He could tell it had been read through several times. There was a headline on page A-3 that immediately stuck out:

  BOMB THREATS AT VA PROBED

  As Murphy, Plante and Soutier continued the search, Gilbert was at Samantha Harris’s apartment climbing the walls.

  “Why are they doing this to me? I have done nothing wrong,” Gilbert said as she walked through the door.

  “Relax,” Harris said. “Let me get you a glass of water.”

  “They say they’re looking for a voice-changing device or something. A kid’s toy. You know . . . you can change your voice up high, like a chipmunk, or down low like a man,” Gilbert said. “It’s probably in the kids’ room, but there’s probably no tape in it . . . it’s probably been erased or the batteries are dead or there’s no batteries in it.”

  She was talking in quick-fire repetition. Looking toward the door. Fidgeting with her house keys. Pacing.

  What Harris didn’t know at the time, but would soon find out, was that Soutier or Murphy never told Gilbert they were looking for a “child’s toy.” They simply secured the apartment, said they were looking for a “recording device,” and told her she could stay or leave.

  CHAPTER 62

  While Welch and his crew continued with the search, Gilbert called Harry Miles from Harris’s apartment and told him what was going on.

  Some time later, the tall, balding, gray-haired defense attorney with glasses barged through Harris’s front door without even knocking.

  “Where is my client?” Miles demanded to know.

  Harris was sitting in the living room. Startled, she could think of nothing more to say other than, “Excuse me?”

  With his rumpled suit, loud voice and forceful manner, Miles repeated himself: “Where is my client?”

  Hesitantly, Harris got up and began to speak. “I think you should have at least—”

  Paying no mind to what she was trying to say, Miles cut her off and walked into the kitchen where Gilbert was sitting.

  Harris thought it best to stay put. There was no need for her to know what they were talking about. It would mean only more explaining on her part when everything was said and done.

  After spending about ten minutes with Gilbert, Miles rushed out of the house without saying a word.

  “Come in here,” Gilbert yelled from the kitchen.

  Harris walked in and sat down. “I don’t want to know what your lawyer said to you, Kristen. It’s none of my business.”

  “Don’t worry . . . it was . . . nothing.” Gilbert was acting strange, Harris noticed.

  In what had become one of Gilbert’s signatures, her entire mood changed in the blink of an eye. With her arms folded, she was now rocking back and forth in her chair, trembling like a junkie. Every so often, she would stop rocking, run her hands through her hair, and mumble something. She began to sweat and speak in broken sentences. Harris had seen her like this before, but never as bad as she was tonight.

  Yet whenever Gilbert wanted to make a point, she would snap out of her trance and speak flawlessly.

  In an eerie whisper, she looked at Harris one time and said, “I want you to bring me to the bank, then to the pharmacy . . . and . . . and . . . a hotel.”

  My God, she’s planning on killing herself, Harris thought.

  “Why are they doing this to me?” Gilbert asked again. “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Come on,” Harris said, grabbing Gilbert by the arm. “Let’s go.”

  It was well af
ter eleven now.

  As they drove to the ATM machine down the street, Gilbert continued to talk. She wanted Harris to know she was grateful for all she had done. She wanted Harris to understand she wasn’t a bad person. “I haven’t done anything wrong,” she kept repeating. It was everyone else’s fault. The VA was out to get her. Perrault was lying. Her coworkers were setting her up.

  Gilbert then said she was thankful most of all for the fact that Harris had kept her mouth shut and had never spoken to the investigators.

  At that point, Harris just looked at her. If you only knew. You freakin’ lunatic. If you only knew what I’ve been up to.

  “Listen,” Gilbert said. “I want you to bring me into Northampton now.” They had already stopped at the ATM machine and pharmacy. Gilbert had plenty of money and a bag of pills.

  “I thought you wanted me to bring you to a hotel.”

  “No!” Gilbert said, getting louder. “Bring me to the bus station!”

  “The bus station? Come on, Kristen. I can’t do that.”

  “No. Listen to me. I don’t want you to know where I’m going. This way you won’t feel obligated to tell them anything when they come around asking questions. I mean, they know I came over your house. So you’re the first person they’re going to when they can’t find me.”

  When Harris pulled into the bus station, Gilbert got out of the car and stopped just short of shutting the door.

  “I feel like I can’t trust anyone anymore,” she said.

  “You know, Kristen, you probably can’t trust anyone.” Gilbert closed the door and walked away.

  For Samantha Harris, the night was just beginning.

  CHAPTER 63

  About an hour after Harris got home, she called Gilbert’s apartment and left a message on the answering machine.

  “Hi, Kristen . . . just checking up on you to see what’s going on. Call me.”

  A few minutes later, Plante showed up at her door.

  “Very funny,” he said.

  “Come in.”

  “I suppose that was a signal to come over?”

  Harris smiled.

  Plante explained that he only had a few minutes. They were meticulously going through everything in Gilbert’s apartment, and he had to get back to work as soon as possible.

  “I think you’ll want to sit down for a minute and hear me out,” Harris said.

  She brought him up to date and told him everything that had just happened.

  “Thanks, Sami. You’ve been a big help. You know that, don’t you?”

  It certainly felt good to hear Plante say she had done the right thing by dropping Gilbert off at the bus depot. Harris had felt funny about it up until that point, as if she had been an accomplice in helping Gilbert escape.

  Everything was about subterfuge with her, Harris thought as she walked up the stairs toward her bedroom. It was now near midnight, and she had to get up at five A.M. to start her bus route. She was always trying to lead people in the wrong direction.

  “They’re going to arrest her any day now, Phillip,” Harris told her husband. He was watching television upstairs. “I can feel it. They’re over there digging through her apartment . . . they’re going to find something.”

  “Go to sleep,” Phillip said. “It’s late. I’ll be in bed soon.”

  An hour later, after Harris and her husband had fallen asleep, the telephone rang. When she picked it up, she could hear someone moaning on the other end of the line.

  Here we go . . .

  Gilbert sounded groggy and tired, even drugged, Harris thought as she listened.

  “Sami . . . is that you?” Gilbert mumbled. “Sami . . . you there?”

  “ Kristen?”

  “I don’t feel so . . . good . . . Sami. I feel like—”

  It sounded to Harris as if Gilbert had dropped the phone. “Are you there?” Harris yelled.

  There was silence, followed by what sounded like the phone being picked up and dropped.

  “You need to call 911, Kristen,” Harris said. She was frightened. “Where are you?”

  Silence. Then breathing. Then moaning.

  “I’m. Going. To. Hang. Up. Now,” Harris said slowly, as if she were speaking to a child, “and you’re going to call 911.”

  They went back and forth a few times. Gilbert would mumble something and then drop the phone. Harris would say she was going to hang up, and Gilbert would quickly pick up the phone and, as sober as a doorknob, snap out of it and say, “I’m here. I’m here.”

  After several more calls, Harris concluded that Gilbert’s latest suicide attempt, like all the others, was merely another attempt to put the spotlight on herself. She sounded as if she were play-acting. Harris didn’t believe for one minute that the same woman who had falsely attempted suicide time and again throughout the summer was tonight suddenly on the verge of dying.

  “I’m hanging up now,” Harris said at one point.

  “No, don’t hang up. I wanted to leave my parents’ phone number with you, Sami,” Gilbert said.

  “Why, Kristen?”

  “Call them in the morning and tell them I’m dead.” Then she dropped the phone and started moaning.

  Jesus, Kristen, could you make it any more obvious?

  After a pause, Harris snapped. “Damnitall, Kristen!” she said. “Are you there? Tell me where you are? I’m hanging up now, so you can call 911.”

  As soon as she heard that, Gilbert picked up the phone again. “I can’t deal with this shit anymore. I just can’t do it.”

  Harris hung up.

  Gilbert called back.

  “Kristen,” Harris said in a more relaxed, pleading tone. “You need to call 911. I have no idea where you are. It’s late. I have to get up in a few hours and go to work.... I’m hanging up now. I have no—”

  Gilbert dropped the phone.

  Harris hung up.

  Two minutes later, Gilbert called back.

  “Don’t hang up on me, please. . . .” She was crying and slurring her speech.

  “You need to call 911! I cannot do anything for you.” Harris heard the phone drop. “I’m hanging up. . . .”

  “Wait,” Gilbert said as she picked the phone back up. “Just wait a minute.”

  “Kristen, where are you? I’ll call Jim or Glenn. One of them can come and get you.”

  There was a long pause. But Gilbert hadn’t dropped the phone this time. Harris could tell she was just holding it, thinking.

  “Glenn is not such an intellectual firecracker now, is he?” Gilbert finally said. She began to laugh. “He’s stupid, isn’t he?”

  “Call 911, Kristen. I’m hanging up.”

  Gilbert called at least another ten times before Harris decided to turn off the ringer and get some sleep.

  When Gilbert realized Harris wasn’t going to pick up her phone any more, she turned her attention toward her new friend, Carole Osman.

  Osman, a divorced mother of two grown daughters, was easy prey for Gilbert. Osman enjoyed living in Northampton and being around the artsy, well-educated class of people Gilbert had fooled everyone into thinking she fit in with. In her late forties, Osman kept few friends and hadn’t become friendly with Gilbert until after the murder investigation had been initiated. Some considered Osman to be “weird” and on the “eccentric” side. Gilbert used to belittle her when they worked together, making fun of her around colleagues whenever she saw the opportunity. Some said Osman was perhaps in the midst of a midlife crisis at the time she went to work at the VAMC. She had been a florist for most of her adult life and, late into her forties, decided to go to nursing school. One VAMC nurse, who had worked with Osman for many years, said she was the most incompetent nurse she had ever seen in some twenty years on the job.

  Gilbert must have known that a call to Carole Osman would mean she’d be tracked down—because Osman had two separate phone lines installed in her home, and Gilbert had been over there plenty enough times to know that. But she still called Osman an
d gave her the same sob story she had just given to Samantha Harris.

  Unlike Harris, Carole Osman fell for it hook, line and sinker. She later told Harris that she felt as if Gilbert was “at the end of her rope and near death that night.” She felt sorry for her.

  Working Osman like a piece of clay, Gilbert carried on and on about her problems and her need to kill herself.

  Osman, scared for her life, told Gilbert to hold on for a moment. She had something on the stove she needed to check on before it burnt the house down.

  When Gilbert agreed, Osman rushed over to the second phone line and dialed up the Northampton Police Department so they could trace the call.

  Osman kept Gilbert on the line while the police learned she was calling from just a few miles down the road—at the local Days Inn, in Northampton.

  When the police got to the hotel, Gilbert appeared to be shaken, desolate, and in distress.

  But close to death? Not a chance.

  Officers from the NPD determined that Gilbert would need psychiatric evaluating and brought her to Cooley Dickinson Hospital.

  CHAPTER 64

  Confined to the psych ward of Cooley Dickinson, on the morning of October 2, Gilbert decided to retaliate against the one person she saw as being responsible for everything that had just happened—James Perrault—by using the only weapon she had at her disposal: the telephone.

  During the first couple of messages she left on Perrault’s answering machine, Gilbert said she had suspected for the past month or so that he had been supplying investigators with information about her.

  “You fucking prick,” Gilbert said into Perrault’s answering machine in a deep, threatening tone. “I know you’re the one behind the search warrant.”

  It wasn’t such a stretch to think that Perrault had something to do with the search warrant. What other choice did he have? Plante and Murphy were telling him that his ex-girlfriend, a woman he had been sleeping with for the past ten months, had possibly killed as many as forty of her patients, maybe even more. What was he supposed to do?