The past two years of his life had been a nightmare. He was partly responsible that it had gone on this long. He’d steadfastly refused to admit any wrongdoing. Experts from all over the country had been brought in to dismantle his lab and review every piece of evidence he and his technicians had ever processed. He had only falsified or tampered with a few cases. Even one would have been enough, however, to make his entire body of work unreliable.
When Abernathy reached his car, a deep voice called his name, and he turned around. A large, dark man wearing what appeared to be a white baseball cap stood in the middle of the road about ten feet away. Abernathy quickly ducked inside his car and sped out of the parking lot, thinking the man was another newshound.
As he traveled down Victoria Boulevard toward his home in Oxnard, he noticed a pickup in his rearview mirror that appeared to be following him. He tried to see if the driver was the man he’d seen earlier, but all he could make out was a shadowy stick figure behind the wheel. His Retinitis pigmentosa was rapidly stealing his eyesight. First his peripheral vision had gone. Then, in the last five years, it was as if he were looking at the world through a straw. He’d tried to hide the problem, desperate to keep his job. Now he would travel the one-way road to blindness in disgrace, locked inside Bollinger’s with a bunch of lunatics.
He turned down Clover Street and headed toward Orange Avenue, driving slowly as he hugged the steering wheel so he could see where he was going. He seldom varied his route, as when he did, he sometimes got lost and panicked.
Divorced for fifteen years, Abernathy lived alone in a modest, three-bedroom house. His adult daughter, Janie, resided in Irvine and spent Saturdays with him, taking him out to dinner since he could no longer drive at night. They still spoke on the phone, but she hadn’t come to see him for over a month, mad about what he’d done. He’d consistently lied to her, telling her he no longer processed evidence and merely served as an administrator.
When he stopped at the light, Abernathy thought he saw the pickup again, but he couldn’t be certain. His fingers trembled as he fired up a Marlboro. After a few puffs, he began coughing. He stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and rolled down the windows.
Fear that someone might try to harm him was one of the reasons his attorneys had argued in the plea agreement that he should be allowed to serve his time in a facility outside the local area. Although he dreaded being confined, at least he wouldn’t have to constantly be looking over his shoulder.
Abernathy had refused to admit what his problem was to the prosecutors and county supervisors during the various negotiation conferences, much to the dismay of his attorneys. He decided it was better for them to think he’d suffered some type of breakdown than to tell them the truth, that it had gotten to the point where he could see very little, even through his microscope. He should have quit years ago when he first realized something was wrong with his vision. He was a stubborn man, though, and he loved his work.
He’d tried to assign most of the work to his senior technicians, but in the serious cases, the prosecutors and police would push to have him process the evidence personally, so he could appear in court and represent his findings as an expert witness.
How could he give up his work when everyone had suddenly developed a fascination with it? He’d gone from being an unknown guy in a lab coat to a celebrity, consulting on TV shows, giving speeches, writing articles for newspapers and magazines.
Warner Chen had been his right hand, and his right hand had turned against him. Chen had known what was going on, unlike some of the other lab technicians. Overnight he had suddenly grown a conscience. Then, after he’d blown the lid off Abernathy’s life’s work, he’d conveniently gotten himself a cushy deal where all he had to do was cooperate with the investigation. Now truckloads of criminals would have to be retried, and many cases would end up in acquittal. The county had done everything possible to keep the situation under wraps, but Chen had decided to spill his guts to the media. Abernathy hoped Chen enjoyed his sixty seconds of fame.
Abernathy carefully steered his car into his driveway. It was quiet when he opened the car door and stepped out. The street was lined on both sides with mature trees, and dense foliage encircled his house. He liked his privacy.
Most of the people on his block weren’t home from work yet. Their yards were full of tricycles, jungle gyms, and other kid stuff, but the children themselves were all in day care. No one in his neighborhood had money for nannies, although the houses had steadily risen in value over the years. Even a house like his now sold for over five hundred thousand. He’d planned to sell when he retired and live off the profits. But the equity in his house was almost gone now. After he paid his attorneys, the small amount that would be left would go toward the twenty thousand in fines the state had assessed him as part of the plea agreement.
Fear coursed through Abernathy’s body when he heard the same deep voice shout his name again. Through the tunnel of his vision, he saw a pickup parked across the street. Opening his gate, he scurried up the walkway. Footsteps. He turned around, seeing a dark figure looming over him.
“Are you Robert Abernathy?”
“What do you want?” Abernathy said, his voice shaking. “Get off my property.”
“Just answer the damn question. Are you Robert Abernathy?”
“No,” he said, turning and rushing toward his house. It must be a reporter. What did these idiots want from him?
The man remained on the sidewalk as Abernathy fumbled for his house keys. “Go away,” he yelled, turning around and shaking his fist at the stranger. “You have the wrong person. If you don’t leave now, I’ll call the police. I don’t know anyone named Abernathy.”
“Oh, you know,” the man said, pulling out a large black gun from inside his windbreaker.
“No! Please!” Abernathy pleaded just before the man pulled the trigger.
The force of the gunshot slammed him against the door. His body slid to the ground, his legs splayed out in front of him. His head fell forward onto his chest. Blood dripped onto his pants, forming a spreading pool on the concrete porch beneath him.
Abernathy would no longer have to worry about his mistakes, his finances, his failing eyesight, or the time he was scheduled to serve in the mental hospital. As he had wrongfully decided so many people’s fate, someone had taken it upon himself to decide Robert Abernathy’s.
Carolyn decided to leave early as she knew she would have to work late the following day. Her briefcase was packed with case files. She took work home almost every night. It was the only way she could stay on top of the constant influx of crimes and still spend time with her children. The traffic was surprisingly light, and she arrived at St. John’s Catholic Church at five-fifteen. Parking her white Infiniti, she made her way to the side entrance of the building.
St. John’s was a small parish and didn’t have an evening mass during the week. Now and then Carolyn would go to the service at St. Bernadette’s a few miles away. Her time was limited, though, and although she tried to partake of the sacraments as often as possible, she derived the greatest benefit from the quiet, solitary reflection she found inside an empty sanctuary.
Walking down the center aisle toward the first row, she genuflected, then entered and knelt to pray. Occasionally she would see another man or a woman, and she always wondered if they were praying for a sick family member, had recently lost a loved one, or, like her, had come to atone for their sins.
Carolyn had taken a life. The shooting had been ruled self-defense, and she was certain she wouldn’t be alive today if she hadn’t acted as she had. The man she had killed had been a hardened criminal, a murderer, employed by an international arms dealer. Nonetheless, he’d been a human being, and she had ended his life in what seemed like the blink of an eye. She didn’t even remember making a conscious decision to fire. That’s the way it always went down, her friends in the police department told her. In situations like the one she’d been in, instinct took over.
People perceived her as a strong, even relentless woman, but underneath the fragile and idealistic child was still present, hiding deep in her psyche. She longed to live in a beautiful, peaceful world, where people were kind and respectful, and where guns, war, and violence didn’t exist.
The stress of the day began to melt away. Inside this place there seemed to be a modicum of hope, something to keep her going at least one more day.
But when Carolyn walked outside fifteen minutes later, reality smacked her squarely in the face. A man across the street was washing what looked like a late-model black BMW, and a tow-haired little boy was using a large, soapy sponge to help Daddy scrub the wheels. She heard a string of profanity, then saw the man yank the child by the arm. “I told you not to get water on my pants, you little shit!” he shouted. “Get back down there and get those wheels clean, you hear me?” He let go of the child’s arm, causing the youngster to tumble to the pavement on his side. The little boy scrambled back to his feet and began scrubbing harder on the chrome-plated wheels his father seemed to value more than he did his son.
Carolyn reached into her handbag and pulled out a small notepad, jotting down the address and license plate of the BMW to give to social services to investigate for child abuse. Just then the little boy turned around and smiled brightly at her, as if nothing whatsoever had happened.
The calm she’d experienced inside the church evaporated. If she were God, she decided, she would take the world down and start over.
CHAPTER 4
Friday, September 15—3:15 P.M.
Carolyn had spent the day reading trial transcripts, making calls to schedule appointments, and organizing her calendar. Now that her desk was fairly clean, she pulled out Carl Holden’s file again to prepare for their four-thirty meeting.
One of her old ID cards slid out. She had no idea what it was doing there. Looking at her picture, she recalled how young and naive she’d been. She winced, seeing how her lovely chestnut hair had perfectly framed her oval face. At the time she’d interviewed Holden, she’d resembled a girl in her late teens or early twenties.
She thought about the young women she’d seen Brad squiring around town. Their skintight pants hung on protruding hipbones, and they pranced around with their midriffs exposed like belly dancers. Carolyn’s stomach was marred with stretch marks from giving birth to two nine-pound babies.
She studied the mug shot of Carl Holden from eight years ago. She remembered how, wanting to make an impression on her supervisor, she had decided to interview Holden face to face rather than behind the glass, where she’d be protected. The rooms inside the jail didn’t resemble the interrogation rooms at the police department, or the spacious facilities depicted in TV and movies. Most of them were eight by ten, close enough that an officer could be seriously injured or even killed by a violent perpetrator.
Relaxing into her chair, Carolyn pulled out the original report she’d written on Holden. She came across a stack of her handwritten notes, which no one else would be able to decipher. Even back then she didn’t use a tape recorder like most of her coworkers. Criminals knew not to talk when their words were being recorded. Of course, many probation officers, unlike Carolyn, didn’t care what the offender had to say. Their only objective was to finish their report and move on to the next case.
Although she carried a yellow pad and a pen, she never used them during the actual interview. She was fortunate in possessing something close to total recall. As soon as she left, she would scribble down what the offender had said. She had her bag of tricks that she’d refined over the years to entice criminals into opening up and providing her with incriminating information, but she had never once cheated, claiming a criminal had confessed something he had not said. Over the years, she’d established a unique style, more along the lines of a conversation between two friends. The fact that offenders frequently mistook probation officers for social workers, ministers, or public defenders also worked in her favor.
She studied her notes. In one of the margins was what appeared to be an address. Closing her eyes, she drifted back eight years to the day she’d been locked inside that claustrophobic room with Carl Holden.
She could remember the feel of the cold chair underneath her dress. Holden had been her first murder case, and she’d been nervous. The man in front of her didn’t look like a killer. He could have been a neighbor, teacher, or friend. Carl Holden was tall and slender, with brown hair parted on one side and intelligent light eyes. The records indicated he was forty-four, but he appeared at least five years younger. Was it possible he could be innocent?
With the first words out of his mouth, the murderer appeared.
“Fresh meat,” he said, his speech slow and deliberate. “Why did they send someone like you over here?”
“To ask you some questions,” Carolyn said, speaking low so he would have to strain to hear her. Most of his criminal activities had been limited to rape. Tracy Anderson had changed everything. This time he’d raped and killed.
“Oh, I know why they sent you…” he paused to see if Carolyn would fill in the blank. When she didn’t, he took a deep breath and exhaled the words, “You’re not my type, little girl. I like them older, riper. If I took you, you’d flop around like those fish I used to catch at the lake.”
Carolyn refused to let him unnerve her. “You’ve been convicted of four counts of rape and one count of second-degree murder,” she stated. “Why did you kill Tracy Anderson? You didn’t kill the other women you raped.”
Holden ignored her, his eyes focused on a spot over her head. “When the fish couldn’t breathe anymore, the tail would stop twitching, but it wasn’t the end. One last pulse and then there was nothing. Do you believe in the Almighty, Miss…?”
“Sullivan.”
“Miss Sullivan,” he said, leaning forward in his seat, “what do you think will happen to you when you die?”
“I’ll go to heaven.” Carolyn felt foolish for uttering such a childish response to a killer. Even though her statement had been somewhat automatic, drilled into her during the years she’d attended Catholic school, her belief in God was unshakable. Where or what precisely heaven or hell was, she couldn’t say. Doubting that evil existed, however, was absurd. She was staring it in the face.
“Lies, my sweet, innocent one,” Holden told her, startling the probation officer out of her thoughts. “When I put my fingers around their necks, there was life. Face flushed, eyes wide in terror, blood pumping as their lives slowly slip away with the tightening of my hand. Then there is no breath, no screams. The eyes close. No bright light comes down from heaven to take their soul away. Just darkness, that’s all, not heaven. The last memory will be my ugly face. Do I look like God to you?”
“I didn’t come here to discuss theology with you,” Carolyn said, knowing she had to turn things around. She shouldn’t have confronted him so quickly. The fact that he was a murderer, coupled with her youthful appearance, had caused him to believe he had the upper hand. Now she had to backtrack, attempt to establish some kind of rapport with him. “Did you grow up here in Ventura?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I went to Ventura High.”
“So did I,” she said, perking up as if she were excited. “Where did you live? We may have grown up in the same neighborhood.”
He told her his mother’s address, then added, “School was stupid. They didn’t teach anything that mattered. Do you think I need to know algebra on the construction site? How to spell? It was a waste of my time.”
“Why didn’t you drop out?”
“Who says I didn’t?”
“You seem to be an intelligent man, Carl,” Carolyn told him, hoping flattery might open up the conversation. “I assumed you were a college graduate. Maybe you could have become something other than a construction worker if you’d taken your education seriously.”
He became agitated. “The educational system is a form of governmental control. When I was fifteen, they gave me an
IQ test. My score was in the top one percent in the nation. They said I was gifted. I agreed with them and stopped going to classes. From that day forward, I educated myself. My mother was very supportive.”
“Your father wasn’t around?”
“He took off when I was young,” Holden said, a catch in his voice. “He didn’t care about anything but himself.”
“My husband’s a teacher. I’ve always been interested in people who educate themselves.” Carolyn had married Frank Polizzito as soon as she’d graduated from high school. They’d both enrolled in college, but she’d gotten pregnant three months after they married. After her son was born, she’d worked as a secretary so her husband could get his teaching certificate. At present, he was teaching high school English and working on his first novel, leaving little time for his wife and children. “What kind of books did you study?” she asked, tilting her head.
“Primarily ancient Greek and Roman philosophers,” Holden said proudly. “You’ve heard of Titus…Titus Lucretius Carus? He argued, as I do, that there is no immortal soul and that people like yourself who accept traditional religious doctrines are being unacceptably superstitious. Are you superstitious, Ms. Sullivan?”
“I don’t understand why a man as smart as you would rape and murder,” Carolyn said. “What happened to you, Carl? What went wrong?”
“‘He who is unable to live in society,’” he stated, “‘or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.’ We already know I’m not a god. It’s my nature to be the beast.”
“Plato?”
“Aristotle,” he answered, a menacing look on his face. “I take pleasure in being the beast. It’s almost second nature to me.”
Carolyn’s eyes darted around the room. She wanted insight, answers, details. “Have you ever heard of circumstances in aggravation and mitigation, Carl? Well, I’m the one who presents these to the court. Do you realize that you can be sentenced to serve your terms concurrently or consecutively? In my report, I determine these factors. Whether you realize it or not, I’m a very important person in what remains of your life. The more you cooperate with me, the more I might be willing to recommend a lenient sentence. Right now, I don’t see any reason not to ask the count to stack the counts as high as they’ll go. The number I came up with is forty-four years to life. How does that grab you?”
Sullivan’s Evidence Page 3