One Little Secret

by Eliza Lentzski

  “This is speculation,” the Assistant D.A. protested. “There’s no evidence that Kennedy Petersik was the one who erased the laptop.”

  Julia inclined her head. “I’ll rephrase, Your Honor. What reason would a person have to erase the contents of this computer?”

  Celeste shrugged. “There was something on the laptop they didn’t want anyone else to see.”

  “In your expert forensics opinion, Ms. Rivers,” Julia continued her line of questioning, “does this suggest pre-meditated self-harm or something a murderer might do post-crime?”

  Celeste sat a little straighter in her chair and leaned closer to the microphone in front of her. “I would say this is indicative of someone cleaning up loose ends. However, whoever erased the laptop would have also needed access to Ms. Petersik’s phone, which has a lock code that wasn’t set up for face recognition or a thumb print. They would have needed her four-number security code.”

  “Who do you think wiped the laptop?” Julia questioned.

  “Unless we’re dealing with someone who can hack cell phones, I’d have to say Kennedy Petersik was responsible.”

  “Objection, Your Honor!” the Assistant DA huffed. “This is all speculation! The State recognizes Ms. Rivers as an expert in forensic science, but even this is beyond her purview. Nothing in the science indicates Ms. Petersik was responsible.”

  “Sustained,” the stern-faced judge remarked. “The witness’s response will be struck from the record and the jury will disregard Ms. River’s statement.”

  Julia’s features were schooled as she moved on with her line of questioning. “You mentioned Ms. Petersik’s phone. What was your office able to extract in the way of evidence from her cell phone?”

  “Her phone was wiped, too,” Celeste revealed. “We were able to restart to factory settings, but all of her text transcripts, stored voicemails, etcetera, were destroyed. Whoever did this, they probably erased everything all at the same time.”

  “Your Honor!” The Assistant D.A. shouted to be heard. Her lungs were getting quite the workout and the trial had barely begun. “We’d like to petition that Ms. Petersik’s phone records be purged from the evidence docket. There’s no evidence that the cell phone was actually with her on the day of her murder. If the defendant, who lives next door to the victim, was in possession of the phone, the cell records would not be able to tell us that.”

  Celeste Rivers appeared to be getting flustered, as if she herself was on trial. “Forensic evidence is the foundation of justice,” she spoke up. She lifted her proud chin. “It doesn’t lie on stand. It doesn’t conveniently forget or suddenly remember what it saw.”

  “Your Honor,” Julia cut in, “if the State is so eager to suppress the only tangible evidence this case has produced, I’m very eager and curious to know how they plan on presenting their case.” She turned to the Assistant D.A. and spoke to her directly. “Will we be presenting character witnesses all day or do you actually have proof that Mr. Tauer killed Kennedy Petersik?” She spun on her heels to once again face the presiding judge. “To be honest, Your Honor, in my entire career as both a city prosecutor and now as a public defender, I’ve never seen such a flimsily supported case. I’m honestly shocked we’re even standing in this courtroom today.”

  Sensing he was starting to lose control of his courtroom, the judge lightly struck his gavel. “Motion to suppress Ms. Petersik’s cell phone records is denied. Ms. Desjardin, you may continue with your witness.”

  Julia flashed the judge a dazzling smile. “Thank you, Your Honor.”

  I might have been imagining it, but he seemed to smile back.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I whistled to myself in the basement of the Fourth Precinct. Once Landon had been arrested, Homicide had moved back upstairs and left us alone. I was thankful to have our space back again, but not about the reason. As much as I wanted to be a fly on the wall, I wasn’t going to be able to attend every day of the courtroom drama. I still had a job to attend to. Even though the District Attorney’s office believed they’d found the person responsible for Kennedy Petersik’s death, we police didn’t sit around on our laurels and wait for the jury to make a decision. We continued to search for new clues, new leads, that might alter the trajectory of the current court case. I was confident, however, that with Julia at his side, Landon Tauer would receive a fair trial.

  I’d thought myself alone, but my whistling attracted the attention of my immediate supervisor in Cold Case, Captain Forrester.

  He stuck his head out of his office like a prairie dog out of its hole. “Miller!” he barked. “My office! Now!”

  I rarely had a reason to be in my supervisor’s office. It wasn’t a complaint, however. His office gave me the creeps. Stuffed woodland animals peered down at me from their respective shelves with their lifeless, black beady eyes. Captain Forrester was an avid taxidermist who spent more time dusting his office critters than solving crimes. It was obvious he was biding his time until retirement when he could collect his pension, and he didn’t care who knew.

  He glared at me from behind his desk, and I wondered what I’d done wrong. “Do you like being a police officer?”

  My features pinched. “Of course. It’s the reason I get out of bed every morning.”

  “They why are you so determined to shoot yourself in the goddamn foot?”

  “What do you mean, Captain?”

  “You’ve got a good gig here.” He spoke slowly to me as if explaining something to a child. “Decent pay. Good benefits. A pension when you retire.”

  I shook my head. I still wasn’t following Captain Forrester’s line of questioning.

  “Julia Desjardin.” He said her name like it left a bad taste in her mouth. “I hear she’s defending our suspect in the double homicide.”

  I didn’t correct him that Landon Tauer was only being charged for one murder. I also didn’t correct him on his choice of pronoun since he’d had nothing to do with the case. I couldn’t speak; I felt too sick to respond.

  No one could have known that I had been the one to ask Julia to represent Landon Tauer. Only Julia and I knew that detail. Landon’s family didn’t have the money for fancy, independent counsel. To an outsider, anyone would have believed she’d randomly been assigned to the case by the public defender’s office.

  “You’re roommates, right?”

  “She’s-she’s my girlfriend,” I corrected.

  Where was Forrester getting this intel?

  “Listen. I don’t care how you get your rocks off. But if you’re serious about a career with the Minneapolis Police Department, you might wanna be more careful about who knows you’re sleeping with a criminal defense lawyer.”

  “She’s a public defender.”

  “I don’t care how you spell it—she’s a lawyer,” he countered. “And you’re supposed to be a cop.”

  I sat up straighter in my chair. “I don’t think Landon Tauer is guilty, sir. If you look at the evidence we’ve been able to collect—.”

  “Well it’s a good thing we’re not paying you to think,” Forrester cut me off with a snarl. “Now get out of my face.”

  I stood in the hallway outside of Captain Forrester’s office, shaking with rage. My heart was lodged in my throat. I clenched and unclenched my fists at my side debating going right back into his office and telling Forrester where he could shove this job.

  But before I could become a contestant on Who Wants to be Unemployed, my colleague from Homicide skipped down the stairs.

  “Miller—there you are,” Jason Ryan called out. “I’ve been looking for you.” He paused long enough to look me in the face. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I quickly lied.

  It was obvious I was annoyed at the very least, but Ryan smartly ignored my lie. He held up an official-looking piece of paper. “I got the judge to sign a search warrant. Let’s go check out the Tauer house.”

  + + +

  “Lemme know if you find any nud
ie magazines,” Ryan told me. “I’ll handle them so they don’t offend your delicate sensibilities.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “You wish.”

  Ryan and I rummaged through Landon Tauer’s bedroom in his parents’ basement. Ryan had been in such a rush to arrest Landon’s father and then Landon himself that he’d never bothered to get a search warrant for the Tauer’s house. I was there to find evidence to incriminate Landon in Kennedy’s death, but after my conversation with Captain Forrester, my heart wasn’t in it.

  I contemplated texting Julia to tell her about the confrontation, but I decided to keep it to myself for the moment. She would be upset with me for keeping my supervisor’s words of warning to myself, but I worried she might give up on Landon if she thought my job security was in jeopardy. I knew what we were doing was a conflict of interest, but I couldn’t sit idle while the System tried to pin a murder on a young man without a shred of evidence. For me, being a cop was about keeping the peace, not trying to find a convenient scapegoat.

  I sifted through a stack of opened mail that had accumulated on Landon’s desk.

  “Isn’t that a federal offense?” Ryan remarked.

  “Not if it’s already opened. But I know you’re chomping at the bit to make another arrest,” I said, not hiding the bitterness in my tone, “so go ahead.”

  Ryan looked like he wanted to make a comment—perhaps another statement about my menstrual cycle—but he kept his words to himself. We’d spent enough time together that he could tell I was annoyed by something besides himself for once.

  “Well, shit,” I muttered.

  “Find something?”

  I unfolded a piece of paper. “Yeah. A life insurance certificate.”

  Ryan tried to peer over my shoulder to see what I’d discovered. “Our guy took out a life insurance policy?”

  “No.” I blinked in disbelief. “Kennedy Petersik did. And it looks like the sole beneficiary is her sister, Kayla.”

  + + +

  Julia dropped a manila envelope on the table in front of Landon Tauer. The presiding judge had granted her a brief recess in the trial so she could contemplate newly discovered evidence. Landon sat in his County Jail jumpsuit. The dark circles under his eyes clued me in to how he was enjoying life behind bars so far.

  I stood in the corner of the interrogation room. I typically wouldn’t have been allowed to observe a private conversation between a public defender and her client, but my job was to babysit the evidence that Ryan and I had found in Landon’s room. I’d somehow convinced Ryan not to take the envelope and its contents directly to the crime lab. I wasn’t convinced that if it was presented to the District Attorney that it would ever see the light of day again.

  “Why did Kennedy mail this to you?” Julia asked.

  Landon didn’t touch the envelope, but he already knew its contents. “It came a few days after the police found her body. I know I should have told someone—maybe her parents, but the note inside told me to wait until after the life insurance check cleared.”

  “Landon, they think you killed their daughter!” I tried not to explode. “Is this really the hill you want to die on?”

  “Isn’t this your job?” he challenged. “Find new evidence and exonerate innocent people?”

  “This is the evidence!” I exclaimed. “There’s no reason for you to be in here! Besides, how are you planning on giving this letter to her parents if you’re in prison?”

  Landon’s eyes opened a little wider. “I-I didn’t think about that part.”

  “I’m going to present this information to the judge,” Julia decided. “This certificate alone should exonerate you.”

  “Please don’t,” Landon pled. “Kayla won’t get the money if the insurance company thinks it was a suicide.”

  Julia leveled her stare on her client: “Landon. What aren’t you telling us?”

  The young man took a deep breath. “Kayla’s not Kennedy’s sister; she’s her daughter.”

  + + +

  Ryan and I sat with the Petersiks at their dining room table. Black coffee cooled in ceramic cups. A coffee cake went untouched on a patterned serving tray. Kayla Petersik bounced up and down on Mr. Petersik’s knee. She blew spit bubbles and babbled without care. The life insurance certificate sat in the center of the table.

  Mrs. Petersik touched her fingertips against the edge of the paper stock. She touched it delicately as though she expected it to crumble. “Landon knew?”

  I nodded. “Kennedy told him about Kayla when she asked him for the gun. He had no idea what she really intended on doing with it though. He genuinely thought she was trying to protect herself—not protect her daughter’s future. He didn’t put the pieces together until he received the life insurance certificate and her letter in the mail. And by then, it was too late. She was already dead.”

  Mrs. Petersik stood from the dining room table. She didn’t say a word, but I sensed that she wanted me to follow her. She floated down the hallway until she came to a closed door that I knew belonged to Kennedy’s bedroom.

  She opened the door and walked to Kennedy’s desk. She opened up the top drawer and pulled out a notebook. I’d assumed I’d seen every one of Kennedy’s diaries, but apparently Mrs. Petersik had specifically kept this one from us.

  She hesitated before handing it to me—her daughter’s private musings that she’d purposefully hidden from the police.

  I looked to her for some kind of instruction, but her face remained impassive. I sat down on the edge of Kennedy’s childhood bed, opened the notebook to the first page, and began to read.

  My throat tightened as I scanned over the feminine, looped handwriting that had become so familiar. It was all there. It wasn’t exactly a suicide note, but it was page after page of Kennedy’s intimate thoughts and fears and worries. The multiple pregnancy kits that all indicated the same thing. The internal debate about telling her parents or not. The anguish over terminating the pregnancy or seeing the pregnancy to term. Her decision to break up with Chase and keep the pregnancy a secret from him so as to not complicate his future. Deferring college for a year so no one would know she’d ever been pregnant. A prisoner in her parents’ home when she’d started to show. The heartache of deciding between giving up the child for adoption or trying to raise it on her own. But never having to make that decision because her parents were going to pretend that their granddaughter was their daughter.

  I closed the journal and its painful truths. “This is why you didn’t want us reading her journals.”

  Mrs. Petersik looked as though in a trance. “I didn’t want them to know. I didn’t want them to think less of her.”

  “Who is them?” I asked.

  “All of them. Everyone. She was such a good girl. A dream daughter. She was always so careful; she never made mistakes. But then …but then …”

  “Your miracle baby,” I finished for her.

  “Detective, are you from around here?”

  “I grew up in St. Cloud.”

  She nodded solemnly. “Then you know how judgmental people can be. They call it Minnesota Nice, but only because people aren’t mean to your face. No, we save all of that nonsense for when company goes home.”

  Mrs. Petersik worried her hands in front of her body. “Kennedy told us about the pregnancy just before graduation. We told her the decision was up to her. We didn’t want to force her to have an abortion, but we also couldn’t stand by while she ruined her life. With Kayla, she never would have been able to go to St. Olaf, and she’d worked so hard to make that happen.”

  She sighed wearily and sat beside me on the small bed. “Oh that, girl. She couldn’t put the baby up for adoption. After carrying that child around for nine months, she couldn’t just erase her from her life.”

  “So you offered to raise Kayla as your own?” I supplied.

  A peculiar smile appeared on her face. “That was actually Frank’s idea. I had no idea how much he’d been wanting another child; he’d never spoken a
bout it before.” She flattened her hands on her lap. “We thought we’d found a happy medium. Kennedy got to see Kayla when she was home on breaks, but then she could concentrate on her studies when she was back at school. Until I read her journal, I had no idea how this double life was tearing her apart.”

  “Do you think it could have been postpartum depression?”

  Mrs. Petersik made a noise like a hiccup. “You know, when I was pregnant with Kennedy, we didn’t have a word for that. We just called it the Baby Blues.”

  Her features suddenly crumbled. “It was there the whole time. I’ve read through these journals so many times, but I couldn’t admit it to myself. Landon didn’t kill my baby; I killed Kennedy,” she choked up. “I made her feel so ashamed. I made her keep Kayla a secret. I told her to just go on with her life—to pretend like she’d never created a life. That burden. That secret. That shame. It killed my daughter.”

  Landon Tauer would go free. Mrs. Petersik probably could have been charged with obstruction, but I wouldn’t be making another arrest. Her offense wasn’t all that criminal, but it didn’t matter anymore. She’d already constructed her own personal prison.

  Case closed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Are you done with that?” Stanley Harris looked down at me expectantly. I sat at my desk in the Cold Case office in the basement of the Fourth Precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department.