Clara knew she needed to get it out there that she had talked with Kyle on IM several times. So she explained to Locke that just recently, in fact, she’d spent six hours or so online with Kyle and had invited him during that talk to come stay in the woods near her house.
All of which, of course, Locke and the LCSO would find out from searching her computer.
For a time, they discussed Kyle and the potential of him killing other people and where he might have done it. Clara brought up the fire at the apartment that day they took off to the store—the morning after Kyle had that vampire experience in the woods. He had buried somebody, she thought he had told her, in the woods somewhere near there. She couldn’t recall exactly where, however.
As they got deeper into Clara’s relationship with Kyle and “the things that he said,” Clara made a point to note that she didn’t really believe him whenever he told a story: “Because there’s so . . . I don’t know ... lies mixed with truth, I guess. . . .”
As they began to speak about Kyle’s foster parents, Clara indicated that her sister had to use the telephone and she had to get off.
“Okay,” Locke said. “Well, was there anything else that you needed to tell me?”
“Um . . .”
“Is that pretty much all that you remembered?”
“Yeah, I think.”
They decided that if Clara recalled anything else, she would call Locke immediately.
After hanging up, Locke sat back in his chair. He considered the call. He now knew that he needed to get Clara back into the LCSO in a more formal interrogative setting. He had to put a little bit of pressure on her, see where it went. She was obviously trying to backpedal and cover her tracks. How deep was she involved? That was the question. Right now, Clara was her own worst enemy—another few hours of interviews and she might crack.
CHAPTER 76
ON DECEMBER 19, not long after Clara and Locke had spoken, Jesse Schwartz called into the LCSO. He wanted to let Locke know that he, Clara, and Michelle were heading back to school on December 21. So, if the LCSO needed to speak with them again, their best bet would be on December 20.
“Could we set something up for tomorrow?” Locke suggested.
They did.
Michelle got ahold of Locke after hearing about the scheduled interview. She wanted to drop off some paperwork that the LCSO needed, anyway, and wondered if he’d be there to have a chat. So she made plans to go down on the twentieth with her grandfather, Robert’s dad. When they arrived, Michelle’s paternal grandfather, who seemed to be a bit perturbed, said he wanted Locke to understand something up front.
“I have some concerns about you questioning Clara,” he explained, sounding like any concerned grandfather whose grandchildren now had no mother and no father.
“Okay. Tell me.”
“I think I want to have an attorney present if she is going to be reinterviewed.”
Damn . . .
Locke had been afraid of this. So he thought fast on his feet. “Look, would it be okay with you if Michelle sat in on the interview? Would that be acceptable?”
“If it’s okay with her, I feel like that would be fine.”
“Michelle, would that work for you?” Locke asked. She was standing nearby, listening to the conversation.
Fingers crossed.
“Sure, that’s fine with me,” Michelle said.
“At that point, Clara had not requested an attorney,” Locke said later. “Once she did, I knew that if an attorney came in, that attorney was going to tell her to shut up, and shut us down completely.”
The next day, Locke made sure the administrative office was vacant for the interview. He didn’t want to come across as intimidating in any way. The goal here was to keep Clara talking. Make her feel safe. Comfortable. This was not an interrogation.
They arrived near noon on December 20, according to a transcript of the interview. Locke didn’t make them aware that the entire interview was being recorded on videotape. He wasn’t bound by any law to do so. Locke and Spitler had talked beforehand, and they wanted a record; so, if nothing else, they could go over it afterward and gauge Clara’s reactions and explanations. “Body language is everything to me in the beginning,” Locke explained.
Indeed, one can tell a lot by the body movements and speech patterns of a subject such as Clara Schwartz.
They all sat down. Locke began by asking Clara to clarify everything she had heard from Kyle—especially what Kyle had told her about the murder itself and how it had transpired. He wanted details, as many as Clara could recall from her conversations with Kyle.
Clara, in turn, stuck to the same script that Kyle had been reading from: the knock on the door, Kyle asking the OG for Clara’s phone number, the backhand, the argument, the scuffle, the OG “grab[bing] the sword” and Kyle drawing it “out of his hand,” and then, of course, the gruesome murder.
Locke asked where, what time, and what was said.
Clara explained that Kyle had told her it all started “somewhere near the bay window.”
They discussed the “smell” of the sword and what Kyle had done with it. Locke knew Kyle had hid it at Mike’s because the LCSO had the bloodied weapon bagged and tagged and sitting in the evidence room.
Habitually, when Clara didn’t want to answer a specific question, she simply ignored it and moved on to something else.
Then they arrived at a point where Clara said Kyle had called and asked her about the sword and how to clean it. This was significant to Locke, so he wondered if that question by Kyle had “raised” Clara’s suspicion at all that something had happened to her father. It seemed almost impossible for her now to deny knowing anything before the fact.
“I wasn’t really sure. I mean, well, maybe in some part of my mind, I did, but I was just like, you know, just really confused by that kind of stuff.”
The guy had asked her about cleaning DNA from a sword, and the best she could manage was: “I was . . . confused by that kind of stuff.”
As Clara said it, Michelle looked at her quizzically.
Clara claimed to have “tuned” Kyle out for the most part whenever he discussed those types of dark, evil things. Yet, Locke knew that they had, in fact, talked about the OG’s murder online, because Kyle had told the LCSO this fact during his interview.
Locke moved on to Kyle supposedly telling Clara he had killed someone before. Locke was interested in this. He wanted to know more about it.
Clara described that walk she took with Kyle that morning to go get coffee. She mentioned the apartment fire and the body that he said he left in the woods.
They discussed Kyle telling his stories of battling bad guys, the weapons he owned, how Kyle liked to talk a big game that was likely all BS, which led Clara into saying how she never knew what to believe.
Sitting and listening intently now, Michelle piped in a few times to clarify certain basic things—times, days—for Clara as Clara stumbled her way through the interview.
That weekend that Patrick blew Clara off and Kyle replaced him came up next. Locke wanted to know everything about Patrick and his potential role in this crime. He asked Clara when the last time she had spoken to him “before your dad’s death” had been.
Clara said they had chatted on that Saturday, near 4:00 P.M., just hours before Kyle knocked on the OG’s door.
“Did you call him or he call you?”
These were easy, important questions. The LCSO could later determine if Clara was truthful by checking phone records.
“He called me. . . .”
They talked about where Patrick was calling from.
Clara said South Carolina, where he had gone to see a family friend.
Locke asked if Clara had called Patrick after she found out about her father.
She said, “Yeah. I called him, and he was like, ‘Oh, my god. You know, I’m so sorry.’”
“He seemed surprised?”
“Yeah. . . .”
Locke want
ed to know if Clara called anyone else with the news of her father’s death.
She said, “Mike and Katie.”
“Why would you call them?”
She stammered and stumbled again: “To tell them that, you know, the police told me and, you know—”
“But, I mean,” Locke said, “you knew they were the ones that did it!”
“But that was—when you showed up at my door, I was like, ‘Oh, man . . . Okay ... so now it’s real.’”
“But—” Locke tried to say as Clara interrupted.
“I told you that that was just to call them and tell them—”
“But they already knew!” Locke said again.
“Yeah. I just—I don’t know.”
Clara was backtracking. She was trying her best to answer each question the way in which she believed the LCSO needed to hear it. Although she never said it, Michelle had to be questioning her own sister at this point, simply because Clara came across so guarded and obviously watching her words so closely.
“Michelle had questions about her sister’s involvement as that interview proceeded,” Locke explained. “I think she began to see that there was a possibility that Clara might have been involved.”
As Clara tried to explain how she just wanted to “let them know,” Locke asked a smart question: “But wouldn’t you be mad at them? I mean, they just—”
“I don’t . . . ,” she tried to interrupt.
“They just killed your dad?”
CHAPTER 77
LIARS ARE OFTEN caught when they forget the smallest details: what you claimed to have eaten one night, the color of a car or house, a phone call you forgot you made. You have to worry and ask yourself: Did I say I was sleeping, or did I say I was out? As the old saying goes, you don’t have to remember the truth.
“This was someone,” Locke said of Clara Schwartz during that December 20, 2001, interview, “that still doesn’t get what has transpired. Her dad was murdered! And there she is, thinking about herself—it’s all about her.”
Clara claimed she didn’t get mad at people the way she used to, which was why she wasn’t angry with Mike, Katie, and Kyle for their roles in killing her father. She compared it to her mother’s death and the same reason why she never got mad at her mother for smoking.
Locke couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It didn’t make sense—that is, if Clara had had nothing to do with her father’s murder. If she did, well, then, it made perfect sense. She was trying to crawl out of a corner she had been backed into.
Even Michelle couldn’t believe what her sister had said, comparing the two. “Well,” Michelle broke in, speaking harshly, “that was a little different situation.” She looked skeptically at Clara, who had been referring to the cancer killing their mother.
“Yeah,” Clara finally agreed.
“I mean, someone came and took your dad’s life away from him,” Locke reiterated. It wasn’t a slow and agonizing death brought on by cancer, which had been brought on by smoking. What the hell was Clara trying to say?
“Well, now I’m really angry at them,” Clara said. “Like—but I was just—I think I was in shock. . . .”
Clara finally said her reason for reacting the way she had was that she didn’t believe them. The bottom line? She thought they were lying.
Again, for Locke, if Clara truly believed they were lying, why did she react the way she had? Locke wanted to know why Clara hadn’t shared any of this with Michelle, who was probably sitting there asking herself the same question.
“Because I thought they were lying. I didn’t believe them. . . .”
(So the cops tell you your dad is dead, your friends tell you they know this, and that one of them did it, but you still don’t believe any of it?)
Locke restated and asked Clara once again, why hadn’t she told Michelle about Mike and Katie and Kyle after they had chatted and then police came and made the death notification? That had made it all real enough, didn’t it?
Clara said she had “blocked” out that part of it, meaning Mike and Katie and Kyle. She explained how she had lain on her bed for thirty minutes after she spoke to them, before telling herself, I need to take a shower. . . . I need to take a shower.
“When Kyle told you that he killed your dad, why didn’t you try to call your dad to find out if he was okay?”
Fair question.
Michelle looked at her sister, waiting for an answer.
“I guess I just ... If I don’t . . . I didn’t want to sort of bother my dad. I didn’t want to wake him up or bother him, have him, you know . . .” Her voice trailed off.
Locke asked if she ever wondered whether Kyle was telling the truth at that time.
Clara’s response: “Sort of. . . .”
They then got into the technicalities of that $60 check Clara had overnighted Kyle the day before the murder. They also discussed how Clara called Mike and Katie and asked them to have Kyle dropped off, and how she had supposedly heard from Kyle that he wanted gloves and a do-rag to make sure he didn’t leave any forensic-type evidence behind. They discussed the sword and all the prior knowledge she had of this murder, and the fact that she now said she didn’t believe any of it when Kyle talked about it. There was nothing in what Clara said that made this experienced detective stop and ponder. He never once thought, Well, maybe she’s not involved? Everything Clara said, to the contrary, all of her body movements and speech patterns, made the investigator question her involvement even more. As he sat listening, it seemed Locke was speaking to the mastermind behind her father’s murder—the person who had put it all together and planned it long before she had even met the man who carried it out.
“There was little doubt in my mind at that point that she had been actively involved,” Locke said later, “even if she wasn’t there present at the scene of the murder. When she told us that she had sent Kyle money and he was going to buy a do-rag and gloves ... she was admitting as much as she was going to admit.”
Still, Locke knew time was not on his side. This was going to be the last opportunity he had to crack Clara, so maybe he needed to push her just a little bit more.
Locke wanted to know everything Clara could tell him about Kyle. If he was such a pathological liar, as she had suggested more than once, what else could she share about his background, about the “lies” he had told her?
After Clara talked about the foster families Kyle had mentioned to her, his childhood, his tenure inside dozens of mental hospitals and institutions, but not much else, Locke asked Clara what she had told him about her father.
“I had said that he was abusive, that he—”
“How?”
Clara took a moment. She stared at her sister. “I’m not sure Michelle wants to really hear this, but there were times that he had pushed—pushed me to take a certain steak. I remember this one time he had pushed me to take a certain steak, and I was ... and I didn’t want to take it, so I took the other one, and he got sick.”
“What?” Michelle said, clearly shocked by the allegation. It sounded absurd, even if true, the way Clara had explained it.
Clara started to say, “There was—”
Michelle interrupted, “What do you mean—a steak?”
In other words, WTF! What in God’s name was Clara talking about?
“Like dinner. And stuff like that. Like, I remember one night I got ... I took a steak. He had fixed up like this huge ... steak ... big enough for two people.” Her dad had had a TV dinner, instead, Clara explained. “I ate half of that and was sick for a week. I gave the rest to the dog over two nights and the dog was sick.”
Locke asked about the pork chop.
Clara recalled the date. The twenty-fourth, she said without hesitating. “They were stuffed pork chops.” She said after she ate half of one, she had to go to the toilet and “puke.”
Locke asked what happened later on, when she saw Kyle that night.
Clara said she gave Kyle a piece of the chop and he said i
t tasted like ammonia.
Michelle, Locke noticed, began almost to back away from her sister at that point. Locke could tell, simply by watching Michelle, that she was now beyond the doubt ceiling of suspecting her sister was somehow involved. Michelle was now questioning everything.
Locke had Clara talk about her steadfast belief that the OG was trying to poison her. She was sure of it. She was also certain it started on “February 13, 2001.” But then Clara changed her mind and said, “No, 2000.” She said there had been eleven separate incidents she had documented. All involved meat. It was the sole reason why she had stopped eating meat altogether.
Michelle interrupted and talked about how Clara would “go into the fridge and eat all the food” at times. It seemed as though she’d binge—one explanation for why she had often gotten sick. Did Clara have an eating disorder that she tried hiding by claiming her father was poisoning her?
Clara explained how she’d fast as part of her core spiritual belief system (although she never made clear what that actually was) and then go on an eating binge to break the fast.
They moved on to Kyle again. Locke wanted to know anything Clara could recall about what Kyle had said to her regarding going to her house on that Saturday evening he killed her father.
For some reason, this led Clara into a discussion about how she liked to cut herself in tenth grade after her mother died and how she began to feel less than others. She said her father started to yell at her a lot back then, and this was near the time she started to buy knives and collect them.
They talked and talked. Locke kept going back to one question that had bothered him from the moment he and Clara had started a dialogue: After Kyle started to talk about hurting her father, why hadn’t she gone to her sister or her father or someone else and told them what was going on? This was where it became very serious, Locke explained. Clara might have thought Kyle was some bullshit artist, especially where fighting and being a vampire was concerned. However, the moment he began to talk about killing or even hurting her father—this after she had specifically told him that her father was trying to poison her and she hated him—well, things had gone from not believing the kid’s stories to maybe she should take him seriously, even if it later turned out she was wrong.
I'd Kill for You Page 26