Buried Evidence
Page 31
A giant of a man in more ways than his reputation, Bruce Cunningham’s brown hair had strands of gray in it, but his eyes were as alert and cunning as ever. He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his tie was slightly askew, and his lightweight tan jacket was tossed casually over one shoulder.
“Talk about being at the right place at the right time,” Jameson told him, slapping him on the back. “We were about to walk out the door to drive to the D.A.’s office. Since you investigated this case, you can help us sort through the evidence and get everything in order.” He pointed to a stack of boxes in one corner of the detective bureau. “We’ve got several other homicides going on right now. We can use all the help we can get.” He paused before continuing. “I don’t know if we can get the city to approve a consulting fee. I mean, we can try to talk the captain into covering your hotel, gas, and food. How does that sound?”
“Sounds okay for now,” Cunningham told them, whipping his tie off and stuffing it in his pocket. At least Sharon wouldn’t have to worry about forfeiting the fancy vacation he’d promised her. On the financial side, things were going very well at his new job in Omaha. Business was thriving; he’d been able to save enough to put his entire brood through college. He might miss the excitement of police work now and then, but overall, he was happy being back in his hometown.
“Tell you what,” O’Malley said, checking his watch to make certain they weren’t going to be late for their appointment, “why don’t you start on the evidence boxes while we’re at the D.A.’s office? I’ll have the front desk issue you an ID badge, then you’ll be all set. You can come and go anytime you want while you’re in town.”
Cunningham’s rugged face lit up with childlike delight as he shuffled off in the direction of the evidence boxes. Sometimes things worked out even better than a guy expected. In this case, the situation was damn well perfect.
CAROLYN MIDDLETON opened her large Louis Vuitton purse at one-fifteen Monday afternoon. It was designed in the shape of a shopping bag, and she carefully placed a rolled-up wash rag inside before she left for her obligatory daily visit to her daughter’s hospital room. She generally arrived at the hospital after lunch, then left by three, in order to pick up the children at school. Since all she was going to do was sit in a metal chair for the next two hours, she popped several pills in her mouth, then stopped at the bar in the living room on her way out and washed them down with rum. Before she reached her car, she pulled a container of breath spray from the pocket of her white cashmere sweater and squirted it in her mouth. The drive to Saint Francis Hospital took approximately ten minutes. The pills wouldn’t cut in for thirty.
Henry didn’t understand. No one understood. Her mother might, but she’d been dead for eight years. Her mind drifted back to her childhood, recalling her eleven-year-old cousin Naomi, the one with the strange illness. Even before Betsy had been diagnosed with Aicardi syndrome, Carolyn had suspected that her daughter had the same illness that had caused her cousin’s death.
She somehow made her way from her home to the hospital without any conscious recollection. She had been doing that a lot lately. She wasn’t certain if it was the muscle relaxants she’d been taking, or if she also suffered from a mild form of the same genetically inherited illness. Out of fear, she had never been tested.
Carolyn passed the nursing station and exchanged a few words with one of the nuns. When she entered Betsy’s room a few moments later, she didn’t move the chair next to the bed as she normally did. Instead she positioned it so she could look out the window at the coastline. She’d spent enough days staring at her daughter’s contorted face and frail body.
After her aunt’s husband had died, Agatha and her daughter, Naomi, had moved in with Carolyn’s parents at their farm in east Texas. From that day forward, no matter what Carolyn did, no one in the family paid attention to her. Naomi had such substantial needs that Carolyn seemed unimportant, almost as if she had become lost within the confines of their combined families.
She recalled the day her mother had scolded her, telling her what an awful girl she was and how she would never grow up and find happiness because she didn’t care about people less fortunate than herself. All Carolyn had done was leave Naomi behind one day. Her eleven-year-old cousin always followed her into a wooded area near the lake where she and her girlfriends met each day after school to smoke cigarettes, talk about boys, and share secrets. Carolyn was thirteen then, and her parents were strict Baptists, refusing to allow her to attend the dances they held at her school. Every time she left the house, her mother made her take Naomi with her, even though she knew the other girls didn’t want her around. Her friends said Naomi was retarded because she had to attend a special school. They were also frightened on the occasions when they had been present during one of Naomi’s seizures.
Wanting to discourage her cousin from tagging along with her, Carolyn had told her they were going to play hide-and-seek. Then once her friends had gone home, she had left her cousin waiting in her hiding place. She didn’t tell her parents what she had done until they started looking for Naomi at dinnertime. The police searched all night, finally finding her cousin at dawn. The poor girl had spent the night shivering and terrified.
Surfacing from her thoughts, Carolyn Middleton walked down the corridor and asked Sister Mary Luke if Dr. Logan was on the hospital grounds. “No,” the nun replied. “I’m not certain when he’ll be coming in today. Would you like me to page him?”
“No,” Carolyn said, quickly heading back down the corridor.
33
Since Richard had two cars, Lily borrowed his Lexus and drove to Santa Barbara Monday afternoon, knowing she had no choice but to meet with the chief D.A., Allan Brennan, to advise him that her former husband had not only been murdered, but that she might be arrested and charged with the Hernandez homicide. Attempting to keep something of this magnitude under wraps was an exercise in futility, particularly now that John had been killed.
The police officers, district attorney, judges, the mayor—basically any public official who would agree to taking such an old case to trial—weren’t seeking justice for Bobby Hernandez, at least not in Lily’s eyes. The man was a multiple murderer, and this was fact, not speculation. His crime partner in the McDonald-Lopez killings had cratered under the shrewd and relentless tactics that had made Bruce Cunningham a legend in law enforcement circles, providing him with a moment-by-moment description of what had transpired during this despicable and senseless crime. Hernandez’s guilt had also been confirmed by means of the fingerprints left on the murder weapon, a gun his brother, Manny, was attempting to throw into the ocean when he was killed by the Oxnard police in a shoot-out.
In addition to orchestrating the slaughter of Peter McDonald and Carmen Lopez, Hernandez’s fingerprints had also been found on the plastic purse which belonged to another of his victims—Patricia Barnes—a woman he had buried in a shallow grave.
The only purpose of prosecuting Lily for the death of Hernandez, as far as she could discern, was to generate media attention. The authorities were using her as a vehicle, knowing the sensationalism of a D.A. charged with murder would afford them the kind of recognition and fame it had so many other prosecutors, judges, police officers, and witnesses, stretching all the way back to crimes such as the Lindbergh kidnapping. People thought the public’s fascination with crime and the judicial system was a recent development brought about by Court TV and televised trials, an assumption that was far from the truth. The only difference in today’s world versus the past was in how people received their information. In the past, information about newsworthy or intriguing crimes had been filtered through the perspectives of radio, television, and print journalists. Now people could watch and arrive at their own judgments. News via the Internet had taken the world to even another level. Men and women could now program their office computers so that every time a new piece of information came up regarding something in the news that they
found interesting, they would be instantly alerted, just as a TV station did when it broke into regular programming. The thirst for entertainment, news, and excitement had reached a pinnacle in the history of mankind.
Matt Kingsley saw Lily sitting at her desk as he walked past the door to her office. “I didn’t think you were going to come in today. Is your daughter still in town? She’s gorgeous, Lily.” Rather than wait for her to answer, he rattled on, “She seems older than nineteen. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that she looks older. She just strikes me as more mature. I’ve dated women in their late twenties who act like they’re eighteen.”
Lily’s glasses were perched low on her nose, her hair was tied up in a knot on top of her head, and she was wearing one of Richard’s white dress shirts under her jacket. On her way in that morning, Richard had learned more details related to John’s murder, cautioning her not to go anywhere near her cottage. “I’m only going to be in the office an hour at best,” she told him. “You can call me, but only if it’s urgent. As soon as I finish here, I intend to ask Brennan for a leave of absence.”
“He’ll go through the roof, Lily,” Kingsley told her, smacking a file against his thigh. “The man’s been riding herd on me every day. You know I don’t have the experience to handle both your caseload as well as my own. Things have been going fairly—”
Lily cut him off. “My ex-husband was murdered last night.”
Kingsley took a few steps backward in shock. “God, I don’t know what to say.”
“I doubt if God had anything to do with it,” Lily answered, lowering her eyes as she signed her name on several documents on her desk. “John was stabbed five times in the garage of the duplex he shared with my daughter in North Hollywood. I’m just thankful Shana wasn’t there at the time.”
“Do they have any idea who killed him?”
Lily slowly raised her eyes, placing the stack of papers back on her desk. “The way my luck’s been running, they’ll probably accuse me. I’m beginning to think I have only two roles in life—victim or suspect.”
“You don’t mean that, do you?”
“My daughter is waiting for me in Ventura right now,” she told him, evading his question. “Fill me in on the Middleton case.”
“Nothing much has happened since I last spoke to you,” Kingsley told her. “I’ve been checking in with the hospital on a regular basis. I called this morning, and they said Betsy’s condition appears to be unchanged.” He stopped, trying to think of anything else he needed to bring to her attention. Lily had dark circles under her eyes, but she always looked somewhat ragged, as if she never got a decent night’s sleep. “Ron Spencer called Friday. He accepted our offer to settle the Hatteras matter.”
“That’s one out of the way,” Lily said, exhaling in relief. “Under the circumstances, I’m not going to be able to handle the Middleton trial. Brennan will probably reassign it.” She saw his face fall, then added, “I’m not saying he’ll remove you from the case, Matt, just that you’ll have to work with someone other than me. Didn’t you just say that you don’t feel competent handling the more complex cases?”
“I wasn’t referring to Middleton,” he told her. “You know how hard I’ve worked. Brennan might bring in some stuffy old fart like Charles Dayton, and before you know it, all I’ll be doing is carrying his briefcase and serving as his errand boy.” He saw Lily stand, the chastising way she was looking at him. “Forgive me…you must think I’m the most self-centered person on earth to be talking about myself when your husband has just been murdered.”
“Ex-husband,” Lily corrected him, stepping past him and disappearing down the corridor.
DR. CHRISTOPHER Logan had spent the entire weekend reviewing Betsy Middleton’s charts. In addition, he had searched the Internet and called several research hospitals, attempting to come up with any information he might have missed related to Aicardi syndrome. The one thing he had been able to confirm and document was that Betsy’s seizures had occurred more frequently when her mother was present.
Glancing through Betsy’s lab reports in his office during his lunch break, Logan noticed that it had been several months since tests to detect strychnine had been performed. Some of the procedures related to the girl’s internal organs were painful, and although there were many physicians who would view Betsy’s level-five coma as an opportunity to perform any tests or procedures possible to obtain more knowledge on such a rare disease, Logan refused to use patients as research subjects.
The treatment of individuals in deep comas fell into the same conundrum surrounding the abortion issue: at what point did an unborn fetus become a human being, and when did the laws of mankind become responsible for its protection? Rising from behind his desk and slipping his arms in his white jacket, Dr. Logan decided that with Betsy’s trial date quickly approaching, he was justified in ordering another series of tests.
Deep in thought, Logan followed the path up the hill behind the hospital to the transitional care unit. No one was behind the nurses station on Betsy’s floor. He assumed that since the occupancy rate was extremely low right now in that particular section of the hospital, and it was the lunch hour, the staff was probably busy attending to patients. Deciding to check on the girl himself, he opened the door to her room.
Carolyn Middleton was standing with her back turned. When she heard someone behind her, she spun around as if he had startled her.
He spotted a syringe in her right hand.
“Dr. Logan,” she said, her eyes enormous. “I was—”
Carolyn’s arm dropped to her side as she attempted to conceal the syringe behind her back. Logan rushed toward her, seizing her arm and forcefully prying her fingers off the needle. A nonviolent person by nature, he experienced a rush of rage. He didn’t realize he was hurting her until she cried out in pain. He quickly turned his attention to Betsy, ripping the IV from the girl’s arm, certain now that her mother had just administered another dose of strychnine, injecting the poison directly into the tube leading into her vein.
“It…was… Henry,” Carolyn stammered, backing up until she was trapped in a corner on the opposite side of the room.
Dr. Logan hit the call button, then shouted into the microphone for a nurse. The next thing he knew, Betsy was in the throes of a violent seizure. He was reaching for the straps to keep her from harming herself when her frail body suddenly rose several inches in the air, then fell limp and lifeless onto the mattress. He started to call for a cardiac cart, but he knew it was too late. Both the machines monitoring her heart and her brain waves were flat.
“Are you happy?” Christopher Logan snarled, bending down to pick up the syringe off the floor.
“Is she—”
“Yes,” Logan said, holding up the syringe in his clenched fist. “You finally killed her. And you’re not going to blame it on your husband, not when I have the proof right here in my hand.”
BECAUSE RICHARD had a mandatory court appearance that morning, he had sent his office manager, June Overland, to his home to stay with Shana until her mother returned from Santa Barbara. The girl had slept until almost noon, and Lily had only peeked in the guest bedroom to check on her before leaving.
Having retrieved her cell phone from Shana’s backpack, Lily called Richard’s house as she was driving back to Ventura. “Is she awake?”
“Yes,” June said, “would you like to speak to her? She’s in the other room watching television.”
“How is she?”
“Quiet, you know,” June whispered, cupping her hand over her mouth. “I tried to get her to let me make her some lunch. She says she isn’t hungry.”
Sitting on a brown leather sofa in Richard’s family room, Shana was facing the television. From the distant look in her eyes, it was obvious she wasn’t paying attention. June walked in and told her that her mother wanted to speak to her.
As soon as Shana came on the phone, Lily asked her if she wanted her to pick her up and take her out for lunch.
Lily wasn’t prepared for her question. “I’m not certain, honey,” she told her, her voice quavering. “It depends on when the police release the body.”
“They’re going to cut him up, aren’t they? You know, do an autopsy.”
“Please, wait until I get to the house and we’ll talk about everything,” Lily told her, wishing she had never left her alone that morning. “I’m in the car right now.”
With the remote in her outstretched hand, Shana turned off the TV, wishing she had a button that would turn off the world just as easily. “I called Jennifer. The police went to her house and took a statement from her. They were asking her the same kind of questions they asked me last night. They wanted to know where we were over the weekend, why I didn’t stay at the house with Dad, basically the third-degree. They even asked me if Jennifer and I killed him. They said they thought I got mad because he ran over that kid and I thought they were going to blame it on me.”
Lily tried to remain silent. She told herself she would have to find out if the medical examiner had determined a time of death. Her assumption was John had been killed the same day his body was discovered, but she now realized she could be mistaken.
“Jennifer’s mother is going nuts,” Shana continued. “She doesn’t want Jennifer to see me or talk to me. Someone killed my dad. I can’t go to school. I’m staying in a strange house, and now my best friend isn’t even allowed to talk to me. Maybe I should just go out and shoot myself.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” her mother said, a sharp edge in her voice. “I don’t care if the world comes to an end, I don’t ever want to hear you make a statement like that again.”