by Brad Parks
“Thank you, Mr. Curran. You’re here freely and voluntarily, is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’ve been advised of your right to counsel.”
“What do you mean?”
“That you can have a lawyer if you want one,” Powers said.
“Oh, yeah,” Curran said.
“And you’ve waived that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. Now. What is it you’d like to say to us?”
“Just that, you know, I did it,” Curran said.
“You did what?”
“I killed that guy in the cemetery. Melanie Barrick had nothing to do with it.”
The way he had said “Melanie” caught Amy’s attention. It wasn’t like he was talking about a stranger. There was a warmth underlying it. Then Amy made a connection. Curran. A common enough name, sure. But it was also Melanie Barrick’s maiden name, the name she had been using at the time of her attack. Was this guy related?
Powers was continuing with his questions: “Why did you kill him?”
“Do I need a reason? I just killed him.”
“But did you . . . know the victim somehow? Did you have dealings with him?”
“No. Nothing like that. My wife and I were walking through that cemetery on Thursday night. We like cemeteries. We were minding our own business, looking at the dates on the graves. Then this guy started hassling us. I’m pretty sure he was doped up on something and I . . . I got worried he was going to hurt me or my wife. So I killed him. It was self-defense.”
“Your wife was a witness to this?”
“Yes, sir,” Curran said. “I’ll have her come here and she’ll tell you the same thing if you want. But she didn’t have anything to do with it either. It was all me.”
“But when you say he was ‘hassling’ you, what do you mean, exactly?”
“Oh, you know. He started by asking us for money and I told him no. I thought he was going to try to rob us. Then he started making threats about how he was going to take me out.”
“Did he have a weapon?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“But did you see a weapon?”
“Yeah. I think he had a knife,” Curran said. “But I could be wrong about that. It was pretty dark.”
“So did he . . . try to stab you or something?”
“I don’t know. It happened pretty fast. I just . . . I was just really scared and he was making threats, so I killed him before he could do anything to me or my wife.”
“And why are you confessing to this?”
“Because I saw in the paper that some young woman had been arrested and I didn’t want someone else to have to pay the penalty for something I did.”
“But if it was self-defense, why didn’t you just call the police after the incident?”
Curran shifted in his seat. “Because I’m a registered sex offender. I’m supposed to stay out of trouble.”
“Oh,” Powers said, as if that cleared up everything.
“I didn’t think anyone would care that some scuzzball had been killed,” Curran said. “And then I saw that young woman in the paper, so I thought I should come forward and clear the air.”
Powers looked over at Kempe. Neither of them was likely aware of the Melanie Curran/Melanie Barrick connection. Still, this had to be one of the flimsier confessions ever recorded in the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office. Amy expected this would be the point in the interrogation where the sheriff would delve further into the details of this story and expose its fraudulence.
Instead, Powers said, “Okay. Well, I appreciate you coming forward, sir. You understand we’re going to have to arrest you and process you?”
“Yes, sir. You do what you have to do.”
“Do you have a lawyer?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, then the judge’ll probably assign you one—”
Amy stopped paying attention to the back-and-forth. She had shifted her focus to Powers. Why was the sheriff letting this continue? Hadn’t he been sure on Friday that Melanie Barrick was the murderer? Was he really that eager to clear a murder from his books that he didn’t care he was obviously getting the wrong person?
The pin map. The missing drugs. The Barrick raid. And now the eager acceptance of an obviously false confession. There wasn’t exactly a straight line between all four of those things, nor was there any obvious benefit. How would punching this guy’s ticket for a murder committed by someone else be of any aid to the sheriff?
Amy couldn’t figure it out. She just had to put a stop to it. A false confession would only muddy the prosecution of Melanie Barrick.
“Hang on a moment,” she said, forcefully enough that the heads of all three men turned her way. “Mr. Curran, I’m Amy Kaye, I’m with the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office. Do you mind if I ask a few questions?”
Curran looked at the sheriff, who didn’t give any response.
“I guess not,” Curran said.
“Thank you. You said you were walking through the cemetery. Thornrose Cemetery is a big place. Roughly where within the cemetery did this altercation take place?”
“I don’t know. I guess you could say the middle.”
“After you killed the victim, did you move the body?”
“No, ma’am.”
Amy glanced over at Powers for a moment. They both knew the monument to Gen. John Echols was closer to the western entrance of the cemetery than the middle. But that was splitting hairs. Really, Amy was only trying to get a rhythm going.
“Did you touch the victim?”
“No, ma’am.”
“But you knew he was dead?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And about what time did this occur?”
“Middle of the night sometime. I don’t know. I wasn’t wearing a watch.”
“So call it midnight, then?”
“Yeah, about that.”
“Well, that roughly matches our time of death,” Amy said. “But maybe you can clear something up for us. The victim was such a mess, the medical examiner couldn’t tell if he had been struck by two bullets or three. How many times did you shoot him?”
Curran didn’t hesitate: “Three,” he said.
Amy looked at Powers, who rolled his eyes and muttered a curse.
“Well, now that I think about it, it might have been two,” Curran said. “I don’t know. I was pretty worked up, you know? And—”
“Mr. Curran, Richard Coduri wasn’t shot,” Amy said. “And you should know making a false confession is a crime.”
Curran brought his head down to the table. When he finally looked away, he was blinking back tears.
“Sorry, Melanie,” he said. “I tried.”
* * *
• • •
It took another hour to clean up the mess that was Billy Curran.
The sheriff was hopeful they could pretend Curran had never happened, but Amy wasn’t hearing it. Failure to disclose exculpatory evidence—even a blatantly false confession from a relative—was a sure way for the prosecution to lose a conviction. They had to document this properly, then make the defense aware of it. Such was the burden of being the good guys.
Amy was coming out of Powers’s office, heading down the hallway toward the exit, when she heard a man calling her name. She turned to see the relentlessly close-cropped hair of Deputy Justin Herzog.
“Hey, I was just about to call you,” he said.
“Oh, yeah? What about?”
“Got something to show you if you have a moment.”
“Sure,” Amy said, and followed him into a cramped office.
Herzog sat down and was already urging the cranky computer there back to life. Amy wondered if he already felt the desire to high-kick i
t.
“Don’t know if Sheriff told you, but you know that guy they found in the cemetery?”
“Richard Coduri.”
“Yeah, him. Sheriff must have thought I was bored or something, but you know we checked for prints in the hotel room where he had been staying, right?”
“Powers mentioned something about that.”
“Did he tell you I spent my whole weekend on it?”
“No, he didn’t mention that.”
“Believe me, I’ll remind him of it if he gives me trouble for the overtime. Anyhow, as you might imagine, there were a lot of prints in that room. A lot were partials that were pretty useless. Some of them were unsubs,” he said, using the slang for unknown subjects. “And of course, some of them were the victim, whose prints were already in the system. But there was one unsub that caught my eye. It was a pretty good one, too. Lotta oil on this guy’s fingers. They pulled it off the dresser, which is a nice, shiny surface. I’d say it was fresh, because the rest of the dresser didn’t have any prints on it, which probably means someone cleaned it not too long ago.”
Herzog was working the mouse. The computer’s hard drive was clicking and clacking so much Amy worried it was going to overheat.
“Okay, here we go,” he said, having pulled up two prints onto the screen. “Now, you do this as much as I do, you actually start to recognize fingerprints. I knew I had seen this one before. It’s like . . . Well, it’s almost like going through a crowd of people and seeing a familiar face. It jumps out at you.”
“Sure,” Amy said.
“You see this print?” he said, pointing to the one on the left side of the screen.
“Yeah,” she said.
“This is the one they pulled off the dresser from Room 307 at the Howard Johnson.”
“Got it.”
“And I started thinking, Where have I seen that before?” Herzog said. “I began running through recent cases in my mind. Then I remember the one from the Pritchett sexual assault, the guy we referred to as Person B.”
“The one I thought was Warren Plotz but wasn’t?”
“That’s right. But guess who it is?”
“Who?”
“The guy from the dresser. I’ve already found sixteen points of similarities. It’s a dead-on match.”
Amy Kaye just stared at the screen.
“In other words . . . ,” Amy began, but was too stunned to complete the sentence.
Justin Herzog did it for her: “In other words, the man who raped Lilly Pritchett was a recent visitor to Richard Coduri’s hotel room.”
FORTY-EIGHT
My new home was exactly eight feet wide by ten feet long. I know because I had nothing better to do than measure it, using an eleven-inch sheet of paper as a ruler.
Other than the heavy steel door, the only opening in the concrete walls was an eighteen-inch-high slit of a window. That it existed, I had learned, was because the Supreme Court had ruled that all inmates, even those in administrative segregation, were required to have a source of natural light—the absence of it being considered cruel and unusual punishment.
Mind you, the glass in my window was frosted, so I couldn’t actually see anything outside. In that way, it was like the Middle River Regional Jail extending an eighteen-inch middle finger at both me and the Supreme Court.
There were two sources of artificial light. One was the fluorescent bulb recessed into the ceiling and protected by a metal grate. The other was the one-foot-square, two-inch-thick piece of safety glass in the door, which let in light from the hallway.
I had no control over either. The light above me came on automatically every day at six a.m. and stayed on until ten p.m. The light in the hallway never shut off. It blazed at all hours, forcing me to sleep with my back to the door if I wanted any relief from the glare.
Breakfast came at seven each morning. Lunch was around noon. Dinner was five thirtyish.
All meals were delivered through the narrow slot in the door just below the window. There was a small ledge on my side of the door where the tray just barely fit, but the inmate who delivered it had to insert it gently or the food ended up on the floor. Some inmates waited for me to be by the door to receive the tray. Others just flung it in without caring.
The only furnishings, if you could call them that, were the bed, the sink, and the toilet. The bed had a three-inch mattress that did little to cushion my back from the hard surface underneath. The sink had only cold water. The toilet was a chunk of forged stainless steel with no seat and no way to flush. My excrement either slid down or did not. Sometimes, when it got stuck, I splashed water at it until it disappeared.
Despite these grim conditions, I continued my attempts to keep my milk supply going. Doing my best to block out all the distractions, I would think of Alex, imagining his blue-gray eyes staring up at me, thinking about the moment when he latched on.
It still felt like it took forever for the flow to start. And once it did, I was no longer drawing as much out. It certainly didn’t help there was a camera box in the corner of the room, so I knew the guards—some of them male—could watch me. It was nearly impossible to be discreet.
Stubbornly, I kept at it. I told myself Alex would be thankful.
I also exercised, doing push-ups, sit-ups, wall squats, burpees, whatever I could manage in that small space. It was more about mental preservation than it was about the physical benefits.
The other highlight of my existence was when one of the guards remembered to grab a book for me on their way into work. The Middle River Regional Jail’s collection consisted almost entirely of genre fiction, mostly romances and mysteries. There was one I enjoyed enough to read five times. It featured a wisecracking investigative reporter named Carter Ross, and I was grateful for the temporary respite it gave me from reality.
For one hour each day—and this, again, was thanks to the Supreme Court—I was invited to stick my hands through the meal slot and be handcuffed. I was then led to an outdoor cage that was wedged between two concrete walls. I didn’t have a piece of paper with me, so I couldn’t give exact dimensions. My best guess was that it was fifteen feet square.
Every few days, on a schedule I had yet to be able discern, my hour in the cage was cut short by a shower, which I took under the watchful gaze of a female guard.
This was my life, day after day. Recovering addicts talk about hitting bottom, about reaching that moment when they knew they could sink no lower, when they simply had to get sober or they would cease being recognizable to themselves as a human being.
In a strange way, I envied them. At least they eventually found that lowest point. Not so in ad seg.
It was like hitting a new bottom every day.
FORTY-NINE
Amy Kaye’s favorite class in law school had been a criminal law clinic she attended during her third year.
The professor began the first day by writing FOLLOW THE EVIDENCE on a whiteboard in the room where they convened. The admonishment remained there the rest of the semester, set off in its own box, with DO NOT ERASE: THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER FROM THIS EXPERIENCE written in smaller letters next to it.
Amy was now tempted to call that professor and ask what she was supposed to do if the evidence she was following didn’t make a shred of sense.
The man who raped Lilly Pritchett—and dozens of other women over the course of nearly two decades—had visited Richard Coduri’s hotel room.
Richard Coduri, who had been, up until his untimely demise, the star witness against Melanie Barrick.
Melanie Barrick, who was one of the rapist’s victims.
Was there a world where a drug snitch and a rapist just happened to associate with each other? It didn’t fit any profile Amy had ever seen.
And the murder had happened squarely within Staunton city limits. Did that mean her pin map wa
s actually misleading evidence? Yes, this was a murder, not a rape. But had the rapist been operating in Staunton as well—perhaps just in a way that didn’t show up in the files? Raping, but not whispering?
Amy had turned it every which way she could think. She had created flow charts, timelines, and Venn diagrams, drawing lines and circles in a desperate attempt to make the patterns clearer.
All it did was waste paper.
After a few days of fretting over it, Amy decided it was either a wild coincidence, or it was a puzzle that would go unsolved for the time being.
Meanwhile, the chief deputy commonwealth’s attorney had other things to keep herself busy. The medical examiner’s report had come back on Coduri, confirming the cause of death was blunt-force trauma and the manner of death was a homicide. It opined the victim had briefly tried to defend himself, enough that he might have left some superficial wounds on the perpetrator. But they were still waiting on toxicology reports and other physical evidence found on the body, all of which had to come from the state lab in Roanoke.
Other avenues of investigation—the sheriff’s canvass, the attempts to find the murder weapon—had led nowhere.
Amy had also been tutoring Aaron Dansby, making sure he would be ready to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Melanie Barrick had possessed drugs with the intent to distribute them. On Dansby’s calendar, these appeared as “strategy sessions.” In Amy’s mind, they were more like exercises in disaster mitigation.
They involved trying to anticipate where her boss might screw up this time. During the Mookie Myers trial, Dansby had nearly forgotten to ask Detective Kempe an entire page’s worth of the questions Amy had prepared. At a murder trial two years before that, Dansby told their smoking-gun witness she could wait to testify in the courtroom—as opposed to outside of it. If Amy hadn’t seen the woman sitting there moments before opening statements began, the witness would have been disqualified.
The man just had an endless capacity for procedural incompetence. For as good as he could be on his feet—and Amy reluctantly admitted the man had some skills as an orator—he couldn’t be trusted with the details. Throughout this coming trial, Melanie Barrick would be one Aaron Dansby blunder away from acquittal.