Love You Madly

by Michael Fleeman

  When he returned, he couldn’t find his gas trail because the ground was wet from rain. He went back to Jason’s truck and found a roll of paper towels, which he lit and threw into the van.

  “Did Jason stay in there or was he up by you helping?”

  “He was by the car.”

  “So he never goes up to where the vehicle is?”

  Brian said Jason never left his truck.

  The fire took about thirty seconds to catch and then the van “basically blew up,” Brian said. “And at that time, I ran down the hill. Jason was freaking out, and we left.”

  It was, to be sure, a full and complete confession, enough to convict Brian Radel of first-degree murder and put him away for the rest of his life. His story was corroborated by the physical evidence: the rope fibers, the glove tip, the melted wine bottle, plus the witness accounts from the clerks at the convenience and liquor stores.

  To the troopers, Brian came off as a stone-cold killer with no conscience. He affected the attitude of a man who didn’t care what happened to himself, chillingly honest and straightforward about the deed he had committed, willing to answer any question, ready for the consequences.

  And yet, McPherron and Claus felt he was still holding something back. Despite his denials, Jason seemed deeper into the murder plot than Brian was suggesting. Why else would Jason just happen to have had a gas can and paper towels that night? And what of Rachelle? Her name barely came up, and yet this murder was all supposedly done to protect her. McPherron had more questions.

  “Obviously you know we’ve arrested Jason,” McPherron told him. “Was it his idea initially to kill Lauri?”

  “He planted the seed,” Brian acknowledged, “but past that, he had nothing to do with any sort of planning. I mean, there wasn’t a bit of this that was his planning.”

  “He was kind of the idea man and you were the follow-through?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I understand also this occurred over a period of several weeks to a month that you guys are plotting this? You guys discussed different scenarios of how you would do this?”

  “Yes.”

  “How to get in the house, how to kill her?” asked McPherron.

  “Again, it wasn’t really discussed,” Brian said. “I came up with different plans of what I was going to do, and again there wasn’t a plan that Jason actually came up with.”

  “OK, so it was more like bouncing ideas off of you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, then, was the original plan to make this look like a car wreck?”

  “The original plan—it went through a lot of metamorphosis. I mean, we went through stages where [it was] my personal desire of trying to find blackmail or something, just something to possibly blackmail her with.”

  “And this is a means to get her to stop abusing Rachelle?”

  “Yes,” said Brian.

  The detectives were now an hour into the interview when there was a knock on the door of the interview room. A voice from the hall summoned McPherron. The sergeant left for a few moments while Claus continued the interview.

  “Sorry,” said Claus, “these things happen. You know, this is kind of intriguing me. What kind of ideas did you have?”

  “Pretty much anything,” said Brian, “from the outlandish, unaffordable. Explosives.”

  “Lots of explosives around here,” said Claus.

  “Due to the lockdown on the kind of explosives that I’d want, it would be highly limited,” said Brian. “I wouldn’t be looking for the stuff that you get at a blasting pit.”

  “You’d get tagged by the ATF or by Homeland Security or something because of recent events?”

  “Yeah.”

  McPherron came back into the interview room.

  Jason, he said, was being interviewed at the same time elsewhere in the station.

  “He’s finally told us the truth about everything,” the detective said, “and this involves Rachelle. He gave her up.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  It was noisy in the jail. The cell that Jason was in had a door, but the other cells have only bars, and the inmate population was making a racket.

  “Hey, guys, hold it down,” shouted Sergeant Mark Habib to the other inmates as he went inside cell number five, where Jason sat on a cot.

  Among those investigating the murder, Habib knew the most about Jason. He knew his parents: Doug worked for the utility company, and Linda had worked for the police department for ten years. Over the years, Jason would stop by the station and talk to Habib about police work or their shared interest in electronics. Habib had overseen the installation of computers in the police station, and Jason was a whiz at computer games. Jason had recently purchased a high-end gaming computer, now in police custody after a search of his bedroom. For a time Jason had expressed an interest in becoming an officer and gone on ride-alongs with Habib. They didn’t socialize, but were friendly enough that Jason once stopped by Habib’s house to pick up a DVD movie for his mother.

  “Look, this is very serious,” Habib told Jason. “This is not a juvenile drinking party that we’re investigating. This is not a burglary. This is a very serious thing. Who do you think they’re looking at? Whose mental state is the evilest of all here?”

  Jason mumbled that it was probably him.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because …” and his voice trailed off.

  “It probably has something to do with the fact that you basically deceived them yesterday and gave them a little bit,” Habib said. “These guys are not dumb. You cannot beat them. This is what they get paid to do. That’s why they sent the investigators of the crime lab in now from Anchorage. These are the CSI Miami guys, OK? They’re not dumb. There’s more to this shit. This ain’t over. This is not over. There is still one more person out there running around free. You two have been scammed. You two have been scammed, bottom line.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Jason.

  “What about Rachel?” asked Habib, mispronouncing her name.

  “Rachelle?” Jason asked.

  “Rachelle, rather,” said Habib. “She’s running around fat and happy right now. She’s not showing any remorse. She’s laughing at school. And this has concerned me from day one. It’s concerned them: Why is she running around happy? Why is she not crying and bawling that her mother is dead? Her mother never beat her. Her mother never mistreated her. Do you know how many juveniles, how many adults like you, I interviewed in the last five days?”

  “Probably quite a few.”

  “That have been in the same position that you are,” Habib said. “She’s going and telling them that she was abused, her mom beats her, her mom mistreats her. I’ve got kids her age and over telling me that her statements to them are: Mom says she’s fat and won’t feed her dinner. I mean, come on. Not hardly. Not hardly.”

  Habib told Jason that he and Brian were “covering for her ass” and that nobody believed that Jason and Brian came up with the murder plot on their own.

  “Not happening,” Habib said. “I don’t buy it. I won’t buy it. And I won’t stop until we find out the truth. This did not happen. She put you guys up to it. Jason, she’s running around, fat and happy right now in that goddamn school.”

  Habib said he’d been to Rachelle’s school every day that week, and each time, Rachelle was seen at the main office, craning her neck through the window to find out who he was interviewing.

  “She’s all over this, man,” said Habib. “Now, you may be bullshitting these guys, but you don’t know them and they don’t know you. You’re not bullshitting me, because I know you. And you know me. And that girl had something to do with that. That girl put the seed in you guys’ brain. That girl played you guys.”

  As the other investigators had done earlier, Habib was exaggerating to get Jason to talk. The sergeant hadn’t been to the school every day and witnesses had described Rachelle’s behavior as changing wildly during the week, from crying fits t
o moments of odd giddiness that a friend attributed to denial. None of her friends had described her as coldly as Habib did, though it was true that when Habib was interviewing one of Rachelle’s friends in the principal’s office, he had spotted Rachelle outside, craning her neck in an apparent attempt to see who was in there with him.

  “Now, you tell me I’m wrong. I mean, hey, either way, why should I care, Jason?” asked Habib. “The state of Alaska has you and Brian on murder in the first degree. Murder one. That’s as high as it goes. I should walk right out of here and say, ‘Hey, case status: fucking closed, man. These morons got played and she’s walking fucking free.’ But I have more respect for your mother than that.”

  It was an insult, Habib told Jason, to expect anybody to believe that Jason and Brian killed Lauri on their own without telling Rachelle about it.

  “You making me a common fool?” asked Habib.

  As Jason listened in the cell, Habib gave a heavily edited version of the witness statements collected that week.

  “She says to her girlfriends: She probably got drunk and drove off a cliff,” said Habib, though actually Rachelle had said her mother probably died in a drunk-driving accident on the basis of the wine bottle left behind. “Where was Lauri at? Where was Lauri’s body found?” said Habib. “Inside of the van. Where was the van?”

  On a cliff, Jason said.

  “What did Lauri have in her bloodstream?”

  “Alcohol,” guessed Jason. Habib didn’t tell him the autopsy found no such thing. Because the remains were so badly burned, the results of an alcohol-level test were inconclusive.

  “Now, I’ve been doing this for sixteen years,” Habib lectured Jason. “I know people. I know their behavior. Human nature. Human nature is what I do. That’s why these yahoos sent me to school for all this stuff. For some sick fucking reason I’ve got a knack for it. I can read people inside and out. I can read when people don’t make sense.”

  Jason cast his eyes down.

  “Look at me,” Habib said. “Her comment to her friends at school Monday morning? Come on. There’s more like that out there that we’ve got. That’s why this isn’t done yet. Just because you’re in jail and Brian’s in jail does not mean these guys are going home. This case is not over. Now, right now, they’re interviewing Brian again. That’s why I’m talking to you back here. They’ve asked me to meet with you. Why do you think they’re going after him?”

  The mention of Brian got his attention. Jason had no idea what Brian had been saying to police.

  “Well, they’re just trying to find out if Rachelle communicated with him,” Jason said.

  “Well, do you suppose?” asked Habib.

  “Like you are,” said Jason.

  “I’m not trying to find out, Jason. I know,” said Habib. “They know she had something to do with this. They’ve seized everybody’s means of communications. They’ve seized everybody’s phone records. They’ve seized everybody’s computers. And you know as well as I do, you can delete everything you want off of a hard drive, is it gone?”

  “Not unless you zero it out. Not unless you zeroed the drive,” Jason said. “That doesn’t even work all the way.”

  “These—these computers,” Habib said, fumbling through another set of lies, “they’re bypassing the Anchorage Crime Lab. They’re going right to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s crime lab. Homeland Security and FBI. I’ve got half your e-mails already printed out. This is before we even seized your computers. You know who’s the stupid shit and left that crap on her computer?”

  “Rachelle,” said Jason.

  “Yeah,” said Habib. “And you know who’s the stupid shit and used computers at school?”

  “Rachelle.”

  “All this is making you look right now, Jason, is that you two assholes, you two evil older men, took her mother,” said Habib.

  The computers would be sent to Alaska’s crime lab for examination, not to any federal agencies. The only e-mails and letters they had were some that Doc Waterman had found printed out in Rachelle’s bedroom. Still, the tactic was working, Habib’s claims about their mountain of evidence starting to sink in with Jason.

  “Whether she’s convicted of this or not, you guys still get charged with murder in the first degree. Bottom line,” said Habib. “The question is whether this chick, who plays people, this up-and-coming black widow, goes free.”

  His voice dripping with sarcasm, Habib painted a picture for Jason of Rachelle’s life after she let Jason and Brian go to prison.

  “She’s thinking about college, graduating from high school, going to prom, moving on in her life, being able to come and go as she pleases now because Mom’s out of the picture, because Mom was the only responsible one in the family,” said Habib. Rachelle, he said, was thinking: “Dad’s too busy out there running around having affairs. Dad’s not going to care what time I get home from school. If he thinks I’m going to clean house and do all the laundry, he’s crazy. I’m not taking on my mom’s old duties.”

  Habib said, “This is from a girl whose frickin’ mother just died. She’s showing no remorse whatsoever. You are showing a thousand times more remorse over Lauri’s death than her own daughter. Now, do you want to tell me about it? Because without someone telling us, we’re going to have to try and pull all this crap in, but in the meantime, she is still running free.”

  Jason made another attempt to defend Rachelle, but it was halfhearted. He was beginning to crack.

  Finally, he admitted he had more of a hand in the murder plot than planting a seed. In fact, he said, the planning started shortly after Rachelle told him of the beatings. With a newfound resignation in his voice, he added, “Whether or not they happened, I don’t know anymore.”

  “They didn’t,” said Habib, “but go ahead.”

  “First we tried to get her to take legal routes, like emancipation or just go into child protective services,” said Jason. “She claimed that she had already tried that and no one believed her. Things kind of simmered down after a while. They weren’t really having any more problems at home. Then things started up again. And I asked her what she wanted done, what she wanted me to do to help her. She said it would be better if her mother was out of the picture. And I’m apparently a goddamn idiot.”

  “Well, you’re a goddamned idiot if you let her get away with it,” said Habib. “Partner, you’re a damned idiot if you let her get away with it. And I’d have more respect for you if you say, ‘Hey, I fucked up.’”

  “I’m aware of that,” Jason said. “I did.”

  “But you’re letting her get away with it. You’re letting her get away and her playing you.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “She told you that it would be better if she was out of the picture. Well, she said more than that. Keep going.”

  “I’m trying to recall exactly what was said,” Jason said. “I know she wanted her dead.”

  “How do you know she wanted her dead?” asked Habib.

  “She told me she wanted her dead.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Few months.”

  “She told you when her and her dad were going to be out of town?” asked Habib.

  “She did,” said Jason.

  “What did she say to you then?”

  “She told me that it would probably be a good opportunity to take care of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “To kill Lauri.”

  “What did she say exactly to you?” asked Habib.

  “I’m having trouble recalling the exact words of the conversation,” said Jason. “But she did know it was going to happen. She was planning on it happening. And she did confirm that we were going to do it.”

  Rachelle called him just before she left for Anchorage and asked if he and Brian were all set. Jason told her yes, that Brian had worked everything out.

  “Did you tell her how you were going to do it?” asked Habib. “She’s got the comment of her
mom was probably drunk and drove off a cliff.”

  “I told her that alcohol was probably going to be involved.”

  “Like how?” asked Habib.

  “Well, Brian mentioned that he should probably get Lauri drunk to make her more pliable,” Jason said. He quickly added: “He didn’t rape her or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “No, no, no, no,” said Habib. “Make her more pliable?”

  “More cooperative, yeah.”

  “And he said that to us already,” said Habib. “When Rachelle and her dad get back, when was the first time you talked to her or communicated with her?”

  “She phoned me the day she got back,” said Jason.

  “And what did she say to you?”

  “She said that she noticed her mother wasn’t home, and I told her it was done.”

  “You said it was done? And what did she say?”

  “She didn’t say much,” said Jason. “Sigh of relief.”

  Habib had heard enough. He told Jason, “Let’s take a break. I’ve got to check some notes.” That’s when the sergeant went down the hall and knocked on the door of the room where McPherron and Claus were interviewing Brian Radel.

  When McPherron came out, Habib gave him a recap of the jail cell interview. McPherron returned to the interview room telling Brian that Jason had given up Rachelle. At first it seemed to have no effect on Brian, who continued to insist that Rachelle was in the dark about the murder plan—as far as he knew. He repeated that he never spoke directly to Rachelle and that anything she said came to him through Jason.

  “So he was the go-between?” asked McPherron.

  “Yeah,” said Brian.

  “So she did say: ‘Kill my mother for me’?”

  “Again, I can’t say that she did,” said Brian.

  “Did she ever relay to him: ‘We’re going to be gone this weekend’?” asked the detective. “‘Now would be a good weekend to do it’?”

  “Jason told me that he had been informed that they were not going to be there over Friday and Saturday,” said Brian.