How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  FBI Confession Expert Charged Innocent People with Murder

  Families Struggle After False Confession Exposed

  The good news was that his colleagues in Montana either weren’t aware of the case or didn’t give a damn. They had thousands of square miles to cover and no shortage of investigations—there was real estate fraud, regulatory fraud, and all flavors of embezzlement; there were interstate opioid traffickers, motorcycle gangs, and militias. The Wild West had not quite been tamed. He tried to throw himself into the work. Give it time, Roxanne Donovan had said, and he was trying his best to do that.

  Then, five weeks after her release, Kimberly Crepeaux called.

  Barrett was driving through the flatlands between Billings and the Beartooth Mountains en route to interview a high-school student who’d been making repeated bomb threats to the sheriff’s department, which was interesting because the sheriff was his uncle. Then the phone rang and he saw the 207 area code, which covered the entire state of Maine, and his mind was out of the mountains and back on the coast.

  He let the call go to voice mail, then played the message.

  “Barrett, it’s Kimberly Crepeaux. I wanted to ask you about something. You’re not the right person but I gotta figure out who the right person is.” Her voice was shaking and slurred. It was evident that she’d been drinking and that she was scared.

  “Nobody believes me, and nobody cares,” she said. “Call me back, please.”

  He didn’t call back. He’d already been taken for a long and painful ride by Kimberly. He knew better than to give her another chance.

  She called again two weeks later, and again he didn’t take the call but listened to the message.

  She was sober this time, and she had clearer requests. She demanded compensation for the way she’d been badgered and intimidated and coerced by the FBI—by him, specifically—and in exchange, he would avoid a “big-ass lawsuit.”

  All she wanted, she said, was a decent house and a decent job someplace warm. Oh, and ideally the house would have a fence. She’d like to bring her dogs, and Sparky and Bama needed room to run.

  He did not return that call either.

  In March, a blizzard swept down out of Canada and blasted Bozeman for three straight days, a howling, relentless wind that seemed determined to peel the houses right off their foundations. It was during the worst of the storm that Howard Pelletier called, and Barrett never saw the number, just received the message once his signal was back.

  Howard wanted to tell him that he thought people were wrong about Girard and that maybe Barrett had been right the whole time.

  For an instant, this was a whisper of validation for the theory that Barrett had never been able to clear completely from his mind. Then Howard explained his reasoning.

  He’d had a dream, he told Barrett. In the dream Jackie was in the water, not a trash bag or a barrel, she was down in the water and the water was still, not like the ocean but more like a pond. She was down in the weeds and even the tops of the weeds didn’t move, so Howard knew that it was calm, inland water. A fish had passed by in a flicker of white belly and dark spine, and he was sure that it was a smallmouth bass and not a saltwater fish. Jackie’s eyes were wide and alert, and right before Howard woke up, she’d opened her mouth to speak to him but only bubbles came out.

  “I’m thinkin’ maybe you were right all along,” Howard said. “Maybe she was down there, and then he moved her.”

  That night Barrett walked to a bar and drank bourbon with beer chasers until the floor was unsteady beneath his feet, and then he stumbled back home through the drifting, blowing snow and fell asleep on the living-room floor, still wearing his boots and his jacket. In the morning, he threw up, chewed Excedrin, and went back to work.

  He did not call Howard Pelletier.

  The snow had melted and spring rains fell and then burned off beneath an ever-warming sun before he heard from Maine again.

  First, it was Kimberly.

  “Barrett, I don’t blame you for not wanting to talk to me, but…he’s gonna come for me. He’s angry because I told the truth, and he’s gonna kill me for it.” She was crying, her voice low and choked with tears. “If you could just…if there’s anybody who could help me out here, I really need it. I really need some help.”

  He didn’t call her back, but this time he made a recording of the message so it couldn’t be deleted or lost.

  For three nights after Kimberly’s call, he played her message back, listening to the panic in her voice and wondering whether there was any legitimacy to it, then cursing himself for being fool enough to let her words drag him back in.

  On the fourth night, he found himself playing old recordings of their early interviews. Only the first rounds; he couldn’t listen to the confession again. Not to her coersed words. Not yet, at least.

  Then, on the fifth night, Liz called.

  “Kimmy Crepeaux was arrested yesterday,” she said. “Up in Bangor. She tried to buy heroin from a police informant.”

  He felt strangely pleased by this report, because if Kimberly was using again, then he could dismiss all her paranoia as a product of the drugs.

  “I’d love to say I’m surprised,” he said. “But I know better by now.”

  Liz went silent. Where he’d expected agreement, there was only a pregnant pause.

  “What?” he said.

  “She’s out on bail.”

  “Of course she is. Her grandmother will go bankrupt getting her out of jail. She probably has a reverse mortgage on the house by now or some high-interest line of credit with a bondsman.”

  “Her grandmother didn’t bail her out,” Liz said. “That’s why I’m calling. I thought you’d want to know who put up the money to get her out of jail.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Howard Pelletier.”

  21

  He returned to Maine on the first weekend of May.

  By the time he reached the Port Hope Road it was just after midnight and the wind was cold and the moonlight choked by clouds. When he was a boy, the Port Hope Road had been a name that amused him as he sought to get his bearings and learned that inevitably the main thoroughfare to any of the little villages would bear the name of the village. The locals had a habit of putting the in front of each name, as if to differentiate the road from the town. How to get to Camden? Head north on the Camden Road. Which way to Searsmont? Take a left on the Searsmont Road. The naming of the roads to match the towns was a distinctly Mainer trait—practical and unpretentious, no need for creativity when the landscape was so creative on its own.

  The Port Hope Road either began in Port Hope or ended there, depending on which way you were headed.

  On this night he headed northwest along the peninsula, the bay visible at points, dark pines filling the gaps, and two miles outside of town, out of sight of the water but still smelling of the sea, stood a house with shake-shingle siding and a detached garage. In front of the garage a flatbed trailer was parked, stacked eight feet high with lobster traps. The traps were green; the buoys piled beside them were a yellow so vibrant they returned the glare of Barrett’s headlights when he pulled in. He shut off the car but the buoys seemed to hold the glow, an ethereal mass of light in his peripheral vision, like an aura.

  The door to the garage opened and a silhouette joined him in the darkness.

  “Go back to your car,” Howard Pelletier said.

  Barrett stopped walking. “Pardon?”

  “Pull her in the garage so I can put the door down. Ain’t many people passing by this time of night, but those who do will notice your car, and remember it.”

  Barrett went back to his car and kept the headlights off when he started the engine and waited for one of the overhead doors to go up. Then he drove into Howard’s garage. The door was already going back down by the time he stepped out of the car, closing behind him like sealed lips.

  “Anybody seen you?” Howard asked.

  “Not yet. But they wil
l.”

  “Ayuh, and they’ll be talking soon as they do.”

  The garage had three bays and a large workshop with a woodstove and a homemade drafting table where Howard had once sketched out designs for his daughter’s studio on Little Spruce Island.

  Howard sat on a stool beside a pile of mangled lobster traps. He’d been mending them, bending and tightening wire and replacing torn lines until the traps were functional again. When they were done, he would offer them back to the sea, where they would gradually be thrashed out of commission again, and then brought back into the garage. This was the constant cycle of a lobsterman: tend and mend, tend and mend.

  Barrett sat on a low wooden bench and turned so that he wasn’t facing the drafting table because he did not like the memories of Howard proudly showing him various designs and asking for his thoughts on what Jackie would think of the place when she came home.

  He’d called Howard from the Portland airport to tell him he was on his way. That was all he’d said. The rest he’d wanted to discuss in person. He wanted to see the man, not just hear his words. He’d taken two weeks of personal leave for what he’d described to his SAC as a family problem. At this point, the only person in the world who knew that he’d flown to Maine was sitting across from him.

  “Tell me why you bailed Kimberly out,” Barrett said.

  Howard nodded without any trace of surprise at Barrett’s knowledge of this event. He’d lost weight since Barrett had last seen him, maybe fifteen pounds. His hair was hidden by a camouflage Cabela’s cap, but there was more gray in his beard than Barrett remembered, and it was thicker and more unkempt.

  “Sure, that’s what brought you back,” he said. “I didn’t know whether you were still payin’ any attention. Figured if you were, that would make you sit up straight. I guess I figured right too.”

  “Why’d you bail her out, Howard?”

  “Because she isn’t a liar.” Howard’s jaw was set, and his gaze never wavered.

  “What about Girard?” Barrett said. “The truck, the blood evidence, the overlap with Girard and Ian and Jackie, the—”

  “That don’t mean there’s nothing else to it!” Howard cut in. “Nobody asks questions anymore. I’m just supposed to believe everyone got it right. For a time I was okay with that, I was getting by believing the right man was dead. But then…” He shifted and sucked in a shallow breath through his teeth. “Then she came to see me.”

  “Kimberly?”

  “Yes. One night there’s a knock on my door, and I open it and she’s standing out there and she starts crying before she says a word. I figured she’s come to say she was sorry for lyin’, you know, and I figured her grandmother had put her up to that, but what she said was…”

  His voice went hoarse and he had to stop and clear his throat.

  “What she said was I want you to know that she was dead before I ever touched her, Mr. Pelletier.”

  He wiped his eye with a thick, gnarled thumb. “If I said anything to her, I don’t remember what it was. I think I was just standing there. Then she told me that she…that she only stabbed Ian, not Jackie. We only used the knife on Ian. That’s how she said it. Talking about all three of them, just the way she’d told it to you.

  “And then I started getting angry. I mean, here’s this cruel little lyin’ bitch standing on my doorstep and starting back in with the same story I’d been trying to put out of my mind, you know? So I shouted and swore and she just stood there and took it. She was crying all the while, but she took it. She’s just a little thing, but she don’t so much as flinch when you come at her.”

  This time he used his whole hand to wipe his eyes, and it took him a few seconds to get his breathing steady.

  “When I’d burned myself out, she said, I told Barrett the truth. I thought it was over, because I told him the truth. And somehow, I found myself…found myself inviting her into the house. Kimmy Crepeaux, who said she put my baby girl in plastic and sank her in a pond, and I brought her into my home.” He shook his head as if he still couldn’t fathom why he’d made that choice. “I said, Tell me what happened. No more lies, just tell me the truth, for once, tell someone the fuckin’ truth!”

  He shouted the last words, then gathered himself and looked up at Barrett, and when he spoke again his voice was soft.

  “She gave me the same story she gave you. If she got a single word different, I don’t know what it was. She sat at my kitchen table and told me how she’d been there when my daughter was killed, and how she’d helped hide the body, how she’d stabbed Ian, and how she’d lied. And I…I believed her.”

  Barrett leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees, keeping calm, while Howard watched him with what looked like hunger.

  “You believed her too,” Howard said.

  “Yes, I did, once. But the evidence—”

  “You’re supposed to be the best at it too. Colleen Davis told me that. Don Johansson said the same. Everyone did. You were sent here because you’d know who was lying and who was telling the truth.”

  It was why he’d been sent here, yes.

  “I remember the day you came out to the island to tell me the story,” Howard said. “I didn’t want to believe you that day. But I came around. Then it all went to hell, and I was trying to get back to believing something new, but Kimmy showed up and…” He shook his head. “Agent Barrett? I believe her.”

  Barrett heard himself say, “I do too.” He hadn’t wanted to say it, but the words left his lips as if pulled forth by some force beyond his control.

  “I knew you did,” Howard said triumphantly. “I knew you still did. I don’t hate her, not anymore. Do I hate what she did and how long she stayed silent? Of course. But she was scared. That ain’t so hard to understand. Then she did what was right, she finally told the truth, and that got her nothing. Got her in a worse position, really. But what reason does she have to lie now? Not a soul around here will hire her, and she’s got the little girl to raise too. A daughter of her own. So she needs cash, and I got Jackie’s life insurance—you think I can touch that money? Ain’t no way in hell I can touch that money. What am I going to buy with that? The only thing I want in this life, I can’t ever have back. But for the truth? I’d pay plenty for the truth.”

  “She’s not going to be able to get it for you, Howard.”

  “Then help her. I’ll pay you.”

  “I’m not taking your money.”

  “She needs help,” Howard Pelletier said plaintively. “Police here don’t trust her. But if anyone listened, I think maybe she can prove what he did. What she did.”

  “Have you asked the police to talk to her again? Johansson or Broward?”

  “They don’t want to hear it! To them it’s done, and Kimmy’s like…she’s like a cancer. She walks down the sidewalk and people cross the street to avoid her. They watch and they whisper, but nobody talks to her, and if they did, they wouldn’t believe a word she said.”

  He leaned forward and grasped Barrett’s shoulder with a grip so fierce, his tendons bunched.

  “I see Mathias Burke every week. It’s a small town; I can’t help but cross his path. I see him buying groceries, see him going into the Harpoon, see him at the lumberyard or the wharf, or I pass him on the road. I watch people shake his hand, I hear people share their friggin’ sympathy with him, talking about what he went through, and I…I think he might’ve done it. Agent Barrett? I don’t know how much longer I can go like that. It’s a lot to hold up against, seeing him and wondering.”

  It was cool in the garage but a few beads of sweat lined the creases in his forehead, and his eyes looked feverish.

  “Can’t you listen to her at least?” he asked. “Can’t you do that much?”

  “I already have, Howard.” Barrett had trouble getting the words out, because the intensity of Howard’s eyes and his grip felt like an anchor pulling him down into a deep and troubled sea. “Listening to her cost me dearly. Cost you dearly, cost us all.”
r />   “One more time,” Howard said. “What’s the harm in that?”

  There was plenty of harm in it, but Barrett found himself nodding instead of objecting.

  “One more time,” he echoed, his voice little more than a whisper. “I’ll listen one more time.”

  Howard released his shoulder and exhaled in a way that came more from the soul than the lungs.

  “Thank you. I can run you out to see her tomorrow.”

  “I’ll need to be alone. When I see her again, when I listen to her again, I cannot have someone else with me. That’s a deal breaker to me, Howard.”

  “That’s fine. Can you run a boat?”

  Barrett cocked his head. “Yes, but why do I need to? Where is she?”

  “The island.”

  The garage seemed to chill another ten degrees. Barrett stared at him. “She’s staying in Jackie’s place? You let her stay in—”

  “No!” Howard snapped. “She’s staying in the cottage. The studio is locked. That’ll stay locked too. But she needed to get away from Port Hope. So I took her out there and put her up and told her to just…just lay low for a bit, right? Until we could get someone to listen. Get you to listen.”

  Two distinct realizations came at Barrett like rolling swells: the depth of anguish that would allow Howard Pelletier to turn his daughter’s sacred cottage over to the very woman who’d confessed to hiding her bloodied and broken body, and the depth of conviction he must have in her words.

  “I’ll go see her tomorrow morning,” Barrett said.

  “Good. I’ll leave my skiff at the public landing. It’s a little thing, but it’ll make it to the island in calm water.”

  Barrett nodded and stood. He’d flown out of Bozeman at noon and he should have been feeling the fatigue and the jet lag but instead there seemed to be a fresh, kinetic energy in his blood, his nerves sparking like live wires.

  A mistake, he thought, this is a terrible mistake, but then Howard Pelletier grasped his hand and said, “I’m glad you came back,” and when Barrett said, “Me too,” he knew that he’d never spoken more honest words.