Absolute Certainty

by Rose Connors

  “Who the hell is Sheila O’Brien?”

  Harry is moving me toward his Wrangler before I answer. “She works in accounting,” I tell him.

  “Marty, I don’t give a damn where she works. Where does she live?”

  “In Yarmouth. You drive. I think I can find it.”

  The town of Yarmouth is east of Barnstable, and in twenty minutes, we are on Sheila’s street. Her house is easy to find; her car is in the driveway and her name is on the mailbox, a single green shamrock next to it. The porch light is on. Harry bangs hard on the screen door and Sheila answers just a minute or so later in her bathrobe. “Glory be to God,” she says, “there’s trouble.”

  I push Harry to the side and open the door. “Sheila, Cara is fine. The Kydd is fine. But we need to find him. Fast. I don’t have time to explain. When do you expect them back?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, Marty. They didn’t get going until after nine. Cara, the poor thing, had to work later than expected. They went to a movie, then planned to stop for a bite to eat.”

  “What movie? When did it start?”

  My tone is making Sheila nervous. She fingers the lapel of her terry-cloth robe. “Something in Dennis,” she says. “I don’t recall the title; nothing I would enjoy. It started at ten-fifteen.”

  I hold my watch under Sheila’s porch lamp. One-thirty. The movie’s over. “Any clue where they went to eat?”

  I am beginning to feel desperate, and the look on Sheila’s face tells me it shows. “Now, there I can help, Marty. Cara’s been aching to have dinner at Claude’s since the first time she laid eyes on the place. And I’ve mentioned that fact to the Kydd more than once. I’ll bet the farm that’s where he’s taken her.”

  Claude’s Restaurant is at the mouth of Bass River, another twenty minutes south of here. Harry hands Sheila a business card with his cell phone number circled. “Everything closes at two,” he tells her. “If you see him before we do, have him call that number. It’s important.”

  “I’ll do that,” she says, turning her worried face toward me. “You be careful, Marty. I’ll say a wee prayer.”

  “Oh no, Sheila,” I tell her. “Better make it a whopper.”

  CHAPTER 54

  Cara O’Brien is drop-dead gorgeous, with a luminous complexion and jet black hair cascading to her waist. She and the Kydd are seated at a candlelit table in the window, having after-dinner brandy. Harry stops the Wrangler right in front of their window, beside the front door, but the Kydd is captivated. He wouldn’t notice if the building fell down around him.

  Harry leaves the engine running. From the passenger seat, I see him barge past the hostess without explanation and appear in the window with Cara and the Kydd. The Kydd jumps to his feet, removes his car key from his key ring, and hands it to Cara. Seconds later, he is in the back seat of the Wrangler and we are speeding through back roads toward the Barnstable District Courthouse.

  The new lock, the Kydd tells us during the drive, was not supposed to be installed until next week. Geraldine gave him a new key on Friday afternoon, along with the new alarm code, but said neither would be needed until Tuesday, at the earliest, since Monday is a hol iday. He put the key on his ring so he wouldn’t lose it. He planned to have copies made for Harry and me this weekend.

  By the time we reach the courthouse, it’s almost three o’clock, almost four hours since Angel was brought here. The Kydd unlocks the door easily. Harry and I both stand back while he enters the new code to disarm the security system. I am stung by how quickly I have become an outsider.

  The Kydd and Harry head downstairs while I unlock my office, grateful that one of my keys still works. We agreed, while driving here, that I would surf the channels to find out which cell Angel is in, rewind the film in that camera by four hours or so, and find out if we missed anything. In the meantime, Harry will head down to the cells. He has defended Angel in the past, and will claim to be on hand to represent him this time, should Angel so choose.

  Harry will identify the officers on guard duty, engage them in conversation, if possible. At the same time, the Kydd will scope out the evidence room. He is the only one of the three of us who can claim a legitimate reason to be there, though I can’t imagine what that reason would be during the small hours of Sunday morning.

  I find Angel on the second try. I assumed they would put him on one end or the other, and they did. Angel is in cell six, at the far end of the corridor. When I tune in to channel seven, I have a clear view of Angel, from overhead, on the cot in his prison-issued orange jump-suit. He’s asleep.

  The Kydd is back in my office even before I finish rewinding four hours’ worth of film. The evidence room is quiet, he reports. No one is there. The door is locked and the lights are out. He leaves and returns seconds later with two counter stools from the lunchroom. We sit side by side in front of the cabinet as the film whirls backward, taking us four hours back in time in cell six.

  Harry returns from his trip downstairs with a wealth of informa tion. Sergeants Sharkey and Kane—both seasoned veterans of the Barnstable Police Department—are seated in the dim hallway, guns in their holsters, their prisoner asleep. They told Harry all they knew about the arrest.

  It was a routine traffic stop, they said. Or at least it started that way. Angel ran a red light in the middle of Hyannis with an unmarked cruiser three cars behind. When the officer turned on the blue lights, Angel took off.

  A high-speed chase ensued, ending when Angel lost control of his car, knocked over a fire hydrant, and careened to a stop against the brick wall behind it. The hydrant rolled into the street, and a twenty-foot plume of water shot into the air. Six Barnstable squad cars called in to assist formed a semicircle around Angel’s car. He refused to get out. The water, he told them, would ruin his new outfit. By the time they extricated him, everybody was drenched.

  Angel was charged with everything from driving to endanger to destruction of public property to resisting arrest, and transported to the Barnstable police station for processing. He was not charged with murder; not then, anyway. His car was impounded and, per standard police procedure, an inventory search was conducted.

  The inventory search is, perhaps, law enforcement’s most powerful weapon. It is certainly its least publicized. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects all citizens against warrantless searches and seizures. All, that is, except those whose vehicles are impounded.

  The Supreme Court of the United States has held that a warrantless search of an impounded motor vehicle does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment. If the search is conducted according to established police procedures, and not merely as a pretext to avoid the warrant requirement, the high court has held it is perfectly legitimate. An inventory search is necessary when a car is impounded, the court rea soned, to protect the car and its contents, to protect the police against false charges of theft, and to protect the public against the possibility that weapons or contraband might fall into the hands of vandals.

  The result of the Supreme Court’s analysis is that every impounded vehicle—no matter what the reason for its impoundment—is subject to police inspection from its antennae right down to its floorboards, no warrant necessary.

  The officers taking the inventory of Angel’s car were not surprised to find it teeming with weapons. Under the seats, they found a sawed-off shotgun, a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol, and a .38-caliber revolver. In the glove compartment was a set of brass knuckles. And a butcher knife—stained—was removed from the trunk. A laundry list of weapons offenses was added to the charges against Angel. All of the weapons will be sent to the Commonwealth’s police laboratory on Tuesday for analysis.

  Angel was brought to the District Court holding cells until the magistrate on call could be located to set bail. As a practical matter, though, the officers knew Angel was in for the long haul. Given the nature of the charges against him, the magistrate would be certain to set bail at a figure far beyond anything Angel—or his cohorts
—might reach.

  It’s what the officers found here in the cell block, on Angel’s person, that brought about the murder charge. Another .38-caliber revolver, they told Harry, was strapped to the inside of Angel’s leg, unloaded. Stuck to the butt of the revolver, they said, was hair, and what looked like human skin and bone fragments.

  The revolver, they said, had been used to smash someone’s skull. And the knife confiscated from Angel’s car easily could have slit a human throat. When Angel refused to account for his whereabouts during the predawn hours of June 14, they booked him for the murder of Jacob Cahoon, Jr.

  The image of the cut through Jake Junior’s throat is clear in my mind’s eye. It was not inflicted with a butcher knife.

  Harry says he asked the officers the obvious question: If Angel had murdered Jake Cahoon on June 14, why in God’s name would he still have the weapon strapped to his leg on July 4?

  The cops just shook their heads. He murdered somebody, they told Harry; that much is certain.

  The tape is rewound. Harry and the Kydd and I stare into the wooden file cabinet, watching Angel’s arrival at cell six. He is searched, stripped, and held down by four officers while Sergeant Kane cuts the strap from his leg. The Sergeant lifts the revolver with a gloved hand and drops it into an evidence bag. Angel is searched again—all body cavities—before the orange jumpsuit is hurled at him.

  All of this is standard procedure. Angel wears an ugly look on his face throughout, but doesn’t utter a word. He has been through this before—more than once.

  The cell door clangs shut. Angel climbs into the orange jumpsuit and sits on his cot, silent. Nothing happens during the next ten minutes, and I speed up the tape. Not so fast that we can’t see what’s going on, but fast enough so that we will be able to review four hours of footage in far less than the actual time. Twice, I slow the tape to normal speed when Angel’s cell door opens. Both times it is Sergeant Sharkey, with Sergeant Kane right behind him, giving Angel the obligatory repeat opportunities to request an attorney. Angel doesn’t say a word to either of them.

  By four-fifteen, we’ve reviewed every minute of activity in cell six since Angel’s arrival. And we’ve seen nothing out of the ordinary. I switch the monitor to channel one, the evidence room, and begin rewinding that camera’s footage back to eleven o’clock—more than five hours’ worth.

  Harry, we’ve agreed, will go back down to the cell block as often as is possible without arousing suspicion, keeping an eye on the present, as Bobo described it. The Kydd will also keep an eye on the present; he’ll check the evidence room every five minutes. I will review the evidence room footage from eleven o’clock forward. As soon as I start rolling the tape, Harry and the Kydd head downstairs.

  I allow the tape to run at normal speed while Angel’s eleven o’clock arrival spurs an initial flurry of activity on the screen. The first person to appear is Sergeant Sharkey, pushing the Rodriguez crates so far to the left that they can no longer be seen through the camera’s lens. He pushes the single Malone crate against them, and it remains visible on the far left side of the screen. The Sergeant hoists up a new crate, empty, and sets it next to Malone. He doesn’t bother to label it.

  The evidence room grows still for ten minutes or so, and I fast forward through that portion. The camera’s clock tells me that Angel is being searched, stripped, and searched again during this time span. When the room grows noisy once more, I slow the tape to normal speed. Sergeants Sharkey and Kane both drop evidence bags into the crate and take turns signing off on a preprinted form on the shelf beside it, presumably accounting for every item they’ve seized from Angel.

  The contents of Angel’s car would not have been brought here. All of that will be kept at the station. But anything seized from Angel while in the holding cell should be in that crate. Each item of clothing, separately bagged; the .38-caliber, unloaded revolver; even the strap that held it to his leg. All of it will be sent out on Tuesday for analysis.

  The officers switch off the overhead lights in the evidence room and all grows quiet on my screen again. I speed up the tape. Harry returns from the cell block with nothing to report. The guards are annoyed with his small talk, he says, and he doesn’t blame them. He’ll let them alone for a few minutes.

  The Kydd returns just seconds later. The evidence room is still empty, he says, its door still locked. He sits down at my desk—technically, it is still my desk—and jots notes on a legal pad. I am glued to the monitor, running the footage fast now, since nothing is going on in the evidence room. It’s almost five o’clock. And I have already reviewed the evidence room footage from eleven to two. I am rapidly reaching the conclusion that we haven’t missed a thing. I’m glad, I guess.

  Ten minutes later, Harry and the Kydd head back downstairs. The monitor continues to show nothing, and I take the legal pad from my desk to examine the Kydd’s notes. He has divided the top sheet into three columns, one for each of the Chatham murder victims. Down the side margin, he has listed basic categories of information, home-town, school, job, number of siblings, date of birth—that sort of thing—and he has started filling in the information for each victim. He is looking for a pattern, but none appears.

  I jump up from my stool when I hear a door open. Not a real door, a door on the tape. I stop the tape and rewind just a few seconds. I have to force myself to stare at the monitor, to tear my eyes away from the Kydd’s notes. Something about them is unsettling; some visceral reaction makes me want to stare at his notes instead of the monitor.

  The camera’s clock tells me I am watching the evidence room at two-thirty, two and a half hours ago, a half hour before we got here. I hear the door open, but the lights remain out. Only the inadequate bulbs from the green hallway cast a dim illumination on the scene unfolding.

  I watch silently as a lone figure walks directly—in the dark—to Angel’s crate. I cannot see the face—the back is toward the camera— but I know who it is, even in the dark. And, during a normal work-day, there might well be a legitimate explanation.

  But not at two-thirty on Sunday morning.

  I am frozen. I watch as the faceless person on the screen takes a wide candle from an interior jacket pocket, strikes a match and lights it, and sets it on the metal shelf, creating a small circle of light in the center of the room. Two gloved hands rummage through the contents of the crate, searching for something specific. The bag holding Angel’s .38-caliber revolver is selected, and the gun is removed from the bag with the gloved left hand.

  I force myself to breathe normally. There is an explanation for this, I tell myself. The evidence is being handled properly.

  A white cloth—presumably sterile—is removed from the right pocket of the suit coat and opened on the shelf, the revolver placed on top. From the left pocket comes a compact plastic box, one that looks like a small sewing kit. It is opened to the right of the gun. An enclosed glass container, the kind we used in high school chemistry class, is removed from the breast pocket and opened to the left of Angel’s gun.

  I zoom in on the glass container. It is labeled “Cahoon, J.” I zoom out again, so I can see it all.

  The left gloved hand takes a long pair of tweezers from the plastic box and holds them up in the light of the flame. The tweezers pluck material from the glass jar and plant it on the butt of the revolver, pressing it hard into the other human material already stuck there. I stop the tape, rewind a few seconds, and zoom in on the butt of the gun. I watch the whole procedure again, this time close up.

  My hands are planted on the stool in front of me. The room is spinning. I can’t swallow. I have to force myself to breathe.

  Angelo Santini has just been framed.

  CHAPTER 55

  Harry and the Kydd are running after me, calling my name, pleading with me to wait, but I can’t. I back the Thunderbird out from behind the courthouse and slam the accelerator to the floor. I grab my cell phone, call the Chatham station house and tell the sergeant in charge everything I can,
as fast as I can. The sergeant patches me through to Tommy Fitzpatrick at home and I shout the information all over again. I dial 911 and use what feels like the last of my breath to alert the state dispatcher. Finally, I try Rob Mendell’s house. I hear what I knew I would hear—the automated voice of the answering service.

  The first hint of daylight is in front of me as I turn east on two wheels out of the county parking lot. A county van—one of the half dozen I parked behind—pulls out immediately after me. The streets are empty. Within minutes, I have the old Thunderbird doing ninety. The county van stays on my tail.

  I had barely digested what I saw on the screen when I realized what was missing from the Kydd’s notes. He had written the category at the top of the page, next to the “date of birth” column. But he hadn’t filled in the numbers yet.

  For minutes, it seemed, I could not process my own thoughts. My brain could not grasp what my stomach already knew. Amid all the gruesome patterns we’ve seen in these Chatham homicides, there is yet another. It is one we all missed, until moments ago, when the Kydd led us to it—almost.

  With all of my being I will it to be a mistake, not a pattern at all, just a random string of numbers attached to a random string of murders. But I filled in the blanks myself. I filled in the numbers in the column the Kydd had labeled “date of birth.”

  Michael Scott was twenty years old when he was murdered.

  Skippy Eldridge was nineteen.

  Jake Junior was eighteen.

  If this is, in fact, a pattern, then the next victim, today’s victim, will be seventeen years old.

  Two boys lie sleeping at this very moment in Rob Mendell’s house. Both just turned seventeen.

  And today is the Fourth of July, America’s Birthday.

  God forgive me. I pray it will be Justin.