“I know. Laura Coleman.”
“That’s right! Laura Coleman. She really needs that evidence, Derek.”
“Have you got a written request?”
“Derek, Derek. Don’t waste time. I know William Hench filed the paperwork. First you said you couldn’t find it. Then you said it was destroyed. You can whisper to me, very softly, that you just don’t give a shit and didn’t bother to look for it.”
“That’s not it,” he said.
“Then what is it?” I asked.
“Why do you care about what happens to one man on death row?”
“I don’t, actually. I just don’t like a good person like Laura Coleman to get the runaround from someone like you. It goes against my sense of justice.”
“That hair dryer won’t tell you anything you don’t already know. It won’t change anything. He’s going to die.”
“Look for it. Evidence storehouses are big, but this one isn’t that big. And it’s not like there are vans filled with stuff waiting for you to check in. It’s Indian River, for God’s sake.”
“What if I say no?”
“Well, then we talk about another issue, don’t we?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Yes, I would.”
“You realize if I go down, you go down.”
“Shh. Don’t even talk about it when we’re alone. Derek, I’m sixty years old, and I’ve been living in a gray zone for most of my life. Maybe it’s time I went down for something. Maybe it’s time I stopped trying to outrun my past. Maybe it’s time for both of us.”
Derek took one of those gulps where you try not to look like you’re gulping so the other person knows just how nervous you are. His Adam’s apple, always a little more prominent than most, bobbled. He knew if I talked it wouldn’t just mean losing his stupid job so he couldn’t play video games during the day. It would mean prison time.
“They don’t want it found,” he said.
“Who doesn’t? The state’s attorney because it will cause too much trouble and his caseload is already full? Or the appellate judge who just rubber-stamped the death warrant? Is it laziness, incompetence, or something worse? Or does it even matter who told you to stonewall? Personally, I couldn’t care less.”
“They’ll give me a hard time.”
“They can’t touch you. They wouldn’t dare. Now me, I can touch you. Hard. I made sure to keep my own chain of custody on our little project just in case we ever came to this point. And we’re here.”
“I’ll look for it,” he said.
“I don’t see you looking for it. I see you just standing there.” I looked at my watch. “When do you expect to find the evidence, Derek? Should I wait, or should I come back in, let’s say, an hour?”
“Give me two,” he said, pretending that he had to search that hard.
I let him hold on to this shred of his dignity. That’s how you forge good relationships. “Great. See you in a bit, but call me if you find it sooner.”
I gave Derek my cell phone number, left the facility. Now for the third person on my list.
Sixteen
FROM THE DIRECT EXAMINATION OF DETECTIVE GABRIEL DELGADO BY ATTORNEY LANCER
Q: Did you detect evidence of any foul play regarding the children? Overturned tables, bedsheets dragged onto the floor.
A: None of that. The bedclothes were rumpled, but you couldn’t tell if they were slept in that night, or if the kids just never made their beds. If they were at home, the children seem to have come downstairs and left the house under their own steam. It appeared if there was an adult present at the time, they trusted him.
Q: And when did you begin to be suspicious of the defendant?
A: Almost immediately. I sat him down and questioned him about his activities in the hours preceding the death of his wife and disappearance of his children.
Q: Is this kind of questioning typical?
A: Oh. Yes. You know—
Q: For the sake of the jury …
A: In so many cases where there’s a suspicion of foul play in a death investigation, in the great majority of cases the killer is known to the victim. I asked Mr. Creighton why he had been out of the house. He said he had returned from a business trip to Miami. I asked him what the business was, and he got cagey.
Q: Cagey?
By Attorney Croft: Objection.
The Court: Can you use another word?
A: Evasive, I mean. He didn’t want to tell me what the business was.
The building was on Fiddlewood Road, off the main drag to keep it more discreet because in Vero no one wanted to think about crime unless they had to. The building blended cunningly with the old Florida style of the rest of the city, white shutters accenting pastel yellow walls. A small sign whispered that this was the Vero Beach Police Department.
I parked in a visitor’s parking space and walked inside to a tasteful lobby.
“I’m here to see Gabriel Delgado,” I said to the receptionist, who, in a thick polyester long-sleeved shirt, forest green, large, that fought against her curves and barely won, was clearly not Very Very Vero.
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked.
“Is he here?” I smiled.
In an effort to preserve the small-town goshness, there was nothing for her to do but smile back. For all she knew I was rich, and the rich needed to be treated just so.
“Yes, he is,” she said through her smile.
I handed her my card.
She took it and disappeared down a short hallway. I heard her knock on a closed door and enter. She came out again quickly, followed so closely by an older than middle-aged man, I knew he would have gotten a thrill if she stopped fast.
She managed to get out of the way in time, and he stopped on a dime in front of me as he said, “Brigid Quinn. To what do we owe the honor of your visit in our humble township?”
Obvious from the start how he was able to keep his job. He was smarmy. But it would have been unnecessary, he was that hot. Yes, yes, yes, I know I said older than middle-aged, and that should eliminate the possibility of hotness in some younger minds out there, but this guy was hot. You know the classic image of the arrogant bullfighter? Black hair combed back? Body sleek and powerful as a whip? That.
I imagined lonely Vero housewives staging home burglaries just so he’d come over and dust for prints on their underwear drawer. Breaking a window at the back of the house. Calling him. Coming to the door breathless wrapped in a towel when he knocked. “I’m sorry, Detective Delgado, I never dreamed you’d come this fast! Do you always come this fast?” And blushing, “I mean, I mean … I’ll be in the bedroom just over there getting dressed. The window is there. I don’t see anything missing, so maybe it was just vandalism.”
Hey, my sexual development was influenced by watching Peyton Place, many decades before Real Housewives. Feeling a little visceral flutter, I admit I stopped to take a breath before I spoke. “I know you’re probably swamped, but may I have just a teeny moment of your time?” I asked, matching his southern gallantry.
He stepped aside and put out his hand with an ever so small bow to show me back to his office. I felt a little thrill going through the door as if it led to his bedroom, and simultaneously wanted to hide my wedding band and show it. Other women my age feel like this, right?
He shut the door.
He gestured me to a not-uncomfortable chair in front of his desk and, instead of going around to the back of the desk, turned another chair to face me. He crossed his legs, leaned back with his elbows on the arms of his chair, and made a confident steeple of his fingertips.
“You actually do know why I’m here, don’t you?” I said.
“Of course I do,” he admitted, bobbing his head to the side to deprecate his former pretense. “Madeline and I are very old friends. She called and told me to expect you. But that doesn’t mean I’m not excited to meet you. I only regret I never got to work with you.”
“Not a lot happens in Vero Be
ach, I imagine.”
“This is true. So when you begin asking me what I remember about the Creighton family murder, you’ll find I remember everything to the last detail. It was not a terribly grisly case, no mutilation or decomposition. Just an electrocuted woman in a bathtub and three missing children. But when a man wipes out his family it makes national headlines. I was interviewed many times. Going over the information again and again is part of the reason I remember it all, I suppose.”
“It was an easy case, apparently.”
“Ah yes, I think I’m on record for closing a murder case in the quickest amount of time. I took Marcus Creighton in for interrogation the morning after the murders, when Shayna Murry blew his alibi. He was so stunned by her not lying for him, he couldn’t offer any other. I arrested him on the spot, even before the forensic evidence came back with his fingerprint on the hair dryer that killed his wife. The thing I regret the most is that he hid the bodies of the children so quickly and so well we were never able to find them. This haunts more than one of us who was involved.”
“Was he offered a deal?”
“Life without parole if he led us to the children.”
“But he didn’t take it.”
“He insisted he didn’t know. He was hoping for an acquittal based on the lack of bodies, or at least for less than a life sentence. That’s what his attorney advised.”
I said, “I suppose Shayna Murry’s testimony did it more than anything. That call she reported from him, ‘If anyone asks tell them I was with you.’”
“That’s right. You and I both know trials are won on the strength of feeling more than fact. What the jury heard was that men should never put too much trust in a woman’s love. That was the evidence.” He stopped to convey with his eyes a second of sadness for a lost romance, then shifted back. His timing was superb.
“Did you ever consider that Shayna Murry could have been an accessory if not an accomplice?”
“If it was anyone else but Shayna Murry I might consider it.”
“Why not her?”
“Do you know anything at all about her?”
“I haven’t met her.”
Delgado shook his head. “You know runaway kids? Well, that time it was the parents. Her no-good parents ran away from home when Shayna and her brother were in their teens. They left them five hundred dollars in cash and that little house that Shayna still lives in.”
“Okay, hard-knock life, sorry for her, et cetera. But just stick with me on this. Shayna Murry as accomplice.”
“And then chickened out and made herself appear oblivious to Creighton’s plan? Okay, could happen. But if she could countenance doing such a thing in the first place, she would have been strong enough to keep up the lie. The reward would have been great. She could have simply moved in and taken over the life Kathleen Melissa Creighton had not appreciated. Instead she lost everything. If you only saw her now…”
“Why do you say Kathleen Creighton had not appreciated her life?”
“I think she was an unhappy, or at least dissatisfied, woman. She knew her husband was having an affair.” He glanced away. “At least this is what her friends reported.”
He even remembered the victim’s full name after all these years. Did he lick his lips when he said it? “Did Kathleen Creighton ever have you investigate a burglary?” I asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Oh, nothing.” And then in the same casual tone, slipping it in to catch him off guard, I said, “Did you pressure Tracy Mack into calling that fingerprint on the hair dryer a match to Creighton?”
In a millisecond his expression flew open and shut. He managed to keep his mild accent, though the steeple he had maintained throughout our conversation fell from his fingertips. He tried not to rush the questions. “Why would you ask that? Have you spoken with him? Did he tell you that?”
“Yes and no,” I reassured him. “He didn’t mention you at all.”
Seventeen
Partly to kill time until I knew whether I’d need round two with Derek Evers, but also on the slight chance that I had a better shot at Shayna than Laura had, I drove the short distance to Cracker’s Café.
Sebastian, Vero Beach’s lower-middle-class neighbor, nestled unapologetically, almost with a smirk, beside the wealthier enclave. This area was more of the Florida Keys flavor, waterfront restaurants with names like Squid Lips, and ice-cream parlors housed in crumbling cottages, their strawberry aroma blending in the humid air with the smell of the fish house next door.
Cracker’s Café was on the main drag. Like the rest of the town it expressed a reverse snobbism. A sign outside said FOR FINE DINING, GO ELSEWHERE. A Ford pickup, more rust than red, was parked outside in a lot with faded parking stripes. Maybe an early eighties model, it could have rated as a classic if it got the respect it deserved. Cracker’s was the kind of place that has several kinds of pie made on the premises and stacked on a stand under a clear plastic dome. Oh, and a counter with vinyl-topped aluminum stools.
The way you could tell the place wasn’t just your generic diner was the decorations. At least a dozen whips hung on the walls, some looped and some extended almost to their limits. Dark leather on dark walls.
The lunch rush must have been over. Only one booth taken, a middle-aged man and woman who munched in relative silence. At the counter a tall scruffy guy argued mildly with a shorter scruffy guy on the other side. The taller one looked youngish or middle-aged, depending on how old you are. The shorter guy was definitely a geezer. The argument was over money, but it sounded like one they had often, and both already knew the outcome.
Instead of a booth I chose a table where I could view the entire place as well as the front door. Covering the table was a plastic cloth with sunflowers and roosters on it. I rested my elbows on it and then drew them away because the tablecloth had that sticky feel and smell of one that’s been washed recently with a stinky dishrag.
The couple watched me with interest as if I was the floor show. The two guys arguing, which included the words “mahi” and “yahoo” at intervals, ignored me.
I waved at the couple. They quickly looked down at their sandwiches.
The waitress approached, and I got my first look at the woman who destroyed Marcus Creighton.
Shayna (as her name tag said) was petite to the point of being elfin in both form and feature. She was the sort of woman who you suspect might be attractive to certain men who’ve denied something taboo deep in their subconscious. Was Marcus Creighton one of these men?
“Coffee?” she asked, lifting the carafe she carried.
“Lovely,” I said. “What kind of pie do you recommend?”
“The cherry is good.”
“What else?”
She looked at the stand on the counter, squinted to see better. “Peach and pecan.”
“Is it fresh peaches or canned?”
She looked at me like I had a smudge on my nose. “Fresh. Straight from Georgia.”
I bobbed my head in a quick nod. She wrote that down and went back to the counter, not bothering the geezer for the order but getting one of those thick white plates out, lifting the plastic cover from the pie stand, and easing a piece of peach out of the top tier. She brought it back to me by the time I had added cream and a little packet of fake sugar to my coffee.
“What’s with the whips?” I asked, waving my hand across the walls. “I haven’t seen anything like this since 50 Shades.”
She snickered at that, apparently accustomed to satisfying tourists spilling over from the more popular attractions several hours west to Orlando. “It goes with the name of the place, Cracker’s. That was what they called the herders in Florida because of the sound their whips made. That was in the early twentieth century when most of Florida was agricultural. Sam has quite a collection.”
“Ah, thanks.” While she was talking, I observed more than listened. The premature stoop of her shoulders matched by the sag in her face suggested that she was still w
eighed down by the burden of Creighton’s conviction, not to mention the fact that she was the killer’s mistress, the woman who had seduced him to violence, the destroyer of a family.
And one of the victims.
It would have been a big load for anyone to carry, but for this tiny creature it seemed especially hard. She had wanted to be an artist; maybe she even thought her involvement with Creighton would give her some level of celebrity. But in the end her bad decision on a boyfriend had made her nothing but a waitress in a backwater café. Whatever her motivation at the time, she couldn’t have foreseen what it would be like to live maybe another half century with drudgery, remorse, and guilt. Life is so much longer than it seems when you’re twenty-nine.
I had been ready to see an opportunistic parasite. Instead I felt bad for the little thing. I pushed on her anyway because that’s what I do.
“By the way, Shayna. I heard Marcus Creighton will be executed in four days. How do you feel about that?”
It had been a long time since I’d felt this much tension associated with a piece of pie. The rest of the people in the room caught the feeling, too, as if they were like those aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a single organism with identical reactions, or something creepy like that. I exaggerate; it was just that everyone in a town this size knew each other and their history.
Shayna didn’t respond, only shot a look that looked like a warning toward the counter. When I looked in that direction, too, I saw both the scruffy guys looking at me. Without saying anything, Shayna disappeared down a hall with a sign over it that said REST ROOMS, where I assumed she was going to try to pull herself together and process the news I’d given her.
While I waited, the older woman in the booth across the way looked at me with a sour little smirk that said I was in for it now. The two men who had been arguing at the counter arrived at my table and pulled out chairs on either side of me. Looked like we were going small-town noir.
My phone rang, but I gestured to the chairs, letting the gentlemen know they were welcome to join me though they had not asked. Attentive to them, I snapped the phone open without looking at the caller. Let everyone here wonder if this call was about Creighton.
A Twist of the Knife Page 10