“No. I did not. I can show you every last one of my tools, and I can match them with receipts. You go out and find the real criminal,” Kyle yelled. “Get me out of here. You have no grounds to keep me.”
Barger stared at him, cold and hard. Like any suspect, the more often Kyle says ‘I didn’t do it’, the more difficult it will be to get a confession. Once guilt is flat-out denied, he would have to stop him from talking to keep him from asking for a lawyer. The suspect had already given his reasons why he couldn’t have committed the crime. The next step was to reinforce sincerity to ensure that the suspect is receptive, to start all over again.
To hell with it, Barger wanted to go home. Every inch of his body twinged. His shoes choked his feet. His eyelids felt like sandpaper against his eyes. He could keep Kyle for 48 hours, but he wanted a blood sample now. Without that, forensics couldn’t match the unidentified blood they’d found at the scene. He couldn’t force Kyle to give one, not unless he arrested him. But there wasn’t enough evidence, not even for a misdemeanor—if Kyle had only pushed his wife, even just a little. Barger knew that once he initiated a court order, it would take more time today than he was willing to sacrifice.
“You must have cut your hand pretty bad. Did you get stitches?”
“No.” Kyle sat on the edge of his chair, gripping the seat of it as if he was going to throw it across the room, staring at Barger.
Barger returned the stare at first, then he softened his stance. “I’d like our doctor to look at that. It might be infected.”
“There’s no need for that. I want to go home.”
“You know, I could hold you for 48 hours. Tell you what, I want to go home, you want to go home. Let someone check that out and I’ll let you go. I don’t want to be responsible for you ending up with a stump.”
“. . . fine. Just get me out of here.”
Barger tossed back an ice chip, abruptly got up, and left the room.
“I can’t stand to look at him anymore.” Barger said to the rookie, Yarnolf, a masculine woman with a disheveled appearance. Barger had told her to watch from the mirrored window this time. “There’s no fingerprints, no one saw him there. Have him sign a medical release, look in the bottom drawer of the third file cabinet. Then go up to the fifth floor and tell forensics to doctor up his hand. Doc should be able to use the blood on the bandage. Maybe get a little blood sample in the pretense of cleaning it out, or . . . . I don’t know. Figure something out. I’m going home . . . .” Barger’s voice trailed off as he walked away.
Chapter 27
Staying at Sam and Marie’s house, Julie came to the door. “Go away!” she yelled from inside the closed door. She could hear Marie arguing with Sam to mind his own business.
“Julie, answer the door!” Kyle yelled through Marie’s front door, from the porch, pounding his fist. “Please, open the door. You don’t understand.” He’d rung the doorbell a dozen times and had pounded on the door a dozen more.
“Open the door, Julie. Please,” he pleaded.
“Stop it. Sam and Marie are upset enough,” Julie yelled through the door.
“I can’t stop. You have to listen to me,” Kyle pleaded again.
Julie swung the door open. Every nerve in her body on edge, she would not be afraid, not outwardly. “You killed him. You actually killed him. Why aren’t you in jail?”
Kyle stepped inside. The door closed behind him. “Julie, you can’t really believe that.” He reached out to her, touching her arm, but she jerked away.
“You can fuck yourself all the way to hell and back,” Julie shouted.
“Come on, don’t be like that.”
“You said you’re going to kill ‘the son of a bitch’ and now he’s dead. How could they let you go? Are they idiots? Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“Julie, I . . . .”
“No! We’re done. I’m not going home with a murderer.”
“I’m not a murderer. You have to believe me.” Kyle said, his eyes piercing through hers.
Julie rubbed her face in her hands. “Just go home. I’ve had enough. Just leave me alone.”
“Listen to me. Please. There’s a reason I’ve been upset. The jobs, the foreman I hired, this last developer, it’s all been torture. Then I find out I’ve been buying bad cement.” The tone in Kyle’s voice turned harsh, the tone she knew so well. “Those last jobs,” he said, “the cement crumbled and now the property owners are threatening to sue me. We could lose the house.”
Julie quieted down, a realization hitting her. It was always something, his excuses for bad behavior, bombs he would drop whenever his temper flared. She wouldn’t fall for it this time, not when he was using it to justify a killing. “I can’t believe you’re bringing all this up now. Not after you killed that man.”
“You know me, Julie. You know I say things I don’t mean. How could you even think I could kill anyone?” He looked so believable, standing there, sincerity in his eyes.
Julie felt herself tensing, blindly staring at a tear in the flowered wallpaper. She suppressed the layer of guilt.
Kyle must have seen he was losing her. He softened his voice. “I’m not kidding. I was so upset today I wanted to drive my truck off the interstate bridge.”
There was a long silence. Kyle’s gaze settled on an umbrella stand. Julie watched her own foot tap in slow motion. She wanted to wake up from this nightmare. She wanted to have her boys back home. She wanted a normal life.
“You have to leave now,” Julie said softly, her hand on the doorknob.
“How can you be like this? I thought he was going to hurt you . . . . I brought you roses today.”
She hesitated. “What did the police say? Why did they let you go?”
“It was just a coincidence, that’s all. I went there but he never came to the door. Nothing happened. You’ve got to believe me. Come home, Julie. It’ll be different this time. I’ll do anything.”
Julie took an exhausted breath. He had risked everything to protect her. He could have gone to jail. Maybe he really was sorry. He’d kissed her last night. Maybe he really did love her.
“Come on, go get your things,” he said softly, touching her face, resting his palm upon her cheek. “You know in your heart it wasn’t me. Trust your gut. Come on home.”
Julie opened her mouth to speak. She heard the sound of ‘O’ flooding the sound of ‘kay’ as the word “Okay” slipped off her tongue—almost like someone else had said it. She searched his eyes, his warm blue eyes.
Kyle retorted, “I can’t believe you said fuck.”
She paused, picking the last of her wits off the floor. Why couldn’t she have been psychotic just once? A couple of maggots wouldn’t have killed him.
Chapter 28
“Are you Kyle Zourenger?” a police officer asked. Kyle looked up from his trowelling position smack dab in the middle of wet cement. Five more officers rushed in from police cars, guns drawn.
“Yeah . . . .” His face sullen, Kyle stood up. The rest of his crew stopped what they were doing, simultaneously gawking at him, at all the policemen, at all the guns.
“Don’t just stand there. That cement’s hardening by the minute,” Kyle yelled to his men.
“Step over here sir,” an officer said, readying his handcuffs.
Kyle obliged.
“Hands behind your back, sir.”
“No, wait. You’re making a mistake.”
“Hands behind your back! Now!” the officer shouted, jerking Kyle’s wrist. “Kyle Zourenger, you’re under arrest for the murder of . . . .”
Kyle pulled away. “No. Wait, this is a mistake!” Kyle exclaimed. “You’ve got the wrong guy!”
The officer yanked and twisted Kyle’s arm, threw him to the ground and stomped his boot in the center of Kyle’s back.
“You have the right to remain silent . . .” He wrenched Kyle’s body, standing him up. “Anything you do say may be used against you in a court of law . . . .” The officer continued
to read Kyle his rights, dragging him to the police cruiser.
Lieutenant Barger and the rookie woman entered the room where Kyle was handcuffed and shackled, the same room where he’d been questioned a few days before. “Mr. Zourenger, this is Officer Yarnolf. I assume you’ve been read your rights.”
“Please. Help me. I didn’t kill anyone. We’ve been over this, you let me go.”
“I can’t help you. I can’t do anything for you unless you’re honest with me.”
Kyle looked puzzled, not the innocent kind of puzzled but the look of puzzlement that only liars possess. “I told the truth. I thought we had a deal.”
“You’re mistaken. I don’t make deals.” Barger sat down across from Kyle, straight faced, setting down a cardboard box. “There’re a few things here that I’d like to show you.”
Yarnolf paced slowly, cracking her neck, ear to shoulder . . . ear to shoulder. Then for her next order of business, she sniffed her fingers. Call it a habit, call it a quirk, by any means it was an effective distraction. Her presence was the white noise that Barger was counting on.
“I’d like you to look at these things very carefully. Two new pointing trowels, one of which I believe is newer,” Barger said, setting them on the table. “The napkin we found in your truck where you can see the victim’s address. There’s blood on it. This is a picture of a shoe casting from the crime scene.” He placed each item side by side on the worn out table. Yarnolf looked over Barger’s shoulder and mouthed, ‘you did it’.
Barger took a pair of Kyle’s shoes out of the box. “These shoes seem to match the castings. See where the tread is thicker here?” He set down the shoes and pulled out an official-looking paper. “But this is the most damning evidence. We were counting on that cut of yours to leave some blood at the crime scene. So we looked for traces of what might have been wiped up before we arrived, blood that wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye. Our guys used luminal spray that detected an enzyme that wasn’t the victim’s. A blood-pattern analysis narrowed it down with an accuracy of ninety-nine percent. Should I go on?”
Kyle’s expression turned into a mask of agony. A silent wave swept in like a tide and rolled out with his answer, “I laid the concrete for almost every garage and driveway in that development. Whenever I cut myself, it soaks right in. I trowel over it. It’s barely there at all.”
“When blood dissipates, whether it’s a day or three hundred days, it leaves traces,” the detective said. “It’s amazing what they can do in 1984. DNA Fingerprinting for one, or DNA profiling.”
“I’m telling you, it would have been invisible. How could they do that?”
“Luminal, it picks up on semen, spit, any bodily fluid, including blood, which all have DNA. Forensics spliced the DNA they found. They typed with an ABO test to see the "splice sites" in that particular part of your DNA.” Barger watched Kyle’s face. “You asked me to help you. Just say you were there.”
“I said I was, before the house was built. I also said I might have cut myself. You couldn’t possibly have found year-old blood.”
“You cleaned up after yourself. Yes?” Barger nodded.
Kyle nodded, too. “Sure I . . . No! I clean up whenever I cut myself. I can’t have a homeowner seeing blood.”
“You think you’re pretty clever. You thought you were covered because of that. Blood is blood. It doesn’t matter how we found it or how old it is, just that it is. In this case it’s yours. You were there that night! Just say it!”
“You’re not going to find a single person who saw me there.”
“That just says you didn’t see anyone around. You thought everyone was at work or in school. What if I told you that an eyewitness says he saw your truck there?”
The veins in Kyle’s neck surfaced. The redness of his ears colored outside the lines.
Barger took a letter from his suit pocket. “I got this from your wife. It was the only one you didn’t burn, the first anonymous love letter. I’d probably want to kill the guy myself.” He slid it over to Kyle. “This is motive.”
Yarnolf peered over Barger’s shoulder as she eyeballed the letter. He could smell garlic and something else musty, mothball like.
“Would you mind leaving us alone, Officer Yarnolf,” Barger said sweetly, so sweetly that he almost gagged on the left over sugar. She left. The white noise was gone. Silence took her place. A dull ache was coming back in Barger’s jaw. His feet were progressively getting hotter and they itched terribly. He needed to focus. Interrogation is an accusatory process—accusatory only in the sense that the investigator tells the suspect that there is no doubt as to his guilt.
“If I were that mad I would have at least gone there to yell at the guy, and you’re saying that you didn’t? You didn’t even try to talk to him?” The detective spoke with renewed authority. “We know you were there. We know you killed him. Tell me. Tell me what really happened.”
Kyle’s eyes focused only on the letter.
“I know you were there. You stabbed him in the throat. Look at this picture. Look at this mess of what used to be a man.” Barger tossed a grotesque picture of the murdered victim in front of Kyle. “You’re in a lot of trouble here, murder one for starters. We have the death penalty in this state.” The detective closed his folder. “This man was stalking your wife, on the brink of acting out all these unspeakable things, following her, watching her. The letters kept coming and coming. He fantasized about every inch of her body. You wanted to stop him. You wanted to kill him. Just say it.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“You wanted to kill him. Didn’t you? You finally knew who was writing those letters, and you did just that. You killed him. Isn’t that right?”
“You don’t get it. You just don’t get it.”
“Then tell me . . . . Set the record straight.”
“Those letters made me mad as hell, but they actually did me a favor . . . I was having an affair. That’s why I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t tell anyone. My wife got so caught up in those letters that she never suspected. I didn’t fall asleep in my car that night. I was with another woman.”
Barger took an exasperated breath. “Okay, so what is her name?”
“I can’t drag her into this.”
“Then tell me where you went, a hotel, her place? Did anyone see you?”
“I don’t know. The hotel manager, some old man. I paid cash. I gave him extra to let me write a fake name in the log. He asked to see my driver’s license at first, but I couldn’t have that. I didn’t want anyone to know.”
“And what kind of angle do you expect me to take from that? If you had a witness that could clear you from a murder conviction, you would tell me her name.”
“No, I can’t. She’s married. This would ruin her.” Kyle leaned over the table with his face in his hands. “You can’t let my wife know. Please. Isn’t there some kind of privacy law?”
“What do you think this is? For one thing this discussion is not confidential. You should have listened to your rights. And for another, what could I possibly have to tell your wife? Another lie?”
“I want a lawyer.”
Barger slowly stood up. He could be stoic, sticking to the rules of interrogation. The suspect had asked for a lawyer, the interrogation was officially over. “Some story. Too bad though, if you’d stuck to the truth, we might have had something to work with.” Barger knocked on the fake mirror. “Book him.”
Chapter 29
Gone were the days of cotton ball clouds, of brilliant blue horizons. Stratus clouds had seized the sky in a way that redefined gray as the anti-color.
Debra worried obsessively. Kyle was in jail because she had given up that address. It had been four days and Julie hadn’t returned her calls. Julie would probably never speak to her again, Debra surmised.
Debra loaded a .22 caliber bullet. There was no one else. Greg couldn’t even kill a snake. Alone on the edge of the cornfield behind Sam and Marie’s, she loaded another
bullet. Julie couldn’t handle a gun, a rifle, or anything of the sort, she’d said so herself. She was probably seeing a lawyer anyway.
Debra loaded another bullet and cocked the long-barrel Marlin rifle. A raccoon huddled in a corner growling—grass and feces clinging to the wire mesh inside a Have-A-Heart trap. The trap itself was a narrow cage where a central lure, when triggered, would close the spring-loaded doors at either end without hurting the animal. Debra had set the trap herself. But Marie wouldn’t hear of letting their captive loose in a cornfield, ‘he’d strip it clean,’ she’d say. ‘Farming was hard enough.’ And besides that, it might have rabies. Marie had gone inside to downplay the sound of gunfire to Sam. Marie would say that Sam couldn’t aim a rifle any more than he could aim his pee.
She could do this. One bullet, that’s all it would take. One bullet to the head and it would be over. Debra tuned out the barnyard sounds—chickens, Billy Goats, one protecting the only chick left, the other ramming a fence. This didn’t feel like an act of kindness, not killing something. But Marie had looked so helpless. Debra didn’t ever want to be that helpless, that dependent. If she didn’t do this now, right now, she might as well accept her fate.
“It’s your fault you know. If you hadn’t gone after her chicks, if you’d left her goat feed alone.” She squatted down. She steadied the butt of the rifle in her shoulder. There was a five hundred dollar fine if she were caught releasing him in a park. The Animal Protective League had told her to call the game warden. The game warden had told her to call the sheriff. The sheriff had told her to shoot it, or find someone else who would. She could do this. She had to do this. It wouldn’t be as bad as killing a groundhog with a shovel—this was clean, simple, fast. He’d never feel it.
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