“I woke up around six, my usual time,” Caroline said. “Ollie and I had a routine in the mornings. He typically didn’t wake up until around six-thirty or so, and because I woke first, I’d go out and put on a pot of coffee for the two of us. Then I’d take a cup in to him. If he wasn’t awake already, I’d wake him.”
“And you were sleeping in a separate bedroom?” Roberta asked.
Caroline nodded.
“Did you see Oliver during the night at all?” Roberta asked.
Caroline hesitated before answering. “I checked on him once, around two, when I got up to go to the bathroom.”
Roberta’s eyebrows arched. “You didn’t mention that earlier. Did you typically do that? Check on him in the middle of the night?”
“No,” Caroline answered. “But I did that night because he’d been complaining of feeling off before we went to bed. And he’d taken one of my Ambiens. I was worried about him.”
The wavy yellow line disappeared with this statement. I frowned at the computer, confused as to why this had happened. I started to say something to Duncan about it when Caroline continued and the wavy yellow line reappeared.
“He was sleeping soundly when I checked on him. I went back to bed.”
“Okay, let’s go back to the morning. You made the coffee. Then what happened?”
“I fixed a cup for Ollie. Two sugars and some milk . . . that’s how he liked it.”
“And you took it to his bedroom?”
“I did.”
“Did you have a cup for yourself as well?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And what happened when you entered the bedroom?”
“I saw that Ollie’s CPAP mask was off. It was hanging from the machine next to the bed.”
“Did that concern you?”
“A little, yes,” she said. The yellow line disappeared again. “But it wasn’t unusual. Ollie sometimes took it off during the night, because he said it made it hard for him to get comfortable when he wanted to change positions and sleep on his side. His sleep apnea isn’t bad if he’s on his side, only when he’s on his back. If he woke up at some point after taking off the mask and turned onto his back, he’d typically put the mask on again.” The line reappeared.
“And you know this because you saw him do it?”
“A few times, back when I used to try to sleep in the same bed with him.” Caroline made a sad face, looking as if she was about to cry, though there were no tears. “I should’ve been harder on him about his diet, and exercise, and visits to the doctor. The doctor made it clear his weight contributed to the sleep apnea, and I promised I would help him eat healthier. I tried for a while, but he would only pick at the stuff I prepared, and then he would sneak out and buy himself some fast food. I know he did it because I found the wrappers and bags stashed under the seat of his car.” She paused, burying her face in her hands for a moment. When she raised her head again, her eyes were red-rimmed but still dry. “I should’ve been more insistent,” she said in a sobbing voice that sounded fake. “I should’ve been harder on him.”
Roberta was unimpressed by this show. She rolled her eyes and then asked, “What position was Oliver in when you entered the bedroom?”
Caroline looked taken aback for a moment, as if in shock that her emotional outburst hadn’t been believed. She cleared her throat and shifted in her chair. “He was on his back,” she said.
“What position were the blankets on the bed?”
“They were up to about midchest level,” Caroline said with a pout.
“Tell me everything you did,” Roberta urged.
Caroline looked away for a few seconds, appearing to be deep in thought. “I walked over to the bed, saying it was time to wake up. I set his cup of coffee on the bedside stand and turned off the CPAP machine. Then I realized the room was unusually quiet. I looked closer at Ollie then, and noticed his color was off.”
“Off how?”
“He looked . . . dusky. His lips were blue. And then I saw how still he was. Nothing was moving. His chest wasn’t rising.”
“What did you do next?” Roberta asked.
“I . . . um . . . I called out to him.”
“His name?”
“Yes.”
“How many times did you say his name?”
“What?” Caroline said. She frowned, sounding a little rattled.
“How many times did you call out his name?” Roberta repeated. “Once? Twice? Several times?”
“I . . . I don’t know . . . several, I think.” The wavy line started to sag and droop.
“Three times? Four?” Roberta pushed.
“I don’t know for sure,” Caroline said, sounding whiny. “I wasn’t focused on counting.”
Natalie closed her eyes, pursed her lips, and shook her head.
“Okay, what happened next?” Roberta asked.
“When he still hadn’t moved, or answered me, or opened his eyes at all, I reached down and touched him on his shoulder.”
“Which hand did you use?”
Caroline thought a moment. “My left hand.”
“Where was your cup of coffee at this time?”
“What?”
“You said you set his cup on the nightstand,” Roberta said, leaning closer to Caroline and pinning her with those piercing eyes. “But you also said you had two cups of coffee when you entered the room. Where was yours?”
Caroline blinked several times really fast and squirmed in her seat. “Still in my hand, I think.”
“You think? You’re not sure?”
“Detective,” Natalie said in a testy tone.
Caroline used the interruption to gather herself. She looked over at her attorney, then back at Roberta. “Yes, I had it in my hand. In my right hand.”
Roberta sat back in her seat. “What happened when you touched him?”
“Nothing,” Caroline said. She made another unconvincing sad face. “He felt . . . hard . . . cold. I pushed on his shoulder several times, but nothing happened.”
“Your husband was wearing pajamas when we arrived,” Roberta said. “So I assume you touched the fabric when you touched his shoulder?”
“Yes.”
“And this hard coldness you felt, you felt that through the material?”
Caroline hesitated, her eyes narrowing. I got the sense she was parsing both the question and her answer before committing. “Yes,” she said finally.
“Okay,” Roberta said, her voice rife with skepticism. “What did you do next?”
“I pulled the covers down a little to get a better look at him. I . . . I thought that maybe he was breathing, but it was so shallow I couldn’t see or hear it. But there was nothing. No movement. I bent over and put my ear on his chest to see if I could hear his heart, but . . .”
“You bent over?” Roberta interrupted. “Were you still holding your coffee at this point?”
Caroline sucked in her lower lip, and her eyes started darting from side to side. “I must have set it down,” she said. The wavy line was undulating like crazy. Caroline was nervous.
“Set it down where?”
“On the nightstand, next to his cup.”
“Did you unbutton Oliver’s pajama top when you put your ear on his chest?”
Caroline shook her head.
“Did you consider trying to do CPR or any other resuscitative measures?”
“I don’t know how to do CPR,” Caroline said. The wavy yellow line disappeared again.
“Oh, come now,” Roberta said in a disbelieving and chastising tone. “You may not have had any official training in CPR, but surely you’ve seen people push on the chest of someone who appears dead on TV, or in a movie.”
“I suppose,” Caroline said, sucking in her lip again. She’d been wringing her hands and now she shoved them down between her legs. “It just didn’t occur to me. Besides, he was so . . . so . . . cold. His skin felt hard. He looked . . .” Her voice trailed off as she thought. Then she shru
gged. “He looked very dead,” she said bluntly, and the yellow line reappeared.
Roberta stared at her for a long moment until Caroline shifted uncomfortably and looked away, glancing over at Natalie, whose expression had remained irritated throughout the entire interview.
“All right; what happened next?” Roberta said eventually.
Caroline looked back at Roberta, appearing more composed. “I went out to the kitchen to get my cell phone and call 9-1-1.”
Roberta’s eyes narrowed again. “And what did the 9-1-1 operator say to you?”
Caroline looked surprised by this question. “She said she was sending some help.”
“I listened to your 9-1-1 call,” Roberta said. “The operator asked you if you had tried to perform CPR. Do you recall that?”
“Oh . . . yes,” Caroline said, raking a hand through that perfectly highlighted hair. “I told her that I didn’t know how to do it. She said she could talk me through it, but I told her that Oliver was cold and blue, and that his skin felt hard.”
“You stayed on the phone until help arrived,” Roberta said.
“Yes.”
“Where were you during that time?”
“I went and stood by the front door to watch for the ambulance. But two police officers showed up first. The 9-1-1 operator hung up once the police arrived. I let them in and directed them to Oliver’s bedroom.”
“Did you go with them?”
“I followed them, but I didn’t go back into the bedroom. I watched them from the door. They took one look at Oliver and shook their heads. They knew he was beyond help.” She said this last bit with a hint of self-righteousness, as if their actions justified her own.
“You never went back into the bedroom once the police arrived, is that correct?”
“It is.”
“The photos of the scene the police took showed one cup of coffee on the nightstand. Where was yours?”
Caroline’s eyes darted around. “Um, I took it with me when I went out to the kitchen to call 9-1-1.”
“You found your husband dead in bed, set your coffee on the nightstand so you could listen to his chest, and when you went to call for help, you thought to pick up your coffee and take it with you?”
Caroline didn’t answer. Natalie rolled her eyes and leaned forward. “Caroline, that’s enough. I’m begging of you, stop this interview now.”
Caroline looked back and forth between the two women, that lower lip once again sucked in. She looked unsure, a bit panicked, and that yellow line was undulating like crazy. “Okay,” she said finally. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Thank goodness,” Natalie said with obvious relief. She shot out of her seat and went to the door. “Let’s go.”
Caroline did as she was told, looking contrite. Natalie held the door to the room open and glared at her client as she passed by. Just before leaving, she shot Roberta an irritated look and then stormed out.
“Wow,” I said, leaning back in my seat. “Roberta is one tough cookie.”
“That she is,” Duncan said. “Did you pick up on anything during all that?”
Gregory reached over and slid the laptop away from us and started tapping away at the keyboard. But he kept glancing at me with a curious look in his eyes.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. There were some odd moments.”
The door to the room opened and Roberta walked in, looking annoyed. “Well?” she said, not bothering with any preliminary pleasantries.
“Mack was just about to share her impressions with me,” Duncan said.
Roberta settled into a chair across from me and leaned forward, elbows on the table, her eyes pinning me in place.
“When I hear Caroline’s voice I see a wavy yellow line,” I began. Gregory had stopped typing and he leaned back, arms folded over his chest, watching me. “At first, I thought the computer feed wasn’t going to work because the line wasn’t there when you first started. Though I realize now that I was able to taste your voice just fine. Anyway, after the first thing Caroline said, the line suddenly appeared. Whenever you had her nervous, the line undulated very fast. But there were a couple of times when it disappeared completely. I suspect those occurrences were when she was lying.”
Roberta took a moment to digest this. “You say this line wasn’t there when Caroline first spoke?”
I shook my head.
She looked over at Gregory. “What was it she said at the very beginning?”
Gregory leaned forward and poised his fingers over the keyboard, but I provided the answer before he could strike a single key.
“It was when she said she had nothing to hide.”
Roberta looked at me, impressed.
“I have excellent memory recall, most likely due to my synesthesia,” I explained with a shrug and a half smile.
“Interesting,” Roberta said. “What did Caroline say the other times this line disappeared?”
I thought back. “It disappeared when she said she didn’t know how to do CPR. And when you asked her if it concerned her that Oliver wasn’t wearing his mask, and she said yes. It also disappeared when she said Oliver had complained of feeling off the night before, and she was worried about him.”
“Interesting,” Roberta said again. She thought a moment and then looked over at Duncan. “What’s your take on all this?”
He gave an equivocal shrug. “Based on what Mack has just said, it sounds like Caroline has something to hide. We just need to figure out what it is.”
Roberta’s face furrowed in thought for a moment, and I caught her staring at me, pondering. “If Oliver Knutson didn’t die of natural causes, and there’s no evidence of any obvious physical injuries, what’s our cause of death?”
“Poison?” Gregory suggested.
Roberta nodded slowly, still deep in thought. “If that’s the case, the most likely source would be the coffee Caroline said she brought to Oliver. But according to her, he didn’t drink any of it. She said he was cold and dead when she brought it into the room. And the cup we collected was full.”
“If he drank any of it, it should be present in his stomach contents,” Duncan said. “I suggest you get the ME to analyze those contents carefully, and search for other, less common poisons.”
Roberta’s expression brightened some. “Good point. I’ll give him a call now.” She took out her phone and prepared to dial but hesitated, looking over at me. “It can take a while to get results from a test like that, and I feel like we’ve lost a lot of valuable time already. Tell me something, Ms. Dalton. Does your synesthesia help you identify odors and smells?”
“It does.”
“So . . . would you be able to identify the presence of something other than coffee in those stomach contents if you had a chance to . . . smell it?”
The mere suggestion made my stomach roil.
Duncan frowned at Roberta. “That’s going a bit above and beyond,” he said, making a face.
I thought about what Roberta was suggesting. I knew my synesthesia would react in a predictable manner to the smell of coffee, but how would the acids of the stomach affect that? And how would I know if any additional reactions to the smell were due to a foreign substance, or the stomach acid?
“I can’t be sure it would work,” I told her. “I’d have to experiment a little with a baseline.”
“What sort of baseline?” Roberta asked.
I explained to her how my synesthesia worked, and how I might be able to identify the presence of coffee based on the reaction I had to the smell of the contents of the stomach. “But the addition of stomach acids complicates things a little. I own a bar, so I’ve been exposed to vomit in the past,” I said with a grimace. “But each exposure had its own unique synesthetic reaction, presumably based on the contents of the stomach at the time. I might be able to identify a unique and different synesthetic reaction to Oliver’s stomach contents, but who’s to say if it would be related to the presence of a foreign su
bstance in the stomach?” I gave Roberta an apologetic look and shrugged.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I went on, “but based on what I’ve learned working with Duncan, it’s the testing for the various foreign substances, like poisons, that will take time. The ME should be able to identify the presence of coffee in the stomach fairly quickly, right?”
“Yes,” Roberta said.
“So, if you found coffee in his stomach, it would disprove part of Caroline’s story. According to her, Oliver was already dead when she brought the coffee in to him. So the presence of coffee by itself would be meaningful, right?”
“Yes,” Roberta said again.
“So test for the coffee, and if it’s present, I’ll do what I can to try to determine if there’s anything else present.”
“Seems reasonable,” Roberta said.
“I have a couple of other questions, if you don’t mind,” I said. Roberta shrugged. “What do you have as the time of death for Oliver?”
“According to the ME, he’d been dead about four hours when we found him.”
“And do you know whether or not the coffee was still warm when the police arrived? Or perhaps it was still warm when you arrived?”
Roberta cocked her head to the side and grinned at me. “As a matter of fact, I do remember,” she said. “The mug was still warm when I touched it, and Oliver definitely wasn’t. So it’s unlikely the coffee had anything to do with it, at least the particular coffee that was in the mug we collected.”
“I think that gets me off the hook,” I said with a smile.
“Not entirely,” Roberta said with a sly look. “I might still ask you to sniff at some stomach contents. It just depends on what we find. I’ll let you know.”
On that rather dour note, Duncan and I left the station and headed back to my bar.
Chapter 18
“I think it’s fair to say you won Bobby over,” Duncan said during our ride back.
“I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Sniffing vomit isn’t what I had in mind when I agreed to this consulting arrangement.” He chuckled. “Do you think Caroline had something to do with Oliver’s death?” I asked him.
Last Call Page 18