Death on the River

by Diane Fanning

  “I can’t accept any gifts. But thank you anyway,” DeQuarto insisted.

  “Are you ready to leave, Angelika?” Laura asked.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it. I’ll just have him bring me home,” she said, pointing at the detective.

  “I can’t bring you home,” DeQuarto said.

  “Oh, you can’t? Why not?”

  “Because you have a ride. I just can’t bring you home,” DeQuarto said. Angelika’s flirtatious manner and her attempts at gift giving were very unsettling to him. He didn’t know if it was just the way she was or if she was trying to ingratiate herself with him to influence the conduct of the investigation.

  With a pout on her face, Angelika followed Laura back to the parking lot. DeQuarto felt relieved as he watched the car drive off a little after 8:00 pm.

  * * *

  Angelika’s friend Joel Goss had learned of Vince’s fate in a text message from another friend. For days, he heard nothing from Angelika, who was staying at the condo she’d shared with Vince, with a night or two spent at the home of Heather Canavan, the president of Shepherd’s View animal Sanctuary.

  Then, on the evening of April 28, Joel received a text from Angelika: “Do you have any lemons?”

  When he answered that he did, she wrote back: “Come over and bring lemons.”

  Joel arrived to find Angelika in the kitchen making risotto. While he helped her cook, she focused intently on the task at hand and desperately tried to ignore the reality of Vince’s disappearance. One moment, she’d be despondent, exclaiming, “It’s been a week!” Minutes later, she would calmly say, “It’s only been a week. Maybe everything will be okay.”

  All night, there was an edginess about Angelika. “She never looked serene,” Joel remembered. After midnight, Joel noticed a particularly pained look on Angelika’s face and coaxed her outside, where he pulled out his laser pointer with a splinter that caused the beam to form shapes. He made patterns on the leaves of a tree. “They look like fairies, don’t they?” he told her.

  Angelika was delighted by the distraction. He left the device with her and headed home. Joel was convinced that Angelika could not have been responsible for Vince’s death because of her belief in ghosts. “She could not have harmed him because she would fear creating a ghost who would be angry with her from the get-go,” he said.

  He believed she was grieving, despite the somersaults and karaoke singing, because of his own experience after 9-11. Joel was in New York at the time and witnessed the “many flavors of grief.” That was what he saw with Angelika. The only answer for Vince’s disappearance, he thought, was that it was a twisted practical joke and Vince would show up in a couple of weeks, laughing at everyone.

  The next day, he heard that Angelika had been taken into headquarters by the police.

  * * *

  The cavalier attitude that many thought Angelika displayed in the aftermath of the incident on the Hudson River all caught up with her on April 29. For more than a year, it had been Angelika’s habit on Wednesday mornings to go out to Bannerman Island, where she would weed and plant flowers with a group of ten other volunteers.

  As she approached the yacht club parking lot that morning, she again went to Facebook and uploaded a video of her driving. “What a beautiful day!” she exclaimed in the video. Then her phone camera focused on the clock that read 9:22 am. “Nine Twenty-Two is the date that we met,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  On the morning of Wednesday, April 29, Investigator DeQuarto received the audio recording of Angelika’s 911 call. After what Angelika had told him, he’d expected her to sound exhausted, out of breath, or breathing heavily. But he was surprised to hear nothing to indicate that she had been struggling to come to Vince’s rescue.

  DeQuarto, Investigator Anthony DaSilva, and Senior Investigator Aniello Moscato, along with two members of the state police scuba crew, Trooper Lance Rell and Zone Sergeant James Whittle, met at Gully’s Restaurant on the Newburgh waterfront at around 10:00 am. While preparing the boat for departure, DeQuarto saw he had an incoming call from Angelika. He didn’t answer.

  Rell and Whittle boarded the state police boat and transported the investigators to Bannerman Island to search the shoreline. Once they’d made it to the island, Moscato received another call from Angelika.

  “Where are you and what are you doing?” she asked.

  Moscato answered as vaguely as possible, trying to avoid naming his location. Angelika, however, had already heard about their plans from Investigator DeQuarto. She said, “I’m going out to Bannerman’s, too.”

  “Oh, what are you going out to Bannerman’s for?”

  “To clean up, clear shrubs, and plant more bulbs to beautify the island. And I also have a wreath that I want to put on in Vinny’s memory.”

  “That’s very nice,” Moscato said. “Maybe we will meet you out there later on.”

  The detectives walked around the island to get the lay of the land and spotted a few volunteers at work but did not see Angelika. DeQuarto followed the shoreline around the circumference of the island but found no sign of Vince in the rocks and no indication of his presence there ten days earlier.

  Just before noon, the three men gathered at the dock and agreed that they’d explored and searched as much as they could without any guidance from Angelika. Moscato called her. She returned the call soon after. “Are you still coming out?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I’m on my way out. I’ll be there shortly.”

  “Okay, before we leave, we’ll stay and say hello.”

  Soon the charter boat that transported volunteers back and forth across the Hudson pulled up to the dock. On board with Angelika were the driver, Angelika’s friend Katie, and two other women. Angelika stepped ashore, smiling and seeming to be in good spirits. She carried a life preserver decorated with flowers to resemble a wreath. She spotted Senior Investigator Moscato, whom she recognized right away from her meetings with him for the last ten days discussing updates on the search for Vince. She rushed over and embraced him in a warm hug. Moscato introduced her to Investigator DaSilva, whom she had not met before.

  She chattered a bit about her responsibilities as a volunteer, then moved away from the detectives to talk to other volunteers and shoot photographs. Thinking her input could add to their understanding of that fatal day, Moscato stepped up to her. “Listen, remember the last couple of days I told you we were gonna need to reconstruct what happened?” he said. “Well, let’s concentrate on the time, like the last six hours, from when you left Plum Point and you went kayaking with Vinny out to Bannerman’s Island. I want you to tell me, specifically, what you did so that we can figure out exactly, you know, where you parked the kayaks, where you guys went afterwards, in order to give us a better understanding of perhaps where Vinny’s body might have floated to.”

  She led him over to one area of the dock and all three detectives followed. For some reason, she had trouble being definitive about the right spot. “Hmmm, let me think about this. Maybe they were here. Or maybe they were over there,” she wavered, pointing in different directions.

  To Moscato, she seemed a little bit uneasy. More than once, he had to ask her to focus: “I just need to know what you did. Try to concentrate.”

  She paced back and forth. She said she needed to have a cigarette. After finishing her smoke, she said she had to use the bathroom. After visiting the port-a-potty, she pointed to the end of the dock that was a bit closer to the island and said, “That’s where we parked the kayaks.”

  The detectives looked at the spot she’d indicated and noticed some guide wires sitting low off the top of the water. Moscato asked, “Are you sure that’s where you parked the kayaks, because how did you get under there?”

  “Oh, Aniello, don’t be silly, you don’t know anything about kayaking,” she chided. “You don’t do it standing up, you do it sitting down.”

  “You’re right, I don’t know that much about kayaking. Where did you guy
s go after? Did you go up on the island?” he asked, indicating the long flight of stairs leading up to the castle ruins and garden.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Can you just walk up the trail so we can kind of create a timeline where you went and whatnot?”

  “No problem,” she said, but asked to stop at the port-a-potty again before they did.

  When she came out, they walked up the stairs to the top of the island and along the trail. She showed them where they had picnicked and pointed out locations where they’d shot photographs. Moscato noticed she had started to clutch at her stomach, breathing heavily as they walked.

  “You know, Angelika, whatever you’re holding inside you, you have to let out, because it looks like it’s burning a hole inside you,” he said.

  Angelika asked to sit down for a bit on a rock wall that ran along the trail. The investigators joined her.

  “Angelika,” Investigator DaSilva said, “did you find that cell phone? You told us originally that you lost your cell when your kayak capsized, but a rescue worker saw you with it on the boat. Investigator DeQuarto asked you to look for it.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember having the cell phone on the rescue boat. I thought I had a missed call. I’ll find that cell phone, don’t worry. Somebody has that cell phone.”

  “Where can it be? Let us help you find it.”

  At this, Angelika’s agitation increased. She placed a hand on her chest and her breathing grew deep and loud.

  Susan McCardell, another volunteer, was passing by and stopped to ask if Angelika was okay. To Susan, it appeared as if the investigators were bullying Angelika. “Do you want me to stay?” she asked her. “I think I should be here with you.”

  One of the detectives said, “She doesn’t really need you. She’s okay.”

  Angelika confirmed that she was all right and added, “No you shouldn’t stay.”

  Once Susan had moved away from the group, DaSilva pressed Angelika further about the cell phone: “Who did you call from the rescue boat that night?”

  “I missed an incoming call and tried to call back, but it didn’t go through.” Angelika was now pacing back and forth and requested another cigarette.

  As soon as her smoke was lit, DaSilva asked, “Where is your phone now?”

  “I don’t know,” she said between inhales. “I had it at the hospital where they took me that night.”

  DeQuarto chose to jump into the conversation. “Angelika, there’s a lot of inconsistencies with what you’re saying. I know you’re lying to us about the phone, because there’s no way you could see it underwater. Then you say you made a phone call with it. Then, that somebody else has it. You have to be truthful with us and let us know what’s going on, because we need some closure for the family and for yourself. So, you need to just tell us what exactly is going on.”

  “Okay,” she said finally. “I’m going to tell you everything. I just need a minute.”

  There was a long pause while Angelika seemed to gather herself.

  Finally, she blurted out, “You know, I know no relationship is perfect. We were having problems. Vinny postponed our engagement.” She added that he was not treating her right and was forcing her to do things she thought weren’t appropriate.

  Noting that the conversation was veering toward more intimate personal details, Moscato asked, “Would you just rather speak to one of us privately?”

  “Yeah, I’d like to speak with Donnie,” she said, indicating Investigator DeQuarto.

  The other two investigators headed down the trail while DeQuarto and Angelika sat down on the rocks.

  “Just tell me what’s going on,” DeQuarto began.

  “I’m going to tell you everything.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can we move to the seating area off the trail, so I can smoke a cigarette?”

  “You can go wherever you want,” he said.

  She led the way to a bench nearby, lit a cigarette, and resumed talking. “You know about the plug, right?”

  DeQuarto, who knew nothing about kayaks, bluffed his way past the question: “Sure I do, but why don’t you tell me about the plug?”

  “What if I did something with the plug?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I just wanted to be free. I wanted him to be gone. I wanted to be free. I wanted him gone. I wanted to be myself.” She blurted the words out quickly, as if she feared she’d lose her courage if she hesitated.

  The investigator was stunned by this revelation, and he struggled to keep his face neutral and his focus keen. “What did you do with the plug?”

  “I took it out. I removed the plug from the kayak.”

  “Did you take it out, so his kayak would fill up with water?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “He trapped me.”

  “Did you take it out on that Sunday?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I remember being at the house and taking it out and putting it in a drawer.”

  “Okay.” DeQuarto pressed further. “Well, why did you feel trapped? Why did you feel like you wanted to be free and couldn’t be yourself?”

  “He always makes these sexual demands to me. He wanted to have threesomes with other women. He demanded sex with me when he wanted sex. He was always wanting to take sexy photos. He expected me to watch pornographic videos with him,” she complained. “I felt trapped. I felt I couldn’t be myself. It made me want to be free.”

  “Why didn’t you just break up with him?” DeQuarto asked.

  “I am a very spiritual person and I knew that he would never really be gone.” She paused. “I need another cigarette.”

  “You don’t need to ask,” he told her.

  Again, Susan McCardell approached them to check in on Angelika. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  When Susan had left, DeQuarto continued, “Angelika, I know there’s more, so tell me what else.”

  “What else? You know about the paddle? The ring wasn’t on the paddle.”

  “What does the ring do?” DeQuarto asked. “Did you take it off?”

  “It holds the paddles together. I think I took it off.”

  “Did you take it off, so he couldn’t use it?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Where is the ring?”

  “Somewhere in the back of my car.” She pivoted the conversation back to her relationship troubles with Vince. “I just wanted this normal life with Vinny. I wanted to have children with him. I wanted to get married and Vinny didn’t want that. He didn’t want to get married anymore and that really upset me.” She told DeQuarto about one of Vince’s coworkers, a woman named Tina, whom she said Vince pressured her about having a threesome with. “Vinny would always say, ‘Why can’t you do a threesome with Tina—Tina would do this to you and do that.’ It upset me.”

  At that point, Angelika began to ramble and change the subject, but DeQuarto interrupted her stream of consciousness.

  “Angelika, let’s focus back on what we were talking about. Let’s talk about when you were in the water and get back on topic.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s talk about the paddles.”

  “You know I had his paddle.”

  “What do you mean you had his paddle?”

  “I took his paddle.”

  “Can you explain to me how you did that?” DeQuarto probed.

  “When he was in the water and he was holding on to the kayak and a flotation device, I reached over and took his paddle from him and strapped it onto my kayak.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Angelika said.

  “Did you take his paddle, so he couldn’t have it?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Does the paddle float?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, you took the paddle, so he couldn’t have it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think you could have helpe
d him or saved him from drowning?”

  “I could have,” she admitted.

  “But you didn’t save him, because you wanted him gone.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you feel about Vinny being dead?”

  Angelika shrugged. “I feel fine. I am over it. I feel like I am myself. I feel free.” She sounded almost bored.

  “Because of what you did, you caused Vinny to drown.”

  “I guess I did.”

  DeQuarto needed to hear a definitive answer. “Angelika, I need the truth. Did you intentionally remove that plug from the kayak, so he would drown?”

  For a moment, she stared down at the ground, not saying a word. Finally, she raised her head and said, “I guess I did.”

  “Does anyone else know what we talked about up here?”

  “No. Only my diary.”

  “Okay. Is Vinny in the river?”

  “Yeah, he’s in there.” She looked out at the water. “Hopefully, he’ll come up soon.”

  DeQuarto knew it was time to reunite with his colleagues and fill them in on what he’d learned. “We’ll go back to the barracks and we’ll sit in a more formal environment,” he told Angelika. “We’ll discuss what we talked about up here in some more further detail.”

  “No problem. I feel better telling you about this because you feel like a real and caring person,” she said.

  She and DeQuarto walked back over toward the other investigators. While she paid another visit to the port-a-potty, DeQuarto joined the others.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but she just admitted to killing him. She said she pulled the plug.”

  “A plug? What do you mean a plug?” Moscato asked.

  “Yeah, I didn’t know about it either, but apparently there’s a plug in the … [kayak] and she pulled it out.”

  “You gotta be kidding me.”

  “No.”

  “She told you this?”

  “Yeah. She also said the paddle has some kind of ring on it that she manipulated or took out so that the paddle would collapse.”