Monday, September 10
I was locked in the six- by eight-foot interrogation room with him. The burly inmate—stinking of unwashed hair and rotting teeth—sat on a gray plastic chair across the table from me, his thick wrists handcuffed to a chain around his waist, his feet shackled to a hasp in the cement floor. I suppressed a gag when his lips parted to form a smile.
“He told me where the body’s buried,” he said. “You get me a time cut. I’ll tell you what I know.”
As I nodded my head in reluctant assent, the overhead light went out. Guided by the meager emergency lighting, I hurried toward the door and pushed the intercom button for the control center.
“We’re done here. Please let me out,” I said, making every effort to sound calm.
No response. No movement on the electronic lock mechanism. Nothing.
The inmate snickered.
Through the window of the steel door I saw thick smoke in the hallway. The fire alarm sounded. With perspiring hands I yanked on the door handle. It didn’t budge. I’m going to die here with this snitch!
Disoriented and terrified from my recurring nightmare, I struggled to consciousness. In the bed beside me, Lily stirred. “Mom! Your phone.” Not a fire alarm, a telephone. A glimpse of the bedside clock jerked me up cold. Three-thirty. Oh, dear God! David was in New York on a security assignment. Please, please, let him be all right.
Grabbing the phone, I rushed to the bathroom and closed the door—trying desperately not to upset Lily, who often crept into my bed on nights when her dad was away.
“Hello?”
“You’ve got to come, Caroline! They’ve arrested me. The girl’s dead and they think I’m responsible.”
With a wave of relief that my husband was okay, I leaned against the sink, pulled my sodden nightgown away from my skin, and paused to get my bearings—attempting to make sense of the call.
“Caroline? Are you there?”
“Who is this?” I asked, incredulous the unknown caller had used my name not once, but twice.
“It’s me. Kate.”
Kate Daniels never identified herself when she called, which, over the years, I’d occasionally found irritating. But it wasn’t usually a problem, since I always recognized her deep, commanding voice—a voice born of confidence and class. This voice was constricted, a half-octave higher, and very, very afraid.
Kate’s talking about a dead girl?
“Take a deep breath and tell me what’s going on,” I said.
“They told me I can only use the phone for a minute. Just come, please! I need you.”
This could not be happening. In the several years I’d spent as an Assistant District Attorney, the bizarre had become commonplace to me. I was used to having inmate informants telling me where to find a body, or a kilo of cocaine, or a cache of stolen guns. I’d prosecuted a woman for trading her twelve-year-old daughter to a pornographer for an ounce of heroin. I’d put a crooked judge behind bars for five years. But I found it unthinkable that Kathryn Daniels—prominent medical researcher and university professor—would be a murder suspect.
I had left the DA’s office for private practice only eighteen months earlier and still knew a lot of the cops. “Let me talk to the arresting officer,” I said, eager to calm my friend’s hysteria as my own unease grew.
“She wants to talk to you,” Kate said, between sobs, to someone on her end.
I listened to snatches of conversations in what I imagined was the squad room. All the while, a thousand thoughts darted through my brain, the most prominent quickly emerging: I have to go if she needs me, but what will I do with Lily? My chest tightened. My stomach churned. When the officer finally picked up the phone, I willed myself to shove the panicky feelings down.
“This is Patrolman Trevor Williams,” said an officious voice.
I didn’t recognize the name. “Hello. This is Caroline Spencer and I’m—”
“Your client says you have questions?” he interrupted.
Questions? Hell, yes, I have questions, I wanted to reply. And there’s no need for you to be rude. But with a calming breath, I summoned my friendly-yet-efficient lawyer’s voice. “What, specifically, are you holding Ms. Daniels for?”
“She’s not under arrest,” he said. “She was at the scene of a suspicious death and voluntarily came in to give a statement. The detectives are on their way in as we speak, but now your client is saying she won’t cooperate without an attorney.”
“Which detectives drew the case?” I asked.
“Connaboy and Jacobs.”
I knew them well—both good guys. “Please tell them and my client I’ll be there as soon as I can. They’re not to start the interview without me. Understood?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said and hung up.
I shook my head in frustration and turned to my immediate predicament: When you’re new to a neighborhood, who do you call to watch your precious, anxiety-prone child in the middle of the night? All my close friends were thirty minutes away—and were working moms with kids of their own. I scrolled through my contacts and finally summoned the courage to dial the number that Lily’s friend Megan’s mother had given me to set up a play date. It went straight to voice mail.
Suddenly our decision to move to this idyllic cul-de-sac, nestled amid the rolling hills of suburban yet rural Middleton, seemed so wrong. The Madison area’s four lakes—while picturesque and a natural magnet for the University of Wisconsin—did little to facilitate travel between Point A and Point B. My trip to rescue Kate at the eastside police station would be akin to traveling from Point A to Point W. What could we possibly have been thinking, moving way out here?
Just as I’d decided to wake Lily and take her with me, I looked out the bathroom window and noticed an upstairs light in the house next door. Maybe Mrs. McKinley’d be willing to come stay with Lily. And I breathed with deep relief when I dialed directory assistance and the robo-operator recited the number. A widow in her seventies, our neighbor had served me coffee a couple of times and had invited Lily to accompany her on several walks with her dog. I had no qualms about trusting her.
“Oh, heavens, you’re not disturbing me,” Ida McKinley said when I explained the reason for my call. “I often get up about this time to stretch my arthritic back. Sometimes I’m able to go back to sleep, sometimes I’m not, and tonight was one of those nights.”
Within minutes, she appeared at my kitchen door, wearing a pink velour warm-up suit and smelling of Ivory soap. Together we roused Lily and told her I’d be leaving. Ida would take her to school if I were delayed. Thankfully, Lily was not at all fazed by being entrusted to a relative stranger. As I stroked her silky dark-brown hair, she clutched the tattered blanket she’d slept with every night of her seven years and went right back to sleep. But I couldn’t hide my trembling hands.
“Why don’t you take a quick shower before you leave?” Ida asked in a soothing tone. “It’ll only take a few minutes, and it’ll clear the cobwebs.”
She was right. Water temperature and pressure set to the max, the pulsing spray and steam relaxed my constricted muscles and restored my equilibrium—and with it my confidence. Stepping out of the shower, I wiped the fog from the mirror and took a glance. My short sandy-colored hair would air dry in the car with the blower turned up. I couldn’t spare the time for mascara or lipstick. I threw on a pair of slacks and a long-sleeved silk t-shirt and headed downstairs.
Ida sat at the kitchen table, her hands warming around a mug of tea. “Better?” she asked as I gathered my purse and briefcase to leave.
“Uh-huh. Much better. How did you know that’s just what I needed?”
She smiled and got up to walk me to the door. “I think I’ve told you I was a psychologist before my retirement. But beyond that, my late husband struggled with panic disorder for years, often to the point where he couldn’t leave the house. Sometimes I was able to see the early signs and help him ward off the attacks. How long have you suffered from this?”
“Since college,” I said, taken aback and more than a little embarrassed that she’d recognized the problem I constantly struggled to hide. “I haven’t had a knock-down drag-out attack for almost a year. But I haven’t conquered my fear of them, and I guess I’m hyper-vigilant—especially when unexpected things like this happen.”
“Let’s talk more about it when we get a chance,” she said with a gentle hug. “In the meantime, don’t worry about Lily. We’ll be just fine.”
Driving had often been a trigger for my panic attacks, and I didn’t feel like tempting fate tonight. So I avoided the freeway and instead opted for slower-going University Avenue. I rolled down the window in my tank-like ‘97 Volvo and drank in the crisp fall air, eliminating any chance of claustrophobia. I needn’t have worried about panicking, though—within blocks I was consumed with trying to make sense of Kate’s call.
She’d said “the girl.” Did she mean a child? A young woman? And what was Kate’s relationship to the deceased? She didn’t have family in the area. The officer had said “suspicious death.” Not a car accident, then. Murder? Suicide? Rape, robbery or domestic violence gone from terrible to worse? Was Kate, herself, in physical danger? By the time I reached the parking lot, I was more puzzled than ever. Professor Kathryn Daniels simply didn’t fit into any of the possible scenarios I imagined.
**
It was impossible to hide my shock when I encountered Kate sitting alone in a waiting area at the police station. Fluorescent lights are never kind, but every flaw in Kate’s waxy white complexion was clearly illuminated. Her wavy black hair, normally lustrous, hung in lifeless, dry tangles around her vacant eyes. She’d lost weight, and her rumpled jeans and stained cotton sweater—now two sizes too big—stank of stale smoke. For an instant I doubted this was, in fact, my long-time friend.
Kate stood and fell into my embrace. I cringed inside. Kate had always been strong and self-assured. Tonight she felt breakable, more vulnerable than I’d ever seen her. The task of helping her might be more than I bargained for. Was I up to it?
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I just want this to be over with. I want to go home,” she said. Kate no longer sounded afraid, but her lack of affect was perhaps more alarming.
As I eased her back into her chair, Detective Doug Connaboy strode into the room, preceded by his signature Old Spice aftershave. In his late forties, Doug had developed a slight paunch, and his closely cropped hair was thinner than when I’d last seen him. But his clear blue eyes sparkled as ever when he looked at me. “Sorry it’s under these circumstances, but it’s good to see you, Caroline,” he said. “Can we talk alone first?”
“Sure.” I turned to Kate. “Sit tight for a minute, okay?”
Although she nodded, I wasn’t at all certain Kate had heard me.
I followed Doug through a labyrinth of cubicles to a sparsely furnished, institutional beige office and took the straight-backed chair he offered. “Who’s dead, and what’s it got to do with Kate Daniels?” I asked.
“I always appreciated your disdain for small talk,” he said with a half-smile. “So I’ll give it to you straight. Your client—or friend or whatever she is to you—is in deep shit.”
“Tell me how deep.”
With nail-bitten fingers, he flipped through the pages of a battered notebook. “At 0130 hours, our officers responded to a 911 at an apartment on Willie Street and found Kate Daniels giving CPR to a non-responsive adult female. The victim’s roommate—who made the call—said she’d just gotten home and had no idea what happened. Said Daniels shook her head when she asked if she’d called for help. The EMTs got there within five minutes and didn’t even bother to transport. Rigor had already begun, so they called in the M.E. to pronounce. We secured the scene and brought in Daniels and the roommate to take their statements.”
I shook my head in disbelief. No way could I envision Kate in this picture.
“In answer to your first question,” Doug went on, “the deceased is Yvonne Pritchard, age twenty-three, and apparently a grad student working on one of Daniels’ research projects. Daniels said she’d only gotten there about ten minutes before the roommate and found Pritchard unconscious on the floor, not breathing.”
“Cause of death?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say drug overdose,” he said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. “But, as you know, at this point I’m here to gather information, not give it out.”
“You said she’s in deep shit. Why? Do you have any reason to suspect my client of wrongdoing?”
“I think it’s somewhat suspicious she didn’t call 911 before trying to revive the victim. And why is she going to a student’s apartment at one in the morning? But the thing I find most unusual is what she’s got with her: no purse, no ID, just five-hundred bucks in cash and a car key in her pocket.”
“Did you search the car?”
“C’mon, Caroline!” Doug said with a deep chuckle. “Everyone in this department knows better than that. She pointed out the car to Patrolman Williams as they were leaving the scene, and he made sure it was locked. We’d like her consent to let us search it, but that’s for you to decide—unless or until we have cause to get a warrant.”
My alarm mounted as Kate and I began talking in a private conference room. More harsh lighting—this time accompanied by a high-pitched persistent hum—made it impossible to ignore her ill health. Could she be in shock?
“What the hell is going on, Kate?” I asked, unable to hold back the harsh words.
“Yvonne called me at the lab at about nine-thirty,” she said in a quivering voice. “I could hardly understand her—she couldn’t stop crying. She’d been depressed for weeks, and there’d been rumors going around she was pregnant. We talked for a while, and she seemed better. But after we hung up, I kept worrying. So I decided to go check on her.”
“You knew where she lived?”
“Yeah. I’d been to a party there a month or so ago.”
You party with your students? I thought but didn’t ask. I needed immediate details. “What time did you get there? How did you get in?”
“I guess it was about one-fifteen. There were lights on in the apartment. No one answered the door, but it was unlocked so I just went in. She was on the floor…” Kate choked back a sob.
“Why didn’t you dial 911?”
“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “Maybe my medical training just kicked into gear? But later I realized I’d left my cell phone at home, and I didn’t see Yvonne’s. So I guess I just didn’t think of it.”
Something about that answer, too, was unsettling to me, but I forged ahead without calling her on it. Kate was vague about the roommate’s arrival but remembered she had done CPR until the EMTs came. She said she hadn’t noticed any drugs or paraphernalia on the premises.
“Why did you have five-hundred dollars in your pocket? It looks incredibly suspicious,” I said.
“I know it sounds crazy, Caroline, but I was going to offer to give it to her for an abortion. Her boyfriend dumped her, and Yvonne was always strapped for money.”
Abortion? Great solution for depression. Again, I bit my tongue.
There were countless questions to be asked, including what was physically wrong with Kate, but Doug Connaboy knocked on the window, signaling it was time to take her statement. I raised one finger and nodded.
“Before we go in,” I said to Kate, “I need to know the truth. Did you have anything to do with Yvonne’s death?”
“Absolutely not.”
“And will they find anything illegal or conceivably incriminating if we give the cops permission to search your car?”
“No. Nothing,” she said with quiet conviction. Despite the circumstances and the little red flags raised by a few of Kate’s answers, I believed her. I’d known her almost twenty years, and I’d never known her to lie.
**
Doug’s young partner, Sam Jacobs, was already seated in the interview room when we walked in. I couldn’t help but smile when he stood to shake my hand. With his head of unruly black curls, bent wire-framed glasses and protruding Adam’s apple, I’d always thought he looked more like a slapstick comic than a police officer. No way could Sam ever play the “bad cop” role in this duo.
As it happened, neither detective played that part in Kate’s interview. The four of us sat around a Formica-topped table, and Kate answered their questions without hesitation. Doug asked most of them, and Sam took the more copious notes.
At one point, Doug asked Kate to tell them what she knew of Yvonne’s family background. I noticed deep creases in her forehead as she decided where to start. “Yvonne was a first generation college student—her parents are blue collar folks. I think maybe they pushed her and her brother a little too hard to succeed. She graduated from high school at seventeen and went on to get her bachelor’s degree in three years. Yvonne was brilliant but somewhat immature and managed to get herself into some iffy personal situations.”
To my shame, it was only during this answer that it finally hit me: the realization a young woman—someone’s daughter, sister, friend—was gone, and way before her time. I’d been so focused on Kate’s predicament that I’d lost sight of the real tragedy. Doug and Sam had the specter of Yvonne’s death indelibly etched in their minds, and I knew they wouldn’t rest until satisfied they knew what had happened and who was responsible.
As the interview proceeded, I grew more and more confident Kate was telling the truth. The details she provided helped. So did her almost constant eye contact with the detectives.
“I think that about covers it,” Doug finally said, pushing back from the table. “I’ll be back in a minute with the consent form for the search of Kate’s car, and then you can both go get some sleep.” Sam followed him out of the room.
I glanced at the clock on the wall—it was almost six o’clock. Lily would still be asleep, and I didn’t want to call home and wake her. Kate and I—exhausted and emotionally spent—sat in silence while we waited for Doug to return with his paperwork. She picked at a snagged thread on the elbow of her sweater. I looked over the notes I had made during the interview, but nothing really registered. Ten minutes stretched to fifteen, then twenty. How long can it take to type up a simple search authorization?
When Doug returned to the room, I got an inexplicable sinking feeling in my stomach. “Caroline, a word, please?” he said, nodding toward the hallway.
“I’m sorry,” he said as the door closed behind us, “but I’m afraid your client isn’t going anywhere for awhile.”