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 Beach, 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.”