“YOU NEED TO START TALKING and you need to start talking now.” D.D.’s voice was hard.
She regarded the stacks of cash and fake IDs in the soot-blackened box at her feet and ideas raced through her head. Conrad Carter was some kind of secret operative. Except any decent undercover agent would also have a backup piece and ammo stashed with his cash. A criminal mastermind or serial offender? Carter was a man with no family whose job demanded long periods away and who was described as the kind of guy everyone liked but no one knew.
D.D. felt she was standing at a precipice. The next step would take her free-falling over the edge, the answers to dozens of questions roaring past her. Except it would be her job to frantically grab each piece and sort them into a meaningful explanation, all before crashing into the ground below.
In front of her, Evie was shaking her head slightly. The woman appeared shocked, but by what? The contents of the box, or that the police had finally discovered her husband’s secret?
Neil, God bless him, did the sensible thing. He snapped several quick pics with his cell phone, showing the box in situ. Then, donning a pair of latex gloves, he started sorting out the contents.
The cash was banded piles of hundreds. Neil organized them in stacks of ten to equal a thousand, then lined up the stacks. D.D. could practically hear Evie work out the math: twenty-five thousand dollars. Not much compared to the solid bricks of Washingtons seized during the average drug raid, but more than enough in a working-class neighborhood where Evie and her husband had probably considered that a solid year’s renovation budget. D.D. took several photos of her own, to corroborate Neil’s photos. Chain of custody over recovered cash was a big deal in policing. Good cops looked out for each other, dotted all i’s, crossed all t’s, so neither they nor their squad could face any scrutiny.
Five photo IDs. The first names were a mix of Conrad, Conner, Carter, Conroy—always good to stick with names that sounded similar. The last names repeated the trick. Conrad Carter from Massachusetts became Carter Conrad in Texas or Carter Conner in Florida.
Given the name game, D.D. doubted the IDs were professional grade—the kind of fakes that cost thousands of dollars and involved trolling death certificates for an infant who’d departed thirty-eight years ago, then stealing that identity. Such an alias could conceivably be used for decades, the holder acquiring credit cards, even a passport. This . . . Neil had lined up each slightly warped piece of plastic. These fakes reminded her of the kind underage kids used to talk their way into local bars. Good at a glance, but not great.
She could tell from the look on Neil’s face he was thinking the same. Whatever Conrad Carter was doing, he definitely wasn’t a pro. Which made him what?
D.D. rose and eyed Evie sternly. Evie was still staring at the cash and cards, but she didn’t appear to be looking at them as much as through them. Seeing something only she could see.
“My client is tired,” the attorney began. “Given her condition—”
“I don’t know anything,” Evie interrupted. Her voice sounded as far away as her expression.
“You said this lockbox contained the overflow of financial documents.”
“I lied. I’d never seen it before. I wanted to know the contents.”
“So you admit—”
“All spouses keep secrets, Sergeant. I already told you to ask your husband.”
D.D. could feel her temper starting to rise. “Fine. Let’s head to HQ, where we can talk about yours.”
“Sergeant Warren, my client—”
“Is lying to the police and admitting it? Is possibly leading a double life of her own? Does your baby even belong to Conrad Carter? Or maybe it’s”—D.D. nudged the closest driver’s license with the tip of her boot—“Carter Conrad’s baby? Or Conroy Conrad’s?”
“Sergeant Detective!” Attorney Dick Delaney again, all outrage and bluster.
“I don’t know anything,” Evie repeated quietly. “I thought . . . He locked his office door. A room in his own house. Every time he went away. Except I was the only person around, and his business, selling custom windows . . . Why lock up customer spec sheets? And why protect such documents from your wife? Or was he protecting me from them?”
Evie glanced up. For a moment, she appeared as genuinely confused and puzzled as D.D. felt.
“You suspected something,” D.D. stated.
Delaney made another noise in the back of his throat. D.D. nudged Neil with her foot, and he shot immediately to standing.
“We’re going to need to see the file box again,” Neil said.
Delaney gave them a look, Neil’s bid at distraction not fooling him for a moment. “Then you can fetch it from the back of the trunk.” He tossed Neil the keys.
D.D. kept her attention on Evie. She was on to something. She could feel it.
“You shot the computer. Why did you shoot the computer?” D.D. moved closer, keeping her voice low. “What did you suspect, Evie? What did you catch the father of your unborn child doing?”
“My client—”
“First your father. You loved him, didn’t you? Idolized him. I conducted those neighbor interviews. Everyone talked about what a close bond you and he had.”
“Sergeant Detective, I am warning you—”
“You thought he killed himself, didn’t you? So acting on your mother’s orders, you became the patsy. All these years, carrying that weight alone. Just so you could fall in love and discover . . . what? That your husband’s sins were far greater?”
“This conversation is over.” Delaney had his hand on Evie’s arm. “Take the file box or don’t take the file box. Either way my client is coming with me.”
“No, she isn’t.” D.D. was staring directly at Evie. She knew she had the woman’s total, undivided attention. She understood then the truth to getting at her prime suspect. Every person had a lever, the button that a good detective learned how to push. Evie had given her the key just yesterday; the woman was her father’s daughter. She did work the math. And she couldn’t walk away from an unsolved equation.
Curiosity. That was Evie’s downfall. Which gave D.D. a slight chill because curiosity had always been her weakness, too.
“Come to HQ. Answer my questions,” she told the woman now.
“She’s going home!” Delaney snapped.
Evie said, “Why?”
“Because in return, I have photos. From sixteen years ago. Going through them, I can prove to you, your father didn’t shoot himself.”
EVIE WOULD COME to HQ. D.D. never doubted it for a second. First her lawyer had to draw her aside and engage in frantic conversation. No doubt informing his client she was being foolish, letting the police get under her skin. If they had any real evidence, they’d be forced to disclose it prior to trial anyway. As for Evie, the woman seemed to have some strong words of her own. D.D. could’ve sworn she heard the woman state angrily, “I am your client and you will not call my mother.”
How interesting.
After a few more minutes of terse exchange, Evie climbed into her lawyer’s car, file box still planted in the trunk. D.D. couldn’t justify seizing the papers as evidence, though she was happy enough to have a photo of Conrad Carter’s life insurance for future reference. Neil bagged and tagged the metal lockbox and its contents as the BPD’s share of the spoils. They loaded up their car, then led the way to HQ.
BPD’s headquarters was an acquired taste. People either were sufficiently impressed by the modern glass monstrosity or, more likely, shook their heads at yet another example of their tax dollars at work. D.D. wasn’t into architecture. As a woman who liked to eat, she appreciated the café on the lobby level. And the upstairs homicide suite was far bigger and more useful than the old HQ had been, even if the blue industrial carpet, gray filing cabinets, and collection of cubicles made them look more like an insurance company than an investigative unit. Sometimes, like now, when she had a suspect she didn’t want to spook, it was nice to pretend they were just hanging out at an office versus, say, starring in an old episode of NYPD Blue.
Given the circumstances, D.D. led Evie and her lawyer to homicide’s conference room, something a bit more hospitable than the spartan interrogation rooms. Evie already had her attorney at her elbow. D.D. didn’t want to spook her prime suspect before extracting as much information as possible.
After a quick sidebar, Neil disappeared to find Phil. Neil would handle processing the evidence they’d recovered at the arson scene. Phil would resume his role as family man/father figure detective. Again, interviews were strategy and while D.D. liked a good full-court press, that was never going to work with a lawyer in the room. This would be a finesse job. Fortunately, she was a woman of many skills.
And like Evie, of much curiosity.
D.D. played nice. She got Evie and her lawyer situated. Brought them both bottles of water; then, at the request of Delaney, who seemed to enjoy having one of Boston’s finest waiting on him, she returned with a cup of coffee. By then, Phil had joined the room, armed with a heavy cardboard box. The outside of the box bore large black numbers: the case number for Evie’s father’s shooting sixteen years ago.
Phil set the box at the head of the table, away from Evie and Dick Delaney. He and D.D. had been playing this game for so long, they didn’t need to speak to know how to proceed. D.D. sat directly across from Evie and her lawyer, engaging them in small talk about best brands of coffee in Boston, black versus cream and sugar, and, oh yeah, having to give up coffee while pregnant, which D.D. had never thought she’d be able to do, but in fact had come quite naturally.
In the meantime, Phil unpacked the box. Slowly. File after file. The murder book. Binders of evidence reports. Stacks of photos. Pile here. Pile there. Pile after pile.
Evie lost focus first. Nodded at whatever asinine comment D.D. was making while her gaze drifted to the head of the table, the growing stack of yellowing papers, frayed photo edges, dirty manila files. Records were all supposed to be scanned and stored electronically these days. And yet, if the average bureaucrat ever walked through the warehouse, saw the full magnitude of the job . . .
Walking the stacks to manually retrieve an evidence box wasn’t going away anytime soon.
“That’s evidence from my father’s case,” Evie said suddenly. The woman was agitated. Not even bothering to sip her water but spinning the bottle in her hand.
“That’s right.”
“You have photos?”
Delaney spoke up. “I would like to go on the record that I don’t recommend my client be here today, taking these questions, Sergeant Warren—”
D.D. kept her focus on Evie: “Do you remember your statement from that day?”
“A little.”
“Let me read it to you, from my notes: ‘sixteen-year-old subject, female, white, appears in state of shock and/or traumatized. Subject states she had been in the kitchen with her father, Earl Hopkins, fifty-five-year-old male, white, after two thirty on Saturday. Father was showing her how to unload a recently purchased Model eight-seventy Remington pump-action shotgun. Father was standing in front of refrigerator when female subject, in her own words, picked up shotgun off the kitchen table and attempted to clear the chamber. According to female, shotgun discharged into her father’s torso from a distance of mere inches. Female states father fell back against the refrigerator, then sank to the floor. Female claims she set down gun and attempted to rouse her father without success. Female further claims she then heard screaming from the doorway, where her mother, Joyce Hopkins, forty-three-year-old female, white, stood. Mother claimed she’d witnessed the shooting. Detective Speirs interviewed independently.’”
Evie didn’t say anything while D.D. read, just kept staring at the box. D.D. set down her notepad. “Does that fit your memory?”
Evie finally looked at her. “What do the photos say?”
“Phil?”
Phil stepped forward with the first set. They were gruesome. A shotgun blast at close range did a tremendous amount of damage. Evie had sat through the real event. In theory, there was nothing here she hadn’t seen before, though in D.D.’s experience, memory had its way with things over time. Meaning the photos could look far worse than Evie had allowed herself to remember, or more likely, given the woman’s burden of guilt, far less awful than the images that replayed in her head night after night.
D.D. spread out the first three photos in front of Evie and her lawyer. Delaney inhaled sharply but didn’t look away. He’d been there that day, too. A friend of the family, summoned by Evie’s mom, who hadn’t thought to call 911 but knew immediately to dial the family lawyer. Said something about the woman’s mental state right there.
“Long guns are used in suicides more often than people think,” D.D. stated now. She kept her voice even but soft. No need to play hardball just yet; that would come later. “This particular shotgun, the Model eight-seventy Remington, comes in two different barrel lengths for the twelve-gauge. Your father had purchased the slightly shorter version, but even then, the barrel length is twenty-six inches, the full length of the shotgun forty-six and a half inches. In instances of suicide, the victim will generally press the tip of the barrel against his own body to stabilize the weapon while he reaches for the trigger. Hence, one of the most common indicators of suicide by long gun is a clear burn pattern against the victim’s skin from the heat of the barrel.”
Evie glanced up at her. “I don’t see a burn mark. It would be on his stomach, yes? I just see . . . soot.”
“Scorch marks,” D.D. provided, “indicating the shotgun was in close proximity to the victim at the time of discharge, but not actually touching the victim’s skin. In fact, the scorch marks are consistent with your initial statement, a scenario of someone standing mere inches away from the victim, pulling the trigger.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The second indicator of suicide by long gun is trajectory. It’s nearly impossible to hold a long gun level and pull the trigger, meaning inevitably the impact of the blast should be up and out. The projectiles enter lower on the body, travel in an upward diagonal until exiting higher on the body. In this case”—D.D. tapped a photo—“we can see the entrance wound was beneath your father’s lower ribs. But according to the ME, the shotgun pellets didn’t follow any diagonal path. Instead, they traveled nearly straight through the body, shredding his organs and intestines along the way.”
“Sergeant!” Delaney objected.
Evie, however, did not look away. “The gun was fired level. From someone standing directly in front of my father.”
“Which, again, would be consistent with the story you provided. You picked up the shotgun. You were trying to inspect the chamber, and instead, you pulled the trigger while standing directly in front of your father. Hence no burn marks, no upward trajectory.”
“Except I didn’t! We’d been out. Myself and my mother. We parked on the driveway. I’d just opened the car door and I heard a noise. We entered the kitchen. And there . . . I saw . . . There was my father.”
“The third thing we’d look at for a suicide,” D.D. continued relentlessly, “is the blood spatter. If someone else was in the room, if someone else pulled the trigger, that person would be subject to blowback, or spray from the impact of the shotgun pellets entering the body. Meaning we should have at least one person covered in spatter.”
She stared hard at Evie, who sputtered: “I walked in . . . the blood . . . it dripped down on me . . .”
“We’d also have a void in the spatter. A clean spot in, say, the floor or countertop, where the shooter’s body blocked any droplets from landing.” D.D. tapped a third photo, where, sure enough, bloody spray appeared above and to the sides of Hopkins’s body, but directly in front . . .
“Your father didn’t commit suicide,” D.D. stated firmly. “The evidence has now been reviewed several times by several different experts. There was someone else in the room, and that person shot him.”
Evie opened her mouth, shut her mouth. “You think I’m lying now,” she whispered at last.
“I think your story sixteen years ago is a better fit with the evidence than the line of bull you tried to feed me yesterday.”
“Sergeant,” Delaney started again.
“Why would I lie? I only did it back then to protect my father.”
“Your father, or your mother?”
“My mother was with me! We’d gone out shopping. Surely, you can find a witness, pull store security tapes. A credit card receipt. Something that proves we were together.”
“From sixteen years ago?”
“I thought he’d killed himself! He’d been . . . off. Not himself. And genius and suicide . . .” Evie shrugged, sounding genuinely distressed.
“Your father did not commit suicide.”
“I didn’t shoot him!”
“So you’re a liar, but not a killer. And Friday night, with your husband?”
“Sergeant! This line of questioning is over!”
“Not so fast, Counselor. Your client came to me yesterday, recanting her story from sixteen years ago. She’s the one who reopened this can of worms. Based on her new statement, the case of Earl Hopkins is no longer being considered accidental. We’re now treating it as an active homicide, and you know the statute of limitations on homicide—there isn’t one.”
“I didn’t do it!” Evie, still aghast, pounded her water bottle against the table. “I would never harm my father!”
“But your husband? The guy with rolls of cash and nearly half a dozen fake IDs?”
“We’re out of here.” Delaney was already on his feet, pulling at Evie’s arm. The woman, however, continued to resist. And it wasn’t the allegations about her husband that had her agitated. Clearly, she was still distressed about her father. Even sixteen years later, it was all about her father.
She was gazing at D.D. wildly now. “My hair. You took photos of my hair. Samples. I remember that!”
D.D. nodded slowly.
“Test it. Have it reexamined. You can, can’t you? I don’t understand it all, but I watch crime shows. You can prove directionality from blood spatter, right? Say, the difference between this blowback you’re talking about, versus contact smear from someone entering the room right afterwards.”
“I don’t know if we have enough evidence,” D.D. said, which wasn’t entirely untrue.
“Test it. Do whatever you have to do. I didn’t kill my father. I didn’t! All these years.” Her voice broke off. “I assumed the worst about him.”
“Him, or your mother?”
“She was with me. I’m telling you the truth. My mom is crazy, I know, but she loved him. They loved each other. I don’t know. Not all relationships are meant to be understood by outsiders—”
“Talking about your husband again?”
“My mom didn’t do this,” Evie repeated more firmly. She seemed to be pulling herself together now, allowing her lawyer to guide her to standing. “She, me, we didn’t do this. All these years, we thought he shot himself. That’s why we lied. Not to protect ourselves. But to protect him. If you’d met him, if you’d talked to him . . . My father was a great man. He deserved better than to go down in the history books as one more depressed genius.”
“Then who, Evie?” D.D. rose to standing. “Who would have motive to shoot your father? Did he have professional rivals? Failing students? Jealous husbands? Someone pulled that trigger. If not you, then who?”
“I . . . I have no idea.” Evie glanced helplessly at her lawyer. It was all he needed.
“This interview is over. You asked for answers from my client and she provided them. You want to learn anything else, Officers, I suggest you go out and—here’s a thought—do some detecting.”
Delaney guided his client around the table. But Evie’s gaze was still glued to the photos as she walked by. Fascinated. Fixated. Frustrated.
That she finally realized all these years later she’d lied for nothing? Or because she’d just discovered yesterday’s attempt at changing her story was never going to work?
D.D. still couldn’t figure it. But there was something about the way Evie looked at the photos that tugged at her, made her wonder if that woman hadn’t told her the truth yesterday after all.
Longing, she finally decided. Evie Carter looked at those photos like a woman who, sixteen years later, just wanted her father back.
It made D.D. wonder what other regrets the woman had, and how many might involve her husband and his own death just two nights ago.
Knock on the door. Neil poked his head in. He appeared nervous.
“Got something on the fake IDs?” she asked immediately, collecting her notes.
“Ah, no. You got a visitor.”
“I have a visitor?”
“A fed. SSA Kimberly Quincy from the Atlanta office. She’s here with Flora Dane and some other guy. Says she needs to talk.”
“No,” D.D. said.
“Too late,” a female voice drawled from behind Neil.
D.D. sighed. “Shit.”