14

Our house sat on a small hill at the end of a cul-de-sac. When I looked out the picture windows of my dad’s study, I could see a good portion of the Seven Oaks neighborhood, and I felt like a queen in her medieval castle.

After my dad’s first stroke, he would spend several hours a day in there, acting busy, though he could no longer practice law. Many times, when I walked by the study on my way out the front door, he would just be sitting at his desk, staring out the windows, deep in thought. There would be a half-full cup of coffee next to his computer, getting cold. When I got home that night, I would dump it down the sink and put the cup in the dishwasher. Sometimes there would be two or three half-full cups scattered around the study, all apparently forgotten and abandoned.

On the morning after my dad’s funeral, I took his spot and drank coffee at his desk, gazing out the windows. Neighborhood kids were waiting for the school bus at the entrance to the cul-de-sac, their parents standing with them, chatting and enjoying the beautiful spring day. I yearned for a life of normalcy like that. And I wished my father were still sitting in this chair, even with the weakened mind and altered personality that had followed his first stroke. I struggled to grasp the finality of everything—the hard fact that I would never see him in this house again, never be able to gain courage and strength from just knowing he was here.

After I finished my coffee, I shook off the melancholy and moved to the Rikki Tate war room. I removed the pictures from the walls and set up an easel in the corner. There were some decorative tables lining the walls, and I cleared the tops of those as well.

I taped a few pictures of Rikki to a side wall and sat down at my computer to start outlining her biography. This was the unique perspective I brought to cases like this. I would look at things through the victim’s eyes—study her habits, her friends, and her personality. I would practically become Rikki Tate so that I could understand what she was thinking and why someone might want her dead. Like others, I would also study the suspect. But big chunks of my time would be spent on the victim, something other law enforcement types didn’t emphasize enough.

Rikki’s life read like a Shakespearean tragedy—from an abusive childhood to Vegas to an Atlanta escort service and ultimately to her marriage to Caleb Tate. I reviewed the pleadings from the civil lawsuits she had filed trying to get her topless pictures removed from the Internet. I read online reports about the angst this created among the purveyors of porn. I searched for a connection between them and Caleb Tate.

The major felony squad detectives had spent a fair amount of time chasing down rumors that both Rikki and Caleb were involved in affairs. Caleb had allegedly been sneaking off with an office assistant. Two years ago, Rikki had been getting together with a guy she met at the gym. Rikki’s affair ended just before her spiritual conversion. The current status of Caleb and his assistant was unknown.

With the help of another ADA, the detectives had already obtained and executed a search warrant at Tate’s home and subpoenaed medical records. Most of Rikki’s records consisted of plastic surgery and other unrelated matters. There was no indication she had ever obtained a prescription for oxycodone, codeine, or promethazine. Caleb Tate had been on OxyContin, a brand name for oxycodone, for a few months after rotator cuff surgery several years ago, but he had only filled the prescription twice.

Caleb and Rikki certainly had their problems. Friends reported fights, but the police were never called, and no one ever claimed that Caleb had laid a hand on Rikki. Her conversion, according to her church friends, only served to exacerbate the issues. Rikki would ask fellow church members to pray for her husband. He flippantly dismissed her faith, certain it was just a fad she would outgrow.

I read every police interview, every medical record, and every other document in the file. There was no way Bill Masterson would let me indict on the basis of this information. At the very least, we would need to show that Caleb Tate had access to the drugs found in Rikki’s bloodstream, and we would have to put together a strong case of motive. Maybe Caleb’s office assistant had demanded that he do something. Maybe Rikki had threatened to file for divorce. Maybe Caleb had just gotten tired of a washed-out former showgirl who was hooked on drugs.

I searched in vain for a hint of a smoking gun among the documents on the table, but I didn’t find one. There was, however, one item in the file that provided a slight flicker of hope. Rikki Tate, not surprisingly, had been seeing an expensive psychiatrist. And not just any psychiatrist. Dr. Aaron Gillespie, an expert witness whom I had used as a forensic psychiatrist on a few insanity plea cases and a former colleague of my mother, had been the primary psychiatrist seeing Rikki for the past ten years.

I called to make an appointment, but his assistant asked so many questions that I politely ended the conversation and hung up. I dressed for work, googled his address, and headed off in my 4Runner to see if the doctor was in.