Nevertheless, as he sat opposite Gail and me the following morning, he didn’t look as if he were going to let any deep-seated honorable character traits get the better of him.
“I can’t believe you did this, Gail. I can’t believe you’d be so totally out of touch with what we do here. To willfully dig up exculpatory evidence against a prime suspect in a capital case. I mean, my God, it boggles the mind. What the hell were you thinking?”
Gail had prepared for this. “I’ve said from the start there’s more to this case than we’re willing to admit. I have no doubt that Owen Tharp killed Brenda Croteau. I have a big problem leaving it there. My interpretation of our job, since you mentioned it, is to seek justice on behalf of the people-the innocent, the guilty, and especially the ones who for one reason or another fall in between. I absolutely believe that to just nail bad guys is a violation of the very premise on which this office is founded.”
Derby stared at her in astonishment, opened his mouth to speak, hesitated, and then finally said, with visible self-restraint, “I think we’d better agree to disagree on that for the moment and stick with the nuts and bolts. Joe, I know the ME said there was no poison in Lisa Wooten’s last dose-Gail handed me that small grenade a while back-but are you absolutely sure Brenda Croteau didn’t sell it to her?”
“We can’t find a single witness who says she did,” I answered carefully. “And we do have someone who says he was her supplier right up to the end.”
Derby glanced at the report Gail had placed before him at the start of the meeting. “Eric Meade. How reliable is he?”
I put the best slant on it I could. “I think he’s utterly truthful-not a devious man at all. He might not make the best witness if you were to put him on the stand, though. A little reclusive.”
Derby stared at me a moment. “Swell.” He checked the report again. “And Walter Freund-he’s the guy you think killed Wooten to gain control of Owen and then steered Owen at Croteau.”
“We think so. According to witnesses, Wooten’s intake hadn’t altered over those last few months, and she was known to be a fastidious shooter. The only variable cropping up near the end was Freund.”
He sighed and pushed the report away from him. “Gail, let’s be honest here. What’ve we got now we didn’t have before?”
Her response was instantaneous. “Doubt.”
He didn’t react but looked at me instead. “Joe?”
“I would like to look into Walter Freund.”
He surprised us both by smiling slightly. “Okay, fine. Why don’t we compromise, then? We have a bird in hand. Let’s prosecute Owen Tharp for the double murder of Brenda Croteau and her baby. Then, once he can no longer hide behind his Fifth Amendment rights-and while you, Joe, have had a chance to build a case against Mr. Freund-we can use him as a state’s witness and issue an invitation to Freund to join him in jail.”
But Gail was already shaking her head. “Reggie McNeil’ll drag out the appeals process for years if he can. Plus, nothing says Owen will turn against Walter in any case. If Owen did kill Brenda for Walter’s sake, there’s no way he’ll squeal on him once he’s already convicted. What would he gain by it? He’d be labeled a stool pigeon in jail and probably get himself killed. But if we approach Reggie and offer a deal for Owen in order to get Freund, that’ll turn Reggie into an ally. It’ll be a two-for-one slam dunk.”
Derby began to respond, but Gail cut him off. “And I don’t think the case against Owen is that strong, anyhow. When we went into this, we were looking at life without parole. Now that his state of mind has been called into doubt-”
“For which we have you to thank,” Derby interrupted in turn, some of his earlier emotion returning. “My God, you’re sounding like his defense attorney, Gail. Have you forgotten what this man did? Do you have to look at those photographs again?” He grabbed another document from off his desk and waved it at her. “And this motion from McNeil to suppress the confession. You want to hand him exculpatory evidence going to intent on top of this?”
I noticed a vein throbbing in his forehead as his face reddened with barely suppressed anger. “I think you are right, by the way, that we probably won’t get life without parole anymore. Is that justice on behalf of the people? That we go gently with a stone-cold killer because he had a rough childhood, or we bend over backwards to help his defense because some bully told him to kill, and he went ahead and did it? I don’t think so.”
Gail’s expression was as tense and closed down as I’d ever seen it, but her voice, when she spoke, was level. “I’ll resign if you want me to.”
His eyes widened. “Resign? What the hell-” He stopped abruptly and studied her for a moment. “You’d quit over this?”
“Only because I think we’re ignoring the big fish so we can make a meal out of a minnow. We could have both.”
He scratched his forehead, peered at me, and asked, “She like this all the time?”
“Yes,” she answered for me.
I mentally tipped my hat to him and reconsidered my earlier harsh opinion. Instead of throwing us out, as he easily could have, he settled back in his chair and asked, “Okay-from the top. You have nothing solid linking Walter Freund to Brenda Croteau. So why couldn’t Owen have visited Brenda, thinking-for whatever reason-that she’d played a role in Lisa’s death, then gotten into an argument with her, grabbed a nearby knife on impulse, and killed her with it?”
“I think that’s what did happen,” Gail said. “What’s bothering me is that it doesn’t explain why all the lights were on in the house, why pages were torn from her journal, why the wounds were so numerous and savage, and why there’s no connection to Brenda living beyond her means. Also, when Owen was picked up and his possessions examined, why was there a single drop of blood on one shoe and a small smear on the cuff of his jacket, when Brenda’s injuries caused blood to spurt everywhere? And, last but not least, why was there a denim knee-print in Brenda’s blood when Judith Giroux claims her nephew never wore jeans and that the slightly bloodstained pants she now admits destroying were khakis?”
Derby was looking confused. “What’re you saying? He did it but he didn’t?”
“I have to believe he did,” she admitted. “The physical evidence is strong, he confessed to it, he knew where the murder weapon had been thrown. I would just like to know the answer to those other questions. Because I’ll guarantee you one thing,” she added. “If I’m thinking along these lines, with as little mileage as I have, Reggie NcNeil’s cooking up a storm.”
Derby stared at me sourly. “No one can say you don’t have mileage in this area. Did any of these questions occur to you? Are new ones occurring to you as we speak? I mean, much as I hate to give Gail any credit here, I need to know if you’re totally satisfied with this case.”
“I’d like to find the answers to some of her questions.”
He rolled his eyes. “Like the degree of frenzy reflected in the wounds? We know he acted out violently in the past. Hell-we know he killed this woman, for Christ’s sake.”
Gail wouldn’t concede an inch. “I got to know the difference when I worked with women’s counseling groups. Putting aside the possibility that Owen was trained to attack like some kind of vicious pet, the kind of acting out he’d done before was spontaneous, short-lived, and asexual-it fit a pattern. In the parlance, he’s ‘psychodynamically predisposed’ that way. That’s what Freund took advantage of, probably without knowing it. We found out that, as a kid, Owen would run out into traffic, or jump from heights and bust himself up, and as he aged he developed the sort of violent behavior we first used to explain his attack on Brenda. But I now think we misread the signs there. The difference is that Brenda was stabbed seventeen times-way beyond some spontaneous acting out-and that the wounds have a sexual connotation to them. All those slashes to the breasts. Owen used a weapon of opportunity, which is perfectly plausible for his type, except that the psychosexual pathology I see in Brenda’s wounds points to a man who came prepared to attack. A man with a past of sexual abuse of some sort, which Owen doesn’t have.”