"Congratulations. You're a couple of steps ahead of me. I think the lodge printer still uses a ribbon."
He laughed. "Then you'll be even more impressed to hear that I have the file on a thumb drive, so I can e-mail it to you right now." I could hear him pecking on the keyboard. "And there it goes. One case file, sent electronically."
"I owe you."
"You do. And I'll take a weekend at the lodge with the kids this winter. They want to learn cross-country skiing."
"You've got the weekend and private lessons."
"Great. I'll expect a call later, to talk about the file."
Reading Amy's case file was as hard as I thought it would be. Maybe harder. When we first found the journal, I'd expected to read details on Amy's murder that I'd never wash from my mind. Yet I'd been ready to do it. The case file, with its cold, documented facts, should have been easier to digest. It wasn't. Because those facts weren't written by anonymous professionals.
I'd read a summary of the case years ago, but it had been just that--a typed summary. This was very different. I recognized the handwriting of Dr. Foster on the autopsy--the same Dr. Foster who'd been our family physician most of my young life. I read the report and I heard his voice and I imagined him there, working on Amy, his former patient. The notations about the crime-scene photos were all in Neil's writing. I read a badly spelled typewritten report and didn't even need to check the signature to know it was Myron Young, who'd gone on to replace my father as chief. Other reports had curt notes in the margins, the pen pushed so deep I could still feel rage emanating off the page. Uncle Eddie--Amy's father.
My father and uncle hadn't been allowed to work the case--it was bad enough they'd been first on the scene. But while other police had assisted the prosecution in gathering evidence, it was clear Dad and Uncle Eddie had kept abreast of the investigation, making their own notes and keeping track of the evidence.
There were the pages and pages of meticulous notes written in my father's hand. I read those, and I was back at my kitchen table, sipping hot chocolate, watching him work as my mother and brother slept. Those were some of my most cherished memories and now, seeing his notes here, detailing some of my worst memories . . . It was almost more than I could take.
I think having Quinn there made it harder. I'd rather have read them alone. No, I can be honest now--I'd rather have read them with Jack. Quinn tried to distract me by keeping it professional, hashing it out, trying to help me distance myself from these pages, but I couldn't distance myself. I didn't want to.
That's how it had always been with Quinn. We could talk for hours, and they could be deep conversations and heated debates that got to the core of our beliefs, but . . . Evelyn once said that for Quinn, it was all about the head. Cerebral. She'd been referring to his vigilantism, but the same could be said for the connection I had with him. I told Quinn what I thought, not what I felt.
Jack came to the door a few times, standing in the opening, where Quinn couldn't see from his angle. I'd feel him watching me and look up to see him there.
The file contained both the police work and trial papers. There wasn't much in the police part that I didn't already know, especially the early events my father and uncle had been involved in. I'd heard the story so many times I sometimes felt that I'd been there.
When my father and uncle left the station, they took two cars. There was no need for that, but neither could bear to be the one in the passenger seat, helplessly urging the other to go faster, Jesus Christ, can't you drive faster? They even took separate routes, each certain they knew a quicker way. They raced through town and barreled down the rutted back road so fast that my uncle nearly ripped off his muffler. The road didn't go the entire way to the cabin. But my dad continued past the end of it, driving the car in so far it needed a paint job afterward. Only when it would be faster to run did he and my cousin Pete leap out with my uncle and Myron Young right behind them.
As they ran, they saw a figure through the trees, fleeing the cabin. Dad told Myron to stay with Uncle Eddie, while he and Pete went after the fleeing figure. It wasn't much of a chase. Aldrich was already at his truck, parked down a side trail. My father saw it speeding away. That's when, according to the file, he heard Uncle Eddie "call out" from the cabin. He didn't "call out." I remembered overhearing Pete say Uncle Eddie's screaming was the worst thing he'd ever heard.
Dad called the station to get an APB out on Aldrich's truck, then ran to the cabin. He went inside and found his brother with Amy. She was dead. Strangled. Raped and strangled.
Dad wanted to stay, but Uncle Eddie begged him to go after Aldrich. There was nothing more to be done for Amy except get her justice. Dad caught Aldrich packing to flee town. There was a standoff at the house where he'd rented a room. Shots were fired when Aldrich came out with a hunting rifle. Aldrich was hit in the shoulder and taken into custody.
I'd known about Aldrich being shot. I'd known who shot him, too. My father. Now, though, reading the file, I thought instead of Wayne Franco. Of how I'd shot him when he'd reached into his pocket, giving me an excuse. Had the same thing happened here? I'd never know. Did it matter? Maybe not.
We were getting ready to start the trial pages when Jack came out of the bedroom.
"Dee?"
I looked up.
"Need a coffee. Want a stretch?"
"I would love both," I said, getting up. "Thank you."
"I'll join you," Quinn said.
Quinn closed the laptop and was pushing his chair back when his cell phone rang. He answered. It was Evelyn. Jack murmured that we'd bring him something and prodded me to the door. Behind us, I could hear Quinn saying, "Can I get back to you with that? Ten minutes?" Then, "All right. I'm looking it up."
Jack ushered me out.
"Lucky timing," I said as we headed to the elevator.
"Not really luck."
"You asked Evelyn to call him?"
"Sounded like you needed a break. From the file. From Quinn." He paused. "Reading the file with Quinn, I mean. He's behaving."
"He is on his best behavior."
"And you kinda wish he was being an ass."
"Yes, I kinda do."
There was a coffee shop two doors down. Jack took me the other way instead and we walked until we found one a couple of kilometers away. We discussed the file as we walked and he knew exactly what to ask to make me open up. I told him how I felt about what I had read, the memories it was bringing back, the issues and the conflicts. Jack didn't say much, but he said all the right things, and by the time we returned I was ready to tackle the next part.
CHAPTER 41
On to the trial transcript, annotated in my father's hand. And this was where I began to see the case break down. The job of the police is to accumulate enough evidence to make a case against the accused. It's only when the case goes to trial that the holes begin to show. And here, they were bigger than I'd ever imagined.
According to the version I grew up with, my father and uncle had seen Drew Aldrich fleeing the scene. In truth they had seen the figure only from the back and noted build, clothing, hair color. At trial, three witnesses testified to seeing Aldrich earlier that evening. He'd been wearing a light T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers--as he was when he was arrested. The man running from the scene had been wearing a dark shirt.
"Why was it an issue at all?" I asked Quinn. "Aldrich confessed to killing Amy--he said it was an accident. Why not admit he was the one running?"
"The discrepancy bolstered the case against your family's reliability."
The next problem followed immediately after, with the standoff at his apartment. Witnesses said Aldrich did indeed threaten that he had a rifle. He even came to the door holding it . . . but he was holding it out, showing that he was surrendering. That's when my father shot him.
Again, the prosecution could argue that it was night. The door was not well lit. All my father saw was a gun. But it still added to the defense's story. My father overreacted, whic
h was very uncharacteristic of him and therefore supported the idea that he was responding as a grieving uncle.
I knew from the journal that Amy had prearranged our meeting with Aldrich that night, but I'd never realized that had come out in the trial. There was even evidence of a phone call from Amy's house to Aldrich's apartment the day before, when apparently she'd given him the train number and arrival time; he'd jotted down the info on a piece of paper that had been found in his wallet. From there, it became much easier to say Amy willingly had sex with Aldrich.
Memory is a strange thing. I guess I should know that better than anyone. But now, reading the trial transcripts, I realized just how many holes my mind had filled in. Maybe that makes sense. My brain had intentionally made those gaps as it ripped apart my recollection of that night. To deal with that, I filled in the blanks and came to believe them as fact.
One of those false memories was right here, in my own statement. I said that I'd caught a glimpse of Aldrich strangling Amy and that's why I ran. Except I hadn't. I knew that now, from the nightmares and the fresh memories. Aldrich had raped me. When he left me, I'd gotten free of my bindings. I'd heard Amy. I'd known she was being hurt. I'd believed she was also being raped. So I'd run for help. But I'd never looked in that room because I knew if I had, Aldrich would realize I'd escaped and I'd never be able to get help for Amy.
Yet apparently, I said I'd peeked in. I'd identified Drew Aldrich as the man with his hands around my cousin's throat. Had I believed it at the time? Or had I simply believed I had to say it to put him in jail? I don't know.
Now I had to admit that to Quinn, without letting him know about the rape. Maybe I should have. But I couldn't tell him and just move on. It would slam down a stop sign on the investigation while we dealt with that--he'd want to know how I found out, how was I coping, what he could do to help. For now I could only tell him that I hadn't seen Aldrich killing Amy.
"I was tied up in the next room," I said. "I got free, and I could hear her in trouble, so I ran for help. I don't know why I said I looked in."
"Because you wanted him caught and punished."
"I guess so."
"No." He caught my gaze. "I know so, and I'd have done the same. Hell, there have been times I've wanted to lie under oath to put a bastard away. If I don't, it's only because, as you've told me many times, I can't pull off an act." A wry smile. "But that doesn't mean I've never fudged the truth, when I knew I could get away with it. You said what you thought needed to be said. Unfortunately, it didn't work, and I can see why."
I bristled a little at that, and he laughed.
"No," he said. "I'm not insulting your acting ability."
"That's not--"
"Oh, yes, it is." He shot a smile my way. "You might ethically worry about having told the lie, but you'd be insulted if I said you didn't do it well enough. You're a web of contradictions, Nadia, and that's what I--" He stopped and the smile vanished. "Dee, I meant. There was nothing wrong with your statement. It's just that it . . . Well, again, it only added fuel to their theory. The defense painted you as the good girl. The police chief's daughter. A straight arrow. Fiercely loyal. Loves her family and worries about her cousin. Smart and sensible but sheltered, too. The kind of girl people want thirteen-year-olds to be."
"The kind of girl Amy wasn't."
"Exactly. So your much more worldly cousin tricks you and you end up at some cabin with a guy, and there are drugs and booze and you're completely out of your element. Confused and terrified. You don't understand what's going on, because you'd never think of willingly doing drugs or having sex, so you presume your cousin wouldn't, either. You certainly wouldn't understand anything about breath-control play. When you saw him seeming to strangle her during sex, you drew the obvious conclusion and panicked."
"And by saying I saw Aldrich, that gave the defense the excuse to say that Amy panicked. That she spotted me and fought, and, in trying to defend himself, Aldrich accidentally killed her."
That's where both theories hit a rough patch, one that only made sense to me now. Aldrich had scratches, which he used as proof that Amy attacked him. Except there was no skin under her nails, so the prosecution claimed he'd been scratched by branches while fleeing the scene. He hadn't. I'd attacked Aldrich during my rape. That's how he got the scratches and I got the knife cut.
But the biggest shock in the file? There was absolutely no forensic evidence that Drew Aldrich raped and killed Amy. No skin under her nails. No fingerprints. No traces of semen. No blood, either, despite proof that Amy had coughed blood at some point. As I read that I began to wonder if there may have been a valid reason Aldrich left nothing behind at Amy's murder scene: if he wasn't the one who raped and killed her.
When I even thought that, my stomach lurched and my brain threw on the brakes. Of course he'd killed her. I'd been there. No one else was in that cabin. I was sure . . .
Or was I? How was I sure if I'd never looked in the other room as Amy was being attacked?
What if Aldrich did have a partner? And that partner killed Amy? It would explain the lack of evidence. It would explain the dark-shirted man seen fleeing the scene. It would explain, too, why there was nothing about her murder in the journal, why Aldrich had seemed to dismiss her and focus on me. And it would explain one last piece of evidence, something both the prosecution and defense had ignored.
A small note on the autopsy report said the pressure of the marks was consistent with a right-handed attacker. Aldrich was left-handed. That was in the file, too. Yet in regards to the strangulation report, neither side made anything of it.
"Because they weren't arguing whether or not Aldrich killed Amy," Quinn said. "Also left-handedness doesn't always mean you do everything left-handed. If one side argued, the other would bring in experts, and it just wasn't worth it if Aldrich had confessed to strangling her."
"But it does mean . . ."
"Yeah. Someone else might have killed Amy."
Quinn pushed the laptop away. Then he reached over and tugged my chair to face him. He leaned forward, gaze on mine, his eyes dark with concern and I felt . . . I felt terrible. A spark of grief for what we'd had, and a full-blown flame of guilt over Jack and because I hadn't been what Quinn wanted.
"You okay?" Quinn asked.
I nodded.
"Aldrich was still involved," Quinn said. "He still lured you girls there and he probably did more than that."
Oh, he did. And even if he didn't kill Amy, I don't regret the fact that he's dead. I was ready to kill him, not for what he did to me but for luring her to her death and for all the other girls he raped. Whether he killed Amy doesn't change that.
But it did change everything I thought I knew. Everything I'd been damned sure of, for twenty years, one of the few constants in my life, that kernel of rage blaming Aldrich for killing my cousin. And maybe more important that confusion and internal struggle over him being set free, not wanting to blame my family but, in a little way, doing exactly that.
Now that I saw the file, I knew Neil and Koss were both right. It was a fair trial. Even if Aldrich did do it, it was hard to convict him of murder based on this. Statutory rape? Definitely. Manslaughter? Probably. If they'd bargained down, he'd have gone to jail. But the prosecution must have thought their murder case was sound and Aldrich hadn't tried to bargain. If he didn't do it, that gave him all the more reason to be sure he'd be acquitted. So why say he'd accidentally killed her? That I didn't know.
At a noise beside me, I turned to see Jack.
"You got something?" he asked.
"We do," I said. "And you?"
"Yeah."
"Tell me."
CHAPTER 42
Jack had found a reference in one of the more recent entries in which Aldrich wrote that he had "shared" a fifteen-year-old conquest with another man. The details of how that came about weren't in the journal, just an allusion to the fact that alcohol and drugs had been involved. Aldrich was always careful to avoid details. I
suppose he figured if the journal was found, he could claim it was just fantasies. Without details, investigators might be unable to find his victims and prove otherwise. So there was nothing there except a description of the encounter itself. We skimmed that. Like everything else in the journal, this was where Aldrich put his detail in, and no one needed to read that.
Here, he'd written that he'd forgotten how good it could be to "share," and that he'd missed it, not just the sex but having someone to share the entire experience with, someone who can open you up to things you'd never dare try on your own. "This wasn't the same," he wrote. "There was none of that this time. It was just sex. But it made me long for the old days. I got scared off back then. We both did. I know more now, though, and sometimes I wonder if it's not too late to go back."
"Damn," Quinn said as we finished reading. "It really sounds like he's referring to Amy. Being tried for murder would definitely scare anyone off, even if he was acquitted."
"What'd you find?" Jack asked.
I told him, and when I finished, we agreed that while it still wasn't solid proof that Aldrich had a partner it was enough to proceed in that direction. But how the hell would we find his partner? There sure weren't any clues in the journal. I'd gotten all I could from Shannon Broadhurst, and there was no way of knowing this partner was even the "old friend" he'd mentioned to her. We could start interviewing his other known victims, see if he'd said more, but that was time consuming, risky, and a long shot.
Quinn was quiet for a minute. Then he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, looking over at me. "We know Aldrich was being investigated under other names. Jack has all that. I'm going to suggest that I start looking into it officially. Obviously, it's not my area, so I'm not investigating officially. But I'd be looking as myself. As a marshal. That will make it a lot easier."
I straightened. "I don't want you taking any risks--"
"I'm not, and here's the part you might not like. You know I didn't keep our relationship a secret. I couldn't. Friends, family, they knew I was seeing someone. A few even got a name. You and I agreed that was okay. While I wouldn't announce that I'm looking into Aldrich or why, if it came up, I have an excuse. You had questions after his death. I agreed to dig."