Surreptitiously, Burnetta glanced at his notes. Only two hours ago, Debora had said, “I haven’t been particularly upset—or really even terribly emotionally involved. That’s not quite the truth. I felt a tremendous sense of relief when he moved out, which surprised him because he thought I’d be devastated.” One of them was either lying or glossing over some facts, Burnetta thought. But that certainly wasn’t unheard-of in messy divorces.
Mike began to describe the last six months of what sounded like a hellish marriage. Debora had done “just strange things. She told me she was going to Africa to do missionary work. And then she said she had been accepted at Louisville for a psychiatric residency and that all the arrangements had been made. I checked our phone bill. She hadn’t made one call to Louisville. It was all made up.
“The house was absolutely in shambles. There were food wrappers all over every floor. There were clothes strewn about. You know how messy a house can be with three kids, but this was far more than that.”
Greg Burnetta, tired as he was, was fascinated. Debora had painted quite a different picture of herself and her marriage. She had described her husband as totally uninvolved, coldly uninterested, and herself as a warm, loving mother who skillfully handled everything to do with her children. She had insisted that neither she nor her children needed Mike.
Mike began talking even faster now, as if under terrible pressure to finally get the story out. The planned visit from the kids to his apartment on the weekend just past had culminated in another screaming fight. Tim and Lissa had never come to his apartment at all. “Debora was screaming at Tim, and Tim was screaming at her.” He ended up taking only Kelly. And after that, the neighbors told him that Tim had locked Lissa outside. She was banging on the door and screaming.
Sighing, Mike said that Debora had become totally dysfunctional. “She’s been very concerned about the money. I don’t know if she would have considered this [arson] for insurance. I have to admit that last time, we came out ahead. They replaced all our furniture and everything we lost. It was all new, and they wrote us a big check. I don’t know if that fire was an insurance issue, or meant to scare me, or was so they would move in with me again. But I certainly think she’s capable of setting a fire.”
Mike gave his version of the debate over lawyers: Debora had delayed and delayed, even about getting an attorney for herself. Then she did everything she could to ignore the divorce. Yes, he had told her that he’d get a tough lawyer if he had to. He was tired of waiting.
Burnetta noted that Mike’s recall of the family’s activities on the evening of the fire corresponded exactly with what Debora had told him. Mike said that Debora hadn’t seemed agitated or upset when he brought Tim and Kelly home from the hockey game. He thought she might have been slightly under the influence of her tranquilizers. He had stayed only a few minutes, while she got food out of the oven and fed the children.
Yes, he had called her between 10:30 and eleven to ask why she had paged him. She said it must have been one of the children. “The kids often page me—but not that late.”
“Five minutes later, she called you back?” Burnetta asked.
“Right. I had told her it wasn’t necessary to see if the kids had called me. But she called back and said they were all asleep. And then she paged me again as I was pulling into my street.”
Burnetta looked up sharply. “And how long would it take you to get home? You left at nine and got home at eleven?”
“No, I was at a friend’s house,” Mike said. “I probably got home at eleven. Debora paged me at eleven-fifteen. I called her back [from my apartment]. I was angry with her. She was really drunk. Her speech was slurred. I was very angry with her. I told her she needed to class up her act, pull her life together, clean the house, give the kids some boundaries. I told her that people were talking about her. She wanted to know who and I wouldn’t tell her. But people were talking about her. People were concerned enough that they were considering calling Social Services. I told her people knew about this—that this wasn’t something she could hide.”
With Debora already irrational and explosive, Burnetta wondered, had Mike’s angry accusations pushed her into outright madness?
Whenever Mike wasn’t speaking, he sighed heavily. The reality of what had happened to Tim and Kelly caught up with him; again and again, he nearly sobbed.
“Has Debora ever threatened to do anything—harm anyone?” Burnetta asked.
Mike shook his head. “No, never. Except for all those weird stories about getting a job and leaving for Africa. She never threatened anything as far as harm to the house or the kids. Part of the problem is she has no friends—no one she talks to. She used to have some tennis friends, but not anymore. She has no support system. All she has is her psychiatrist and her attorney. So she talked to the kids like you would talk to one of your friends if you had a problem. She said absolutely vile, horrible things to the kids.”
Mike sighed. “She would tell them I was out ‘fucking three women’ or I ‘went to Peru and ran around with my dick hanging out chasing other women.’ She gave the kids specific names [of women]. It was absolutely crazy. Crazy. I have grown close to these people from Peru because of all this, and some of them have their own set of problems.”
Like his interviewers, Mike had questions to ask. He wanted to know where his children had been found, and who had searched for them. Who was looking for the cause of the fire?
“There’s been no good search of the house yet by the state fire marshal,” Burnetta said. “They’re going to be looking for signs of foul play.”
“I understand,” Mike said quietly. “But I hope it’s an accidental fire.” It was clear he meant that sincerely but held little belief that it would turn out that way. His voice was suffused with tears as he said, “Tell me one thing—one more time. Where was Tim?”
Both Burnetta and Jordan shifted uncomfortably, and Burnetta answered cautiously, “To the best of our knowledge—it’s hearsay to hearsay to hearsay . . .”
They didn’t want to tell him. Jordan put in that it would be better for them not to guess, that they should wait until they were sure.
“You’ll be able to leave with your mother and father and Lissa,” Burnetta said. “But don’t go back to the house.”
“No . . . no, I won’t.”
“There’s someone from the district attorney’s office working with us. They will probably want an autopsy.”
“I understand,” Mike said, but had to ask, “Were they . . . were they badly burned?”
In almost every human life, there are times of incredible sorrow, sorrow that brings such desolation to the soul that any possibility of future happiness disappears. The three men who sat in that austere room had been part of too many of those moments of crisis. Police and firefighters and doctors live on the edge of other people’s tragedies, striving always to maintain some kind of balance.
Now, Wes Jordan and Greg Burnetta struggled to give Mike some small scrap of information that might ease his mind—without resorting to deception. They told him, truthfully, that Kelly had not been burned. “Not at all. We think she died in her sleep of smoke inhalation.”
“Oh, really?” Mike said. And the two investigators heard a slight sense of relief in his voice. They had given him a tiny benefaction in the midst of this horror.
Mike was doing what everyone in bereavement does, trying to find something solid to hold on to in order to regain his balance. “You know,” he said. “You know, I’ve had a good life. This is the first true tragedy of my life. My parents, my sisters, my kids are healthy—” And he choked up again, remembering.
Women usually handle grief more easily, able to reach out and hug, to cry unashamedly. Mike was crying, and the two tough cops who were obviously bleeding for him had not the faintest notion how to help.
“Are you a religious man, Mike?” Jordan asked.
“No, I’m not a religious man.”
“I wish there was just
something we could do for you,” Jordan said quietly.
The counter on the police videotape read 6:58 A.M. Burnetta and Jordan left the interview room for a few moments. Mike was alone, waiting for the policemen to come back and trying not to cry, heaving shuddering sighs.
When Burnetta returned, he told Mike that they would need to have his clothes. “So you can be eliminated as a suspect,” he said.
Mike understood: if the fire had been arson, he would be considered a suspect, just as Debora would. But it was obvious that this was the first time the idea had occurred to him. “Sure. Sure,” he said.
He told the two detectives that he had been at Celeste’s house for dinner, that he had had two beers, that they had talked. He did not tell them that he and Celeste were having an affair, and they did not ask. It seemed to have no bearing on the fire.
“What time did you leave Celeste’s house?” Burnetta asked.
“Between eleven and eleven-fifteen. I was there when Debora paged me the first two times. I don’t have those pages—I erase my pages out of habit. The only ones on there now are the one from the alarm company and a page from my partner.” Mike, too, was off on his time by ten or fifteen minutes. Last night it hadn’t seemed important.
While Burnetta went to arrange for a change of clothes, Jordan and Mike talked quietly. And a disturbing thought hit Mike. “What are they going to do with Deb? I can’t take her.”
“Tell me, did the dogs get in the coffee beans?” Jordan asked, changing the subject.
Mike nodded. Tim had told him about that. As chaotic as the house had become, it didn’t surprise him.
“What will happen to her today?” Mike persisted, wondering where Debora would go. There was no house anymore. She had no friends. Her family was far away.
“You, your mom and dad, and Lissa will be released,” Jordan said.
“Where is Deb going to go if she’s released?” Mike asked again. “I can’t take her in my apartment. I’d be afraid.”
Then Mike began to speak of his loss and his fears. “Poor Lissa. Goddamn! Two siblings that died in the fire. And maybe her mother . . . God, how can her life ever be normal?”
“She heard Tim,” Jordan said softly. “She heard him calling for help.”
“Oh, God. I know. I know.” And Mike started to sob quietly. “Tim was so angry, so confused. But he was still participating in sports. He’s a strong kid. The coach came up to me afterward and complimented Tim. The poor guy. He never had a chance. Poor Kelly. And I’m so thankful I went to the game. I missed part of it because I promised Kelly I’d go get some shoes for her.”
Mike was beginning to come out of his shock a little, and he was trying to find answers. “I lived with this woman for seventeen years,” he said. “I knew she had trouble in her interpersonal relationships—some problems with her personality. Basically, I thought she was a reasonably good mother. She got the kids involved in so many things. Lissa’s going to be Clara in The Nutcracker. Kelly was going to be an angel. Tim was doing so well in his soccer and hockey. Kelly told me everything would be okay. She said, ‘Mom and Lissa and Tim think you’re chasing those women from Peru, but I know it’s not true.’”
Sighing deeply, Wes Jordan told Mike that he would have to start thinking about funerals. “We’ll need to know where the children are to be taken.”
“Who should I call?”
“Find out who you want. Sit down with your mom and dad and make a decision.”
“Oh, my God.”
But thinking about funeral arrangements gave Mike something to do. He had always been a man who made lists, who planned things out to the smallest detail. This was not something he had ever expected to do, but he reached for the phone book that sat nearby and turned to the yellow pages.
“I’ll have to call the social worker at Menninger’s,” he said more to himself than to Jordan, “and have her tell Deb’s psychiatrist. I should call the school. I need to call her parents—the problem is, I don’t know their number. Maybe she should call her parents?”
Time seemed to move sluggishly. Jordan didn’t ask any more questions. He and Mike just talked. They spoke about how hard the wind had blown that night and how lucky it was that every house along the cul de sac hadn’t gone up in flames.
“Our officers tried to get in,” Jordan said.
“I know.”
“But, you know, even when they were trying, it was already too late. It’s an absolute miracle your little girl got out. The good Lord never gives you anything you can’t handle.” Jordan kept talking, trying to help. “I’ve seen some very bad things—and I know you have, too, as a doctor—but it’s hard to understand.”
Mike nodded. “When I think I’ve got problems, I hear about theirs.”
“Well, today’s your turn. You’ve got big problems today.”
Mike was fighting so hard not to cry. The big cop was trying so hard to help.
Finally, Mike had to ask the question that kept bubbling up to the surface of his mind. “What if she did do this? Would it be second-degree murder?”
“You see, we have to match three things,” Jordan said after a long hesitation. “What you tell us. What she tells us. The crime scene—if it is a crime scene. Those all have to match. If we don’t have a match, then something’s the matter. It doesn’t get any worse than that. It would be premeditated. That’s why we’re treating it very, very seriously.”
“At least I’m sure Tim did not suffer long,” Mike said.
“No.”
“With all that smoke . . .”
“He would have passed out.”
“Poor Tim,” Mike said, his voice breaking. “He was so strong. I was going to get him into counseling. If we could just get him to control his anger. My grandfather died this week. He was eighty-six years old. He was healthy until he was eighty-six and a half. He just developed cancer the last three months. He lived a great life. His funeral was Saturday.”
It was 7:26 on Tuesday morning. Still waiting to change his clothes, Mike tried to concentrate on the yellow pages listings of funeral homes. Only thirteen hours before, he had picked up Tim and Kelly for the game. Only ten hours before, he had had the last glimpse he would ever have of his son as Tim ran up the stairs to take a shower. His last look at Kelly was while she ate Kentucky Fried Chicken and grinned at him.
He wondered if he had said good-bye.
It wasn’t nine A.M. yet when Mike returned to the Georgetown Apartments, where he had been living less than a month. His apartment sat a few feet from a frontage road that paralleled I-35. There was a little garden in back, and a sunken living room, but the apartment was a far cry from the house that now lay in ashes a few miles away.
His phone rang in mid-morning: the Prairie Village police were going to release Debora, but they didn’t know quite what to do with her. She had nowhere to go. “She had no clothes, no money, no anything,” Mike recalled.
Taking care of Debora had become a central part of Mike’s life in the last two or three years. The private side of their marriage was no longer even a semblance of a partnership; now he was the caretaker and she was a child consumed by tantrums. And despite his grief, his anger, his frank fear of her, Mike could not in good conscience see Debora turned out onto the streets. He knew that she would not be able to cope.
Although he believed absolutely that Debora had poisoned him, Mike was mystified about her motivation. He was afraid of her—but he had trouble believing that she would deliberately harm the children who had sustained her. And the police investigation had barely begun. No one yet knew for sure what had caused the fire that had killed their two children.
It was less than giving Debora the benefit of the doubt, and more than most men might have done, but Mike told the police to bring her to his apartment. He would see that she had someplace to stay.
When she arrived, Debora expected to remain with her husband—after all, he had taken her and the children in after the fire on West Sixty-fi
rst Terrace.
“I told her absolutely not,” Mike said. “I couldn’t live with her again. I told her that I would lend her the truck, get her some cash, and give her a cell phone.”
The most money Mike could get quickly—from an automatic teller machine—was $300, and he gave that to Debora. He let her use his apartment phone to make calls. He told her to be sure that she called her parents, and then find a friend she could stay with. Perhaps this was cruel—he knew she had no close friends—but he could no longer bear to be responsible for her. Their marriage was not merely broken—it was shattered, pulverized, reduced, like their home, to ashes.
After Debora had driven away, Mike called Norman Beal. “He was concerned about Lissa’s welfare, and I was concerned about Lissa’s welfare,” Mike said. “So I went down to his office and talked about what to do, and I filed for divorce and asked for custody of Lissa.”
Lissa was staying with his parents. After filing for divorce, Mike went there, and slept for the first time in thirty hours.
20
Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison came from a workingman’s family. There were no lawyers or law enforcement officers in his background. His father was a railroad man most of his life, on the Santa Fe line. And after that he worked for an oil company. “I come from a real blue-collar family,” Morrison said. “Farmers and railroaders. My father really pushed me hard to go to school and try to make something of myself. I was the first adult male in my family to go to college, in fact.”
Way back when he was thirteen or fourteen, Morrison had toyed with the idea of being a lawyer, because he liked to argue and he questioned everything. “I’m sure,” he said with a laugh, “that I was really annoying to my parents.”
Morrison’s ambition to practice law lasted until he got into college. Then he found that police work seemed more appealing. He wanted to be a detective. “But I realized that everybody can’t be Sherlock Holmes, and I’d have to work my way up to a detective’s spot. The idea of spending all those years in a police car . . . I thought there had to be an easier way to get involved in solving crimes, and that renewed my interest in law school with the idea of being a prosecutor, and only being a prosecutor. I tried to tailor everything I did in law school to that end.”