“Nick, we're going to have to call the police,” Chip said.
“Police? No way. Not in my house.” Suddenly, he'd come wide awake.
Chip went over to him and put his hand on Nick's shoulder. He put his face close to Nick's and spoke quietly and with intensity. “You called me because your wife was dead. You knew I was someone who could advise you. Well, here's my advice. We have to call the police. And it's better if you're here while they're here.”
Nick's face fell. He glanced out toward the pool. “Okay,
okay,” he muttered. “I hate it, but okay.” He trudged back to the kitchen and we all followed. He sank into one of the chairs. “Go ahead. Call them.”
There was a phone on the kitchen wall. Annie picked it up and dialed. She talked quietly, giving them the information they needed. Then she came over to me and slipped her hand into mine. I squeezed back, reminded of how I never again wanted to lose someone like I'd lost Kate, like I'd lost my friend Channing Temple.
Nick was slumped at the table, staring into midair. He seemed almost in a trance. In the hours after Kate was killed, I'd been barely able to talk. I reminded myself that numbness was a normal reaction to a world gone crazy.
I crouched alongside Nick, our faces level. I sought eye contact, but instead of windows in, I found only myself reflected back. At some level, I realized this was an opportunity I'd never had before. Within hours of a murder I was talking with someone likely to be accused of the crime, witnessing the scene firsthand. Usually I didn't get brought in until shortly before trial. The police reports and statements I saw were months old, dry and lifeless on the printed page; crime-scene photographs were framed and focused by a police photographer who'd made conscious and unconscious choices about what to include and what to leave out.
My first question: Was Nick anchored in the present? “Do you know where you are?” I asked him, knowing full well that the question sounded inane.
“I'm in my own home, Doctor.” The shadow of a smile crossed his face. “It's Saturday”âhe glanced at his watchâ“make that Sunday. And my wife ⦔ His voice broke and his face twisted in anguish. “My wife is in the pool. She's dead.” He struggled to regain control. “He killed her.”
“Who's he?” I asked.
Nick's eyes had glazed over. He didn't seem to hear the question.
“Who's he?” I asked, louder this time.
Nick's head jerked. “He?” His eyes darted one way, then the other, then narrowed. “He's always here, watching.”
“Is he here now?” I asked.
“Here now?” Nick half rose, as if this possibility were just occurring to him. Nick looked at Chip, then Annie, then me. His hands gripped the edge of the table. “I don't know.”
A chill went up my spine. Fear and anxiety that potent could be contagious.
Blue lights pulsed against the trees. Nick went over to the window and looked out. Tendons stood out like cords in his neck as watched the cars park. He gave me a quick, wary glance, then looked away.
Chip stood, tugged his suit jacket. “I'd advise you to say nothing while the police are here,” he told Nick.
Nick gave Chip a questioning look. “Won't that make them think I did it?”
“Don't worry about what they think,” Chip said. “When they say, âAnything you say can and will be used against you,' they mean it. Trust no one.”
“Trust no one,” Nick repeated the words. “I don't.”
As I watched Nick sit down at the kitchen table and rest his head in his hands, I wondered. A man finds his wife murdered. He cooks breakfast, washes the pan before packing his mother up and driving her to a nursing home. Then he has the presence of mind to call a friend who happens to be a lawyer? Seemed like an odd arrangement of priorities.
ANNIE WENT out through the garage to greet the police. A few moments later, four uniformed officers and a pair of plainclothes cops were crowding into the kitchen. Chip talked to one of the guys in plain clothes who seemed to be taking charge. He was a large man, probably in his midthirties, thickset, his dark hair cut close to his head.
Chip gestured toward the swimming pool. The officer lifted his head, looked out in that direction, and seemed to go white. He shuddered. His look hardened as his eyes came to rest on Nick. I found it somehow reassuring that even a detective, for whom violent death isn't a novelty, could still be affected.
Then the officer's glance shifted to me. “What in the hell is going on here?” He glared at Chip. “As an attorney, you should know better ⦔ he sputtered.
“We had no idea this was a murder scene until we got here,” Chip explained. “We called you right away.”
“Well, I sure as hell hope you kept your goddamn size elevens the hell out of ⦔
“I've barely moved from this table,” I said.
Annie said, “It's okay, Al. As soon as we realized what had happened, we stayed in the kitchen.”
“Yeah, well ⦔ It was Annie's assurances, not mine, that seemed to calm him down. She had the pedigree, an investigator from a family of cops, even if she usually worked for the defense. He turned to Nick. “Mr. Babikian.”
Nick blinked up at him.
“I'm Detective Albert Boley. I met you before. You had a theft at your office? A bomb threat?”
Nick squinted up at him. He didn't make a move to shake the hand offered. Boley pocketed it. “I don't ⦠yes, I do. I do remember you.”
I'd expected Boley to say something more, but he just hung there watching, waiting, like he was looking for some kind of reaction from Nick. Finally he said, “I'm very sorry about your loss. Can you tell me what happened?”
Nick opened his mouth, then shut it. Glanced at Chip. He mumbled, “My attorney has advised me not to say anything.”
Boley sighed and shook his head. “Figures. If that's the way you want it.” He drew himself up. “I need all of you to keep out of our way. Understood?” He turned to one of the officers who'd arrived with him. “Keep them in here. We'll want statements from all of them. Schedule them to come down for prints.” Boley glared at us. “And no one's to leave until I say so.” Then he stalked off.
The officer wrote our names on his clipboard. After that the four of us sat around the kitchen table, waiting. The refrigerator hummed on, then turned off with a thunk. A cat-shaped wall clock wagged its tail and eyeballs back and forth, marking the
seconds. It was nearly four and the sky hadn't yet started to brighten.
More police personnel arrived. We stayed put as investigators swarmed through the house and the backyard. It was painstaking the way they worked their way across every surface, collecting evidence in carefully labeled bags, collecting them and removing them from the house in batches. With police officers hovering over us, observing our every move, I wasn't about to engage Nick in any further conversation.
Feeling restless, I got up. I leaned against the counter. This was nothing like my own cluttered kitchen. Neatly stored dishes were visible through glass cabinet doors. The only signs of disarray were the dirty dishes on the table and the single frying pan sitting in the drying rack alongside the sink, probably the one he'd used to cook the eggs.
Other contrasts struck me. The granite countertops and the black tile floor were incongruous alongside blue and white gingham half curtains. On a little corner of the otherwise bare countertop were a half dozen blue-eyed, pink-cheeked ceramic angels frolicking around a cluster of canisters decorated with mushrooms and elves. On the massive, gleaming stainless steel refrigerator were several rows of small snapshots of fifty or sixty newborns, their crumpled faces oblivious to the camera. A name and date were written on each photo's white border.
Above this rogues' gallery was a photo of Nick with a pretty blond woman, probably in her early thirties. They were dressed up, him in a tux, her in a long pale blue gown. She was looking at him, and he was looking away without expression. I stared at the woman who was now floating in her own swimming pool, dead, undoubtedly the same one who'd hung the blue gingham curtains and carefully placed each baby picture in its own magnetized frame.
A doorway from the kitchen led to a laundry room. Clean
wash was folded neatly on the dryer. There was a faint smell of detergent and bleach. A wall calendar hung on the door. The photograph for the month of May was a pair of cocker spaniel puppies, their fur bunched over their eyes, sitting in a field of daffodils.
I went over to it. Notes were carefully written on each day, each week the same. Monday, laundry. Tuesday, grocery shopping. The only items that weren't obviously chores were on Tuesdays at seven and Fridays at four. In the same careful hand was printed: DR. T. A biweekly doctor's appointment?
As the hours passed, Nick seemed to float in and out of consciousness. He could sit for an hour at the kitchen table, slumped over in his chair, his eyes nearly closed under the brim of his cap. Only his occasionally clenched fists gave a hint that, for some of the time at least, he was alert to the strangers upending his home.
From the window, I watched the investigators working in the backyard. The perimeter had been marked off with crime-scene tape. Detective Boley was very much in charge. He seemed to be everywhere at once, directing efforts, acting as if the body floating in the pool didn't exist.
It was nearly ten when an officer finished skimming debris from the surface of the pool and tapping it out onto a piece of plastic. I shivered. Among the leaves and twigs, there seemed to be bits of human tissue. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't.
I'd witnessed two other murder scenes, but each time the loss had been intensely personal. I'd found Kate, her throat slashed in her ceramics studio in our home. I'd found my friend Channing Temple in her office, dead from what looked like a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. At those times, I'd felt pure emotion, my vision warped by rage and loss. It was only in retrospect that I had any kind of detached perspective.
This was differentâthe murdered woman was someone else's
wife, a friend to strangers. Despite the horror of it and the profound sadness I felt in the face of death, in another part of my brain was a disconnected sense of fascination, putting this crime firmly in the third person. I felt like a motorist who can't help slowing down and gawking as medics pull a stranger from a car that's flipped over and smashed up against a highway median.
I watched as a diver lowered himself into the pool, swam out, dove down, and came up a few moments later holding a fireplace poker. He handed it to an officer at the edge of the pool. Meanwhile, an officer with a grappling hook nudged the body up against the edge.
Nick stood beside me watching, gripping the countertop, his knuckles turning white. One of the police officers came in and asked him if he'd go out and identify the body. He went.
As Nick stood by the side of the pool, they pulled the body from the water and rolled her over. He shuddered and looked away. Lisa Babikian's face was covered by a half maskâthe white lacquered face made up like a clown. Intestines that trailed in the water were pulled along. She had been cut open, through the sternum and abdomen, like a carcass of meat. I closed my eyes.
Nick was led back into the house. When he returned, his face was wet with tears. Outside, Detective Boley knelt beside the body. Maybe it was the blue of the water reflecting off his face, but Boley seemed pale. One of the medics tried to tell him something, but Boley held up a hand to silence him. He bowed his head for a few moments, then seemed to shake himself out of it. He staggered a few steps when he got up, then stood back while they lifted the body onto a gurney and zipped a dark body bag over her.
It was nearly noon by the time they let us leave, and then only with the promise that Annie and I would each drop by later in the day to give them fingerprints and hair samples. I was exhausted. The fantasy of returning with Annie to pick up where we'd left off had long since faded. At least it was Sunday, and I didn't have to go to the Pearce.
I needed a shower, something to eat, but most of all I needed sleep. I wondered how long it would be before the image of the young woman's butchered body would wash out of my consciousness.
Chip walked us through the laundry room and to the door to the garage. A step farther and he'd have lost sight of Nick sitting at the kitchen table. Chip lowered his voice. He told me he'd talked to Detective Boley. “They think the cause of death is related to a head trauma. Her skull is pretty well dented.”
“The fireplace poker?” I whispered.
“Probably.”
Head trauma? If a blow to the head was what killed her, then why butcher her and then drown her? I could already imagine the newspaper headlines: Overkill. There would be interviews with so-called experts pontificating on the psychology of it. They'd probably tell the drooling reporter that overkill wasn't unusual in a “thrill killing” where typically two or more killers gang up on a stranger just for the fun of it. More often you saw it in crimes of passion against a loved one. Then, the violence was intimateâstrangling and stabbing as opposed to shooting or poisoningâand the perpetrator was often a man driven by a terror of being abandoned.
Chip held his hand over his mouth. “And they found bloody clothing in the bathroom hamper. Nick's. Looks like he changed his clothes and took a shower before he drove his mother to Oakvale.”
I turned my back to the kitchen and said quietly, “If he didn't
kill his wife, then how the hell did Nick get blood all over his clothing?”
“I have no idea.” Chip's voice was weary. “I'm hoping he'll be able to explain.” Chip glanced back at Nick. He was sitting at the table, watching us from under the cap brim. He looked quickly away, got up, and opened the refrigerator.
“Weird,” Annie whispered. “I wonder why he didn't change his shoes.”
“Shoes?” Chip asked.
Nick took a glass out of the cabinet and ran the water at the sink.
“Looks like they're spattered with blood,” I said. “Wouldn't you think someone changing his clothes to cover up his involvement in a murder would change his shoes too?”
“Not much of a cover-up if he leaves his bloody shirt hanging halfway out of the laundry basket in the bathroom,” Chip added.
Chip went on to say that he expected Nick to be arrested. He'd request bail, of course, but said he'd be surprised if the judge granted it. “The DA is going to want to get the state's shrink in to interview him,” Chip said. “I've already told Nick not to talk to anybody unless I say so. I hope you'll have time to get in there and evaluate him right away.”
“Whoa, hold your horses,” I said. It came out louder than I'd intended. I was glad that Nick had the water running as he rinsed out the glass.
Were there some crimes so horrific that they rendered the standard arguments for mitigating circumstancesâinsanity, diminished capacityâirrelevant? And when had we slipped from being concerned friends and friends of a friend to being Nick's attorney and support team? There were plenty of things I could see doing with my time other than defending a man who'd butchered his wife.
“I'm not so sure you're going to want my help on this case.
There're lots of other folks out there who, for the right amount, will do whatever you want them to do and testify accordingly.”
Chip did a double take. His eyes widened. “Peter ⦔ he started.
I realized that hadn't come out the way I'd intended. “I'm sorry. That sounded like I was questioning your ethics, and I don't. But you can't just assume that I'm going to jump in and help. And I'm not so sure you're going to
want
my help on this case. I've got very strong biases about men who kill women and what should happen to them. You might even say it's a blind spot.”
“Peter, we don't know
who
did it. And besides, you always call them the way you see them. This time won't be any different.”
“You may not like what I have to say.”
“You make your findings. I decide whether to use them.”
I glanced back into the kitchen. Nick was slumped at the table again, the brim of his cap shadowing his face. Was this really different from any of the other murder cases where I'd defended an accused? Probably not. But with my nose rubbed in the reality of it, I was finding myself forced to face my own competing impulses. Admit it, I told myself, I was repelled and fascinated at the same time.
Chip rushed on. “Can you do a preliminary evaluation right away? Once he's charged and in custody?”
I gave a mute nod.
Chip returned to the house, and Annie and I walked back to the Jeep. I put my arm around her, as much to reassure myself that she was there as to show her that I cared.