Occam's Razor Read online

  “You’re going to have to give Willy high marks here,” I told her. “He went at it with a vengeance, especially after I told him how many rules we’d be breaking. To be honest, when you first came up with the Owen-as-guided-missile theory, my bets were on Jamie Good, what with all his groupies. But Walter’s smarter and more manipulative, and we’ve got him positioning poor old Owen like a chess piece. Good, on the other hand, never had much to do with him.”

  “We’re going to have to do better than that,” Gail said glumly. She’d already told me it had been a bad day of sniping with Derby. “Well, it’s all circumstantial,” I continued, “but we have a witness who says Walter was putting a wedge between Lisa and Owen just before Lisa died. And afterward, although he’d been treating Owen like shit before, he tucked him under his wing like a doting mother.”

  “Why?” Gail asked. “He couldn’t have been grooming Owen to kill Brenda years before the fact. It strains credibility.”

  “We don’t think he was—not specifically. We think he was either planning for a rainy day or just saw in Owen the chance to mess with somebody’s mind. Knocking off Brenda by remote control was probably an experiment—and a successful one, as Walter would see it. After all, if we’re right, he’d already done a variation of that with Lisa, so it definitely fits his character.”

  Gail frowned. “Hold it, explain that. I thought Lisa died of a straight overdose.”

  “She did, but I don’t think it was unassisted. Bernie Short planted the idea that she may have lowered her tolerance through a period of abstinence, and thus overinjected herself by simply taking her usual dose. But now we’ve been told her drug use had been constant till the end. My bet is that Walter overloaded her last syringe without her knowing it and let her kill herself so he could gain control of Owen.

  “After we found out about Walter’s possible role in all this,” I continued, “we talked to everyone we could about him, especially concerning the time period following Lisa’s death. We confirmed he made a special project out of Owen, even having him move in for a year. And it was then that Owen started telling people Lisa had been poisoned, although no one heard him say by whom, which makes me think Walter left that role blank till later.”

  Gail sat forward, keenly interested. “Were there any instances of Walter directing Owen to act against his own welfare?”

  I smiled, having already thought of that. “Not that anyone’s seen. Walter made sure the mind-control aspect of their relationship was kept mostly under wraps. Actually,” I added, “I feel a little guilty about that. Early on, a girl named Janice Litchfield told me Owen was ‘Walter’s pet’ and had attacked Walter once, using a pen like a knife after Walter taunted him to do it. At the time, I thought it just meant Owen was prone to violence. Now I think it was more of a training exercise—like a handler making a dog go after a guy in a padded suit. Janice told me Walter laughed right after the supposed attack, and yesterday she added that Walter even hugged him, like he was rewarding him.”

  Gail shook her head. “Aside from Janice, who’re your witnesses?”

  I pulled a short list from my pocket and gave it to her. “It starts with a man named Eric Meade, who was Lisa’s supplier, and then runs down a few people Willy and I have been interviewing over the past few days, including Janice. I also ran it by the department shrink, who says it’s perfectly possible. Problem is, Walter’s got Meade so spooked, he’s armed himself to the teeth and has his house ringed with security devices, and I doubt any of the others will be any less paranoid.”

  She took the list and laid it on her desk. “My God. What’s Walter’s past like?”

  I produced another sheet of paper. “Pretty bad. He’s thirty-five now and his record goes back twenty-three years. His juvie records are sealed, but he hit the ground running once he came of age—everything from disturbing the peace and speeding, to sexual assault, armed robbery, bank fraud, pimping, manslaughter, and some serious drug activity. Over twenty hits so far. He’s the proverbial three-time loser, and he’s currently on federal parole for a weapons charge, which is probably encouraging him to keep a low profile. All in all, a classic sociopath, and one well motivated to work from the shadows—or to use tools like Owen Tharp.”

  Gail sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. “You’re sure Brenda Croteau didn’t sell Lisa the dope that killed her?”

  “As sure as I can be. As far as we know, they never even met.”

  Gail gave me a tired smile. “Well, I guess I asked for this one. I’m going to have to tell Jack I just came up with a late Christmas present for McNeil, without having anything to replace it except a bunch of psychological mumbo-jumbo. You mind sitting in when I break him the news? He’s going to want to know the details.”

  I got up, leaned toward her, and gave her a kiss. “You couldn’t just hang the bad guy and be done with it, could you?”

  She caught my face in her hands and kissed me back. “Nope. It’s not my job.”

  “No one would agree with you, but that’s one reason I love you.”

  · · ·

  Jack Derby’s office was a modest affair—a box in a string of boxes, lined up along a hallway on the second floor of a modern bank building. One wall was covered with two windows looking up Main Street toward the courthouse, while the others had either pastoral pictures or framed law degrees hanging on them. His predecessor had been more of an egomaniac, and while admittedly the SA’s office had been housed elsewhere in his day, James Dunn had always made sure he got the biggest desk, the best view, and the grandest room to call his own. It made me wonder how Dunn would rearrange things in the unlikely event that he won in November.

  In fairness to Jack Derby, who’d recently been getting on all of our nerves, he was certainly no egotist. He was a decent, hard-working, well-intentioned man who—I personally believed—had let his inexperience, an enormous workload, and a premature case of reelection jitters get the better of him. Which probably helped explain both his testiness and frazzled appearance, even though that election was still eight months off.

  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.”

  Derby didn’t respond, but both his silence and his expression were enough.

  Gail added, “Of course, I’m not qualified. This is strictly speculative, but I bet we’ll be hearing it again at trial from McNeil’s experts.”

  He looked over our heads out the window for a moment, seemingly lost in thought, pondering no doubt things both practical and political. “Well, that’s great,” he finally said in a tired voice. “Between the two of you, it doesn’t look like I have much choice. What’s happened so far is bound to leak out. So, I better get the jump on Reggie, distract him with these exculpatories, and get our own psychological analysis done on Owen. After which”—and he pointedly addressed Gail—“I’ll issue a statement emphasizing our search for justice on behalf of all the people.” He shifted his gaze to me. “I want a plan of attack from you ASAP on how we’re following up what was said here today.”

  In the stilted silence that followed, we both understood it was time to leave.

  “One more thing,” Derby said, just as we were about to cross the threshold. “Part of my agreeing to this is because I know how the shit would hit the fan if I didn’t. That doesn’t make me very happy. I don’t want anything like this to happen again—ever.”

  He wasn’t fishing for a response. I closed the door gently behind us.

  The conference room was packed and the conversation at an unusually high pitch, given that the sun hadn’t even broken the horizon.

  “You see this?” Willy asked, waving a copy of the Reformer at me as I entered.

  “Haven’t had a chance yet.”

  “The Senate passed the Reynolds Bill. Biggest crock I ever saw. They want to call us the VBI, like we were a bunch of G-men.”

  “Who says you’d be one of them?” Sammie asked.

  “
Are you kidding?”

  “They pass it as a cabinet-level agency?” I asked, moving through the crowd to the head of the table. I was impressed that Reynolds had met his deadline. Town Meeting Day—the first Tuesday in March—was next week.

  “Yeah,” Ron answered. “They’d have a Secretary of Criminal Justice, which’ll probably go to Commissioner Stanton. The VSP, Fish and Game, the Alcohol guys, and everybody else will all be included, except the sheriffs and constables. They’ve been left out.”

  “And how,” Willy added. “No one’ll admit it, but it sounds like the sheriffs are being reduced to a taxi service for cons.”

  J.P. was sitting back in his chair, his own paper neatly folded before him on the table. “Even if the House passed it, it would never work,” he said quietly.

  “Why not?” I asked, realizing I’d never once heard him speak on the topic, despite its popularity around the building.

  “Simple economics,” he said. “The bill states that all officers will be brought up to the highest pay levels now currently available, which would be the state police. That was obviously just to buy off their union. But right now, the state police budget is around twenty-five million dollars a year, almost the same as all the other municipal agencies in the state combined. The state cops number three hundred, more or less. The municipals come to twice that many. You do the math. And that doesn’t include the costs of bringing all those people and all that equipment under one umbrella. They can talk saving money till they’re blue in the face, like Reynolds did in the Senate, but this thing’s one huge white elephant, whether you like the principle behind it or not.”

  Willy finally threw his paper onto the windowsill behind him. “Well, I think the principle sucks. There’s no God-damn way this thing’s going to fly, and if it does, there’s no God-damn way I’ll be part of it.”

  Sammie laughed. “Maybe the library’ll take you back.”