A Good Killing (17 page)

“If they involve his wife, they are relevant. My theory is that his wife killed him. Anything that would give her a motive to do so is
Brady
material and should be turned over to me.”

“You’re going to put the poor family through this?”

“I’m thinking about my own poor family,” Anna said.

“There’s absolutely no evidence that Wendy Fowler hurt her husband.”

“The jury can decide that.”

Anna didn’t have much to support her theory, yet. But the
Brady
case required prosecutors to turn over any material exculpatory evidence. Even if the prosecutor didn’t think it was exculpatory, she risked having her conviction overturned on appeal if she didn’t turn over evidence that could support a defense theory that someone else did it. By staking out this position early on, Anna was trying to expand the information the prosecution would have to give her.

It worked. Late one afternoon the following week, the doorbell rang again. This time the FedEx envelope was marked with the words:
FRAGILE, DO NOT BEND.
Anna opened the package and pulled out a letter from Desiree Williams and an attached silver disk marked
Holly Grove Police Communications
. It was a recording of all the 911 calls from the coach’s house.

Anna tried not to get too excited. The calls could be nothing: a cat caught in a tree or a downed power line. But she’d found, amid the ocean of lies she had to navigate in every case, 911 calls could be tiny islands of truth.

She slid the CD into Jody’s computer.

27

A
fter the sex-assault exam at the hospital, the nurse told Mom to take me to the Holly Grove police station to file a report. The nurse said she’d notified the police that we were coming. No one seemed to be expecting us at the station, though. Mom and I sat in those plastic chairs in the lobby for a couple hours. I remember it was decorated for Christmas, and the cardboard Santas were the only ones who smiled at us.

Eventually a young officer led us back through the cubicles to an actual office with a door. The laminated wood name tag announced the office of Sergeant Herb Gargaron, your boyfriend Rob’s father.

He was eating a massive roast beef sandwich from Arby’s and surfing the Net. I stood in the doorway, staring at him. I did
not
want to talk to him. I didn’t want to tell Rob’s dad about the sloppy fight Rob and I had the night before. More important, I didn’t want everyone in town to know what happened between me and the coach. Once Rob knew, I was afraid he’d tell all the other kids.

“Is . . . is there a different policeman I can talk to?”

“Sorry, missy, you don’t get to pick your officer,” Sergeant Gargaron said with a forced chuckle. He looked like an older, fatter, more highly decorated version of his son. He wrapped his half sandwich in the foil and gestured for me to take a seat. The office smelled like sweat and curly fries. I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and it was dark outside now. I felt hungry and sick at the same time.

Today, I would know how to handle myself in that situation. I would have politely refused to talk to Sergeant Gargaron, saying the reasons were personal. I might have joked about not wanting to interrupt his dinner. I might say I was more comfortable with a
female detective. I would definitely hold my ground. But that night, I was a kid.

I sat. So did Mom.

Sergeant Gargaron folded his hands together on the desk. “How can I help you?”

I had no idea. It was not a question with a clear answer. This wasn’t McDonald’s, where you could order a number 3 with Sprite.

I looked around the office. A big trout was mounted on one wall, near a picture of the sergeant standing proudly with Rob, two rifles, and a dead twelve-point buck. On the other wall hung a Holly Grove football pennant and four framed pictures of the team, one for each year Rob had played.

“We need to make a report,” Mom said.

“Go ahead, then.” He had a blue Holly Grove football ribbon pinned on his chest, just above his badge and over his heart. Mom patted my arm, signaling for me to talk, but I shook my head. I couldn’t make the words come out.

So Mom told my story, piece by piece, occasionally turning to me to confirm that she was getting a detail right. Sergeant Gargaron did not move his hands from their folded position on his desk. I hadn’t told Mom the part about Rob, and so she did not tell his father. After she finished, he opened a notebook.

“So let me get this right,” he said. “Your daughter is the one who called Coach Fowler, correct?”

“Yes,” Mom said.

He took the cap off a ballpoint pen, touched the tip to his meaty tongue, and finally jotted something in his notebook.

“Your daughter didn’t call you?”

“I was at work.”

“You do have a cell phone.”

“Yes.”

“Mm hm. Coach Fowler allegedly went to this party at your daughter’s request.”

“Yes.”

“He drove her home at her request too.”

“I . . . suppose you could say that.”

“Although no one saw her leave with him.”

“I’m not sure.” She looked at me. I shrugged and shook my head. Another jot in the notebook.

“When she came home, she didn’t tell anyone what allegedly happened?”

“No one was home. I told you, I was working.”

“Mm hm.” Another mark in the notebook. “In fact, she showered and went to bed?”

“Yes.”

“And then had breakfast in the morning? Without telling you anything?”

“Yes, and then we went to church.” Mom started to sound annoyed.

“Where she didn’t mention the alleged incident to anyone. Not even to your minister? Or her Sunday school teacher?”

“She doesn’t go to Sunday school anymore. She’s fifteen.”

“Just the facts, ma’am.”

“That is a fact.”

He frowned and wrote the longest entry yet in his notebook, as if my waning religious education or Mom’s snark were the most important pieces of information in the case.

“And you say she was a virgin.”

I wanted the chair to swallow me up.

“Yes. But I don’t see how that matters.”

He turned and picked up a faxed sheaf of papers. “This is the report from the sexual-assault nurse.” He handed it over to Mom. I glanced over her shoulder and saw from the time stamp that he had received it more than two hours earlier. I wondered if he’d deliberately made us wait those last two hours. He said, “Page five.” Mom flipped to page five. I gaped at the picture. It was a huge diagram of a vagina.

“You’ll see that the nurse noted there was no vaginal tearing, no intact hymen, and no indication that Jody’s hymen was recently punctured.”

“What are you saying?”

“There’s no evidence that Jody was a virgin who was deflowered last night.”

Deflowered? What was I, a daisy? If so, I was the most mortified daisy in this garden. My petals would have all fallen off the moment I had to start discussing my vagina with Herb Gargaron.

Mom cleared her throat. “It’s my understanding that a girl can lose her hymen before having sex.”

“Maybe so. It can also indicate that your daughter was not being entirely truthful. You know, she might not want to tell you if she’d had sex before.”

I sunk in my chair. This was a nightmare.

“Now you listen here, sir,” Mom’s hands were clenched so tight, the papers crumpled. “This is not about my daughter’s chastity or choices she might have made with boys her own age. This is about what Coach Fowler did to her last night.”

“No offense intended, ma’am,” Sergeant Gargaron said, with condescending calm. “I’m just pointing out the evidence in the case. In a he-said-she-said like this, the victim’s credibility becomes very important. Any evidence that she lied about, well, anything, could be very damaging. I’m not trying to tell you what to do. But you should know: questions will be asked. You might not like the answers. You should consider how your daughter’s name will be tarnished if she decides to pursue this claim.”

He sucked on the straw in the Arby’s cup, pulling up the last inch of pop with a long, strangled slurp. He gestured for her to give him back the papers. She obeyed. Her hands were shaking; her voice, too. “I assume she’ll get a victim’s advocate? Someone who can counsel her besides you?”

“Ah, a victim’s advocate.” Sergeant Gargaron smiled. His eyes were as small and mean as Rob’s. “I almost forgot. You know the system quite well, don’t you, Mrs. Curtis? As I recall, you were a frequent flier in our domestic violence program for a while.”

I hadn’t thought about it, but Mom probably came to this very station a few years before, after Dad was arrested for the Big One. Plus, there were all the times she’d called 911 on Dad for hitting her
before that. She probably knew many of the officers in the station, but not in the way she knew people in the hospital. There, she was a respected colleague, the med tech who could draw blood from patients with even the tiniest veins. Here, she was just a “victim.”

We tend to rise or sink toward others’ expectations of us. It takes a lot of conscious will not to. Although she’d gotten stronger since Dad left, Mom seemed to grow smaller in her chair.

“It’s one thing to go making accusations about your husband,” Sergeant Gargaron said. “But it’s another thing to accuse a respected man. A pillar of this town. You might find there are more drawbacks than benefits to yourself this time.”

“I am not making this up,” I said. “And neither is my mom.”

His eyes slid toward me. “
I
would never say you made it up. I’m just telling you: other people might.”

“What he did was wrong.” Mom’s voice was quiet. “We want to press charges.”

“I’ll note that in the file.” He sighed loudly. “But I just take the reports. The DA makes the final decision on cases like this. We’ll let you know.”

Sergeant Gargaron stood up. The meeting was over. As we showed ourselves out, he sat down with a grunt and started unwrapping the remains of his Arby’s sandwich.

The police didn’t come to our apartment to collect my clothes that night.

28

W
indows Media Player showed four different tracks, which meant that there were four different 911 recordings from the coach’s house. Anna clicked on the first one. An audio recording began.

“911 Emergency,” said a male operator. “Do you need police, fire, or ambulance?”

“Police,” a woman sobbed. A baby cried near the phone, too. “Maybe an ambulance.”

The operator got her address. Several words had to be repeated because of all the crying. Then he asked her name.

“This is Wendy Fowler.”

“What’s going on, ma’am?”

Her words were obscured by the sound of banging and a male voice yelling. Wendy screamed louder. “He hit me. My husband punched me in the face, and he pushed me down, and I’m scared that he’s going to hurt me more. He’s very, very drunk.”

“Where is he, ma’am?”

“He’s outside the door!” More banging. “I’m locked in the bathroom with my baby daughter!”

“Does your husband have any weapons, ma’am?”

“No. I mean, yes, he owns a couple guns, but I don’t think he’s got them now.”

The banging continued and the yelling got louder. The baby squealed again.

“Please hurry,” Wendy cried.

“Yes, ma’am, stay calm, a unit has been dispatched and should be there any minute.”

He stayed on the line with her for another three minutes, during which Coach Fowler yelled and Wendy sobbed. His slurred words were mostly indecipherable, with the occasional “bitch,” “whore,’ and “fuck you up” loud enough to be heard. Then there were two more male voices.

“Sir, sir, calm down. We’re here to help you and your wife.”

“Back away from the door, sir.”

The recording ended. Anna felt a sick sense of familiarity. In her job, she had heard countless phone calls like this one. Growing up she had, too.

She clicked on the next recording, then the next. They were all similar, Wendy calling the police because her husband was beating her and she was afraid he’d get more violent. As the dates of the recordings progressed, the baby changed into a little girl, who expressed her fear in words instead of baby cries. Anna stopped at one part and played it again. “Please come before Daddy kills Mommy!”

Anna shuddered. She looked at the attached paperwork, which listed the dates and times of the calls. Wendy had dialed 911 from her house four times over the course of her ten-year marriage.

Anna looked up and saw Jody standing in the doorway. Anna had been so engrossed in the tapes she hadn’t heard her sister returning home from work.

“Is that Wendy and the coach?” Jody asked.

“Yeah,” Anna said.

“God, that’s horrible.”

“Did you know he abused her?”

“No one knew.”

“Did he ever do this to you?”

“No.” Jody shook her head. “He was a perfect gentleman.”

Anna suspected there were even more violent incidents, but Wendy only called when she needed someone to physically restrain her husband from
continuing
an assault. If he just hit her and walked away, she didn’t call the police. This was someone who wanted to keep things private.

Most likely, Wendy forgave him afterward. That’s how it worked in most cases. In 80 percent of domestic assaults, the victim didn’t want to press charges. It wasn’t like a mugging: the victim often was in love with her assailant. She might blame herself for “causing” the assault. And in Wendy’s situation, where all the money and power in the relationship was held by the coach, she would have even more incentive not to take him to court.

But in the end, Wendy
had
consulted a divorce lawyer. Anna took the CD out of the computer and held it up. “We just found your defense.”

“Ugh. I don’t want that, Annie.”

“Why not? Let the blame go where the blame goes.”

“I want you to defend me. But I don’t want to drag someone else into this. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

“She
is
your worst enemy.”

“She’s more similar to us than different. She’s just a woman trying to live her life.” Jody pointed to the CD. “How can you want to hurt her after hearing that? Don’t you feel sorry for her? And her daughter?”