If You Really Loved Me (28 page)

It was still like moving underwater to Cinnamon. An alien environment. Her own voice echoed in her ears, and she heard her voice shake. "I like horror movies, but I
don't
have the stomach for that. You know me."

"I didn't think you would," David said. "I don't either."

Cinnamon said she had looked at Patti and said, "Does
she?"

David explained that he and Patti had been discussing it.

"I don't even know what you guys are talking about," Cinnamon had cried. "I don't know what's going through you guys' heads!"

David's voice was very deep, very calm, and very determined. Cinnamon could see his eyes looking back at her from the rearview mirror.

"If you love me, you'll trust me. Just believe what I say. I'm your father. I know what's best."

26

F
red McLean and Jay Newell listened with a kind of horrified fascination. They scarcely felt the heat that had crept into the room where they sat. If what Cinnamon Brown was saying was
true,
she was describing the most sadistic manipulation they had ever heard. A fourteen-year-old girl drawn into her own father's murderous plot.

To prove her love for him.

Without prompting from Newell, Cinnamon described the next time the subject had arisen. The entire family— including Arthur and Manuela Brown—had gone to Riverside to visit a relative who had just had a baby. Linda, Manuela, Patti, and David went into the hospital and left Cinnamon alone with Krystal and her grandfather. "The baby and I were too young and had to stay in the lobby, so Grandpa stayed with us," Cinnamon remembered, closing her eyes as if she could see that day.

Arthur had questioned Cinnamon about some plot between Alan and Linda to hurt David, asking her, "What do you know about it?"

"I said, 'I don't know. That's for my father to tell you.' "

When Patti and David came back to the hospital lobby, leaving Manuela and Linda to ooh and aah over the new baby, Grandpa Brown had brought the subject up again. "My dad said, 'Remember, Father, I told you briefly what was going on with Linda? Her threat she made over the phone?' "

Arthur wanted to know more, and Patti had piped up, "Well, we're thinking about taking care of it tonight."

David nodded. "Yeah, we're going to take care of it tonight on the freeway. . . . Don't mention it to Mother, because Mother has a big mouth," David said, referring to Manuela.

Cinnamon had listened with horror—was it more of "the game" or were they serious?

"We're going to be driving down the freeway," Patti was saying to Grandpa Brown. "David is going to go fast. Not real real fast to exceed the limit, but he's going to go pretty fast. And when Linda gets in the car, we're not going to shut the door all the way. We're going to take out the light there—so you can't see in the van when the door opens."

Just then, Linda and Manuela had walked into the hospital lobby. Linda was smiling, and they started for home. Manuela seemed oblivious of the undercurrent of tension; she fussed over Krystal, adjusting the baby's car seat.

Cinnamon shuddered. "We were on the freeway and I was waiting for Patti to open the door and push her out like she said she was. And I didn't see anything, and I thought, 'Good. Good. ... I love Linda and I'm not ready to deal with this. I need to spend more time with her.' "

But Patti had moved between the van seats—back to where Cinnamon sat. "You go do it," she said to Cinnamon.

"Are you crazy?"

"You go do it,"
she whispered.

"No."

"Why not?"

"For one thing, I'm not strong enough," Cinnamon stalled. "No, I'm not going to do it." She said she saw her father look back at her in the mirror, his eyes trapping hers. "He looked at me, and I shook my head no."

"Was your grandfather doing anything?" Newell asked.

". . . I'm not sure, but he heard them talking about pushing Linda out of the van."

"He
did?"

"Yeah, and he was telling my father, 'I don't think that's a good idea, David. You better not do it.' "

They had driven west along 91, stopping at a fast-food restaurant. According to Cinnamon, when she and Patti returned to the van, Patti moved back to where she was sitting and insisted that she carry out the plan. "You
need
to do it."

Cinnamon balked. "You don't know what I need to do."

"If you love your father, you'll do it."

"I love my father, but I'm not ready to do something like that!"

"You
don't
love your father—otherwise you wouldn't have any hesitation. You'd go do it."

The constant repetition of what she should do for love was beginning to get to Cinnamon. She began to feel guilty. Fortunately, her grandfather came out of the restaurant and sat by her.

"Your father's wrong," he whispered. "Whatever you do, it's wrong. He's a sick man. I'm telling you now he's a sick man."

Nothing bad happened. Despite all the intrigue and dark plotting on the freeway, they had arrived home in Garden Grove from what turned out to be an uneventful trip. Linda had no inkling how close she had been to instant, shattering death on the freeway. She carried her baby in and put Krystal down for a nap, completely oblivious to danger.

She had, perhaps, a month to live.

Cinnamon told Newell and McLean that the topic of killing Linda before Linda and Alan killed David was never really dropped again. Every time they were in the van or the car going someplace, either David or Patti would bring it up. And each time, there was more urgency in their voices. David told Cinnamon a hundred times or more that he would have to go away from her—in order to survive. If not that, Linda would have to die.

If this was true, McLean and Newell realized that Cinnamon must gradually have become inured to the inhumanity of the plot. What had seemed incomprehensible would have become almost commonplace—when it was drilled into her mind continually, and when the manipulator was the man she trusted most in the world, it would have happened more quickly.

Had
she been brainwashed? If she had, it was obvious that Cinnamon herself was not aware of it.

"The next time you discussed this—" Newell began, the question scarcely out of his mouth before Cinnamon responded. She had been gagged for so long that her words and thoughts burst forth in freshets of sound.

". . . The next incident I remember is we were planning a trip. Most of it took place in the van. My father had said we were going up shooting and also that there was some money he had hidden up there a long time ago."

"Up where?" Newell asked.

"Somewhere up in the mountains up in Riverside. ... I think he was planning to take us on a long trip ... so he said we needed to load up the first-aid kit, and the guns, some food, soda, the ice chest. The van had a refrigerator so I filled it with food and stuff. . . . Linda wasn't too thrilled about this trip. She said, 'I don't want to take the baby up there,' and my father was saying, 'We'll drop you off at your mother's house so you can visit your relatives.' "

Cinnamon recalled working most of the day before the planned trip, mowing the front and back yard, helping clean the house, loading all the heavy gear into the van. David asked her to load a very heavy box from under his bed. He also said, "Take the guns out there."

"There was a lot of guns," Cinnamon said. "There was some rifle guns, some smaller guns ... I can't remember if we took the bow and arrows."

"A crossbow?" McLean asked; he had not seen any bows or arrows when he worked the crime scene—nor had Morrissey listed any. "The kind with cams on it?"

"I would think it had arrows," Cinnamon said.

"Yeah, but I mean cams for reducing the draw pull on your shoulder—but it increases the force of the bow. It's got wheels on both ends," McLean explained.

Cinnamon shook her head, baffled. She couldn't remember if she had loaded a crossbow into the van—her father had so many weapons—but she did remember David had reminded her to be sure the BB guns were in for herself and Patti.

They headed for the mountains, but David never stopped for BBs. Nor did he stop to leave Linda at her mother's house. When Cinnamon asked why they hadn't stopped, her father had told her to sit down and be quiet.

The tape clicked to a stop. Newell held up his hand to silence Cinnamon for a moment. He looked at his watch. It read 12:21.

A new tape started rolling, and Cinnamon began again. "At this time, we were way up there in the mountains somewhere. I reminded my father about the BBs again. He goes, 'You're on my last nerve. Go sit your butt down.' . . . My grandpa said . . . 'Don't worry about it. Just sit down.' "

"So your grandpa and grandma went too? Everybody went?"

"I can't remember if Grandma went. Grandma sort of blended into the carpet when she was in the van, and I can't remember if she was there or not."

Newell and McLean exchanged an amused glance. Despite the grim subject at hand, Cinnamon had a flair with words. Her recounting of the perambulations of the van packed full of Browns sounded like a day trip with The Family From Hell.

It was full dark before David would interrupt the trip to eat, and very, very late. They stopped finally at a Del Taco for food.

David had been nervous as a cat, his daughter remembered. When Cinnamon jumped out of the van, shouting, "I'm hungry!" he had told her to shut up. "I said, 'I've been back there really quiet for the past couple of hours and you're going to start yelling at me?' "

Linda had stood up for Cinnamon and told David to leave her alone. The tension between David and Linda had been almost palpable, but then David had backed off meekly.

Patti said nothing, watching them.

And then the oddest thing happened. They ordered their burritos and got right back in the van. They had been on the road for almost six hours. Cinnamon was "still vibrating" from riding so long and begged to at least stay in the restaurant long enough to sit down and eat. David flatly refused.

Linda was nervous too. "I think we should turn back. I think we should go back home. It's late."

David said, "Why don't we just stay here overnight?"

"I want to go home
now,"
Linda insisted.

"Are you sure?" David asked. "We came this far."

But Linda was almost shouting. "I want to go home
now!"
She seemed frightened, no,
petrified
—of camping out in the dark March night in the lowering mountains.

And so David had turned the van around and they went back down the mountain, bouncing and bucketing over the road. "So we got in the van; we were eating and I was smashing the burrito in my face from ail the bumps and stuff, and I was getting mad," Cinnamon told the two detectives. "A totally wasted trip."

Cinnamon had not understood the purpose of that abortive trip, the need to pack all the guns, bullets, arrows, and supplies—simply to drive up in the mountains, buy burritos, and turn right around to go home. McLean and Newell thought they did. With all the plots to get rid of Linda, perhaps she was not meant to return from that camping trip. Had David lost his nerve? What had thrown him off?

"The next day, my father told me to go get the stuff in the van and put it all back in the house," Cinnamon continued. "I said, 'Why don't you have Patti do it? I put it in there—you have her take it out,' but he just told me not to argue."

Cinnamon had obeyed that Sunday, March 17—St. Patrick's Day. It seemed dumb to her to unpack everything. They were supposed to go on a picnic to the desert the next day. Why not leave everything in the camper?

But then, it rained the next day.

And during that night, Linda was murdered.

Cinnamon seemed to be growing more nervous. She was supposed to go to work, she explained. Would she get in trouble with the staff at Ventura if she was late? Newell assured her that she would not. But he could sense that they had come to a place in a long, long recitation that would soon cast a chill over the hot room. All the earlier details had been, if not easy for Cinnamon, endurable.

Now, they had come to the day of Linda's death.

Newell had learned enough about Cinnamon Brown in these two hours to note that the more frightened she was, the more animated and humorous she became. She was smiling now, but he knew she was scared to death.

Cinnamon described Monday, March 18. Her mother and her aunt and great-grandmother from Utah had dropped by the Ocean Breeze house to visit. They had taken pictures, and she had shown them her new puppy. Her father had grudgingly agreed to come outside to greet his ex-in-laws. "He put on a good show for them because he'd been snapping at me a lot and the rest of the family."

Cinnamon visited with her relatives for a little while. "I went inside a little later. He goes, 'You didn't tell them anything, right?' I said, 'No, I didn't tell them anything. Stop getting paranoid.' He goes, 'Good.' And that night is the night Linda was killed."

"That night your grandparents came to visit from Utah?" Newell asked.

She nodded. "My
great-grandmother
and my aunt."

Cinnamon said that her father had called Manuela and Arthur at about six and invited them over for dinner and to play Uno. "Linda was cooking dinner. I can't remember what we had, but it was one of the bigger meals that took a long time to make. I was in and out of there grating the cheese and stuff. My grandma was just sort of helping her. Linda didn't like Grandma in the kitchen too much because she would, like, take over."

Newell and McLean let Cinnamon tell it at her own pace.

"And we were playing Uno cards. My grandpa was cussing me out. I kept on laughing at him in the game, giving him a whole bunch of cards which he didn't need. So he was yelling at me . . . and I was laughing. Well, then, Grandpa goes, 'I don't want to sit by
her
anymore,' and he was yelling. He was
serious.
'Get her away from me.' And I sort of took it to heart, you know, because usually he'd just cuss me out and I enjoyed that."