The Yoga Store Murder (19 page)

The open door was no accident. Drewry wanted Brittany to know she was free to leave any time she wanted. That meant that, legally speaking, he didn’t have to inform her of her constitutional rights to remain silent and consult a lawyer. Defense attorneys often challenged the open-door technique, but courts had adopted a standard: it didn’t matter what the detectives thought—and right now, Drewry and Ruvin thought Brittany was a cold-blooded and possibly psychopathic killer—it mattered what the suspect thought. If Brittany felt she could go, she wasn’t entitled to hear her rights.

As it happened, the department’s fingerprint machine, on which a suspect merely had to roll his or her finger across a glass scanner, wasn’t working. Drewry exploited the development, part of a broader strategy to present himself and his department as bungling. He walked back into the interview room. “Okay, let’s do the—I’m trying to think of the best way to do it. We got to do elimination fingerprints. Okay, and it gets really messy and whatnot. I thought that we had this new system still here where it’s inkless, okay, but apparently it’s . . .”

He paused for effect, emphasizing the next word.

“. . . broken.”

Ruvin walked up to the doorway. Drewry told him they’d probably have the hair samples taken first. He updated his partner on the broken fingerprint machine. “They ain’t going to replace or repair it.” To hear Drewry tell it, Brittany was dealing with a department stuck in the Stone Age, though even as Drewry complained, analysts upstairs were working up DNA samples in a lab stocked with more than a million dollars’ worth of equipment.

Drewry and Ruvin had developed a rhythm from earlier cases. With his experience, Drewry would lead the questions, while Ruvin would sit back and take notes, giving him time to jot down inquiries his partner missed, and interject his own questions at the end. The two hadn’t been able to come up with a solid plan for bringing the car up, but in two-dozen years of talking with suspects, Drewry had learned that plans didn’t work well for him anyway. He preferred to get people talking about anything, let them lead the conversation, and respond accordingly. “Flying by the seat of my pants,” Drewry liked to call it.

When Drewry finally took a seat, he did so atop the metal table, his head turned slightly away from Brittany toward the open door as he waited for the hair-sample technicians to arrive. He hardly wanted to seem eager. Brittany broke the silence, asking if there were any more developments in the case. “Any other good news?”

Drewry seized the opportunity to assert that Brittany’s fingerprints were just one of many they needed to get to distinguish innocent store employees from the killers. “We’re just still working on it. And that’s one of the things, like, what we have to do is, because we got a ton of doggone prints gathered inside of there. And so, we, like, need to get stuff from you, and from, like, everybody else that would have been, you know, working there.”

Drewry told her about receiving lots of tips and leads. “I’m trying to follow up on them. But again, like, you know, you’re one of our best sources, because you were there.”

“The only source,” Brittany said, quietly and quickly.

Drewry asked Brittany if she’d had a chance to talk to one of the counselors the county provides to rape victims. Not yet, Brittany said. He asked about lululemon. Brittany said a company executive had come to check on her earlier that day. And she said she enjoyed working at the Bethesda store. “It’s like a little family.”

Drewry engaged Brittany in more chitchat, asking about her family and where she’d gone to college. Brittany said she graduated from Stony Brook, something she’d been saying for the past seven years, since it had almost happened.

“What was your major?” the detective asked, still sitting on the table, dangling his feet a few inches above the floor.

“Sociology and psychology—originally wanted to be a social worker, and then ended up, when I graduated, I wanted just to hang and actually have fun. I moved to D.C. because I have family here,” Brittany said, waving her left hand, the fingertips of which still shone from her manicure five days earlier. “Had no idea what I really wanted to do. I used to say I was going to play soccer all my life. Ended up working with Bank of America for a little bit. It’s where I met one of my boyfriends. He was a dentist. I worked for him. Parents hated that.”

“They didn’t like him?”

“They didn’t like me working with him.”

“Oh, okay.”

Drewry and Ruvin felt confident the DNA results would point their way. But what if they didn’t? What if the blood in the car was Jayna’s, what if she had cut herself a few weeks earlier? What if the DNA from the store had Brittany’s and Jayna’s blood in so many places that the chaos was difficult to sort through? Their case would become more and more circumstantial:
Brittany was the only known person in the store, and her explanation of what happened amounted to a series of lies.
Could they even arrest her on those grounds? The more lies they had—and the more provably false they were—the better their chances.

The detectives knew Brittany was smart enough to think through the inquiries they were making. She likely figured they’d delve into what happened at the Georgetown store. Drewry wanted to bring up the topic, if only to shoot down the notion that he cared about it.

“How come you transferred up to the Bethesda store? Is it a larger store, or what?”

“Well, the reason why is a long story behind it.”

“Oh, okay. Drama?”

“Yeah. It’s kind of a blessing in disguise, you know?” Brittany said, waving the back of her left hand in a gentle, flowing motion. She talked about how it had led to the job offer at the fancy health club. “Just with the way things kind of happened with Equinox and everything.”

At 5:05 P.M., Drewry gave way to two women in blue uniforms who walked in. They weren’t dressed like cops and weren’t: they were there to get the hair samples. The duo—Cheré Balma and Amanda Kraemer—had worked with Jennifer Greer on Jayna’s car the night before. They knew the detectives’ suspicions, but acted their parts, deferring to Brittany as a traumatized victim. Snapping on a pair of rubber gloves and holding a pair of tweezers, Balma began to go to work. Brittany politely helped, offering to pull her hair to this side or that, to remove her bobby pins. At one point, Balma warned that a certain pull could be painful.

“Oh my gosh,” Brittany said. “Is it going to hurt a lot?”

*

It took twenty minutes to pull the hair samples. Drewry walked back into the interview room and took Brittany out to get her a bottle of water. When they returned, the detective casually stepped in front to naturally guide Brittany to the straight-back chair in the corner, the one nearer the hidden microphone and facing the hidden camera.

“Do you want me to sit here?” Brittany asked.

“I got a bad back,” Drewry said, pointing at the rocking seat. “If you don’t mind, if I can sit here.”

“Sure.”

“Okay thanks,” Drewry said. Next to Brittany’s knee, welded to a metal table leg and clearly visible, was a ring familiar to anyone who’d watched crime drama on TV. That’s where they cuffed the bad guys in place.

It was another part of what the detectives hated about their cramped, outdated police station. With only two interview rooms—often in use at the same time—they had to equip both with restraint rings. Ideally, they’d have other, less threatening rooms with the recording equipment. But they had to make do to try to keep things casual.

Ruvin tried to do his part by making himself out to be little more than a stenographer. He walked into the room, took a seat across the table from Brittany, and held up a folder that held his legal pad. “I usually do the writing,” he said. “I guess I’m a faster writer.”

Ruvin imitated a typing action and said he was thinking about buying an iPad.

“Well, for this, it’d probably be really good,” Brittany said with a smile and a soft voice on the border of flirtatious. “My brothers just bought me one.”

“Yeah? The new, new one?”

“Yeah, I don’t want it . . . I haven’t even opened it.”

Brittany gently lifted her bottle of water. Her right hand still had the cut. “Can I maybe ask, could you possibly open this?” she said.

As Ruvin did so, Drewry casually shut the door that led to the squad room. Brittany was now inside a room with two locked doors, which could only be opened with a swipe card. Drewry felt a judge would not view locked doors literally—that all Brittany had to do is ask to leave and she’d be allowed to do so. But it became that much more important for him and Ruvin to not come across as dominating or threatening. He gently suggested they speak for a bit before the fingerprint people arrived, asking Brittany about Jayna and any boyfriends she might have. She told him about Jayna’s boyfriend, Fraser. “He’s at the University of Washington. She was planning on moving in May, and so that’s how we kind of bonded right away is, because like, ‘Oh, you know, I’m from Seattle.’”

Brittany sat with her legs crossed, calmly answering questions. She spoke about the last night she and Jayna worked. As far as Brittany knew, she told the detectives, Jayna headed home. To Drewry, it seemed liked an opening to ask the car question, even if it had presented itself early.

“And she lives in Arlington?”

“Uh-huh,” Brittany said by way of affirmation.

“And she drives?”

Brittany nodded her head.

“Do you know what kind of car she has?”

“I don’t. I saw it once,” Brittany said. “But I don’t know the make and model.”

Drewry and Ruvin realized Brittany had answered the question in a way that left wiggle room down the road.
Sure, Jayna gave me a ride once, but I wasn’t paying attention to whether the car was a Toyota or a Honda or a whatever
. Drewry decided to let the car questions go for a while.

He got Brittany going again with her recollections of the night of the attack: closing down the store, leaving behind the wallet, going back inside with Jayna, being followed in by two masked men. If it was all lies, the detectives thought, Brittany was painting the broad outlines of how she killed Jayna. Brittany needed masked men to match the evidence; and the best way to do so, wherever possible, was to substitute what she did to Jayna with what they did to her. But Drewry had trouble picturing the attack Brittany was describing. He turned to Ruvin. “Give me your diagram,” he quietly asked.

Ruvin reached into his folder, pulled out a floor plan of the store, and gave it to his partner. Drewry placed it on the table between himself and Brittany. He wheeled his chair closer to her. “I should have done this before, I’m sorry,” he said, holding a pen over the diagram and readying himself to follow her lead. “Okay, here’s the front of the store, then, and this is where the alarm pad would be?”

“Uh-huh,” Brittany said, and spent the next twenty-five minutes helping Drewry draw a map of the attack.

He’d need it. In Brittany’s telling, the assault covered all four sections of the store: starting in the fitting area, where the bathrooms were, and moving back and forth among the three other sections—the rear stockroom, the main front portion, and the back exit hallway. As Brittany helped Drewry fill out his diagram, she had one of the masked men pushing and pulling her in eight directions. For the most part, Brittany spoke calmly, using her right hand to point to the diagram and using her left hand to wave and open and close for emphasis. Her facial expression didn’t change, but at one point her right foot under the table fluttered nineteen times in four seconds.

Brittany sometimes spoke in the present tense, like when she described Jayna getting pushed into the rear hallway, behind the purple door, where her screams started to fade. “She’s a lot more faint. And, like I, you, can’t make out what she’s saying,” Brittany said. She described breaking free of her attacker, squeezing into the rear hallway to try to help Jayna, seeing her, and getting dragged back. Brittany helped the detective draw a figure of Jayna’s body, where it was lying, what direction it was facing. Brittany’s voice began to quiver at the memory: “I remember seeing a lot of blood and stepping in it.”

As Ruvin took notes, he could hear when Brittany was trying to cover holes in her story. This was one of those points: she knew she had tracked Jayna’s blood in the store on the bottom of her sneakers. And so Brittany had just offered an explanation. In Ruvin’s mind, however, Brittany had a deeper hole to fill: coming up with reasons why the detectives would find Jayna’s blood on Brittany’s clothes and her hands, and why the detectives would find Brittany’s blood on Jayna’s body. She’d started her explanation Monday night in her apartment with the notion the two masked men shoved her onto Jayna’s bloody body. Now, Brittany was taking it one step further—explaining how she had bled onto Jayna. She pointed to the diagram and asserted what came next.

Her attacker dragged her back into the fitting-room area, she said, where he struck her in the forehead with something heavy. Then he forced her onto a bathroom floor and cut her hands and her stomach. Suddenly, both men wanted to know how to get out the back door. So Brittany’s attacker dragged her into the rear hallway to tell them how to disconnect the fire alarm.

Brittany was starting to whimper.

“I know it’s rough,” Drewry said, “but you’re almost through it.” The detective stood up, reached into a back pocket, pulled out a stack of tissues and put it on the table next to Brittany. Then he reached over, pulled a tissue off the pile, and put it next to her as well, so that Brittany had tissues next to both hands if she wanted them.

Brittany continued, offering an explanation for the biggest hole of all: why Jayna had been brutally massacred yet she herself was sitting there in relatively fine health. It was told to her by her attacker after he dragged her into the bathroom for the second time.

“Back out here,” she told Drewry, pointing at the diagram. “Back into the bathroom, he tells me that I’m like more fun to fuck with or something: ‘You’re lucky like,’ I don’t know, something like I’m more fun to fuck with, ‘You’re lucky you’re cute, you’re more fun to fuck with.’”