The Yoga Store Murder (22 page)

“Did you want some water or something like that?” Drewry asked, holding his own cup of coffee.

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Positive,” Brittany said quickly, staking out a pleasant but slightly edged tone that gave a clear message: I am here to amend my story and then I’m leaving.

Ruvin walked in. Brittany greeted him softly. “Hi, Dimitry.”

Drewry learned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. “Thanks for coming back in. In talking with Chris and Marissa, it sounds like they’ve finally been able to convince you, like, to go back to Seattle and stay with Chris for a while.”

It was part small talk and part establishing the framework of a “noncustodial” interview, which didn’t require him to inform Brittany of her rights to remain silent and consult an attorney. Drewry wanted Brittany to feel that as far as he was concerned, she was not only free to leave the interview room; she could head across the country.

“It’s definitely an option,” Brittany told him, assuring the detectives she didn’t want that to become an obstacle to them solving a case. “I told them my only concern was being here throughout this, and if needing anything from me, I didn’t want, you know, to be like unreachable. They told me that was the last thing I needed to worry about, and, if need be, I could fly back and forth. They would fly with me. They said not to worry about that.”

“Okay, good,” Drewry said.

Brittany spoke about how rattled she was—how she hadn’t slept, how she was scared even to walk out of her basement apartment and ascend the outside stairs to Marissa’s place. Brittany said she’d spoken to her brother Chris about her fears, and how that had led her to talk about what had happened Friday night. It was Chris’s idea, Brittany said, for her to come in and share additional details with the detectives.

“So I’m here now,” Brittany said, fumbling over a few words before coming out with it. “Prior to him sexually assaulting me and zip-tying me, they made me move her car.”

“Okay,” Drewry said, rolling his chair slightly back, displaying little reaction, and reaching to shut the door. He didn’t want any noises interfering with the recording on this one. Drewry nodded to Brittany, hunched his shoulders, leaned forward an inch. It was an acceptance of what she just said, an invitation to keep going. Brittany did.

“They asked, they said, ‘Where are her keys?’ I said. ‘I have no idea.’ One of them punched me in my head, and made me look through her coat and her bag for them. When I finally found them, they said if I was to pass anyone and open my mouth, I can consider myself dead, and that one of them would be watching the entire time.”

Brittany told them about the lot where she’d moved the car. Drewry offered one word, “Okay,” followed by silence. It was one of his favorite techniques, the pregnant pause. Suspects often felt compelled to end it by saying something, as Brittany did. “I remember seeing a cop, and I was just too scared to even flag him down.”

Seeing a cop and not running to him for help? Maybe what really happened was that Brittany had seen Officer Justin Tierney ease his cruiser past her when she was parked in Jayna’s car—and she was trying to get in front of that story, too.

Drewry asked a few more questions about Brittany moving the car, biding his time to segue into a broader discussion about the case. His tone was apologetic. “Okay, well, let’s, go, ah, through it step-by-step then as far as your returning to the store then, because you might remember some other things, too.” Brittany stuck to her earlier story. To help explain Jayna’s movements, she took her left hand out of the front pocket of her gray lulu jacket, extended her index finger and moving it across the metal table. Nine minutes after Brittany arrived, though, her tone had shifted to exasperation. “Do I have to go through it?”

“Yeah,” Drewry said, “because you left out some things, okay? So let’s, like, see if you remember some other stuff.”

“Left out what?”

“Well, as far as like the car thing is concerned.”

“I know,” Brittany said, raising the pitch of her voice, leaning back, and looking at the ceiling. “And that’s the only thing.”

*

The best detectives are also skilled con men. Judges have ruled again and again that detectives can deceive and lie during interrogations. It gave them permission to use an arsenal of tricks, ones Drewry and Ruvin had employed together in the past. They planned to use some with Brittany.

Drewry wanted to come across like he was in Brittany’s corner, but that he needed some more explanations to get his superiors off his back. Ruvin wanted to eventually toss Brittany an “out,” a term detectives used to tempt suspects to lie their way out of trouble, only to get into more trouble. The “out” here would be that it was somehow not really Brittany’s fault for trouble that erupted inside the store; it was Jayna—she’d started a fight.

For forty minutes, the detectives kept coming back to questions about the weakest links in Brittany’s story, in particular, this most recent notion that the men had sent her out, alone, to move Jayna’s car, and she came back to the store anyway, even knowing that one of the men had just viciously attacked Jayna. But Brittany edged forward, trying to add a detail to fill in another hole: the black cap she must’ve by now realized she’d accidentally left in the back of Jayna’s car. Before going out to move the car, she told the detectives, the men made her put the hat on.

“Okay,” Drewry said.

“I had a hat on. It’s a black hat.”

“Okay. Why did they make you put the hat on?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, what did they say?”

“I don’t remember. I don’t remember,” Brittany said, raising the pitch of her voice. “Do you know how many times they hit me in my head?”

Drewry shook his head no and turned the question around. “How many times did they hit you?”

“I don’t know.”

Drewry leaned his chin atop his clasped hands, creating gaps of silence stretching past ten seconds. He returned to his questions about Brittany leaving the store to get Jayna’s car, acting out the role of just a cog in the wheel. “Okay, people would probably ask, ‘Well, why didn’t you just keep on going and not go back,’ you know?”

“Because I was scared for my life.”

Drewry asked Brittany why she didn’t flag down the cop she saw. “You know, people would probably ask stuff like that. And I guess I have to try to be able to answer that. So what’s the answer to that one?”

“I was scared for my life. I mean I was scared for my life. That’s all I can tell you.”

Drewry got Brittany to again confirm that she had blood on her face when she moved the car. Edging up the heat of the flame below her, Drewry asked Brittany about her three-block walk
back
to the store among late-night pedestrians. “Did they kind of look at you funny or anything like, you know, ‘Whoa, what’s she doing all bloody?’”

“I don’t know if they saw, like I would have been more in front of them,” Brittany said.

Ruvin smiled inside over Brittany’s contortions. It must have been a gut-wrenching moment for Brittany, he thought, when she realized that she left behind such a telling, bloodstained clue in Jayna’s car, the hat. And Drewry was returning to that subject, asking Brittany where the attackers got the hat. “I don’t know,” Brittany said, “maybe on like one of our mid-racks.”

Drewry kept pushing on what happened inside the store. Brittany said she didn’t want to go over the horrifying details yet again, even as Drewry continued to go back over them.

“And how did you fall onto Jayna, I mean, were you on your hands and your knees? Or straight down, facedown?”

“On my knees.”

“Okay. Were you straddling her, or were you actually physically, like, pancaked on top of her or what?”

“He pushed me on her,” Brittany said, pausing for several seconds, and turning her voice into a soft, whispering cry. “I touched her head.”

Drewry’s only concern about Brittany’s soft cries was that they weren’t being picked up by the recording equipment. In a gambit he repeated several times, Drewry pointed to his right ear and spoke of his own pretend limitations. “I understand that you’re emotional, and that you’re crying, okay. But with my, my hearing, and you know, and your crying, I can’t hear you.”

“One of my hands,” Brittany said, “fell on her head before like sliding to the ground in the blood.” From the detectives’ point of view, Brittany played up her whimpers about having to relive what she’d seen, about how she had just wanted to come into the room that morning, give them her car-moving addendum, and leave.

“I wanted to feel better after coming here,” she said.

“Well, hopefully you will, okay?” Drewry said.

“I don’t,” Brittany snapped.

By 11:44 A.M., nearly an hour after the interview had started, Brittany had said she wanted to go at least four times. The detectives knew they were getting to decision time—either let her go or inform her of her rights to remain silent and get a lawyer. Drewry put his hands on the table and stood up. “Let’s take a break, okay. Do you want to use the bathroom, or some water, or something like that?”

“Can I go?”

“Probably in a couple of minutes. I just need to take a break, okay.”

The detectives opened the door, leaving it that way so Brittany could see into the cubicles. They took a sharp left and walked forty feet down a hall to their captain’s office to strategize.

*

It was the same crowd as the morning. At issue was if and when to confront Brittany. Drewry still didn’t want to. He advocated going back into the room and getting Brittany to agree in front of the camera that she didn’t mind staying; then, ask a few more questions and see what happened. But it meant that they should be willing to let her walk out, to see if they could go after her next week with more evidence. His commanders returned to their same point in the morning: if she leaves, she’s not coming back. Go in there and confront her, they told Drewry. Ayres, the prosecutor, chipped in too, reminding the detectives they needed to advise Brittany of her rights before confronting her.

*

Drewry walked back to his cubicle, collecting the evidence he had to blow holes in Brittany’s story. He still wasn’t sure if and when he would follow his orders. He and Ruvin walked back into the interview room. Brittany sat expressionless, with her left leg looped over a chair arm.

“I just wanted to clarify a couple of things,” Drewry began, getting Brittany to talk about how she may have gotten blood on her clothes. The detective saw an opening to try to evoke a feeling of guilt or sympathy.

“When he pushed you on top of Jayna, was she moving at all?”

“She moved when I fell on her, but she didn’t say anything.”

“Okay, did she moan or anything like that?”

Brittany softly whimpered and nodded her head yes. But like earlier that morning—and two days before—the detectives noticed that she couldn’t seem to make tears come out.

“She was moaning?” Drewry asked.

More nods.

“She was probably dying, right?”

Brittany eked out crying, barely audible sentences. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Drewry spent a couple more minutes asking Brittany about her clothes. Then he made a decision. Fuck it, he thought, pausing for sixteen seconds and leaning back in his chair, arms crossed.

“Brittany,” Drewry began, “there comes a point sometimes when we have to break down and get everything off of our chest, okay. I know this has really been rough for you as far as, like, I’m sure that you have been going absolutely nuts for these past couple of days as far as what the cops have found out, what the cops have figured out, what the cops know.”

“No, no one will tell me anything,” Brittany said. “I can’t even watch the news.”

“Oh, I can only imagine, you know. You have got to be going absolutely nuts with worry, with fear, you got to be, got to be. And you got to tell us what really happened.”

“I’m telling you.”

“Because I know what really happened.”

“I told you what really happened.”

“No, what you have done is, you’ve concocted an incredible story that doesn’t make any doggone sense.”

“No.”

Drewry lifted his right index finger. “Listen to me, okay. I’ve been doing this, I’ve been a cop for over thirty years, I’ve been working homicide for damned near twenty-five years, and I’ve seen a lot of stuff. And I’ve heard a lot of tales, and I’ve seen a lot of people—good and bad—and sometimes people get into situations way over their heads, and it’s like, ‘What the hell am I going to do now?’ You know, ‘How do I explain this? What the hell am I going to do now?’”

He paused, reaching into the back pages of his legal pad for three printed photographs from the hospital. “I guess we can start off with the injuries that you have. They’re self-inflicted.”

He moved his coffee cup out of the way and arranged the photos in front of Brittany. He explained to her how superficial and straight the scratches were.

“I wouldn’t do this to myself,” Brittany said.

Drewry told her he didn’t believe she was knocked out during the attack. Even bound up in those zipties, he said, she could have lowered her arms and wiggled to a phone. “Brittany, I know about the thefts. I know that Jayna found clothing in your bag and that you had been suspected of stealing.”

“No,” Brittany said. “Jayna did not think that I had stolen anything.”

“So why did you kill her then?”

“I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.”

“No, I didn’t. I would never do that. Jayna was my friend.”

Drewry told Brittany how shoe prints in the store had revealed that there were never two men inside—just the tracks made by Brittany’s shoes and the store’s size 14s: “You put those shoes on.”

Brittany shook her head, lifted it back, and spoke in a whimpering whine. “I would never do that. Who do you think I am?”

“I think you need help, okay? And I am very, very concerned for you,” Drewry said, seeing an opening. “And I think that you need to, like, really get this off your chest.”

As the two went back and forth, Ruvin prepared to throw Brittany her “out.” He would tell Brittany that he understood the cover-up and all, but that what he didn’t get was what had actually happened.