A Twist of the Knife Read online

  “The attorney’s name is William Hench. Right now we’re working on an appeal for a man who’s been on death row for fifteen years,” she said. I could feel more than hear that intensity in her vocal cords, her voice a little higher pitched and raspier than usual, like she was trying to pretend she wasn’t being gently strangled with a phone cord. She got that way when she was passionate. She was very passionate.

  “Remember the Lynch case?” she asked.

  Did I remember the Lynch case. That was what nearly got us killed, because she insisted on fighting to free a man she knew was innocent of serial murder even if he was guilty of necrophilia.

  She didn’t wait for the obvious answer. “This is the Lynch case again. It combines cold case with wrongful conviction. It’s, like, what I’m meant to do with my life. We don’t think this man did the crimes. But,” she went on, “we’re missing a couple of pieces of evidence. There’s a thing with getting evidence released in Indian River County, and they’ve been stonewalling Will. I told him you might know some people in this area who you could put the pressure on. Will’s heard of you. He was impressed that I knew you.”

  “Well, you’re both in luck. What I called to tell you is that I’m coming over. My dad’s in the hospital with pneumonia. Eighty-three years old and a smoker. I think he’s got emphysema, too. No one there to help my mother except my brother, and he’s useless. But we’re not what you’d call a close family. I’ll probably need a break from the hospital. Let’s get together. Just think what fun it will be to talk out a case together again.”

  “I was thinking more like you could just make a phone call to some—”

  “Nah. Who’s the guy you’re trying to get off?”

  “Marcus Creighton.”

  Alarm bells. I didn’t know everything, but I knew Creighton was guilty. Laura was going to lose. I remembered again Laura didn’t care much for losing, and that made me question what she was doing working appeals. Then I remembered how the first time I met her she was so impassioned about a man’s innocence she nearly leapt across the table at me in her effort to convince me she was right. But I didn’t say any of that. I just said, “No shit? Seriously?”

  “You remember the case.”

  I said, “That case was Casey Anthony huge. O. J. Simpson huge. Even if I hadn’t been working in the area at the time, it was national news.”

  “Huge. The difference is, there was a stronger case against both of them, and yet they both got off. Seriously, who’d have thought? We think we can find evidence for Marcus Creighton that will, if not exonerate him fully, overturn the death penalty ruling for a life sentence. If he’s proven innocent, the publicity will add to the current groundswell against capital punishment.”

  “It doesn’t hurt that he’s an upper-middle-class white guy,” I said.

  Silence on her end.

  “I’m just saying I don’t need a lecture,” I said.

  “Public opinion is turning, Brigid. Most legislators on both sides of the aisle feel the same way.”

  “But, Laura. Marcus Creighton.”

  It struck me that she might know me as well as I knew her when she said, “You think I’m deluding myself. I know what the odds are on this, but I think sometimes it’s worth going against the odds, and I know you do, too.”

  “Right now I’m thinking I’ve always hated arguing over the phone.”

  “Well, don’t then. Not until you hear what new evidence we’re tracking.”

  “Tell you what, e-mail me anything you’ve got on the case so I can take a look. I’m coming in tomorrow afternoon, I’ll stop by the hospital and then meet you at that Howard Johnson’s on the beach in Deerfield.”

  So. Parents, then Laura. Good thing I didn’t have any pressing cases to attend to in my investigation business, because I was clearly needed elsewhere.

  I packaged up my firearm, took it to the post office, and shipped it to Laura’s address because of TSA rules. Not that I was anticipating trouble.

  Did I just say that? I always anticipate trouble. What I didn’t anticipate, and what Laura didn’t know at that point, was that the following day, around the time I was changing planes in Phoenix, the governor of Florida was signing the warrant for Marcus Creighton’s execution by lethal injection.

  Two

  The next day Carlo, that’s my husband, insisted on taking me to the airport. When I told him I could drive myself, he reminded me we hadn’t bought a new car after I totaled mine around the same time I got shot in the leg. Not that he doesn’t trust me behind the wheel or anything like that.

  He let me drive, while he folded his long legs into the passenger seat like a praying mantis or some other unusually large insect. Our Pugs rode in the backseat, looking out the windows on either side of the car for a while before settling down to sleep. On the way to the airport we talked. About Dad’s precarious health and what to do with Mom if, when, he died.

  “Bring her to live with us,” Carlo said.

  “The hell you say. My family is nuts.” I had turned his dusty Volvo east on River Road and found the desert sun positioned over the Rincon Mountains, hitting my windshield precisely midway between the wipers and the bottom edge of the sun visor. We spent a few moments in silence as I drove blindly, hoping not to hit a car I couldn’t see.

  Then I said, “They may have behaved at my sister-in-law’s funeral, but you never know when somebody is going to throw something.”

  That was the one time he’d met my family, six months earlier. We’ve only been married a couple of years. Carlo was a Catholic priest turned philosophy professor, whose first wife died of cancer about five years before we met. He was my first husband. I may be able to kill a man with my bare hands, but when it comes to civilian life I’m what you call a late bloomer. I’m learning marriage by trial and error. It helps that I’m crazy for this guy.

  We talked some about Laura then, her turning into an activist, and her latest passion for exonerating felons. Possibly more like abolishing the death penalty. Laura set herself high goals.

  “I like Laura. I hope she succeeds,” Carlo said.

  I tried not to get up on my soapbox, but the thing is always sitting right there beside me.

  “I like her, too. And because of that I have to convince her to stop tilting at windmills,” I said.

  “If there hadn’t been a windmill, we wouldn’t have Don Quixote.”

  I know I could have argued that, but we were nearing the airport. “You old softy, you don’t even know what he’s in for. The guy murdered his family, including a wife and three children. That’s her asshole client.”

  Carlo was silent at that, but not because I had shocked his religious sensibility with the heinousness of the crime. He had been a prison chaplain at one point, and knew what it was like to have feces thrown at you, and to hear the confession of a man about to be executed. No, Carlo was silent because he was a retired philosopher. There were times when finishing a sentence took hours, days, in coming.

  He sipped from a to-go cup of coffee dwarfed by his big hands. He said, “That’s ugly. But if he didn’t do it, I don’t think I can imagine anything more cruel than to have your family ripped from you and then to be punished for it. If Laura is doing this, there must be a reason. You’ve got to respect it.” The image of the man I had once seen executed flashed into my head. You know, those several dozen flashbulb memories that play and play and play.

  * * *

  As requested, Laura Coleman had e-mailed me a huge file on the Creighton case, including the complete court transcripts. On the leg from Phoenix to Fort Lauderdale I opened my iPad and chose the first file because it was labeled PHOTOS. Photos are easy; you know, a picture, a thousand words, et cetera.

  Well, sure. Why not start with the victims?

  The mother: Kathleen Creighton, taken at a formal gathering with her lipstick fading on the bee-stung lips popular at the time, a glass in her hand, toasting the camera. Chin slightly up, not drunk enough to forge
t that little bulge below your jaw. An attractive man by her side, laughing in appreciation of nothing the way people do at parties. Marcus Creighton? What did it say about the Creightons that this photo was the one they used?

  The others were school photos of the children, the last ones taken before they disappeared, or died, probably died.

  The oldest girl: Kirsten Creighton, hair modeled after Jennifer Aniston’s in Friends, a style too old for a girl barely in her teens. That Victoria’s Secret pout that’s supposed to look sexy without the child even knowing what sexy means. Trying on this person and that person. Whoever she was to be, ultimately, never was.

  The younger girl: Sara Creighton, around eight years old, not yet practicing with a mask like her sister. Facing the camera dead-on, unselfconscious smile showing a double gap where her lower teeth should have been, she reminded me of a drunk pirate. She was the clown in the family. If they ever found her skull there would be secondary teeth still in the jaw, forever waiting to erupt.

  The boy: Devon Creighton, Sara’s twin, a shyer glance than his sister, with lids half-shielding his eyes and a more tentative smile that probably covered gaps like hers. But this was a snap in time, like those flashbulb memories. You couldn’t really tell who he was, whether he was the best soccer goalie on his elementary school team. The social stratum these kids came from, too rich for football and too poor for lacrosse.

  School photos tell you everything and nothing. These were interchangeable with a million other little Americans in school photos. Only different, because there would never be high school graduation photos taken of these kids.

  It was too early in the morning for a drink. I backed out of the photo file without looking to see if there were any of the crime scene, and decided on a court transcript.

  CLOSING REMARKS OF DAVID LANCER, FLORIDA STATE’S ATTORNEY

  Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury. As I told you in my opening remarks, I’m David Lancer, and I have had the responsibility of prosecuting the case against Marcus Creighton on behalf of the State of Florida. Now I’m going to summarize the case we have proved. Here is how the detectives, forensic scientists, and crime scene reconstruction experts, all experts in their fields, reconstructed the scene at the home of Marcus Creighton, 2357 Oleander Drive, Vero Beach, Florida, on the night of April 30, 1999.

  It is after midnight. Mr. Creighton has been away for several days on a business trip to Miami. Upon his return, arriving at the Melbourne Airport, where he picks up his car, he drives to the home where his wife and three children reside. In particular, a wife who has complained to her friends of the many arguments they have had over the sorry state of their finances, of the errors of judgment Mr. Creighton made that put his family at risk. She more than once threatened divorce. If she knew about his lover, it was the one thing she kept to herself.

  Mr. Creighton has arranged for the children to be out of the house that night, attending a slumber party at a community center.

  From this we can understand that he expected to find his wife home alone. Next events were planned even before he arrived there. Or perhaps he saw an opportunity and seized it. Whatever his mode of operation, when he walks into the master suite of his lavish dwelling, he finds his wife in the bathtub. She has, some would say foolishly, taken a sleeping pill prior to her bath, and is quite asleep. Perhaps he knows that this is common practice for her. Perhaps Creighton nudges her. Perhaps he perceives that she is out cold, and this is his chance to be with his mistress.

  He has two choices: He can either push her under the water, and make it look like an accidental drowning, or … he opens the bathroom cabinet and finds her hair dryer. Plugging it into the wall socket between the sink and the tub, he sees that even the noise of the dryer does not awaken her. It’s so easy, and the ease makes the temptation unbearable.

  He tosses the dryer into the tub, and the water is instantly charged. Kathleen’s body jerks with the current. Within less than thirty seconds she’s dead. Perhaps he watched. Perhaps he turned away. But whenever he turned away, he saw one of his children, watching, too stunned to react, too frightened to even scream. The child had watched him watching their mother die.

  The children had not gone to the slumber party after all. Let us imagine the child who saw this was a little girl.

  Marcus Creighton is caught, but at what he doesn’t know. Perhaps the child only saw her mother dead in the tub? Did she see her dying while he did nothing? Did she see her father throw the hair dryer into the water and then stand there doing nothing?

  Does Marcus Creighton stop to question the child, and the child shrinks from his touch? Tries to run?

  Impulsively, Marcus Creighton grabs the child and puts his hand over her mouth. What is he to do? What are his choices now? Somehow he binds the child, perhaps dragging her into the garage where a roll of duct tape rests on his workbench. He tapes the child’s mouth and binds her hands, still horrified at the way this is playing out, not daring to think where it might lead. But this step is driving him there. He puts the child in the backseat of his car.

  If anything is to be done, he reasons, it must be done completely and forever. He goes upstairs and rouses the other two children, one at a time, under some pretext of having to leave the house. They trust him. What child does not trust their father? And he leads them one after another to the same garage, the same duct tape binding them, the same car. Even now, they are more puzzled than fearful.

  What then, ladies and gentlemen? Did he drive around for a while, weighing his options? Did he resist killing them or was it easy for him? Is it necessary to surmise what happened to the children after that? Where are the bodies of these children that cry out to you for justice?

  There will always be questions which Marcus Creighton stubbornly refuses to answer, but let us address the answers we know for certain. Among the people providing testimony to this crime, you heard from Dr. Tracy Mack, a respected latent print expert, who developed the fingerprint on the hair dryer that, when questioned that night, Marcus Creighton told Detective Gabriel Delgado he had never touched.

  You also heard from Detective Gabriel Delgado, who took Mr. Creighton into custody, and to whom Mr. Creighton insisted he had been with his mistress earlier that evening. You also heard Shayna Murry, the mistress whose peccadillo turned into horrific tragedy, deny he was with her that night, which places him at the house hours earlier than he said he was. We have also heard from friends of Mrs. Creighton who repeated conversations surrounding the state of their marriage.

  The evidence is overwhelming. You have been told of the purchase of a life insurance policy on Mrs. Creighton, with Mr. Creighton as a beneficiary, twelve months prior to the death of his family. The State has presented a case that assigns motive, means, and opportunity to Marcus Creighton. Motive is the reason for a crime. Means signifies the way the crime was committed. Opportunity is the time and place that came together to allow the perpetration of the crime.

  These three are necessary to convince you beyond a reasonable doubt, and the State has done so. The evidence is overwhelming. The defense may try to convince you that you cannot find a verdict of homicide for the three children because their bodies have not yet been found. This is erroneous. There are many precedents for homicide convictions in the absence of the body. The facts are plain.

  Were it not for that child who saw his or her mother die, Mr. Creighton might have gotten away with the murder of his wife. Instead, he is accused of the crime of murdering his whole family. For this crime, the crime that all civilized cultures consider the most heinous, the State asks you to deliver not only a guilty verdict, but the death penalty. Thank you.

  I felt my spine settle back into the seat, ordered a coffee with whitener as the attendant passed by, and leaned my iPad against the drop-down table in front of me.

  Creighton did it. I was more certain than I’d ever been that he did it, and because of that, Laura would need me more than she realized.

  Three


  I knew David Lancer. Sure, he was a state’s attorney, and his job wasn’t to find the truth. His job was to get a conviction. He would call it winning. He was law enforcement’s hero and had passable ethics.

  But whether or not it was a just conviction, you can’t take on the world. Guilty or not, Creighton wasn’t one of the battles I was called to fight. Like that saying goes, Not my circus, not my monkeys. It’s a Momism—she was full of platitudes that sometimes flapped through my head.

  Mom, I thought. First Mom and Dad, then Laura.

  June starts hurricane season, and even in the air-conditioned Fort Lauderdale airport terminal I could sense the tropical dampness I took for granted until I moved to Arizona. Without even looking I felt the tiny lines in my face disappearing, the cracks around my mouth filling in, while my hair doubled its body. My hand felt slippery on the plastic handle of my roller bag, and I tried to remember the last time I had sweaty palms.

  Inside the terminal was nothing compared to the outside, though. I dragged my carry-on out the automatic doors and into the real humidity, making me feel like I’d been hit in the face with a warm wet cotton ball. After the dryness of the high desert my lungs had to work a little harder sucking in all that water.

  Florida. It’s a wet heat.

  The feeling stayed with me as I made my way to the rental car terminal a short walk away, got directed to a self-effacing gray Accord, and drove north on I-95, not imagining how much time I’d be spending on this road in the coming days.

  I grew up in this area. I left it to go to college and then Quantico and wherever that led, but had done some time working for the FBI in South Florida, too. Even with all the changes, I knew where I was. Every exit held a memory.