Crime Scene

Chapter 22

Julian Triplett’s sister now went by the name of Kara Drummond. I phoned her at her place of employment, the Macdonald Avenue branch of Wells Fargo in Richmond, where she was an assistant manager. She agreed to speak to me during her lunch break.

With time to kill, I hung around in the parking lot, seeing ghosts. It was a neighborhood with a high body count. The year before I’d worked a shooting outside Target, two people dead, spillover of an argument that began with a dinged car door. More recently, I’d read that the city had begun paying high-risk kids a stipend for not getting arrested, a policy that kicked up controversy, folks arguing over whether it represented a new standard for creativity or a new low for desperation.

Noon thirty, a woman I knew from her DMV photo emerged, blinking against the cold bright sun. We headed into Starbucks. She declined my offer of a drink and we took a booth.

Kara Drummond was eight years younger than her brother, pretty, with good skin and quick, wide eyes. Heavy bone structure lurked beneath her surface; she’d put work into staying trim. She wore gray slacks, a white crepe blouse, black heels. No ring, leading me to wonder if she’d changed her surname in order to escape its notoriety. Could be divorced; a different father. She spoke with a polish that belied her age and origins. A pair of earrings, tiny dangling sunflowers, swung as she shook her head at me.

She said, “I don’t have contact with either of them. Edwina’s toxic. God knows where he is.”

I asked when she’d seen Julian last.

“A long time ago. After he got out,” she said. “I went over there to get him away from her. I didn’t want him picking up her habits. I told him he could move in with me but he wouldn’t budge.” She made a disgusted face. “I was about ready to slap him. All that time he was inside, she never went once to see him. She wouldn’t even pay for my bus tickets. You believe that? How cheap can you get?”

“Where’d they keep him?”

“Atascadero,” she said. Unconsciously she reached across the table and picked up my napkin, began twisting it. “It took me all day to get down there. They never wanted to let me in, cause I didn’t have ID. I was too young. I had to argue my way in.”

Her devotion impressed me. The youth camp was in San Luis Obispo, over two hundred miles to the south. “You went by yourself?”

“Who else’s going to take me?”

“Reverend Willamette?”

“I don’t do church,” she said. “Only thing I believe in is me.”

I decided I’d misread her reasons for changing her name.

She said, “Have you ever seen a juvenile facility?”

I nodded. I had. Far more often than I’d ever wanted to.

“Those kids,” she said. “They’re not kids. They look like kids, but that’s not what they are. They ate my brother alive. First time I show up, I haven’t seen him in two years. He’s got cuts all over his face. I’m twelve and he’s crying to me like I’m the big sister instead of the other way around. ‘You gotta help me, I can’t take it no more.’ I told him, ‘Julian, you fight back. They come for you, you hit them first. Hit them as hard you can.’ He couldn’t do it. The next time I come he’s got his arm in a cast.” The napkin was by now reduced to pieces. “They broke his arm with a fencepost.”

She paused to compose herself. “Once he got out, the last thing he needs is to end up back inside on account of Edwina doing something stupid. She’s not the kind of person who can handle her own business, let alone someone else’s. Let alone someone like him.”

Despite her efforts to the contrary, she was starting to get worked up again. “I’m the one petitioning to seal his records,” she said. “I’m the one filling out job applications. I’m not trying to sound selfish, but it’s not like I don’t have my own life.”

“It’s not selfish,” I said.

“How’m I supposed to manage it when she’s whispering in his ear the whole time?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I couldn’t.”

She sat back, drained but restless, her hands active, searching for something new to destroy.

“Did Julian use?” I asked.

“I never saw him do it. But I don’t know what he learned inside.”

“I’m asking cause I understand he suffers from mental health issues, and it’s common to have substance abuse problems on top of that.”

“As long as he gets his meds, he’s fine. That’s another reason I couldn’t have him living with her. She’d forget to give him his pills and next thing I know he’s calling me up, talking crazy. I have to drop what I’m doing and run over there.”

“She seems to think it was the experiment that kicked off his problems.”

“That’s because she was too high to notice,” Kara said. “He’s always been like that. Not dangerous. Just...” She bit her lip. “Himself.”

“Does he have — did he have, at some point, before or after his release — someone monitoring him? Social worker? Anyone like that?”

That earned me an eye-roll. For an instant she looked just like her mother.

I asked where Julian had gotten his meds.

“Clinic, I think.”

Staff might have a bead on him. But I doubted they’d speak to me: confidentiality.

“What about old friends?” I said. “Can you give me some names?”

She shook her head despondently. She said, “All the other kids did was tease him.”

Her voice had fallen.

“They called him Grimace. Like the McDonald’s character. The purple one? Big, dumb Julian. Ma — Edwina, she wanted him to play football. She saw a meal ticket. When he got into high school, she made him go out for the team. But he couldn’t follow instructions, he’d wander around in circles. He didn’t like to get hit, or to hit anybody else. He never could hurt another person, no matter what they did to him. Never.”

She was sticking up for him, and I felt for her, more deeply than she could imagine.

Kara stirred the remains of the napkin with a long, lacquered fingernail. “So what do you think he’s done this time?”

“Nothing. As I told your mother, I need to talk to him to make sure he’s okay.”

“So you can arrest him.”

“I have no cause to do that.”

“That didn’t stop you all before.”

We’d been circling this point, and as much as I dreaded it, it was almost a relief to have arrived. “With respect, I read the file. There’s no shortage of evidence.”

“With respect to you,” she said, “that’s wrong, because I know he didn’t do it.”

I said, “I’m listening.”

“I was with him,” she said. “At home. That whole night.”

“The night of the murder.”

She nodded.

“You and Julian were together.”

“It was a Sunday. We were both in the house all day, watching TV.”

“He might’ve left the house after you were asleep.”

“He wasn’t supposed to do that,” she said.

That didn’t mean he hadn’t. But she’d never concede. I said, “You’re sure it was that same night?”

A withering smile. “I’m sure, Deputy.”

“How old were you?”

“Seven.”

“Okay, well, I’m thirty-four,” I said, “and most of the time I couldn’t tell you the date off the top of my head. I’d have to check my phone.”

“I’m sure,” she said. “It was Halloween. People kept knocking on the door. I had to send them away because we didn’t have any candy.”

“Where was your mother during this?”

Kara shrugged. “Wherever she would go. Out.”

“Can I ask why you didn’t tell this to the police?”

She chuffed. “You don’t think I tried? I went to the station myself. Nobody believed me.”

By now I’d read the complete file, some parts multiple times.

There was no mention of Kara’s statement, anywhere.

I said, “You are aware that they had Julian’s fingerprint on the knife.”

“I am.”

“Can you explain that?”

“I can’t. But I know what I know.” She sat up straight and tall. “My brother was sick. He needed help. But he wasn’t evil, and he wasn’t violent. He never killed that girl.”

There were lots of reasons to discount what Kara had told me, almost none to believe her, and as I relayed our conversation to Ken Bascombe, I tried to convey my own skepticism. All the same, I could sense his impatience growing, until finally he cut me off:

“What are we talking about. She was five?”

“Seven.”

“How many seven-year-olds can tell time?”

“That’s what I told her.”

“You said you needed to find the guy for some other thing. Why’re you messing with my case?”

“No messing,” I said. “She’s his sister, I thought she’d know where he is.”

“Yeah. And? What’s that got to do with any of this other shit?”

“Nothing. It came up. I wanted to run it by you.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “It came up, or she brought it up?”

“She did.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s why I checked the file. To verify her credibility.”

“And you didn’t find it because she has none. I never spoke to her. Ever. Okay?”

“Is it possible somebody else did, though?”

“Is it possible? Sure. But they never told me. Listen, Thomas Edison, I don’t have the file in front of me. I don’t have it memorized. If you say it’s not in there, there’s a reason why not. And — and, let’s pretend for a second I did speak to her, or someone did. It doesn’t change a thing. Okay? I’m not about to rearrange reality to fit to some unsubstantiated thing, coming from a child, who by the way also happens to be an interested party. You said it yourself. She’s his sister. Whatever bullshit she’s spinning out does nothing to change the fact that we have physical evidence, an eyewitness, and a confession.”

“Her brother’s been out for years,” I said. “Why lie to me about it now?”

Bascombe laughed. “I think even you can figure that out.”

“To rehabilitate his reputation.”

“Or to get you off his trail. Or just to yank your chain. You think she gives a shit?”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Cause it’s sensible,” he said. Another of his barking laughs. A seal after swallowing a sardine. “Look. What you do, it’s gotta be a drag. I know it must feel exciting, the detective thing. Take it from me. It dead-ends. Like everything.”