I’ve never heard of these guys; their names mean nothing to me. “So what’s the big news?” I ask.
“Well, it turns out that Durelle didn’t just serve in Afghanistan. He also died there.”
“What?” I ask, as penetrating and clever a retort as I can muster.
“His chopper went down, and all four guys on board died. He was one of them.”
“There obviously has to be a mistake.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Pete grudgingly agrees to try to find out more about Durelle, but he retaliates for the imposition by ordering the most expensive beer on the menu. It’s a small price to pay, and far smaller than the price I’ll have to pay the bookmaker, since all our bets on the NBA games lose.
I head home and call Laurie before going to sleep. She pumps me with questions about the case, mostly motivated by the close call with the highway shooter. I can hear the relief in her voice when I tell her I’ve hired Marcus.
It feels strange to wake up in the morning and go to the office, but that’s what I do. I get there at nine thirty, and waiting for me are Kevin and the files that Koppell had retrieved from storage. Edna walks in about an hour later, glancing at her watch in surprise at the fact that she’s not the first to arrive.
Kevin and I spend most of the day going through the information. There’s a huge amount to digest, and we’ll be better prepared to gauge the value after we are more familiar with the case in its entirety. There are no exculpatory bombshells, but we didn’t expect any. Koppell was looking for them, and if he’d found one, Richard wouldn’t be in jail.
By late afternoon we are feeling confident enough in our knowledge of the case to set up another interview for tomorrow morning with our client. At least now we know what questions to ask.
* * * * *
THERE IS A noticeable spring in Richard’s step when he is brought into the interview room. Since this is an official attorney’s visit, Kevin and I don’t have to talk to him through the glass in the visitors’ area. We get to talk in this private room, a risk the state is willing to take because Richard is in handcuffs and leg shackles. Should this prove insufficient, two guards are stationed outside the room, probably armed with tactical nuclear weapons.
Despite the fact that our chances for success are remote, Richard’s improved outlook is at least somewhat warranted. For the past five years he has had absolutely no reason to be hopeful; no one was working on his behalf to win his freedom or supporting his cause. Now we’re doing that, and for the first time Richard can believe that things are happening.
I introduce Kevin, and then we get right to it. I start by giving the standard speech about how we can help him only if we know everything, and that he should leave nothing out when answering our questions. Any detail, however small or insignificant it might seem, can be the crucial one.
“Tell us about that night,” I say.
“There was nothing unusual about it except for the way it ended,” he says. “It was summer, and Stacy and I would go out on the boat most weekends, at least when the weather was good. When it wasn’t, we’d go to a cabin I have in upstate New York.” He pauses a moment. “That’s the ironic thing. If we had known a storm was coming, we would probably have gone to the cabin. But it wasn’t predicted.”
“When you went out on the boat, did Reggie always go along?”
He nods. “Absolutely. Reggie went everywhere with us. Stacy loved him almost as much as I did.”
“You slept on the boat?”
He nods. “Most of the time. It was a forty-footer… slept six.”
“So there was nothing out of the ordinary about that night that you can remember?”
“Nothing. I’ve thought about it a thousand times. We went to bed at about nine o’clock. By then we had heard there was a chance of weather coming in, and I set the warning system up loud so I would definitely hear it.”
“Warning system?” Kevin asks. He knows as little about boating as I do.
Richard nods. “If there are weather warnings, a general alert is sent out. We were only about four miles out, so we’d have plenty of time to get back if we had to.”
“And you never heard a warning?” I ask.
“I never heard anything. I went to sleep and woke up in the hospital.”
“Do you remember taking the sleeping pills?” Kevin asks.
Richard shakes his head vigorously. “I never took sleeping pills. Not that night, not ever in my life. I didn’t even have any. They were not mine.”
“Were they Stacy’s?” I ask.
“I don’t believe so. If they were, she never mentioned it. I never knew her to have trouble sleeping.”
“So you have no idea how they got in your system?”
He shakes his head. “None at all.”
We talk some more about the night of the murder, but he has little else to add. While the important things were happening, he was asleep. All he remembers is a pleasant night out on the water, dinner, some wine, and an early trip to bed since he was tired from working all day.
I turn the focus to his job, that of a senior customs inspector at the Port of Newark. I ask him if there was anything about his job that could have made him a target.
“No, nothing,” he says. “It was a slow time.”
The answer is a little quick for my tastes. “Richard, I want you to understand something. You may not have committed this murder, but someone did. Someone with a reason. Now, that reason could involve you or Stacy, or the two of you together. So you need to open your mind to anyone who could have possibly hoped to gain from putting you in this position.”
“Don’t you think I’ve done nothing but think about that for five years? If someone was trying to get rid of me because I knew something, they shouldn’t have bothered, because I sure as hell don’t know that I know it. Besides, if I was a danger to someone, why not just kill me?”
It’s a good question, and one I eventually must answer. But for now I take him through a description of day-to-day life on his job. Border security in this era of terrorism has taken on an obviously extreme importance, and it was Richard’s task to make sure that the Port of Newark was as free of contraband as possible.
Finally, I turn the conversation to Stacy, and even five years later, it’s evident that his grief over her loss is still powerful. “How did you meet?” I ask.
“At a counter, having lunch. She was sitting next to me, and before I knew it we were having a conversation. We had dinner that night, and it just went from there.”
“Where was she from?” Kevin asks.
“Minnesota… a town just outside of Minneapolis. Her parents were killed in a car crash when she was eighteen. She worked there and then decided to move east.”
“What did she do?”
“She was a teacher, but what she really wanted was to be a chef. The things she made were incredible. She wanted to open her own restaurant.”
He talks about Stacy for a while longer, answering every question but never getting much below surface platitudes. He makes her sound so perfect she reminds me of Laurie.
“Were you in the Army?” I ask.
He nods. “National Guard. Served three months in Kuwait during the first Gulf war.”
“Do the names Archie Durelle or Antwan Cooper mean anything to you?”