I was smoking pot and drinking beer that afternoon in the woods alone. I had talked to Anna Jo Bonners about meeting me at the cabin so we could mess around. Anna Jo didn’t show up so I hung out by myself. I heard a scream coming from the cabin later and I went inside. I found Anna Jo Bonners in a pool of blood. I was scared that whoever had hurt her was still there so I grabbed the knife. I ran out of the cabin and hurried down the trail where my cousin Birdy found me. I don’t know why I picked up the knife, but I threw it away before my cousin came up to me. I did not kill her. I really liked Anna Jo. I think I might have loved her even.
All of the evidence supported the contention that Tommy was the killer. He’d had Anna Jo’s blood on his shirt and hands, his fingerprints had been recovered from the knife, and Birdy’s eyewitness testimony had put him fleeing the scene of the grisly homicide in Ponder’s cabin.
Surprised that she’d devoured half of the roll, Birdy pushed the plate away just as a call came in with a 509 area code, eastern Washington.
“Waterman,” she said.
“Dr. Waterman, I hope you don’t mind the intrusion,” a man’s voice said. “This is Ken Holloway. I’m the guard you talked to at the prison. You know, about your cousin?”
“Of course. Is everything all right? I didn’t leave my ID behind, did I?”
“No. Not that. It’s about Tommy. He’s been admitted to the infirmary. They might take him out of here to Spokane. He’s not doing so hot. After you left, he changed his family contact info to your name. Not changed. Actually gave a family contact. The spot on his file had been empty since he got here.”
Birdy felt sick and it wasn’t the cinnamon roll, which was now expanding in her upset stomach. “What can I do?”
“Nothing,” he said. “He wanted me to give you a message. He wanted me to tell you that …” The man’s voice grew soft. For a second, Birdy thought he might be crying.
“Are you all right, Sergeant?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice clipped in an obvious attempt to snap out of his grief. “He just wanted me to tell you that even if you don’t believe in him all the way yet, he’s grateful knowing that someone out there thinks he matters.”
Birdy asked, “Will you let him know I got the message? Tell him that I’m doing my best. I don’t want to give him false hope.”
“Hope is never false,” he said. “Hope is what keeps the innocent from killing themselves. Hope is what makes me think that justice will be done.”
She hung up and looked at the time on her phone. Pat-Stan was waiting for her.
Patricia Stanford produced an old audiocassette from the box of things she’d taken when she’d hobbled out of the Clallam County Sheriff’s department. It had been kept in an envelope with the date and Tommy’s first name scrawled on it in pencil. On the top right-hand side, a red ink stamp read: EVIDENCE.
Pat-Stan offered her some coffee, but Birdy declined. She was sick to her stomach.
“If you have any Rolaids,” she asked. “I’ll take a couple.”
“Alka-Seltzer all right?”
Birdy nodded. Pat-Stan went into her kitchen and returned shortly with a fizzing glass of water.
“Lemon lime,” she said.
As Birdy drank it, she couldn’t help but think of Pat-Stan’s need to collect some things from her office, her own kind of a Bone Box, maybe. She wondered if there were hundreds, if not thousands, of law enforcement people who carried away the flotsam and jetsam of cases that niggled at them too.
“Why Tommy’s tape?” she finally asked.
Pat-Stan inserted it into the player. “I guess I took things that bugged me. Things that I wasn’t really sure about.”
Birdy didn’t tell her about her own stash. Pat-Stan, in some ways, was a kindred spirit. Maybe law enforcement was full of people like them; those who were on the right side of the law, but weren’t as convinced as the men and women who lined up in the jury box. More times than she could care to admit, Birdy and her colleagues turned over the best information they could find, in hope that the jury would sort out the puzzle pieces that didn’t really fit. Their job had been to gather the evidence, the prosecutor’s job was to put it all into a story, and the jury was called upon to make the final call.
“Were you there?” Birdy asked. “In the room when this was recorded?”
She shook her head. “No. Not at all. Didn’t have the right badge back then. Derby treated me like an office girl and flunky. My scores on the detective’s test were twenty points higher than his. He’s now sheriff and I’m a human tripod selling
Even though the woman had clearly been wronged by her boss, in a very real, and very uncomfortable way, Birdy was grateful for it. Pat-Stan’s anger was proving to be more helpful than she’d hoped. Bitterness, sadly, was something that she could put to use.
Pat-Stan pushed the PLAY button. The tape crackled and popped, but Tommy’s voice was unmistakable. It was young Tommy. Broken Tommy. Not the man old before his time rotting away in prison. Tommy Freeland spoke in a deliberate, halting manner.
His words were so precise that Birdy wondered if he’d been reading his statement. But he couldn’t have been because the statement was a transcription of the tape, not the other way around.
“Stop the tape, please,” Birdy said, looking up from the transcript of her cousin’s statement, her heart beat a little faster. The Alka-Seltzer roiled in her stomach.
Pat-Stan complied. She kept her facial expression flat, but her eyes were alert and sharply focused. There was awareness behind them, and, Birdy thought, a kind of appreciation for what she was hearing.
“Did you hear what I heard?”
“Yes. I guess that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“He says that someone told him to put the knife down,” she said.
“That’s right. That’s what he says.”
“But at trial he said he was alone.”
“He didn’t. Maybe you don’t remember, but Tommy Freeland never actually testified. His lawyer told him not to. The transcripts were used.”
“But the transcriptions are wrong.”
The former detective nodded. “I know. I was there. The only comfort I’ve had is that all the other evidence so clearly indicated that Tommy was the killer. It was only after his conviction that I played back the tapes.”
“Not only that, but doesn’t he sound peculiar?” Birdy said.
Pat-Stan watched her visitor closely. “How so?” she asked.
“Stilted, calm. Not like someone who’d just killed his girlfriend and was looking for a way out of it,” Birdy said.
“Funny that you should say that,” Pat-Stan said, her finger hovering over the recorder to advance the audiotape one more time. “I saw him the afternoon they brought him in. He was a complete wreck. He was barely able to breathe because he was crying so hard. Also, this isn’t an interview tape at all. It seems like a compilation, bits and pieces strung together. Did you hear how the hissing in the background stopped at the end of the sentence?”
Birdy was still stunned by the disclosure that someone else had been at the crime scene. “Not really,” she said. “I’ll listen more carefully.”
Pat-Stan nodded. “I want you to follow along with your transcription, okay? You are missing something.”
