to Dudley Baker, I was suddenly attracting gullible saps like a picnic basket attracts wasps. I stood over the toilet and marveled how my life had taken this bizarre twist.
This murder investigation was no longer any of my business. My only involvement would be as a witness at Professor Westergaard’s trial. And yet the spectral image of that murdered girl just wouldn’t leave me be. I’d begun to fear it never would. I didn’t trust Menario to find Ashley Kim’s killer, whether it was Hans Westergaard or not. The idea of adding her name to Maine’s list of unsolved homicides filled me with a red rage. I owed it to that poor woman to do something on her behalf.
By the time I returned to the living room, I’d decided on a course of action. “I’ll look through Bell’s files,” I said with a theatrical sigh. “On one condition, though. You have to promise to share information with me about the Ashley Kim investigation.”
Baker’s fat neck flushed scarlet. “I won’t share anything that might compromise the case.”
“Does Westergaard have access to a private plane? I know he’s rich. Is there any way he could have slipped out of the country? Back to Europe or something?”
“I’m not at liberty to reveal those particular details.”
I pressed my splint against my chest. “Just tell me who Menario has interviewed, then.”
He puffed out his cheeks. “Mark Folsom, the owner of the Harpoon Bar in Seal Cove. We pulled one of his fingerprints off the pay phone outside Smitty’s Garage.”
Charley Stevens had called me with that news. “Folsom was Nikki Donnatelli’s employer.”
“And a suspect in her murder. But he claims that he’s used that phone on several occasions, and there’s nothing to place him at the scene of the accident on the night of Ashley Kim’s disappearance.”
“What about the Driskos?”
“So far, they’ve refused to talk. The state police are expediting the DNA tests on that blood and hair you collected, but it seems certain that the Driskos stole the deer from the road. Menario can’t arrest them until he has proof of it, though.”
“How about the Westergaards’ caretaker-Stanley Snow?”
“He has alibis for the entire day Ashley was missing-people who swore they’d seen him at the Square Deal and around Seal Cove. He’s also offered to take a polygraph.”
I remembered what Jill Westergaard had said about Snow-that he was the gentlest man she’d ever met. The caretaker was either supremely confident or supremely stupid if he had volunteered to take a lie-detector test to prove his innocence. But polygraphs were not infallible, and they could be beaten. There were sites all over the Internet that taught you techniques on becoming an artful liar.
“Who else are you looking at?” I asked.
“Menario’s team has been going down the list of sex predators for Seal Cove, although it’s possible it’s someone who’s never been registered. If it was just some random person passing by at the wrong time, it’s going to be very hard to solve.”
“Is that why you came to me-because you’re grasping at straws?”
“You might say that.”
The admission squeezed some sympathy from me. “I’ll take a look at Ozzie Bell’s files,” I said, rising and motioning my good hand toward the door. “If I notice anything noteworthy, I’ll give you a call.”
“As sheriff, I can’t have a public connection to this.”
“You mean I should call Lou Bates instead?”
His rabbit nose crinkled when he smiled. “Lou is-how should I put it?-a very zealous person. I’d recommend that you speak with Bell.”
I escorted him to the door. “I’m curious what changed your mind about Jefferts’s innocence.”
Very carefully, he buttoned the front of his jacket with his short fingers. “Read the evidence, and you’ll see.”
“You made it sound like your own conversion was personal,” I said. “Like Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus.”
He perked up at my New Testament allusion. “Even before I read Bell’s report, I had doubts,” he admitted. “The junior staff at the prison-they assume everyone is guilty because a jury convicted them. But the older guards, they develop their own views, based on personal interactions over time. These guys have a list of inmates they’d personally set free if they could. At the top of that list is Erland Jefferts.”
25
It took some doing, but I managed to manhandle Bell’s box of files out of my truck and lug them as far as the mudroom. I pried open the dented cardboard cover and extracted the first document: “Rush to Judgment: The State of Maine’s Rigged Case Against Erland Jefferts.”
This is going to be good, I thought.
Ozzie Bell’s box included the complete trial transcript (1,334 pages) of the State of Maine v. Erland R. Jefferts; the report of Knox County sheriff’s deputy Dane Guffey on finding Jefferts and his truck on the night of July 12, 2004; the handwritten notes of Detective Joseph Winchenback, recounting the circumstances and exact wording of Jefferts’s “confession,” which disagreed with the investigator’s sworn testimony at trial; a printout from the Maine Sex Offender Registry listing every convicted predator within a ten-mile radius of the crime scene (Calvin Barter’s name was circled, for some reason); a photocopied map showing the location of Jefferts’s truck in relation to both the Harpoon Bar and the swampy spot where Nikki Donnatelli’s body was later located; an inventory of items recovered from his pickup; the report of Warden Katherine Frost concerning the search and discovery of the dead girl’s body; the final report of the state psychologist on the sanity of Erland R. Jefferts; the autopsy report of the state medical examiner, Dr. Walter Kitteridge; snapshots of Jefferts with his J-Team supporters in prison on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday; a letter from Louise Bates to the presiding judge, pleading for mercy for her nephew; and a statement by Maine’s attorney general denying an investigation into prosecutorial misconduct. And that was just half of it.
I decided to read in bed, with my inflamed hand elevated against my chest.
As I rearranged the lumped-up sheets, I found my bottle of Vicodin under a pillow, where I must have tucked it. I swallowed a pill and settled down to immerse myself in a juicy conspiracy theory.
As best I could tell, the J-Team’s argument was that the state’s case against Jefferts was entirely circumstantial and made in bad faith. Investigators hadn’t framed Erland per se, but they’d bent the law to convict a man they believed from the start to be a sex killer. Winchenback had fabricated a confession, the prosecutors had conspired to conceal exculpatory evidence from the defense and jury, and forensic science proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Erland Jefferts could not have committed the crime.
The J-Team stipulated that, yes, Erland had been intoxicated on the night of Nikki’s disappearance. But they took issue with Mark Folsom’s ex post facto statement that he had bounced Jefferts out of the Harpoon for making lewd remarks to Nikki. In fact, patrons remembered the bar owner dragging a stumble-drunk Jefferts into the parking lot, but no one could attest to the exact reason why. After Erland was arrested, however, the story that he had groped Nikki became the accepted version of the event.
Furthermore, Erland Jefferts had no record of violence. So what had made this affable man, so well liked in the community, commit such an atrocity? A credible motive was therefore a problem, according to Ozzie Bell.
Then there was the question of opportunity. The time-of-death evidence indicated that Nikki-like Ashley Kim-was kept alive for some hours before being murdered. She even had a bump on her head that seemed to have been inflicted many hours before her other wounds.
“Somebody played Mr. Jefferts for a patsy,” his attorney said at trial. “They found him passed out in the woods and planted the rigging tape to frame him.”
Typically, sexual predators take an object from the body of their murdered victims, panties being especially popular. So where was Nikki’s underwear if Jefferts didn’t have it in his possession?
When forensic technicians examined Nikki, they found traces of blood beneath her fingernails. But the DNA didn’t match Erland’s. It belonged, instead, to an unidentified male. Dr. Kitteridge countered that there was no
