Flat Lake in Winter Read online

  “Do you ever hear from him?” Hillary asked.

  “He sends us postcards sometimes.”

  “Who do you mean by ‘us’?”

  “M-me and my grandparents.”

  Hillary noticed that Jonathan referred to his grandparents as though they were still alive. “What kind of postcards?” she asked.

  “Pictures,” he said.

  “What kind of pictures?” She was hoping for something like the Statue of Liberty, or Niagara Falls, or the Baseball Hall of Fame, that might give her a city to begin with, at least.

  “Animals.”

  Animals. Hillary almost let it go at that. But she’d learned it was always better to ask the next question, even if it seemed pointless and stupid, and nine times out of ten brought nothing but another stupid answer.

  “What kind of animals?”

  To Hillary’s eye, Jonathan’s face lit up just a bit. Apparently he liked animals.

  “K-k-kangaroo,” he said.

  Not quite what Hillary had expected. Perhaps Uncle John worked in zoo somewhere. “Any others?”

  Jonathan knitted his brow. With great difficulty, he managed to pull up another name and force it out. “P-p-plattypussy.”

  “Platypus?”

  Jonathan smiled broadly.

  Hillary didn’t. She was busy imagining what it would be like trying to find a man named John Greenhall in Australia.

  When Hillary asked about brothers or sisters, Jonathan told her he once had an older brother named Porter, whom nobody had seen or heard from in many years. Asked if he had any idea where Porter might be now, Jonathan shook his head slowly from side to side. “Dead,” he guessed.

  Hillary didn’t pursue it.

  “Anybody else?” she asked.

  This one seemed to stump Jonathan. For a moment, he didn’t do or say anything. Then, in a barely audible voice - so soft that Hillary Munson later couldn’t say for sure if she’d heard him correctly or not - Jonathan said something that sounded to her like, “Maybe.” But when pressed, it was as though he hadn’t said it at all: One moment it was there, the next it was gone.

  In all, Hillary spent just over three hours with Jonathan during their first meeting. She left exhausted, so difficult had been the process of extracting the bits and pieces of information that Jonathan was able and willing to share with her. But she was heartened by the knowledge that she’d gotten along with him quite well, had his signatures on her various release forms, and knew a little something about his background.

  Looking back now through the prism of hindsight, it can probably be said that the meeting was most notable for what Hillary Munson missed.

  PEARSON GUNN DOESN’T miss much. Or so he likes to think. Gunn went to see Jonathan Hamilton on Tuesday, when Matt Fielder was busy at his computer, working on his motion to dismiss the indictment, and Hillary Munson was back down in Albany, firing off requests for records.

  Gunn - who brushes off any notions of privileged communications with a wave of his huge hand and a bellowed, “Do I look like a lawyer to you?” - is far more ready to talk about meetings with Jonathan than either Fielder or Munson. While he won’t quote Jonathan directly, Gunn is willing to summarize the conversation that took place between the two of them that day.

  “I found the kid sorta dazed-like,” Gunn reports. “It was like he’d woken up in jail all of a sudden one day, and couldn’t really say just why. When I asked him if he knew anything about what had happened to his grandparents, he nodded and let me know he knew they’d been killed. I asked him how he felt about that, and he told me he loved them and he missed them a lot. He didn’t quite choke up at that point, but he came damn close. I thought it was real. I mean, I see people lying and acting all the time. When Jonathan said that, I thought it was real.

  “Next I asked him if he knew who’d done it. He said he wasn’t sure. When he said that, I didn’t say anything else right away. I wanted to see if he’d volunteer anything without me asking another question. And he did. After a minute he like shrugged his shoulders and went, ‘Me?’

  “The thing about it was, for the life of me, I couldn’t tell if he was saying that he thought he was the one who had done it, or if he was just guessing. I had the feeling that he was trying his hardest to come up with the right answer, just so he could please me. It was weird in a way, it really was.”

  Asked what his overall impression of Jonathan was at that first meeting, Gunn narrows his eyes. “I remember thinking to myself that this was a kid who hadn’t been dealt a full deck. I didn’t think he was lying to me. I didn’t think he was smart enough to lie to me. And yet everything about the case pointed to him, in spades, five times over. So I ended up thinking something like this: He did it. In a way, he knows he did it. But for some reason he really can’t recall doing it.

  “I remember reading once that sometimes a person can do something so terrible, so out of character, that afterwards it’s so painful for them to think about that they have to bury it to go on living. But I mean really bury it. Gets to the point where they honestly don’t remember it anymore. Put ‘em on a polygraph and they’ll deny doing it, and the needles’ll back ‘em up every time. Absofuckinglutely amazing, the things the human mind can do.”

  With Gunn so forthcoming about his impressions even now, it is a virtual certainty that he wasn’t bashful about sharing those same impressions with Matt Fielder at the time he’d formed them. And if one looks back at the operation of the defense team in those early days and weeks of the case, it’s easy to see that Fielder, Gunn, and Munson were all pretty much on the same page. In the face of overwhelming evidence pointing at Jonathan, they’d come to accept the fact that he had, in fact, killed his grandparents. They had no idea why he’d done it; however, and they’d quickly found themselves at a dead end of sorts: If Jonathan himself didn’t remember committing the murders - and they were ready to accept that he didn’t - how on earth were they ever going to find out just what it was that had driven him to do it?

  Here they were, three people desperate to save the life of a fourth person. Only, that fourth person was totally unable to help them. Looking back at their early frustration some months later, Fielder would put it this way: “It was like we were trying our hardest to reach out to this drowning man, who was sinking out of sight before our very eyes. All we needed was for him to reach out a hand to us, so we’d have something to grab on to. And it turned out he didn’t have any arms.”

  AN ICY RAIN accompanied Matt Fielder on his drive to Cedar Falls that Friday morning. The rain was just heavy enough so that he needed his wipers, but light enough so that if he kept them on, the windshield would begin to streak. The Suzuki was a base model: four cylinders, five speeds, two doors, and not much else. He’d passed up shelling out an additional $2,000 for something they called a “convenience package,” that would have given him tinted glass, a rear-window defroster, intermittent wipers, a locking center console, a lighted vanity mirror, and a couple of other things that had struck him at the time as totally frivolous. He’d have liked the intermittent wipers, but naturally they wouldn’t sell him those without the rest of the deal - they knew what they were doing. So now he drove with one hand on the steering wheel and one on the wiper control, flicking it on and off every five seconds or so, so that the blades would make a single pass across the windshield before returning to rest. Manual intermittent wipers, he called them.

  The icy rain had turned to the regular variety by the time Fielder reached the courthouse, but he saw right away that it hadn’t kept the public away. He had to drive around the corner to find a parking place, finally settling for a spot in front of the jail. By the time he made it back to the entrance, his suit was spotted, and his socks were soaked through his loafers.

  The court appearance was brief but significant. Gil Cavanaugh presented the indictment he’d obtained from the grand jury. To nobody’s surprise, it charged Jonathan Hamilton with two counts of murder in the first degree, as well a
s various lesser included crimes - second-degree murder, burglary (for illegally entering the victims’ home with the intent of committing a crime), and the illegal possession of a weapon (the knife) with the intent to use it unlawfully.

  Asked how the defendant pleaded, Fielder responded on Jonathan’s behalf. “Not guilty,” he said.

  Next, Cavanaugh handed up a motion requesting that the defendant be required to submit to the taking of blood and hair samples, as well as having his footprints taken, all, no doubt, to compare to evidence recovered at the scene. Fielder asked for time to respond, but he knew this was one round he was going to lose. Unlike statements, which may be refused under the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against compelling an individual to give testimony against himself, the items Cavanaugh was seeking were “non-testimonial.” Unless Fielder could show that supplying them endangered his client’s life (as he might be able to do, for example, if the issue was one of removing a bullet lodged near the brain) or “shocked the conscience” (such as pumping the contents of his client’s stomach), all Cavanaugh had to do was demonstrate that there was “probable cause” to believe that the defendant had committed a crime - something the grand jury conveniently now had done for him by voting its indictment.

  Turning to the offensive, Fielder submitted papers of his own - the motion to dismiss the indictment, based upon Cavanaugh’s failure to give the defense a reasonable time to decide whether to have Jonathan testify before the grand jury, and to prepare him to do so. But there, too, Fielder knew he had a loser. Still, he was doing what he had to do. What was reasonable in an ordinary case might turn out to be unreasonable in a capital case. One of Fielder’s jobs was to make a record at every step of the proceedings, so appellate courts could one day decide just how different death was going to be in New York. Even in non-capital cases, every lawyer’s nightmare is the discovery that his client’s rights were in fact violated - but, that in failing to preserve the issue by registering a proper and timely objection, the defense waived the defect.

  Prisons are full of defendants whose lawyers didn’t bother to object.

  With no further business, Judge Summerhouse adjourned the case for three weeks, for each side to respond in writing to the other’s moving papers.

  THE RAIN DID little to dampen Cavanaugh’s impromptu press conference, held on the courthouse steps following the arraignment. “Today is September twelfth,” he said into the microphones. “As the district attorney elected by the citizens of Ottawa County, I have 120 days from today to decide whether it is my intention to seek the ultimate penalty in this case. As horrible as these murders are, and as defenseless as these poor victims were, I am going to extend to the defendant a courtesy that he certainly never offered the victims. I am going to hold off a bit, to give the defense the opportunity to try to convince me why I should not seek the death penalty in this case. I will consider anything they present to me in the next three weeks. I’m a tough man, but I’m also a fair man. So, you see, I’ve now served public notice. The burden’s on them.”

  As cameramen jockeyed for position, Cavanaugh stood under an umbrella held by an aide and answered a few softball questions lobbed at him by reporters. No, he had never seen a more gruesome crime in all of his years in public service. Yes, he was certain the right man was locked up, and yes, the good folks who lived in the county could sleep well at night. No, offhand he couldn’t imagine anything the defense could possibly tell him that would persuade him not to ask for death, but he wanted to give them the chance, just the same. And yes, he expected to be reelected handily the following November.

  Then he excused himself and left, with his entourage in tow.

  When the reporters made their way over to Fielder, who’d been watching the performance from one side, he held up a hand and told them he had no comment for them. He hated to do it. For one thing, reporters can be helpful: They live in a world where information is currency and are generally eager to trade a good lead for a bit of background material and an unconfirmed rumor, with maybe a future piece of gossip thrown in. Besides that, Cavanaugh’s antics infuriated Fielder, who would have loved to be able to say something to balance the scales. But what was he going to tell them? That his client didn’t know whether he was guilty or not? That he was having trouble remembering if he’d murdered his grandparents? Or maybe, that if he’d done it, he couldn’t say why?

  “Sorry,” he said three or four times.

  “Are you going to try to talk the DA out of asking for death?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Is there anything good about your client?”

  “Sorry.”

  “When will you talk with us?”

  “I’ll have a statement at the appropriate time,” was about all he came up with. Public relations has never been Matt Fielder’s strong suit.

  He broke away from them and made it around the corner to his car, just in time to see a uniformed officer placing a parking ticket underneath one of his manual intermittent wiper blades.

  He was starting to get the feeling that it wasn’t his day.

  AROUND THE SAME time Matt Fielder was beginning the drive back to his cabin near Big Moose, a technician was getting to work some 150 miles to the west, in the Rochester suburb of Rigney Bluff. The technician’s name was Yvonne St. Germaine, and she worked for a company called Gen Type. Gen Type is a commercial testing laboratory that had been in business only three years at the time, but was already employing eighty-five people and grossing over $7 million a year in receipts. Along with a handful of similar labs like CellMark, LabCorp, and BioTest (it was beginning to become apparent that a prerequisite to success in the field was having a two-syllable name that could be cleverly SplitUp), GenType’s claim to fame was that it was a well-known and widely accepted tester of DNA samples.

  Less than a decade earlier, the discovery of the value of deoxyribonucleic acid as a nearly unique genetic marker had revolutionized the science of identification. And only two years ago, a celebrated West Coast trial had made DNA a household term. The fact that few people even knew what the initials stood for, and that fewer still had any inkling of the theory behind the application, made no difference; it was no longer sufficient simply to tell a jury that something looked like blood, or was blood, or was human blood, or was even type AB - human blood. By 1997, every prosecutor in America knew that henceforth it would be necessary to explain to the jurors that DNA testing had been performed, and had conclusively established that the odds of the blood’s having come from anyone other than the accused were precisely one in 46,351,562,837. And, so long as the accused wasn’t some sort of a celebrity golf player, chances are, that would pretty much do the trick.

  Yvonne St. Germaine opened the Express Mail package that had arrived that morning from someplace called Cedar Falls, New York. Inside, she found an inner container that, when slit open, revealed twenty-seven small items. Each item was separately wrapped. Each contained either a cotton swab, a red smear on a slide, a small swatch of cloth, or what appeared to be a human hair, complete with the follicle. Each was marked with a number. The numbers were all different, but each was preceded by the letter X. In Yvonne St. Germaine’s language, X stood for “unknown.” She also found, separately protected in plastic bubble-wrap, two test tubes containing blood. From the fact that the test tubes were plugged with purple stoppers and the blood inside them was still liquid, she knew that it had been properly mixed with an anticoagulant. The tubes were marked K-l and K-2. The K designation meant that these were “known” samples for comparison against the unknown ones.

  Finally, there was a letter typed on the letterhead of the Ottawa County District Attorney, requesting analysis of all the items, and explaining that additional samples, to be collectively labeled K-3, would be forwarded to GenType in several weeks.

  Yvonne checked her watch, entered the exact time in her notebook, and, using a sterile forceps, lifted the first item, X-l, from its envelope. To Yvonne, it looked like a small portion
of terrycloth material, perhaps snipped from a towel or a bathrobe. The material itself may have been white at one time, or perhaps a light gray or beige. It was hard to tell for sure, though, so thoroughly was it soaked in what certainly appeared to Yvonne’s trained eye to be blood.

  MATT FIELDER SPENT Saturday pouring the footings for a small barn he hoped to raise before winter set in, and cooking up a large pot of chili. To anyone watching Fielder cook - and nobody was - it would have been apparent that he was having company for dinner, and that the company was female.

  They would have been only half right.

  The chili recipe was something that had evolved gradually since Fielder’s meat-eating days, now some ten years behind him. It called for dried lentils and soaked black beans, fresh onions, leeks, celery, carrots, tomatoes, and whatever wild mushrooms were to be found. A half dozen different varieties of peppers, ranging all the way from sweet red bells to chemically unstable black habaneras, provided both depth and fire. By the time it was ready, it was thick enough to stand a fork up in it and so dark and rich that vegetarians drew back from it in disbelief.

  The truth was, Fielder certainly could have used a little female company. Married at twenty-three, single again by thirty, he’d been on his own ever since. There had been women in his life, to be sure, but something in him had always managed to keep them at arm’s length. Perhaps it had been the trauma of divorce, or the comfort he took in retreating into his own protective shell, or the multitude of little idiosyncrasies he’d developed over so many years of doing things his way. Whatever it was, those who knew him well - and there were precious few in that category - had pretty much given Fielder up as a “lost cause” who was destined to live out his days alone. His sister, herself happily married and surrounded by a houseful of kids, joked that he was searching for the perfect “elationship,” so afraid was he of the “r-word.”