The Wrong Suspect

It starts as a quiet day, drinking coffee and reading the paper on a fall Sunday morning. Before I know it, I need a shower and have started smoking again. My quiet Sunday morning, long in the rearview. I'm now dealing with flashes of the grotesque that occur each time I blink. My questioning should be short-lived. There's little reason to think I need to get a confession out of the girl's father. Leaving her in the squad room to wait for her grandparents, I go to visit with daddy.

The interrogation rooms are the final stop on the road to the courts. They're affectionately called the killing floor. These are the rooms in which lives become lost to the system. It's a minor recompense considering the sins that end people up in one of these rooms. A uniformed officer stands by in the halls while a suspect awaits his time with the interrogator, giving them plenty of time to consider how they wish to proceed.

The suspects sweat the details. They have their questions, questions that often the answers reveal what their best direction forward may be.

I punch in my passcode on a ten-digit keypad outside of interrogation and step into the room. Jonas Bradford is sitting there, his left wrist in cuffs attached to the steel table. He barely looks up at me. I think to myself that it is a good sign. He's tired. I can work with that.

"Mr. Bradford," I say, introducing myself, "I'm Detective Sargent Nicholas Lametti."

Jonas looks up, a slight acknowledgment I'm there. His eyes are red and puffy. He's been crying for some time now. Remorse? I wonder. I take my time getting the case file and my notepad out in front of me.

"So, Mr. Bradford, can I call you Jonas?"

He looks up at me, a questioning look on his face. He's off of his guard already. For me, this is a good sign. It will make my task that much easier.

Before we get started I explain the procedural things to Mr. Bradford. I have to read his rights to him to question him about what went on tonight.

"Mr. Bradford, you have the right to remain silent...".

"Do you wish to talk with me about what went on tonight?"

"I," he hesitates. "I suppose so. Yes, I'll talk to you."

"Alright, why don't you just start at the beginning of the night, if you don't mind? I'll stop you when there's something I need you to clarify," I explained to him.

Jonas went on to explain how he arrived at home a little after six o'clock. It was close to his normal time getting home. He admitted he was a little later than normal, not that it was relevant to anything that I knew of. He recalled his wife, Jennifer, was cooking dinner.

"Do you remember what she was making?"

He smiled.

"Of course I do," he sadly said. "She was making lasagna, her specialty."

Why did you kill her, my voice rings in my head. I write down lasagna on my notepad, indicating that he was clear, lucid, and fully recalled the evening up to at least this point.

"Then what happened?" I asked, urging him to continue.

"We had supper, the three of us, and I opened up a bottle of wine."

"Do you remember what kind of wine?" I asked him.

"It was a cabernet, but I'm not sure of the brand. It was something Jen found while shopping," he explained.

"Do you always drink with dinner?"

"Oh, no. Absolutely not. We were celebrating," he told me.

"What were you celebrating?" I asked, looking over the background I had on the couple.

"I got this promotion...at work. And, well it was kind of a big deal because we were going to be able to afford to put a down payment on a cabin out at the lake," he explained.

Something didn't fit. Jonas Bradford was found in the house, over his wife's dead body, with her blood all over him. He looked like the killer and when the cops found him he was so enraged they had to taser him to get him under control. What happened between celebrating a promotion, plans to buy a cabin at the lake and finding him on the floor over his murdered wife?

"Jonas," I leaned in as I spoke, "What changed from dinner to when we got to your home?"

"I don't know," he answered. "We had a great night, dinner, watched a movie, and then I and my wife went upstairs to bed."

"Go on," I urged him, suddenly feeling like there were answers I was getting that I didn't expect. What was I missing?

"I woke up about one o'clock. I noticed Jen wasn't in bed. I figured she'd gone for something to drink. We both have a habit of getting thirsty in the middle of the night...you know. So I got dressed and went down to the kitchen. That's when I found her," he explained.

"You found your wife, already dead?" I asked.

"Yes, I tried to tell the other officers that," he told me.

"Why did you rush them?"

Jonas said that all he could see were the silhouetted images of men in his house, their flashlights in his face. He thought that his wife had woken up during a burglary.

"They never even said they were cops until after they tasered me," Jonas frustratedly said as he slammed his one free hand on the table.

"Why did you call the police?"

Jonas looked up at me, confused by my question. Tears streaked down his cheeks as he squinted at me.

"I didn't call anyone," he somberly admitted.

"It must have been your daughter," I replied, getting ready to leave the room.

"We don't have a daughter."

I turned, looking at my suspect, and realizing he was telling the truth ran out of the interrogation room and back to the squad room. I nearly knocked over a uniformed officer as I tore through the halls of the station. When I got to the doorway, the girl was gone. Our squad room was empty.

"Lametti!" the desk Sargent yelled. "Phone's for you."

"Transfer it sarge," I yelled back.

When my desk phone rang I picked up, putting aside the missing teenager that claimed to be Lori Bradford. It was the medical examiner's office.

"Lametti," I answered.

"It's Steve Riggs, hey, the husband wasn't the killer. His prints aren't anywhere on the knife. The prints we pulled...well it's tough to explain," he told me.

"What's the problem?"

"The prints were in the system. They come up as a Lori McCallister," he explained.

"Who in the hell is that?"

"Actually, she lived in that house. She also murdered her mother there, nearly twenty-five years ago."

"When did she get out of prison?"

I heard him say it but I couldn't believe what I was hearing. She was dead. She'd been shot by the police in 1997. I hung the phone up and sat down at my desk. This was something that I had no idea how to report. Jonas Bradford was in all likelihood innocent. How did I explain that our secondary suspect was someone that was shot and killed in a police shooting?

"So, what's the verdict on Bradford? His attorney's here," the watch commander advised from the doorway to the room.

I looked up and told him, "Let him go, forensics just confirmed it couldn't have been him. Tell his lawyer to take him to a hotel, he's not going to want to go back there."

Personally, if it were my call, I would burn that house to the ground. But, the man's wife was murdered. I could track him down later and explain that fact of life to him.