“Listen, dude,” Murphy said. “Why don’t you just go up there and ask him what he wants, you know?”
“Just walk up to the car?”
“Yeah. Walk up to the car, ask him what he wants.”
Half an hour after pulling out of the driveway, Trooper Cherven and Detective Arrighi saw Aaron walking toward them.
Arrighi, who’d been sitting in the passenger seat, walked up and met him halfway, identified himself, and shook Aaron’s hand.
“Did you rent a black Chevy Suburban?” the cops asked Hernandez.
“Yeah,” Aaron said. “I rented it for my friend O.”
“Who’s O?”
“Odin.”
“How do you know Odin?”
“My girlfriend’s sister dates him.”
“When was the last time you saw Odin?”
“I was up his way yesterday.”
Cherven asked Hernandez where Odin’s way was.
“Boston,” Aaron said. He could not provide the exact address, but had it in his GPS. Then Aaron said, “I saw you out here on my security monitors. What’s with all the questions? I’m gonna have to speak to my attorney.”
Hernandez walked back up the drive and went inside the house, locking the front door behind him. Cherven and Arrighi followed. A moment later, Aaron opened the door and handed Cherven a business card.
“Ropes & Gray,” it read. A law firm in Boston.
“We’re investigating a death,” the detective said.
Instead of asking, “Whose death?” Hernandez slammed the door in the cops’ faces and locked it again.
Chapter 58
Slamming that door was a mistake on Aaron’s part.
It wasn’t how innocent people acted.
“If somebody says, ‘We’re here about a death investigation,’ I don’t even know if it’s possible not to say, ‘Who died?’” Lieutenant King, of the state police, says today. “But he doesn’t. At that point, we don’t jump to conclusions, but we do have to see it through. Clearly, it’s a lead we have to follow. At that point, he became a person of interest.”
At the time, Trooper Cherven became suspicious enough to place a call to Assistant DA Patrick Bomberg.
Bomberg was close friends with a Ropes & Gray lawyer named Robert Jones. The two men had known each other for twenty years. Now the DA called Jones and told him that he was at the North Attleboro Police Station. Bomberg was there in connection with a homicide, he said, and the police were interested in speaking with a Ropes & Gray client—Aaron Hernandez.
In the meanwhile, Trooper Cherven and Detective Arrighi had returned to their vehicle. They waited there for Hernandez to come back outside.
A little while later, he did. “I’ll follow you to the police station,” he said, “to talk.”
Aaron left the house with Shayanna, who was carrying their daughter, Avielle. Shayanna put the girl in the back of their white Nissan Juke (the car’s vanity plates read HERNANDZ) and climbed in the driver’s seat. Aaron rode shotgun, with the officers following in their own car as they made their way toward the North Attleboro police station. When they arrived, Shayanna let Aaron out at the entrance and started to pull away. Trooper Cherven followed and flashed his blue police lights. Shayanna stopped. Cherven and Arrighi walked up to her car.
Did Shayanna know that Odin Lloyd had been murdered? When Cherven told her that Lloyd was dead, she started to cry.
Shayanna told the officers that she didn’t know Lloyd all that well, but knew that he dated her sister. She said that he smoked and probably dealt marijuana, and that the last time she’d seen him was Saturday morning. She gave the officers Aaron’s cell phone number, and said that she and Aaron had been home all day Sunday, she said. But Aaron was not there when she’d gone to bed, and had not come home at all that evening.
Just then, Shayanna’s phone rang. It was Aaron. He told her that his agent, Murph, had said not to talk to the cops anymore.
“She dropped him off,” an official close to the investigation remembers. “The baby was in the backseat. She was questioned in the parking lot—that’s when she said, ‘Odin’s a drug dealer.’ This must have been around eleven. Why would she leave Aaron at the station? She had the baby with her. But she left, and went home, and then she left again.
“The reason, I’m sure, is that on the way to the station, Aaron had said, ‘Go home, get the guns.’ So she went home to get the guns. After that, triangulation—cell phone towers—prove that she drove to Franklin, and then to the state line between Connecticut and Rhode Island.”
On her way to the state line, Shayanna drove to an ATM in Plainville, where she and Aaron had once lived. She withdrew the maximum—$500—then drove to an ATM in Coventry, Rhode Island, and made another $500 withdrawal.
Having done so, Shayanna met up with Bo Wallace and Carlos Ortiz at a McDonald’s in Rhode Island.
“You okay?” Wallace asked as she gave him the stack of bills. “Everything’s gonna be okay,” he said.
Jenkins told Wallace, “Be safe,” before driving back to North Attleboro.
Chapter 59
Inside the police station, Hernandez was led to a second-floor interview room. He asked detectives for a phone charger. Then he asked if the lights could be turned off, and if he could lie on the floor—Aaron’s back was bothering him, he explained.
Outside of the room, detectives dialed the cell phone number Shayanna had given them. It was the same as a number that Odin Lloyd had in his cell phone, marked on the dead man’s contact list as “Nigga Dis.”
Inside the room, Hernandez’s cell phone rang.
Half an hour later, Hernandez’s lawyers, Michael Fee and Robert Jones, arrived at the station.
Patrick Bomberg met Jones and Fee down in the lobby. He told them that Hernandez was alone in an interview room, and said that the police wanted to question him in connection with a homicide in North Attleboro.
Bomberg also told the lawyers that his wife was a partner at Ropes & Gray, and that the lawyers should be sure to disclose this to their client, along with the fact that Bomberg and Jones were old friends.
Fee, who seemed to have assumed the role of Aaron’s primary spokesperson, assured the DA that they would.
Aaron had not been placed under arrest. He had not been questioned yet. When his lawyers arrived, he was allowed to leave the station.
Hernandez, Jones, and Fee walked outside and conferred for forty-five minutes.
As they did so, Detective Mike Elliott made his way to the dispatcher’s room, where the controls for the police station’s security camera were located. Elliott had twenty-five years on the force. Back when the station was built, he had served as a tech and helped to install the security system. Now, in the dispatcher’s room, he picked Aaron and the lawyers up on an exterior camera.
They had walked to a car in the station’s parking lot. One of the lawyers opened the driver’s side door. Luckily for the detective, he left it open. With the car’s interior light on, Elliott could see Hernandez climb into the passenger seat, take out his cell phone, and remove the battery. Then the lawyer removed another cell phone from a briefcase in the backseat and passed it to Aaron.
At one in the morning, the lawyers walked back into the station. In a conference room, with two police officers present, Assistant DA Bomberg provided them with more information: a Dorchester man named Odin Lloyd had been found dead that evening.
Lloyd’s girlfriend was the sister of Aaron Hernandez’s girlfriend.
A set of rental cars keys found in Lloyd’s pocket had been traced to a car that had been rented in Hernandez’s name—the Suburban, which had already been found near Lloyd’s apartment in Dorchester.
Michael Fee told Bomberg that his client had no objections to the DA’s friendship with Robert Jones. But, Fee said, Hernandez did not want to be interviewed that night. He was tired. He was not dressed appropriately for a video interview. And Fee himself wanted more time to consult with Hernandez.
When the police asked to see Aaron’s cell phone, Fee declined.
Chapter 60