“Let’s see,” Sheriff Cruso murmured, sitting down on the couch in the formal living room and hunching over Cindy’s sketch. I was on the floor next to her for support, my legs straight out under the coffee table and my back against the couch’s ruffled base. Sheriff Cruso’s knee was right next to my face, and it was inappropriate how turned on I felt by the two of us sitting like that. I didn’t even like sex. Denise said that wasn’t a “me” problem but a Brian one.
Sheriff Cruso passed the sketch to Detective “pronounced like dill” Pickell, standing behind the couch. “Take a look at that, Pickell,” he said. Pickell and Cruso appeared to be about the same age—younger than I thought a sheriff and detective should be—and while Cruso was Black, he was clearly the one in charge. This was highly unusual in the 1970s, not just in the Panhandle but anywhere. For generations, the Southern sheriff was white, middle-aged, and poorly educated, a defender of the status quo. But as crime increased in rural areas and racial attitudes shifted, voters trended toward younger, more educated candidates. Cruso had his criminology degree from Florida A&M and he was Leon County’s first Black sheriff, which was a milestone New York City wouldn’t achieve until 1995.
Detective Pickell held the drawing under one of the table lamps for a better look. “This is good, Cindy.”
“Can I wash my hands now?” Cindy asked. She was sitting with her carbon-blackened palms turned up on the edge of the coffee table so she wouldn’t stain the cream-colored furniture in the formal room. We were still worried about the nice couch in the nice room when, upstairs, Jill’s blood had seeped through the mattress and would eventually rust the springs.
“Go ahead.” Cruso tipped his head. Then, over his shoulder to Pickell, “Can you check to see if we’re clear for Miss Schumacher here to take us through the house?”
Pickell headed for the foyer, arcing widely around the girls lined up to use the downstairs bathroom after being fingerprinted in the dining room. They were covering their faces so the police wouldn’t see them cry, ruining the arms of my sweaters. The press would go on to write that you could hear our screams from outside, not their most offensive fabrication but one I took umbrage with nonetheless. We conducted ourselves with a restrained horror that I was proud of at the time. I thought if this had to happen to us, at least everyone would remember that we were strong and brave. Back then you were strong and brave if you didn’t carry on about it. But people wrote whatever they wanted to about us with no regard for the truth. Looking back, I should have let everyone scream.
Sheriff Cruso gazed down at me and gave me an approachable smile. Now he was actually handsome, unlike The Defendant, who was just handsome for having done the vile things he’d done. Sheriff Cruso was well over six feet, with a defined, manly jawline but cherubic cheeks. I’d soon come to learn he wore cowboy boots with everything.
“So this Roger Yul. What’s he like?”
I’d told Sheriff Cruso and Detective Pickell the truth. How at first I was so taken aback to see a man at the front door in the middle of the night that I’d thought it was Denise’s ex-boyfriend, Roger. I was prelaw, the daughter of one of New York City’s top corporate lawyers, and somewhere along the way I’d picked up a thing or two about the criminal investigation process. I knew law enforcement was trained to fixate on that first gut impression, but I wrongly assumed they possessed an appreciation for the nuance of a mind, for the ten-car pileup of neurons and chemical messaging that occurs in the moment your whole world goes sideways.
“Roger is a typical guy who can’t make up his mind,” I replied as patiently as I could. “But it wasn’t Roger I saw at the door.”
“What do you mean by that?” Sheriff Cruso asked, ignoring the second part of my answer entirely. “Can’t make up his mind, that is.”
I wanted to sigh. Kick my legs like a toddler having a terrible-twos tantrum. You’re wasting my time, your time, everyone’s time! Go out there and find this guy with the pointy nose and the nice overcoat!
But I kept my composure. “Sometimes he wants to be with Denise, and sometimes he wants to be single. But again, it was not Roger I saw at the front door.”
“And right now?” Sheriff Cruso persisted. “Does he want to be with Denise or not be with Denise?” He smiled down at me in a humor-me way I did not at all buy. Most men couldn’t stand me.
“She broke things off before the Christmas break, and now it’s pretty obvious he wants to get back together with her again. Don’t tell Denise I told you that, though. Her head’s big enough.” I rolled my eyes in a way that I hoped would make Sheriff Cruso see I wasn’t trying to give him a hard time. People always felt like I was giving them a hard time, and I don’t know, maybe I was. But Sheriff Cruso didn’t laugh. He did this thing when I mentioned Denise. A sort of blink and a double take at the same time.
Detective Pickell returned to the room. “We can do the walk-through now. But first, Pamela, I need you to remove your slippers so that we can eliminate your footprints from those of the intruder.”
I drew my foot into my lap and regarded the blood-cast rubber sole with an archaeologist’s curiosity. I’d had no idea my arches were high until that moment.
I retraced my steps for them, starting at the back door. Where I heard the thud overhead, Pickell ripped off a strip of black tape and marked the carpet in the after-hours hall. He did it again at the edge of the foyer where I had seen the intruder come down the stairs and pause at the front door. We were told not to touch the tape until we were given the okay, but then no one ever gave us the okay or bothered to return our phone calls. Just before everyone went home for summer break, I ripped it up in a silent, towering rage.
Pickell told me to stand in the exact place where I saw the intruder and hold down the blade of the measuring tape with my big toe. At the front door, he looked down at the other end in his hand and declared, “Thirteen feet, two inches.”
Sheriff Cruso nodded, satisfied, as though something inevitable had been confirmed. “That’s pretty far in the dark.”
“But it wasn’t dark.” I pointed at the chandelier, my grand seeing-eye glass.
“It’s still not the best lighting in the middle of the night,” Sheriff Cruso said, though objectively, he was wrong. We were both squinting, looking up at it. “And I don’t want to be so quick to discount your initial instinct.”
It is a guilty pleasure to be persuasive when you are wrong. That’s what my father always used to say, to warn, really. Once you have the tools to win an argument, a good lawyer must use them not just wisely but ethically.
And yet, he would always add with a wink, great lawyers know when to compromise.
“Sheriff Cruso,” I said slowly, as though something were just dawning on me. “One of my sisters, her name is Bernadette Daly—she’s our treasurer, actually. Second in command.” I wanted him to know she was a reliable source. “She went to Robbie’s room at two thirty-five a.m. and stayed for a few minutes. She said Robbie was fine then. When I came down here, the TV was on. An I Love Lucy episode. And when I turned it off, the credits were rolling. They’re half-hour episodes. So that must have been just three a.m. No more than a minute later, I heard the thud.”
Pickell was feeding the blade of the measuring tape, closing the distance between the front door and where I stood, and his eyes were trained on his superior, as if to see whether Sheriff Cruso agreed that what I was saying was important.
“That means all this happened in about a twenty-minute span.” It was seventeen minutes, according to the original crime scene report, oxidizing somewhere in the Florida Museum of Archives. “How could one man do what he did to four girls in a twenty-minute span? What if there were two of them? Roger and this other guy?” I held my breath. I did not at all believe what I was saying, and I had no idea the damage done in that moment, just trying to get them to listen to me.