“I have a headache and an exam to study for,” I explained. “I’ll be in my room.”
“Your mother?” he asked, taking the tray.
“I set her up in the kitchen. She’s reading a magazine.” She never speaks to us, anyway.
Having satisfied everyone to the best of my abilities, I went upstairs with my own bowl of soup. I cleaned all the schoolwork off my desk and closed the door. After pulling out the police file, I ate my supper while examining the file’s exterior. The tab listed a date from three-and-a-half years ago and simply, Haines, Gavin.
Pushing my empty bowl aside, I took a deep breath and then flipped open the cover. I was afraid there would be photographs. But I didn’t see any yet. The top page was a neatly executed summary. Report: Fatal Accident Investigation.
I’d never been told exactly how it all went down. But now the order of events was spread out in front of me, as tidy as the outlines my high school teachers used to demand for research papers. At 7:53 a motorist had made a 9-1-1 call from the two-lane highway heading north out of town. At 7:55 two of my father’s deputies were dispatched, along with an emergency vehicle (The Lifeline Highliner) from the fire department.
The first responders arrived all around the same time. They found one Gavin Haines in a prone position in the ditch. He’d been thrown from the vehicle and was not breathing.
One Jude Nickel was trapped inside the vehicle. He was non-responsive.
At 8:10, seventeen minutes after the first 9-1-1 call, a second ambulance was dispatched.
Ten minutes later the LifeLiner departed the scene for the trauma unit at Montpelier Medical with Gavin Haines onboard. He would be pronounced dead on arrival.
The report didn’t have much to say about the next hour. The door of a Porsche 911 was “forcibly removed,” and Jude Nickel was extracted. He was taken into police custody when officers left the scene at 9:12. There were no notes about Jude’s condition or about any medical treatment he received.
I turned the page.
Interview Record: Jude Nickel. At 9:14 Mr. Nickel was read his Miranda rights and verbally waved his right to both silence and an attorney.
I shivered when I read that statement. Jude had told me that he came to in an interrogation room with Newcombe hitting him. So on page two, I was already reading lies. Jude had also said that no cop in Vermont would take it easy on the guy who killed the police chief’s son.
If Jude read this spotty account of that awful night, would he even be surprised?
I kept reading. There was a medical report for a blood test “done at the scene.” The result was consistent with “prescription opioids.” There was an affidavit by the county’s DRE (Drug Recognition Expert) swearing that he had evaluated Jude at the station house and found him to display symptoms of “profound intoxication.”
And yet he’d waved his Miranda rights. How were those two things compatible?
I got up and walked away from the file, as if the distance from the pages would help me think. I’d noticed there was no mention of my father anywhere in those notes. But he’d been there that night—he’d gone into the station a while after the terrible knock had come at our door. He’d waited for Father Peters to arrive. And then he’d strapped on his gun and left the house. I didn’t see him until the next day.
Just thinking about that night made me tremble. I’d dialed Jude’s phone over and over. I probably tried a hundred times. The officer who came to tell us that Gavin was dead hadn’t said a word about Jude. So I’d called the station house, but my father hung up on me when I asked him.
I’d spent the night crying and shaking in this very room. Alone.
Now I found myself staring out the window at our darkened street. But that wasn’t going to get any of my questions answered. I went back to the police report and examined every last page. There weren’t any photographs at all, which was weird. Maybe Nelligan had left them out intentionally to save my feelings. That was something I needed to know, so I fired up my laptop and wrote him an email. But before I hit “send,” it occurred to me that I didn’t want my questions hitting a station email account. And I didn’t know Nelligan’s private email address.
But I did have his phone number.
I sat down on the floor between my bed and the exterior wall. This is where I’d always parked my ass when I needed to have a private conversation with Jude.
Nelligan answered on the second ring. “Hi there,” I said.
“Hi, Miss Sophie. How are you on this fine evening?”
I chuckled at his cheesy greeting. “Fine, thank you. And I called to tell you again how much I appreciate that you brought me this file.”
“I hope it’s not too tough to read,” he said.
“It’s not easy, honestly.” I had to tread carefully. “I mean, I know that Gavin is gone. And now I know a little more about that awful night, and that’s important to me.”
“Good.”