04.Die.My.Love.2007 (32 page)
Read 04.Die.My.Love.2007 Online
Authors: Kathryn Casey
until around 10:30 p.m. And she had witnesses, O’Keefe and the bartender, Crider, who would tell Kelley they remembered seeing her. There was another possible witness, she said, a man she connected with that eve ning who walked her to Ti-na’s, a man she sometimes called Jerry and other times Steve.
She hadn’t been able to find him yet but was still looking.
“Which one is it, Jerry or Steve?” Coby asked.
“He switched back and forth,” Piper said. “Sometimes he said his name was Jerry and other times he said it was Steve.”
She had other evidence of her innocence as well. Her friend, Charles Tooke, would be able to show Coby an e-mail she’d sent to him on Saturday afternoon from her home computer. And she’d also called Charles from her house that afternoon. Finally, she’d remembered that one of her neighbors had stopped over with her daughter on Saturday afternoon about two-thirty selling Girl Scout cookies, and Piper had opened the door and talked with her. If that were all true, how could she have been on an airplane on Saturday that didn’t land in Houston until four-forty?
The one bit of evidence Piper admitted that worked against her was that she still said she had talked with Paxton and Callie on that Friday afternoon. “Yes,” Piper said. “That was me.” Cell rec ords showed that both calls had originated in Richmond, not Houston.
Always, her attention was drawn back to the children, and DIE, MY LOVE / 231
when Piper pressed Coby, demanding to know if he would testify on her behalf and help her get custody, he answered,
“It’s out of my hands . . .
“The bottom line is that at 6:30 a.m. on the East Coast your ex-husband was murdered,” he told her. “If you can verify where you were . . . that would be helpful. If you were with somebody, anybody, even a one-night stand.”
When Coby hung up the telephone, he knew he had a lot more legwork to do before the Jablin case resulted in an arrest.
In Richmond at Henrico P.D. headquarters, an imaginary line had formed down the middle of the chief ’s conference room. On one side, Wade Kizer argued against arresting Piper, still wanting more evidence. Captain Stem, on the other side, couldn’t believe Kizer was still holding out. He argued his men had more than enough evidence to make an arrest. Uncomfortably in the middle stood Owen Ashman, who was working with the D.A. in Houston, attempting to get a search warrant for Piper’s Kingwood house. She understood both Kizer’s and Stem’s positions. When Kizer walked out of the chief ’s conference room and Ashman was alone with Stem and his men, she’d later say, “I got an earful.”
Now they were all facing a glitch that could send the investigation back to the beginning. They had what Kizer said he needed, not just one person who identified Piper as having been the woman who traveled to Richmond as Tina, but two: the hotel manager Tomiko James and the Southwest Airlines ticket agent Kathy Molley. Yet Piper, it appeared, had at least two people and perhaps three or four who could place her in Houston late on the night before the murder, too late to make it to Richmond by Saturday morning. If that were true, they had a problem. Who traveled on the Tina Rountree ticket?
“We need more evidence,” Kizer said.
232 / Kathryn Casey
Frustrated, Stem agreed that his men would keep dig-ging.
Help arrived with the videos that showed up at Henrico P.D. headquarters that Thursday. After the enhancement done at the state lab, Danny Jamison could see a woman who looked like Piper walking into the 7-Eleven wearing what appeared to be a blond wig, a three-quarter-length dark coat, and gray sweatpants, carrying a shoulder bag. He noted that the wig looked similar to the Frosti Blond one purchased on the wigsalon.com website. Still, Kizer said, he needed more.
That afternoon, Henrico also received the fi nal cell phone rec
ords from Sprint, fulfilling the subpoena. There were
stacks of pages and hundreds of phone calls to dissect. On the day of the murder, Piper had begun calling early and hadn’t stopped. The majority of the calls were to Tina, four times just between 7:19 and 8:40 a.m., and other calls that continued throughout the day. When Owen Ashman examined the records, she could only imagine what Piper might have been telling her sister, including, “I finally did it. I killed Fred.”
Other calls had been to Piper’s other sister, Jean, and to Jerry Walters.
In Houston, Kelley wasn’t sure what to make of Walters.
That Walters had been forthcoming with information made Kelley think he probably wasn’t involved. He’d checked Walters’s alibi, and it appeared he had been at the L.S.U.
football game in Baton Rouge that weekend, as he’d said.
Plus, Williamson had checked, and Walters’s cell phone was used in Louisiana all that weekend, including when Piper called him at 8:44 on the morning of the murder. But he was still troubled by the phone call that the rec ords showed had come in from Piper and lasted eleven minutes. “I wanted to know what she told him on the telephone that morning, if she’d confessed,” said Kelley. Yet whenever he asked, Walters insisted that he didn’t even remember talking with her.
DIE, MY LOVE / 233
* * *
Miller felt stunned by the loss of his former professor.
Fred had been a good friend and a mentor, and in Fred’s office, Miller sensed his personality once again, for the fi nal time. In the clutter he’d left behind, Fred had left an indication of the man he’d been in life, one devoted to his children and his work.
On his desk, Miller found Fred’s notes on his latest work, his investigation of courage, an irony that didn’t escape Miller as he stacked some material to be sent to Linda Putnam, Fred’s collaborator on the books, some to Michael Jablin for the children, and some to be retained at UR for a memorial. “Maybe Fred had been able to draw courage from reading the work of others,” Miller pondered later. “It was certainly the most difficult time of his life.”
Meanwhile, at Henrico P.D. headquarters, Chuck Hanna found something interesting while going through the phone rec ords. Earlier, he had called all the usual car rental agencies at the Norfolk airport, and none had a record of a Tina or a Piper Rountree renting a car on Thursday, October 28. But as he worked his way through the phone bills, cold-calling numbers that Thursday, he dialed a number and the person who answered the telephone said, “Ea gle car rental.”
“I found it,” he said to Williamson. “She called a car rental agency.”
234 / Kathryn Casey
“Did you ask them if they rented her a car?”
Hanna laughed, embarrassed. He’d been so excited when the woman answered that he’d just hung up the telephone.
Minutes later he had Eagle back on the line. “Did you rent a car to a Tina Rountree last Thursday?” he asked.
“Yes, we did,” the woman said.
Yes, Hanna thought. Finally.
“How could you answer that so quickly?” he asked.
“She’s white, and we hardly ever have Caucasians coming in to rent cars,” she said.
“Is the vehicle there now?” Hanna asked. When the woman said it was, Hanna told her to keep it there. “We’re coming down.”
Kelley’s partner, Robin Dorton, was the one who drove to Norfolk to talk to the people at Eagle that afternoon. When he arrived at the small auto sales and rental agency on North Military Highway, Tarra Watford, a thirty-four-year- old clerk with her hair in braids, told him of her interaction with the woman who called herself Tina Rountree.
The woman had called earlier in the week, she said, asking if she could rent a car without a credit card. When she learned that she could, with her driver’s license and a utility bill to show proof of her address, she wanted to reserve a compact car, one that Eagle rented for a mere fi fteen dollars a day. Watford explained that Eagle, a discount agency, didn’t take reservations but rented the cars on a fi rst-come, first-served basis. The woman who identified herself as Tina Rountree argued the point, but Watford didn’t bend.
Then on Thursday, October 28, just after 5:00 p.m., the same woman called from the Norfolk airport, to ask them to hold a car. At that time, all Watford had available was a maroon 1998 Ford Windstar van with a gray interior that cost $55 a day. The woman sounded miffed but said, “Okay, I’ll take that.”
Fifteen minutes later Watford looked out the window and DIE, MY LOVE / 235
saw a cab pull up in front of the window. A petite, middle-aged woman got out with her luggage and came inside. She was in a hurry but polite, handing Watford a driver’s license and a Time Warner cable television bill with the name “Tina Rountree.”
At first, “Tina” said she wanted to return the car on Sunday—the day “Tina” had booked her return fl ight. Watford explained that the agency would be closed that day.
“I’ll have it back Saturday, then,” the woman said.
When Watford asked for a Richmond address, the woman gave her the address and a phone number for the TownePlace Suites, the hotel Piper had stayed in over the years when she’d come to Richmond to see the children. “I normally stay with friends when I’m in Richmond,” the woman had said. “But they’re gone so I’m staying in a hotel. I’m thinking about buying a place there.”
Tarra went over the agency’s policies on gas and insurance, and then went outside with the woman to check the van’s fluids. Twenty minutes after she arrived, the woman put down a $230 deposit and left in the rented van.
“You know, I usually take people’s fingerprints when they rent cars,” Watford said to Dorton. He cringed when she added, “But the pad was dried up, and I didn’t have any ink.”
On Saturday, the woman returned. She’d driven 342 miles, and Ray Seward, the own er, checked her in, gave her a $65
refund from her deposit, and then his son drove her to the airport.
Dorton pulled out the photo of Piper he had with him, one of her sitting on a rock near a lake. He also took out Tina’s driver’s license. Watford eyed them both, then pointed at the driver’s license. “I think that’s her,” she said, identifying Tina as the woman.
With that, Dorton went outside to talk to Seward, a balding man. He verified what Watford had told Dorton.
236 / Kathryn Casey
“Could you identify the woman?” the investigator asked.
“Yes,” Seward said.
Dorton showed him Tina Rountree’s driver’s license photo.
“That doesn’t look like the lady I saw,” Seward said.
Then Dorton pulled out the photo of Piper he had with him, one of her sitting on the rock.
“That’s the lady,” he said.
“How sure are you?”
“One hundred percent,” he said. “She was a nice lady, attractive.”
Seward then gave Dorton some bad news. The van had not only been cleaned after the woman in the photo rented it but it had been rented by another customer.
Still, Dorton hoped, perhaps there would be something left behind. When the crime scene unit arrived they did fi nd evidence to collect: fingerprints, a fruit punch bottle, water bottle, candy wrappers, a bottle of lotion, a pair of black sunglasses, and something Dorton found very interesting—
a key to a room at the Homestead Suites.
In Houston that afternoon, Kevin O’Keefe was at the Volcano bar, where he’d arranged to meet with Coby Kelley, who took notes as the Team Martini member recounted the events of the eve ning before. When O’Keefe got to the part where Piper referred to the murder victim as her ex-boyfriend, Kelley was surprised.
“That’s weird,” he said. “It was her ex-husband. They were married for eighteen years and had three kids. Are you sure she said boyfriend?”
“Yeah, boyfriend,” O’Keefe said.
“Are you sure it was Friday night you saw her? Could it have been another night?”
O’Keefe thought that over. He knew he’d seen the woman, but could it have been another night? He’d been working a DIE, MY LOVE / 237
lot lately on a big project and often didn’t get to hook up with his buddies at the bar as he normally did. He wasn’t sure when he’d been there the previous week.
“I guess it could be another night, but it was sometime last weekend,” he said. “I’ll have to check my rec ords.”
Later on his cell, O’Keefe called Cheryl, the bartender.
“Is it possible we saw that woman another night?” he asked.
“Is there a way to tell when I was in the bar last week?”
“Yeah, we keep the bar tabs with your name on them,”
she said. “We can check. But I didn’t work Saturday night, just Friday, and I saw her.”
“Well maybe she’s right and it was Friday night then,” he said.
Early Friday morning a call came in to Henrico P.D. headquarters, which was later recounted to Coby Kelley. The caller, a woman named Patti, said her friend, Carol Freed, a comic who worked at a defensive driving school, knew something about the Rountree case, including the possible involvement of Tina Rountree. McDaniel and Kelley drove to the school, in a small, tired-looking beige brick office building two miles from the Volcano, Tina’s clinic, and all the other sites they’d visited while investigating the case.
They walked through an overgrown courtyard, up a fl ight of stairs, and into the driving school, where clocks on the wall marked time around the world. The place was empty except for a man sitting behind a reception desk. McDaniel asked for Carol Freed, and the man said she wasn’t in. Explaining he was an investigator with the Houston P.D., McDaniel handed the man his card and asked him to call Freed. The receptionist picked up the telephone and did as instructed.
“There are some police offi cers here to see you,” he said, handing McDaniel the telephone.
“Ms. Freed, we’re investigating the murder of Fred Jablin, and we’d like to talk with you,” he said.