04.Die.My.Love.2007 (33 page)

McDaniel heard a click and the line went dead.

With that, McDaniel returned his attention to the man behind the desk. “Tell Ms. Freed we’re not going away,” he said. “Tell her she needs to give us a call.”

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* * *

“Oh, yeah, I remember her,” Landrum said, explaining why the woman had made an impression. The woman in the photo, she said, came in that morning and hung around “the junk aisle,” where the silk flowers and novelties were displayed. Landrum noticed the woman walk to the beer cooler and then the ATM. The ATM rejected her card. The woman then approached Landrum, behind the counter, and asked if she knew what the limit was on the ATM. “I told her it was whatever she’d arranged with the bank,” Landrum said.

As they talked, Landrum smelled alcohol on the woman’s breath. The next thing Landrum knew, the woman was gone.

There was one other thing Landrum remembered: The woman in the photo was wearing a longish blond wig.

McCune asked if she were sure that the woman in the convenience store that day and the woman in the photo were the same. Landrum insisted she was.

When he and Holsinger left that day, he took with him yet another surveillance tape with a section marked where Landrum had picked out the image of a woman with long blond hair, the woman she said was Piper Rountree.

Meanwhile, in Houston that afternoon, Breck McDaniel and Coby Kelley were back in Kingwood, standing on the porch of the

house next door to Piper Rountree’s rental house, knocking on the door. From the description Piper had given—the house to the right as they faced her house—this was where the woman with the daughter in Girl Scouts lived, the woman Piper claimed could verify that she was at home 240 / Kathryn Casey

at two-thirty that Saturday afternoon, two hours before the plane from Norfolk landed. When the woman answered, McDaniel and Kelley noted that she was a Mexican immi-grant and spoke limited English. As Kelley asked questions, the woman tried to answer, all the while getting increasingly upset. Kelley and McDaniel finally gave up and left.

That same afternoon, Cheryl called Kevin O’Keefe on his cell phone. She’d checked the tabs and discovered that Kevin hadn’t been in the Volcano on Friday night of the previous week, only Monday and Saturday. The two started kicking around the possibilities. If that were true, then Kevin felt sure he’d seen the woman on Saturday night, since he was certain it was late in the week. But then, how could Cheryl have seen her? She hadn’t worked on Saturday night.

Another element of Piper’s alibi evaporated later that day when McDaniel called the neighbor woman back, this time with an interpreter on the telephone. First he assured her he wasn’t investigating her or questioning her status in the United States, trying to appease any concerns she might have if she were an illegal alien. The murder case was more important than any concerns about the woman’s immigration status.

McDaniel explained that all he wanted from her was information on what she’d seen at her neighbor’s house the Saturday before. That seemed to quiet the woman’s fears.

When questioned, the woman said she had noticed a black SUV in the driveway on Saturday at Piper’s house, but she didn’t know what type. When asked to describe the woman who answered the door when she went to deliver the Girl Scout cookies with her daughter, the woman hesitated. The woman, she said, hadn’t opened the door all the way. In fact, she stood behind it, peeking out. A baseball hat was pulled down over her forehead, and she kept putting her hand in front of her face, coughing, saying, “I’m sick.”

“Was it the woman who lives in the house?” Breck asked.

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“I don’t think so,” the woman said. “This woman was bigger.”

McDaniel hung up the telephone and recounted the conversation for Kelley.

“Tina has a black SUV, too, a GMC Envoy, and she’s a larger woman,” Kelley said. “That could explain the e-mail to Charles Tooke and the phone call. Maybe Tina went to Piper’s house to send them?”

Meanwhile, in Henrico, Kizer and the others in the Jablin task force listened to the reports from Houston and the news of the identification by Tina Landrum in the Miller Mart.

They now had the information from Tarra Watford and Ray Seward’s positive identification of Piper. They also knew the make and year of the van Piper had rented. Once they had that, another piece of evidence clicked into place: When he’d taken another look at the 7-Eleven convenience store surveillance tape, Jamison discovered that the woman with the long blond hair, who appeared to be Piper, could be seen in the parking lot getting out of a maroon vehicle that matched the description of the Eagle rental van.

They still had loose ends, but the investigation was clearly coming together.

Soon, a wave of back-patting erupted in the Henrico P.D.’s chief ’s conference room.

“All right!” one after another said, congratulating each other.

Wade Kizer judged he now had enough evidence to arrest Piper Rountree for the murder of Fred Jablin. All that remained was to decide when and how. The past few days, Piper had made herself scarce. Houston police were trying to monitor her whereabouts but hadn’t seen her at her house, Tina’s, or the clinic. She’d checked out of the Houstonian.

Yet Kizer wasn’t too worried. He’d followed the Jablin children’s custody case and knew there was a court hearing 242 / Kathryn Casey

scheduled in Henrico for the coming Monday afternoon. He had a plan: He would convene a special grand jury on Monday morning. Assuming they voted to indict, police offi cers would then arrest Piper after she left the courtroom. Knowing what he knew about Piper, and suspecting that she was obsessed with reclaiming her children, Kizer felt certain that she would be there to demand custody.

“This is it,” he said to Owen Ashman and the offi cers gathered around him, including Dorton, Hanna, Russell and Stem, who’d worked so hard on the case. “Great work, all of you.”

Still, as Kizer walked from the meeting, he had nagging doubts. He was a careful man, not the kind who liked to walk into a courtroom unprepared, an important attribute in a good prosecutor. He couldn’t help but hope there was more in the offing, more evidence that would clearly tie Piper Rountree to the crime. If she’d committed the murder—and he believed she had—it had been one of the coldest crimes he’d ever encountered, premeditatively gunning down the man who’d loved her, her husband for nearly two decades, just yards away from their sleeping children.

For all Piper Rountree’s talk about how she loved her children, Wade Kizer had no doubt she’d murdered Fred Jablin with no regard for their welfare, only her own selfi sh motives.

15

While preparations were being made for Piper’s arrest in Richmond, at ten the following morning, Saturday, in Houston, Breck McDaniel and Coby Kelley received a phone call.

“I’m sorry I hung up on you yesterday,” Carol Freed said.

“I’m ready to talk to you now.”

The bulky woman with round, full cheeks, a high forehead, a straight smile, and a brash manner had been Tina’s patient and friend for years. Her friends called her Cari and Tina would later describe her as a “Tina wannabe,” a woman who emulated her. “She wanted to be around me,” Tina said with a wry smile. “But she has a coarse sense of humor, and she’s loud. We’re really not very much alike.”

When Freed’s phone call came in, Kelley and McDaniel were in HPD headquarters working via a conference call with Houston assistant district attorney Kelly Siegler and Owen Ashman in Richmond on the search warrant for Piper’s house. They offered to pick up the forty-seven-year-old Freed, to drive her to HPD headquarters to talk with them.

She declined, saying she’d rather use her own car. As soon as she arrived, in early afternoon, they brought her up the elevator to the sixth fl oor, Homi cide, and into a windowless interview room with plain white walls and bright fl uorescent lights, to take her statement. At times Freed would become jittery, and they’d escort her downstairs and wait with 244 / Kathryn Casey

her outside, while she smoked a cigarette, then bring her back upstairs to begin again. Throughout the hours they spent with her, Freed’s mood spiraled up and down, fueled by tobacco and caffeine.

“You have to understand,” she said. “This was high girlfriend drama. It was exciting.”

The account Freed gave to the police began the Thursday before the murder, the day Piper boarded the Southwest Airlines flight to Houston. That day, Tina and Cari were talking when Tina mentioned she was worried about Piper. “I think she’s going to do something stupid,” said Tina, who described Piper as being “eerily calm.”

That previous week, Tina told Cari, Piper had gone to a shooting range to target practice with Tina’s boyfriend, Mac.

“After he showed her how to do the beady thing [to use the gun’s sites],” Freed said, Mac had told Tina that Piper was a good shot.

At the time, listening to Tina, Freed said she’d envisioned Piper kidnapping her kids and getting caught at the Richmond airport when she tried to spirit them out of Virginia.

Then Tina added something else: Piper had taken off with Tina’s driver’s license and credit card.

“She won’t get far with that,” Freed said she’d responded, implying that there probably wasn’t enough available cash on the card to take Piper far. Carol said she and Tina both laughed.

The next episode Freed described for McDaniel and Kelley took place on Sunday, the day after the murder, when Tina called crying and said that she needed help, something awful had happened.

“With you?” Freed asked.

“No, Piper,” Tina answered.

It was then, Freed said, that Tina told her that Piper had gone to Virginia and killed her ex-husband.

Afterward, Freed said she’d gone to Tina’s house, where DIE, MY LOVE / 245

they sat outside and talked, Tina crying while she explained that she’d helped Piper dispose of evidence, including a purse and a wig.

“That’s stupid,” Freed said when she learned that Tina had thrown grocery-store-type plastic bags containing the wig and other evidence in two Dumpsters. The disposal sites didn’t sound all that safe to Freed.

“We agreed to get whatever it was Tina threw away,”

Freed told the offi cers.

With that, the two friends drove to the fi rst Dumpster, outside a convenience store. Once there, Freed said she asked Tina to go inside and buy her a Red Bull energy drink. While Tina was inside the store, Cari rummaged through the garbage bin and found a bag that felt and looked like it had a blond wig inside.

In Freed’s account, from the convenience store the two women drove to a Medical Center parking lot. Tina pointed out another Dumpster, and Freed retrieved the only bag inside, which felt like it contained a purse. Apparently afraid police would be looking for her black SUV, Tina then drove Cari’s Geo Metro to the defensive driving school, where she dropped her off to work. About three-thirty that afternoon, Tina returned and picked Cari up. The bags they’d pulled out of the garbage were gone, and the car sparkled. Tina had had it washed, inside and out.

The following day, Monday, the second day after the murder, Cari told the investigators she went to Tina’s house again. This time her friend wasn’t there, but Mac McClennahan was home. When Freed asked if he knew what had happened, Mac told her that he knew Fred was dead and that somebody had killed him. Freed then told Mac that she thought “she” was the killer, without saying who “she” was.

The conversation ended quickly when Piper pulled up in her Jeep and walked toward the house.

When Piper walked inside, Cari said she did what any 246 / Kathryn Casey

friend might do, offering Piper her condolences. “I’m sorry about Fred’s death,” she said.

“I’m not sorry he’s dead, just about how it happened,”

Piper responded.

Freed then told Kelley and McDaniel that she asked Piper where the gun was. Piper, she said, replied that she didn’t know. “I’m your friend and we’re going to get through this,”

Freed said she then told Piper.

Piper then brought up her computer and asked, “Do you know anyone who can change out a hard drive?”

Freed said she didn’t.

There was something else that Piper said Cari could do for her: get rid of filled garbage bags in her garage. If unspoken, the implication was that there were items inside the garbage bags that Piper didn’t want to fall into the hands of the police.

Perhaps still caught up in the “high girlfriend drama,”

Freed agreed.

With that, Piper drew a map to her house on the back of her business card and listed what items she wanted disposed of—the garbage bags and her desktop computer tower. They walked outside to the car, and Piper handed Freed her garage door opener.

With that, Cari said, she left Tina’s house and drove to Kingwood. When she got to Piper’s house, the bags were in the garage, just as Piper had said they would be. Freed loaded them in her trunk and then went inside the house to retrieve the desktop computer, just as Piper surprised her by walking in the door.

“I thought she’d be arrested by then,” Freed told Kelley.

Out of a drawer, Piper pulled a laptop computer and gave it to Freed to take as well.

“What am I supposed to do with all this?” Freed said she asked.

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“Take it away,” Piper replied.

On the way home from Kingwood, Freed said she began to feel sick. The rush was evidently wearing off and the reality of the unfolding events she’d become caught up in came crashing down on her.

Later that eve ning, Freed said Mac came to see her at the Laff Stop, a Houston comedy club. When they started talking, he said he thought that earlier that day she was voicing the suspicion that Tina had murdered Fred. Freed corrected him, saying she thought Piper had done it.