The Sabbathday River (49 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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In front of Naomi, Judith straightened and loudly objected. “Your honor, we've had no proof as yet that either of these infants was murdered.”
“Two dead infants?” Charter suggested sarcastically.
Judith sat, scowling.
“Well, about a week after Heather made her statement, Naomi Roth called me to come out to Heather's house. She had found a second baby in a little pond at the bottom of the hill behind the house. So we had two,” he said lamely.
“And did you interview Heather Pratt about the second baby?”
“No. Her attorney would not permit a second interview.” He paused. “I would very much like to have interviewed her again, but it just wasn't possible.”
“You had questions you needed answered, didn't you?” Charter said with eminently false sympathy.
He nodded. “Many questions. Yes.”
“Questions about the second baby?”
“Yes.”
“Questions about other men in Heather Pratt's life?”
“Yes.”
“But she was no longer cooperative, was she?”
“She did not agree to speak to us again.”
“Officer Erroll, did you conduct your investigation in a responsible, professional, and thorough manner?”
He looked sad. “I tried to. I … There were others involved in the investigation. We worked together. We tried to do our best.”
“Was the woman who eventually emerged as your suspect, Heather Pratt, treated with dignity and fairness?”
“She was,” Nelson said.
“Was she forced in any way to make a confession, or identify the weapon she had used, or give a detailed statement to the police?”
He shook his head, but not very emphatically.
“I don't think so, no.”
“Can you think of any reason why Heather Pratt should claim that she was forced to confess, and that she confessed falsely to this crime?”
“It happens very often that people recant their confessions,” Nelson said. “But I can't think of a specific reason in this case.”
“Thank you, Officer Nelson.” And Charter was done.
Judith rose. Naomi, who lacked her habitual taste for revenge in this instance, did not quite relish the cross-examination to come. Nelson was drumming his fingers on the thighs of the brown corduroys he wore. He looked resigned, but not particularly strong. He looked as if he was not quite fortified, not quite committed to the cause.
“Do you often conduct your investigations by public opinion poll, Officer Erroll?”
Nelson, to his credit, took this without offense. “I've never conducted an investigation like this before. I was willing to take advice wherever I could get it.”
“Including advice based on nothing more than suspicion?”
“Sometimes suspicion can be useful,” Nelson observed. “People can certainly misplace suspicion, but often a person attracts suspicion because he does, in fact, warrant it.”
“Did any of your callers possess actual, direct evidence that Heather Pratt was involved with this crime?”
“No one knew anything,” Nelson said. “There was no direct evidence.”
“And yet the consensus was that Heather Pratt was the guilty party.”
“There were many calls about her,” he said.
“She wasn't very well liked, was she?” said Judith. “I mean, by her neighbors.”
Nelson nodded. “That's true.”
“In fact, she was rather vehemently disliked, wasn't she?”
“True.”
Judith gave the jury a sad look. “When these …
informants
called you to talk about Heather Pratt, did they only discuss her supposed pregnancy?”
“No. In fact, only one or two mentioned that they thought she might have been pregnant.”
Judith looked surprised. She
was
surprised, Naomi thought. This was a windfall. “Only one or two? And the rest of them? What did they talk about?”
“Heather's …” He glanced at Naomi. “Her character, I guess you'd say. People knew about her affair with Ashley Deacon, and they knew who Polly's father was. I think they were pretty disgusted by the whole thing.”
“I see,” Judith said. “And so, this is how you came to focus your investigation on Heather? Because her neighbors were pretty disgusted by her affair with Ashley?”
He shrugged. “I guess you could put it that way.”
“And is that, in your own opinion, enough reason to accuse a woman of murder?”
The question caught him off guard, but he didn't look angry. “No,” he said carefully. “I don't think so.”
“Then why did you accuse her, Officer Erroll?” Judith asked. “What was the evidence that convinced you Heather Pratt had given birth to the infant known as the Sabbathday River baby?”
He looked uncomfortably at Charter. Thus far, Naomi knew, Charter had had barely a walk-on role in the official story of the investigation. She wondered why Judith had chosen to let this falsehood alone, and if she ever planned to confront it.
“We had established from Ashley Deacon that the affair had ended the previous January. We had established that, in the opinion of some observers, Heather might have been pregnant in the late summer. These two things were enough to justify our interviewing Heather. Other information emerged from the interview.”
Judith smiled. “Ah yes,” she said, almost happily. “The
interview.
From the fact that you use the word ‘interview' rather than the word ‘interrogation,' I infer that this was a voluntary conversation, that you did not force Miss Pratt to come to the police station and speak with you.”
“In no way was Heather forced,” Nelson said, looking a little resentful for the first time.
“You gave her a call, asked her if she would come in and have a chat, and she came. Is that it?”
He shook his head. “No. We went out to her house. She came back to the station with us.”
“Us?” Judith said. “How many officers makes an
‘us'
?”
“I believe there were three cars. Six of us.”
“Six officers? Three police cars? For a voluntary interview?” She sounded aghast.
“It was voluntary,” Nelson said stiffly.
“And at what time of day was this invitation extended?”
“I believe it was late in the afternoon. About five.”
“Was it dark out?” Judith asked.
Nelson nodded. “Getting there.”
“And what was Heather doing when you arrived with three police cars and six officers to extend your invitation, Officer Erroll?”
He looked, for the briefest instant, at Heather. “Cooking dinner.”
“In fact, you left her chicken roasting in the oven when you took her away, didn't you? I hope somebody remembered to turn the oven off,” she said archly.
Nelson didn't answer, but his discomfort was eloquent.
“Let's talk a little bit more about this voluntary interview,” said Judith. She was speaking without notes, her arms folded as she leaned back against her table. She was settling in. “It must have been after dark by the time this young woman and her fourteen-month-old daughter got to the police station in Goddard Falls with her six-police-officer escort. Did you place her in an interrogation room?”
“An interview room, yes.”
“Was Polly just about falling asleep in Heather's lap?”
He knew what she was asking, and he didn't shy away from it. “She wasn't in Heather's lap. She was in another room. She was well cared for,” he added.
“Well cared for?”
Judith sounded amazed. “You take this baby out of
her home, at night, and transport her in a strange car to a strange place, and then take her away from her mother, and you think that's well cared for?”
“A female police officer was with her. She was perfectly safe. And we needed to speak with Heather while she was not distracted.”
“Don't you think the thought of her daughter in another room with a stranger must have been pretty distracting?”
He thought about it and answered honestly. “I don't know. Maybe.”
“But that didn't bother you because you needed to have your voluntary talk with Heather.”
“The interview was entirely proper.”
“Yes, so you said earlier. You also said that Heather did not ask for an attorney. Was she made aware that it was her right to have an attorney present?”
Nelson considered. “I don't know for a fact that she knew that. Most people know that.”
“But you don't know if Heather knew it.”
“I don't know, no.”
“And you didn't tell her, Officer Erroll, did you?”
“No.”
“Because, as you're well aware, an attorney would almost certainly have ordered you to stop your … interview.” Judith smiled.
“I was not under an obligation to tell Heather about her rights at this point. She was not under arrest.”
“Oh?” Judith said, sounding surprised. “Could she have left if she'd wanted?”
“Sure.” He nodded, but he didn't look at her.
“Just get up and leave? ‘I don't feel like talking. See ya!'”
“She could have, if she'd wanted.”
“But instead she elected to go with you and five other police officers in the middle of feeding her daughter dinner and then remain in the police station as the evening wore on and her daughter was kept with strangers in another room, talking about her sexual partners and her private experiences. She could have gotten up and left at any time, but she preferred to spend her evening this way, with you and District Attorney Charter?”
Nelson looked at the jury—but he did not like looking at the jury either.
“I can't know what was going on in Heather's head, Ms. Friedman.”
“Did Heather inquire about her daughter Polly, who was with a stranger while she herself was being interrogated?”
He reacted to the word, but he did not quarrel with her over it. “She might have. I don't really remember.”
“You don't remember?”
“No.”
“And she didn't ask for an attorney.”
“I said she didn't.”
Judith nodded. “Right. So you did. You said that Heather first denied her pregnancy, then admitted her pregnancy but said she had miscarried her baby, is that correct?”
Nelson said it was.
“And then she confessed that she had had a full-term baby which she stabbed and threw into the Sabbathday River?”
“Right.” He ducked his head.
“Are you sure you're not leaving anything out? Are you sure you're not omitting any interim steps here? After all, this was a rather lengthy
interview,
wasn't it?”
“I don't think I'm leaving anything out,” he said stiffly.
“No? What about the part where she consistently denied any connection to a stabbed baby in the Sabbathday River? What about the part where she said she had had a stillborn baby in the back field and placed its body in a pond, near the spot where it was born?”
“I don't remember that,” Nelson said quickly. “That wasn't part of her statement.”
“What about the part where she offered to show you where she had put the body of her own stillborn baby, and you refused to allow her to do so?”
“No,” Nelson objected. “That didn't happen.”
“What about the part where she was told that she would never be allowed to take her daughter home unless she confessed to a brutal crime she insisted had nothing to do with her?”
This was enough for Charter. He objected loudly and called Judith a bully, which, under the circumstances, was only accurate. Hayes agreed, but Nelson was shaken. He was looking at no one now. His fingers, enmeshed, gripped together.
Judith took a moment, more to calm herself down than anything else.
Then she adopted an air of sincere intellectual inquiry. “Officer Erroll, if Heather was going to the trouble of confessing to murder, why do you think she didn't add the detail that she had had two babies instead of one?”
He shook his head. “I wish I could answer that. It's one of the things I wasn't able to ask her in a second interview.”
“I see.” She appeared to ruminate. “Do you think it might have slipped her mind that she had had two babies instead of one?”

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