I don’t disagree with what Berger is saying. I know she is pointing out a significant truth. But I desperately resist being interested in Chandonne. “I’ve always been victim-driven,” I tell Berger. “I’ve never spent my time trying to get into the soul and mind of the assholes who do it.”
“And you’ve never been involved in a case like this, either,” she counters. “You’ve never been a suspect in a murder, either. I can help you with your mess. And I need you to help me with mine. Help me get into Chandonne’s mind, into his heart. I need you not to hate him.”
I am silent. I don’t want to give Chandonne any more of myself than he has already taken. I feel tears of frustration and fury and blink them back. “How can you help me?” I ask Berger. “You have no jurisdiction here. Diane Bray is not your case. You can drag her into your Molineux motion in Susan Pless’s murder, but I’m left hanging out to dry when it comes to a Richmond special grand jury. Especially if certain people are trying to make it appear that I killed her, killed Bray. That I’m deranged.” I take a deep breath. My heart races.
“The key to your clearing your name is my same key,” she replies. “Susan Pless. How could you possibly have had anything to do with that death? How could you have tampered with that evidence?”
She waits for my answer, as if I have one. The thought numbs me. Of course, I had nothing to do with Susan Pless’s murder.
“My question is this,” Berger goes on. “If the DNA from Susan’s case matches your cases here and possibly the DNA in the Paris cases, doesn’t that mean it has to be the same person who killed all these people?”
“I guess jurors don’t have to believe it beyond a reasonable doubt. All they need is probable cause,” I reply, playing devil’s advocate in my own dilemma. “The chipping hammer with Bray’s blood on itfound in my house. And a receipt showing that I bought a chipping hammer. And the chipping hammer I actually bought has vanished. All sort of sticks out like a smoking gun, Ms. Berger, don’t you think?”
She touches my shoulder. “Answer me this,” she says. “Did you do it?”
“No,” I reply. “No, I didn’t do it.”
“Good. Because I can’t afford for you to have done it,” she says. “I need you. They need you.” She stares out at the cold, empty house beyond our windshield, indicating Chandonne’s other victims, the ones who didn’t survive. They need me. “Okay.” She returns us to why we are waiting in this driveway. She returns us to Diane Bray. “So he comes through her front door. There’s no sign of a struggle and he doesn’t attack her until they are all the way to the other end of the house, in her bedroom. It doesn’t appear she attempted to escape or defend herself in any way. She never went for her gun? She’s a policewoman. Where’s her gun?”
“I know when he forced his way into my house,” I reply, “he tried to throw his coat over my head.” I am trying to do what she wants. I act as if I am talking about someone else.
“Then maybe he nets Bray with a coat or something else he threw over her head, and forced her back to the bedroom?”
“Maybe. The police never found Bray’s gun. Not that I know of,” I reply.
“Huh. Wonder what he did with that?” Berger muses.
Headlights shine in the rearview mirror and I turn around. A station wagon slows at the driveway.
“There was also money missing from her house,” I add. ‘Twenty-five hundred dollars, drug money Anderson had just brought over earlier that evening. According to her, to Anderson.” The station wagon pulls up behind us. “From the sale of prescription pills, if Anderson’s telling the truth.”
“Do you think she was telling the truth?” Berger asks.
“The whole truth? I don’t know,” I reply. “So maybe Chan-donne took the money and he may have taken her gun, too. Unless Anderson took the money when she came back to the house the next morning and found the body. But after seeing what was in the master bedroom, it’s frankly hard for me to imagine she did anything but run like the wind.”