The creek meant St. Catherine’s Creek. We met there a lot in the beginning, at the bend between Sherwood Estates and Pinehaven.”
“You used cell phones to communicate?”
“Never directly. She sent me that message from a computer—probably one at St. Stephen’s. There was no traceable link to her cell phone.”
Sherwood Estates and Pinehaven, the two most expensive subdivisions within the city limits. At the rear of each, wooded bluffs drop down to muddy, cane-covered flats that border the creek. During heavy rains, the creek rises several feet in hours and becomes a fifty-foot-wide torrent filled with logs and other debris.
“Kate would take her dog down there like she was exercising him,” Drew says. “I’d just jog down there. If we needed to talk during the day, it was a good place.”
“During the day? You’re nuts. Why not just get her a cell phone in your name, or something like that?”
Drew shakes his head. “Too dangerous. In the past couple of months, I’ve had the feeling Ellen might be having me followed. It’s very easy to eavesdrop on cell phones, and you can monitor their GPS position simply by calling a company that specializes in that. No warrant required.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“I don’t know how long Kate was waiting at the creek. I got the text message at my office. It was time-stamped one fifty-four p.m. She was almost certainly at school then. She probably left the building at three. I left my office at three-thirty. It took me ten or twelve minutes to get down to the creek, I guess. I didn’t park at home, because I was impatient. I parked at the back of an empty lot in Pinehaven and came in from the south.”
“Did anybody see you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But they could have. The blackmailers, for example. They could have seen your car and followed you.”
“Maybe. But I don’t think so. You can’t see the back of that lot from the street.”
I motion for him to continue.
Drew’s voice drops in volume, forcing me to strain to hear him. “I saw her from forty yards away. She was lying on the creek bank with her head trailing in an eddy of water. I told myself it couldn’t be her. My mind totally rejected the visual evidence. Cognitive dissonance, I think it’s called. But at some level I knew. I sprinted up to her and looked down, and I just … she’d been wearing her tennis outfit. Her Izod shirt and sports bra had been pushed up to her neck, but she was naked from the waist down. There was fresh blood on the side of her head … petechiae around her eyes. I cradled her head and—”
Drew covers his mouth with one hand, unable to go on. A muffled sob comes from his throat. Then he speaks in a monotonic voice. “Her eyes were wide open, glassy, the pupils fixed and dilated. I was sure she was dead, but I tried to resuscitate her anyway. I gave her CPR for ten minutes, but I couldn’t get a heartbeat.”
“You didn’t call 911?”
“I’d left my cell phone in my car.”
I wonder if this is true. “Would you have called for help if you’d had it?”
“Hell, yes!”
“Was she still warm?”
Drew goes still. “Yes.”
“Okay. So you knew she was dead. What happened then?”
“I went insane. I literally came apart. Suddenly everything I’d been holding inside for months just burst out of me. I was crying, talking to myself, screaming at the sky like Captain Ahab.”
“Is this when you saw someone else there?”
“I didn’t see anybody else. But there was someone there.”
“How do you know?”
Drew clenches and unclenches his right fist. “I felt him.”
“How?”
“The way you do in horror movies. Your scalp is itching and you start to sweat. You can feel someone looking at you.”
This is a popular notion, but entirely untrue. Extensive experiments have proved this type of “intuition” false. “That was probably just paranoia.”
Drew shakes his head with absolute conviction. “I’ve hunted all my life. There was a human being close to me in those woods. But he stayed concealed. He knew how to use cover, or I’d have seen him watching me.”
I finally ask the obvious question. “If this is really how it went down, why wasn’t it you who reported Kate’s death?”
Drew looks at me as though puzzled about this himself. “It almost was. My first instinct was to cradle her like a baby and carry her up to my car. I was going to take her home to her mother and confess everything.”
As reckless as this sounds, I sense that he’s telling the truth. As a prosecutor, I heard many confessions in which murderers expressed this urge, and some even followed through with it.
“Did you actually pick her up?”
“No. It was at this point that I sensed the other person. I felt an urge to run, but I didn’t. Only a coward would run, I told myself. I had to face the situation. But as I sat there staring at her blank eyes—eyes I’d looked into the night before as we made love, eyes so alive you can’t imagine them—I started to see the situation from outside myself. What would I accomplish by confessing the affair? Kate was beyond help. If I confessed, I’d lose my medical license and probably go to jail. I might even be suspected of killing her. At that moment I honestly didn’t give a shit about myself. But what would it do to my family? My parents? What would happen to Tim? I wouldn’t be there to raise him. But worse, what would he think about me? He’d grow up believing I was a total shit, and maybe even a killer.”
“So you left the scene?”
Drew nods. “I pulled Kate clear of the water, but I left her in the open so that she’d be easily found. I was going to make an anonymous call.”
“Did you?”
A silent shake of the head.
“Why not?”
He bends down and examines the Honda’s carburetor. “I’d been there for a while. I’m no detective, but I’ve read enough to know that you leave trace evidence everywhere you go. It was raining pretty hard. I figured the rain would wipe away any evidence that I was there by morning.”
“That and more,” I say softly, wondering more and more about Drew’s actions. “It also washed away any evidence of the real killer. And it damn near washed Kate down to the Mississippi River.”
He says nothing.
“You don’t come out looking too heroic in this, buddy. A cop would be reading you your rights about now.”
Drew looks at me with a direct gaze. “Probably so. But Kate
