Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) by Thomas H. Cook Read Free Book Online

initial questions.
    â€œI graduated from the state police academy three years ago,” she answered. “When I was twenty-three.”
    â€œAnd how long have you been a member of the Coburn Municipal Police Force?” Mr. Singleton asked.
    â€œTwo years.”
    Before that, as her subsequent answers to Mr. Singleton’s questions made clear, Wendy Hill had served in the United States Navy, two tours in Iraq, thus a war veteran, and for that reason—at least in the jury members’ eyes—loyal, courageous, and truthful, thus quite pointedly my opposite number, even down to the fact that I’d never worn a uniform or served my country in any official capacity.
    â€œNow, Officer Hill, at approximately 1:33 a.m. on the morning of November 15, did the police dispatcher inform you of a recent death at 237 Crescent Road in the town of Coburn?” Mr. Singleton asked.
    Indeed, Chanisa Evangela “Evie” Shipman had so informed Officer Hill.
    â€œWhat did you do in response to that information, Officer?”
    â€œI went to the address she gave me.”
    I remembered that the air had been crisp and cool in those early morning hours, but in my memory’s more dramatic reconstruction it is very dark and there is a thickness to it, so that I’d felt a strange sense of suffocation. The patrol car’s flashers weren’t pulsing as it pulled into the driveway at what I would have described—had I been asked—as a leisurely pace. Obviously, the dispatcher had told the officer behind the wheel that there was no need to hurry. A woman was dead and nothing could be done about it.
    â€œWhat happened when you arrived, Officer Hill?” Mr. Singleton asked.
    She met me, or should I say I met her, at the door. She was in uniform, of course, and I noticed that her holstered automatic pistol hung low, like a western gunslinger, and that her hand cradled its handle in the wary manner of one unsure of what to expect.
    â€œI understand there’s been a death,” she said.
    I nodded. “My wife.”
    â€œWhere is she?”
    â€œIn the bedroom. I’ll show you.”
    I led her down the corridor and into the room Officer Hill now began to describe to the court.
    â€œThe room was in a mess,” Officer Hill informed the jury. “There were papers all around. And books. It was really sort of a cluttered place, because everything was covered with stuff. Mostly books and magazines, that sort of thing.”
    Our bedroom had always looked in disarray, so I’d made no apologies for it as I’d led Officer Hill into the room. Even so, I’d earlier thought of straightening it up a bit, then heard Alexandria’s warning in my mind, and for that reason I touched nothing at all within the room save those scattered bits of porcelain cup, which I’d carefully swept into a dust pan and deposited in the large plastic garbage receptacle on the back deck, an act I’d hardly considered incriminating at the time.
    â€œWhere was Professor Madison at this point?” Mr. Singleton asked.
    I’d been standing in the door of the bedroom, watching as Officer Hill glanced about the room. She’d seemed to find it strange, all the many books and papers, how untidy it all was, and which I now suspected to have generated her first suspicion that perhaps all was not well ordered at 237 Crescent Road. Could it be that this was the reason, I wondered, as she continued her testimony, she’d later reported the bedroom’s disarray to Detective Alabrandi? Had a murder, or the idea that there might have been one, first begun to take shape in this former navy recruit’s sense that some sort of domestic dispute had taken place in this room? Had we thrown these books at each other, Sandrine and I? Had things gotten tossed about during the course of a struggle?
    â€œDid you notice any of these books?” Mr. Singleton asked.
    â€œI noticed the one