James Kane was my best friend. We had known each other from middle school all the way into our adult years—we had graduated high school together, attended each other's college graduations, and when he got married, I was the best man at his wedding. So on November second, at one in the morning, when I got the call that he had been murdered in his home, and that his wife was the leading suspect, I couldn't help but feel devastated.
I arrived at his home at one thirty that morning—I was a police officer for the Boston Police Department—and it was my job to investigate the crime. When I got there I found blood on the linoleum kitchen—that trailed into the living room, up to the coffee table, where his body had fallen after the attack. The glass cover on the coffee table was smashed, and shards of glass were sprayed about the room. There was a knife on the carpet, covered in blood, a few feet away from his body.
A television set was lying face down, having been dropped near the living room window. A microwave had smashed through the window, as if it had been thrown as a projectile weapon, and it lay in some bushes outside. There were jumbles of CDs strewn about the floor, many of them aggregated near the living room couch.
The scene was taped off, and his body was bagged and taken to the forensics lab. His wife, Lauren, was already in custody, and had been taken to the police station where she was to be held indefinitely. After looking at the house—the same house I had only visited a week earlier, when James and Lauren had invited me for dinner—I felt like throwing up. I couldn't believe that anyone would do this to James—especially not Lauren, who was one of the gentlest, most caring people I had ever met.
There was no warning for any of it. James had actually just gotten a promotion at his work, and he and Lauren were beginning to talk about children, and possibly moving to a bigger home. He had even asked me, if all things worked out, if I'd be the godfather. And I of course had said yes.
I left the home at five past two in the morning, and went back to the station, knowing that I had to see Lauren. I had to speak to her for reasons beyond the obvious homicide investigation.
She was in the chief's office, wrapped in a blanket, sitting in a chair near a large glass window, answering questions from the two detectives on duty: Alex Garrison and Doug Souerberg. I walked into the office and they looked at me angrily.
"What are you doing here, Sam?" Doug asked me.
"I want to speak with Lauren," I said. "I want to talk to her alone."
"We have a few more questions to ask," said Alex, "And then you can have the suspect. But we have to finish our job."
I looked at Lauren, who was looking at me with tears in her eyes, and I smiled faintly trying to show compassion. "I'll be back soon," I said.
I walked to my desk, which was around the corner, and opened the bottom drawer. At the top of a stack of papers was a picture of James and me on a hiking trip six years ago, up in Vermont's Green Mountains. We were both smiling broadly, with sunglasses covering our eyes, large metal-framed backpacks on our backs, and crudely crafted walking sticks—which we had made out of long, broken tree limbs—in our hands. The picture was taken a week after his college graduation, when James had demanded that we celebrate by hiking for a week in the fresh air.
Looking at the picture, what I felt wasn't sadness or anger, but honest, plain emotionless. I had loved James like a brother—more than a brother—and now he was gone. It was strange that I couldn't feel it; that my emotions had seemingly disappeared under an anesthetic.
When Alex and Doug had finished, I found Lauren weeping. She didn't look at me when I walked in, as if she were ashamed to see me. "Lauren," I said quietly. I bent down beside her chair. "Lauren, it's okay. I'm here." She looked at me, her eyes red and swollen, her face wracked with suffering, her mouth slightly parted—
"Sam," she said in a trembling voice, "I'm so sorry. I didn't—" Her head bent forward, as if she were accepting some hidden secret that she didn't want to accept—it didn't seem like guilt, but more like hopelessness.
I put my hand on her arm and asked calmly, "You didn't, what?"
"I didn't see what happened. I was in bed. James was out late with some clients—he said he needed to take them for drinks, and that it was extremely important. I didn't really think much of it; he often had to work late. But I heard the fight downstairs—it woke me up—and I came down, and there he was, in the living room—but—"
"But?"
"But he was dead. I don't know. I don't know anything. I don't know if it was work-related—but I can't see how it could have been—he was a fucking property salesman. Who would want to kill him?"
I shook my head. "It doesn't make sense."
"What are they going to do to me, Sam?" she asked calmly. She didn't look scared, but more like a person who had accepted her fate, and seemed only curious to know when and how it would finally end.
"I don't know," I said. I hugged her, hoping that the contact would somehow give either of us a little bit of life.
The trial was set for January fourteenth. No other suspects had surfaced. New information had come to light: I had learned that James had been working not only as a property salesman, but also as a financial officer for a strip club. He of course didn't tell Lauren about it—nor me—but he had been working there since last April, and had been earning quite a lot of money with it. I had initially thought that maybe the murder was tied to this work, but after inspecting the place, I couldn't find any connections. There didn't seem to be any dishonest transactions, or anything related to gang or mafia activity, and it just seemed to be another job. The place was completely clean—as clean as a strip club could ever be.
The theory was that Lauren had murdered her husband when she found out about the strip club. How she had found out—or even if she had—there was no proof. But most agreed with the consensus that the only logical scenario resulted in her discovering James' job (without him knowing), and then, thinking that likely he was cheating on her, she murdered him in jealousy.
I didn't agree with them—but I also didn't have any proof either way. And, having worked on the police force for over four years, I had learned that when there's no proof, it's usually the innocent people that pay the price. But there was nothing I could do: Feelings couldn't solve crimes—only cold, logical calculation could.
I spoke to Lauren daily, and kept updating her on whatever I found. When I told her about the strip club, she seemed surprised. And when I told her about the theories of her guilt, she was even more surprised. "If I had been jealous," she said, "I would have tried to talk to him—not attack him with a knife." I told her that I agreed with her, but at this point in time, it was her word against theirs.
When the trial started, her guilt was all-but decided. I was asked by my superiors to gather any kind of evidence that I could that would prove, even to a small degree, that she was guilty. They wanted to sweep the crime under the rug and get it out of the way. Any unsolved case, they explained, made the police department look bad, and that was bad for the public opinion polls.
The prosecution at the trial did everything they could to slander her: They called her "a jealous wife, because her husband made more money than her and flaunted it in her face;" they called her "mean-spirited, because she couldn't cope with his working at a strip club," even though there still wasn't proof of her having known about it; they called her "a liar—because she wouldn't admit to either of the other two facts."
It wasn't until late January that something finally happened. I had learned through a colleague of James', at his former real estate job, that James had been talking to a group of ex-juvenile kids about a particular property in southern Massachusetts. James, nor his colleague, didn't really think much about it, and figured they were just hard luck kids trying to get a fresh start. But the clue came when I discovered that they were refused the real estate.
