The Monster of Twenty Mile Pond Page 4

  “Absolutely and totally necessary,” said one of the officers. “Last week a sixteen-year-old girl we had in custody for breaking into a house and robbing an elderly lady in her own bed at knifepoint bolted out of the police car on the way to court and fled on foot. It took us three days to find her again. We’ve had egg all over our faces on the open-line shows ever since. You can imagine the uproar if someone accused of a drug-related murder vamoosed on us.”

  Brian recounted to me the story so far that he’d pieced together from the detectives and Esme and Molly. The police had received a 911 call from Esme on her cell saying she was down a trail off Old Broad Cove Road next to Windsor Lake and there was a man there who looked like he was dead. A sharp stick or broken branch or something must have gone into his eye, she said. They asked if she was in any danger while they got directions from her about where she was parked, and told her to stay put in the car and lock the doors and they’d dispatch a patrol car right away.

  When the police car got there a few minutes later, the two constables saw two civilian cars parked at the entrance to the trail. A young man was hurriedly getting into one; he took off in it when he saw the police car turning in, but the officer got the licence number and called it in.

  The other car contained Esme and Molly. Esme led the officers down the trail a short way to a small natural clearing where they saw a man in his twenties lying on the ground. The police felt for a pulse and then proclaimed him deceased. It looked as if his brain had been pierced through his eye, one officer said, but they could see nothing near him, a stick or knife or the like, which might have done it.

  Esme told the officers that the victim, whose name was Jason, had sold her marijuana down by the lake. She didn’t know him but she’d seen him before in a car parked a short distance from the school. Some boys in her class, who were with her when she’d asked about him, called him the Candyman, and she’d approached him and made the arrangements to meet.

  When Esme and Jason had completed their transaction near the lake, she started to walk back to the car, but he put his arm around her chest from behind. He made an obscene suggestion as to what they could do “down here all alone like this,” and he offered her a free Desoxyn tablet “to get you goin’.”

  She was able to twist and shrug him off, and then she threatened to scream and stab him with the hiking pole she had strapped to her wrist. To make her point, she actually thrust the point of her pole down into his boot. Jason swore, apparently in pain, and backed off. He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you yet. I always do.” Brian said to me that it would have been better if Esme hadn’t told the police any of that—it provided them with a half-baked motive they could fixate on, and brought attention to her lethal pole.

  Esme’s story continued: after Jason let her go, and she was about to walk back to the car, he told her to tell the guy in the other car that he’d be there in a minute—first he had to use the bathroom.

  “Was that the word he used, ‘bathroom’?” an officer asked.

  “No, he said ‘take a leak,’” replied Esme, and the officer told her to use the words Jason used.

  They were already near the water, but he stepped to the very edge of the shore and started to pull down his fly. According to Esme, she said to him, “My God, you’re not going to do that right in the lake; that’s the city’s drinking water.”

  Jason replied, “Yeah, like I gives a sweet shag about a bunch of townies drinking my pee. Looks good on them.”

  “And no, ‘pee’ wasn’t the exact word he used,” Esme told her questioner.

  Esme had turned away from Jason and walked quickly on, keeping him in her peripheral vision. Next she heard some sort of a squawk, and then, before she had a chance to turn around completely, she glimpsed, out of the corner of her eye, something large flying through the air. It seemed to be moving higher than her height, and when she turned and focused on it, she saw it was Jason. He landed on the ground by some trees about ten or twelve feet from the shoreline.

  She waited for him to move, and when he didn’t, she went over to him. He wasn’t stirring. His eye looked punctured and there was blood everywhere. When she called his name and prodded him with her toe and then with her pole, there was absolutely no movement or response.

  She ran to the car, got in, and told Molly what had happened. The guy in the other car jumped out and shouted, “Whassup? What’s going down?” or words equally cool, and jogged down the trail. A few minutes later, he came flying back, swearing and bawling, and was running at the girls’ car with fury in his eyes when he heard a police siren. He hopped back in his own car and started it. The police arrived just as his car was pulling out. Soon Esme and Molly heard another police car rush by, its siren wailing.

  They caught the other guy, whose name was Danny Power, the brother of the victim, and found his car loaded with hashish and hard drugs—oxycodone pills, Percocet, Desoxyn, cocaine, ecstasy, you name it. Jason Power, the dead man, had a variety of drugs on his person, too. Esme and Molly had nothing on them and there were no drugs in their car. Esme had thrown her bag of grass into the woods as she was running to the car. The police quickly found the ditched bag.

  It might have been better if she’d kept it on her, said Brian, as now the police were claiming she must have bought harder drugs, too, which she’d also ditched somewhere. They kept asking her what she’d done with the hard stuff. Had she thrown it in the lake?

  At this point, Brian told me, Esme’s mother, Maggie, showed up at the station. She’d managed to get Wheelway, the transportation service for people with disabilities, to bring her there at short notice. She told the police that it was all her fault, that she had talked Esme against her will into buying marijuana for her in order to curb the muscle spasms she was suffering.

  Esme said that wasn’t true. It was she who had seen an article on the Internet about medical marijuana being used for that purpose and she had suggested it to her mother, who turned it down flat. Her mother had told her, Esme said, that she couldn’t drag her brother, Bill, him being a lawyer, into that kind of thing by spending his money on dope. Her mother had also told Esme that she was going to mention marijuana therapy to her doctor on the next visit, although she doubted he’d go along with it. Esme and Molly decided something had to be done, and, like a dutiful daughter and niece, they did it on their own. It was all her own idea, though, said Esme. Molly had nothing to do with it.

  The police exhibited skepticism over both stories—mother’s and daughter’s. Hadn’t Esme already been thrown out of school at least once for toking up in the washroom? It appeared, said Brian, that the principal had reported that incident. And in any event, the detectives said, matters had proceeded far beyond any defence claim of innocently purchasing marijuana for medical purposes, and even beyond any police allegation of purchase for the purpose of trafficking. This was a case of murder, perpetrated during the commission of an indictable offence.

  Preliminary lab tests showed that there was blood on Esme’s hiking pole, which she had tried to scrape off on moss, evidently; police suspected that it was the victim’s. DNA tests would no doubt confirm that. There was no uncertainty in their minds that Esme had stabbed him in the eye with her pole. She had already used the pole to attack a fox. That charge, though withdrawn, was still in her police file, too.

  Now ordinarily, the police said, they might have been justified in charging Esme with just manslaughter, and perhaps her lawyer could argue self-defence as a result of the victim’s alleged attempted assault on her. But in this case, the homicide took place during the commission of a serious crime, thereby requiring that the charge be second-degree murder.

  Moreover, because the chief of police and the Department of Justice, and the premier herself, had made it clear publicly that there was to be no tolerance shown to perpetrators, young and old alike, in the escalating drug scene that was part of the b
ooming St. John’s economy, the prosecution would be applying to the judge to have Esme, who’d be eighteen on her next birthday, and was possessed of mature intelligence, tried as an adult.

  They seemed determined, said Brian, to make her into an example, and she was ideal for the purpose—good family, good grades, good character—not some lout from whom nothing better could be expected. The traumatic death of her father and her mother’s infirmity added to her status as a poster child for the war on dope. It proved that no one was immune from involvement with drugs. This arrest would proclaim loud and clear to young people of all stations and conditions in life that the justice system was demonstrating zero tolerance to all drug perpetrators.

  And if Esme were to be found guilty of second-degree murder as an adult, which was the likely outcome according to the police, she would be sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for fifteen years or more. However, if her lawyers were inclined to spare everybody the cost and inconvenience of a full-fledged trial by having her simply confess to killing Jason Power, no doubt a better deal might be worked out for her. There were no guarantees, but a guilty plea to manslaughter might net her, for example, only a ten-year sentence, or perhaps less.

  “If Esme were to be tried as an adult,” I said to Brian, “her identity would automatically be made public and her life and career chances would be ruined, whether she was found innocent or guilty. How do you assess the position the police are taking?”

  “Bill, it doesn’t look all that good. They are really gung-ho to nail her as an example. There’s no doubt about that. I heard them say what a piece of luck it was that you, this big corporate lawyer, were related to Esme and Molly.”

  “What are they going to do about Molly, do you think?”

  “They’re playing coy on that at the moment, but I’d be extremely surprised if they didn’t do their worst.”

  “Okay, apply for bail for Esme right away. Let’s retain the best criminal lawyer in town to lead us in handling this. Confer with senior members of our firm on that and call me with the recommendations. No reflection on you, Brian, but only on your age and experience.”

  “I agree. The cops were treating me like a rank amateur in there. There’s no one senior in the firm who’s really up to speed on this stuff. If they’re going to try her as an adult for murder, we definitely need to hit them with someone high-powered.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I was scheduled to have lunch and dinner with the executives and lawyers in Calgary the next day. Before I talked to Brian, I had decided I would stay despite the ruckus at home. After all, there was nothing I could accomplish on the spot, personally, regarding the immediate judicial procedures. They were best left in the hands of lawyers who knew what they were doing, and they could consult with me by phone. But Brian’s report on Esme’s description of the place and manner of the victim’s death had gripped my mind, and I could think of nothing else. I telephoned my regrets to my partners and our client for having to leave, called the airline, cancelled the flight home I’d reserved, and booked the red-eye for that evening.

  Mostly sleepless, I flew from Calgary to Toronto to Halifax to St. John’s, arriving at the airport at midday feeling overwrought and agitated. I didn’t even go home first. I’d called Brian from Toronto, waking him up early in the morning, to tell him to meet me at the airport, and to bring Molly with him. We were going to drive straight to the place near the lake where Esme and Molly had parked their car. I’d called Jennifer and Maggie from Halifax to confirm my plan.

  When she saw me at the baggage carousel, Molly charged ahead of Brian and put her arms around me. I was struck by the contrast between how mature and womanly she had started to look this year and the little girl’s face on her as she held onto me tight and whispered how sorry she was. I murmured, “Shh, we’ll talk in the car.”

  As we drove the few miles to the lake, I said, “Molly, we’re not going to get into any guilty-innocent, good-evil analysis of this. The whole thing is mind-boggling, yes, but remember that whatever happens, your mother and I will love you as much whether you’re behind bars in prison or winning a scholarship to Harvard. Now where were you parked, exactly?”

  Nearing that place, we saw an empty police vehicle. We pulled in, parked, and got out of the car, and Molly led us to the opening of the trail. The grass and brush were wet under our feet. As we entered the woods, we met two uniformed police officers, a male and a female, on their way up. They told us to stop; we were not allowed near the crime site. I told them that we were the girls’ lawyers, and we had to look at the place where these two young female teenagers had supposedly committed the Criminal Code’s most serious crime. The policewoman called through to her superior, who said the site was off limits; the prosecution would be sharing with the defence any evidence that supported either side of the case.

  I said, loudly, “Please tell him that it has already rained since the alleged crime took place and we need to look at the site before any further evidence is destroyed or made useless by the elements.” I raised my voice more, my temper ballooning. “Tell him he’s making this very easy for us: our next step will be to apply to a judge for dismissal of the charges because of obstruction of justice by the police.”

  Brian touched my arm: Don’t lose it. And evidently, the supervisor, as well as the police officers, knew the sound of a crazed lawyer when they heard it, one who would make no end of trouble. The policewoman listened to her phone in silence for twenty seconds, eyeballing me unkindly the whole while, and then said, “Yes, sir, I agree. I would.” She listened again, and then explained their decision to me. “You are to proceed to the ‘do not cross’ tape and survey the site from there. Under no circumstances are you to enter or act in such manner as to contaminate the crime scene. Anything further will require a court order. Are we clear on the conditions?”

  “Entirely.” We walked down to the tape. Another police officer was standing near a tent covering a few square metres of ground by some trees. “Is that where the body was found?” I asked.

  “Affirmative.”

  We could scarcely hear ourselves. The crows were cawing in an unusually strident manner from the trees near the water where they had gathered in numbers greater than I’d ever seen in one place, except perhaps once before.

  One of the policemen waved an arm at them and said, “They’ve been here since yesterday. They must be mad at us for moving the body they had their greedy little eyes on. I hate crows.”

  The last time I’d heard them this loud and in such numbers was when I’d seen the tentacle grab the gull. Were they agitated like this by yesterday’s event in this spot, just as they had been by the event two decades ago? Their raucous presence here again today was evidence of nothing, but the crows were helping to give me the gut feeling that Esme’s story and my sighting back then were both part of the same “truth.”

  I looked out across the lake. Seagulls were markedly absent from the surface of the water. In my youth we used to joke that the gulls—we called them rats with wings—would dine in their hundreds on the garbage at the city dump at Robin Hood Bay and then flock over here to the drinking water supply to rinse the filth off their dainty, protected-species little feet. In recent years, though, they seemed to have largely abandoned the lake.

  I scanned the spruce trees that stood behind the tent in a straight line from the lake. About eight feet up on the foremost tree I could see a broken-off branch projecting rigidly out from the trunk some five or six inches. Perhaps it was my lack of sleep, plus anxiety from contemplating the possible futures of two lovely, bright, blundering young women, that stimulated my imagination: I saw plainly in my mind’s eye a young man standing by the water’s edge urinating into the lake, and then I saw with absolute clarity his offending body being flung by some immense unknown force across the glade to the tree and its eye-impaling branch. And I saw his body drop to the
ground. My heart sank as I looked at the droplets of rainwater on the vegetation and realized that overnight showers might have already washed away crucial evidence, or it might have been eaten by the crows.

  I pointed out the tree to Brian, and asked if he could see the broken branch. He could, and confirmed its height, length, and colouring. “Do whatever is necessary,” I went on, “either through the police or by court order, to have the forensic people collect anything adhering to or around that branch and the trunk of the tree under it, and have it analyzed and identified in a lab.”

  “Uh, okay. It’s two feet or more higher than the height of a man. What do you expect to find?”

  “Human blood and brain. And do it quickly, before we have another downpour of rain or feast of crows.”

  Brian Keeping, my own legal associate, was the first to give me that odd, curious look I would grow accustomed to from everyone before this case ended, the look that asked: Has the strain driven this poor fellow around the bend?

  With co-operation from the police, people from the lab scraped the branch and the bark on the trunk and found organic matter on the underside of the branch and directly below it—blood and brain matter—identified as human, and then, with further testing, as belonging to the victim, Jason Power.

  CHAPTER NINE

  At our meeting with the prosecution and police about the evidence scraped from the tree, they pronounced themselves unimpressed. How could that material have possibly gotten up there, they asked, if it wasn’t scraped off the end of her hiking pole by Esme? She was easily tall enough to reach the branch with her pole, and when she’d first noticed the fortuitously placed broken branch above the body, the clever girl concocted her bizarre story and did what was necessary to support it.