Читать книгу Because You Loved Me - M. William Phelps - Страница 27

For Chris McGowan, the nightmare had just begun. It was like a telephone call in the middle of the night—it was never good news.

“Look at all this blood?” Chris told himself as he stood underneath the fluorescent glow of the lights inside the small room that detectives had put him in at the NPD. Both of his arms, from his triceps down to his fingertips, were covered. His knees, because he was wearing shorts, had patches of blood where he had knelt down beside Jeanne.

My goodness, thought Chris while sitting in the room by himself, holding up his arms, looking at it all for the first time. What happened?

Two detectives sat Chris down at a small table on the second floor, gave him a glass of water and told him to “relax,” someone would be back to ask him a few questions in due time.

What seemed to Chris like “an hour” actually took fifteen minutes. As he sat, contemplating life without Jeanne, thinking about what could have happened, he still didn’t feel as though he was being treated as a suspect.

“I had nothing to hide,” he said later. “It didn’t even cross my mind.”

Equally disturbing was the idea of never seeing Jeanne again. She’s dead. In the breadth of an instant, just like that—Chris snapped his fingers while recalling the memory—he and Jeanne were talking about the rest of their lives together, going out to dinner, taking walks, raising Jeanne’s two kids, saying good-bye at work, discussing soda and pizza and chips, the kids—and now she was gone. How quickly life can be interrupted by tragedy.

When one of the detectives came back into the room, Chris was asked, “When was the last time you saw Ms. Dominico?”

He took a swallow from the cup of water in front of him.

“Geez…it was at work. We work together at the same company.”

“She say anything to you about meeting anyone tonight?” The detective wrote something down on a notepad he had in his hand.

Chris ran one of his hands through his hair, took a long breath.

“No. Not that I know of. We had plans to meet up at the house. I was staying there this week. She was supposed to pick up a pizza, go home…and meet up with the—”

“How?” the detective interrupted.

“—the kids. Where are the kids? I need to find the kids.” Chris became nervous, suddenly worried. “I need to tell them before they find out some other way.” It had been on his mind the past few hours: how was he going to explain to Drew and Nicole what had happened to their mother?

“No, don’t worry about the kids. We’re working on locating them.”

“I gotta tell them.” Then, speaking more to himself than the detective, “Where are they gonna go? What are they gonna do now?”

Chris shook his head and began crying.

The Criminal Investigation Division (CID) of the NPD consisted of thirteen members on the day they began investigating Jeanne Dominico’s death. It was one of five divisions within the NPD’s Detective Bureau. Comprised of one lieutenant, two sergeants and ten detectives, the CID’s primary function, according to official policy, is to “further the investigation into all felony level crimes committed by adult offenders that occur within the City of Nashua.”

Among a city housing some ninety thousand residents, a larger population, incidentally, than a majority of the nation’s cities, the NPD’s headquarters at Zero Panther Drive, near downtown, a modernized redbrick building, is up to date with all the latest investigative techniques, procedures and practices. Capable of investigating “all levels of crime,” the NPD stands in a relatively small class of police departments statewide that can boast of such diligent street-level crime-fighting strategies and crime scene investigation tactics. Homicide, kidnapping, violent assaults, sexual assaults, burglaries, thefts and corruption of all types generally encompass most of what the NPD prides itself on. Quite interestingly, the NPD Uniform Field Operations Bureau is considered its “most prominent,” simply because it is “called into action” and acts, mainly, as an initial response team the moment a major crime is reported.

“The officer at the scene will conduct a preliminary investigation into the incident,” says official procedure, “documenting the facts as he learns them,” before forwarding a report to the attention of the Detective Bureau. “On occasion, based upon the seriousness of the offense, detectives may be called to the scene of the crime immediately after members of the Uniform Bureau have arrived and assessed the situation.”

The NPD homicide investigating team is a tight-knit group of cops, whose primary focus is to be ready and willing to conduct any type of investigation required in order to solve a crime as quickly as possible. The safety of the residents of Nashua is the NPD’s number one concern, obviously. This is one of the reasons why the response at Jeanne Dominico’s house once Chris McGowan called 911 on the night of August 6, 2003, was so thorough and quick: in theory, like many of the police departments throughout the state of New Hampshire, members of the NPD were waiting for the call, ready to take action the moment a violent crime had taken place.

What detectives from the NPD’s CID unit knew as the night moved forward and the investigation progressed was that violence was not an intense enough word to explain what had happened inside Jeanne’s kitchen. In fact, Jeanne hadn’t fallen from her countertop and split her head open, as most everyone now knew, nor had she gotten into a scuffle with a burglar, as many may have believed early on. Detectives knew immediately upon entering Jeanne’s home that she had been beaten savagely with some sort of blunt, solid object, and stabbed repeatedly with, authorities knew, two different knives. Some early estimates, as crime scene investigators worked the scene—taking videotape and photographs, collecting fingerprints, shoe prints and other evidence, and reported back to detectives—was that Jeanne had been stabbed approximately forty, or maybe even fifty, times. She had wounds to her face, neck, head, throat, along with what looked to be defensive wounds on her hands. Moreover, investigators uncovered a broken knife handle inside Jeanne’s kitchen sink; its blade on the floor nearby.

This was no random act—Jeanne’s murderer was angry. Detectives knew right away there was a personal connection.

From those early moments, it appeared detectives had some key pieces of evidence to go on, yet no viable suspect. Then, at 9:13 P.M., while searching Jeanne’s backyard, one of the investigating officers found something.

“Over here.”

Detective Denis Linehan and his boss, Detective Sergeant Richard Sprankle, had been at the scene for a little over an hour. When they heard the officer call out, both walked over to see what he had found.