Page 64 of Steadfast
Ten minutes later the LifeLiner departed the scene for the trauma unit at Montpelier Medical with Gavin Haines onboard. He would be pronounced dead on arrival.
The report didn’t have much to say about the next hour. The door of a Porsche 911 was “forcibly removed,” and Jude Nickel was extracted. He was taken into police custody when officers left the scene at 9:12. There were no notes about Jude’s condition or about any medical treatment he received.
I turned the page.
Interview Record: Jude Nickel. At 9:14 Mr. Nickel was read his Miranda rights and verbally waved his right to both silence and an attorney.
I shivered when I read that statement. Jude had told me that he came to in an interrogation room with Newcombe hitting him. So on page two, I was already reading lies. Jude had also said that no cop in Vermont would take it easy on the guy who killed the police chief’s son.
If Jude read this spotty account of that awful night, would he even be surprised?
I kept reading. There was a medical report for a blood test “done at the scene.” The result was consistent with “prescription opioids.” There was an affidavit by the county’s DRE (Drug Recognition Expert) swearing that he had evaluated Jude at the station house and found him to display symptoms of “profound intoxication.”
And yet he’d waved his Miranda rights. How were those two things compatible?
I got up and walked away from the file, as if the distance from the pages would help me think. I’d noticed there was no mention of my father anywhere in those notes. But he’d been there that night—he’d gone into the station a while after the terrible knock had come at our door. He’d waited for Father Peters to arrive. And then he’d strapped on his gun and left the house. I didn’t see him until the next day.
Just thinking about that night made me tremble. I’d dialed Jude’s phone over and over. I probably tried a hundred times. The officer who came to tell us that Gavin was dead hadn’t said a word about Jude. So I’d called the station house, but my father hung up on me when I asked him.
I’d spent the night crying and shaking in this very room. Alone.
Now I found myself staring out the window at our darkened street. But that wasn’t going to get any of my questions answered. I went back to the police report and examined every last page. There weren’t any photographs at all, which was weird. Maybe Nelligan had left them out intentionally to save my feelings. That was something I needed to know, so I fired up my laptop and wrote him an email. But before I hit “send,” it occurred to me that I didn’t want my questions hitting a station email account. And I didn’t know Nelligan’s private email address.
But I did have his phone number.
I sat down on the floor between my bed and the exterior wall. This is where I’d always parked my ass when I needed to have a private conversation with Jude.
Nelligan answered on the second ring. “Hi there,” I said.
“Hi, Miss Sophie. How are you on this fine evening?”
I chuckled at his cheesy greeting. “Fine, thank you. And I called to tell you again how much I appreciate that you brought me this file.”
“I hope it’s not too tough to read,” he said.
“It’s not easy, honestly.” I had to tread carefully. “I mean, I know that Gavin is gone. And now I know a little more about that awful night, and that’s important to me.”
“Good.”
“I was wondering if you edited out the photos to take it easy on me, though.”
“Well, I would have considered it, except there weren’t any.”
My neck tingled. “None?”
“My guess is that they’re stored somewhere else, in deference to the chief.”
That didn’t sound right to me, though. The file said that my brother was rushed to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. So photos taken at the scene would not have shown anything graphic or bloody. “Maybe,” I said. Asking Nelligan to snoop wasn’t a good idea. He was a stranger, and I couldn’t push him to sneak around behind my father’s back. “Thanks again, Nelligan.”
“You’re welcome, Miss Sophie.”
After we hung up, I went back to the file. I read every scrawled note in the margins and every line of the copy. I found two more odd things that didn’t sit well with me. Someone had scrawled “tox screens for Haines and Nickel” into the margin of the file’s index page at the back. But there was only one blood test in the file—Jude’s. And who would test a dead passenger? Maybe that was an error.
The other odd thing was that it said “door forcibly removed to evacuate passenger.” That should have readdriver. My brother was thrown from the car through the windshield, and Jude was stuck inside. But one line of the report had it backward.
Feeling like Encyclopedia Brown, on a fresh sheet of notebook paper I began to list every detail that bothered me.
1. Jude waives rights, but Jude is wasted.
