The next twenty-four hours were a nightmare.
Detective Demer and Sergeant Oliver transported me nearly forty-five minutes north to the Martin County Sheriff’s Office. When I asked why I was being taken out of Palm Beach County, Demer explained that the Jupiter Island Public Safety Department didn’t have a jail and the Grants’ house—and the scene of the alleged crime—was located in Martin County. All pretrial detainees were booked into the Martin County Jail.
He’d allowed me to call Todd before we left my house. Oliver had protested this.
“Why should she get special treatment?” the sergeant had snapped.
But Demer had looked down at me, and for a moment I had the oddest feeling that he didn’t want to arrest me. That in some way he was sympathetic to what I was going through.
“Please,” I’d said. “I have to let my husband know he needs to pick our children up from school.”
Demer had nodded. “Go ahead.”
I’d called Todd, but maddeningly he didn’t pick up. The call went to voice mail.
“I’m being arrested,” I said, surprised at how steady my voice sounded. “I need you to pick up Liam and Bridget from school, and then hire a criminal defense attorney. Not John Donnelly. Someone else. One of the school dads, Alan Feldman, is a tax attorney. Call him. He might be able to recommend someone.” I’d hesitated, then added, “I love you.”
After I hung up, Sergeant Oliver read me my rights, simultaneously taking out her handcuffs.
“I don’t think cuffs are necessary,” Demer said.
“It’s protocol,” Oliver snapped.
Demer did instruct her to cuff my wrists in front of me instead of behind my back like she wanted to. My comfort was not at the top of her concerns, but she acquiesced.
Oliver drove, heading north on US 1. Demer sat in the passenger seat, while I rode in the back, my handcuffed wrists resting on my lap. For a while, we passed by the strip malls, restaurants, car dealerships and marine supply stores that made up the main commercial area of Jupiter. I wondered if I’d be spotted in the back of a police car by anyone I knew.
“We have some time on our hands,” Demer said, breaking the silence. “Is there anything you feel like talking about?”
I ignored him and continued to stare out the window. The Intracoastal Waterway came into view. Across it, I could just glimpse Jupiter Island.
“For example, we could talk about why you lied about where you were on the night of Howard Grant’s death,” the detective said in a conversational tone.
“What?” I couldn’t help but say. “I didn’t lie.”
“You said you were walking on the beach. But one of the traffic cameras took a photo of you on South Beach Road heading toward Jupiter Island,” Demer said.
“Which has beaches. That’s where I went to walk.”
“There’s a beach less than a half mile from your house. You would have had to pass right by it on your way to Jupiter Island. Why wouldn’t you walk there?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t put a lot of thought into it. I was angry, so I left my house. I drove around for a while. Then I decided I felt like taking a walk. Why does it matter where I accessed the beach?”
“It matters, because it puts you within a few miles of the Grants’ house on the night Howard Grant was murdered,” Demer explained.
“That’s why you arrested me? Because I walked on a beach that was a few miles away from Kat’s house?” I was incredulous.
Sergeant Oliver had been quiet until then, but she obviously couldn’t help herself. “You can cut the innocent act. We know Katherine Grant gave you twenty thousand dollars.”
For a moment I felt like I couldn’t quite breathe. They knew Kat had loaned us that money. A loan we hadn’t paid back. But, wait...how did they know? And why was it even relevant? She had given me that check over a year ago. Unless it finally gave the police a missing piece in their theory. Kat wanted Howard dead. And Kat gave me twenty thousand dollars.
I was beginning to understand why they had arrested me.
Breathe, I thought. Think.
“Have you heard from Katherine Grant?” Demer asked.
“Excuse me?”
“The day we interviewed you, you said you hadn’t spoken to Mrs. Grant since she returned home from her trip to London. I was wondering if you’d gotten back in touch with her.” Demer’s tone was conversational, as though we were casual acquaintances discussing whether it was likely to rain later in the day.
“I’m not going to say anything without my lawyer present.”
“Okay,” Demer said. “Let me know if you change your mind. We do have some time to kill.”
I pressed my lips together and looked back out the window.
* * *
When we got to the Martin County Jail, the following things happened:
Sergeant Oliver removed my handcuffs. Then she and Demer handed me over to a female uniformed Martin County Sheriff’s deputy who didn’t bother to introduce herself. She was short, with a muscular build, large brown eyes and unusually shiny dark hair. Under different circumstances, I would have asked her what hair products she used. As it was, I was too focused on trying not to throw up.
This new officer brought me into another room, this one small and windowless and furnished with only a utilitarian bench. She closed the door to protect my privacy, which was pretty much the high point of what happened over the next ten minutes.
I was instructed to take off all my clothes, including my underwear. I did so, folding them neatly and placing them on the bench as though I were just at my gynecologist’s office and the nurse had asked me to disrobe. Any delusions I might have had that this search would be anything nearly similar to a gynecological exam were quickly dispelled.
The deputy picked up my clothes. She first shook them out, then ran her hands over all the seams, apparently checking for drugs or needles or God knows what, while I stood there, naked, trying to cover myself with my hands.
The deputy then told me to lean forward and run my fingers through my hair. Then she snapped on a pair of latex gloves and issued a set of terse instructions, which I did my best to follow.
“Pull your ears forward.”
“Open your mouth and move your tongue from side to side.”
“Tip your head back.”
She checked all of these spaces, as well as my armpits and under my breasts. Then came the most humiliating part of the examination. I was instructed to spread my legs, bend over, and, finally, to squat and cough. It was awful and humiliating, and by the time it was over, my eyes were stinging with tears.
How has this become my life? I wondered, swallowing back the sob building in my chest.
At least the deputy hadn’t made it worse than it had to be. She wasn’t rough with me or unnecessarily cruel. If anything, she seemed almost bored by the exam. But then, unlike me, she probably did this every day.
Once she’d ascertained that I wasn’t carrying any contraband inside my body, I was given back the underwear and sports bra I’d been wearing earlier, along with a set of dark green scrubs and plastic shower slides.
“Put these on,” the officer said. She stood and waited while I dressed in the scrubs, then escorted me out to the main booking room.
The rest of the booking process reminded me of waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, only with the horrifying addition that at the end of it, I was going to be imprisoned. They were processing quite a few people that day, so at each station—intake, fingerprints, photos—there was a line. While we waited our turn, we sat in a holding room behind a heavy sliding door. There was an officer present, watching over us. Not everyone was handcuffed, although I was, probably based on the severity of the charges against me. I did my best not to make eye contact with him or any of my fellow arrestees.
One of the men also waiting to get processed was watching me. He was heavily tattooed and had a goatee and shaved head. The weight of his stare felt dirty.
Finally he said, “Hey, there, Ginger. Does the rug match the curtains?”
This earned him a chuckle from a few of the others. Encouraged, he stuck out his tongue and waggled it in my direction.
“Knock it off,” the attending officer said in a bored voice.
I folded into myself and wished I could become invisible.
One by one, we were called out for the various phases of booking, then sent back to the holding area to wait some more. I was given a wristband with a number and my photo on it. It reminded me of the ones I had worn at the hospital when I was giving birth.
I noticed that the deputies in charge of shepherding us through the booking procedures were not in any obvious hurry to process the prisoners in the most efficient way possible. Instead they stood around cracking jokes and talking about the latest episode of The Voice. I was fairly sure that one of the deputies, an overweight man with a cherubic face, had a crush on the woman who had strip-searched me. He kept attempting to engage her, while she smiled with polite disinterest.
I tried to do as I was told, determined not to ask too many questions. But finally I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I asked the deputy taking my fingerprints what would happen next.
She paused as though considering whether she wanted to tell me. But maybe the desperation in my voice moved her, or maybe it was just the fact that they hadn’t found any drugs inside my anus.
“You’ll be brought before the judge tomorrow. He’ll make a decision on bail then,” she said.
That one word—tomorrow—was so horrifying that for a moment I couldn’t even breathe.
“Tomorrow?” I repeated. “What about tonight?”
But the talking part of our interview was over. She pursed her lips and pressed my fingertips against the blotter.
* * *
I was brought back to a pod. That was what they called the prisoners’ living area—a pod. It consisted of a brightly lit central room built out of cinder blocks and painted a dirty cream with a jaunty dark green stripe around the middle. It reminded me of the common room in my freshman dorm at college, although here, the only furniture in sight was a group of tables and benches, all of which were bolted to the floor. There was also a television suspended from the ceiling, tuned to a game show, and a shelf that held a battered-looking assortment of board games. The room smelled terrible, a combination of locker room funk and bleach. The pod was filled with women, most of whom were younger than me. They barely looked up as the deputy and I passed, which I took as a good sign. I didn’t want to attract any attention.
Surrounding the pod, like spokes on a wheel, were the prisoners’ sleeping quarters, each of which were large enough to house two inmates. The deputy escorting me led me to my room, which consisted of a set of metal bunk beds, a toilet and a tiny corner metal sink. The bottom bunk bed in this quarter had clearly been taken, while the top bunk had a bedroll and pillow. My stomach turned again. I had a roommate.
“This is yours,” the deputy said, handing me a flimsy plastic sleeve that contained a toothbrush, a travel-size tube of toothpaste and a bar of soap.
Something about these spare toiletries caused me to panic.
“Wait!” I pleaded just as the deputy was turning to leave.
She turned to look back at me. She had a plain, fleshy face devoid of makeup and wore her hair in a long braid down her back. “What?”
“You can’t just leave me here,” I said. “I need to see a lawyer! I have rights!”
She actually smiled. “That’s what every first timer says.” She turned to leave.
I was left alone, standing in my cell. Just outside, past the open sliding door, were a few dozen criminals. Although I was pretty sure that they were, like me, pretrial detainees. I knew from somewhere—Political Science 101?—that they weren’t allowed to house pretrial detainees with convicted felons. And, I thought, the pretrial detainees were probably somewhat safer to be around. Surely they wouldn’t want to make things worse for themselves before they went to trial.
The full realization that I was trapped here, locked up like a criminal, suddenly hit me.
They were keeping me away from my children. Liam and Bridget needed me. I couldn’t stay here.
But I couldn’t leave.
My breath shortened and my heart began to pound so quickly that I could hear the blood thrumming in my ears. My chest began to hurt. I wondered if it was possible that I was having a heart attack.
“My God,” I whispered. “What’s happening?”
I realized distantly that I was probably having a panic attack. Bridget suffered from them occasionally, and her doctor had taught us how to cope with them. I closed my eyes and forced myself to take a deep breath, hold the air in my chest for a few beats, then slowly exhale through my mouth. I repeated this several times while trying to picture the ocean on a calm day. The water lapping serenely...a lone pelican gliding low over the waves...the warmth of the sand under my bare feet.
My heart rate slowed, and fear began to recede, retracting its twisting, barbed tentacles.
Once the panic attack had subsided, I decided that the only way I would get through this would be to break down everything into manageable tasks.
First I would make up my bed. I had to perch on the metal edge of the bottom bed frame to reach it. But the extended time I was spending in the sleeping quarters had apparently piqued my new roommate’s curiosity.
“What the fuck you doing?” a voice said from the doorway.
I smoothed the blanket over my bunk, then stepped down and turned to meet my roommate. She was a scrawny woman with short, spiky peroxide-blond hair showing black roots and a truly impressive number of tattoos. She had a vine of flowers sprouting from one foot and extending all the way up to her neck, and a series of words and symbols inked on both her arms.
“I’m Alice.”
“Okay, Alice,” she repeated, nodding, “what the fuck you doing?”
* * *
My roommate’s name was Kayla. She had been arrested on drug charges, but other than insisting that the charges were “fucking bullshit” and that she’d been “set up by a fucking whacked-out meth-head whore,” she said she didn’t want to talk about it. At least, not for the first five minutes of our acquaintance. After that, it was all she wanted to talk about.
“I didn’t even buy the drugs,” Kayla complained. We had moved out to the common room and were sitting together on hard plastic chairs. “I mean, I gave Spring my money, but I was arrested before I got the Oxy. So if I never had it, how can I be guilty of buying it? It’s like you go into Best Buy to get a fucking TV or whatever, you haven’t actually bought it until you check out and leave with your merchandise, right?”
“Who’s Spring?” I asked.
Kayla snorted and rolled her eyes. “She’s a fucking bitch, that’s who she is. She used to be, like, my ‘best friend.’” Kayla made quotation marks with her fingers. “But then she got busted for possession, and if she’d just shut the fuck up, they wouldn’t have known about me. But, no, she was whacked out and started running her mouth. Shit. Now I’m here.”
“The Prisoner’s Dilemma,” I said.
Kayla squinted at me. When she frowned, her eyebrows, which had been plucked into thin lines, formed a startling V shape.
“Huh?”
“It’s a famous logic puzzle.” I waved a hand. “Never mind. It’s not important.”
“I like puzzles,” Kayla said. “When I was a kid, I used to do those puzzles where you find the words hidden in a square of letters. I was good at them, too.”
“This is a different kind of puzzle.”
But Kayla wasn’t ready to give up. She nodded her chin at me. “Tell me, but don’t give me the answer. I want to see if I can figure it out on my own.”
“Okay.” I swallowed a sigh. After all, there wasn’t anything better to do. The television show currently playing at a too-loud volume was some sort of talk show on which people yelled and swore at one another, their nonstop expletives bleeped out. It was impossible to understand what any of them were saying, and listening to it was giving me a headache. “The Prisoner’s Dilemma involves two people who have been arrested for committing a burglary.”
“What are their names?” Kayla asked.
I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s call them Bert and Ernie.”
“You mean like from Sesame Street? No, my daughter hates that show.”
“You have a daughter?” I asked, surprised. Kayla was very young, probably no older than twenty. “What’s her name?”
“Beyoncé,” Kayla said proudly.
“Oh, that’s very—” I hesitated “—original.”
“I know, right? Anyway, Bey thinks Sesame Street is stupid. I don’t blame her. That little Elmo is annoying as fuck,” she said.
“What show does she like?”
“I guess Dora the Explorer. That’s her favorite.”
“Okay,” I said. “So, we’ll call our two suspects Dora and Diego.”
“Yeah, I like that better. Dora and Diego.” Kayla laughed. “That’s funny as shit. Anyway, go ahead.”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath and gathered my thoughts. “The police believe that Dora and Diego committed a burglary, but they don’t have any evidence to prove it. So in order to make a case, they need Dora and Diego to testify against each other. They put each suspect into a separate interrogation room, then ask them to testify against the other.”
“Why would they rat on each other?” Kayla interrupted. “No one does that, other than meth-head whores like Spring.”
“They’re offered an incentive to talk,” I said. “The police give both suspects the same deal—if you testify against the other, you’ll walk free, and your accomplice will spend ten years in jail.”
“So what’s the catch?”
“The catch is that if neither one of them testifies against the other, they both walk free. But if they both agree to testify against each other, they’ll both have to serve five-year jail sentences. So without speaking to one another, Dora and Diego have to decide what to do. If you agree to testify, you’ll either walk free or, at worst, serve five years in jail. But if you remain silent and your accomplice testifies against you, you’ll go to jail for ten years.”
Kayla was silent for a minute, considering this.
“That’s fucked up,” she finally said.
I shrugged. “That’s the problem. It’s a game of trust. What would you do?”
“I don’t know. If I’m Dora, then Diego’s my homey,” Kayla said. “I wouldn’t want to betray him and shit. Like Spring did to me, that little bitch.”
“Okay, so imagine Diego’s not your friend. You’d never met him before the night of the burglary.”
“I don’t know. I guess you sort of have to do the testify thing, right?” Kayla said. “Because that way you might go to jail, but it wouldn’t be for no ten years.”
“That’s exactly right,” I said. “Anyone acting in their own self-interest will always choose to testify.”
Kayla grinned broadly. “So I got it right? Really?”
“You got it right.”
She let out a whoop and thrust a fist in the air. “I told you I was good at puzzles!”
“So is that what happened with you and your friend?” I asked.
“Who, Spring?” When I nodded, Kayla shrugged and said, “Nah, it wasn’t anything like that. The police popped her for buying Oxy, and so she became a narc for them. She brings in enough people for them to arrest, she gets off.”
“And she gave them you? Her best friend?”
“I told you, she’s a fucking bitch.” I knew Kayla was trying to sound tough, but the betrayal was clearly hurtful. She ran one hand through her spiky hair while the other tapped out a beat against her leg. Tap-tap-TAP. Tap-tap-TAP.
“I’m sorry she did that to you,” I said. “She wasn’t a very good friend.”
Kayla shrugged, looked down at her tapping hand.
What are you going to do? that shrug seemed to say. There’s no true loyalty in the world.
I knew how she felt.
“Alice Campbell? Your lawyer’s here,” one of the officers called out.