Perfect Poison (28 page)

Monday, September 30, had been a long day—and even longer night—for James Perrault and most of the VAMC staff involved in the bomb-threat debacle. They had been through several days of what amounted to terrifying phone calls from someone they now presumed might also be a murderer.

It was no secret that the events were, in everyone's assessment, escalating. If Gilbert was capable of killing her own patients, and truly believed the entire VAMC staff was “out to get her,” what was she capable of doing to get even?

 

 

After the end of his shift on September 30, James Perrault found solace the same way he had on many nights: at the VAMC Rec Hall gym. Three or four times a week, Perrault went to the Rec Hall and lifted weights. Lately, though, spending time in the Rec Hall was twofold. The time and energy he burnt working out not only benefited his appearance and physical strength, but also took his mind off the utter chaos that had been going on around him.

As he often did after working out, Perrault stopped at the Michael C. Curtain VFW on Meadow Street, just down the street from the VAMC. It was a convenient place to stop and unwind after a night of work. Beers were cheap. Talk was casual. Playing pool helped kill some time and take his mind off things. It had been a rough summer. Hell, the last year had been anything but normal. Going down to the bar after work and discussing things with colleagues and locals over a few cold ones seemed to take a little bit of the sting out of the events.

Plante and Murphy had been telling Perrault right along that it was possible Gilbert had murdered forty patients during her seven-year tenure at the VAMC. It was an unthinkable crime. Perrault couldn't fathom how a person could do such a thing. The thought of Gilbert's killing someone during her shift and Perrault's bedding down with her the same night made him sick to his stomach.

But that was only the half of it. As almost everyone knew, Perrault's dream was to become a cop one day. He talked about it all the time. Regardless of what anybody said, he knew his track record during this investigation would unquestionably have something to do with his future in law enforcement. He had to forget about Gilbert and focus on helping Murphy and Plante. He had no other choice.

Around 11:55, after a quick workout and shower, Perrault flung the solid oak VFW bar door open, walked up to the bar, and sat down.

“Whatcha havin' tonight, Jimmy?” Jane Moran, the nighttime VFW barmaid, said in a flinty, nice-to-see-ya voice. It was comforting to Perrault.

“Same thing, Janey.”

Sipping his beer, Perrault ran his hand through his military-cropped haircut and stared blankly at the projection television at the bar.

Earlier that day, he had received an odd letter from Gilbert.

Gilbert wrote that while she was out driving one night she just happened to be going by the VFW and, wouldn't you know it, she spied Perrault's car out in the front parking lot. She said she “couldn't help herself,” so she pulled in. Instead of going in and saying hi, however, she said she stood outside the window, just watching him as he threw darts. After a while, she left. Seeing him like that and not being part of his life, she said, was just too much to bear.

Perrault shook his head. He was appalled. “I never lied to you about loving you,” Gilbert's letter ended.

“Hey, Jimmy, you got a phone call,” Janey yelled.

It was a few minutes past midnight.

Perrault motioned that he would take the call in the lobby. It was odd, he thought, someone phoning him at the bar at this hour. The only person he knew to have done that in the past was Gilbert. And there was certainly no reason for her to be calling him at the bar, especially since she didn't even know where he was.

“Yeah . . . hello?”

“You think you have a problem? Just wait and see what I have planned for you.”

It was that same cold, eerie voice. Same speech pattern. Same angry, threatening tone. Same phony Southern drawl, along with the same articulate pronunciation of words and syllables.

Yet something else struck Perrault as he stared out the window, holding the buzzing phone receiver in his hand: It was obvious to him now that Gilbert could have been the only person to know where he was at that exact moment. The timing of the call was too perfect.

“Janey,” Perrault quickly yelled from the foyer, “star fifty-seven the call I just got.”

“Hold on.”

It didn't work. Gilbert had again blocked the call.

But Perrault had heard enough. It was time to do something about Gilbert before she did something about him.

October 1, 1996 dawned crisp and cool in Hampshire County. With fall came that cold Canadian air from the north that enveloped the Northeast every year. Within weeks, the leaves on the gigantic maples around town would be bursting a fiery collage of blood red, pumpkin orange, coppery-bronze and sun yellow. Tourists would be swirling around, settling in to rooms at local inns, and clogging local restaurants. All here to take in the breathtaking view of the foliage.

Perrault had scheduled a meeting at the Northampton DA's office before his shift. Gilbert was out of control, he told Plante on the phone earlier that day. Her behavior was turning vindictive, violent. If letting the air out of Perrault's tires and keying the cars of just about everyone who had ever been involved in the case weren't enough, now she was following him around.

What would she do next?

When Perrault introduced himself to the secretary in the DA's office, she phoned Detective Thomas Soutier, and let him know Perrault had shown up a bit early.

“Send him to my office,” Soutier said.

Detective Soutier knew why Perrault was there, and he wanted to make him feel comfortable while he waited for Murphy and Plante.

“How's your job search going?” Soutier asked. “I understand you're applying at several local police departments.”

The detective seemed excited. They had something in common. A bit of small talk might do them both some good and maybe loosen Perrault up a bit. It was obvious he was uncomfortable about going to the DA's office.

“It's slow,” Perrault said, regarding his search for a job in law enforcement. “I'm concerned that my involvement in the murder investigation will taint my possibilities of
ever
being a cop.”

“If there ever comes a point in time that anyone questions your part in the murder investigation, Jim,” Detective Soutier said sincerely, “feel free to have them call me, and I will explain everything.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

Soutier, Murphy and Plante considered Perrault to be a professional. He acted mature, and they agreed between themselves that he would probably make a fine cop one day. He was a good man who had made a few bad choices and was trying his best to clean up the mess.

An hour before Perrault showed up for the meeting, Plante had one of the female clerks in the office make a recording into the Talkgirl Plante had purchased at the Toys-R-Us just days ago—one of the calls—verbatim—that the VAMC had received. Before that, Plante had his wife record her own voice into the Talkgirl. He wanted to be sure it was possible to change a woman's voice into a man's.

The experiment had worked perfectly.

Detectives Murphy and Soutier, along with Bill Welch and Plante, agreed they wouldn't tell Perrault they had made a recording of the clerk. They would simply play the tape and see what Perrault's reaction was. It was a bit devious, perhaps. But it would certainly produce an unbiased opinion of what they believed to be the truth—that there was absolutely no way in hell James Perrault could mistake Kristen Gilbert's voice for somebody else's, disguise or no disguise. Perrault knew her possibly better than anyone.

After listening to the tape, Perrault identified the “distortion and background noise” as being similar to that in the calls he had received, but there was a problem recognizing the caller's voice. It sounded similar, he said, meaning “metallicky” and “mechanical sounding,” but he could tell from the tone and inflections that it was definitely not Gilbert.

It wasn't necessarily something they could use as evidence in court, but at least it told the detectives that Perrault could discriminate between Gilbert's voice and somebody else's.

“We figure Gilbert made the calls from the phone booth at the Look Restaurant across the street,” Plante, who had just walked into the room, said. “The traffic sounds are what lead us to believe that. What do you think, Jim?”

“I'll buy that,” Perrault answered.

“We need you to do something,” Murphy, who had also come in with Plante, then suggested. “When you get to work today, after you make your usual rounds, we want you to call her.”

Perrault agreed.

Murphy then explained that he would conduct surveillance around the immediate area of Gilbert's apartment—especially the pay telephone booths, both north and south of where she lived. Easthampton was farming country. Beside the fast-food restaurants, gas stations and car dealerships found in any town, there really wasn't much to it. There was only one main road, Route 10, which ran perpendicular through town in a north-south direction. Telephone booths were spotty. Putting a cop at one for the evening would be a piece of cake. And if Gilbert was dumb enough to be making the mistakes she had been making up until that point, being fingered wasn't something Plante or Murphy had to worry about.

Plante would be on the other side of town, driving back and forth between several phone booths, but concentrating mainly on the one in the parking lot of the
Daily Hampshire Gazette.

 

 

Before the surveillance, Plante had driven by every pay phone in the area and jotted down their numbers. It had been agreed that when a call came in, someone would get hold of NYNEX, who was now working closely with them, to see if a trace turned up a match to any one of the numbers Plante had written down. NYNEX had already placed a pen register, at the request of Plante and Murphy, on Gilbert's home phone. If, for some reason, she decided to make calls from her apartment, the pen register, in real time, would tell the investigators whom she was calling.

It wasn't rocket science—just good, solid police work.

At 5:12, as he said he would, Perrault called Gilbert's apartment. She wasn't home—or wasn't answering the phone. So he left a message on her answering machine.

“I'll be at the security desk until seven o'clock. Call me.”

Around 5:30, the security desk phone rang. As luck would have it, it was the mysterious VAMC bomber.

Gilbert didn't say much of anything that Perrault could understand during the first call; her words were garbled and inaudible, as if the recording device she was using had once again malfunctioned. But if everyone's assumptions were correct, she wouldn't stop there. It was a game to her now, an obsession. Murphy and Plante had investigated criminals similar to Gilbert in the past. As they saw it, like an active alcoholic, there was no way she could just stop.

Between 5:40 and 6:30, Gilbert made several more calls. Most were brief and rather indiscernible. Yet she began to reveal an entirely different side of herself that no one had anticipated.

In the first call, disguising her voice once again in a thick and slow Southern drawl, she asked, “What can I do to make you understand what's going on here . . . ?”

“Well,” Perrault said, “you can talk to me and tell me what's going on. I mean, I'm—”

“—Oh, man, her pussy taste so sweet,” Gilbert said, cutting in on Perrault, before she hung up.

A few moments later, “I'm going to fuck your bitch, Perrault.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

There was a pause. Then, “. . . until she begs . . .” before the line went dead.

A minute later, “Officer Perrault speaking, how may I . . .” “I really enjoy looking in the window of Apartment D, James Perrault. She looks mighty fine today in those . . .”

Perrault tried interrupting, but his voice was squelched by Gilbert's.

“Well, she is available,” Perrault tried insisting. “If you want to go out with her, you can call her up.”

When he realized that it was useless to try to interact with a recording, Perrault stopped talking and let it finish.

“. . . I got a hard one just thinking about it. I been following her . . .”

Perrault couldn't help himself, thinking maybe Gilbert was listening somehow. So he said, “Why don't you talk to her and see about doing something?”

“I been seeing her around, James Perrault . . . I know where she's been today.”

“Where
has
she been today?”

The line went dead.

A minute later, Perrault picked up the phone again.

At first, all he heard was a loud buzzing sound. So he tried to get things going. It was possible that Gilbert was just hanging on the line, waiting for the right time to press the PLAY button on the Talkboy.

“Sir, do you have a problem with me?” Perrault asked. “I mean, I know you happen to like my ex-girlfriend. And from what I understand, you happen to like me. . . . I personally am not into that. But if you would like to talk to me, I'll see what we could arrange. You know, give me a call, talk to me face to face . . . do something.”

Perrault seemed to be letting the calls get the best of him by this point. His tone kept rising as he spoke. He was getting frustrated.

“I'm tired . . . tired of the little threats,” he said, “so . . . so . . . why don't you
do somethin'?”

There was a sigh—then a long, heavy breath.

“Well,” Perrault said, “breathing sounds nice.” He could hear someone tapping on a computer keyboard in the background. “Hello . . . is anybody there?”

Gilbert hung up.

Shortly after that, the phone rang again.

“This is . . . so . . . I can go in and
fuck
her brains out,” Gilbert said, again disguising her voice as the Southern black man.

Surprisingly, around 5:50, Gilbert phoned the security office.

“Hi, it's Kristen,” she said in a soft and innocent voice.

When Perrault asked her why she was calling, Gilbert said she had received several “sexually graphic” phone calls the previous night, September 30, and into the early morning hours of October 1, from the same person who, she believed, had been calling the VAMC. She thought Perrault needed to know.

“The calls,” Gilbert said, “were very demeaning to you, Jim. That's why I'm calling you.”

Confused, or perhaps overwhelmed by her gall, Perrault demanded an explanation.

“Well, the caller said he has given you so much information about himself that he can't believe you haven't caught him by now. He said you couldn't police a 7-Eleven . . . that you're nothing but a rent-a-cop.”

“Is that right?” Perrault asked sarcastically. “What did the caller sound like? How many calls did you receive?”

“About five. He sounded like . . . like a Southern black male.”

“Listen, Kris, why don't you star fifty-seven the calls? Maybe you can trace them back and find out who it is . . . you know, where he's calling from? I mean, if you're that scared—”

Gilbert cut him off. “I can't do that,” she said.

“Well . . . I don't want to be dragged into the investigation. Let's just keep this between you and me, Jimmy. Okay?”

“You
can
help, though . . .”

“Actually,” Gilbert said, interrupting Perrault, “if you really want me to, I'll try that star fifty-seven thing.”

After a bit more small talk, Perrault said he had to go.