Small Sacrifices (37 page)

Diane looked up and caught the detectives' expressions.

"You're making faces, but it does make sense--"

"I don't understand," Kurt Wuest said. "You mentioned something about being your fault?"

"Somebody hated me enough that they would do this. So it (5

my fault."

Diane said she was terrified when the last thing the gunman said was--her name. She had just been shot, and she was still outside her car when he breathed her name and threatened to kill her if she told.

"But we had armed guards on you and the children when we interviewed you in the hospital." Wuest was puzzled. J "But I had to go home from the hospital."

"That was quite a few days later."

"I didn't know that. Can't you put yourself in my place and quit being a detective and just be a person?"

"I am a detective," Wuest said. "I am a person and—but

... if you had fear for your safety and your children's safety, it would seem to me that would have been the best time—when you had all the policemen around, armed guards on both your kids

. . .not now."

"Correct," Diane agreed. "But the person has no reason to come get me now, because you guys are chasing me. He couldn't be safer."

"They don't know that," Wuest countered. "We are still showing pictures in the paper."

"You guys are still calling me suspect . . . Who in the world would feel safer? The person that did this."

Diane was not as happy with the debate as she had been. She hinted that she would prefer another time. "I have very little patience with men."

"We're getting anxious," Wuest said frankly.

"It's kind of exciting, you know," Welch said.

"Yes, it is." Diane brightened. "It's scary—" They checked the tape, whirring in the background. Welch took off his tie, undid his collar, and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. He was sweating.

Welch asked her why she had turned away from the route

home after she'd left the road Heather Plourd lived on. It was late and very dark then.

She had only been looking for a scenic route—to sightsee.

"For what reason did you stop and turn around again?" Welch pushed.

"Well, because I looked in the back seat and Christie was asleep. There was no sense in going sightseeing—I had already seen that route."

"Oh, kids had konked out?"

"Yes, Christie had. Cheryl was still awake."

"How about Danny?" Wuest asked.

• "I don't know—he was quiet—I'm assuming he was asleep." How fast had she been driving after she turned around and finally headed toward home, only to impulsively decide to turn off the main road again and drive along the little road that curved beside the river?

Forty miles an hour.

After the shooting. How fast then?

Diane didn't know about Joe Inman's statements. She had no 252 ANN RULE

idea that someone had followed her down the black corridor of Old Mohawk, after the shooting.

"But after--after the shooting, you really scooted to the hospital?" Welch asked again.

"I don't know."

"You don't remember?"

"I have never been on the road, and it was dark. I was looking in the back seat most of the way, so I can't tell you that I was driving fast. I was driving slow enough that I didn't go off the road ... I remember almost hitting the fence. I remember reaching over and rolling Cheryl's window down because I couldn't get my arm down to open my window."

"Where was your arm? Was it in your lap?"

"Yeah, I picked it up and put it in my lap."

"Was it bleeding pretty good then?"

Diane had calmed down; she was weighing each answer carefully, and she was doing well. She had her rhythm back. "I don't remember. I know that when I got to the stop sign, my arm was cold. I looked down to see if I was bleeding a lot, and there was a towel wrapped around it, and I don't remember putting the towel on there either."

"OK. So you don't know if you really raced to the hospital or if you just drove super slow?"

"Or if I stopped. I don't know--I have no idea at all." Diane's recounting of events had changed subtly. She had been definite in her first taping in the hospital that she had "kept on driving, kept on driving" to the hospital.

Welch reminded her of that.

"I was very definite about everything that I told you--I was not definite about the things that I didn't know--"

"What do you remember telling us about your speed?"

"I don't remember what I told you, but I can tell you I remember I was going fast enough to get to the hospital on time, and slow enough to stay on the road and not wreck."

"On time?" Welch asked, puzzled.

"They were all alive ... I had accomplished my goal which was to save the kids. They killed Cheryl. I didn't. I wasn't the one

, that took too long driving to the hospital or whatever. My dad ^ tries to say--maybe I blacked out."

"You think you did?"

"If I did, I don't want to think it."

"Whoever had the gun in their hands is the one who killed Cheryl," Wuest said quietly.

"I agree—but I'm the mother and I was there. Why didn't I do something? ... I don't know why."

They talked about a time lapse, and why Diane had so much trouble remembering.

Wuest proceeded cautiously. "You're probably going to get mad at me."

"Go ahead," she said. "I've been mad at lots of people."

"Yeah, but you haven't been mad at me yet."

"Give me a chance."

"You've been under a lot of stress—you said something earlier—you were possibly blocking out this horrible thing that you saw." s

"Yeah?"

"You may have forgotten a lot of these things when you blocked them out on purpose. Do you have any kind of idea at all what this horrible thing could have been?"

"No, I don't. So what are you saying?"

"What I'm trying to say is—"

"What you're trying not to say is—"

"You said it was more horrible than watching Christie get shot . . . and bleeding and everything else, and I can't think of anything more horrible that that."

"Neither can I."

"So what would you have to block out that would be more devastating that that?"

"I don't know. I told you that talking about it with you guysS

wasn't going to fix it."

Diane had come perilously close to the edge, and now she pulled all the way back.

"I gave it a shot," she said. "I really did; I tried." The interview had come to an end—or at least to a turning place. Diane made no move to leave.

Would she consider seeing a psychiatrist, they asked.

She waffled. Maybe "I could open up without feeling pressed, without feeling that I'm in trouble if I say the wrong things—that maybe my mind really still believes that I'm going to get killed if I say it. And it doesn't feel safe because you guys are my enemy

• • . as much as the person who shot me is my enemy." 254 ANN RULE

"Have you been totally truthful and candid with us thus far?" Welch asked her bluntly.

"Yes . . . yes, yes."

"There's nothing you have knowingly omitted?"

"The only thing that I knowingly omitted from you was telling you that the man used my name."

It had come to her in a dream, she said, but by that time, the police had begun to persecute her, and so she had not told them.

"We're talking about a murder investigation, and we can't play little games like we've been playing," Wuest reminded her.

"This is a big game," Diane corrected. "It's not a little game. My daughter's dead--there's nothing more serious than that . . . You should have come to me straight away," she lectured them, "and said, 'There's a discrepancy. We think you did it and this is why.' You shouldn't play games."

They waited.

"You don't lie to me--but you don't lie to me for one thing. Don't ever lie to me, 'cause I hate lying more than anything in the

whole world."

Her voice was playful, but the veneer of hostility was there. Kurt Wuest reminded her that she was free to leave anytime. She nodded. "I know. As soon as this tape's over, I will be too . . . I'm sorry if I don't trust you. I think that if I did trust you, things would be a lot different."

"Do you think that you'd be able to come up with this suppressed information--if you trusted us?" Welch asked.

She didn't know. She laughed. "You are starting to look like a pouting child, Kurt. You're sitting there with a whole bunch of questions and you're just not going to play ball if I don't let you bat."

Diane's war with men had not slackened; she was good at

male-female repartee, skilled at keeping men off balance by being alternately seductive and ingenuous, soft and caustically witty. On this July night as the interview strung itself out longer and longer, Diane clearly considered the detectives only men. She might have been rapping with the guys back at the post office. If she even remembered that Kurt and Doug were policemen, one cannot hear it on the tapes.

»The interrogation turned a corner; Diane never realized it.

"You want to play hardball?" Welch asked flatly.

"Yeah--I want to find this guy ... At first--like I said--it

didn't matter whether you caught him or not. But now it seems that the only way for my life to get back to normal is to catch him."

"It's very important to us."

"I guess so," Diane agreed. "It's like the forbidden door . . . there's something behind that door that really happened that night--something bad.''

"More horrible than watching Christie bleed?" Wuest asked softly. It was a point he would not let go. He had only been waiting.

"Watching Christie get--yeah . . . there was something there

... I want to know--but at the same time, my mind knows better than my conscious mind. That it's bad and you're not supposed to look."

Wuest continued to question Diane quietly. "There's an emotion that--the only thing I can think of that--that's more horrible than watching a little girl get shot and bleed, and blank your mind out--is if/had some involvement doing it." /

"I agree," Diane said pertly.

"That would be--"

"That would be horrible," she finished.

H'That would probably be more horrible than watching the little girl--"

"You're right," she said. "That would be terrible." Diane caught herself up sharply. "I know for a fact that I didn't do it." Doug Welch played the smart-ass, demanding more explanation, throwing out impertinent questions that annoyed Diane. But only a little. She could deal with him.

"Why?" he asked now. Why did she know she hadn't done it? , ,.„

"Because--" ";

"You can't remember," Wuest said.

"I know that I didn't do it."

"You don't remember," Welch said. "You're telling us that you don't remember."

"I remember seeing Christie get shot. I remember the man reaching in the car and shooting her."

"Diane," Kurt Wuest said, "I'm being flat-out straight with you. You say there's a void there, that something's missing and-you're saying whatever it is, it's more horrible than seeing Christie bleed and I say that the only thing I can think of that would be more horrible is if I had the gun in my hand and I saw that." 256 ANN RULE

Diane didn't flinch. "I agree with you. That would be devastating."

"Right, and that would create ... a void."

"Or perhaps," she began slowly. "It's knowing that it's going to happen and that you could stop it somehow ... I know what would be horrible, is--it's worse--" She looked up. "If the world was going to end tomorrow, would you want to know about it?"

"Yeah," Wuest answered laconically.

"Figures . . . Would you?" Diane turned to Welch.

"Yup."

"I wouldn't because ... I would live the whole rest of this last day in agony, trying to do all the things I couldn't do--or trying to stop it--when you knew that it was futile, and just knowing that it was going to happen, what if the man taunted me with it? What if he was telling me how he was going to do it? I don't know."

The tape ran out.

They expected Diane to leave. But she gestured to them to put on another tape. It was twelve minutes to five in the afternoon, and now they could hear flies buzzing in the hot room. The leaves through the tiny windows were still. All the birds had left the courtyard.

"We just took a short break," Kurt told the tape recorder.

"Diane, you indicated that you wanted to stop after the last tape?"

"Yeah--I was in the middle of a thought . . . We were talking about what could be more horrible than seeing my daughter get shot, and I was simply relating the fact that I can think of something more horrible, and that is knowing that its going to happen and not being able to stop it."

But that thought, she was quick to point out, was only an assumption--not a true memory.

Doug Welch asked her if she was afraid at the present time.

"Of whom?" she asked.

"Us."

"No." ;

"Not at all?"

"No."

" Are you worried ?'

"No."

"I think I started to say this earlier," Welch said. "I've been working this case since the beginning and involved very deeply in

the investigation--and there are some things which just don't jibe."

"OK," she said.

Kurt Wuest stood up, and paced the small office. Diane

casually propped her feet up on his vacant chair and waited to hear Welch's theory, a half-smile on her face.

"Is it possible--we know that you told us numerous times, you loved your kids deeply--they are basically your whole world--"

"Yeah."

"And you have also talked about fits of depression that you've had since; you said that Steve used to get you to a point where you contemplated suicide."

"Yeah . . . yeah."

"Is it possible that you were in one of these states of depression that night? And wanted to commit suicide, but couldn't stand the thought of your kids being without a mother, and decided to take them with you so they could be with you?"