Chapter 45
FORTY-FIVE
Thirty-six hours later, I walked into another interrogation room in another police station. It looked like every other one I’d ever been in. Small room. Cement walls. Uncomfortable metal chairs. A beat-up metal table with loops welded on top for wrist shackles to be threaded through.
Roy Dennison, Mark Gilchrist, Detective Renee McCallister, and Leslie Fields, the Washtenaw County Prosecutor, sat in the observation room on the other side of the wall.
I wore my armor. My black suit, crisp white blouse, spiked heels.
I was ready to pick up my sword and wage a battle I’d won hundreds of times against a hardened criminal who thought he was smarter than me.
Daniel Palicki would be no different except for one thing.
Lock sat at my side. The swelling on his face went down but left behind an ugly purple bruise that spread from his forehead all the way down to his chin. He held my hand in a vice-like grip.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
He shook his head. “How can you ever be?”
I didn’t get a chance to answer. A deputy brought Palicki in. I don’t know what I expected. I’d seen his mugshot so many times. I’d become familiar with the photo of him as a scruffy, lost teenager. I’d seen him in that lineup. But this seemed like a fourth version of him.
When he saw Lock, Palicki straightened his posture and smiled.
The lights gleamed off his bald head. His beard grew long and scruffy.
He filled out the orange jumpsuit they issued him.
I tried to see the lost boy Lock knew all those years ago.
I could only see a monster in front of me.
When the police told Palicki that Lock wanted to see him, he immediately agreed.
He thought he was still in control. He would soon find out how wrong he was.
Palicki shuffled forward, his legs still in chains. The deputy secured his wrists to the loops in the table. He would stand against the wall, ready to subdue Palicki if he somehow managed to make a threatening move.
Palicki’s smile never faltered as he made himself as comfortable as he could. He stared straight at Lock, never acknowledging me with his eyes.
“Hello, Preston,” Lock said. There was compassion in his voice still. I knew Lock was trying to reconcile the man sitting in front of him with the young boy he tried to save.
“Why is she here?” Palicki asked. His voice didn’t match the bravado of his swagger. He sounded scared. “I said I’d talk to you, Lock.”
“She’s here because I want her to be,” Lock answered. “It’s not up for debate.”
Palicki shrugged. “So he got you to marry him, huh?” Finally, he looked at me with an air of scorn, then lewdness. He licked his lips. Beside me, I felt Lock go rigid. I placed a gentle hand on his arm.
I was used to this little game. Guys like Palicki thought they could reduce me. Intimidate me by sexually objectifying me.
“He did,” I answered, leaning forward, closing the distance between us. I was not afraid of this man. He had no power over me. But he still might have power over Lock.
“That’s enough,” Lock said, his voice booming like thunder. “You wanted to see me? Well, here I am. What do you have to say? You killed those women.”
The smugness left Palicki’s face. His eyes widened as he looked at both of us. “No. I didn’t kill anyone. Isn’t that why you’re here? Isn’t that what you told them?”
“I know there’s a human being inside you, Preston,” Lock said.
“Give some peace to those girls’ families.
That’s why you wanted me here, isn’t it?
I’ll listen to anything you have to say.
You wanna blame me for your lot in life?
Fine. You’re right. I screwed up. I made too many promises to you.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t a trained social worker.
I thought you just needed someone to be kind to you.
To believe in you. I was misguided. I’m sorry you didn’t get the love you should have had from the people who should have given it to you.
You are going to prison for the rest of your life.
You will face the consequences of what you’ve done. ”
“What I’ve done?” he asked. “I didn’t do anything. I thought you were here to help me.”
“Did you want Fiona because Lock did?” I said. “You wanted to destroy something of his. The same with Corrine Egan. Is that it? Well, Lock’s still here, Daniel. He’s still living in that big house you could never afford. Having the life you can only dream about.”
Palicki started to sweat. “This isn’t happening. I’ve got to be in some kind of nightmare. I never killed anyone. I don’t know anyone named Fiona. I don’t know anyone named Corrine. I told them. Hook me up to a lie detector. I’m telling the truth.”
Palicki surprised me. I couldn’t read minds. A lot of the body language cues people say indicates lying are just myths. But as I sat there, watching Daniel Palicki sweat and squirm, I started to believe him.
Lock, on the other hand, became enraged. “I would have done anything for you, Daniel. I took you into my home. You have no idea how hard I tried. Eli and I both. It was you who turned on us.”
Palicki’s eyes flashed. Something seemed to snap inside of him too.
“Now who’s lying?” he said. “You care more about a dead person than you did us. Your brother is gone. I was right here. I loved you, man. I believed every promise you made me, then broke. You turned your back on me. You and Eli. All the two of you know how to do is throw money at things. Eli? You don’t even know who your friends are. ”
“No more lies!” Lock shouted. “My home! You violated my trust. They know it was you. Mina told me your DNA was in one of your victims’ cars.
Her blood was in your house. Don’t you dare bring up Bennett’s name to me.
You’re perverted. You took something that means something to me.
You hung it on the wall in your bedroom.
A place where you committed your horrors. ”
“My wall? You mean that stupid painting? That’s what you think?
I loved that painting because you did. When you told me what it meant, I wanted to think we could be like that too.
Connected. Because you promised we would be.
That I could always count on you. Call on you.
I thought you were finally going to honor that promise today. You’re a fraud.”
As Lock and Palicki shouted at each other, something Palicki said rang in my ears on repeat.
You don’t know who your friends are. Corrine had said almost the exact same thing. He always trusts the wrong people. He’s never known who his real friends are. He can’t see who’s truly on his side.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. I should have been able to detect something in Palicki. Some small crack in his story. But he was relieved when we walked in, if only for a moment.
He always trusts the wrong people. You don’t know who your friends are.
My heart felt ready to burst. I vaulted out of my seat and practically ran into the observation room.
“What are you doing?” Dennison asked. “This is going nowhere. Get Lock out of there.”
“Roy, something’s wrong. He isn’t… there’s not…” I was spinning again. I could tell from the look on Roy’s face he thought I was losing it. Except I wasn’t. I knew exactly what I was doing.
“Come here,” I said to Roy, grabbing him by the arm. I dragged him out into the hallway.
“What’s going on?”
“You said you found Lock’s contact in Palicki’s phone. Show me.”
“What?”
“The phone forensics report. Can you pull it up? Show me the contacts they found.”
It was a little crazy, maybe. But if Palicki was truly innocent, he’d never think to delete anything.
Roy walked into the observation room and grabbed his backpack.
His face reddened with anger or frustration.
I didn’t care. We sat on the hallway bench as Roy took out his tablet and fired it up.
I nearly crawled out of my skin from impatience.
Finally, Roy found what I asked for and handed me the tablet.
My eyes blurred as I scanned the lines of data. Palicki had over a hundred contacts in his phone. I almost passed right over it. It was as if the wind knocked out of me as I saw the name I knew I would find.
“Eli Shepherd,” I said.
“Okay? And?”
“And,” I said. “Eli has been Lock’s best friend since college.
He knows everything about him. He knows about the red ribbons.
He’s seen mine! He knows what it means. He has access to my house.
He even lived there for a while when he was younger.
He’s been checking up on me. Asking how things are going for me at work.
He knew Fiona McBride. They went on a double date.
Lock has a picture of them together in a photo album in his study.
Corrine said someone tried to hurt Lock.
She said he doesn’t know who his real friends are.
Just like Palicki just did. You have to ask him. ”
“Ask him what?”
“Ask Palicki what he meant by that. Find out what his relationship with Eli is.”
“Mina, I don’t know…”
“Trust me! Are you serious, Roy? You know I was telling you the truth the whole time. You really want to tell me I’m nuts right now?”
Ten minutes later, Daniel Palicki did end up destroying something Lock loved.
“How long was it going on?” Dennison asked. This time, Lock and I sat in the observation room.
“He would call me,” Daniel said. “When he wanted certain things done. A lot of it had to do with him sneaking around on his wife. He had me follow her a couple of times. Make sure she wasn’t headed home. He’d pay me a hundred bucks here and there. Just enough to keep me going.”
“What else did he have you do?”
“One time he asked me to set up a video camera and take some pictures. It was at this rental house in some hick town outside Kalamazoo. I was gonna say no. It was sick. I thought it was gonna be him and some chick he was with. He paid me a lot that time. More than he ever had before. A thousand bucks.”
“Who did you take pictures of, Daniel?” Roy asked.
“It was Lock and some girl.”
Roy had his tablet on the table between them. Lock winced as Roy showed Daniel the pictures of him and Corrine.
“Yeah,” Daniel said. “That’s them.”
“Did he tell you what they were for?”
“I assumed. Eli was jealous of Lock. We talked about it a lot. He said he was arrogant. Never had to work for anything. He was gonna take him down a peg. It was a thousand bucks. And I meant what I said. Lock wasn’t there for me like he said he was gonna be.
He gave up on me just like everybody else. ”
“Oh, Daniel,” Lock whispered beside me. “That’s not true.”
“What was he going to do with the photos?”
“I don’t know. I suppose blackmail him. I never heard what happened with them.”
“What about the girl in these photos?”
“I didn’t know her name. But I knew Eli was screwing her too. I thought that was pretty stone cold. Lock seemed like he was really into her.”
“Eli was screwing her too?” Lock said, stunned.
“He was going to hurt you,” I said. “That’s what Corrine meant.
Lock, I think Eli put Corrine up to filing that police report the first time.
I think it might have been his idea to blackmail you.
She said she protected you and you never knew it.
Maybe she couldn’t go through with it. Whatever was going on, she thought she loved you. She thought you belonged together.”
Lock buried his face in his hands. “What have I done?” he whispered. “All this pain. All these people. All because of me.”
“No,” I said. “You can’t think that.”
Palicki’s interview went on for another four hours.
By the end of it, he revealed that Eli often met him at Palicki’s house.
For more money, Palicki allowed Eli to use it as a place to bring the women he was sleeping with.
Palicki had several months-long stints in prison over the years.
The neighbor’s granddaughter told him she’d seen Eli going in and out in Palicki’s absence multiple times.
It made a sick sense. It would explain why Palicki’s transfer DNA was found in Gretchen Small’s car.
Eli could have had something from Palicki’s house on him when he was with Gretchen.
They had found some traces of unidentifiable male DNA in the vehicle as well.
I knew it would be a match for Eli Shepherd.
They would not release Daniel Palicki. Not yet. But by the end of that day, they would have Eli in custody.