Don’t Look Behind You

cook,” McCoy said. “So I can’t do your job. Right? My job is to talk to people. And I feel that I can generally tell when someone’s lying. I think you’re lying to me. I’m just going to be very frank with that. I’m not gonna beat around the bush and I hope you don’t. If you’re gonna lie to me, I’d rather not have you say anything to me … I think you killed your wife. You never saw your wife in Montana. Your wife died September twenty-second. What I don’t know is
why.
Did you have a fight? Was she whoring around? Did you catch her? Did she try to kill
you
? I don’t know. That’s what I got to get from you. You’ve never seen me before. I’ve never seen you. And your wife is dead.
    “You’ve known Brad for some time, and I hope you regard him as a friend. I hope you regard me as a friend. All I’m asking is tell me
why
it happened. Don’t lie to me.”
    “I didn’t—” Nick stuttered, poleaxed. He’d thought he was doing so well in the give-and-take, and suddenly the power shifted and he was losing.
    “There’s too much that doesn’t add up, Nick. That just blows your story all apart. She never went to Montana. She was lying up there in the gravel pit, dead. You knew it, but you had to have some kind of cover.”
    The three troopers balanced the questions expertly. Their dialogue with Nick might well be taken from a movie script—but this was real, and their quarry now realized he was in deep trouble.
    In the time-honored style of interrogation, Brad Brown talked to him as a friend, and McCoy was colder as he deftly described the degrees of murder. The thought of first degree wiped all color from Nick’s face. “In the heat of passion” wasn’t so bad—only second degree. Vickie might even have died of an accidental shooting, McCoy suggested.
    Even a casual observer could see Nick Notaro’s mind darting from one choice to another. At length, he sighed and told them that it had been an accident. McCoy offered to leave the interview room and let Brad Brown take a statement, but Nick shook his head.
    He was ready to talk, to tell the truth.
    Perhaps.
    “Well,” Nick began, describing the drive back to Healy on September 22. “I bought the gun at J.C. Penney, and I wanted to do some target practicing. I went up to the side road there, from off the highway. Vickie went up to set up some cans and some beer bottles that were lying around back there. The gun was loaded and it was lying right up by the windshield of the driver’s seat. I heard somebody talking on a CB, and I laid the gun down on the hood of the car [and got back in]. I wanted to listen because it sounded like an emergency call. I wanted to see what happened. And when I sat down in the car, the gun fell off the fender—and it went off.”
    “Where was your wife when it went off?”
    “About ten feet in front of it.”
    “Where did it hit her?”
    “It hit her in the head. I got scared.”
    “You drug her body down through the weeds?”
    “I knew she was dead.”
    “Normally, when you’re hit in the head with a thirty-eight, you’re dead. No question about it,” McCoy said drily.
    “I just panicked and drug her off into the side—and I left.”
    Nick said he at first meant to go to Nenana and find a trooper and tell him what had happened, but he was “really scared” that he would not be believed. So he threw Vickie’s purse out of his car window and headed toward Healy.
    The second tape ended. Once more, the troopers read Nick his rights, and he said he knew he could have an attorney—but he waived his rights to one.
    With a new tape rolling, the four men studied the map of the area where Vickie’s body was found, but Nick wasn’t able to remember just where he had thrown her purse away.
    “Why didn’t you contact me, Nick?” Brad Brown asked.
    “Like I said before, Brad, I was scared. I’m still scared.”
    And he was still lying, too. Asked if his car was running when the gun slid off the fender, he said it was.
    “Did you see her hit the ground?” McCoy asked.
    “No—I heard it. By the time I saw her, she was on the ground. From the way she was laying [
sic
], she looked like she had spun around. It was a distance within five feet.”
    But he had told them Vickie was ten feet away from him. And Nick had overlooked other elements that would pin him to the wall.
    “Nick, you’re lying to me,” McCoy said. “Are you familiar with hand guns? I want to explain a couple of things to