Now he walked down the long expanse of open room behind the counter in the main room of the Hollman police station and poked his head into Kyle Borden’s office. Kyle was sitting at his desk, surrounded by state police, a frown on his face. On the desk in front of him, he had a legal-sized sheet of paper covered with lines and arrows in black marker. Gregor had written it out for him to make sure he understood just what had happened when and that he could explain it. It wasn’t clear that this had actually worked. Kyle looked worried. The state police looked confused.
They all looked up when Gregor stuck his head in the office door, and Kyle immediately relaxed.
“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been trying to explain this, but I think I keep getting bogged down in details. You want to tell them what you told me?”
“What I really want to do is call Bennis and have her come get me. She must be somewhere I can get in touch with her.”
“I’ll have Sharon call Ms. Hannaford. You sit down and explain things.”
Kyle left the office, but Gregor didn’t sit down. Peggy Smith Kennedy was downstairs, locked up in one of the town’s only two jail cells, but Gregor didn’t know how long that would last. Mrs. Kennedy was entitled to a lawyer. As soon as they got into court, she would get one, and that would almost assuredly mean bail. Gregor wondered what a judge would make of a prosecution move to deny bail on the grounds of wife battering—of Peggy Smith Kennedy being a battered wife. Because, assuredly, if that woman was allowed to go home, her husband would try as hard as he could to kill her long before the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania got a chance.
Kyle came back. “I found her. She wants to talk to you, too. She asked if it was okay for Elizabeth Toliver to leave town, and I said yes. It’s okay, isn’t it? You’re not going to have us arrest her, too?”
“No,” Gregor said. “You may need her to testify to something or the other about what went on at the Toliver house on the day the dog was found or the day that the body of Chris Inglerod Barr was found, but if you can manage to keep Mr. Kennedy away from Mrs. Kennedy, that may not be necessary.”
“Why not?” one of the state police asked.
“Because,” Gregor said, “I’m fairly sure she’ll be more than happy to enter a plea as long as the sentence tops out at, say, twenty years. The issue, for her, is not going to be taking the biggest possible risk to see if she can get off without any penalty at all. It might be if she were willing to let an attorney wage a battered woman defense—”
“Wait,” Kyle said. “I thought those were about women who kill the men who beat them, not about how they kill somebody else because their husbands beat them.”
“Actually,” Gregor said, “defense attorneys have taken both tacks. There was the Joel Steinberg case, with the child in New York who was battered to death, and the woman involved, Hedda Nussbaum, I think, her defense was that she took part in the abuse of her adopted daughter because she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because her husband beat her. Except that I don’t think he was her husband. I think they’d been living together a long time, but that they’d never made it legal.”
“So, did the jury buy it?” the other state trooper said. “Did this Hedda what’s-her-name get off because her husband beat her?”
“No,” Gregor said. “But defense attorneys try the tack every once in a while. I was thinking about Karla Faye Tucker just a minute ago. Her case was like that. On drugs, battered and pathologically dependent on her boyfriend.”
“It didn’t help her, either,” Kyle pointed out.
“No, it didn’t,” Gregor said. “And Mrs. Kennedy’s case is different, because in all those other cases the man was present at the violence and took part in it. In a way it was a kind of sex. I’ve always wondered about those cases, if the man sees something in the woman so that some part of him knows all along that she’s attracted to the blood and the pain and the violence, or if she’s normal enough when she enters the relationship, and then—I don’t know. Gets addicted to the man? Gets addicted to the sensation? You’ve got to wonder how it all starts, what she thinks the first time he goes violent, not against her but against somebody else. There’s got to be some kind of psychological progression. I don’t know if anybody understands what it is.”
“But that isn’t what happened in this case, is it?” Kyle asked. “Stu wasn’t there when she killed Chris Inglerod. He wasn’t there when she attacked Emma, either. She was on her own.”