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But when I got there, the chaos that followed Chris’s death was still waiting for me. Friends and family filled every room, neighbors kept knocking on the door delivering their sympathies. And the press was back in force, still refusing to take no for an answer about my doing an interview.

  Finally, I agreed to let the Austin newspaper take a picture of me sitting in the backyard. They agreed that if I did that, they would leave me alone, at least for a while. I was desperate to be given some space.

  I recall thinking that it seemed so unnatural to be asked to pose for a photo solely because something terrible had happened to someone I loved. I sat down in the backyard on the deck I had built for Chris, next to the table where we had shared so many meals, and marveled grimly at the unique awfulness of the moment. I felt both cornered and abandoned, heartbroken and wearing a brave face, angry with the police and totally dependent on them. I appreciated everyone who was trying to help me and fervently wished they would all go away. My stomach growled with hunger and I had no interest in eating. I was dead tired, but when I closed my eyes, I began reliving the past few grinding days, one tragic detail at a time. And I was still worried sick about our son.

  Now I had the further distraction of a stranger standing in our yard, snapping pictures of me as I sat there in the heat, the constant shutter clicks punching through the drone of the air conditioner and the buzz of hungry mosquitoes. I thought at the time that the picture would be simply a snapshot of one man’s grief. The police, the press—and eventually the Williamson County prosecutor—would look at the picture of me and see something else entirely.

  They saw a portrait of guilt.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Three friends of mine arrived at our home to escort me to the polygraph test. They were all husbands and fathers, men with wives and lives and jobs, but since Chris’s murder, they regularly dropped everything to drive me to and from places I didn’t want to be. Now they were here to pick me up for what I thought would be a breakthrough appointment with the sheriff. I was right, but as with everything else in the past few days, it turned out differently than I had expected.

  Bone weary, I was poured into their car and they drove me back to the now familiar sheriff’s office. We got there, as instructed, at 6:00 P.M. But as soon as we arrived, the agenda changed.

  The sheriff announced that I would be riding with him to the Department of Public Safety headquarters in Austin, miles and miles out of the way. We could have saved so much time by just meeting the sheriff at the DPS offices. When I told my friends we had to head back in the direction we had come from, I could see they were perplexed. But they hadn’t been watching the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office at work, as I had. This latest twist was a perfect example of my frustration with the sheriff and his team. Everything was more difficult than it needed to be. Everything about their operation seemed dysfunctional. And I couldn’t tell if it was malice or incompetence that led to these kinds of decisions.

  All I could do was grit my teeth and march forward.

  Our caravan pulled in behind the DPS office at almost 7:00 P.M. There were a handful of deputies on hand, along with Sergeant Wood, all led by the imposing sheriff. My trio of friends and I brought up the rear. Our two posses headed for the now empty building’s back door, only to find it locked. We tried another door. It, too, was locked up tight. Finally, through a series of trials and errors, we were able to get inside and found ourselves in a long, nondescript corridor.

  That was followed by another empty hallway, and then another. We climbed the stairs and tramped down at least two more empty corridors. I was hopelessly lost, and I was beginning to think the sheriff was, too.

  The linoleum floors had been buffed to a high gloss, and the sound of our small army of feet reverberated as if we were giants. Every door we passed was closed. Many were labeled with indecipherable acronyms, cop speak and state seals. We were in the bowels of a massive bureaucratic beast, and no one was home.

  The sheriff stopped at a door and tried the knob. Locked. He knocked. No answer. And then we were off again, down more empty halls, past more empty offices, trying more locked doors. The sheriff wouldn’t even look at me, and I thought he must have been embarrassed. If the moment hadn’t been so sad and frustrating and deadly serious, it would have been funny.

  Finally, a voice called out from down the hall. It was the polygraph examiner, who apologized for being late. He pulled a tangle of keys out of his pocket and unlocked one of the dull, unmarked doors.

  Sheriff Boutwell told my friends to wait in the outer office. I followed him and the examiner, along with the deputies, into another room. Boutwell and the examiner whispered in one corner while the deputies gave me looks they must have reserved only for the guilty.

  Next, the sheriff ordered the deputies to remove me so he could share the details of the case with the polygraph operator. I sighed and trudged into the next room. My friends weren’t there, but there was a table and a chair. Sitting down, I told myself that I could endure this last test. I had to do this. If Chris’s killer was ever going to be caught, I had to get this out of the way, no matter how tired, frustrated, and upset I was.

  By now, it was clear—even to me—that I was very much a murder suspect.

  I laid my head down on the table, and despite the hard surface and the rough treatment—despite all my angst and anger—I fell asleep immediately. When they woke me, it was well after 8:00 P.M. Finally, I could take the polygraph and go home.

  I followed the examiner into a tiny room, where he sat down at a little desk, his old-style machine at his side. I sat in front of him but facing the opposite way, so he was looking at my back. I was staring into a large mirror on the opposite wall. As the examiner droned on about how the polygraph worked, I realized that Sheriff Boutwell, Sergeant Wood, and God knows who else were sitting on the other side of the mirror.

  The examiner began asking questions—had I had any alcohol? Was I fatigued? Lack of sleep could skew the results. Was I taking drugs? I told him I was ready and that I just wanted to get this over with so the police could find the person who killed Chris, so I could go home and be with my boy.

  That’s when he told me that I shouldn’t expect to be headed home until well after midnight.

  The sheriff had told me to be there at 6:00 P.M. and I had been. But he had blown the deadline. I was sick of his incompetence. I was sick of Sergeant Wood’s foolishness. I was sick of not seeing Eric. I was heartbroken about Chris’s death. I wanted to be with my family. I wanted them to find the killer.

  I had simply reached my limit. I told them I wasn’t going to take any test that night. They would have to reschedule.

  Instantly, the sheriff and Sergeant Wood came tumbling out of the adjacent room, the ruse of the two-way mirror totally abandoned. Boutwell was incensed. He said that the examiner had come in after hours as a personal favor, that he was very busy, that rescheduling would be next to impossible. He pleaded with me to reconsider.

  But nothing he said mattered to me. I was tired of his swagger, his gun belts, and his bravado. I was tired of his cowboy hat. I was tired of the unprofessionalism, of always having to make allowances for what he needed. I was tired of him treating me as if I had killed Chris.

  And on top of everything else, I was just tired.

  I left with my friends. And after that night, everything changed. I did not realize it, but my late-night refusal to take a polygraph hit the reset button on the investigation.

  A few days later, I was notified that I would have to go to probate court because Chris had no will. Neither did I. We were both young and healthy and thought we would live forever.

  I called a lawyer friend to talk about probate, and he suggested a day for me to stop by his office. When I told him that I couldn’t make that appointment because I was taking the rescheduled polygraph test with the sheriff’s office—as it turned out it had been perfectly easy to
reschedule—he went ballistic. He told me probate court could wait, that what I needed right now was a criminal defense lawyer. He wanted me to see two friends of his—Bill White and Bill Allison.

  Up until that point, no one in my life had ever needed a criminal defense attorney for any reason. I didn’t know any defense attorneys and had no idea where to start looking, so the advice from my friend was a godsend. Very soon, I found myself standing outside the office of White and Allison in central Austin.

  Bill White and Bill Allison—or the two Bills, as they were sometimes called—complemented each other well. White was quick on his feet, street-smart, and had an uncanny ability to connect with people instantly and intimately. He had been a prosecutor in Travis County some years before and knew more about the ups and downs of criminal court than anyone. He inspired confidence in me, at least in part because he drove a beautiful new Porsche. I thought he must be good to afford that car.

  Bill Allison could not have been more different. Well over six feet tall, he was thin as a young sapling and sported a massive mustache. He spoke slowly and thoughtfully, and each of his comments was delivered with a world-weary authority. Most important, I immediately got the sense that he cared about me, that what happened to me mattered to him personally. I would learn in the days ahead that Allison’s heart was outshone only by his intellect.

  Together, they were brilliant, accomplished, and eager to help.

  “Never talk to the police again,” Bill White told me. “We will do that. It’s our job, not yours.”

  That was just fine with me.

  The more we talked, the clearer it became how far out of my depth I had been. Allison told me, “I’m going to cancel your polygraph tests with the sheriff. You can take a couple from independent examiners first.”

  What White said next was sobering. “I don’t know if you know this, but no one’s passed a polygraph test at DPS in the last five years.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Chris was being buried in Houston—about 160 miles from our home in Austin—because her family still lived there. It seemed to give them some small peace to know that their girl would always be close by. And frankly, I wasn’t sure where Eric and I would be in the years ahead.

  I didn’t know if, as a struggling single dad, I would keep my job, our house, or our plans for Eric’s future. Chris had wanted him to grow up in a house on a Texas lake, a place where he would learn to swim and fish and feel at home with the water. Now, the oppressive summer temperatures and the tragedy that would be forever linked with Texas were driving me away from the place I had planned to live out my life.

  But before I could make any decisions about Eric’s and my future, I had to say good-bye to Chris.

  As I trudged across the funeral home’s asphalt parking lot, heat waves rising around my feet, I knew exactly why I was there. I needed to see her. I needed no proof of her death, but I needed something tangible, some moment that allowed me to let her go, something—anything—that would force me to concede to myself that Chris was never coming back, something that would help me figure out how Eric and I could begin moving on.

  I stepped inside, and everything became soft and serious and terribly sad. Even the music seemed to whimper from the ever-present speakers. The funeral director—all obsequious concern and carefully practiced grief—met me just outside his office. When I told him I wanted to see my wife, I could tell that he had not been prepared for the request. He fumbled the moment, letting his discomfort show. The man’s lack of finesse told me in an instant everything I feared most—that seeing Chris’s body was going to be even harder than I’d imagined.

  He said she would be ready in five minutes and silently swept out of the room, leaving me alone in the place where so many people had mourned. I was struck most by the way it smelled. The scent of flowers, of photosynthesis itself, was overwhelming. Packed with plants and blossoms, mossy baskets and massive floral sprays, rich, oxygenated air filled the rooms, as if the building that hosted so much death was simultaneously—and ironically—bursting with life. I had never before, and have never since, smelled anything like it.

  Double doors off to one side opened quietly, and the funeral director motioned for me to come forward, then stepped aside so I could enter. I passed him, and as I walked into the dimly lit chamber, I heard him scurry away behind me.

  I was alone at the back of an empty room, looking at my wife’s steely gray coffin. It sat open at the front with rows of upholstered chairs lined up to face it. The setting felt like a small church that had been deserted by a fleeing congregation, the music left playing, the seats of the chairs still warm.

  I gathered myself and began the long, painful walk to my wife’s body.

  As I got closer, I could see deeper inside the coffin. I couldn’t see Chris yet, but I saw the creamy silk fabric that surrounded her, the handles on the side of the casket that would help us carry her to her grave, the curves of the huge box that held her. I knew that, if I kept walking, I would see her any second.

  Flinching, I veered hard to the right. I wasn’t ready. Standing at the foot of her casket, I swallowed the lump in my throat and thought about how much I loved her, how much I needed to be with her. I knew it was going to be horrific. I knew it was going to hurt. I knew I was going to see something I would never be able to forget.

  I stood for what seemed like a long while, staring at the foot of the casket—then I began inching closer. First, I saw and recognized long strands of her beautiful hair. I saw her soft hands folded with serenity and grace—her familiar chest, where Eric had so often fallen asleep. My eyes sought her face. I needed to see her.

  What had been her head came into view.

  I had been through so much in the past few days—being told she had been killed, seeing the evidence in our bedroom of how brutally she had died, holding our sobbing son, all the while fearing that he had witnessed his mother’s murder—nothing, none of it, came close to preparing me for seeing firsthand what the killer had done to my beautiful wife.

  Her body was bloodless, and the violence that had taken her was far, far away. But even cradled in silk and dressed in her best, with her hair combed and her hands delicately clasped, the savagery of the attack that took Chris’s life was shockingly evident. It looked as though her skull had been crushed, shattered, collapsed—left concave by repeated blows. The funeral home had clearly tried to put her back together. But their efforts had failed tragically, leaving my beautiful, beautiful Chris looking as if someone had partially inflated a balloon inside her head—offering only a cruel and grotesque semblance of who she had been and what she had looked like.

  I lost my hearing.

  The roar of what sounded like escaping steam filled my brain. My eyes watered, and I couldn’t see; my breathing came in gasps. It seemed as though the room had tilted, that I was running uphill as I bolted for the door. My senses were under siege, and in response, they seemed to shut down.

  When I reached the outdoors, I noticed no difference between the heavily air-conditioned funeral home and the blistering August heat. I sensed that the funeral director was behind me, rushing toward me, maybe even extending his arms to help me. It didn’t matter. I was beyond reach—no one could have calmed me, no hug from a stranger could heal me. I was as broken on the inside as Chris was on the outside.

  She was gone—truly gone—and, finally, so was all the psychological endurance that was left in me.

  Yanking the car door open, I fell inside. I remember cranking the engine frantically, desperately trying to turn the air conditioner on. In seconds, it was blowing full blast, right into my face, but I didn’t feel a thing. All I could sense was a growing homicidal rage—a blood-red anger that built in my heart and moved to my hands, that stretched to my head and drenched my hair, that finally flooded each cell and changed every bit of me that it touched.

  It consumed me.


  Right there, in my simmering car in the funeral home parking lot, all by myself in a city I didn’t know, I was certain beyond any doubt of what I was going to do. And it didn’t matter if it happened in broad daylight, with hundreds of witnesses.

  I was going to kill the man who murdered Chris.

  On a trip to Houston years before, I had purchased a shotgun at a big gun shop that I remembered as being nearby. In reality, I had no sense of where it was. I was lost, geographically and emotionally, with no map to help me find my way home.

  I peeled out of the funeral home parking lot, dead set on replacing the pistol that had been stolen from our home by Chris’s killer. I was going to find that gun shop and buy a large-caliber pistol, a big weapon that would tear apart the man who tore apart my family.

  My breathing was still shallow and uneven. My face felt warm despite the waves of icy air flowing from the car vents. But my hearing was beginning to return, and slowly, the sounds of the traffic around me started to register. It became clear that my impressions of where the gun shop was were vague at best. With each passing mile, I realized that I didn’t know where I was going—and I didn’t know who had killed Chris and I didn’t know why and I didn’t understand anything and I knew I had nowhere to turn—and that my chance of finding the target of my rage was even slimmer than the chance I had of finding the gun shop.

  My breathing began to return to normal. And eventually, so did my thinking.

  I pulled to the side of the road, lowered my head, and wept in frustration and pain and utter hopelessness—finally letting my tears go, finally letting my wife go.

  Eventually, I pulled myself together—exhausted, humiliated, brokenhearted. I began the drive to my in-laws’ house to see Eric, to be with the people who loved Chris, and to prepare myself for the funeral.

  When I arrived, I found Chris’s family feeling as lost as I was. I so wanted to be included in their grief. I wanted to be with them, to hold someone who shared Chris’s DNA, who loved her the way I did. Sadly, it seemed that Sheriff Boutwell’s heavy-handed tactics had already succeeded in pulling us apart.