Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

In the interrogation room, Lily Hayes looked even paler than the day Eduardo first saw her; her fingers were spread out on the table in a gesture of bald terror, and her hair did not appear to be entirely clean. She did seem very young—but Katy Kellers had been young, too, and Eduardo’s empathy for her was not contingent on age. Neither was it contingent on her guilt or innocence. He was going to be as clear and kind as the situation allowed. This was only humane. He sat down.

“Quien es usted?” she said.

“Eduardo Campos,” he said. He did not extend his hand, because he didn’t want to be patronizing. For the same reason, he did not switch to English. “I’m the fiscal de cámara, a representative of the investigative magistrate. My job is to help decide whether there’s enough evidence against you to bring you to a criminal trial. I have ten days to make that determination, starting from today. I’ll make my assessment and issue a recommendation to the instructor judge as to whether we should continue our case against you. In the eventuality that your case is brought before the criminal court, I’ll argue the state’s case alongside the instructor judge. It will be heard by a panel of three judges, who will determine your guilt or innocence. Has all of this been explained to you?”

He saw her pause, unsure whether to admit she had no idea what was going on.

“Yes,” she said carefully.

“This is your judicial interrogation. You understand that you don’t have to talk to me?”

“Yes,” she said, more confidently. Eduardo flashed to an image of the unthinkable cartwheel this girl had done during her initial questioning; he saw her starfishing her way across the interrogation room under the cold light of the camera. “Why can’t my dad bail me out?” she said.

“Bail has to do with the seriousness of the crime, not the evidence against the accused. Do you have any other questions for me?”

She did not, but Eduardo had a few for her. He spent the first twenty minutes asking for factual information he already knew—Lily Hayes’s full name, her date of birth, her reason for being in Buenos Aires. (“I thought it would be an interesting place to study abroad,” she’d said. “And has it been?” She’d laughed a harsh, unbecoming laugh.) These were the equivalent of lie tests on a psych battery or polygraph. He asked her to go through the day of the murder minute by minute, in order to catch deviations from the account she gave to police; he then asked her to repeat it four more times, in order to catch variations between accounts. Certain variations were suspicious, of course, but then so was no variation at all. Lily Hayes was chewing a strand of hair, he noted, which was intriguing. It was a strange, careless thing to do—it was vulgar, really, and he wasn’t sure he could remember seeing anybody over the age of about seven do it—and it was interesting to him that she felt comfortable engaging in such an activity in this, one of the most important formal conversations of her life. At the forty-five-minute mark, Eduardo began asking the real questions.

“So,” he said. “I understand you felt that Katy was insipid.”

At this, Lily looked green and appalled. “Where did you hear that?”

Some prosecutors wouldn’t tell her, in order to make her wonder who among her friends might not be on her side. They’d want to make her understand that the days when she could expect answers were over; that avenues to comprehension were charities now, to be dispensed or withheld at their whim. These kinds of prosecutors would want to build up the breathy edginess of paranoia, that bewildered lost-in-the-woods-at-night disorientation that makes someone look for any sort of beacon or semaphore. Paranoia in a defendant was a great asset for a prosecutor, it was generally thought. But Eduardo did not like to withhold answers. Partly, it offended his sense of fair play. And partly, he disagreed with the strategy. He felt that giving defendants a false sense of marginal competence—a slight idea of where they stood in relation to the world—made them relax just enough to make a mistake, if there were any mistakes to be made (which, of course, he never assumed that there were).

“An email you wrote,” he said.

“I see.”

“Do you remember who you wrote that email to?”

“No.”

“So it could have been any number of people, then?”

Lily said nothing. Eduardo pretended to look at his notes. “When you said she was insipid,” said Eduardo, “did you mean she was ‘lacking in qualities that interest, stimulate, or challenge’?”

“I mean—yes, I suppose so. Yeah.”

“Was there anything in particular you found especially insipid about the victim?”

There was really no need to refer to Katy as the “victim” just now—though it was how Eduardo would refer to her in court, of course, to remind the three judges (over and over and over) that the dead girl, in stark contrast to the living girl in front of them, was dead. But it was best to get in the habit early.

“I don’t know,” said Lily.

“Her reading tastes, perhaps? Her vocabulary?”

“I guess so.”

“Do you consider yourself a smart woman?” said Eduardo. This language, too, was intentional. In public, in the courts, Eduardo would refer to Katy as a “girl” and Lily as a “woman,” whenever he wasn’t referring to them as “victim” and “defendant,” even though Lily was, in fact, three and a half months younger than Katy had been when she died. This was, again, just good sense. You could subtly direct the judges toward the truth through small adornments and pressures and omissions; Eduardo would never deviate from the facts, of course, but there was nothing wrong with using words with slightly different connotations in order to illuminate the reality of a situation. Who could deny that the differing designations reflected an emotional veracity, if not a biological one? You looked at Lily—leaving aside questions of guilt or innocence—and you saw her callousness, and her emotional remoteness, and her sexual experience, and you knew you were dealing with an adult. And then there was the small matter that Lily would grow up, in prison or out, and Katy would always be a girl and would always be dead.

“What?”

“It’s a simple question.”

“I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

“Is it fair to say you thought were you smarter than the victim?”

“Is it fair to say you think you’re smarter than me?”

Eduardo put down his notepad and raised his eyebrows. Lily’s face was flushed; he could tell that she was slightly surprised, but also slightly pleased, at what she had said.

“I would not presume that,” he said firmly, and lifted his notepad again. “Insipidness aside, there were a lot of other things you didn’t like about Katy Kellers.”

“That’s not true.”

“Let me remind you of some of the things you didn’t like about her, according to emails you sent during the month of January alone: her hair, her name, her teeth—”

“I loved her teeth!”

“ ‘They were not the teeth of a serious person,’ according to a Facebook message you wrote to your friend Callie Meyers on January seventeenth, 2011.”

“I liked her teeth. I wanted teeth like that.”

“Do you think Katy ever had to have braces?”

“I don’t know.”

“She never had braces. They were just naturally straight.”

Lily stared at him.

“You had to have braces, didn’t you?” said Eduardo. “I understand you had them into college. I understand you had to visit home on weekends for orthodontic follow-up.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

“We’ll move on. Tell me about your relationship with Sebastien LeCompte.”