Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

And he was, like a lot of the real wife beaters, a great self-deluder.

And, perhaps, a great actor.

That morning I met him, he told me how he’d baptized Alice Hayward the day before and how he should have seen this coming from something she’d said when she came out of the water. I couldn’t decide whether he was overintellectualizing the fact that there was a dead woman in her nightgown on the floor and a dead guy with half a face on the couch, or whether he was so completely in shock that he was finding reasons to feel guilty himself. It wasn’t like he had strangled the woman. It wasn’t like he had shot the creep on the sofa.

Shows you what I know.

It was one of my associates, David Dennison, who first questioned what really had occurred at the Haywards’ the night they both died. David is the medical examiner. He’s tall and scholarly-looking, and his hair is almost translucently white. His eyes are sunken, a little sad even, but he’s a very funny guy. I’ve worked with three pathologists in two states, and I’ve learned that most MEs are pretty witty. I think if you’re going to do that for a living, you have to appreciate black humor. He’s also an excellent witness, and as a prosecutor I need that in an ME. Cop shows on TV have ruined me: I don’t dare put a dull guy on the stand if I want to keep a jury awake.

In addition, David is a total control freak, and I want that, too. I have seen him go up to a person at a crime scene who is clearly there for the first time and politely take their hands and put their fingers together as if they’re praying. The last thing he wants-the last thing any of us want-is for someone to accidentally screw up a key piece of evidence by touching it.

David didn’t say much to any of us that Monday morning we all converged on Haverill. His office is up in Burlington, a good two and a half hours away, but he got to the crime scene by lunchtime. Everyone from the village was either somber or stunned, but the few words I overheard him exchange with Drew were collegial and about as pleasant as one could hope for. Drew, like many of the people who eventually wind up as suspects, was very, very helpful. He told us lots about the Haywards-about both George and Alice. After all, he’d been providing some counsel for Alice. (That was actually what he said to me: “I offered her some counsel.” It was only later that we’d figure out that a hell of a lot of that “counsel” had been between the sheets.) And he was a real scrubber. He donned those rubber gloves and just went to town on the gore in one corner of the room. (In the days that followed, this also would strike me as a tad suspicious.) He was a cool customer, not the sort of person I would have expected to panic suddenly and flee.

In any case, it was David’s preliminary autopsy report that caused me to sit up in my office chair and reassess in my mind what had occurred. According to David, the cause of death for Alice was precisely what we all had assumed: strangulation. The manner was homicide. Aspects of George’s death, however, were a little murky: Though the cause was still that gunshot wound to the head, David had not cited the manner as suicide. Instead he had typed in that single word that would help trigger the whole investigation: pending . In his opinion there were factors in George’s death that left him wondering, and his report suggested that homicide was a possibility. In other words, it was conceivable that someone other than George had pulled the trigger of the gun that Sunday night-and, likewise, that someone other than George could have strangled Alice. It wasn’t likely, in that bits of George’s skin were under Alice’s fingernails and it was clear that she had scratched the hell out of his face. But people are bizarre. For a time I kept open the possibility that George and Alice had fought violently but it was a third (or fourth) person who had murdered Alice.

The first red flag for the ME was George Hayward’s head wound. When a person decides to put a bullet into his brain, he tends to press the barrel against the temple. At the hairline, usually. Or, if the gun is not actually touching the skin, it’s still pretty close: A suicide is either a contact or a near-contact wound. Besides, a person’s forearm is only so long; you really can’t aim a gun at your temple from a distance of greater than six or seven inches, and most suicides bring the gun a lot closer than that. The result is that most of the powder is driven into the skin and there is a dense deposit of soot. When a pathologist washes away that soot, he is likely to find abrasions and stippling, all those burning bits of powder embedding themselves into the flesh. The farther the gun is held from the bullet’s point of entry, the less pronounced those marks will be. In David’s opinion the bullet that killed George Hayward was certainly not a contact wound and-based on the negligible amounts of powder and stippling and soot-not even particularly close. The gun might have been fired from as much as a few feet away.

Second, there was the pattern of the blood and bone and brain that had sprayed the living room: the remains that people like the Reverend Drew and Alice’s best friend had cleaned up on the screen and the china cabinet, and had tried and failed to remove from the couch. David thought it was possible that the spatter was the result of a bullet pulverizing the skull in a suicide. But from the moment he had entered that room, he told me later, a part of him had wondered at the angle.

Finally there was George Hayward’s right hand. There was residue on it from the gunshot, but not a lot. And while no one puts a great deal of stock in gunshot residue these days, he still thought there might have been more if Hayward had indeed pulled the trigger. (The fact that there were traces meant nothing: In a small room, residue can be anywhere once a gun is discharged.)

Toxicology-the blood and urine tests-would take two or three weeks, but David suggested that a lot more could be inferred right now with another look at the gun. Just how severe was the blowback? Or, to be blunt, how much of the bastard’s brains were up the gun barrel? (Make no mistake: Though it seemed possible now that George Hayward was a murder victim, he was still a complete and total bastard.) David also suggested that after the weapon had been examined, someone in the crime lab should conduct a series of test fires with the same load to offer a baseline on the stippling it was likely to elicit. Once we did that, we could get a fairly precise sense of the distance the gun had been from Hayward’s temple.

Now, none of this would have led me to start wondering what sort of involvement Stephen Drew might have had with the deaths of either George or Alice Hayward if the guy hadn’t gotten out of Dodge the second the bodies had been shipped to New York and New Hampshire for burial. Had he stuck around, it might have taken considerably longer before any of us in the state’s attorney’s office would have turned our eyes upon the local pastor. One of my associates, for instance, conjectured that the murders might have been an attempt to cover up a robbery and the burglar had known of George’s history of domestic abuse. In other words, someone had murdered the pair of them and then made it look like it was George’s handiwork. And there was also the possibility this was all some sort of horrible thrill killing, not unlike the 2001 murders of two Dartmouth College professors in their own home: Perhaps someone had strangled Alice while George had watched and then offed him. But why make that look like something it wasn’t? And when the house once more was viewed as a crime scene and thoroughly investigated, there was no indication that anything had been stolen and no reason to believe that either of the Haywards or their teenage daughter had had some sort of secret life as a drug dealer.