Fatal Vision Read online

  "If we can drift back again," Ivory said, "you say during the initial assault you heard screams. Were they just screams or were they—"

  "Words?"

  "Yeah."

  "Yeah."

  "Like what?"

  "Ah, my wife was, ah, saying ah—" he cleared his throat. " 'Jeff, why are they doing this to me?' " "Were you still on the couch then?" "Right."

  "Did these screams continue, or did they cut out?"

  "I, ah—I don't know, they asked me in the hospital and I don't, ah—I can't, you know—I don't remember any cutoff time specifically. They could or could not have continued, you know, while I was wrestling. I really don't remember, once this—really, the struggle was on. I remember sitting up and hearing them. I remember hearing my wife say, you know, 'Jeff, Jeff, why are they doing this to me? Help me.' I heard her screaming and I think I heard Kristy—Kimmy, the older girl, said, 'Daddy' —saying, 'Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.' "

  "You fought your way to the entrance to the hallway?"

  "Yeah, you asked me that fifteen times. Right."

  "Could you see down the hallway? Did you see anything going on down at the end of the hallway?"

  "No."

  "What lights were on in the house?" Shaw asked. "Kitchen light?"

  "Kitchen light was on. I left that on. And usually, we left the—the bathroom light on—the big bathroom in the hallway, so it's shining—so the hallway was a little lit for the kids. And that was—I think that was on, too—when they woke up in the night, and—''

  "You said when you woke up you could see your wife," Shaw said.

  "Well, I could see—yeah." "You could see in there?" "Right."

  "You could see your wife. Was that because the light was on in there?"

  "Well, I—I didn't say that I could see my wife when I woke up."

  "Well, again, I'm not—I'm not—" "No."

  "—snapshooting. I just want to know."

  "When I woke up, the first thing I thought of was—you know, I'm ashamed to say—myself. I mean, when I woke up I said, 'Christ, I'm going into shock.' And then I realized that everything was quiet and I started—you know, I started to remember that I heard screaming, so I was—I really didn't even like look ahead. I—I went into the bedroom and then I saw my wife.

  "In other words, I didn't lay on the floor and look up, if that's what you mean, and see her. I remember, as I got up—I was lying there and I was thinking, 'Christ, I'm going into shock.' And—see, that's the first thing that hits—hits me when I was chilling. You know, my teeth were actually—literally chattering. And the light was on, and—it isn't real bright when just the bathroom light is on.

  "Now, at the hospital they told me these shakes and chills— they weren't from shock. So it must have been from the temperature. It must have cooled off, that's all I can tell you. You know, when I go over it in my own mind, it must have taken a long time for me to get the shakes and chills. My teeth were chattering, and that's a real chill, you know, in contrast to people when they say they're chilly. So if I wasn't in shock, the only thing I can say is—I have worked it over six million times—is that it must have been cold in that hall there and I was just cold from the cold."

  "You think it was from the door being open?" Shaw asked.

  "Right. That's what I mean."

  "It was real warm when we got there," Shaw remarked.

  "Oh," MacDonald said. "Jesus, I don't—well, the heat's always on. We just turn some of the radiators off if it gets too hot."

  "Okay, this is the point," Shaw said. "You woke up, Captain MacDonald, while you were still on your living room couch, and you saw four people and you heard your wife somewhere."

  "Right."

  "You heard your daughter, right?"

  "Right. This is what I, ah—this is what I can't figure out. Now, I've gone over this hundreds of times in my own mind, you know. Literally, all night long, many nights, and I—I don't—there's so many unanswered questions to me. If they—I assume they came in that back door. They had to come through there. You know, through my wife's bedroom—our bedroom. And I don't understand why, you know, by the time they got to me, that I still heard screaming. Or were there more people involved than four?"

  "Four people are a lot of people," Shaw said. "Four strangers—'' "I know."

  "—in a house your size are a lot of people."

  "I know."

  "There should be—"

  "I know." MacDonald laughed.

  Shaw did not laugh. "In my experience," he said, "and in his experience," pointing to Grebner, "and his," pointing to Ivory, "there should be a mess in your house. Not—"

  "Right."

  "There should be busted furniture and broken mirrors and bashed-in walls, and—"

  "Oh, well—you people have more experience than I have," MacDonald said, "but I wouldn't normally—I mean, I wouldn't necessarily expect that. If someone is attacked when they're sleeping, I—you know, you might not get broken—"

  "There aren't things out of place."

  "Well, I don't know. What—"

  "Does this suggest anything to you? Like maybe this group of people—"

  "Knew the inside of the house? Or, yeah, were being careful, sure."

  "Can you give us any better description of these people that you saw?" Shaw continued.

  "I wish I had a Polaroid. You know, this—all I can say is everyone seemed moderate height. You know, this is ridiculous, I know, to you, but everyone seemed normal height. I don't really remember anything distinctive. I don't remember long hair on these people, and this is a little hard for me to figure out. If they were on, you know, LSD, or something, they're supposed to be hippies. They're not always. I mean, I've seen a lot of clean-cut Special Forces guys."

  4'How do hippies react?" Shaw asked. "Not hippies but people. How do people react when they are under the influence of LSD?"

  "Well, anybody—"

  "Are they capable of carrying out something like this? Coming to your house, out of all these other houses—"

  "Well, now you're getting—now, see, you're getting to why they came to my house. If they—"

  "Well, I'm not interested in why they came to your house, just for the moment. Let's say it was a matter of fate, okay?"

  "All right."

  "It had to be some house*."

  "Right." -**

  "Why not yours? Why not—"

  "Right. Okay. All right. In other words, can they do this?"

  "Can they carry this out, all this business?"

  "I've seen many patients that I felt were—now, you don't always know what they've taken."

  "Well, let's say LSD for the moment."

  "Okay. Well, again, now a person will come in the emergency room and say he's taken LSD, and he's having an acute anxiety reaction, paranoid, and he's, you know, seeing people that he's afraid of, or anything. That could be LSD, it could be speed, it could be mesc—you know, any of the—any of this amphetamine-type things—or mescaline. And very often the kids don't know what they've taken, so you have no way of knowing. But they always say LSD.

  "Like I treated one two nights ago at Cape Fear and this guy was—not two nights ago—last week, and this guy was capable of anything, I'm sure. He was extremely agitated and wild, and all you had to do was move and, you know, he'd jump up and he was very paranoid. You know, people were attacking him and he had to defend himself."

  "Do most—okay, let's branch away from that for just a minute," Shaw said. "The people that are taking amphetamines, uppers—''

  "Right."

  "We've got four of them now that we know about in your house. They're on something, we think. This girl was talking about acid—"

  "Right, LSD, right."

  "It could be, as you say, anything. Could be even peyote buttons, for all we know, right?"

  "Right. Well, I don't know what that means. They'll—yeah, Tve heard about them."

  "They're excited, they're doing something that's emotionally
exciting to them. They'd be jumping around wild, wouldn't they? There'd be a lot of hyperaction here. Is this correct?"

  "Yeah, you—most of the—I agree with you: Most of the people I've seen on these drugs, you know, they don't—they're not steady and cool by any means. Usually, they're paranoid and anxious and—"

  "When they do something, it's sort of in a frenzied kind of way, isn't it?"

  "Well, I don't know. That's kind of a—I don't know."

  "The other problem I have," Shaw said, "is a motive." "Right."

  "We've got to establish a motive for this thing and I don't see one. There's nothing even missing from your house—not even vandalism."

  "Right."

  "Captain MacDonald, there's nothing missing. You have a lot of things in your home that people would like to steal." "They were nice. I know." "You have a lot of—a lot of drugs in your house." "I know." "Why?"

  "Oh, I just got something of everything in case anyone ever asks me. Johnny-on-the-spot, you know. Very often I'd suture people, and I took care of half the neighborhood, you know, and—nothing there was controlled. I was careful about that. I didn't have any controlled drugs or anything like that. Everything was stuff there wouldn't be any problem with and no one should be after for any reason. And I just had—like, for instance, if we were going to go on a camping trip, I was all ready to make up a nice little kit with—you know, all the possibilities involved. But that was the only reason.

  "All this came about when the Third Special Forces disbanded, and they had boxes and boxes of stuff they were just going to burn. And I thought that was stupid, so I just took a couple bottles of everything and was going to make up my own aid kit, you know, for my car, and camping and stuff. But I know it looked a little—a little excessive, I'm sure."

  "It looked more than a little excessive," Shaw said, glancing at a list which showed that, among many other drugs, syringes, and disposable scalpel blades, MacDonald's hall closet had contained eighteen fifty-milligram vials of liquid Thorazine—an anti-psychotic drug often used to sedate unruly mental patients. "It looked real excessive, frankly. I'm being frank with you as you're being frank with me, I hope."

  "Yeah, well—"

  "Were you sending these things to people?"

  "Just my mother, my in-laws. Diet pills, thyroid medicine, blood pressure pills."

  "Okay, were you sending anything to anybody around here that would suggest—"

  "Huh-uh," shaking his head to mean no.

  "Can you give us any help along this line at all?"

  "Geez, I wish I could. I just can't imagine that I've ever offended anyone enough—unless they're psychotic."

  "And then that one person commits at least three others to his cause."

  "At least. Right, right. Other people, and to—and to have no—no one break down, you know, no one come forth and feel bad or read the newspapers and say, 'Jesus, I know of,' you know, i know some people and I saw them Tuesday morning and they were all bloody,' or something. So 1 agree with you. I don't know. I'd sleep a little easier, I'll tell you that."

  "Captain MacDonald," Shaw continued, having decided to further quicken the inquiry's pace, "there are some other things we found in the house. Some other questioning we have. We'll present them to you, and if you can explain them, fine. If you can't, we'll just have to worry about that. But I want to get with you on this thing because this is—this like money in the bank to you. This is real important to you.

  "For example, let's start with one thing. This pajama top you were wearing, okay? We've taken this thing and we've examined it under laboratory conditions. We know what it's made of. We know what kind of fiber is in it. We know what kind of threads are in it."

  "Right."

  "Okay. Now, we have found fibers and threads in various places in the house. And one of the most puzzling things to me personally is that we found fibers from this jacket under Colette's body. Strung out under her body. And I'm interested in how they came to be there."

  "Shaken off? Or—I don't know. Maybe—do these things shed? Are they laying all around the house? I mean, I don't know. You mean they're big fibers?"

  "Yeah."

  "Not—"

  "Not microscopic."

  "Not a fuzz," Ivory interjected.

  "Not a fuzz?"

  "No," Shaw said. "Fibers and threads." "I don't know. I can't answer that."

  "All right," Shaw said, "moving along a little bit further with this thing, how does it happen that the pocket from this pajama top has a little bit of your wife's blood on it—very, very minute amount—but it's laying in the bedroom. The rest of it—the jacket—is soaked with her blood—"

  "I laid it—laid it over her."

  "And with Kimmy's blood. Now, how does that happen?" "Well, I'm sure I had blood all over my hands from everyone, when I was checking for pulses and stuff.'' "Yeah."

  "And, ah, when I went back to see my wife, I—I don't know how much, ah—Jesus, I don't know. If I had blood on my hands and I went back and touched, ah, this—this, ah, pajama top, could it have gotten on it from that way? I mean, I had blood all over me, you know. I mean I checked—I know I checked carotid pulses in everyone and I'm sure I got some blood on me from everyone. And I went back in to see my wife again."

  "Like I say, this is important to you," Shaw said, "and I want you to understand what we're talking about. We've got your pocket in one location and it had a couple of spots of blood on it—Colette's blood. The rest of the pajama top, including the area beneath where the pocket had been, is drenched with blood. But the pocket was way over in another part of the bedroom, away from Colette."

  "Could it have been torn off me, I mean in the struggle, and someone else dropped it?"

  "That's what we think—that it was torn off during the struggle. But we have to find a way to get it to the bedroom."

  "I don't know. Maybe someone, ah—maybe it was hanging on and when I walked in, it fell off. You know, I mean, I just, ah—there's a couple of ways I could picture it. Ummm, either— say that, when we were struggling, it was torn off—"

  "Okay, we'll say that."

  "—and the person on the way out the door dropped it. Is that possible?"

  "Well, anything is possible," Shaw said. "Right. Okay."

  "Some things are less possible."

  There was a short pause. Then Shaw said, "In addition, we found fibers from this jacket in Kristy's room and in Kimmy's room—both."

  "Holy Christ."

  "Again, I'm not snapshooting you now—" "No, I know."

  "—but you told us that you took this off in the master bedroom."

  "Right, well, now, how about my hands and stuff? Could it—could they be coming from my hands as I was taking it off and walking down the hall? I don't know. You know, when I—I mean, couldn't it have been attached to the hairs on my arm or something and, you know, ripped in the—in the struggle and fall off?"

  "Well," Ivory said, "we're not talking about a, say, stray thread or a fiber here and there. We're talking about a profusion."

  "Well, it doesn't make sense to me. A profusion, I don't know. All I can say is that—I don't know what this—you know, how ripped this jacket looks. I don't even remember it, to tell you the truth. I just remember taking it—taking it off my hands.

  "But if it was ripped up, it seems to me that threads could be on them and on me. It could have fallen on them. That's all I can honestly say."

  "Now, in addition to all this," Shaw said, confusing the names of MacDonald's two daughters, "we found a fiber from that jacket under Kimmy's fingernail, and it had blood on it, which would indicate somewhere she—"

  "Under Kimmy's?"

  "—she got her—"

  "I don't know. It's pretty obvious what you're ah—" MacDonald laughed. "I don't know."

  "Well," Shaw said, "this is why, Captain MacDonald, we've got these specific things we've got to talk about—"

  "Right."

  "—because you are the only
person who knows what happened in that house."

  "Listen, I know all about that, and, ah—look, ah, all—Jesus Christ. All I can say is that it seems to me these fibers in a struggle could have gotten on everyone, and I don't know. I—I mean, obviously, I wish—I can't give you the answers specifically. All I can do is make conjectures."

  Abruptly, Shaw shifted direction. "At any point during the night," he said, "during this checking of your family before the military police arrived, did you wear a pair of gloves?"

  "Did I wear a pair of gloves?"

  "Yeah. You."

  "Oh, yeah, to do the dishes." "What kind of gloves were they?"

  "She usually had two pairs laying there. A yellow, thick dish glove and—and a pair of my surgeon's gloves. I don't know which ones I used. I don't remember."

  "But did you use gloves to wash the dishes?"

  "Yeah."

  "Okay. After you realized—after you had been attacked yourself and you woke up and you realized that there had been harm done in this house did you wear gloves at any time?" : "No."

  "Not to take pulses or anything like that?" "No."

  "Okay. Well, we have a—we have a lack of blood in some places where there should be, Captain MacDonald, a lot of blood. There should be a lot of blood on the telephone in your bedroom and there should be a lot of blood on the telephone in your kitchen, but there isn't. The phone is down, it's off the hook, where's the blood? Did you wipe your hands off someplace?"