04.Die.My.Love.2007 (19 page)

would later say he was disappointed when Piper told him they wouldn’t be able to work that Thursday and Friday. Yet he understood when she explained that she had a legal continuing education seminar to attend, in Fort Worth.

Everything seemed so calm that last week in October, 2004, so normal. Nothing seemed particularly out of the ordinary. But looking back, there was something, perhaps, that might have hinted at what was to come: Later, Mac told Charles that the Rountree sisters irritated him, listening over and over to one song on a CD Charles had given Piper, the same CD he’d played for her the day they bought the couches—k. d. lang’s
Hymns of the 49th Parallel.
The song that Piper and Tina played over and over was the same one Piper gravitated toward the first time she heard the CD: Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” with the verse:
Maybe there’s a God above,

But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.

It’s not a cry you hear at night
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light.

It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.

10

Darkness cloaked Hearthglow Lane on the morning of Saturday, October 30, 2004. At just after six two golden retrievers began a troubled, angry barking across the street and two houses down from the Jablin house hold. The dogs’ own er, groggy after being awakened from a deep sleep, wondered if a raccoon could be searching for garbage cans to topple, a breakfast of discards to claim. Bundled in her bathrobe, the heavyset woman walked the dogs to the back door and out onto the back deck. Once outside, as inexplica-bly as they began barking, the dogs stopped. Quiet restored, the woman retraced her steps, ordering the dogs back inside the house. With that, the woman locked the back door and returned to her bed.

Half an hour later, at 6:37 a.m., Bob and Doreen McArdle lay in bed awake on the second floor of their house, directly next door to the Jablin house, the windows open to air out the newly painted bedroom. Then, suddenly, three shots rang out through the streets of Kingsley, piercing the early morning silence. Bob, a gray-haired salesman for a consulting company, jumped from bed and ran to the open window. The bedroom overlooked the street, and he saw a shadowy fi gure—he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman—running left to right across his front lawn, from the same direction as the shots.

Wondering if the sound could have been from construction DIE, MY LOVE / 143

workers remodeling a house down the street or a teenager fi ring a gun in the woods, Bob fumbled for his glasses. No, he thought. McArdle was a former Marine, and to him it defi -

nitely sounded like gunshots, and it sounded closer than the woods.

Grabbing the phone, he dialed 911. “Someone just shot a gun off, and it sounded like it was close,” said Bob, a transplant from New York, in his Long Island accent.

“We have a squad car on its way,” the dispatcher said.

With that, Bob and Doreen, a petite woman with short tousled brown hair, roused from bed, grabbed robes and walked downstairs to wait for police. Within minutes they saw a squad car circulating through the street, pausing in front of their house and others, shining flashlights onto the darkness, illuminating lawns, driveways, and front doors of houses as they crept through the neighborhood. Bob waited, watching, until, ten minutes after his call, the squad car pulled up in front of his house.

“Find anything?” Bob asked when he opened the door.

“No.” Henrico County police officer Philip Maggi, a square-jawed man dressed in a blue-shirted uniform, shrugged. “Tell me what happened.”

Again, as he had to the dispatcher, Bob McArdle told of being in bed when he heard three gunshots. “It sounded like it came from somewhere down there,” he said, pointing to his left, down the street, in the direction of the Jablin house.

“Okay,” Maggi said. With that, he left, and the McArdles went back inside, and again watched the officers search. In the pitch-darkness, the police flashlights skimmed the street, the grass, the houses, throwing slim slivers of light. The day before Halloween the yards on Hearthglow were decorated for trick or treat. When the light from the fl ashlights illuminated leaf- bag pumpkins and wind-tossed scarecrows, it gave the street the look of an eerie tableau.

144 / Kathryn Casey

It was still black outside when, at 7:00 a.m., half an hour after he heard the shots, Bob answered the door a second time. “We didn’t find anything,” Officer Maggi said. That wasn’t unusual. Reports of sporadic shots fi red were relatively common, and often the source was never found.

“Okay,” Bob said. “Don’t worry about it. My wife and I are going for a walk with the dog. We’ll take a look around once it gets light. If we find anything, we’ll call you back.”

With that, the morning’s excitement appeared over. Maggi and his partner drove off in the squad car, and Bob and Doreen McArdle returned to their second-floor bedroom to dress for their morning dog-walking ritual.

At seven- fifteen, as the darkness lifted, the McArdles exited the house out their back door, with the dog on a leash, and walked out toward the street. It had rained the night before, and the wet street and grass glistened. The breeze was crisp and smelled of fall. Just as they walked in front of the Jablin house, another neighbor drove by and Bob waved to stop him. “Did you hear anything this morning?” he asked.

“Yeah,” the man said.

“Where did it come from?” Bob asked.

“Sounded like around here,” the man said.

It was then that Doreen glanced toward the Jablin house.

As the darkness faded and the sun crept upward over the horizon, she looked up the driveway’s incline, toward the level area near the house, and saw something crumpled on the driveway, below the family basketball hoop and next to Fred’s black 1999 Ford Explorer.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“That’s not anything,” the man said, before he drove off to the golf course, appearing worried about missing his tee time.

The two of them alone again, Bob wondered if what he saw could be something as innocent as a Halloween decoration, DIE, MY LOVE / 145

perhaps a scarecrow that had blown out of a front yard and onto the driveway.

“You’d better check and see what that is,” Doreen said, with a feeling of dread.

Holding the leash, his dog sauntering beside him, Bob walked up toward the garage and Fred’s Explorer, along the right side of the Jablin driveway. As he drew closer, he saw a figure with a bleached white face, paper-white ankles pro-truding from navy blue sweatpants, and too-white hands and wrists. The figure appeared starkly pale, as if bloodless.

What had been obscured by the darkness was now easily seen.

That’s no scarecrow, he thought.

Not wanting to, wishing he could turn around and leave, Bob cautiously walked closer. There was no mistaking what he’d found, who was lying there. His heart pounding, he turned back toward Doreen, who stood on the street holding her cell phone. “Call the cops back,” he shouted. “It’s Fred.”

At 7:25 a.m., less than an hour after they awoke to the crack of gunshots, Doreen dialed 911. This time she left no room for conjecture. “We found Fred Jablin, our neighbor, in his driveway,” she told the operator. “It looks like he’s dead.”

Within minutes Maggi and his partner roared back up Hearthglow Lane in their squad car. They ran from the car, and Doreen pointed toward where Bob stood. Maggi sprinted up the driveway and crouched beside the body, feeling for a pulse, finding none. Bob McArdle glanced around and noticed Fred Jablin’s eyeglasses, lying on the ground, as if they’d flown off as he fell.

Quickly the call went out: Police and an ambulance were needed at 1515 Hearthglow Lane. From that point on it seemed to the McArdles that time both stood still and sped up, as what they’d anticipated to be a relaxed Saturday morning took on an unnatural urgency. Squad cars and an 146 / Kathryn Casey

ambulance flooded the street, and offi cers strung crime scene tape across the front of the Jablin house. Bob McArdle saw an officer in his yard pointing at footprints in the wet grass, leading from the body in the driveway past his house.

“That’s where I saw someone running,” Bob told the offi -

cers. “Right after I heard the gunshots.”

By then paramedics had lifted Fred’s lifeless body onto a thick blue plastic backboard. They cut his blue sweatshirt up the front and peeled it back from his chest. When they rolled him over, they found a bloody hole in the back of his sweatshirt that lined up with a bullet wound in his lower back. His body was cool and still, yet they checked for a pulse. They found none. As the paramedics worked, police congregated outside the house, looking through the yard, searching the neighborhood. One paramedic injected heart-stimulating drugs into Fred, and another breathed into his lungs and pushed on his chest, administering CPR. It was too late.

Fred Jablin was dead.

Once on the scene, Sergeant George Russell began pointing to officers and issuing orders. A black-suited SWAT

team arrived after the McArdles and other neighbors warned that three unaccounted for children lived in the Jablin house.

Were they being held hostage? Was the gunman still close, watching from the trees, or inside the house with the children? No one knew.

Officer Robbie Reamer, a nineteen-year veteran with the force, who’d arrived on the scene early and was assigned to cordon off the street, was called back to the house and told he’d be going inside with the SWAT team, to find and if necessary rescue the Jablin children.

Later, Officer Reamer would remember entering the house that morning as if in snapshots, walking through the unlocked back door and into the kitchen, where he smelled DIE, MY LOVE / 147

the rich aroma of the coffee Fred had set to brew that morning still steaming in the pot. Carefully, the offi cers cleared each room, walking past the dining room table covered with the family photos Fred was organizing, and fi nally up the stairs to the bedrooms.

The first bedroom the officers approached was Jocelyn’s, but the door was locked. Seconds later they heard the door being unlocked, and the pretty teenager with her soft brown hair in her sleepy eyes emerged from her bedroom.

“We have to get you out of the house, come with me to the back door,” Reamer told her. He walked her down the steps to the door.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I can’t tell you now,” he answered. “You just need to get out of the house.”

At the back door, Reamer handed Jocelyn off to Maggi.

“Stay with this offi cer.”

“What’s going on?” she asked Maggi.

“We’ll explain later,” Maggi said.

“Make sure my brother, sister, and dad get out,” she said as Reamer walked away, grateful that the Explorer blocked the view of the body.

Back upstairs, the second team had moved into Callie’s room to wake her. They nudged the youngster several times.

She didn’t respond. For a moment Reamer feared the eight-year-old was hurt or dead, but then, gradually, her eyes opened. Again the question no one wanted to answer: “What’s going on?”

Reamer was the first into Paxton’s room, and shook him.

The twelve-year-old’s eyes opened wide, and he looked instantly frightened. “Come on, buddy,” Reamer said. “We have to get you out of the house.”

Paxton shook off sleep and saw Reamer in his police uniform and the other uniformed officers behind him.

“Okay,” he said.

148 / Kathryn Casey

With that, Reamer and the other officers escorted the two youngest children downstairs. Once there, all three children were hustled out onto the deck their father had built years earlier. Then they were directed to turn left, away from the driveway, the family’s black Explorer, and their dead father’s body. Officers lifted them over the split rail fence on the side of the house that led to the McArdles’ front yard, and rushed them toward a rescue vehicle waiting in the street.

When Henrico County investigator Coby Kelley arrived on the scene, Fred Jablin’s body still lay on the backboard, covered by a white sheet, and Jocelyn, Paxton, and Callie had been put in an ambulance and driven down the street, out of eyeshot of the house and the driveway.

In Homicide for nearly four years, Kelley was a broad-chested, six- foot- two- inch, thirty- two- year- old man with a short, military- style haircut. He’d grown up ten miles from the Jablin house and had become a cop for many reasons, not the least of which was that he enjoyed “sitting across from somebody and getting them to say things that would probably put them away for the rest of their lives.” An investigation, in his eyes, was a game, one with incredibly high stakes.

Despite his

case-hardened attitude, Kelley, who’d once wanted to be a lawyer, had a boyish look and an infectious enthusiasm for “the job,” as police refer to their calling.

In the street, Kelley met with the fi rst officers on the scene, Sergeant Russell, and their boss, Captain Jan Stem.

The minute Stem, a dapper man with glasses and reddish-brown hair swept over his forehead, heard the deceased was a University of Richmond professor, he knew the pressure would be on. “The murder of anyone that prominent in the community is bound to cause a stir,” he says. After thirty years with the Henrico P.D., twenty- six in investigations, he figured he’d pretty much seen it all.

Henrico County had changed over Stem’s tenure on the DIE, MY LOVE / 149

force. In the beginning it was a sleepy place to work, but as Richmond’s sprawl reached north and the county grew, he’d become busier and busier. In the past, third-shift offi cers

rarely encountered more than teenage pranks. As he’d climbed the ranks, the number of officers grew from two hundred to more than five hundred, and the night shift tackled many of the same crimes as those within the city limits, including drug cases and murder. Still, not usually on the quiet, upper-class West End.

As the uniformed offi cers filled Kelley and the captain in, Stem’s head started spinning with the possibilities. Maggi and others had already heard about Fred Jablin’s nasty divorce, and, of course, an ex-spouse was always an intriguing murder suspect, but there were so many others. Could it have been a burglary? Stem didn’t think so, when he heard there was no sign of a break-in and that, at least on fi rst inspection, it didn’t appear the house had been ransacked or that anything was missing. What about Fred’s students at UR?