Part 18 (1/2)

”I don't know,” he answered. ”But we follow national patient safety regulations, and the nurses dispense the medicines.”

Another piece of the puzzle clicked into place when McNamara talked to Salazar, and she recounted the events of June 19, the day Matt's computer disappeared, including that she'd told him that the computer was subject to subpoena.

Before he left WCY, McNamara asked Edwards to secure any data off the main network from Matt's old computer. ”We'll be getting a subpoena,” he said. ”I'll be back.”

Later, at a meeting in Johnston's office, McNamara filled in Linda, Johnston, and Bennett. Everyone at the meeting immediately realized the importance of what McNamara had found out. ”As more information came in, it was like bombsh.e.l.ls exploding,” says Bennett.

”It was obvious that this was a deliberate plan to get rid of the computer,” says Johnston.

For Linda, it was another piece of evidence proving how little she knew about her son-in-law. ”I could see she really didn't want to believe all of it,” says McNamara. ”But the evidence just kept piling up.”

As reluctant as she'd been to embrace the possibility, by then even Linda was convinced that there was no other feasible explanation. Matt had murdered Kari. ”I knew my child. She wasn't perfect, but she was a good woman. She tried her best to be a good wife and mother. She just didn't know whom she'd married. Maybe Matt killed my daughter because he'd fallen in love with his latest conquest. Whatever the reason, it was becoming obvious that Matt Baker wanted my daughter dead.”

As they talked, the conversation often wound back to another tragedy, Ka.s.sidy's death. There were so many similarities, too many to ignore. When Johnston wondered out loud if Matt might have killed Ka.s.sidy, too, the possibility terrified Linda. ”I began to worry that Kensi or Grace could become inconvenient for Matt,” says Linda. ”What if they were in danger as well?”

Chapter 40.

Bill Johnston began a war room in his office. Brown butcher paper lined the walls, and each time a new piece of evidence was found in the Baker case, he wrote it on the time line. One afternoon, Matt Cawthon stopped in, and he, Johnston, Bennett, and McNamara looked over the chart and discussed the case, Cawthon making suggestions. As the meeting ended, Linda arrived.

”I don't know what I can do,” Cawthon said. ”But before this is over, I'm going to arrest Matt Baker.”

Tears in her eyes, Linda hugged him, and whispered, ”Thank you.”

”It's not a favor to you,” he replied. ”It's the right thing to do.”

A similar process was under way at Hewitt PD's headquarters, where Spear and Toombs tracked all the incidents and facts they hoped would reveal how Kari had died. One day, Toombs called Matt's attorney, Villarrial, asking again about the possibility of Matt's taking a polygraph. To his surprise, the defense attorney informed him that Matt had already done just that, a private one set up through the law office. ”I'll send you the results.” When they arrived, however, it was Toombs's opinion that it was worthless: ”There were three questions, all about the pills, none of which were conclusive.”

”The questions weren't substantial enough,” Toombs told Villarrial on the phone. ”I'd like to have him take one given by law enforcement.”

”I'll check with Matt,” the attorney answered, but Toombs never heard from him.

Leads continued to funnel in, often through those who contacted Linda. One was Heather Sigler, the young woman who worked at Kay Jewelers on the day Vanessa and Matt looked at engagement rings. After Linda talked to her, she pa.s.sed the information on to Bennett and McNamara, who in turn called Matt Cawthon with the lead.

The Ranger was still trying to collaborate with Hewitt PD, but while Spear and Toombs were working on the case, Chief Barton seemed intransigent about pus.h.i.+ng it. Cawthon had a hard time understanding that. ”He should have been admitting that they screwed up, asking what can we do to fix it,” he says. ”But he just wanted it to go away.”

When he looked at the case, Cawthon believed Bulls was the key. He began calling Vanessa, but she ignored his messages. The one time Cawthon got her on the phone, she was at work. ”You wait, and I'll be right there,” he told her. ”We're going to talk.”

”I'm leaving. I don't want to talk to you,” Bulls said.

”I told her exactly what I thought of her,” says Cawthon. ”I knew I wasn't going to catch a fly with honey with her. I told her, 'I'll be coming after you.' ”

Frustrated, Cawthon decided that the best way to get Bulls to talk was to put her in front of a grand jury. Yet, his badge didn't give him that power. The only one who could order Vanessa to appear was the county's district attorney. Determined, Cawthon drove his SUV downtown and parked in front of the grand stone, more-than-a-century-old McLennan County Courthouse. Once there, he ran up the long flight of stairs, through the doors, and into the balconied lobby, under a dome topped with open-winged eagles and a sculpture of Themis, the Greek G.o.ddess of law and justice.

Once inside, Cawthon dropped in to talk to Melanie Walker, a slender woman with long dark hair, a prosecutor who'd successfully taken on a spate of murder cases. ”I went over all we had with her,” says Cawthon. ”I told her what I needed, and that I wanted Bulls brought in front of a grand jury, that I believed that could open up the case. She said, 'Let's do it.' But later, when I talked to her, Melanie had a sheepish look on her face. I asked what was wrong, and she said she'd had a meeting with her boss, Segrest.”

”We're not going to be able to help you,” Walker said, according to Cawthon. When he asked why, she explained, ”Because of Bill Johnston. The district attorney says he won't have anything to do with anything involving Bill Johnston.”

Later, Walker would deny the above scene, saying she was unsure who gave her the order not to proceed. But Cawthon stood firm on his account, saying he saw the situation as purely political. Over the years, according to Cawthon, when Johnston was a federal prosecutor, he'd taken cases Segrest refused. ”Bill Johnston was strong where Segrest was weak,” says Cawthon. ”It's as simple as that.”

What Cawthon said he told Walker was: ”You're telling me that there's a state law-enforcement agent standing in front of you, requesting the tools you would afford any investigator, and you're telling me you're not going to provide me with the tools to continue this investigation? And this is a murder case?”

According to Cawthon, Walker answered, ”Don't kill the messenger.”

As soon as he'd filed the wrongful death suit, Johnston had his office write subpoenas for records from all Matt's former employers, the Hewitt Police Department, the EMT service that sent paramedics to the scene, Baylor University, Kari's medical records, and something else: records pertaining to little Ka.s.sidy Lynn Baker.

While they didn't have anything solid, Johnston, McNamara, and Bennett had mounting suspicion that if Matt murdered Kari, it might not have been his first killing. They'd talked often about the similarities between Ka.s.sidy's and Kari's deaths, from the time of night, just after midnight, to Matt's being the only one with both of them. Bennett involuntarily shuddered when Jill Hotz repeated what Matt had told her: that both Ka.s.sidy and Kari were in fetal positions when he found them.

Now something in particular had McNamara's attention, something he and Bennett found on one of the computer disks Linda had pulled from Matt's trash: a paper ent.i.tled ”The Eyes of a Child.” Matt had written it a month after Ka.s.sidy's death for his Human Growth and Faith Development cla.s.s at Truett Seminary. The paper told Ka.s.sidy's story, but what seemed odd to McNamara was the way Matt repeatedly described his daughter's eyes. ”Ka.s.sidy's blue eyes can pierce the hardest of hearts and melt a heart of stone,” Baker had written.

”What do you think about that?” Bennett asked.

”That is so weird,” McNamara said, explaining that it brought to mind something he'd noticed over the years, that law-enforcement officers who'd taken a life, even in the line of duty, often later remembered looking into the eyes of the person they'd killed. ”That Baker wrote about Ka.s.sidy's eyes gave me the chills,” says McNamara. ”It made me think about that little girl looking up at him from her bed that night, seeing her daddy. And I wondered what Matt might have done to her.”

Chapter 41.

In Waco, especially at Crossroads, rumors circulated that Vanessa and Matt had broken up. ”We heard that Larry Bulls told people that he and Cheryl asked Vanessa not to see Matt until the investigation into Kari's death was over,” says a church member.

On August 4, 2006, Cawthon and Ben Toombs again discussed strategy, and it was decided that Toombs and Mike Spear would confront Vanessa and bring her in without prior warning. ”We didn't know for sure what her situation was with Baker,” says Toombs. ”We didn't want her calling him and having him tell her not to talk to us.”

That evening, they went to Tarleton, where Vanessa had a cla.s.s. She'd say later that not enough students had shown up, and the professor sent her on her way about eight forty-five. Spear and Toombs followed her car to a grocery store.

When they walked up, Vanessa at first looked stunned, perhaps a bit frightened, but she agreed to talk. At the station, they escorted her into the same small interview room in which Cooper had talked to Matt months earlier. They suggested she take a chair in the corner, then they stepped out for a few minutes. At that point, the video camera was turned on, aimed at where Bulls sat. Her long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, she wore a short-sleeved, dark green and gold John Deere T-s.h.i.+rt and black athletic shorts. She had a tube-shaped pink purse on the table beside her. While the officers talked in an adjacent office, Vanessa fidgeted. She alternated between appearing bored and bothered, yawning one moment and peering peevishly at her watch the next.

”Do you want water?” Toombs asked, sticking his head in the door. When she said yes, he returned with a clear plastic bottle. She unscrewed the top and took a swig. A longer wait, then the interview began, with Toombs reading Bulls the Miranda warning. At first, he asked the essentials, including her birth date. At one point she grabbed a tissue and dabbed at her eyes. ”I'm sorry,” she said. ”This is just scary.”

The officers murmured that she had no reason to be upset; they simply had a few questions. At first, they let Bulls talk while planting the occasional prod to keep the conversation flowing. Yet, they needed to say little. From the tone of it, Bulls had been thinking for a long time about what she would say if ever questioned by the police. As if she'd rehea.r.s.ed, she laid out her version of the events that had transpired since she met Matt and Kari in the fall of 2005, when he became pastor at Crossroads, where Bulls's father was the music minister. ”Kari and I became good acquaintances,” she said.

As she described it, Kari often talked with Bulls about her divorce and Lilly. Appearing as angry as sad, Bulls cried when she talked about how her ex-husband had signed away his parental rights ”because he doesn't want anything to do with Lilly.” What Bulls didn't mention was that this came after a paternity test proved her ex-husband wasn't Lilly's biological father.

Rather than Matt, Vanessa said that when the Bakers arrived at Crossroads, it was Kari who reached out to her. ”I have a daughter they loved, and their daughters loved mine. Kari and I talked about getting together for dinner and to get the kids and eat out or something.”

It was Matt, however, who Bulls said began calling her house in either late January or early February 2006, two months before Kari's death. ”He asked for my father, but he wasn't there,” she explained. ”He said he didn't know I'd be home.”

Vanessa was home afternoons with Lilly and going to school at Tarleton in the evenings. From that point on, Matt called often, spiraling from a couple of times a week to two or three calls a day. ”He wanted to chat. I thought that he was doing the pastor thing. It didn't get inappropriate or out of context,” Bulls a.s.sured the officers. ”He asked about my divorce and said G.o.d would work everything out.”

”Did it seem like he was pursuing you a little bit?” Toombs asked.

”He seemed happily married. He never talked bad about his wife or anything,” Bulls answered, gesturing with her hands. ”I felt sorry for him. He talked a lot about Ka.s.sidy, and my heart went out to him . . . It was nice to have someone to talk to.”

On the phone, Matt went into detail recounting Ka.s.sidy's illness and death. ”He said that Kari had never quite gotten over it and was depressed,” Bulls said. ”Sometimes she made the other girls feel like she loved Ka.s.sidy more than she loved them.”

Answering questions, Bulls related how she'd gone with her parents to the Dulins' house the afternoon of Kari's death, then to the funeral. That night, Matt called and spoke with Vanessa's parents, talking about what Matt described as Kari's depression. The first time he came to their home was one week to the day after Kari's death, when Vanessa's parents invited Matt and the girls for dinner and an egg hunt on Good Friday. ”We wanted to be there for him and the girls,” Vanessa stressed. ”For the long haul.”