Death on the River Read online

  “Yes.”

  “Why?

  “Because I didn’t trust him. He was not always focused. He has a memory thing or something.”

  DeQuarto then asked a series of questions about Vince’s life insurance policy and why she was on it when they were not married. She explained she needed proof that they were in a domestic partnership to enable Vince to put her on his employer’s health insurance.

  The discussion then returned to the tumultuous relationship between Angelika and Vince. “Was he at all irrational?” DeQuarto asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Like how?”

  “He was not giving me air, ever. He was constantly suffocating me. He would not leave my side. He would not let me go to the store. He would not let me be for a fucking second. Even when he was at work, he’d come home and say, oh, Peanut said this and that.”

  “Bringing up other girls?”

  “Yeah, bringing up other women all the time and putting me down. I’d bring it up and he’d say, ‘I’m not putting you down.’” She went on to repeat her claim that Vince was always pushing her for sex. She said that when he insisted and she complied it dredged up the memory of when she was raped years earlier. She’d once told him, ‘Whatever you want from me, just take it.’ “He did take it forcefully, more than once,” she told DeQuarto

  The investigator wore his empathy like a badge of honor. He wanted her to feel as if he were on her side, that he believed all her complaints about Vince, while all the time hoping he would break down her resistance and give up the kernel of truth buried between the layers of rationalization and denial. “As much as he made you happy, he made you unhappy.”

  “It was fifty-fifty.”

  The investigator tried to get more from her, but she said that she had told him everything he needed to know. “At this point, I’m over it. You know, I’m not that kind of person. I am over the rape. I am over the forceful stuff. I will never—”

  “Are you over Vinny?” DeQuarto interrupted. “You can just go on?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That makes sense. Now you’ll never have to experience it again.” DeQuarto rose from his seat. “Just hang out here for a minute. I’ll be back. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Would you bring me my purse? I need to get a tampon.” Once she was alone, Angelika slipped on her shoes, sipped water, and wiped her underarms with tissue. She stood and walked to the two-way glass, where she flipped her long, waist-length hair to settle behind her back, flicked at spots on her shirt, and did a couple of yoga stretches. Then she sat back down at the table and fiddled with her necklace.

  After a minute, apparently unable to stay still, she pushed down on the arms of the chair, raised herself up, and folded her legs underneath her body. She then fooled around with her hair, pulling it back, holding it up, and combing it with her fingers. She sat hunched over, folding and unfolding a tissue in her lap.

  When DeQuarto returned he didn’t have her purse but told her someone had gone to the store for tampons.

  They talked again about phones: the one she had in her purse now and the one she said she’d dropped in the water, which she insisted were two different phones. She said that the bag she’d taken out in the kayak was at home, but it was still wet. DeQuarto asked if the phone could still be in there.

  DeQuarto returned to the moment she was pulled out of the water by rescuers. “Did you know he was gone?”

  “I couldn’t see … it was dark.”

  When he probed her about when Vince had actually drowned, she insisted that she tried not to think about it. “I know you try not to think about it,” he said, “but it is something we haven’t discussed.”

  Angelika nodded her head. “Umm-hmm, I was safe, and I knew he was gone.… I admit I was glad.”

  The investigator tried again to nail her down on removing the ring from the paddle. Again, she said it was either in the Jeep or on the floor of the apartment. She told him that she and Vince had talked about the missing ring. She’d suggested to him that they shouldn’t go kayaking that day because of its absence, but he’d brushed off her concerns.

  DeQuarto again walked her through their departure from the island in the kayaks. For the first time, she said that while Vince was still in his kayak he’d said, “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

  DeQuarto was surprised at the difference in this statement and pressed her for details. “He was still in the kayak.”

  “Yes.”

  “When he yelled to you, ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it,’ did you call nine-one-one then?”

  “No. I called nine-one-one when he told me to.”

  “Was he still in the kayak?”

  “No. He was in the water.” She added that he’d had one arm over the kayak and another over the paddle. He held the floatation device and the bag with the camera in his hands.

  “Now, did you really want to save him?” he asked.

  Angelika gave a big, long sigh and said, “Yeah, somehow. If he did not say call nine-one-one, I would have fucking paddled the shit out of myself and got to him somehow.”

  “That’s a little different than what you told me earlier, though,” DeQuarto said. “Why? Why do you keep changing what you’re saying? You’re confusing me.”

  “I’m tired,” Angelika complained.

  “I know you’re tired and that’s a real issue for me. You say one thing and then you go to another. I feel like you’re not telling me some things—”

  “About the night, right? Not overall.”

  “Why do I have this feeling that you’re not telling me the truth?”

  “I’m not lying to you. I’m not,” Angelika insisted.

  Angelika said that she felt a lot of guilt and DeQuarto wanted to know why.

  “Why? Because I didn’t want anyone hurt. I never wanted anybody hurt.”

  “So why do you feel guilt?”

  “Because of the thoughts I had. I wanted to be free. I wanted him to drown.”

  “That’s understandable. Do you feel guilty for other things that happened that night?”

  Angelika gave a long, rambling response, and DeQuarto cut her off: “You watched him drown. It’s difficult. I know—”

  “I didn’t just watch him drown,” Angelika said, her voice sparked with anger. “I tried to do something about it.”

  After a few more questions, DeQuarto left the room. Angelika fiddled with her bracelet, drank water, and did yoga stretches in her chair. Then she stood, rearranged the water bottles on the table, checked out her face and hair in the two-way glass, and did a few standing stretches. Her boredom filled the room like a dark cloud.

  * * *

  When DeQuarto returned, he wasn’t alone. Investigator Matt Skarkas, in a light tan suit, entered the room with him. He introduced himself to Angelika and pulled up another chair at the corner of the table.

  DeQuarto asked that she tell her story again, starting at Plum Point. Angelika laid it all out again with Skarkas occasionally interrupting her to get clarification, covering many of the same points already visited by the other investigator.

  After a short while, DeQuarto walked out and Skarkas continued the questioning alone. Skarkas tried, without success, to pin Angelika down about the time between when Vince went into the water and she called 911 and the amount of time that elapsed between when she last saw him and when she was pulled from the water.

  “Ultimately what this is about for me, and for Don, [is] to sort of understand what you were feeling and how he made you feel that made you do what you did and take out that plug and know that he was going to drown in that river. Okay? So, let’s go through that.”

  “Okay,” Angelika reluctantly agreed.

  How did he make you feel? Why did he have to be dead at that point?”

  “Because he made me mad.”

  “In what way?”

  “In a lot of ways.”

  “Well, what did he specifically do to you?”
r />   “He never hurt me physically,” she said. She spoke about the happiness in her relationship and how one day it would be here, the next day totally gone. “He was constantly talking to me—‘you gotta do this, you gotta do that. I won’t marry you until then.’”

  “Did it upset you that he sort of switched that he did not wanna marry you?”

  “Yeah, of course,” Angelika replied, indignant. “Who proposes to somebody and then changes their mind?”

  “Did he give you a reason why he changed his mind?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He wanted me to open up.”

  “What did he want you to open up to about?”

  “Everything.”

  Skarkas asked for details and she described his controlling behavior—how he wanted to know where she was and make sure she locked the door when she left the house.

  When Skarkas said that it all sounded like safety issues, she said, “I felt safe with him, but I felt better when he was not at home.”

  Skarkas continued to push her for precise answers about her feelings. She said that she never wrote about how she wanted to kill him, but she did write that she’d simply had enough.

  “How long ago did you get to that point that you had enough, and you wanted him gone?” he asked.

  She paused for a long while and then said that she couldn’t give an exact time. Getting nowhere, Skarkas asked if she had ever thought about killing him in another way and why she decided on the drowning. Getting no real response, he tried again: “When did you decide that your life would be better without Vinny in it—with Vinny gone? When you made some of these choices and decisions that you knew, ultimately, was going to lead to this?”

  Angelika still wouldn’t answer directly but said that she did nothing to stop his drowning from happening because a part of her wanted him gone. She admitted that after she was rescued her overwhelming emotion was relief that he was gone. She wouldn’t admit that she overturned her kayak to make the people on the rescue boat think she’d done everything she could for Vinny, insisting she’d done it to “experience the water.”

  Switching tacks, Skarkas turned the questioning to the cell phone she’d had on the island. She said that the one she had with her was an old one and she had no idea where the new one was. She could only assume that someone who was there that night had it, but there were a lot of people on the shore. She added that she’d taken her old phone to the AT&T store and had it reactivated the next day. The account was in Vince’s name. “I called Laura the other day and she freaked out because it showed his name,” she said.

  “If you had to tell his family why he had to die, what would you tell them?”

  “Laura and I will have our own closure eventually,” Angelika said cryptically. “I don’t know. You can’t tell them he was a bad person or anything like that. I can’t.”

  “What would you tell me—if you had to tell me?”

  “That’s different. I can tell you.”

  “What would you tell me? Did he do anything to you, sexually or some other way?”

  Angelika didn’t respond.

  “Listen,” Skarkas continued, “to feel strongly enough that you feel an overwhelming sense of happiness that a person dies, there has to be some real reasons beyond that someone is a little controlling. I want to understand exactly what led you to make those kinds of decisions. What were some of the things he made you do?”

  Angelika sat still in her chair with her head bowed. When she moved, she shook one hand as if trying to remove some unseen contaminant. Then she rested her elbows on the table with her forehead in her hands. “I don’t have any specific examples of things.”

  “Look. When you want someone dead, there are reasons why that made you feel so strongly in such a way to feel that sense of happiness that he’s in the water and he’s going to die. And that’s what we’re here for, to try and understand that. What did he do?”

  “He pushed me,” Angelika said vaguely.

  “Specifically, what did he do?”

  “He wanted me to be fully his, sexually. He wanted to own me.”

  “Is … [this] something you noticed about him when you were first together or did it start coming out—”

  “It started coming out a month or two in the relationship,” she said.

  “Did you ever talk to him about that?”

  “Yeah. We had daily conversations.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “Trapped. Trapped.”

  “So, as he starts taking in water, do you get that sense of happiness, of relief that he’s going to be gone?”

  “Yeah.”

  She then told Skarkas that it had been a very happy day on the island until the very end, when she’d grown angry at Vince because he was rushing her to leave. She insisted that she didn’t think about him not making it back until his kayak started taking on water.

  As Skarkas continued to pepper her with questions about the paddle and the ring, Angelika grew exasperated: “You guys know what you know, so yeah, for fun, I took the oar.”

  Skarkas assured her he wasn’t putting words in her mouth and left to get her a cigarette. Angelika paced and went into a yoga pose.

  After a couple of minutes, DeQuarto walked in with pizza. She told him she’d rather have a cigarette. He assured her they would get her one, but for now she should “just sit down and relax.”

  She didn’t sit but took bites of pizza as she paced heel to toe across the length of the room. DeQuarto returned with a cigarette, matches, and an ashtray and then left her alone to enjoy her smoke. She lit up and then sat cross-legged on the floor against the wall.

  When Skarkas returned to the room, Angelika remained on the floor, smoking. He asked if she’d put anything into Vinny’s beer, which she denied.

  “At this point, we know what happened, we’re just trying to get an understanding of it. So it’s better to talk about this openly so we get all the facts, you know what I mean?” Skarkas said.

  Rather than answering, Angelika questioned whether or not the sprinklers would go off since she was smoking a cigarette.

  After discussing the plug once again without garnering any new details, the investigator asked her about her diaries and where they were. She told them she’d been keeping them since she was thirteen years old. The older journals were at her parents’ house and the current ones were on top of the desk or in a drawer. She said that she wrote in them when she was happy and when she was depressed, but she hadn’t written in them at all since Vinny died.

  When asked who she had been in contact with since the accident, she said, “Nobody.”

  “No one?” Skarkas said.

  “Except you guys.”

  “What two guys?” Skarkas asked, misunderstanding what she had said.

  “Just you guys,” she repeated.

  “Oh, ‘you guys’—meaning us, the police,” Skarkas said. “That’s it. You’re only talking to the police for ten days?”

  “Yeah. And my family and friends.”

  “Well, that’s what I’m talking about. Who are the friends and family you were in contact with?”

  Angelika became defensive, swearing she didn’t talk to anyone about what happened. Finally, she answered as vaguely as possible, “The whole world, man. Everybody.” Then she insisted again that she didn’t share any of the details because “no one … [could] handle it.”

  Once again, she asserted that all Vinny had said to her was “call nine-one-one.” She was too far away from him to hear anything else.

  “I sense that you wanted him dead,” Skarkas said, “but you also didn’t want to do something that was up close and personal. Was it easier for you to be far from him and not really be that close to him when he was in the water?”

  “I found it easier, but I tried to get closer.”

  “But you wouldn’t save him, one way or the other.”

  “I could have,” Angelika s
aid.

  “I know you could have, but you wouldn’t,” Skarkas said, “because you obviously wanted him to be gone, you wanted to be free, correct, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Skarkas moved back to the paddle and Angelika stated firmly, “I did not take the ring off.”

  “It seems like you’re waffling on that, back and forth.”

  “Well, I’m still trying to remember.”

  “But you knew it wasn’t there.”

  “Well, I knew it. I saw it. When I took the paddle from him, I looked at it.”

  Skarkas asked her for details about the ways Vince had pressured her about sex. “Okay, being tied up, what else?”

  “To just be available to him at all times.”

  “Are there going to be toys in the apartment?”

  “Oh yeah. He had a sex bag.”

  “What kind of things are going to be in that sex bag?”

  “Well, uh, handcuffs, blinds,” she said, motioning an eye covering across her face.

  “Did you allow him to use some of those things on you?”

  “No. I don’t like pain. I told him that and he was fine with that.”

  “What are some of the things he would have liked to have done that would cause pain that you wouldn’t do?”

  “He wanted me to be strapped to another girl and I refused.” She added that there were rings in the bedroom for fastening the straps.

  The investigator asked if she ever participated in those type of things in another relationship and she said she had not. “So, this was a foreign concept to you?” he asked.

  She admitted that she’d thought about it, indicating that she believed everyone did. She said that when Vince had done things to her she’d felt ashamed.

  “To the point that you wanted him dead?” Skarkas said, throwing his arms wide as if saying, “Ta-da.”

  Angelika, however, did not answer.

  Skarkas continued to probe: “Did you feel like this was your only way out?”

  After a pause, she said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

  But when asked if she feared what Vince might do if she tried to leave, she said, “He was civil. He was very civil. He was a good guy in that sense.”

  While Angelika smoked a second cigarette, Skarkas went out to find her a cup of coffee. Using the pack of matches, she tidied up the area in front of her, scraping pizza crumbs and ashes into the ashtray. For a while, she sat very still with her head hanging low. She transitioned briefly into seated yoga stretches before returning to her previous static pose. Her lack of emotion was chilling.