if we know everything, and that he should leave nothing out when answering our questions. Any detail, however small or insignificant it might seem, can be the crucial one.
“Tell us about that night,” I say.
“There was nothing unusual about it except for the way it ended,” he says. “It was summer, and Stacy and I would go out on the boat most weekends, at least when the weather was good. When it wasn’t, we’d go to a cabin I have in upstate New York.” He pauses a moment. “That’s the ironic thing. If we had known a storm was coming, we would probably have gone to the cabin. But it wasn’t predicted.”
“When you went out on the boat, did Reggie always go along?”
He nods. “Absolutely. Reggie went everywhere with us. Stacy loved him almost as much as I did.”
“You slept on the boat?”
He nods. “Most of the time. It was a forty-footer… slept six.”
“So there was nothing out of the ordinary about that night that you can remember?”
“Nothing. I’ve thought about it a thousand times. We went to bed at about nine o’clock. By then we had heard there was a chance of weather coming in, and I set the warning system up loud so I would definitely hear it.”
“Warning system?” Kevin asks. He knows as little about boating as I do.
Richard nods. “If there are weather warnings, a general alert is sent out. We were only about four miles out, so we’d have plenty of time to get back if we had to.”
“And you never heard a warning?” I ask.
“I never heard anything. I went to sleep and woke up in the hospital.”
“Do you remember taking the sleeping pills?” Kevin asks.
Richard shakes his head vigorously. “I never took sleeping pills. Not that night, not ever in my life. I didn’t even have any. They were not mine.”
“Were they Stacy’s?” I ask.
“I don’t believe so. If they were, she never mentioned it. I never knew her to have trouble sleeping.”
“So you have no idea how they got in your system?”
He shakes his head. “None at all.”
We talk some more about the night of the murder, but he has little else to add. While the important things were happening, he was asleep. All he remembers is a pleasant night out on the water, dinner, some wine, and an early trip to bed since he was tired from working all day.
I turn the focus to his job, that of a senior customs inspector at the Port of Newark. I ask him if there was anything about his job that could have made him a target.
“No, nothing,” he says. “It was a slow time.”
The answer is a little quick for my tastes. “Richard, I want you to understand something. You may not have committed this murder, but someone did. Someone with a reason. Now, that reason could involve you or Stacy, or the two of you together. So you need to open your mind to anyone who could have possibly hoped to gain from putting you in this position.”
“Don’t you think I’ve done nothing but think about that for five years? If someone was trying to get rid of me because I knew something, they shouldn’t have bothered, because I sure as hell don’t know that I know it. Besides, if I was a danger to someone, why not just kill me?”
It’s a good question, and one I eventually must answer. But for now I take him through a description of day-to-day life on his job. Border security in this era of terrorism has taken on an obviously extreme importance, and it was Richard’s task to make sure that the Port of Newark was as free of contraband as possible.
Finally, I turn the conversation to Stacy, and even five years later, it’s evident that his grief over her loss is still powerful. “How did you meet?” I ask.
“At a counter, having lunch. She was sitting next to me, and before I knew it we were having a conversation. We had dinner that night, and it just went from there.”
“Where was she from?” Kevin asks.
“Minnesota… a town just outside of Minneapolis. Her parents were killed in a car crash when she was eighteen. She worked there and then decided to move east.”
“What did she do?”
“She was a teacher, but what she really wanted was to be a chef. The things she made were incredible. She wanted to open her own restaurant.”
He talks about Stacy for a while longer, answering every question but never getting