I ask if they know what food she ate, where it came from. Ariana says there was nothing on scene that she could find. No suspicious wrappers. No crumbs. Susan Snyder had dinner that night at A Taste of Texas, but the owners said there’s no way it came from them. They were well aware of her allergy and were always very careful.
“Besides,” Ariana says, “Susan’s allergy was so severe that she wouldn’t have made it home if she’d eaten peanuts in the restaurant. She lives out of town. Whatever caused the reaction, she ate it at her house.”
I look through the autopsy report.
“Did they look in her stomach?” I ask. “I don’t see anything in here about that.”
She shakes her head and agrees that it seems like an oversight.
“Where’s the body now?” I ask.
“Cremated,” Ariana says.
I give her a hard stare. That seems like an oversight. On her part. It was a mistake to release the body to the family before a comprehensive autopsy was performed—and the report I’m looking at doesn’t seem comprehensive to me.
Ariana looks at the glass door to make sure no one is close enough to the conference room to hear us talking.
“I couldn’t get the chief to declare this a murder investigation,” she says. “She was already cremated before John Grady finally gave in and agreed to call you guys.”
I nod, letting her off the hook. Obviously she’s been alone in this from the start. I want her to know I’m here to help. And in a situation like this, with a seemingly obvious cause of death, it’s possible they would have skipped the autopsy entirely. So we should consider ourselves lucky to have any information at all.
“I think the examiner hung on to some blood samples,” she says.
“So why do you think this wasn’t an accidental death?” I say, sitting back in my chair and giving Ariana my full attention. “Aside from the fact that she never would have knowingly eaten anything with peanuts, what’s so suspicious?”
Again, she looks toward the door as if she’s afraid someone might be listening.
“Let’s drive out to the crime scene,” she says. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
Chapter 17
I OFFER TO drive, and we climb into my truck. For a second, I almost go around to the passenger side and open the door for Ariana. But I wouldn’t think to do that for a male cop, so I don’t do it for her.
She tells me where to turn, and within a minute of leaving the station, we’re heading out of town on a curvy back road. The landscape is quite pretty. Coming from Waco, which is much greener, I appreciate these rolling brown hills, rocky buttes, and zigzagging slot canyons. There is a beauty to the barrenness.
A few minutes out of town, Ariana says that she found Susan Snyder’s body the morning after she died.
“What were you doing at her house?” I ask. “Were you friends?”
“Not really.”
She seems nervous to go forward with what else she wants to say. Sometimes silence is the best motivator, so I remain quiet.
“I went to her house because she’d called me the day before,” Ariana says. “She said she had something important to tell me. She wanted to talk to me about a crime. I’m sure of it.”
“I see,” I say. “You get a call that says she’s got something important to tell you. Then she winds up dead. I’d be suspicious, too.”
Susan Snyder owned a nice ranch-style house that we can see from a long way off. We pull into the gravel driveway, and Ariana takes me inside and shows me around. She points to where the body was lying on the floor and where the used EpiPen had been left, but there isn’t much else she can tell me. If this had been declared a crime scene from the start, forensic investigators could have examined the house from top to bottom, looking for fingerprints, DNA, anything suspicious. But there have been dozens of people in and out of the house since then, obliterating the evidence. Her family came in from Florida and hosted a memorial service in the house.
Ordinarily in a murder case you look at the evidence on the scene first. And it can usually tell you a lot. But we’ve got nothing to go on this time.
“The family said they’d return in a few weeks to take care of the house,” Ariana says. “Clear out all the stuff. Put it on the market. They were upset, as you might imagine. I don’t think they were in any shape to go through her things.”
We look in Susan Snyder’s office, which contains a desk with two large-screen computer monitors. Inside a filing cabinet are loads of paperwork—town council agendas, news clippings, various reports from county agencies. There are also files and files of work-related information: invoices for clients, folders full of graphic design samples, notes about design projects, etc. And that’s just what’s been printed—I’m sure the computer itself has a whole world of information on it.
“It will take forever to go through all this stuff,” she says.
“Box it up,” I say. “We don’t know what’s going to be relevant.”
We fill file boxes and evidence bags with anything that seems like it might be useful later. I have a feeling that most of what we’re doing is a waste of time, but this is part of the job. You have to be thorough.
When we’re finished, we sit on the tailgate of my truck under the shade of a mesquite tree. The temperature is blazing hot, but the air lacks the oppressive humidity I’m used to in Central Texas. I take a couple of warm bottles of Ozarka spring water from the cab, and we each drink one. Ariana’s demeanor seems friendlier now. More relaxed. I think she’s just happy to be doing something on this investigation. Anything at all.
“What I don’t get is why the chief wouldn’t declare this a murder investigation,” I say to her. “Or at least take a good close look before ruling that out. The phone call she made to you seems like enough cause to raise suspicions.”
Ariana fixes me with her big brown eyes. She looks vulnerable right now, scared.
“There’s something else,” she says.
I can tell she’s deliberating whether to trust me. Again, I let silence do its magic.
“The truth is,” she says finally, “I never told the chief she called me. He doesn’t know that part.”
“What?”
“That was the other part of what Susan told me,” Ariana says. “She said she had something important she needed to talk to me about. And she said don’t tell the chief. Her exact words were ‘I’m not sure he can be trusted.’”
Chapter 18
WHEN WE GET back to the police station, I can feel Ariana’s nervousness. Am I going to tell Harris? Am I going to report him to my higher-ups?
A big part of what the Texas Ranger Division does is investigate instances of suspected corruption of public officials. Ariana could have contacted us and asked us to look into Harris, but instead she gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked him to be the one to call for help. That suggests to me that she still believes—or wants to believe—that Harris is trustworthy. So I want to tread carefully here. I don’t want to let him know I’m suspicious of him, but it’s also too soon to open a full-fledged investigation of him.