The Whole Truth Read Online Free PDF Page A

They said her daughter's body, if the child was Natty, was on its way to the morgue.
    "It was," Paul Flanck said later, "enough to make you want to quit police work, and start mowing lawns for a living."
    Making it even worse was the unavoidable fact that in the murder of a child the first suspects are always the parents. That meant interviewing Susan and Anthony McCullen during the first moments of the greatest shock and grief of their lives. It was very hard for either detective to believe that the beautiful, hysterical young woman standing in the doorway in front of them could so heinously have murdered her own child. "My baby, my baby," Susan McCullen screamed, before she collapsed to the floor, moaning, crying, screaming, "no, no, no." The muscular, good-looking young man who ran up behind her appeared so undone by the news of his child's death that Detective Robyn Anschutz's first impulse was not to interrogate him, but to hug him.
     
    2
    Raymond
     
    "This is my courtroom!" Judge Flasschoen has put down her pistol and picked up her gavel, and she's pounding and pounding on the wooden surface of the bench. "Order! There will be order in my courtroom!"
    Nobody pays any attention to her now.
    We're all still angling to see what happened to the man she shot.
    She sits down so hard that her chair rolls back to the far wall and slams against it, jerking her head so hard that her neck bones crack audibly into the microphone attached to her robes. She rubs the back of her neck, and withdraws into a display of silent judicial dignity while chaos explodes around her.
    I get a quick glimpse of Ray, motionless below her bench.
    Through the crowd, I see Leanne pick herself up and hurry to his side, where she kneels, and screams, "For god's sake, somebody do something! Call 911! We need a doctor!"
    I flinch as the double doors at the back of the courtroom fly open and bang against the walls. Here come five Howard County deputy sheriffs surging in. Two of them, in the dark green short sleeve uniforms and gold badges of the department, take up posts at the back, not far from me, to keep people from leaving. Another one runs down the center aisle, and yells out, "Ladies and gentlemen, sit down and be quiet. Quiet! Take your seats. We'll get you out of here as soon as we can, but we need your cooperation right now.'
    Slowly, reluctantly, we spectators follow his orders, although within moments we're popping back up to our feet again, and the noise level rises to its previous roar.
    Word filters back through the crowd that Ray is alive, but unconscious. When I hear that, I start inching my way forward, hoping no deputy will stop me. I want to see for myself, for my book.
    "Excuse me. I need to get through. Thank you."
    People are obliging, and move aside. A few do a double take, as if they've recognized me from my book jackets, or from magazine or television interviews. One of them even says, "Aren't you—?" and I nod, smile, and keep moving.
    I get almost up to the front, and there he is—
    I stop in my tracks, feeling weak-kneed at the sight of Ray Raintree lying facedown on the courtroom floor. For all the times I have written about murders, this is the first time I've seen an actual shooting. Cold bodies in morgues are one thing—I have viewed enough of them to get almost used to it—but a wounded, bleeding person I know . . . this is scary. I don't see any blood, so it must be soaking into his flesh and his clothes. His attorneys dressed him up in a white shirt, and dark trousers and a tie, trying to make him look normal. His black running shoes—they never talked him into dress shoes—lie still against the hardwood floor.
    Maybe he's dead, and not just wounded?
    I glance to my right, looking for Tony McMullen, and I see him sitting down among all the frantic people who are standing up around him. Natty's young father looks shell-shocked. As I watch, he leans over and puts his head between his legs, as if he's on the verge