Read Online Beyond Obsession by Richard; Hammer - Free Book Online

knew he was in trouble, he said, and so she had asked Aldor Dubois, at whose house she was staying, if he knew the names of any criminal lawyers. Dubois had mentioned two, Reese Norris and Hubert Santos, a man in his forties with whom Norris had worked when he was a volunteer intern and Santos was a senior attorney in the federal public defender’s office; Santos, now in private practice, is considered one of the state’s most prominent and inventive criminal lawyers. Karin was calling to pass on those recommendations. Later, when she needed a lawyer of her own, she turned to Santos.
    When the conference was over, Norris began making some preliminary inquiries of his own. As far as he could see, the police might have their suspicions, but they had no solid evidence to back them up. The best strategy at that moment, he decided, was to stonewall.
    So on Monday, when the police arrived at the Coleman house, Norris was ready for them. The police wanted to interview Dennis again. Norris said no way. They could sit there as long as they wanted and talk about the weather or the baseball scores or anything they wanted, but not about Joyce Aparo or anything to do with her. They wanted to search Dennis’s room. Norris said to go try to get a search warrant, and if they did, he would go to court and argue that they had no probable cause for the issuance of such a warrant.
    For the moment the police were stymied. They had a suspect, Dennis Coleman. But that was all. As for putting together a solid, convicting case, all they had was a lot of talk from a lot of people, an overheard phone call and a note that might mean nothing or everything. It was not enough.

4
    Karin, Sands, and Zaccaro devoted the early part of Saturday, August 8, to the grim task of making the necessary arrangements for Joyce Aparo’s funeral. They had no choice; no one else could do it. Their first stop was a funeral home, to see about shipping Joyce’s body from Springfield and to set a time and place for the service and burial, which they did in consultation with Archbishop John Whealon. Then they proceeded into the home’s showroom to select a coffin from among the dozen or more on display, standing open both to reveal the texture of the interior and, according to those who know, to calm the fears of the mourners that the boxes they are viewing are not empty. What happened then caused both to begin to suspect that Karin was not as innocent as she proclaimed, that she was somehow involved in the murder of her mother. For they were stunned by her actions, by her lack of emotion.
    â€œShe was so cold,” Zaccaro remembers, “that it was almost unbelievable. When the undertaker took us around to show us the coffins, she didn’t look at the boxes; she looked at the price tags and chose the cheapest one. We finally persuaded her to upgrade at least a little.”
    Sands was still at this point finding rationalization for Karin’s behavior. “She was,” he said, “concerned about the cost of the funeral and how she was going to pay for it, and she seemed upset by that.”
    The undertaker asked about the notice in the paper, whether she wanted one in the Hartford Courant and what it should say. Did Joyce have any relatives and, if so, who should be included? Neither Sands nor Zaccaro knew much about Joyce’s personal history; she rarely discussed it. They knew that within recent years she had been married to and soon divorced from a man named Ed Murphy, for both knew Murphy and had been involved with Joyce and him during the courtship, marriage and breakup. Now they discovered that not only did she have another former husband, Michael Aparo, about whom they were aware, but that both her mother, Rose Cantone, and her sister, Ina Camblor, lived in nearby South Windsor, and that there was a brother, Thomas Cantone, a construction executive in White Plains, New York. But Karin wanted no mention of any of them in the