The young man threw her gun into the backseat of the car and climbed in. She hit the gas and they hightailed it for home. From Pennicott Circle, she turned right onto Five Mile Line Road and headed south.
She navigated toward the expressway to take the quickest route home, but she was not thinking clearly. Later, she would almost laugh when she thought about it. Trying so hard to be cool, and they had gotten lost. She got on the expressway going north rather than south, which she didn’t realize until she saw signs announcing upcoming exits in the town of Irondequoit, a heavily populated middle-class suburb northeast of Rochester.
She got off the expressway and retraced her path on back roads, back to Penfield. After fifteen minutes of getaway driving, the woman had the car to within a mile of the crime scene. She was freaking out. That blood. They needed to stop.
They needed to clean up. They needed cigarettes. They needed beer. The woman pulled into the parking lot of what would turn out to be a series of gas stations, but they never got out of the car.
“You go,” the man said.
The woman, who was very young and appeared even younger, said, “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“No ID.”
Because of her youthful appearance and size, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to buy cigarettes without the kind of photo identification that gas stations demanded. She didn’t say if “no ID” meant she was driving without her license.
“I can’t go,” the man said. He didn’t have to say why. He just looked down at himself. He had blood on his clothes. They left the first gas station and drove around.
The woman told the man that she had brought along a spare pair of clothes for him, so he could change, if he wanted to. This, he did, while she drove around Penfield. The truth was that the woman had brought along a change of clothes for herself, too. That wasn’t unusual. Her lifestyle was such that she was often away from home overnight. But she had made it through the tough part of the night without soiling her clothes and didn’t need to change.
Once he was changed, she pulled into another gas station and the man got out to buy the beer and the cigarettes. The man cracked open the bottle of beer and they shared it. They had cigarettes, and felt a little better.
She pulled out of the gas station parking lot and back onto the road. They had planned to do lines after they got home, but they couldn’t hold out that long. They needed a boost bad. The third stop—to sniff coke—they made only one gas station down the road from the second.
Refreshed by the blast, they again headed south. When the woman got to Old Penfield Road, also known as Route 441, she turned right and headed west for a time. This took her to Route 65, also known as Clover Road, where a left-hand turn took her on a southerly route, headed toward Bloomfield.
On Clover Road, they passed a county park known as Mendon Ponds. There, the man rolled his window all the way down, pulled out the big bloody knife, and tossed it out the window. It would never be found.
Again there was blood on his hands from the knife. It was not the blood of a stranger. The woman who had died at the end of that knife and the man with the bloody hands had shared the same mother. She was his half sister.
CHAPTER 4
Blood Was Splattered Everywhere
By 12:02 A.M., Monroe County sheriff’s deputies were on their way to 2 Pennicott Circle in Penfield in response to Kevin Bryant’s 911 call. Jacqueline Sanabria kept Kevin talking on his cordless phone until sheriff’s deputies arrived at the Bryant home. Only then did she allow the strangely calm man to break the connection. It was approximately 12:08 A.M.
Deputies, noting that there was no walk, crossed the lawn and came into the house through the front door. Straight ahead was a hallway that led to the kitchen. Looking to the left, they saw the minimally decorated living room. The living-room rug was whorehouse red, a strange choice, some of the deputies thought. There, they discovered Tabatha on the fold-out couch. She was dead—both shot and stabbed. First job: get the family out of the house.
Kevin called his parents, who came over immediately to pick up the two Bryant boys. Sheriff’s deputies sealed the house. Crime scene investigators (CSI) arrived and began the long process of going over every square inch of the home. Within minutes the quiet semicircle street was lined on both sides by official vehicles, some with lights flashing. By this time all of the other residents of Pennicott Circle were out on their lawns. Something had happened at the lawyer’s house. No one had heard the popping of the champagne cork.
Kevin wanted to leave with his dad and the boys, but he had to remain behind. Leaving was out of the question. He was going to need to answer just a few questions. Kevin followed a sheriff’s deputy out of the house through the garage. Barefoot and still in his blue T-shirt and plaid shorts, Kevin stood out in the driveway. Two deputies accompanied him, one on either side. One of them was Deputy Bridget Davis, a six-year patrol deputy. A systematic grilling of the husband began. The neighbors could see him clearly, the little guy—clear as day out there, with the full moon. Although there were no streetlights on the tract, additional light came from the streetlights and headlights on the nearby main road.
Kevin must have felt like he was in a spotlight. He answered the deputies patiently, but from time to time, he would have to excuse himself in the middle of a question or an answer so he could fold over at the waist and convulse with dry heaves. For three hours he stood there, answering question after question.
In the meantime, inside the house, there was also the occasional sound of retching. Even the hardened members of law enforcement, used to seeing the more unpleasant manifestations of society’s underbelly, were shocked by what they saw in the living room of the Bryant house.
The young blonde was still on the bed—actually the couch that had been pulled out into a bed. She was on her back, her face now a ghastly mask of blood. She had been stabbed repeatedly, including, most noticeably, in the neck, where there was a gaping, and still frothing, wound.
There was also a wound to Tabatha’s right eye. As it turned out, her largest wound was in the back of her head, the exit wound, but that wasn’t apparent at first.
The attack had been horrifically violent. Blood had splattered in all directions, onto the lamp shade of a nearby table lamp, on the walls—in particular, the north wall—on the ceiling, and onto the blades of a ceiling fan overhead. The splatter, experts surmised, was probably caused mostly by the knife attack. The throat wound looked like it might have severed the jugular. That would have caused a rhythmically squirting wound. The killer had been frenzied and had stabbed the victim many times in a short period of time. The violent pulling out of the knife after each stab and the raising of the knife for the next stab was what sent blood flying onto the ceiling fan.
The medical examiner would later determine that Tabatha had been shot once in the eye and stabbed fourteen times in the neck and upper body. Semen was found on her body.
Crime scene investigators went over the entire home, square inch by square inch. To the right after entering the front door, you went into a small room. Deputies could tell by the scattering of toys that this was a playroom for the kids. Connected to that was the dining room, which went along that side of the house on the bottom. Also, to the right of the living room was another hallway that led to a small bathroom and to a door that led to the garage. Behind the living room was the kitchen, which provided access to the backyard deck through the sliding glass door. Just inside the front door, a little bit to the left, was the flight of stairs that led to the house’s upper level. At the head of the stairs, a right-hand turn took you into the master bedroom, where Kevin said he had been reading. Pretty much straight across from the head of the stairs was the upstairs bathroom. To the left was the kids’ bedroom, a spare bedroom, and a third bedroom, which had been converted into an office. Once the house was cleared of the Bryants,