Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [18]
To their surprise, Casey strode confidently through the maze of office buildings that housed the business side of Universal Studios. She took a left at the first building, walked to the end of the roadway, and took them left again. At the next intersection, they crossed to the opposite side of the street through a parking lot, passed the first of two connected buildings, and entered the door of the second. Turtora knew that the building did not contain the event planning division, where Casey claimed she worked.
By this point, the cops’ curiosity had morphed into incredulity. As they went through doors and turned corners, each of them silently tried to figure out how far she was going to take this. Somehow, the charade that should have ended back at the security gate was still going on, and no one, perhaps not even Casey, could predict when or how it would stop. What kind of person would do this—and to what end? It was no longer a mystery whether she was lying; the real mystery was why.
Just as confident as she had been when she left the security gate, she led them halfway down the building’s main hall, and then she stopped suddenly. Shoving her hands in her back pockets, she turned to them, flashed her cutest shy-girl grin, and said the words they’d been waiting to hear ever since she’d arrived: “Okay, I don’t really work here.” Four lies.
No one was shocked by the revelation itself. Indeed, more than anything they were confused by why she’d chosen that moment to fess up. Only in retrospect would the answer become clear: she’d backed herself into a corner. She’d reached the end of the hall, and with literally nowhere else to take the lie, she gave up on it. It was the same thing that had happened with Lee the night before, shifting her story just before the police arrived, from Caylee being with the babysitter to Caylee being kidnapped. It was the second time in as many days, and it would not be the last. It was a pattern that we would become all too familiar with over the next three years.
CHAPTER FIVE
CAUGHT
Turtora found Detective Melich a room inside the Universal offices with nothing in it but a white plastic couch and armchair, and Turtora said the investigators could use it for speaking to Casey. Melich wanted to get to her while she was vulnerable, before she had time to think. Whether because of her guilt over being caught in a lie or her fear of arrest because of the lie, experience told him that her defenses should be lowered, and this was probably his best opportunity yet to get at the truth. There was no way she would be able to maintain her story once such a large part of it had given way beneath her; they’d have Caylee back home by the end of the day.
Casey and Melich sat on the couch, and the two detectives perched on either arm of the chair. The ensuing conversation was taped.
“I know and you know that everything you’ve told us up to now has been a lie. Correct?” Melich began.
“Not everything I told you.”
“Okay, uh, pretty much everything, including where Caylee is right now.”
“That I still . . . I don’t know where she is.”
“Sure you do.”
“I absolutely do not know where she is.”
Detective Melich asked Casey about Caylee’s father. She told him that he had died in a car accident. When Melich asked if she had proof, she said she had an obituary from the newspaper in her bedroom.
“Let me explain something,” the detective continued. “Together, combined experience in this room, we have thirty years of doing this. Both myself and Sergeant Allen worked in the homicide division for several years. We’ve dealt with several hundred people and conducted thousands of interviews, the three of us. . . . I can tell for certainty that right now, looking at you, I know that everything you’ve told me is a lie, including the fact that your child was last seen about a month ago and you don’t know where she