"Linda said she was going to kill you?"

"Yes. Me and her were in a big fight and I don't know why she wasa"why she started it."

"You have no idea why there was a fight between you and Lindaa"Cinnamon?"

"I'm herea"I don't feel good."

"Why did Linda want you to leave?" McLean hated having to press on with the questioninga"the kid was pale green with nauseaa"but he also felt she was evading his questions. He needed to find some motive for such a seemingly senseless crime.

"She was tired of me, and she didn't want me around. She just doesn't like me."

"Why?"

"I guess because I'm my daddy's daughtera"she's jealous. I don't know. We never did get along . . . because one day my dad went to the post office with Patti, and I was in Patti's room drawing a picture and Krystal was choking, and all she did was sit there. She didn't even try to help her, and when my dad gets home, she never hugs him. She never says, 'Hi, dear.' She just ignores him. She's been acting real weird lately."

"When Krystal was choking, did you help her?"

"I tried to, but when she would see me going in, she goes, 'It's my babya"I'll take care of her,' and I go, 'Fine.'"

"When Krystal was choking, did you actually pick her up to help her? Cinnamon?"

"What?"

"Did you pick Krystal up to help her?"

"No . . . but I wanted to. . .. She like sometimes. .h.i.ts Krystal, and it makes me so mad when Daddy isn't home. One time, my dad saw her do it, and Linda didn't know he was home."

"You didn't like her treating the baby badly? Cinnamona"?" "I'm here." And then under her breath, she murmured, "Please don't let them get away with murder."

"Well, you've got to answer my questions then," McLean said gently, puzzled by the way the girl's answers didn't always match up to his questions.

"I'm trying toa"but I can't keep my eyes open."

"You don't have to keep your eyes open to talk to me. I just want you to concentrate on what you're telling me. Yesterday, Linda said she was going to kill you if you didn't leave?"

"Yes. That's the first time she ever said that. I thought she loved me. She told me she hated my guts, and I go, 'Well, I guess I hate you too.' We started arguing."

"Did Linda say why she hated you?"

"No, she wouldn't tell me."

Cinnamon seemed unaware that she had just contradicted herself. McLean had to drag answers out of her, but she repeated that Linda had hated her, wanted her out of the house, and was cruel to the baby, Krystal. She could not, however, give specific responses when McLean asked her what she and Linda argued about.

"Just little thingsa"I don't know."

"Cinnamon, what little things?"

"Uh?"

"Cinnamon?"

"Uh?"

"CINNAMON?".

"Huh? I'm . . . here."

McLean asked her about the gun, and she remembered that she had found it in a drawer in her father's office, that it was there for anyone to use "in case of emergency." She insisted that she had asked no one how to use it.

"I shot three shots."

"... Three shots?"

"Uh-huh. One was in the room with Patti, and the other two were with ... with Linda."

"Why did you shoot a bullet in Patti's room?" "The gun got stuck ... or something in it... the thing got stucka"that trigger thinga"the thing you pull back. I couldn't turn on the light or she would have seen it."

"Did you ask anyone how to use the gun? Cinnamon? Cinnamon?"

"Uh-huh. No. Uh-uh . .."

"Cinnamon. Cinnamon."

"I'm here. Would you just stop saying my name?"

McLean realized that he had very little time left with her. She was sleepy, and she was annoyed with his constant questions. Yes, she answered, yes, she knew how to fire a gun. They went out shooting guns in the desert.

"Cinnamon?"

"I'm here."

"Cinnamon?"

"I'm here____"

But she really wasn't. She muttered that they used little guns in the family " 'cause they don't do much harm."

"Where did you shoot those little guns?"

"What do you mean?"

"Those little gunsa"where did you shoot them?"

"I was watching TV, and then I was asleep."

McLean stopped the interview. He wanted to have a reading on the proportion of drugs in the girl's bloodstream before he contiued. He looked at her and saw her eyelids drooping.

She seemed to him a very little girl. Not fourteen. Not even twelve. And yet she had just told him she had shot her stepmother.

This time around, he was almost sorry he had found his suspect.

It was eight-twenty when Edith Gwinn of the Golden Coast Lab arrived to take a blood sample from Cinnamon. Over the next eight minutes, three vials were filled. One read #8015, one #8020, and the third was to type in case Cinnamon needed a transfusion later.

Cinnamon seemed to rouse and become more alert during the blood drawing, but only because she was frightened. She had never had blood drawn before.

When McLean attempted to talk to her again at 8:40, her condition had changed radically. Her head lolled, and her eyes were not focusing. She was unable to respond to his questions in anything more than a mumble.

He stopped the interview at once and summoned the paramedics.

Cinnamon's blood pressure had dropped to a point where it would not register on the cuff and had to be palpated. Her pulse was eighty. The paramedics hooked her up to a heart monitor and started an IV as they raced her to the Garden Grove Medical Center. Police Officer Pamela French rode with Cinnamon in the aid car. The girl appeared to be unconscious or asleep during the trip, and there was no conversation.

French remained with Cinnamon in her hospital room from 9:18 until noon, and during that time, Cinnamon Brown did make some statements. But they sounded robotlike to the policewomana"almost as if they had been programmed into the teenager's subconscious. Cinnamon would blurt them out from time to time, with virtually no continuity. Although she vomited almost continuously, she was barely awake.

Some of her ramblings were clear enough for Pam French to understand, and some were garbled.

"Haven't slept for twenty-four hours ... had an accident .,. killed my stepmother ... didn't do it on purpose, didn't mean to."

Still, despite all the disjointed mumbling, some sentences hung in the air as clearly as if they were written there.

"She was hurting me . .. she hated me ... she wanted to kill me ... she wanted me out of the house."

French had not questioned Cinnamon, and she made no response to the girl's words, although she jotted them down in her notes.

"I got the gun out of the office drawer in the housea"I was angry with her . . . she hurt my little sister ... I couldn't ignore her choking her."

French had no way of knowing that she was hearing almost exactly the same words that Cinnamon had said to McLean. The girl tossing on the bed beside her seemed bone tireda"no, more than thata"absolutely exhausted as she fought the effect of the pills she had taken, but she also seemed coherent.

"She hated me . . . wanted me out of the house ... I was angry at her."

And then, finally, Cinnamon Brown could no longer fight the medication's creeping sedation, and she slipped into unconsciousness.

It seemed a cla.s.sically simple case. The suspect herself had admitted the crime. Although the thought appeared to break his heart, her own father presumed she had done it. Cinnamon had asked Patti Bailey to show her how to shoot the .38 only hours before Linda was shot. What other answer could there be? A jealous teenager, resenting her stepmother, chafing at rules, regulations, orders to do ch.o.r.es, and believing that she was the object of hatred and rejection, had struck back.

With a gun. She was sorry now, horrified to hear that Linda had died.

But it was far too late.

If the events of March 19,1985, had been a movie and not tragically real, it would have been over. But a confession is never enough to take into court. It is only a part of the body of the crime; the corpus delicti is nota"as so many people believea"the actual corpse, but is, instead, all the components that make up each crime itself.

Back at the house on Ocean Breeze Drive, Bill Morrissey continued to take pictures, gather evidence, and supervise the measurement of each room of the house. If, as Cinnamon Brown had now admitted, she had shot Linda, he needed the evidence that would substantiate her confession. More of the body of the crime, as it were.

McLean had reported to Morrissey that Cinnamon said she had shot the gun three timesa"twice at Linda, and once in Patti Bailey's room. And Patti herself said she had been awakened by gunfire. Morrissey moved to the front bedroom. Patti's room.

Morrissey's photographs showed that, like the rest of the house, Patti Bailey's room was crammed with new furniture. It seemed a room any teenage girl would love. The walls were papered in beige, yellow, and brown, and there were crisply starched white sheers over the window, topped with lacy valances. Patti's furniture was heavy maple with bra.s.s drawer pulls, and her bed was a smaller version of the white iron bed where her sister had died. The covers were turned back, as if someone had leapt out in a hurry.

There was a trundle bed in the room, pulled from beneath Patti's bed; it had not been slept in.

Patti had her own stereo, her own television set. And she had a profusion of dolls and teddy bears and stuffed animals. The dolls were "collector's items," the kind offered to viewers of television shopping networks. Any one of them would cost a hundred dollars or more. There were booksa" the only books in the house beyond a Reader's Digest condensed-book series and the Bible on one of David Brown's chests. Patti's books were teen romance novels. Innocent puppy love books, much beloved by p.u.b.escent girls, the precursors to Harlequin romancesa"without the s.e.x scenes.

David Brown had not only taken his wife's sister into his home, he had given her a room that any girl would envy. And she kept it in immaculate condition, with all of her treasures neatly arranged and all her furnishings polished.

Morrissey scanned the walls, looking for some sign that a bullet might have pierced them. He gand around the room, taking it in in segments, his camera dispa.s.sionately recording everything. The mirrors, TV, stereo, window, were all intact. The dolls and teddy bears sat undisturbed, as did Patti's large jewelry case, and the gold and crystal display case above it. There were golden chains tumbling out of the crammed drawers.

Just over the head of Patti's bed there was a little sconce holding teddy bears and a framed picture, an etching in pale silvery tones. Morrissey bent closer. It was a bird of some sort taking flight. He had seen similar birds in David Brown's office. Eagles ora"what were they?a"phoenix birds. Like in that old movie with Jimmy Stewart and his crew who crashed in the desert and rebuilt their shattered plane, The Flight of the Phoenix.

Morrissey was a no-nonsense man, not given to musing over the deeper meaning of mythical birds. His eyes were grainy from lack of sleep, and he had hours to go as he methodically preserved the olive-green bungalow and its contents with photographs and measurements. But at the moment, he wanted most to find the single missing bullet that would validate Patricia Bailey's firm belief that Cinnamon had stood in the door of her room and deliberately fired a gun at her.

And then he saw it. He had been staring right at it without registering what he saw. There was a large wall hanging over Patti Bailey's beda"about three feet by five feet. It was the kind of tapestry often sold at roadside stands, along with cement lawn statues, birdbaths, and wooden whirligigs. This was a familiar staple in the tapestry mediuma"tigers playing with their cubs against the bright yellow earth, green palm trees, and a red sky.

One tiger had taken a bullet right through its plush heart.

Morrissey figured the slug had to be embedded deep in the wall behind the hanging. That meant the tapestry would come down, and if the bullet was not resting just behind it, the wall was coming down too. As luck would have it, the wall had to be carefully sawed in a large rectangle, removed, and there, between the studs, Morrissey found one battered .38 slug.

Beyond that slug, Bill Morrissey's roster of evidence removed from the Ocean Breeze Drive house the morning of March 19 included:

1. Gunshot-residue evidence kit with swabs from two testsa"David Arnold Brown and Patricia Bailey.

2. One Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, serial #R304915 (initialed by officer), from floor of. .. master bedroom.

3. One Smith & Wesson, Model 19-4, .357 magnum revolver, serial #6F8K783, with six live rounds, in holster in plastic bag, from master bedroom.

4. One box Winchester .38 Special silvertip ammunitiona"from beneath bed in master bedroom.

5. One box Winchester .357 magnum silvertip ammunitiona"from beneath bed in master bedroom.

6. Bloodstained bed sheet, multifloral pattern, pillows and cases, blanket.

7. One black leather "Liberty" holster for .38 Smith & Wesson, with chrome metal belt clip, in drawer in master bedroom.

8. Drinking gla.s.s with Star Trek character.

9. Sample of clear liquid in gla.s.s.