Protector (65 page)
Authors: Laurel Dewey
Tags: #Police Procedural, #Denver (Colo.), #Mystery & Detective, #Psychic ability, #Women detectives, #Crime, #Suspense, #Women Sleuths, #Children of murder victims, #Fiction, #Occult & Supernatural, #Espionage
Emily started to cry. “You hit me.”
Jane leaned toward the child, “Emily, I—”
Emily slapped Jane’s arm as she struggled to her feet. “Get away from me!” She smacked Jane’s arm again, this time with more force. “I hate you! I hate you!” She ran down the hall into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
Jane stood paralyzed in the shadows of the hallway. Every nightmare she ever had was coming true. She took a long drag on her cigarette. As alone as she felt at that moment, she suddenly realized that somebody was watching her. She looked up. There standing at the front door with its front pane smashed out, were Kathy and Heather. It didn’t take Jane much time to figure out how long they had been observing her; their incriminating expressions of disgust answered that question.
Jane moved toward the front door. Kathy and Heather took a step backward off the front porch, but still held their ground. Jane flung open the door. “What is it?”
“We wanted to come by and see how Emily was doing,” Kathy said, her voice low and modulated.
Jane turned to Heather. “Is that right?”
Heather took another step back, hiding partly behind her mother’s body.
“We want to invite her to watch the July fourth parade with us,” Kathy said, measuring every word with care.
Jane took a resentful step toward Kathy. “She is no longer allowed to be anywhere near your sick, fucked up daughter. Do I make myself clear?”
Kathy’s steely eyes contracted. “Oh, yes. Very clear.” Kathy turned to Heather. “Let’s go.”
Jane slammed the door shut. She watched as they walked down the front path. Kathy stopped for a moment, lingering on the sidewalk as she stole a glance toward the right front window. When she saw that Jane was observing her actions, Kathy took Heather by the hand and walked down the street. Jane turned toward Emily’s closed bedroom door. “Emily?”
“Go away! Leave me alone!” Emily screamed at Jane from inside the room.
Jane debated whether to pursue a conversation with the kid and apologize for slapping her. But she figured it was best to let Emily calm down. Jane walked into the living room, standing with her back to the front windows. After several minutes, she heard a distinctive click from inside of Emily’s bedroom. She turned and realized Emily had just locked her door. Jane stared at the doorknob, distressed that Emily felt the need to lock her door.
Jane headed for the kitchen and sat at the table, burying her head in her hands. The full impact of Chris’ involvement began to hit her hard. Anger melted into betrayal and then merged into disgust. The enormity of the situation overwhelmed her. The man whom she had called a partner, both on and off the job, was responsible for the murder of two innocent people. The second that thought crossed Jane’s mind, she realized that if he killed the Lawrences, he was also the killer of Martha Durrett. Furthermore, it was reasonable to assume that Chris was also involved in the SUV explosion that took out the Stover family.
Jane puffed on her dying cigarette as a fountain of memories flashed in front of her. There was that fateful night outside the Stover’s house. She recalled Chris’ edgy behavior. Jane had disregarded his attitude that night, chalking it up to his usual surly demeanor. But in retrospect, she realized there was more to it. Within the folds of his words, there was a sense of urgency. A desire to dominate. A need to coordinate a deadly deal and not get caught. She broke the memory down minute by minute and then second by second. Stover and his family took off for ice cream in their SUV, surrounded by two police flank cars.
“What an asshole! He really wants to sign his own death certificate!” Chris remarked in a self-satisfied tone as the final flank vehicle drove past their observation car.
Jane remembered looking at Chris and seeing beads of sweat drift across his forehead. At the time, she thought nothing of it. But now it started to fit together.
Chris grabbed his cell phone, speaking in the same cocky cadence. “Yeah, it’s me. I can’t believe Stover was so stupid! He drives off with his family for ice cream so he can get thirty minutes in the outside world! Thirty fucking minutes! It looks all clear from here but hurry up!”
That’s when it hit Jane. All this time, she thought he was talking to an officer in one of the flank vehicles. But now the words had a different flavor. Was it possible, Jane wondered, that he was talking to a lackey who was hidden in the darkness near the Stover’s house?
A lackey who was in place—C-4 bomb in hand—and waiting for Chris’ call and coded language, telling him that he had thirty minutes to set up the explosive.
The more Jane tossed the notion in her head, the more it fell into place. The cops had done a thorough sweep of Stover’s residence and come up clean for any explosive devices. The crude, military C-4 bomb that was placed in the darkened recesses of the Stovers’ driveway that night was most likely detonated from just outside the Stovers’ house. Jane had always struggled with the idea that the perp who set up the bomb in the driveway must have had the guts of a front line soldier to brazenly walk into the shadows when two cops were seated across the street. But perhaps it didn’t take a lot of nerve when you had a Denver Police Detective calling you and giving you the green light while he covered your ass. The thirty minute window of time gave the minion enough time to set up the explosive, while Chris engaged Jane in conversation, purposely directing her attention away from the action taking place on the driveway. When Jane could not get the lid off of her coffee thermos, Chris jumped on that unexpected opportunity to further distract Jane from witnessing anything.
The deadly link between the Stover and Lawrence families was still vague to Jane. Was Chris on Bill Stover’s list of Denver’s influential and powerful? Was he tied in with the Texas mob? Did one of the mob’s cronies tip off Chris’ tight connection with the mafia to Bill Stover? And then did Bill spill the whole story to David Lawrence?
The letter. Did Bill Stover decide to write everything out in that letter as an informal affidavit of what he knew and then hand it to David? Was that letter an insurance policy that David kept from Patricia until he broke down that evening and showed it to her? When Patricia read the letter and understood the gravity of the situation—of their sideways involvement—that could have fueled her vitriolic outburst, simply from the realization that her family’s life was in grave danger.
Jane’s mind raced as she recalled Emily’s words when the child recalled her mother’s frightened appeal to David Lawrence and her resentment over his “bad decisions.” Perhaps his worst decision was agreeing to go to bat for Bill Stover just in case anything happened to him. From what Jane could deduce, David was the quintessential, self-conscious technical geek who had a secret longing to live life on the edge. He could feel important because he possessed the pivotal, written proof that law enforcement was desperate to acquire.
Jane considered the possibility that Stover may have mentioned Chris’ involvement with the mob in the letter. She realized it was a leap on her part but maybe . . . maybe it was the inked proof. Somehow, the personal relationship between David and Bill became apparent to the Texas mob who were obviously concerned enough about this affiliation to alert their number one gopher, Chris, to the situation. Did Chris make grand assumptions due to his paranoia and conclude that Bill was talking to David about Chris’ involvement? It was doubtful that Stover described Chris’ physical appearance in his doomed letter since Chris was obviously welcomed into the Lawrence home that fateful evening. Jane figured Chris probably put on his choirboy smile, uttered the words “ma’am” and “sir” in a cordial way to endear himself and then used the ruse of an accident down the street to get into their house.
Once inside, it only took several minutes for Chris to observe the house, discreetly place himself out of eyesight in the kitchen and quickly change into gloves, shoe covers and a mask—all of which, Jane presumed, he stashed in his jacket pocket. It was pure Chris, she surmised: cunning, smart and efficient. Jane could easily picture Chris’ subsequent quick attack homicidal maneuvers—all learned and perfected during his stint in the Marines and his subsequent law enforcement training. Jane knew that Chris would leave nothing to chance. She surmised it was for this reason he used two different knives during the murders and was careful to never cross contaminate the blades. His plan, Jane figured, was to make the homicides look as if two different people committed the crime. Jane remembered standing in the Lawrence living room with Sergeant Weyler during her first visit to the house. After Weyler went over everything—from the chaotic living room with its destroyed furniture and pristine pile of undisturbed cocaine to the meticulous way in which each victim met their death—Jane recollected how she called the whole scene “premeditated manipulation.” Looking back, Jane realized she was right on target. Who better to know what cops would look for than another highly trained cop? Brilliant evil, she thought.
Jane considered the five ounce pile of cocaine at the Lawrence crime scene. Her comment that it was planted amidst the turmoil was dead on. “Cocaine,” Jane said out loud. She suddenly realized that the amount of cocaine found at the scene was just under the amount of coke missing from the evidence room. Chris’ voice radiated in Jane’s head. It was the conversation they shared when she secretly called the lab and got an earful from Chris about Ron Dickson’s suspension.
“With the amount of coke Ron took,” Chris told Jane, “Brass figures he’s been dipping into the powder since May!”
That’s where Chris slipped up. Chris probably stole the coke from a K-Pak evidence bag in early May in preparation for the Lawrence murder and eventual cover-up. No doubt Chris used his altar boy sweetness to con Ron into leaving him alone in the property room long enough to steal the drugs and reseal the K-Pak bag. But when Chris was telling the story to Jane on the phone, how could he or anyone possibly know that the cocaine went missing around a certain date since there had been no audit of the evidence lab for over one year.
Jane wondered if Chris was planning to set up Ron from the beginning. As a detective, Chris was always projecting five steps in front of the case, factoring the variables and coming up with enough possible scenarios to fill several crime novels. He left nothing to chance; he played on people’s character weaknesses and took advantage of every plausible “in” that he could find. Jane flashed onto the scene at the hospital, after Emily fell off the roof. When Chris saw Ron walk into the emergency room with his injured hand and shaken demeanor, he jumped on the opportunity like a cougar on fresh kill. He had to. He was desperate.
Jane rapidly put two and two together regarding that fateful evening. He thought he had killed Jane under the blanket on the couch, not Martha Durrett. As far as Chris knew when he went off shift that evening, Jane was still guarding Emily. He was never aware of her fight with Emily and eventual departure from the scene. Suddenly, the cryptic “PAYBACK” note that was plunged into Martha’s eye made sense. On some level, Chris felt that Jane knew more about the murders than she was disclosing. That’s why Chris bugged the living room to eavesdrop on their conversation. He was convinced that Emily was sharing pertinent information with Jane and so, in his twisted mind, he had no choice but to kill her. No wonder Chris looked so surprised to see Jane when he reached the hospital. Once again, Chris’ words echoed in Jane’s head. He was speaking to her at the hospital, doing his version of consoling her after learning that Martha Durrett was killed.
“Shit happens,” Chris said to Jane. “At least the son-of-a-bitch couldn’t find the kid and had to take off. Don’t blame yourself for this huge mistake.” But in retrospect, Jane realized that Chris misspoke. At that point, Weyler had not debriefed anybody about the crime scene. More importantly, Jane was the only one who had spoken to Emily and knew that the intruder on the roof suddenly left when he couldn’t find the kid.
As Jane began to see everything with clearer eyes, she took into account Chris’ appearance over the past months. His wardrobe had become increasingly slovenly. His breath had taken on an acrid odor. His eyes looked dark and puffy, as if he had been on a five-day bender. Jane concluded that her own drunken demeanor prevented her from attaching any significance to Chris’ disintegrating appearance. And then there was his attitude: restless, anxious, overly talkative, intensely paranoid, an obsessive interest in rough sexual activity, all juxtaposed against a false sense of confidence and raw power. Jane sat back in shock; it was almost exactly like Bill Stover’s behavior during his last few months. She felt the floor drop away from her.
“Meth?” Jane said out loud.
Could it be? Could meth be one of the fateful connections between Chris and Stover? True, it was difficult to be a high-functioning meth addict and a cop without other cops catching on. Chris’ often erratic behavior could easily be chalked up to severe stress and a driving desire to catch the crook and close the case. But it was also true that meth addicts have zero stress tolerance. Then again, Chris had a lot of things going for him, including his keen intelligence and profound understanding of the criminal psyche. Who better understands the way a criminal thinks than another criminal?
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