A Deadly Game (24 page)

While Scott's defense team would make light of this at trial, I thought I'd never seen a more classic case of a criminal returning to the scene of the crime. At no time did Scott park and walk down to the search sites. Nor did he stop to thank the officers who were braving the bay to look for Laci. Instead, it was reasonable to conclude, he was gauging their progress.

"We were only there approximately five minutes before we left" on Scott Peterson's trail, the surveilling officers wrote in their report. By this time, Peterson was driving erratically. As the cops headed back on 580 toward Modesto, "Peterson was driving extremely fast. He was driving in and out of traffic at approximately eighty-five to ninety-five miles per hour in heavy traffic."

Scott raced past San Leandro and sped along Highway 580 through Livermore. "Peterson exited in Livermore and went to a Chevron," the report continued, and "drove up to the gas pumps as if to get gas. Peterson kept driving past several vacant pumps and got back on the freeway."

The game was on. Suddenly the cops were on notice: Scott was playing to win.

"Peterson then took another off ramp and drove through two gas station lots before finally stopping. It appeared Peterson forgot which side the gas tank was on and drove in circles until he properly pulled up next to a gas pump.

"Peterson went into the gas station," the report continued, but noted that something had changed about his attire: Scott was no longer wearing his blue-and-yellow ribbon.

Once he was back in Modesto, Scott slowed down, obeying the speed limit. By 3:35 he was back at his house on Covena Avenue, where he remained for an hour before climbing into another car with a male driver and driving to the Del Rio Country Club.

Back at headquarters, Brocchini was working the phones. His first call was to Renee Garza, who had known Laci since kindergarten. Renee and her husband, Brian, still socialized with the Petersons. Renee told Brocchini she'd never sensed any problems in the Petersons' marriage, and that Laci spoke as though she and Scott had a "very good sex life" and a great relationship.

About two years ago, Laci had stopped taking birth control pills and bought an ovulation kit in hopes of conceiving a child. Renee remembered the day that Laci excitedly phoned to tell her, "I think I'm pregnant."

Brocchini asked if Renee had discussed the case with any of Laci's other friends. She said she had. After the candlelight vigil on New Year's Eve, she invited their friend Rene Tomlinson to her home. The two agreed that it was troubling that Scott was shying away from the media, a sentiment that many friends now shared.

A short time later, Brocchini reached Laci's maid of honor, Heather Richardson, on her cell phone. Heather quickly dispelled rumors that Laci had been dating another man. She was certain that Scott was the father of the couple's unborn child. The last time she heard from Laci was either December 23 or 24, when Laci left a holiday greeting on her voicemail. After Laci's disappearance, Scott told Heather that Laci had gone to bed around 9:00 P.M. on December 23, and that when he left to go fishing the next morning she was wearing her diamond earrings and her grandmother's watch.

"What's your gut feeling?" Heather asked, turning the tables on the detective.

Brocchini explained that he was keeping an open mind. Still, he expressed concern that he had been unable to eliminate Scott as a suspect.

In a subsequent call, Brocchini asked Heather's husband, Mike Richardson, to help the investigation by asking Scott about his activities on Christmas Eve. Mike agreed, and in mid-January he talked with Scott. Scott told Mike that after reading an article saying that sturgeon were running in the bay, he'd decided to go fishing Christmas Eve. Scott remembered speaking with five people at the marina that day.

Despite the efforts of the Modesto officers and Scott's own private investigator, none of these people was ever located. By now, the police suspected that Scott had changed his alibi from golfing to fishing after he realized that he'd been sighted at the marina that afternoon. Detectives were convinced that he'd made the decision during his ride back to Modesto that day, then quickly placed "cover-up" calls to Laci, leaving messages for his wife at home and on her cell phone.

Mike told Brocchini that Scott didn't appear worried about Laci being found in the San Francisco Bay. As for the fishing boat he'd recently purchased, Scott told Mike Richardson that he'd planned to surprise his father-in-law, fellow fisherman Ron Grantski, with it after Christmas. This seems to be the first and only time Scott ever floated this story. In all the thousands of documents and countless interviews I've conducted in covering this case, I never heard anyone suggest there was any real camaraderie between Scott and Ron. They were not fishing buddies. The whole thing was another one of Scott Peterson's lies.

When Brocchini asked Greg Reed about a message Scott left on his answering machine. "Have you or Kristen seen or talked to Laci today or yesterday? I can't find her," was the exact message Scott left Greg that Christmas Eve. Scott must have been in the car when he phoned, Greg told Brocchini; he could hear road noises in the background. Scott never told Greg where he was, and Greg never asked.

"Are you certain that's what he said?" Brocchini responded. It was the phrase "yesterday or today" that seemed strange to the detective. "Yesterday" would have been December 23, and Scott told police that his wife had disappeared on Christmas Eve. Greg had saved the message on his voice mail, and offered to let the detective listen to it.

Greg and his wife, Kristin, lived around the corner from Scott and Laci, and Greg's mother was the couple's next-door neighbor. He and Scott were good friends, and they spoke at least once or twice a week. Laci was in his wife's Lamaze class, which Kristen conducted at their home on Edgebrook Drive.

Greg also told the detective that Scott had called him on the afternoon of December 24. The two discussed an upcoming New Year's party. He and Scott often talked about hunting and fishing, so when he learned later that Scott had bought a boat he was surprised that he hadn't mentioned it-or his fishing trip-on the call.

Nor had he mentioned his wife.

"What do you think about this case?" Brocchini asked Greg.

"I don't know what to think anymore," Greg told the detective. Several things bothered him. He couldn't understand why Scott was refusing to speak to the press. Nor could he understand why Scott had asked about hearing from Laci "yesterday or today" in his message. For me, this remains one of the unsolved mysteries of the case. Was Scott worried about something Laci might have told the Reeds before she disappeared? Or was he revealing, inadvertently, that she hadn't lived through the night?

Greg recalled something else unusual. He recounted a conversation he had with Scott the year before about a fence between Scott's house and his mother's place that needed to be replaced. At the time, Scott said he had no money for a new one. A month later, he installed a swimming pool in his backyard. If Scott had been telling the truth about not having the money to replace a simple fence, Greg wondered, how did he find the money for an expensive pool a month later?

In the days ahead, Brocchini also interviewed an employee of Scott's named Rob Weaver. Weaver told the investigator, he and Eric Olsen met with Scott at a restaurant in Fresno. Olsen, who was resigning from Tradecorp, came to the meeting to return the company fax machine. With Olsen's departure, Weaver was now Scott's sole employee. Scott talked about Laci's disappearance, telling them that he was a suspect in the case, and he didn't know what to do about it. He also said that he'd had a private meeting with Geraldo Rivera, but never revealed what the two discussed.

Next, a former classmate from Cuesta Junior College, Richard Reynolds, spoke with the detective. Reynolds said he and Scott had played on the school's golf team together. Like several of Scott's other friends, Reynolds described his buddy as a "loner." During college, he would date women just two or three times before moving on. Reynolds said that his wife, Lisa, had never cared for Scott, mainly because she didn't like his sense of humor. Reynolds recalled that Scott had once sent him a suggestive photo of a woman standing next to a bed with a caption that read, "This is my wife." From the photo, it was obvious that Scott wasn't married to the female posing in the photo. Reynolds's wife thought the joke was in bad taste.

In early January, Lee Peterson called the Modesto Police Department tip line to alert officers that he'd heard of a Modesto Satanic cult called the Order of the Silver Crescent that sacrificed babies. The group, he said, was headquartered at 701 I Street.

A detective assigned to check out the tip learned that 7011 Street was occupied by a commercial business, and neither the business owner nor the others he spoke to there had ever heard of the Order of the Silver Crescent. A check of police records showed that officers had been called to the address twice that year, once for a discarded license plate and once for an alarm going off. There was no indication of any criminal activity, and nothing to suggest that a Satanic cult was operating from that address. Still, the detective decided to check further.

The previous year, there had been four calls to the police from that address-three for an alarm sounding and the fourth for a burglary. When the detective checked with the police department's gang unit, he was told that none of its members had ever heard of a group called the Order of the Silver Crescent.

"I determined there was no validity to this tip," the detective wrote in his report.

Later, once Scott hired Mark Geragos to lead his defense, stories about satanic cults gained widespread attention. But these early tips suggest that more than a few people were ready to believe that such cults were operating in their midst.

A more realistic tip came from a woman named Kristen Dempewolf, who told the clerk that she'd seen a man she believed to be Scott Peterson on Christmas Eve morning in front of his house. He was in the driveway, and said "Good morning" to her as she walked by the house on her way home from the park. Dempewolf said the man was "putting things in the bed of his truck, small things, but I didn't see any of the items. He was moving things around."

Dempewolf, a petite brunette eight months pregnant, explained that at 8:45 that morning she was walking her chocolate Lab in East La Loma Park. She had already called police on December 25 to alert them that she was in the park between 9:00 and 9:30 on Christmas Eve morning and hadn't seen Laci there.

Dempewolf said she walked from East La Loma Park up to the bridge at Kerwin and then left the park at the easement by the 1000 Oaks Lift Station. From there, she walked by the Petersons' residence. Dempewolf told police that during the walk, she encountered a man and two women walking with a golden retriever that wasn't on a leash. Between 9:20 and 9:40, while she was walking on Covena, she'd seen Scott Peterson standing in the bed of his pickup truck. She said she typically heard a dog barking when she passed that house, but that there was no barking on that day. She observed an "older white utility van parked across the street" from the house. Her tip was passed upstairs to Detective Brocchini.

At least five people, including Diane Jackson, Rudy Medina, and Kristen Dempewolf, reported seeing a strange van in the neighborhood around the time of Laci's disappearance. Several of the sightings occurred on or near Covena Avenue at the very time Scott was loading his pickup in the driveway. Yet, I found it curious that Scott never mentioned seeing a van that morning.

Two explanations for this have been suggested to me. The first is that Scott did not act alone and the van was somehow linked to an accomplice.

The other is that Scott was too busy loading Laci's body into the truck to notice.

As the investigation progressed, Scott remained under twenty-four-hour watch. On January 5, the surveillance team reported, Scott paid a visit to his attorney, Kirk McAllister. When Scott entered the Eleventh Street office, he was dressed in a red-checkered shirt and blue jeans, with a business-card-sized photo of Laci pinned to his lapel. When he emerged, the photo was no longer there.

At 10:20, the team followed Scott to the Enterprise Rent-a-Car office in Modesto, where he parked Laci's Discovery in the lot and rented a 2002 Honda. He retrieved something from the back seat of the Land Rover and put it in the red Accord. Scott then unknowingly led officers on a ninety-minute ride to the Berkeley Marina. He parked for a total of ten minutes, and then "contacted an unidentified subject in the parking lot." Sources close to the investigation believe this man could have been an accomplice, and one source even told me that it's possible money was exchanged that day. The police report revealed nothing further about this clandestine meeting; the officers reported only that they lost track of Scott as he left the parking lot.

Some pundits have argued that a single individual could not have committed this crime, and have pointed to this meeting as evidence of a conspiracy. It does seem clear that the officers should have noted the license plate of the man Scott met that day and followed up on the contact. They did not. Yet, I have never seen any evidence that would support a second participant in this crime, and to this day I find it highly doubtful that this loose end would have led to such a discovery.

After losing him at the marina, the police set up mobile units at Scott's house, his business, and the Red Lion, hoping to resume their surveillance when he returned. Officials from Enterprise Rent-a-Car promised to alert the team as soon as Scott brought back the red Accord or rented another vehicle.