A Deadly Game (28 page)

"Are you telling me Laci was okay with me?" Amber insisted. "Well, when you get all the facts, it will make sense to you," Scott contended.

"So, I'm still having a very hard time thinking in Laci's shoes: My husband has a girlfriend and I'm pregnant with his child.'" Amber paused, as if taking a moment to envision how she would feel in that situation. "So when did . . . when did she first learn of me?"

"After our first date," Scott responded coolly.

"After our first date?" Amber angrily repeated.

"Yeah," Scott affirmed, as he drove the streets of Modesto.

"So why did you carry the charade of lying to me if she already knew and you had the opportunity to come clean with me, especially knowing how I feel about truth?"

"I don't know," Scott said.

"Was there . . . what reason, what purpose would that serve?" Amber demanded. "If Laci already knows about me and the situation had come up for you to have that opportunity to be honest with me, why did you keep up the deception?"

"Just so I wouldn't, you know, hurt other people and make a ..."

"Who are you gonna hurt?" Amber quizzed.

"Well, her family and ..." Scott stated.

"The truth . . . truth is so much easier to handle than a lie, Scott!"

"I know, and I'm so weak in that regard," Scott admitted. "I was so weak in that regard. This has made me so much stronger in that respect."

"Really? But look at where you're at now, Scott, with this in your life."

"I know. I know."

"Is it that... is it that lying is so fun for you?" Amber asked.

"No. Lying is terrible."

"It seems to come to you so easily," Amber said.

"It doesn't, and it's a terrible thing, and I've done it. And I know that it's wrong and, I'm just... I have no ... I'm stronger . . . stronger now."

"Or you could just add it to your collection of hobbies now, can't you-pathological liar?" Amber shot back. "You can add that to your resume with all your, uh . . . degrees."

"I will never lie again. I know you can't believe that."

"No, I can't," Amber agreed.

The conversation moved on to Scott's reluctance to appear on television. Scott defended his decision, telling Amber that he didn't agree with the angle the media was taking.

"Now, when you watch, like, Fox News and they give, you know, twenty minutes to it, right? Fifteen of those minutes is asking the family, you know, Sharon, Laci's mom, how do you feel? Laci's brother, how do you feel? What has it done to you? When they should spend twenty minutes on the disappearance showing, you know, those things you just talked about and trying to develop those leads. The family should only appear in order to help. Should only appear and say, 'You know what, she's gone from here . . . '" "But you haven't [appeared]," Amber said. "They have not shown my appearances because when they do, I hold up the flier, and say this is what's important," Scott explained. "They want some kind of drama beyond that."

"Of course, you're gonna want to direct them away," Amber chided. "In the back of your mind, you're thinking, There's Amber, of course I can't show my face in front of the camera left and right, because in the back of my mind Amber's out there somewhere. There's Amber, you know, somebody I've been telling I'm in Europe. Of course that's in the back of your mind, of course. If I were in your shoes, I wouldn't want my face to be shown, either. Because there's Amber, right?"

Ignoring Amber's theory, Scott insisted that he had been on camera. "So did you love Laci and your baby?" Amber probed. "I love Laci. I loved Laci, no question," Scott insisted. "And she doesn't. . . She doesn't deserve to be missing."

"So you loved her, but there's me. How can I make sense of that, Scott?"

"Honey, I'm sorry, Amber, I can't tell you all the details."

Amber next asked Scott if he had told his attorney about her.

Scott said he had, although his attorney had advised that speaking with Amber was "not a good idea."

"He said 'You should not be talking to her,'" Scott continued. "He said, 'The police had a hard-on to make a case against you, Scott.' And he repeated that three times."

I find it telling that Scott acknowledged that his lawyer had admonished him not to speak with Amber-yet he chose to ignore that advice. Once again, Scott just didn't seem to think the rules applied to him. Only in hindsight, while he was in jail awaiting trial, would he admit that his decision had cost him dearly.

"It's not going to get to trial because it's not a case, but he said this is a capital case, and they can make anything enough to arrest you. You will not be allowed bail. You will be in jail for months until we can get you released."

The conversation ended with Amber threatening to go to police with the details of their sexual affair.

"Well, yeah, if you think that's the right thing to do, do it." Scott told her.

It was just before 4:00 P.M. when surveillance teams observed that Scott was heading toward police headquarters on Tenth Street. Using the tracking device on the Land Rover, the team trailed behind him as he slowly circled the building. It appeared that he might be looking for a parking space, but he didn't stop. Instead, he drove toward the Investigative Services building that housed the Detective Division, a few blocks away. Cops followed behind him as he crept along F Street to Thirteenth Street, then turned south on E Street, lapping the department's satellite office at a slow crawl.

Using their cell phones, the surveillance officers alerted detectives inside the building. Rushing to the window, Detectives Buehler and Owen and Sergeant Alan Carter gazed out at the street in time to see the green Land Rover motoring eastbound on F Street.

Scott never did park the Land Rover and go inside either police building that afternoon. Grogan later theorized that his suspect was doing some surveillance work of his own-checking to see if Amber Frey was making good on her threat. I wonder what Scott might have done if her car was in the parking lot. He was obviously suspicious about her police connections by this time, and further conversations should be reviewed with this in mind.

Scott may have been concerned about Amber's actions, but clearly that wasn't the only thing on his mind. Later that day, he called the Dish Network to request that the Playboy Channel be added to his programming package.

At 4:00 P.M., police watched from a distance as Scott pulled into the parking lot of the Enterprise car rental office on Seventh and G Streets. Noting that he was wearing the symbolic yellow and blue ribbon on his shirt, they watched as he loaded several items from Laci's Land Rover into a white Chevy rental truck, left the parking lot, and returned home.

That same day, police divers were examining the waters beneath the Berkeley Marina with a sonar device. Search teams focused on the waters off the Cesar Chavez Park, where earlier cadaver dogs had picked up a scent. Detectives had been advised that a blue tarp had been recovered from the bay earlier in the month, near the corner of the Cesar Chavez Park.

Interestingly, an officer from a neighboring police department reported that she had seen a blue tarp on Brooks Island on December 28. That site was directly in line with the area in the park where the tarp was recovered, and where search teams were now poised to begin their sweep. Investigators wondered whether the tarp, which was similar in color to the one Scott had used to wrap his umbrellas, was linked to Laci's disappearance. Authorities forwarded it to the Department of Justice's crime lab, where an examination revealed the presence of cat and dog hairs. The hairs were submitted for comparison against those of Scott's pets.

When the searchers had no luck in the Cesar Chavez section, they shifted to the water near the Old Pier. There, one of the officers noted an object on the screen. It appeared to be the silhouette of a human body floating off the marina, about three miles from the shore.

CHAPTER TWELVE

JANUARY 9, 2003

At sunrise on January 9, police dispatched divers to the Berkeley Marina to take a closer look at what they believed to be the silhouette of a human body.

As Grogan waited for word from the dive teams, he was advised that Scott had taken the white Chevy rental truck and was on Highway 132 heading in the direction of the marina. Scott had loaded a black suitcase into the rental's cab and a white one into the bed of the truck. By 10:30 A.M., he was pulling into the marina's yacht club. "He drove to the end of the road, where the road circled around. Peterson slowly drove around the circle as he looked at the water," the surveillance report read. "Once around the circle, Peterson turned into a parking lot [and] drove around the parking lot twice."

At 10:44, officers reported that Scott exited the marina and drove to the San Luis Reservoir, where he entered the parking lot for O'Neil Forebay. He circled the lot for several minutes, then left the parking area, traveling east on Interstate 580.

"Peterson was utilizing counter surveillance driving when he left the San Luis Reservoir area," the surveillance report stated. "Since Peterson's vehicle was equipped with a tracking device, surveillance units backed way off, allowing Peterson to drive into parking lots, make U-turns for no reason, stop on the side of the road and eventually end up at the Double Tree in Bakersfield. All of Peterson's erratic driving was captured and stored in the tracking device."

The surveillance officer reported that he next trailed Peterson to the South Central Valley, near Fresno. The officer verified that Amber Frey was not at her massage therapy center nearby. Scott returned to Bakersfield, where he checked into a Double Tree Motel and stayed the night. "Cell records indicated he was at a motel," profiler Sharon Hagan wrote in a Criminal Investigative Analysis. "He didn't answer incoming calls and let them be transferred to his voice mail. This behavior was inconsistent with his habit of frequent cell phone use."

That evening, Grogan telephoned Sharon Rocha and Lee Peterson to advise them that search teams "had viewed an image that appeared consistent with a human body" in the San Francisco Bay. He told both sets of parents that a team of divers would conduct a search on Saturday, January 11. A dive team had attempted to view the object earlier that morning, but weather conditions had prohibited the underwater search, he said.

Grogan also explained that if the object did turn out to be a body, it might not be Laci. He warned them against believing any news reports they heard, advising them to wait until police contacted them. The detective later reported that neither Lee nor Sharon believed the discovery was Laci.

"Have you informed Scott?" Lee Peterson asked Grogan. The detective replied that he hadn't, but said he would call Scott to let him know.

According to friends and family, Scott had hoped that going out into the world and "doing something" would "make it easier" to deal with Laci's disappearance.

By the morning on January 10, TV trucks encircled the area of the bay where police teams were working. As officers worked an underwater grid with sonar devices, Scott was at the Enterprise rental office in Modesto exchanging the white truck he had been driving for a silver Saturn.

Police weren't prepared for this latest change; Scott's new car had no tracking device.

Scott was still driving the silver car when he left home on the morning of January 11. He checked the undercarriage of Laci's Land Rover before leaving his house, apparently looking for a tracking device. Police observed that Scott was carrying a duffel bag and had stopped at the bank, possibly withdrawing money. From there he drove to the Red Lion and remained there for about thirty minutes. Once he emerged, he began using counter surveillance tactics on members of the team.

One of his maneuvers was to come to a sudden halt on the freeway, forcing officers in pursuit to pass him. At one point, after leaving the highway, he approached a member of the team who had turned off on a cul-de-sac in Modesto. When Scott got out of his car and began walking toward her, the officer reported, she quickly drove off.

Based on Scott's behavior, Grogan ordered the supervisor of the visual surveillance to cease the covert operation. From that point on, police kept tabs on him by monitoring the wiretap on both his cell phones.

The police had since obtained a new warrant, expanding their wiretap beyond Amber's calls to include sixty-five other individuals. Most were family and friends, but the list also included a number of high-profile members of the media, including Greta Van Susteren, Diane Sawyer, Matt Lauer, John Walsh, Gloria Gomez, Dan Abrams, Larry King, and Rita Cosby. Had any of these figures known they were being recorded, of course, they would have been furious. I am surprised that not one of them raised any objections when they found out. I know for a fact that some of them tried to get copies of the transcripts of their calls, but they were never turned over by police. Ultimately, however, the officers had the courts' authority to do so, and the media was fair game.

"Throughout the day, officers who were monitoring the wire on Scott's cellular phone updated me," Grogan wrote in his report. "Scott told his friends that he was in Bakersfield, to verify that he was not at or near Bakersfield at that time based on his cell site."

Even as he was stringing the cops along, Scott was apparently still up to his old manipulative tricks with his family and friends. "Scott acted as though he was crying in one telephone conversation and then in the next behaved completely normally when the telephone calls were separated only by a few moments," the detective noted.

Later in the afternoon," Grogan reported, "we were informed -L/that the dive team in the San Francisco Bay had identified the object on the sonar and a dive team determined it was a boat anchor." The news traveled fast: "Within a few moments, we were informed that Scott received a phone call from a cellular phone number associated with Laci's mother, Sharon Rocha, where a female voice informed Scott that officers in that area had found a boat anchor rather than a body."

"Hi Scott, this is Mom," Sharon's message began. "It's about quarter to one, just wanted you to know, I just got a call from Ron Cloward, who is at the boat marina, and it was a boat anchor. Of course, we knew it wasn't Laci. But I just wanted you to know." Listening to the message, Scott broke in with a loud whistle. To the agent listening in, the whistle sounded like "a sigh of relief."

That afternoon Scott spoke to his father, telling him that he was in Bakersfield when in fact he was in Gilroy, some two hundred miles away. He also spoke with Guy Miligi, telling him that he'd gone back to work, believing that "going and doing something" would make it easier to cope.

"God, yeah, I couldn't imagine," Miligi concurred. "And then, now all the suspicion, man, did you see all the people at the marina?" Scott asked.

Miligi said he'd heard about the crowd. Scott said he'd received a call from the Modesto police chief informing him that the object in the bay turned out to be a boat anchor.

Scott laughed. "They had eighty-eight people out there, you know, and they came up with an anchor. Maybe they will send the eighty-eight people somewhere else and start working, I don't know." Scott was campaigning among his friends, but to what effect? Did he hope they would relay his reservations to law enforcement? If the community thought the cops were on the wrong track, would the police really change their tactics? It was wishful thinking.

Scott ended the conversation abruptly. "All right, man, I gotta go, or I'm going to have to pull over here," he told Miligi, suggesting he might be about to cry.

Scott's display of emotion didn't last long. Within four minutes he was back on the phone, leaving a message for his friend Mike. His tone was upbeat; the officers listening in detected no signs of sadness in his voice.

Sunday was a quiet day for investigators but Monday, January 13, brought a twist in the case that forced investigators to become more circumspect in their dealings with Amber Frey.

When Detective Buehler reported for duty on Monday, he learned that the tap on Scott's cell phone revealed that he and Amber had had a thirty-minute phone conversation on Sunday evening. The records also indicated that Amber had received a two-minute call from Scott earlier that day. But Amber had not recorded these calls. For reasons police could only speculate on, Amber mentioned neither conversation when Buehler reached her that afternoon.

Since she'd first called the police on December 30, Amber had been staying with Doug Sibley, her friend Shawn's uncle. Now, she told Buehler, she wanted to move back to her own house in Madera.

Buehler interpreted Amber's request as an attempt to maintain her privacy, and to ensure that Doug would not overhear her phone conversations with Scott. Buehler noted that "it also matched up with her apparent lack of concern of a violent attack as she continued to stay at her residence through Tuesday night, 1/13."

"It appeared possible that Frey is attempting to maintain contact with Peterson in the event he is not involved in the disappearance of his wife," Buehler wrote. "At this time, it is unknown if she is making more contact with Peterson or if she is not cooperating with this investigation and possibly giving him information."

That same day, Grogan was advised that the National Enquirer intended to run a story in the upcoming issue, scheduled to hit the newsstands on Thursday, January 16, that could blow Amber's cover.

The police didn't know how much information the paper had. They knew that the article was likely to include "unspecified details about a girlfriend, quite possibly from the Fresno area, along with some restricted information about evidence that would appear in print." The physical evidence "included but was not limited to concrete anchors that were made and had been discovered during the investigation."

Detectives discussed the "positives and negatives" of releasing information about the affair "to the family of suspected murder victim Laci Peterson."

During the meeting, Grogan received a call from Scott's lawyer. McAllister was angry that the detective had been speaking with his client knowing that Scott had secured counsel. Grogan informed McAllister that he was not in violation of any law. Scott was not in custody, nor had he filed any complaints.

The lawyer said his concerns were ethical ones. Grogan said his concern was for Amber Prey's safety, and he wanted Scott to know that police now knew about her.

Still unaware of either her son-in-law's relationship with Amber Frey or the impending Enquirer article, Sharon Rocha appeared on live television that evening, telling viewers that she stood firmly behind Scott. Sharon Rocha, Ron Grantski, Lee Peterson, Amy Rocha, and Modesto Police Chief Roy Wasden were all Larry King's guests that night. Also appearing as a commentator was defense lawyer Mark Geragos, who was not yet representing Scott.

When King asked how Scott was holding up, Lee said that his son was "devastated," that he was "just terribly distraught. He's lost a lot of weight. I've never seen him so sad. He's just what you'd expect from someone who is missing their wife and baby." He told the audience that "Scott and Laci were a wonderful couple, just very devoted and did everything together. They had such a marvelous life. They had a home they bought two years ago, [that] they were remodeling. And, well, the baby was coming, and they gardened. They just did everything together."

Laci's mother seconded Lee's portrait of Scott and Laci's happy marriage. "They just are really truly in love with each other. They're partners. They're a team. They love each other. They planned together. They play together. They're always smiling. They're just a very happy, well-adjusted couple. Never been any indication, I never heard Laci say she was even angry with Scott for any reason at all."

"We have no question in our mind about Scott. He's part of our family," Amy Rocha added.