Sex. Murder. Mystery. (35 page)

Perhaps he had changed his mind and had tried to get out?

“A seasoned firefighter doesn’t die in a fire in his own home,” Jim told his wife as he began to dial Chief Bob Snyder. “You crawl your way out. It's your house, you know where you are.”

Chief Snyder, who had been in on the early stage of the investigation, agreed with Jim Schindler's growing skepticism. The two conferred by telephone that morning.

“This doesn’t ring true,” Jim persisted. “Something is wrong. Investigate this thing.”

The chief assured him it was already being done. The arson squad was at Columbine and a meticulous examination of every inch of the charred house was underway.

Jim made another phone call to the police department; they agreed that something was up. In fact, they did not want it released that Glen's body had been discovered. Information that might lead to an arrest would be kept close to their vests.

His last call would be to Glen's first wife; the mother of his son and daughter.

It was the last person Andy Harrelson expected to connect with, but it was a nice surprise. When Jim Schindler phoned out of the blue that morning, Andy thought he was calling to catch up. She took a seat at the kitchen table and prepared for a leisurely chat. The couples had drifted apart after the divorce and Andy had missed the Schindlers.

“Have you heard about Glen?” Jim asked abruptly. His tone was soft, suggesting something had happened.

Andy felt a jolt. She braced herself. “What?” she asked, her heart sinking to a place lower than she thought possible. Something terrible had happened. She knew it, even before he said it.

“There was a fire in his house…”

The rest of the words would escape Andy Harrelson, but their meaning was clear. She gripped the phone and asked what hospital Glen was taken to.

“He didn’t make it, Andy,” Jim said. “I'm so sorry.”

“I'm going to the house,” she said.

“No. You stay there. I'm coming over.”

Todd Harrelson overheard his mother's end of the conversation and joined her at the kitchen table. As they held each other, the teen and his mother cried before going upstairs to tell Tara. The sixteen-year-old girl fell apart. She and her father had been close, despite Sharon's frequent meddling. Tara loved her dad. She was, in her eyes and his, Daddy's Girl.

Andy Harrelson still loved Glen. She loved the good parts of their marriage and the children they had made together. By the time she had her wits about her, her home was filled with people from the fire department, the police, even a witness assistance professional from the county.

Shock was displaced by sorrow and worry. She asked if Sharon had been notified. An officer said they had not yet made that call. In fact, they couldn’t call. Sharon Harrelson had no phone in her remote house in southeastern Colorado.

“This is going to be so hard on Sharon,” Andy told the victims assistance woman. “She just lost another husband not too long ago.”

The victims assistance person excused herself to make a call.

Todd and Andy went upstairs, away from the activity that was enveloping their home. A mob of uniforms had taken over. Tara had gone to be with a girlfriend. Andy caught her son's anguished face in the dressing-room mirror.

Clarity had begun to set in as the initial shock turned from upheaval to numbness.

Andy's own words echoed in her consciousness: “She just lost another husband not too long ago.”

“Sharon did it,” she said.

Todd looked hard at his mother, prompting her to say more.

“Oh my God,” she said quickly, as if she could censor what she had blurted out. “I'm sorry I said that.”

But she wasn’t sorry, not really. From what she had seen, Sharon was the type of woman who’d be behind something like her husband's murder.

Anxiously, Mikki Baker took another look at the clock. What was keeping Glen? He was supposed to get in touch with her before they met for coffee that Saturday morning at Village Inn off 84th Ave and 1-25. She reran what he had said, and she became worried.

“I have something to talk to you about. I can’t tell you, now. I just need to see you.”

Mikki told her husband, Steve, about her concerns. It wasn’t like Glen to not call when he said he would. She got dressed and planned on going to the coffee shop to see if Glen had forgotten and showed up.

Instead, from her bedroom telephone, she dialed his number on the off chance that he had returned to Columbine Court.

A man identifying himself as a police officer answered her call.

For a minute, Mikki thought she had misdialed. But she knew Glen's number by heart. She hung up.

“Call the number again,” Steve told her.

The same man answered. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Mikki Baker. I'm trying to reach Glen Harrelson and his number is ringing you.”

“Why are you calling?”

“He's a friend of mine. We’re getting together for coffee this morning.”

Steve watched his wife's face grow white. Later, when Mikki Baker recounted what the man said, she would not be able to come up with the exact words. Something about an accident. Something about a dead man. The line had been patched over from the bumed-out house to the Thornton police station.

“Glen's dead,” she said, tears already flowing.

Steve Baker reached out for his wife and held her.

“What's Sharon going to do?” Mikki sobbed. “This is the second husband she's lost to death.”

Steve shook his head.

“Mikki,” he finally said, “don’t be too hasty. I told you there's something about her. I don’t like her.”

Mikki stopped listening to her husband for a moment. Her thoughts slipped to Glen and the reason they were going to have coffee that morning.

“He never got to tell me what he so desperately wanted to say,” she said.

* * *

A hot shower was all he wanted. Rick Philippi returned from pheasant hunting in Kit Carson, on the Kansas state line and was on his way to the shower when his wife, Theresa, stopped him with the grim news.

“Glen's dead. He's been killed in his house! His body, Rick, was set on fire.”

Rick was shocked into silence as grief took hold. How could that have happened?

Something wasn’t right
, he thought.

Finally it hit him. “Where's his wife?” he asked.

Theresa Philippi knew what her husband was thinking.

“They’re looking for her,” she said.

“She did it. I know she did it. I just know it.”

When Sharon's son-in-law, Bart Mason, picked up the phone in his rambling old Trinidad house, it was Glen Harrelson's mother, Ruby, calling all the way from Des Moines, Iowa. The kindly old woman had some bad news and needed to reach Sharon right away.

With a worried look on his face, Bart pressed the receiver into wife Rochelle's outstretched palm.

Mrs. Harrelson was distraught and nearly out of breath. There was no room for the pleasantries that usually accompany the start of a phone conversation.

“Rochelle, how far do you live from your mom's house?”

“About thirty minutes,” Sharon's eldest daughter answered.

“You’ve got to go up there and be with your mother.”

“We’re going up there anyway. Why the sudden need?”

Mrs. Harrelson's fragile composure began to slip further and she let the words rush from her lips. “You’ve got to go tell your mom Glen died this morning in a fire at the house.”

Rochelle was overwhelmed. She could barely think of a response. “What house?”

But Mrs. Harrelson was gone. The line was dead.

Rochelle and Bart made it to Round House in record time, probably less than fifteen minutes, though they didn’t time the drive.

Danny and Misty were in the front room playing when Rochelle and Bart went inside.

“Bart and Rochelle are here!”

“I'm so glad you’re here,” Sharon said. “Come and sit down. We’ll eat supper and watch a movie.”

“Mom, I think you better sit down,” Rochelle said, tears running from her eyes.

“What's wrong?” Sharon asked.

“Mom, Glen's mom just called… Glen died this morning in a fire at the house.”

Sharon stood perfectly still for a moment and started to cry, before words came to her lips.

“Oh my God, how did this happen?” she finally asked.

Rochelle held her mother, feeling her shuddering body convulsing with grief.

“How did this happen…”

She collected herself enough to tell the children the terrible news that their new stepfather was dead.

Danny Nelson stood in the front room, his eyes wide open and his mouth agape.

“Mommy,” the nine-year-old boy said, “why do all our daddies have to die?”

Something snapped. Her crying shut off like a tap run dry.

“Oh,” she said, as she fumbled with her shoelaces, tears obscuring her vision. “I’ve got to make a phone call. I’ve got to find out what's going on.”

Bart, who stayed out of most of the conversation, told his young wife to take her mother down the mountain to the pay telephone at Robinson's Mill. He would stay at the house with the little kids. It was all he could think to do. Everyone had been so shaken by this tragedy. Imagine the poor guy dying in a terrible fire like that. What could be worse?

Way up north, near the scene of the crime, Thornton Detective Glen Trainor was called out to the crime scene at the fireman's house. A bit later, Elaine Tygart also received news of the suspicious death. Within a few hours, the two would be heading for Trinidad. Driving down the freeway to solve not one murder, but two.

Chapter 28

SNOW WAS THREATENING, TURNING THE SKY OVER Brighton, Colorado, into a leaden lid. Lorri Nelson Hustwaite's knotted stomach rolled inside her and her knees nearly buckled as she walked the long corridor to the visiting area of the Adams County Jail. She was there to see Sharon Lynn, the woman who had been arrested following the Pizza Hut confession of her involvement in the murder of Perry Nelson. Lorri, pale and wan from the trip and the anxiety of the pending confrontation, had arrived from Montana to ask the question to which everyone had sought an answer.

Directed over to a seat separating visitors from prisoners by a wall of glass, Lorri spotted Sharon before her former stepmother saw her. As she moved closer, the woman who killed her father stretched forward as a delighted smile rushed over her face.

“Lorri,” Sharon called out with the kind of exaggerated excitement one uses to demonstrate to a long-lost friend a sense of joy for a reunion.

Lorri did not return the look. She did not match Sharon's smile, nor was her greeting given with any semblance of friendliness.

“I want to know one thing,” she said. “Why did you kill my father?”

The happy look long gone, Sharon shook her head sadly. “I never meant for it to happen,” she said. “I can’t possibly explain it all. It is far too complicated. My feelings. My feelings were all mixed up.”

As Lorri listened, Sharon trashed her father's memory. Sharon shifted blame and said Perry had cheated on her. He had an affair with another woman and it broke her heart.

“You don’t know what I was going through with his affair. It hurt.”

“You’ve had many, many affairs,” Lorri snapped. “And you’re not dead.”

Perry Nelson's favorite youngest daughter fought her tears and tried to keep her composure while Sharon went on about how no one could understand her. No one could understand the pain Perry had caused her by his betrayal.

Her father's betrayal? What betrayal? Sharon had slept with a half dozen guys and murdered Perry. Betrayal? Lorri had heard enough. She realized at that moment that she had come to say something, not to listen to the woman behind the glass. The woman behind the glass could say nothing that would undo what she and her lover had done.

“I want you to know that you not only killed my father,” Lorri began, her voice breaking into a million pieces, “you also killed my children's grandfather and my grandparents’ son. You killed your own children's father… and they say you paid a man fifty thousand dollars to do it.”

Sharon looked down as a preschooler does when caught misbehaving.

“I would gladly have paid you ten times the amount you paid Gary, if you would have spared Dad. But it doesn’t work that way, does it?”

“No, Lorri, it doesn’t,” Sharon answered, now irritated by her visitor.

Lorri stood up. “I hate you. And I will hate you forever.”

“I know,” Sharon said.

With that, Lorri turned to leave. How she found her way out of there, she would never quite know. A man offered help as she sobbed her way down the hallway, but she declined. Outside, she realized she had not returned the plastic-laminated visitor's tag that had been affixed to her blouse when she was processed for the visit.

She could think of nothing but her father and the lies her stepmother had told her.

On the way back to the Springs, the snow came down like talc. Lorri could barely see as she drove along the freeway, remembering Sharon and her father. Remembering the en-counter she had had with evil. Between the tears and the falling snow, Lorri would later wonder if only the hand of God had assured her safety.

After her sister was picked up by Tygart and Trainor and taken away to jail, Judy Douglas tried to figure out what had gone wrong and how it could have been stopped. When could it have been stopped? She knew whatever role Sharon had in the deaths of her second and third husbands, it was the result of a seed planted long ago. Sharon had been on a selfish course to disaster since she was a child. Sharon was a speeding train that could not be stopped. And though she had not allowed herself to believe that Sharon was capable of murder, Judy became consumed with guilt and worry that if only she had told Glen that things were not so great between him and his wife, that Sharon was a woman who could never settle for just one man at a time, things would have turned out differently. Maybe he would have been alive if Judy had told him to leave Sharon.

Judy also wondered if well-to-do Buzz Reynolds hadn’t been an intended murder victim a couple of years before.

“Maybe it just didn’t work out for Gary and Sharon at that time,” she said later. “I'm still not sure that Buzz and she were legally married, but I suppose that wouldn’t stop Sharon.”