by John L. Work
Murder For Comfort
By John L. Work
Copyright © 2011 by John L. Work
All rights reserved
For My Father Jack, My Mother Mary Elizabeth, And My Brothers – Tom and Bill
Preface
My mother, Mary Elizabeth Work, was a true suspense crime fiction addict, in the extreme. During her life she spent countless hours in public libraries, searching for authors in that genre whose novels she had not yet discovered. She was always looking for a Sunday afternoon read that would occupy her time with a good whodunnit. Toward the end of her life, when she didn’t have the stamina to make the trip herself, she sent my brother, Bill, or me to the library, armed with a large canvas tote bag, on a mission to scour the shelves and bring her a big stack of books. She could read her way through the entire load in a week and call for more. She didn’t want to trudge through difficult, complex works. She wanted to be entertained by mysteries and detective stories.
I’m fairly sure that Mom read every book that Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie ever wrote.
I think she would have enjoyed this story. It might be a bit too realistically graphic, that is to say, too hardboiled for most Agatha Christie fans, but it’s pretty entertaining, if I may say so.
Enjoy the ride.
1
It was five-thirty on a hot Friday afternoon. Sheila McCowell, thoroughly worn out from her week at work, had taken off an hour early with best wishes from the boss for a good weekend. As she pulled into the garage of her ranch style Colorado home and turned off the BMW’s engine, she was anticipating a swim in her backyard pool before fixing dinner and beginning a relaxing two days off. Her daughters were at sleepovers with their high school friends for the weekend. School would begin the fall semester on the coming Monday. Reaching across the front seat console she grabbed her purse, swung her legs out of the car and walked to the entry that led into her kitchen. She stepped up onto the threshold before pushing the button that closed the garage door.
Inside, she immediately sensed that something wasn’t quite right. Her black Labrador, Maxie, didn’t greet her at the doorway. That big beautiful dog was always waiting there, happily wagging her tail in anticipation of her best friend’s arrival and the biscuit she knew would be forthcoming from the metal canister atop the kitchen cabinet. There was a well-established ritual here. Maxie faithfully met her owner at the door, for which Sheila gave her some loving attention – and a biscuit.
She walked across the stone-tiled floor and looked into the living room. Nothing. Over to the sliding glass door that opened to the patio and swimming pool, she looked outside and called to her dog.
“Maxie?”
Frowning, she closed and locked the door, walked through the hallway and checked her home office. She looked into the bedrooms, then went back to the living room. She continued to the front entry landing where there was a descending stairway leading down to the basement family room. Carefully she started down. Her feet made soft creaking sounds as she went step by step into the darkness. At the bottom she reached to her right, flipped the wall switch upward and the lights came on. She turned left, took a couple of steps and froze in mid-stride as the hair on the back of her neck raised. Her Maxie lay motionless near the couch, in a pool of congealing blood.
“Oh, my God.”
Unable to take her eyes from the dog’s dead body, she staggered backward toward the doorway, her mind screaming that she had to get upstairs and call the police. She heard, or rather sensed, something else in the room. Quickly came two metallic clicking sounds in rapid succession, right behind her head. Her heart suddenly pounding from a surge of adrenalin, Sheila McCowell whirled quickly about to her left and looked directly into her killer’s eyes.
2
At exactly five fifty-five that afternoon, the Roberts County Sheriff’s Office communications center received an anonymous 911 call from a motorist near the foothills on the west side of the county. The R/P, or Reporting Party, said that he was calling from a payphone in a gas station parking lot. He told the dispatcher that he had just watched a screaming woman trying to get out of a westbound car which was stopped at the intersection for a red light. There were two other people inside the vehicle with the shrieking female. A man in the back seat was restraining her. She actually got one of her feet out of the rear passenger-side door before he pulled her back into the rear seat and slammed the door closed. The complaining motorist was in a hurry to get home and refused to give the dispatcher his name. When the light turned green he watched as the car continued westbound and said that he lost sight of it. Before disconnecting, the caller told the dispatcher he thought a woman with short dark hair was driving that car, which could have been a blue BMW. He couldn’t read the license plate number. But he did notice that the driver was wearing a baseball cap.
Two responding patrol deputies searched the area, but didn’t find any vehicles that matched the complainant’s description. After driving around for a bit and stopping to chat with each other, they coded out the disposition as G.O.A.U.T.L., which meant Gone On Arrival, Unable To Locate. As was customary with coded calls where officers can’t locate a victim, witness or complainant, no one wrote a police report. The only official record of the event was a computer stamped card that was categorized as a routine suspicious situation. The card eventually went into a basement repository with hundreds of thousands of others like it. The original tape of the 911 call was ultimately erased a couple of months later, when the reel was re-used in the usual manner.
3
On August 12, Bob Stafford unlocked the front door at his real estate brokerage firm. It was a sunny, warm late summer Monday morning. His office was located a few blocks from downtown Denver, Colorado. The building was empty, which he thought rather odd. Usually, by eight-thirty, at least one of his seven agents would already be there, making coffee or punching cold-call numbers into a telephone, hoping to drum up a new contact. Must have been a wild weekend, he thought. Too much party, too much drinking, too much whoopee, maybe.
He went to the break room and made the coffee, himself. What the hell, it must have been his turn. And if it’s too strong for the kids, he thought, this’ll teach them to beat me here and get it done before I walk in. He left the Mr. Coffee percolator to do its work and walked through the maze of cubicles to his office. There was a stack of messages on his desk from the prior Friday, all bearing the initials of Sheila McCowell, his office manager. What would he do if she ever left? She’d been pretty much running the place for eight months, scheduling his calendar and routing new clients to the agents, arranging interviews, typing legal forms and contracts, and making sure the place was well-stocked with business supplies. As office managers went, they didn’t come any better than Sheila. Bob Stafford would know. He’d been operating a successful real estate business for thirty-five years in the same building his father had bequeathed to him.
Sheila had seen Stafford’s office manager position advertised online. She came in for her interview a few months out of a divorce. Her ex-husband gave their house to her in the settlement and she was re-entering the work force after having been a stay-at-home mom for her two daughters over the past seventeen years. During the interview Sheila told Stafford that she’d done all of the administrative and payroll work for her ex-husband’s thriving construction business, which he operated from an office in their home. She had a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Penn State and said she helped her father run his construction business for several years after her college graduation. That was where she met her ex-husband. He was one of her dad’s employees. Sheila and Jim got married and moved to Colorado, where he started his own operation, building custom homes. When he told her he wanted out of their m
arriage, they’d already been together for eighteen years. Her parents had died in a car crash a few years before and she had no siblings. Her two children were fourteen and sixteen at the time of her job interview, but they were seldom at home, fully immersed in their day time and night time high school activities.
Sheila readily revealed all of this during the first five minutes of the interview. Then she very convincingly told Bob Stafford she really wanted the job as his office manager. At forty-five, she could’ve passed for a woman in her late thirties. Stafford couldn’t help noticing that she was in excellent physical condition and quite beautiful. Her wavy auburn hair was shoulder length and she had captivating green eyes. When she smiled, her full mouth revealed a set of perfectly straight bright white teeth. And oh, that voice. She spoke clearly and articulately, with grammar that revealed she’d grown up in a home where good English was spoken. Stafford hired her on the spot, knowing that any potential clients who talked with her on the phone would want to meet the lady with the beautiful alto voice. And he thought that her remarkable telephone manner would help to get them into his office to do some real estate business.
Later, as their professional friendship grew, she revealed to her boss that her ex had left her for another woman – a much younger woman whom Sheila subsequently encountered a few times, but knew little about. His new love interest was in her mid-twenties and worked as a personal trainer at a large Denver fitness center. That was where Jim McCowell met her during one of his frequent trips to the gym. Sheila thought the new girlfriend’s manner was just a little on the boyish side, but kept her opinion to herself. After Jim moved out, Sheila never even bothered to change the locks on their home. The new lady’s name was Marnie Sullivan. The older man and his new young woman moved into a home together down the road from Denver in Colorado Springs. Recently they’d begun to talk about getting married. While Sheila and Jim had reached some sort of working relationship for the children’s sake, she remained home for a few months after the divorce was final before she decided to stop grieving her losses and get on with it. She found Stafford’s office manager position advertisement and made application over her computer. It had worked out well.
Now sitting at his desk, Stafford made a few phone calls as his people began to wander in for the week’s work. On the prior Friday he’d scheduled a staff meeting for nine-thirty this morning – the usual Monday inspirational go-get-em-rah-rah pitch. Gotta keep ‘em motivated, he thought. At fifty-seven years of age, he’d slowed down quite a bit in his own sales work, but still had a knack for inspiring his employees to do just a little better today than they’d done yesterday. He liked his agents and they certainly seemed to like him. The turnover rate in his office was unusually low for the real estate business, a sign that he knew how to run the shop and that his staff members appreciated his interest in their successes.
Nine-thirty arrived, but Sheila McCowell did not. Stafford became more than concerned. She hadn’t called in to say she was sick or to request a day off. This was entirely out of character for her. In fact, it was the first time in eight months that she hadn’t shown up for work without some sort of notification. Sheila either arrived on time or called in to let him know she wasn’t feeling well. Most of the time, she came in to the office even if she was ill. He dialed her cell phone number and it went straight to her voice mail – which told him the phone was probably turned off. He postponed the staff meeting until ten-thirty and sat at his desk, pondering whether he should call someone, like the police, to go and check at her home to see if she was alright. After the staff meeting, which went on without the freshly baked pastries that Sheila would normally have purchased on her way in to the office, he made his decision and picked up the telephone. Something was very wrong. He was sure of it.
4
Roberts County Deputy Sheriff Andy Simmons was getting ready to stop at a drive-through hamburger joint for his lunch break when he got the radio dispatch call.
“One eleven.”
“One eleven at Grant and Sherwood.”
“One eleven, respond to 1535 Edgewood Circle on a welfare check. R/P is reporting that his office manager did not show up for work and is requesting an attempt to contact her at home.”
“One eleven copy, en-route.”
“One eleven, you’re en-route at ten fifty-seven hours. One eleven, the employee’s name is Sheila McCowell, a white female, age forty-six, five-five, one twenty, auburn over green.”
“One eleven copy.”
“At ten fifty-eight.”
Simmons headed for the upscale neighborhood on the west side of the county. He knew the area. It was up against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, featuring nice homes with beautiful landscaping, all occupied by successful people. But, damn, it was almost lunch time and he was getting hungry. He stepped up his speed, thinking that the quicker he got this call coded out, the sooner he could get to his lunch break.
“One eleven, arrival.”
“One eleven, copy your arrival at eleven ten.”
Simmons stopped his patrol car on the street about one-hundred feet north of the home. His officer survival training had taught him to never park directly in front of a residence in response to any kind of call. And never stand directly in front of a door or window, especially on domestic violence complaints. He walked up a long, winding driveway to the ranch style, sprawling brick structure, framed by a lush lawn and colorful flora. There was one step up to the over sized front door and he rang the bell. No one answered. He knocked loudly. Same result. The deputy walked to his right and looked into the living room picture window. He could see nothing out of the ordinary – some very nice furniture, a big-screen TV against one of the walls, and lots of colorful pictures hung very tastefully. He walked across the entire front of the home and found all of the windows were locked.
Moving back across the front lawn to his left, he stepped up onto a large landscaping rock and looked over the six-foot cedar fence into the back yard and beyond. To the rear of the lot was nothing but a wide open space, full of aspen trees and wild grasses that led all the way to a back road that bordered the foothills. From this vantage point he saw neither anything unusual nor any people. He climbed over the fence, walked to the right and tried the glass patio door. It was locked. Not one of the back windows was open, broken, or unlocked. He looked around the back yard and red flagstone patio. There was a crystal clear San Juan fiberglass swimming pool, complete with a water slide and a spring board. The pool was framed by a wide concrete deck, which in turn was surrounded by full trees and shrubbery. The patio furniture was Adirondack style, made of redwood. There were two tables with center-mounted standing umbrellas, both pulled down and tied off. Simmons was impressed. He reached with his left hand to the shoulder epaulet of his uniform shirt and keyed the microphone on his portable radio.
“One eleven.”
“One eleven.”
“One eleven, can you ask the R/P if he knows someone who might have a key – a family member, neighbor or friend? The house is secured and I see no damage at this time. All the windows are locked and no one answers the door.”
“One eleven, stand by.”
“Copy.”
Moments later the dispatcher keyed his microphone, “One eleven, the R/P is responding to the County High School to pick up one of the children, who will have a key to the residence. R/P’s last name is Stafford. He’ll be driving a red Mercedes.”
“One eleven, copy.”
“At eleven twenty-seven.”
At about twelve-fifteen, a red late model Mercedes Benz rolled up and two people got out. One was Bob Stafford and the other was Sheila McCowell’s eighteen year old daughter, Kim. She gave Simmons a house key. She looked worried, fighting back tears. As soon as the vice-principal called her from the American History class and escorted her to the office, Stafford had told her what was going on. Now, outside Sheila’s home, he told Simmons that both Kim and her younger sister, Adrienne, had spent the e
ntire weekend at sleepovers with friends. Without coming home on Monday morning they went directly to school for their first day of the autumn semester. Neither girl had seen their mother since the past Friday morning.
Simmons took the key from Kim. He told Stafford and her to wait outside while he took a look around inside the house. By that time, his backup officer, Deputy Al Gonzales, a recent lateral transfer from Calhoun County, had arrived. The two cops entered the front door with weapons drawn at standard two hand grip ready gun position. Just inside the entry, Simmons announced their presence in a loud voice and received no response. They worked their way carefully through each room, moving one behind the other, each providing cover for his partner. Everything seemed to be in order upstairs. There were no open drawers and nothing had been rifled or disturbed. All of the beds were made and they found no damage to any of the furnishings.