Murder For Comfort

by John L. Work

  Janet and Sheila first met at Penn State University, where they were assigned as roommates in a girls’ dormitory. Over their four undergraduate years they developed a friendship that lasted a lifetime – Sheila’s lifetime. When Sheila and Jim got married, Janet was a bridesmaid. The couple’s move to the foot of the Rocky Mountains temporarily separated the two friends. For a few years they communicated only by phone and letters. Then Janet’s husband got a corporate transfer to the Denver Metro area and the friendship picked up where it had left off. In Colorado the two women usually spent one evening a month together, at dinner or at a movie, catching up on current events.

  Welch said, “Tell me about the divorce.”

  “Sometimes Sheila came into the bank. She and Jim had a joint savings account. She took me out to lunch, usually on Fridays. When her parents were killed in the accident, she was devastated. She went into a severe depression.”

  As Janet’s statement went on, she related to the detective how Sheila confided that she and her husband were struggling in their marriage, arguing a lot over sex – or a lack thereof. Sheila just couldn’t get interested and he let her know it was troubling him. Nonetheless, Jim’s affair with Marnie Sullivan caught Sheila completely by surprise. Janet and her friends were shocked to see the McCowells going through a divorce. They’d seemed like the perfect couple who had everything – a beautiful home, a lucrative family business, and two marvelous daughters. They seemed to love each other very much, at least until Sheila’s depression episode. Up to that point, Jim had been a patient, caring, devoted and faithful husband for their entire married life. Sheila adored him. Yes, Janet knew that the McCowells argued once in awhile, but they never stayed angry with each other for long. Nonetheless, they separated after eighteen years together and settled their divorce without a lot of acrimony.

  “For a while Sheila was distraught at the breakup, but she seemed to come around after a few months. I went to Court with her for the final orders. She had to testify before the judge would grant a divorce.”

  Janet went on to say that Jim had left his ex with about one and a half million dollars in her bank account, so she wasn’t strapped for cash. She knew her best friend to be an excellent homemaker who seldom drank. Janet could think of no enemies who might wish Sheila ill – or dead.

  If Sheila had gotten involved in dating someone, she never told Janet about it. She seemed very content with her job at Bob Stafford’s office. Janet met Stafford and his wife at one of his office Christmas parties and found him to be a genuine, classy gentleman. Sheila stayed fit by exercising regularly in her swimming pool at home and rode a stationary bicycle during winter. She walked her dog, Maxie, every evening when the weather permitted. Janet was completely at a loss to figure out who would have killed her best friend.

  Janet Rogers had no useful information to contribute toward solving the mystery.

  As Welch left Janet in the bank lobby he took one more look at Sammie. She smiled at him from behind her desk. He put her in her mid-thirties.

  Welch interviewed all of Bob Stafford’s employees. They were terribly affected by her death and seemed to hold her in great affection. Each of them had attended the funeral. None of them knew of anyone who would want to see her dead. The detective asked if there were any recent clients who might have become angry with her – they dismissed the question. Sheila McCowell was a woman who made every client who came into the office feel welcome. She had no enemies. None among them had ever heard her in an angry conversation on the telephone.

  Welch was spending a lot of time thinking about this one. And he wasn’t coming up with any answers to the big question – who killed Sheila McCowell?

  13

  His old friend Benny Graham from the Drug Enforcement Agency did the searches of both of Sheila’s desktops. In 1996 Graham had built the recording device that enabled Welch to put together his murder solicitation case against Jim Holber. Although considerably grayer than he’d been back then Benny was still sporting his beard and paunch. Funny, Welch thought, how this police business ages people so quickly.

  Her business computer unit yielded nothing of any particular use to the investigation. There were interoffice memos, letters and contracts she’d typed, a calendar for each of the agents in the office and another for Bob Stafford. It was a pretty standard batch of files and desktop icons for an office manager in a real estate office.

  On Sheila’s personal computer Benny turned up the usual expected family photos of her daughters and her ex-husband. As Welch looked them over he felt a wave of sadness, both for himself and for her. It looked like she and Jim had at one time been very content with each other. They’d apparently taken some great vacations together. There they were in one photo on the stern of a cruise ship, leaving a huge white wake on a deep blue ocean behind them; then in bathing suits on a white sand beach that was probably situated on some Caribbean island; again on Main Street in Disneyland with Mickey Mouse and Goofy beside them and their kids; and lastly at the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps with their hair blowing in a summer breeze. They looked so very happy with each other. Welch recalled some of those kinds of moments from his own life, long ago – before his divorce.

  There were a few essays she’d saved from some of the history websites. It looked like Sheila was interested in the Wild West. As the backdrop for her desktop she’d kept the online poster from Tombstone with Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer. Welch liked that one, too. Sheila had lots of family photos and very few documents.

  Her saved personal emails were rather unremarkable – sent mostly to Janet Rogers at her home and work computers. They were the usual mundane questions and answers about what’s going on for the weekend, how’d your day go at work, and when are we going to get together again for dinner and a movie. But in the deleted files there was a note, one which hadn’t been completely removed, that caught Graham’s attention. He pointed it out to Welch:

  IronMaiden 8/8/01

  To Sheila

  Down, girl. You’ll just have to hold out until your ex has the kids for the weekend.

  On August 7, 2001 at 10:15 p.m. Sheila wrote:

  I don’t know if I can bear the waiting. My God, what you do to me.

  I love you. Sheila

  14

  Welch stared at the email for several minutes. He was transfixed. It couldn’t mean what he knew it meant. There was someone new in her life – a love-interest she’d kept even from her closest friend. Then he wondered if he was mistaking the meanings of the words. No. It meant exactly what it said. Sheila McCowell had a secret lesbian lover and she’d covered those tracks masterfully – except for one final click on the Delete icon. Now he had to find out who this lover was. It might be a dead end or it might mean breaking the case open. D.E.A. Agent Benny Graham had delivered again.

  Welch called Sheila’s internet service, identified himself as a sheriff’s detective, and asked what he needed to do to find out the subscriber’s name and address for an internet alias. He told the customer service agent he was a cop investigating a murder case. The woman who answered the phone refused to cooperate with him. They had to have a Court Order or a subpoena to divulge any customer information. Yes, they would accept service of the subpoena by certified registered mail and it would take two days for the retrieval of the information. She gave him a post office box address in Chicago. He hung up and called the District Attorney’s Office.

  “Don Alcomb speaking.”

  “Don, it’s John Welch. I’m working on the Sheila McCowell homicide and I need a subpoena to get some records from her internet service. They’re being difficult. Can you help me?”

  “Bring me what you’ve got. How’s tomorrow at ten sound?”

  “Great. I’ll be there. Thanks.”

  By noon the following day he had a subpoena duces tecum in his hand and sent it by overnight certified registered mail to the internet provider’s post office box. Welch thought to himself, it’s a murder case. It shouldn’t be this h
ard. Then, again, a release of information without a Court Order might get the internet service sued for a whole lot of money. Now he had to wait for, what, three days? He was also waiting for Sheila’s cell phone records. He’d sent that subpoena five days after her body was discovered.

  Then, to add a small wrinkle to an already puzzling case, a few weeks after the murder he got a phone call from the U.S. Consolidated Life Insurance Company. It was an investigator calling to notify Welch of the suspicious death of one of their insured – and that they were going to contest any claim that might be filed, pending the outcome of the police investigation. The insured’s name was Sheila Ann McCowell. She’d purchased the term life policy herself in January of 2001 and the beneficiary was one James Allen McCowell. The death benefit was in the amount of five-hundred thousand dollars. The claims investigator hadn’t yet contacted Mr. McCowell. He wanted to know how the police investigation into her death was coming along. Welch filled him in.

  What other surprises could there be?

  15

  Jim McCowell moved his daughters into his home in Colorado Springs. Sheila’s funeral had been harrowing and the girls were inconsolable. They had to enroll in a new high school where they knew no one except each other. Fall sports were already underway and it was too late for them to get tryouts for the teams. He promised them they could go back up to Roberts County every other weekend to visit their friends. That helped a little in cheering them up. But it was an incredibly difficult situation for them. They spent a lot of time together in each other’s rooms. He figured that was good. Thank God they had each other for comfort in dealing with the loss of their mother.

  Marnie seemed to take it all pretty well in stride. She helped the girls fix their rooms and took them shopping for new clothes. She’d sat next to Jim at the funeral and put her hand on his shoulder when he broke down and cried for his daughters. She took some time off from her new job at the gym in Colorado Springs to be available for him and the girls. How lucky could a man get?

  They made love four or five times a week. Marnie wore him out and it was difficult to keep up with her. But this wasn’t a complaint that any sane man would voice to his partner, even if he was twenty three years her senior. She knew exactly how to arouse him with a look, a touch, or just a certain move with her athletic body. Sometimes he wondered how long he’d be able to satisfy her seemingly boundless libido. Then he’d take her to bed and stopped thinking about it for the night.

  The construction business continued to boom, putting him into the ranks of the wealthiest ten percent in the country. He had seven separate crews working at any given time and each crew had a foreman. The sites were spread out all over the southern part of Colorado and there were many days when he didn’t come home until late in the evening. Marnie didn’t seem to mind. She had her clientele to train in the weight room and sometimes she, too, worked well into the night. Once in awhile she took an overnight trip to Denver to visit one of her high school classmates. For the new couple it was all working out very well.

  They got married on a Friday afternoon in late August. They didn’t even tell the girls. They just went to the Justice of the Peace and did it. Marnie had suggested they not wait until the following January, as they had originally planned. Her argument was solid – who knew how long they’d have together? Jim agreed and jumped right into holy matrimony for one last time.

  Marnie called her parents after the ceremony and told them about the wedding. They were shocked, but nevertheless delighted at the news. When Kim and Adrienne got home from school, Jim sprang it on them. The newlyweds took the girls out for dinner. Dismayed and puzzled at having been left out of the wedding plans, both girls nonetheless did their best to put on happy faces.

  16

  “Which way now?”

  He’d already been driving for about an hour and a half on highway 285 out of Denver. She began giving him directions that took them onto remote four-wheel drive trails. She knew the way. He didn’t. They were somewhere in the remote mountains of Park County and he didn’t know this area. In fact, he was completely lost. He’d never been up here. And it was nearly midnight.

  “Keep going straight. There’s another little four-wheel drive trail up ahead on the left. Turn there. They’re going to meet us about a mile down that road.”

  “You sure they’ve got our money?”

  “They’ve got it. Don’t worry. Here it is. Turn here.”

  “I gotta get outta here. I wanna go to Mexico for a little vacation. I need that cash.”

  “Yeah. Vacation. Vacation from what? As if you had a job. They’ve got our money. Quit worrying.”

  He turned left onto the dirt road and drove. It was slow going. The old Chevy Blazer bounced over some big rocks. The trail was unbelievably rough and walled in so thickly with trees that he could no longer see the full moon. Barely wider than a VW, the trail was so narrow that branches scraped against the sides of the Blazer, producing piercing, screeching sounds that made his skin crawl. He turned on his high beams and inched his way as best he could around the larger stones. Who built this trail, anyway? Where the hell were they? With all of the winding dirt roads they’d driven on to get to this one, he’d never find his way back out to civilization by himself.

  “Stop over there. This is it.”

  She pointed to the right at a small clearing. He slowed and brought his rusted Blazer to a stop, turned off the lights and shut off the engine. He rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. It was dead quiet, except for the crickets. But the air was cool and clean and a light breeze was softly whispering through the pine trees.

  “Where are they?”

  “Not here, yet. But they will be. I’m gonna get out and stretch. I gotta pee.”

  “Need any help? Can I watch?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’m horny.”

  “Not now, Jimmie. Later. Use your hand if you can’t wait.”

  She walked away from the Blazer, just out of the clearing and into the trees.

  “Bitch.”

  He was twenty years old. His name was Jimmie Slaikovitch and he was a long way from his Fullerton, California home. He was a high school dropout, a burglar, an alcoholic and a drug addict. He did his first shoplift at age ten and didn’t get caught. At first it was candy and cigarettes, but that was before the cigarettes got locked up behind the store counters like all of the controlled substances in the pharmacy. Then he figured out how to make a profit from the loadies at school. He sold them all the over-the-counter cold and allergy pills he stole from the grocery markets.

  An older kid in his neighborhood taught him how to do daytime burglaries, looking for cash, coins, and jewelry to steal – stuff with no serial numbers. It’d be easy to spend the cash and impossible to identify the jewelry in a pawn shop. He knew to wear latex gloves while he was inside a house. Sometimes he even put on those cheap light blue paper suits that medical teams used, including the booty shoe covers. It had to do with evading all of the new DNA technology and not getting caught. The kid who gave him that helpful tip was an ex-convict who’d picked it up from some other prisoner in the joint. Slaikovitch had also gotten pretty good at lifting women’s purses from shopping carts while they were looking away.

  In middle school, he developed a good solid closed fist punch for jacking the smaller kids’ lunch money. He’d been in and out of California Youth Authority juvenile institutions since he was fourteen – then in and out of adult prisons for a couple of short stretches. His latest term was in Canon City, Colorado for possession of cocaine and stealing some sound equipment out of a few cars. He was on parole now, temporarily hooked up with this red hot babe for who could know how long. He never made any long-term plans. What was the point?

  He’d met her at a Court ordered A.A. meeting about a year ago. But like so many who underestimate the gravity of their addictive illnesses he’d neglected his A.A. homework. He lapsed back into drinking and smoking crack. Besides, he often thought
, what’s the point of living if you can’t drink and get high? But he kept going to the meetings, because this luscious hunk of female had caught his eye and taken some time to flirt with him.

  After a while they started hooking up for sex every week or two after the Friday night A.A. meetings. He detested sitting there, listening to the recovering alkies tell him how to get sober and stay sober. But what followed the tedium at the meetings was more than worth having to listen to the drunks relating their stories. His reward for attending and pretending to be interested was hours of carnal pleasure with her strong, supple, magnificent body. For him, the sex was anything but casual. He’d never been with a woman who was put together like this one. She was more than a good looker. He didn’t understand what she saw in him, but he wasn’t one to question a willing female’s motives. Not one with a body like she had. So, he eagerly looked forward to the post-meeting couplings. She was fifteen years older than he and insanely insatiable. Their frenzied, torrid mating sessions nearly drove him crazy with arousal. He had to admit he didn’t mind her calling a few shots in his life. The sexual rewards for a little subservience to her were well worth the loss of a little of his autonomy. She had his cell number and it was always she who called him. Her own number was restricted and he didn’t get to call her – ever. There were weeks where he didn’t hear from her and had no idea know where she might be. The only times that they came face-to-face were at the Friday night A.A. meetings – and in bed. That was fine with him.