by John L. Work
As they lay side by side one night, he smoking a cigarette, she’d broached a business proposition to him. She promised him some big cash – ten-thousand dollars in cash, to be exact. He needed it badly. He already owed his crack cocaine dealer two-thousand bucks. The rest he would use for more fun. So he agreed to help her with a criminal project. But what she’d talked him into doing for the money was giving him nightmares. His alcohol consumption had greatly increased after he’d completed his part of the bargain.
Each night he needed his memory numbed, as he tried to go to sleep without seeing the images of him pounding that woman’s face with the rock, as she shrieked and cried.
Now they were out here in the middle of this damned wilderness waiting to collect the big paycheck. He had no idea who had financed this deal. She’d made all the contacts and money arrangements. But it didn’t matter to him – so long as he got his cash and the occasional opportunity to get her fantastic body into bed.
He was six feet tall. One could look at him and say he was almost skinny. Severe acne scars covered his face. His shoulders were broad, but years of smoking crack had made him look like an overly trained distance runner. He kept his blond hair cut short. Most of the time wore long sleeved shirts to cover his tattoos.
Now he got out of the car and walked slowly toward where she was squatting. There was a little moonlight here and he wasn’t going to give up that easily. He really was ready now. It had been a whole week since they’d last been together. He could feel the familiar anticipation building as the muscles in his lower belly began to tremble. As she stood up he could see the familiar hourglass outline of her angular hips and narrow waistline. She pulled up her shorts. Damn, her calf muscles really looked good in this lighting. He swallowed hard as he started to get an erection.
She turned around and faced him. He heard an ear-splitting crack, saw a bright round white flash from her right hand and felt a burning pain in his gut. It was like someone ran a red hot piece of rebar right through him. He went down onto his knees, then fell to his right side, clutching his flaming lower stomach.
“Christ! You shot me!”
She walked closer. He was screaming through his clenched teeth.
“Shut up, Jimmie. Somebody’s gonna hear you. You fucked up when you brought along that cheap ass .32. Remember? The one that misfired? It was supposed to look like a robbery, remember? But you fucked it up and brought her out to me instead of killing her inside the house. And then I had to sit out in the car and listen to her scream while you beat her brains out in that shit house. Fuck you, Jimmie. Here’s your cash.”
She pulled the trigger again, and again, and again. He rolled over onto his back, clawing at his belly, gasping, unable to scream, in agony, knees pulled up, kicking his feet, his heels churning in the Colorado Rocky Mountain High dirt. Then she walked up on him, aimed carefully and put one right through the middle of his forehead. Calmly, she stood there, intently watching as he took a few sickening, snorting, gurgling, reflexive breaths – and he was still.
A few minutes later a white Ford pickup truck rolled in and stopped. The driver got out and closed the door quietly.
“Did you bring the shovel?”
‘Two of them.”
Her ears were ringing. “Let’s get this done. Gimme one. How deep you think we should dig?”
“You sure he’s dead?”
“I put one through his fucking lame brain.”
“My God. About three feet ought to do it, I think.”
They finished about three hours later, both of them drenched in sweat. There were lots of rocks in the mountain soil, so it wasn’t easy to dig a grave that deep. By the time they left, the moon had disappeared behind some dark clouds.
In the darkness they could only find two of the spent shell casings. Only then did it occur to them that they should have brought a flashlight.
17
Welch received his information on the mystery lesbian lover from Sheila McCowell’s internet service about a day later than the agent promised. Iron Maiden’s billing identity was listed as one Sherry Marie Tolucca and all she had given them for an address was a post office box in Littleton, Colorado. Her phone listing came back to a cell number, for which, as it turned out, she’d paid cash at a Walmart store in Trinidad, Colorado. Sent every month with a postal money order, she paid her phone bill by mail and no one in the billing office had ever seen her. That wasn’t much help. He could find no listing for Sherry Tolucca in the regular computerized Denver Metro phone directory websites.
The IP on the computer originating the Iron Maiden email showed it was a Toshiba laptop. Welch called Toshiba Computers, gave the agent the URL number and asked if he could find out where it had been purchased. Customer Service told him he’d have to get a subpoena or a Court Order to get that information.
He got yet another subpoena duces tecum from Don Alcomb and sent it by overnight registered mail to the Toshiba American administrative offices in Los Angeles. Those records arrived about four days later and revealed that Iron Maiden’s computer had been purchased for cash at a Toshiba outlet in Colorado Springs in February of 2001, by Sherry Tolucca of Raton, New Mexico. The warrantee card was never filled out and returned. The company had no home address for the buyer and no handwriting records.
And there was a new troubling development. This was the first laptop computer to be manufactured complete with WiFi capability. With the advent of free wireless service in different businesses, a message could be sent over the internet without the archaic cable hookup. The only address, other than the computer’s IP, which would reveal the message’s point of origin would be the location of the business’ router. So, a criminal with a personal computer could now move about and send internet communications with very little risk of ever being identified. And, the chances of a coffee shop employee recalling who’d been sitting at a particular table or chair on any given date and time with a laptop computer were just about less than zero.
It took him an hour to get through the heavy late summer lunch hour traffic to the Littleton post office. After waiting for twenty minutes he got to speak to the Post Master. As the detective explained the nature of the investigation to her, along with the specific information he was after for Iron Maiden’s P.O. box number, she raised the palm of her hand toward him, cutting him off.
“Sorry, but you’ll have to give me a subpoena or a Court Order before I can give you any customer records on a Post Office box.”
Two days later, thanks to Don Alcomb at the District Attorney’s Office, he was back at the post office with a subpoena duces tecum in hand. The Post Master, Millie Johnston was her name, took the subpoena from him and came back a few minutes later with her handwritten report.
Sherry Marie Tolucca, or someone purporting to be Sherry Tolucca, had paid cash for a six month P.O. box rental, beginning on February 5 of 2001 and expiring on August 5. Tolucca, or whoever she was, presented a current New Mexico Temporary Driver’s License that had no photograph. The Post Office box rental was pre 9/11. Her timing was quite propitious. No one on that day and time could have known how easy it would soon be for nineteen Muslims, in the country illegally with fraudulent photo IDs in hand, to start another war by hijacking four airliners and killing three thousand Americans. Ergo, the Postal Clerk allowed the customer to rent the P.O. box without a photo ID. The clerk couldn’t recall anything about Tolucca’s description or appearance. The address on the temporary license was in Raton, New Mexico, just across the southern Colorado border. The clerk made a photocopy of the license, which gave the detective at least one thing to be thankful for.
Welch thought he might be on to something useful with the driver’s information and was anxious to get back to the office. When he arrived back at the field division substation, he ran a computer check on the license number and found it had been reported stolen on February 1, 2001. He picked up the telephone and called the Raton, New Mexico Police. He got hold of Detective Miguel DeHerrera,
who pulled up the case file and sent it by fax. The crime report said that Sherry Tolucca was shopping in a local grocery store one afternoon and left her purse in the cart while she went to the meat counter to pick up some rib eye steaks. When she returned, the purse was gone. There were no surveillance cameras in operation at the time and the store security agent was out to lunch, so the investigation was dead ended with no suspect description and no leads to follow up. Tolucca told the cop who wrote the theft complaint that her new temporary driver’s license and a couple of credit cards were inside the purse. The officer made a note in his narrative that she was really pissed about losing the credit cards.
Welch had hit another dead end.
18
The three hundred pound black bear made its way through the trees, sniffing the air and looking about. With a sense of smell seven times keener than that of a bloodhound, it was a fearsome hunter and an immensely strong predator. It had smelled the odor of humans on prior occasions, but this was different. This was something to be scavenged, rather than hunted down and torn to pieces. This was flesh in the early stages of decay.
It had worked its way back and forth across the breeze, following the unmistakable scent. After crossing a small clearing, it stopped. The food was right here, buried in the soil. It moved a few feet further away from the clearing, just inside the tree line, and stopped. This was the place its super sensitive nose had been homing in on for the past two miles. The bear began to dig in the softened earth. Using sharp claws and powerful shoulders it tore into the dirt, searching for the meal it instinctively knew was concealed in this spot.
Plunging its teeth into the viscera, the animal pulled at the entrails and ate voraciously – then reburied the remaining meat for storage and safekeeping. There would be another feast later. It lumbered off into the forest. During the feeding session, Jimmie Slaikovitch’s decomposing head had been chewed from his shoulders and kicked aside.
19
During the noon hour on a late August day Janet Rogers and Samantha Newsom walked out of the First Colonial American Bank office. They’d been having lunch on Fridays pretty much since Sammie hired on back in January. Next to Sheila McCowell, Janet had come to consider Sammie her closest friend. They did have a lot in common. Both had attended college on scholarships, although Janet’s was for academic excellence and Sammie’s was for athletics. Janet majored in business at Penn State. Sammie had been a Physical Education student with a free ride as a member of the girls’ gymnastics team at East Texas State. She’d changed her mind about becoming a girls’ high school track coach after she did her student teaching. Having listened to the veteran teachers on the faculty chronically gripe about their wages and frugal lifestyles, she pragmatically figured out pretty early that there wasn’t nearly enough money to be made in being a public school teacher – at least not for the lifestyle she wanted.
Sammie tried marriage for a short time after graduating from college, until her husband became a problem drinker – or rather, until she figured out he was already a chronic alcoholic. He’d been a football player at East Texas State – a middle linebacker – and their marriage only lasted about six months before his alcoholism led to some violence in their home. She told Janet that she would never let another man control her life like her ex did during the brief time they were together. He kept a closed fist on their money, their financial account records, everything. But he also spent money behind her back that they couldn’t afford to spend. All in all, he was just another loser drunk jock who fooled her into believing he was husband material. He revealed his true nature only after their wedding. So, while she’d dated casually from time to time after the divorce, she’d never been emotionally committed to any man. In fact, after her marriage and divorce, she wasn’t sure she had much use for men, at all.
During the recovery boom of the early nineties in Dallas she’d become a real estate agent, specializing in commercial properties. She did so well that she accumulated enough cash to take a couple of years off and move to Colorado. She enjoyed the winter skiing and summer hiking opportunities. Janet Rogers sat on the interview board that hired Sammie to work at the bank. They immediately hit it off and became friends. With her background in real estate, not long after she got her foot in the door, she earned a promotion into the home loan department. Janet became her boss, friend and mentor. When the regular receptionist went out for lunch breaks, they took turns filling in at the front desk to greet incoming customers.
Janet told her new best friend about her own marriage, which had ended in divorce two years prior. Her ex-husband left her and moved back to Pennsylvania to rekindle a romance with his high school sweetheart. He’d made contact with his old flame over the internet. Eventually Janet stumbled onto some of the love letters when he forgot to log out of his email account. She confronted him and he admitted to everything, including the long distance affair he carried on during business trips. His paramour joined him on those forays, flying in from Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania. She waited for him in their motel room while he went to his meetings and seminars. Childless, Janet and Carl Rogers parted ways and divided their assets. To this point in her divorced life, she’d not even considered dating anyone. She was still getting over the shock of her ex’s betrayal and the revelation of his double life, all of which she shared in great detail with Sammie Newsom.
Having listened to her supervisor talk about their history Sammie also knew about the lifelong friendship between Janet and Sheila McCowell. After awhile, she carefully made it a point to say hello to Sheila on the occasions when she came into the bank to withdraw money from her savings account, or to take Janet out for lunch. Sometimes Sheila and Sammie conversed briefly while Janet was tied up on phone calls. After awhile, the three friends started going to lunch together.
Now, with Sheila gone, and alone as a divorcee, Janet looked forward more than ever to Friday lunches with her new confidante. Sammie was a great sounding board, always willing to listen to a whole lot of Janet’s lingering post divorce angst and grief over losing her best friend to a brutal murderer. It was so good to have a friend.
20
The two backpackers were hiking their way out of the deep woods, returning to civilization. It was dusk. The sun was down, but there was just a bit of lingering late August twilight. They’d been camping and fly fishing for a full week in the mountain wilderness, and hadn’t bathed since the morning of their first day on the trip. It had rained nearly every day. Both were looking forward to hot showers and home cooked meals with their wives. As they approached a clearing up ahead, one of them noticed that someone, or something, had been digging in the soil. Then they saw the bear tracks – large ones. Each began to look around for signs of the animal, full-well knowing the danger they’d be in if, unarmed, they surprised a large black bear in the approaching darkness.
The taller of the two men turned on his flashlight to better see what had been unearthed. As he looked to his right beneath a Colorado blue spruce tree, the beam of his light shone on the wide open eyes of a human head. There were maggots crawling in and out of the nose, eye sockets, ears and gaping mouth of Jimmie Slaikovitch.
21
Welch was on his way to a monthly State homicide investigators’ meeting in Florence, hosted in August by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He’d been to this place a couple of times before. The federal prison in Florence is a super maximum security facility where some heavy-weight shot-caller Muslim terrorists and genuine high caliber Cosa Nostra mobsters were supposed to be housed. But that was all speculation. The feds would never tell anyone, not even their colleagues in other law enforcement agencies, who was locked up there.