by John L. Work
Because the McCowell killing was foremost on his agenda, he’d debated within himself about whether or not to go but finally decided to make the trip, just to get away for a few hours and perhaps pick up some useful information for one of his other cases. The drive to Florence took about two hours. Following a hot lunch put on by the feds, the meeting began with the usual chatter among the murder investigators. Most of the conversation centered around griping about their case loads. And as it typical of cops, they didn’t hesitate to express their opinions of the attorneys who represented defendants in killings which they had already closed out by arrests and gotten filed into the court system for prosecution.
The meeting format was very simple. It was for all of the cops to disseminate information on any unsolved murders they had on their unsolved case lists. Each would give brief rundowns on the modus operandi in the more noteworthy investigations, in the hope that someone else might have a similar case. That way, the two cops could link up and share their notes. Welch was one of the first to speak. He gave a ten-minute presentation on the murder of Sheila McCowell, although it wasn’t really necessary for him to do so. That case had already received state-wide television, radio and press coverage, mostly because it was such a gruesome killing. Virtually all of the cops present at the meeting had a pretty good picture of what he was up against, with so little evidence and no suspect leads.
About halfway through the informational part of the gathering, a Park County Detective stood up and spoke briefly about a dead body that a couple of hikers had found in a remote section of mountainous forest area. Their forensics team had managed to collect two fingerprints from the dead white male’s left hand. At the autopsy his age was estimated between eighteen and twenty five years – with no thanks for any assistance to the bear which had consumed a large portion of his torso and viscera. A check through the AFIS, or Automated Fingerprint Identification System, revealed that he was a former Colorado Department of Corrections parolee who had a long juvenile arrest history out of California.
His name was James Patrick Slaikovitch, date of birth May 17, 1971, height six feet two inches, weight one hundred forty-five pounds, blond hair and blue eyes. The Denver Police Department had an arrest record on him as a car burglar and a known crack cocaine addict. He was known to sometimes hang out at an A.A. club on Larimer Street. He had no known permanent address and no records of recent employment. The cause of death was an undetermined number of gunshot wounds from a .45 caliber handgun with plain copper-jacketed slugs. The cops knew he’d been shot at least once because they found the hole through the center of his skull and they’d managed to dig up one slug in the earth a few feet from where he’d been buried. And, incidentally, the shooter had neglected to pick up three shell casings from the ground. The bear must have eaten any other rounds which might have been embedded in the victim’s torso.
Slaikovitch had given his parole officer a bogus residence location, so no one really knew where he was staying. His family was living in California. His father hadn’t sounded too surprised when the Fullerton cops called to tell him his son had turned up dead in Colorado. Slaikovitch had a lot of tattoos, according to the records of the Department of Corrections. In fact, his nickname at D.O.C. was Tattoo Jimmie. The shooting happened twenty miles from nowhere. It would have been impossible for local residents to hear the gunshots because there were no homes within twenty-five miles of the place.
Welch was curious, but only mildly so. At the end of the meeting he asked the Park County detective, Steve Reilly, if they’d done a DNA profile on their dead guy.
Reilly said, “We had the coroner take extra autopsy samples of tissues for testing. There wasn’t much left to salvage after the bear finished. We’re still waiting for the profiling report from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.”
Welch gave his card to Reilly and asked for a phone call when the DNA results came back, in the hope of perhaps matching Slaikovitch with any other unsolved crimes.
On his way back to Roberts County Welch wondered who’d shoot someone in an area so remote that no one could ever hear the gunshots. Why not just do it in a city alley and drive away? More pertinently, why was anybody even up there in a place like that? What was Slaikovitch doing in the wilderness? Welch figured Jimmie must have gotten himself killed over some money and drugs. Using an overhead projector, Detective Reilly had displayed a map of the area where the body was recovered. Welch shook his head when he saw the locale. It reminded him of something out of a Martin Scorsese movie – like that vast desert where the mob buried their dead bodies outside Vegas in the Casino movie with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. Of course, the Rockies are much more picturesque than the Nevada desert, but it was the utter remoteness of the location that grabbed Welch’s imagination and got him thinking.
Someone either kidnapped Slaikovitch or drove him up there – maybe even lured him on some pretense – and then killed him. Either way, it was probably a druggie hit. It happened a lot. But if he was lured with some bullshit story and induced to go clear the hell into the middle of nowhere up in the Rocky Mountains, someone must’ve been offering one hell of an inducement. Minus the pine trees, the isolated area would make the middle of the Gobi Desert look like downtown Denver at noon on a Friday. The detective tried to think of what would be enough to tempt someone with Jimmie’s criminal lifestyle and street savvy to go up there and expose himself to who knew what. How did he know what roads to take to get into the place? Had he been there before? Someone must have been with him, either someone he thought was a friend – or his kidnapper. Who could know, unless a snitch eventually came forward to talk? Well, young Jimmie had screwed up one final time in life and ended up on a Colorado black bear’s hot lunch menu. The Park County detective would have his hands full trying to solve that one. With an unemployed, shot dead, crack head, ex-con transient buried in a mountain forest and half eaten by a bear, it looked like a case as difficult as the Sheila McCowell murder. And it was damned near as gruesome.
22
The phone rang.
“Detective Welch.”
“Detective Welch, it’s Jim McCowell.”
“Yes, sir. How are you?”
“I’m okay, but I just got a phone call I think you should know about.”
“Yes, sir. Go ahead, I’m listening.”
“An agent with the U.S. Consolidated Life Insurance Company called and told me they’ve got a five hundred thousand dollar term life policy payoff pending. Sheila bought it awhile back without telling me and the agent says I’m the beneficiary. This is a complete surprise. I just wanted you to know about it right away.”
“I appreciate you calling me. Are you trying to file the claim for the benefit?”
“No. I’m much more interested in finding out who killed her than I am in the money.”
“Do you have the insurance agent’s phone number and name?”
“Yes.”
“Are you willing to give that information to me?”
“Of course. Her name is Roberta McClendon and she can be reached at 970-555-2168.”
“Thank you. I’ll give her a call. How are you and your family doing?”
“As well as we can. The girls are still struggling, which is about what I expected. I’ve gotten them into school down here and they seem to be doing pretty well. Is there any progress in your investigation?”
“Do you mean, have I developed any viable suspects? Not yet. I’m pursuing every avenue I can find. As soon as I turn anything up, I’ll be in touch with you.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that. I intend to keep pestering you until you find whoever did this.”
“Is there anything else you think I should know at this point, from your view?”
“I can’t think of anything right now. We’re just waiting for you to do your work and find Sheila’s killer. Oh, there is one thing. Marnie and I got married.”
“That’s wonderful. Congratulations to both of you. And yes, I’ll do my ve
ry best to find out who killed Sheila. I thank you again for calling.”
‘Yes, you’re welcome. Bye.”
“Bye.”
While Jim McCowell, as the ex-husband of the deceased, had to remain at the very top of Welch’s suspect list – in fact, as the only plausible suspect to this point – his stature and credibility had actually improved a little with this phone call. It was definitely an exculpatory conversation and he sounded pretty genuine, again. There had been many murder cases in which an ex-husband, husband, or family member immediately filed for payment of a death benefit, not knowing that the police always get information about the life policy from the insurance carrier. In any suspicious death, the company will vigorously contest the claim, until the beneficiary has been cleared of any wrongdoing. It’s their prerogative to do so.
The two major reasons ex-spouses kill each other are for money, or because there’s a triangular love affair. The fact that Sheila had purchased her own life insurance policy and made her ex the beneficiary, unbeknownst to him, reinforced the idea that they had as good a relationship as any ex-spouses could hope to have. Were she harboring animosity toward Jim, it was highly doubtful that she would’ve put his name on the beneficiary line.
So, McCowell and his young fiancé made the big jump into marriage earlier than they’d originally planned. The detective wondered what prompted that decision and if it meant anything of significance to his case. It was another small piece of information to try to fit into the puzzle. Or, perhaps it didn’t even belong in the same box with the parts he’d already assembled. There was a load of work yet to do. It was a very sketchy picture and he was still missing a whole lot of pieces.
He went through his list of players in the drama once again:
Of course there was Jim McCowell, the number one candidate for suspicion. He had Kim and Adrienne McCowell, the two motherless children – teenagers who were by all appearances emotionally crushed by their mother’s death. There’d been no battle for control of the kids, so that motive seemed to be out of the picture. But Welch had seen ex-spouses end up dead over less serious issues than custody fights, so he wasn’t entirely ruling anything out. At the same time, he was reasonably at ease with the way this couple had made their child custody arrangements and worked together to make their kids’ lives as enjoyable as possible.
Then came Janet Rogers, the victim’s best friend. She wasn’t completely out of his line of sight, although he had no solid reason to believe she could be involved. Of all the people around Sheila, Welch believed that she should know of any love relationship that might have given rise to her best friend’s murder. But Janet had come up with a blank there. She had no clue that Sheila was intimately involved with anyone after her divorce. At least that was her story, so far. That made Welch wonder if Janet had told him everything she knew about her best friend. One of the first rules in a homicide investigator’s playbook is the fact that sooner or later everyone lies. It was long ago written down somewhere by a veteran detective who’d become quite cynical about people, human nature, and life, itself.
Bob Stafford was a player in the scenario. As Sheila’s boss, he’d originally called the cops to check on her welfare when she didn’t come in to work. That made him look pretty benevolent. But, sometimes the one who first alerts the police to the crisis, or reports actually finding the body, turns out to be the killer. So far, Welch had seen nothing but forthrightness and good character in him. He ran a successful business, had been married for thirty years to the same woman, and had given no subtle hints to the cops of anything other than appropriate friendship, coupled with professional interest in the victim’s welfare. He’d cooperated fully during the police interview and responded to all of the questions in a direct manner, without hesitating or stalling to take the extra time that dishonest people would use to formulate a deceitful answer. He seemed to be appropriately shocked when Sheila’s body was found. His background was squeaky clean – there wasn’t even a traffic ticket on his driving record. The other employees in Stafford’s business office were very low on the list. No one had tipped a hand to show any possible deep involvement with Sheila, either as a lover or as someone with a personal grudge to settle.
Welch had a nagging something in the back of his mind about Jim McCowell’s new wife, but he couldn’t quite put it into focus. Marnie was definitely someone who had the equipment to attract a man’s attention. She was young, beautiful and intelligent. Maybe it was the fact that, by virtue of their recent wedding, she’d become the next of kin to a very wealthy businessman. That might be what was bothering him. But why was that so troubling? Her position in the cast of players put her far out on the periphery of Welch’s radar scope. He had no information that there was any prior relationship at all between Sheila McCowell and Jim’s new wife – other than that while he’d been married to Sheila, Jim somehow became acquainted with Marnie at a gym, began an affair with her, moved in with her, married her – and now Marnie seemed to be doing very well in her new capacity as a wife and step-mom to Sheila’s daughters. The truth about which of the two, Jim or Marnie, had actively pursued the other in the beginning of their relationship was still in question, depending on whose story he was to believe. That part of their narratives was a little odd and gave him pause to ponder. On one hand, he was pretty well ready to eliminate Marnie from suspicion. But then again, he thought no one should be eliminated at this juncture of the case. There was too little information to make any big decisions about eliminating suspects.
Sheila’s phone records gave him nothing of use. All of her cell phone calls were either to the kids, to Janet Rogers, to her ex-husband, or to her office at Bob Stafford’s realty. She did have a large bank account – nearly 1.5 million dollars. Again, Jim was the beneficiary. Her credit cards hadn’t been used to make any large purchases and she’d taken no vacations that would cost a lot of money. She was caught up on her credit card payments and had an excellent credit score. Her life apparently consisted of going to work, coming home, walking her dog and spending a lot of time with her children – and with Janet Rogers.
Lastly, there was Iron Maiden, the unknown lover, who was nearly of equal interest to the detective as was Jim McCowell. All the cop had to work with was one partially deleted email from the victim’s computer, strongly indicative of Sheila’s deep emotional involvement with whoever the Maiden might turn out to be. He was pretty certain that Iron Maiden was a female, both from the feminine internet handle and from the stolen New Mexico driver’s license she’d presented to rent the Post Office box. He also knew she’d used a Toshiba laptop computer with WiFi capability to send that mysterious email. Using the computer’s IP, he’d run down the origin of the email to a coffee shop router in south Denver and there was no hope of finding anyone who worked there to recall and identify her. But that was all he knew. She wasn’t the person described on the stolen driver’s license. He was certain of that. And at this point, Welch had no idea how he could find out who she really was. He had no physical description or clue as to her age or where she might live. But he did know that he wanted to find and talk with her in the worst way. Right now, that was his only solid lead in the case.
He was very intrigued with the lengths to which Sheila must have gone in order to conceal Iron Maiden’s existence, even from her very closest friend. Or was Iron Maiden actually Janet Rogers? Was it a feeling of shame over getting involved with a woman? That seemed to be a good reason for concealing the affair, especially if this were to be her first involvement with a lesbian. It’d be difficult to explain to her children. While she could’ve been heavily involved in a newfound emotional infatuation, and with their physical lovemaking, she might also have been harboring doubts as to whether this could last for a very long time. Having been a heterosexual all her life, she could’ve been torn inside with long held beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of her new lesbian passions. Why reveal something like this to her closest friend or to the kids if she was still teeteri
ng back and forth with the thought that it might all turn out to be just be a passing fancy – a taboo adventure for a heretofore rather straight laced middle aged divorced woman trying something new and exciting? So, Janet Rogers, who, by the way, was also divorced, remained on the list as a possible suspect in the murder.
He went through the list two times and tried to think of anything else he’d missed. Short of a big break, it was beginning to look like he was going to be stuck with a dead end case. His only hope now was for something unexpected to happen, such as a snitch with a score to settle against someone directly involved with Sheila’s murder to come forward and give something up. Welch didn’t like his prospects for solving this one and wouldn’t have bet two dollars on it.