by John L. Work
The airport security captain had been briefed about the impending arrest and the customs agents who worked on the luggage line would get their instructions on the following morning. Welch was impressed that Winston’s men had covered all of the bases. He was very confident that it would go pretty smoothly. Samantha couldn’t be armed – weapons weren’t allowed on any flights. She wouldn’t be able to wrestle her way out of these men’s grips, if she decided to fight. And where could she go if she did manage to somehow break away from them? She’d be in a foreign airport with no knowledge of the lay of the land.
Later at his hotel Welch ordered dinner and tried to call Janet on his cell phone. He hadn’t been able to take the time prior to leaving Denver on early Monday morning. With his late arrival on Tuesday, the jet lag, the Wednesday morning meeting with Winston, and the dress rehearsal for the arrest on late Wednesday afternoon he’d been so damned busy that he’d forgotten to try reaching her. He got her answering machine and left a message. Then he looked at his watch, did a few calculations and realized it was almost one in the morning in Denver. She was probably long ago asleep after a hard day’s work at the bank – while he ate his seven o’clock supper in Auckland. He figured he’d call her tomorrow after they had Samantha in custody. His homeward flight was scheduled to go out on Friday evening, with a stop in Los Angeles before going on to Denver. He’d be very glad to see her. He went to sleep that night with her scent in his memory, her arms around his neck and her lips softly caressing his cheek. They were dancing, again.
65
The flight was scheduled to land at ten-thirty a.m. Carlyn came to Welch’s hotel at eight and they had breakfast together at the hotel restaurant before going on to the meeting at the Auckland Airport with the rest of the team at nine-thirty. Inside the terminal all six of them ordered coffee and sat around, talking. They asked Welch about being a police officer in the United States and he wanted to know about their work in New Zealand. Some of them actually thought that American cops go around shooting people indiscriminately, as depicted in Hollywood movies. And a couple thought the American police were brutal, based again on things they saw on television and in the movies. That gave Welch one more reason not to go to any more Hollywood movies – ever.
By ten o’clock they were all in position, waiting for Samantha Newsom’s plane to touch down. The minutes dragged on endlessly. At ten fifteen, Welch felt the morning coffee beginning to do its work on his bladder and he had to use the rest room, which was about twenty-five yards away from his assigned position. He walked quickly and made it back to his station by ten twenty. At ten thirty-five there was strangely no activity at the gate. No announcement had been forthcoming over the public address system. Hundreds of people had walked around them, either going to or from their planes. He wondered if something had gone wrong.
And there was something very wrong.
Carlyn walked about one-hundred feet down the concourse and nervously glanced up at the arrivals television screen. He cursed aloud, “Damn!”
Samantha’s flight had been re-assigned to dock at a different gate. The plane had already arrived at the northern most end of the “B” eastern concourse. They were a good quarter mile away on the wrong end of the terminal!
Six big men in suits and ties sprinted through the crowds, beating feet for several hundred yards toward the western concourse. Some passengers thought maybe a funny TV commercial was being filmed and looked about for the cameras. A couple of startled old women lost their balance and fell over as the cops ran by, picking their feet up and putting them down, leather shoe soles slipping on the carpets as they turned, dodged and galloped. The detectives ran on. Sweating, gasping and lungs burning for oxygen, they arrived at the correct gate as the last passenger on the flight, a tiny Samoan man who walked with a cane, was coming through the tunnel into the terminal. He stared at the red faced hard breathing men in suits and shook his head. There was no Samantha in sight.
Baggage Claim! They turned away from the little old man and began to run in that direction, which was another distance race that seemed like ten miles. They stopped and looked at the crowds. There were hundreds of people picking up their bags from the rotating carousels. It was hopeless. She could have been anywhere in that throng.
Customs! They could head her off there. Another sprint began with their lungs already about to burst, and they looked at a mass of humanity standing in long lines waiting for their suitcases to be searched. It would be impossible to find her. So, the six detectives stood there huffing and puffing – and stared at each other in disbelief. They’d missed her.
Back on the western concourse one of the elderly fallen women sustained a sprained wrist and went to a first aid station – assisted by an airport security agent who wrote a detailed report of the incident. That injury report quickly found its way into the hands of Chief of Detectives Thomas Winston, who immediately faxed it to the Roberts County, Colorado Sheriff’s Office, attention: Sergeant Bill Jackson.
Their suspect had eluded them. And Welch’s troubles had barely begun.
66
He sat dejectedly, with his chin resting on his right fist, staring out the window of the plane at the passing white clouds. He’d already made a phone call to let his sergeant, Bill Jackson, know about what happened at the airport.
He related to his supervisor that after all the running, sweating, swearing and searching they’d done, Chief Inspector Harold Carlyn had finally thought to check the passenger manifest. And he discovered that Samantha Newsom had never boarded that plane. She was still safe in Samoa.
But why didn’t she come to Auckland? Someone must have tipped her off that the cops would be waiting for her. Welch’s first suspect was Marnie McCowell. Yes – Marnie had probably gotten a double cross case of remorse and let Sammie know that she shouldn’t go to the Apia airport to get on that plane bound for Auckland.
But Marnie would never have to answer the questions that Welch intended to ask her. Just prior to his departure by plane from Auckland to Los Angeles, Bill Jackson told his detective by phone that the Colorado Springs Police had found Marnie McCowell dead in her garage, where she hung herself from one of the exposed two by four truss cross members. She’d left a note, telling Kim and Adrienne that she was sorry about her part in the deaths of their father and mother. She asked them to forgive her. There was a separate note addressed to Samantha Newsom. In it, she wished Samantha a good life and expressed her regret that she couldn’t get out of the country before she was caught – both by the cops and by her remorse for what they’d done. She asked Samantha to send some money to Kim and Adrienne, so the two girls would be able to go to college. That was all that Bill Jackson had for him at the moment and he said he’d get with his detective after Welch was on the ground in Denver.
So, it had been Marnie, after all, who caved in on the agreement that would have saved her from a life sentence – and she burned off the cops by telling Samantha what was going to happen at the New Zealand airport. Welch thought to himself, that just about wraps up all the damned loose ends, doesn’t it, except they didn’t get the one who’d actually pulled the trigger on Slaikovitch and Jim McCowell. The driving force behind all the clandestine affairs, evil and death got away with it. Somehow, through good luck, or fate, or Divine Intervention, Samantha Newsom had evaded them.
Welch was suddenly very tired. As he stared at the clouds, he was really looking back over a career of some twenty years as a cop and everything he had seen – misery, alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence, child abuse, forgery, burglary, robbery, rape, murder – and divorce. He decided in that moment that he was going to retire. It was time to do something else. He didn’t know what that something else might be, but he was going to get out of this Hell while he still had his health and sanity. He’d seen a lot of cops who stayed on the job too long – they died soon after retirement, many because they were already sick when they finally wised up and pulled the plug. Cancer, high blood pressu
re, emphysema, heart attacks – and suicide – were all killers of newly retired cops. Somewhere he’d read or heard that the average life expectancy for a career male police officer was fifty eight years. At fifty-five, he was figuring to get out while he could still get around and do a few things – even if his special early retirement pension wouldn’t give him that much money. He wanted to be able to get up in the morning and not have to think about a case load on his desk that would never go away – and to go to sleep at night without worrying about a crime unsolved. Yes – it was time to quit.
His grandfather, Ernest, had been a Pennsylvania State Mounted Policeman back in the early 1900s – then he got out of police work and went to work in a steel mill for the rest of his working life. Ernest only lived for three months after his retirement at age sixty seven.
Welch’s uncle once told him that Ernest got out of police work because there was no justice in the legal system – not really. Welch had figured that one out, too, a long time ago in his career.
He mulled over the first case he was ever called out on as a new detective – the rape of a fourteen year old girl – on her birthday. He could still remember the victim’s name – Angel. But, he couldn’t remember the names of the witnesses. The victim’s best girl friend, also fourteen years of age, took Angel over to an older male friend’s home for the birthday party – and he furnished the alcoholic beverages. His name was Martin. Angel had enough to drink that she willingly followed her twenty-five year old host upstairs to a loft style bedroom, where he forced her down onto the bed, pulled her skirt up and raped her. It was a perverse scenario, probably planned by Angel’s little friend. There were two other adults sitting downstairs in the living room, a twenty-three year old female and her boyfriend. The fourteen year old girlfriend who brought Angel to the birthday party was also parked there on the couch. During the taped statements they later gave to Welch and his partner, Joe Bryerson, all three of them said that they could hear everything that was going on in that loft – the rustling clothes, Angel’s cries as Martin wrestled to control her, then the rhythmical creaking of bedsprings and the girl whimpering. After the witnesses had all departed from the sheriff’s station, Bryerson told Welch that he overheard the adult female telling her boyfriend that listening to those sounds coming from the upstairs, followed by all of this talk about sex during the police interviews had really made her horny – she just wanted him to take her home and fuck her. The junior detective just shook his head in astonishment at that one. A fourteen year old kid had just been forcibly raped and this lady was horny?
“No shit. That’s what she said, J.D.,” Bryerson told him.
They worked all night on an arrest warrant and a search warrant. They got a Calhoun County judge out of bed at about four o’clock a.m. to sign them. At six-thirty the same morning they followed a uniformed graveyard shift deputy named Russell Michaelson to Martin’s apartment. When Bryerson knocked at the door, Martin opened it just widely enough to show his face. Michaelson, a former United States Marine who had fought at the 1968 battle of Khe Sanh, jerked their suspect right out of his slippers and hauled him down a flight of stairs to a police car. Later, he thanked Bryerson and Welch for inviting him along.
Six or eight months later the victim was on the stand during the trial, testifying about her rape. The defense attorney grilled her for a couple of hours and finally managed to get her to tearfully admit she wasn’t a virgin when Jake ripped her panties down and forcibly violated her on her fourteenth birthday. The prosecutor stood up and objected. There followed a heated argument that ended when the defense counsel yelled at the judge, in the presence of the jury, that poor Martin could get thirty-two years in prison if convicted. All of which resulted in the judge declaring a mistrial, because the jurors are never supposed to know what punishments may be in store for a defendant if they find him guilty. It’s been deemed prejudicial. Their function is solely to weight the facts and find for guilt or innocence.
The entire situation had all been carefully orchestrated by a very competent lawyer, who sensed exactly when he’d sufficiently worn down the victim’s will to go on with the ordeal. He took the measure of her emotional state pretty well and blurted out the fatal gaffe for the jury at just the right moment. They all sat transfixed as the argument blazed before them and did not at all understand why the proceedings were suddenly terminated and the trial ended. The judge explained that he’d granted the prosecution’s motion for a mistrial and they could all go home. So, they left the Courtroom, many shaking their heads in disbelief and talking among themselves.
There immediately followed a meeting at the District Attorney’s Office with Joe Bryerson, Angel and the prosecutor, Mike Samuels, all present. Samuels explained to his bewildered victim what had just happened – that the trial would have to be done all over again. Poor Angel sobbingly decided that she’d just about had enough of this cross examination business and refused to testify again at a second trial. So, the case was ultimately dismissed.
Welch never forgot that lesson. Sometimes there’s no justice in the justice system. And as someone famous had said, the worst thing for a rape victim is not always the rape – sometimes it’s what happens to her in the legal proceedings that follow it.
For Welch, now, it was just a matter of typing up the last reports and going over the Sheila McCowell case with Bill Jackson. This trip to Auckland and the entire case had become a pure, unmitigated disaster, all the way round. Everybody was dead. There was no one left alive to take to trial – except for Samantha Newsom – and the chances of ever catching up with her weren’t very good. Welch figured that if she ever did much traveling out of Samoa, which was also not too likely, she’d probably go to non-extradition nations. There were a few he could think of that might be okay for vacations – like China. On second thought, many of them were Islamic states that operated under sharia – Muslim law. Or they had communist governments that created conditions which would hold very little attraction for a woman like Sammie. So, Welch figured that she’d have to make herself comfortable right there in that tiny Polynesian paradise and pretty much stay put – or risk getting jerked back to the United States for three murder trials.
He wondered how she would amuse herself over there. She probably still had a computer and whatever television services there might be in Samoa. There was always satellite TV, if she could get it hooked up on a small island. And he figured that she wouldn’t be living in one of the bigger cities. Her dream, according to Marnie’s confession, had always been some tiny remote locale in the South Pacific. Anyway, if there were major hotels in Apia that offered satellite television, surely she could buy it for a beach house on one of the lesser islands somewhere in the group that made up the nation of Samoa. She had all of the McCowells’ money now, so expenses should be no problem.
But satellite television and warm ocean breezes alone wouldn’t hold Sammie’s interest for long. She needed people to manipulate and seduce. That had become too obvious as the investigation progressed. Was there a gym close to where she’d be living – someplace to put her amazing body on display to attract male, or female, attention – and perhaps develop another relationship like the ones she’d had with Sheila and Marnie? Sammie managed to get around on the town with the boys and girls – that was for sure. Welch didn’t think it’d be long before she found herself someone new to love – or to toy with – someone to control. She’d played and used all of them – yet, they could never have gotten enough of her. He didn’t know if she was a sociopath, because he hadn’t spent that much time around her. Then, on second thought, he’d have bet a month’s pay that the answer to that question would be a resounding yes. She’d killed two people herself and been present for a third murder. She’d had love affairs with Sheila McCowell, Marnie Sullivan, Jimmie Slaikovitch – and who could know how many more there were – or would be. All of her bedmates ended up dead. She was the ultimate terminal manipulator of men and women.
And the beauti
ful Marnie had ended it by taking her own life. For all her trouble – after all that planning and scheming – the affair with Sammie, the affair with Jim, talking him into getting married, moving all the money overseas, the planning of three murders so that she and her lesbian lover could possess the material things they wanted – just to end up with a life sentence hanging over her – and then her lifeless body hanging from a rope in her own garage, was such a complete waste of everything.
Thinking over the whole story was mind-numbing for Welch. Who were the winners and losers in this twisted game? Sammie Newsom was the winner. Jim’s children were the biggest losers – that was for sure. They’d lost their mother and father, and Sammie had stolen their inheritance from them. It was now all so depressing to Welch that he could barely stand to think about how the entire mess had unfolded.