by Gregg Olsen
Gary Adams tried to re-focus his weary eyes. Once again, he was a man on a mission, a soldier for love.
Gary parked about a mile away at a bar, and walked the rest of the way to the house. He followed the map made out by Sharon, her handwriting curving in schoolgirl loops and swirls. Seductive, sweet. She had also passed on the key. Gary was glad she had made things so easy. He didn’t want to be found out. He didn’t want to attract attention. He had a job to do, a promise to keep.
It was 8:30 P.M. The Colorado night air was black and cold; as still as a frozen lake.
His mind was racing by the time he stood outside Glen Harrelson's tidy blond brick-faced ranch home at 12370 Columbine Court in Thornton. Though he shouldn’t have, he had a hell of a time finding the place, and had nearly panicked when he passed a fire department only a few minutes from the house.
The same fire department where Glen worked as a firefighter and dispatcher.
With sweat spreading from his armpits down his sides, Gary knew he’d have to get away quickly once he struck the match. After—of course—he had done what he had promised to do.
Gary patted his jacket pocket, confirming the pistol was still there. An eighteen-inch lead pipe he’d stuck into his dusty Levis passed his belt-line and pressed hard and cold against the middle of his rib cage. The .22-caliber handgun had been brought along merely as a backup. It was the pipe he intended to use. A pipe, Sharon reasoned during one of their trysts, would make what was about to happen appear as if a botched burglary had taken place.
A fire would lay a black veil over what had happened. No one would ever know the truth—as they had not known the time before.
Gary glanced over his shoulder as he stood in the doorway. So quiet, so still. Though he was short of breath from his hurried walk, his heart picked up a beat as he slid the key into the lock and turned the knob.
Light from street lamps cut through the expansive glass of a picture window in the front room. The room was barren, save for a pair of recliners and a television set. It was the home of a man who had just moved in, or whose wife had left him with the remnants of a broken marriage.
Deep in the shadows, Gary made his way down the hallway. He wanted to know the layout of the house, though it had been described in detail by Sharon. The first bedroom was empty. At the end of the hall, he found the master bedroom. A dark mahogany bed was neatly made up. On the dresser, he saw the glimmer of gold: a man's wedding band. It was just where Sharon had said it would be. He put the ring in his pocket.
“Bring it to me! Bring it when you are done!”
The numerals on the digital bedside clock glowed in the darkness. It was 8:45 P.M. “He is home no later than nine! He is so predictable you could set your watch by him!”
Gary padded softly through the living room to the kitchen, where he checked the back door's security lock. There would be no escape from the rear of the house. Nor would there be a way out through the windows—all were shielded by decorative wrought-iron grates. His only way out would be the way he came in—through the front door.
He could feel his heart thump as he checked his watch. Returning to the living room, he drew the lead pipe from his pants before settling into a recliner to wait.
“‘Do this right and we ‘ll make love all night. Every night. You and me. Forever.”
Minutes passed and the conversations, the promises of sex and money, filled Gary's head, nearly distracting him from the plan at hand. Over and over, he re-focused on the reason he was there. And as it played in his head, Gary became increasingly jittery. He was nervous. He was unsure. He could not do it.
Not again. Not for her.
Acting on impulse, he bolted from the recliner just as headlights swung wide across the driveway and pierced the darkness through the picture window. It was too late. The wheels that had been set in motion so long ago were moving with a speed he could not halt. There was no turning back.
God, he loved Sharon.
As he listened to Glen get out of his car and walk toward the door, Gary Adams crept to wait by the door. If he still had wanted to turn back, it was too late. He had to do what Sharon had begged him to do.
Gary raised the lead pipe and swung at Glen Harrelson's head. Glen went down, but just as Perry Nelson had done, he tried to stand to fight. He was not out cold. And this time there wasn’t the icy water of a raging creek to revive him. It was fear and the instinct to survive that gave him the burst of strength to fight his attacker.
Gary hit him once more with the bloody pipe.
It didn’t put him out. Thought he’d be out like a light.
Glen Harrelson grabbed Gary Adams's arm and forced him to the floor, flipping him onto his back.
With the light streaming in from the garage door, they could see each other. Two men brought together by the same woman. Their eyes met. Glen Harrelson had the look of a man who was fighting for his life. It was the same wild-eyed look Perry Nelson had that night along the edges of Clear Creek five years before. Glen kicked Gary's leg and knee. Hard, with a force of a man that was going to kill the killer.
The pipe was not going to work and Gary knew it.
He reached for the gun, which he had set off to the side as his insurance policy for such a moment as what was taking place in Glen Harrelson’ s house. The gun fired two times.
It was over. It had gone all awry. Murder is like that. Gary Adams knew that there was no way he could make it look like an accidental death. It was going to have to resemble a botched burglary. He heaped a pile of clothing about the room to make it look as though the place had been ransacked.
Sharon had told him that the grates over the basement windows could be removed. Glen went downstairs and confirmed that one, in fact, was loose. He moved a chair to the window, got up and pulled the grate off, quietly setting it to the side. There had been enough noise coming from the house. Gary went back upstairs and took a jar of coins from the closet and scattered its contents. He went into the garage where Sharon had said Glen kept a supply of gasoline. When he returned he stepped over Glen's body and doused the area with the liquid.
Before he struck a match, Gary decided he needed a delayed fuse. He lit a cigarette and placed it inside a book of matches. That, he thought, would give him the five minutes he’d need to get away.
And he was gone. In a few minutes, Gary was sitting in his truck waiting for the sirens to signal that a neighbor had seen the fire. But five minutes, then ten more, passed. Nothing.
He wondered what went wrong. Did the cigarette go out? Why hadn’t anyone called?
Gary Adams walked back to Columbine Court. He went into the open garage and cracked the door open. Like yardage of black plastic, a curtain of black smoke ripped out of the opening. Gary slammed the door and ran like hell.
Eighteen-inch-deep footprints ran up the ridge from the Dude Ranch to Round House. It was frigid outside, colder than a witch's tit in a brass bra, as the locals liked to say. Sharon had left the yellow light on the deck, casting a warm glow over the snowy hillside. The tracks were left by Gary Adams as he trudged up from his place to tell Sharon that he had taken care of everything back in Thornton.
It was a little after 4 A.M. when Sharon let him into her bedroom.
“It's done,” he said, taking off his coat to let the air of the house warm him.
“Are you sure he's dead?” she asked.
“Everything didn’t go according to plan.”
Sharon smiled. “You look like you’re in one piece,” she said.
Gary shrugged, his attitude remarkably casual for a man who’d just killed another. “I got some bumps and bruises.”
He reached deep into his pocket and brought out a circle of gold. It was Glen's wedding ring, taken off the bedroom bureau as proof that he had been in the house and done as he had promised.
Sharon took the ring and regarded her lover with mock skepticism.
“Are you sure he was dead before you started the fire?”
&nbs
p; “Yes. There was smoke coming from the windows, I didn’t see any flame, but I wasn’t going back in.”
He also returned the key and the map. Sharon put the key back on her key ring and threw the map into the fireplace, a small flash of light illuminating their faces as the slip of paper burned to ash.
Gary said that he made it look like a burglary by scattering some coins around her dead husband.
He even remarked that he had to change a tire on the way up to Thornton.
Sharon wanted to make love. She said she wanted to hold her mountain man, the Adonis of the Rockies, the sipper of her special sauce. She pulled Gary closer and ran her tongue over the salty areas of his muscular body. But nothing happened. Nothing stirred. Nothing stood to attention. Gary couldn’t get it up. Their passion had been extinguished like a birthday candle attacked by a fire hose.
Gary muttered how tired he was. He kissed Sharon and put on his Levis and shirt. They’d make love tomorrow.
And every night after that.
When Gary went back down to the Dude Ranch, he told his son he’d been out with friends. He was tired and he went to bed, the images of what he had done for love haunting him as he drifted off to sleep.
Jayne Schindler reached over to stifle the ringing of the telephone. She and her husband were still in bed when Ron Motley, a firefighter from Station 26, phoned to speak with her husband. The time of day and the brusque seriousness of his voice made it clear that his call was business-related.
Jayne sat up while she watched Jim's face.
“It can’t be,” he said. “Glen died in a fire…at his house?”
He repeated the words so that his wife could hear, but also so that they could sink into his no-longer-slumbering consciousness. His mind flashed to his last conversation with a troubled Glen. What had he wanted to say?
In a minute he got off the phone and faced his concerned wife.
“Suicide,” they both said. “Glen must have killed himself.”
A few minutes passed, and their dual first reaction went by the wayside as reason began to set in.
“No,” Jim said, “Glen wouldn’t do that. Something is wrong.”
Jayne agreed.
Both knew that the odds of someone trained in fighting fires actually dying in one had to be extremely remote. Motley had said that Glen had been found in the crawl space.
Perhaps he had changed his mind and had tried to get out?
“A seasoned firefighter doesn’t die in a fire in his own home,” Jim told his wife as he began to dial Chief Bob Snyder. “You crawl your way out. It's your house, you know where you are.”
Chief Snyder, who had been in on the early stage of the investigation, agreed with Jim Schindler's growing skepticism. The two conferred by telephone that morning.
“This doesn’t ring true,” Jim persisted. “Something is wrong. Investigate this thing.”
The chief assured him it was already being done. The arson squad was at Columbine and a meticulous examination of every inch of the charred house was underway.
Jim made another phone call to the police department; they agreed that something was up. In fact, they did not want it released that Glen's body had been discovered. Information that might lead to an arrest would be kept close to their vests.
His last call would be to Glen's first wife; the mother of his son and daughter.
It was the last person Andy Harrelson expected to connect with, but it was a nice surprise. When Jim Schindler phoned out of the blue that morning, Andy thought he was calling to catch up. She took a seat at the kitchen table and prepared for a leisurely chat. The couples had drifted apart after the divorce and Andy had missed the Schindlers.
“Have you heard about Glen?” Jim asked abruptly. His tone was soft, suggesting something had happened.
Andy felt a jolt. She braced herself. “What?” she asked, her heart sinking to a place lower than she thought possible. Something terrible had happened. She knew it, even before he said it.
“There was a fire in his house…”
The rest of the words would escape Andy Harrelson, but their meaning was clear. She gripped the phone and asked what hospital Glen was taken to.
“He didn’t make it, Andy,” Jim said. “I'm so sorry.”
“I'm going to the house,” she said.
“No. You stay there. I'm coming over.”
Todd Harrelson overheard his mother's end of the conversation and joined her at the kitchen table. As they held each other, the teen and his mother cried before going upstairs to tell Tara. The sixteen-year-old girl fell apart. She and her father had been close, despite Sharon's frequent meddling. Tara loved her dad. She was, in her eyes and his, Daddy's Girl.
Andy Harrelson still loved Glen. She loved the good parts of their marriage and the children they had made together. By the time she had her wits about her, her home was filled with people from the fire department, the police, even a witness assistance professional from the county.
Shock was displaced by sorrow and worry. She asked if Sharon had been notified. An officer said they had not yet made that call. In fact, they couldn’t call. Sharon Harrelson had no phone in her remote house in southeastern Colorado.
“This is going to be so hard on Sharon,” Andy told the victims assistance woman. “She just lost another husband not too long ago.”
The victims assistance person excused herself to make a call.
Todd and Andy went upstairs, away from the activity that was enveloping their home. A mob of uniforms had taken over. Tara had gone to be with a girlfriend. Andy caught her son's anguished face in the dressing-room mirror.
Clarity had begun to set in as the initial shock turned from upheaval to numbness.
Andy's own words echoed in her consciousness: “She just lost another husband not too long ago.”
“Sharon did it,” she said.
Todd looked hard at his mother, prompting her to say more.
“Oh my God,” she said quickly, as if she could censor what she had blurted out. “I'm sorry I said that.”
But she wasn’t sorry, not really. From what she had seen, Sharon was the type of woman who’d be behind something like her husband's murder.
Anxiously, Mikki Baker took another look at the clock. What was keeping Glen? He was supposed to get in touch with her before they met for coffee that Saturday morning at Village Inn off 84th Ave and 1-25. She reran what he had said, and she became worried.
“I have something to talk to you about. I can’t tell you, now. I just need to see you.”
Mikki told her husband, Steve, about her concerns. It wasn’t like Glen to not call when he said he would. She got dressed and planned on going to the coffee shop to see if Glen had forgotten and showed up.
Instead, from her bedroom telephone, she dialed his number on the off chance that he had returned to Columbine Court.
A man identifying himself as a police officer answered her call.
For a minute, Mikki thought she had misdialed. But she knew Glen's number by heart. She hung up.
“Call the number again,” Steve told her.
The same man answered. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Mikki Baker. I'm trying to reach Glen Harrelson and his number is ringing you.”
“Why are you calling?”
“He's a friend of mine. We’re getting together for coffee this morning.”
Steve watched his wife's face grow white. Later, when Mikki Baker recounted what the man said, she would not be able to come up with the exact words. Something about an accident. Something about a dead man. The line had been patched over from the bumed-out house to the Thornton police station.
“Glen's dead,” she said, tears already flowing.
Steve Baker reached out for his wife and held her.
“What's Sharon going to do?” Mikki sobbed. “This is the second husband she's lost to death.”
Steve shook his head.
“Mikki,” he finally said, “don’t be
too hasty. I told you there's something about her. I don’t like her.”
Mikki stopped listening to her husband for a moment. Her thoughts slipped to Glen and the reason they were going to have coffee that morning.
“He never got to tell me what he so desperately wanted to say,” she said.
* * *
A hot shower was all he wanted. Rick Philippi returned from pheasant hunting in Kit Carson, on the Kansas state line and was on his way to the shower when his wife, Theresa, stopped him with the grim news.
“Glen's dead. He's been killed in his house! His body, Rick, was set on fire.”
Rick was shocked into silence as grief took hold. How could that have happened?
Something wasn’t right, he thought.
Finally it hit him. “Where's his wife?” he asked.
Theresa Philippi knew what her husband was thinking.
“They’re looking for her,” she said.
“She did it. I know she did it. I just know it.”
When Sharon's son-in-law, Bart Mason, picked up the phone in his rambling old Trinidad house, it was Glen Harrelson's mother, Ruby, calling all the way from Des Moines, Iowa. The kindly old woman had some bad news and needed to reach Sharon right away.
With a worried look on his face, Bart pressed the receiver into wife Rochelle's outstretched palm.
Mrs. Harrelson was distraught and nearly out of breath. There was no room for the pleasantries that usually accompany the start of a phone conversation.
“Rochelle, how far do you live from your mom's house?”
“About thirty minutes,” Sharon's eldest daughter answered.
“You’ve got to go up there and be with your mother.”
“We’re going up there anyway. Why the sudden need?”
Mrs. Harrelson's fragile composure began to slip further and she let the words rush from her lips. “You’ve got to go tell your mom Glen died this morning in a fire at the house.”
Rochelle was overwhelmed. She could barely think of a response. “What house?”
But Mrs. Harrelson was gone. The line was dead.