Shocking True Story

by Gregg Olsen

  Instead, there were neat rows of houses that sported a kind of affected country look—a cement goose wearing a hat, a wide porch with a wicker rocker purchased at Home Depot, or a replica metal milk can used as an umbrella stand.

  A hand-painted plaque next to Mrs. Warinski's door read:

  FRIENDS ARE NICE,

  BUT CLEAN FLOORS ARE WONDERFUL!

  The first chapter of most true crime books opens with blood and guts and a murder. Publishers almost require it. While Love You to Death lacked a murder per se, it had plenty of blood and guts. Even better, it had twists and turns. Jett had been helpful in setting up the interview with Mrs. Warinski, a part-time night clerk at the River's Edge Motel, next door to the Ruston Tavern where Deke Cameron went for help the night of the shooting. I appreciated Jett's help and knew from our first meeting on my doorstep that she would be the person that I could count on whenever I needed help around town. Though I couldn't use her to facilitate meetings and interviews with Danny's or Deke's families and friends, I knew she'd be a big help with her sister and mother's side of the story.

  Mrs. Warinski's breasts were large and pendulous, and swung with such force when she greeted me that I thought she'd knock over her early—or very, very late season—scarecrow door decoration. And they undulated when she introduced herself and shook my hand.

  "I made coffee, come on in!" she said.

  Melba Warinski was a pleasant woman in her mid-forties. She had a ready smile and smelled of cinnamon.

  "Making apple pie?" I asked, following implied orders by taking off my shoes and setting them by the door.

  "Thank you, but it's my stove-top sachet you're getting a whiff of now."

  I settled into a chair at the kitchen table. I told her about myself, my books, my wife, and my children. I was there to get information, but I was there to win her over. And I did. We talked about her life, her children, her husband, her interest in crafts and the night of the crime.

  She was still shaken by what she had seen.

  "When I think about that bloody young man and how he fought for his life...it just makes me wonder: what would have happened if I hadn't been there? He might have died. Good night, there was so much blood on his chest! And on the pavement. At first I thought the black pool was an oil puddle. But it wasn't. It was blood."

  She took a deep breath and ate another store-bought cookie.

  "Mr. Ryan, we're living in a very violent world," she said.

  I nodded. I didn't want to say that violence kept police, doctors and true crime authors in business, but it fluttered through my mind. When it was time to go, Melba Warinski gave me two little angels made of rolls of Life-Savers as gifts for my daughters. The wings were fashioned of the silver foil of a gum wrapper.

  "Doublemint," she said, proud of her handiwork. "For your twins!"

  "I've never seen anything like these," I said as I waved from my truck. "My girls will love them. Thank you."

  I had one more appointment. A man who rented one of the River's Edge Motel rooms as an apartment had been on the scene near the same time as Mrs. Warinski. Andy Lowery was a fry cook at the Green Grasshopper on Meriwether Avenue.

  I introduced myself and sat down in a booth with a plate of waffle fries and ketchup.

  "Good job on the fries," I told the cook, dumping pepper on the ketchup pool dammed by the fries.

  Andy Lowery grinned, revealing a man in considerable need of serious dental work. The Green Grasshopper Cafe was not a leader in health care for its employees, though management had hung a sign in the men's room that reminded workers to wash your hands after your business, so that we can do our business.

  Andy was thirty-two, thin as a wicket, and as excited as could be to tell me what he had seen the night the story began.

  "My girlfriend woke me—we're getting married next year—at one-twenty in the morning, yelling that someone was in front of the motel screaming that he had been shot! Shot! I threw on some clothes and ran out there to see what was going on. My girlfriend's name is Amber."

  "Pretty name," I offered.

  "Melba, the night clerk, was out there and she had already called 9-1-1. I didn't know what I was getting myself into so I went over carefully. I didn't want to go right up to this individual, because he seemed so agitated, so husky and big. I don't mind telling you that I was a little bit afraid of what might happen. I told him to stay down, to lay still. There would be blood everywhere. I mean everywhere. The inside of the truck was red. I saw chunks of skin, and stuff, too. Melba and I kept telling the bleeding guy that he would be all right. We would stay with him until help arrived."

  I picked at my ketchup-bloodied fries and made a few notes. If I needed anything else, Andy told me he was more than willing to help out. I thanked him and got up to leave.

  "Can you leave Amber out of it?" he asked as we walked to the door of the cafe.

  "Why?"

  His face went red and he stammered out a reply. "Uh. Uh. She's married and I don't want to get her into trouble."

  "You know, Andy, I'm writing a true story. If she's important, she's in. If she's not, she's out."

  "All she did was wake me up. That's all."

  "I'll do what I can."

  I left Timberlake with enough information to begin the writing of the critical first chapter—the chapter that would hook my editor into another contract. I drove north on I-5 as fast as I could without the worry of the flashing blue light of a Washington State Patrol car. The house was quiet when I got home. No new letters from any haters, which was good. I slipped behind my computer to answer e-mail (nothing but spam) and do a quick Google search.

  TODAY'S LIST

  Google: Not much on the blogs ("Crimella" is still yammering about the corpse photo in one of my books. Not my idea!) Sympathy posts for Jeanne-O dropped off on Kevin's Krime Blog.

  Crime case in the news with the most hits: Monica Dewars killed her preacher husband, Matthew Dewars, over an affair he was having with a church secretary.

  Possible book titles: "Unholy Matrimony" or "The Devil Made Her Do It"

  Amazon ranking for backlist: Stuck in the 400,000s.

  Need from the store: Coffee, corn and a pint of Chunky Monkey ice cream.

  Chapter Nine

  Saturday, July 27

  I GOT UP EARLY TO MAKE SOME CALLS TO THE EAST Coast before trying to write something. I made Valerie a pot of coffee and we watched a little bit of the morning news before embarking on the day. She was going to a seminar to learn to empower herself in the business world. Empowerment for me meant Taylor and Hayley sleeping in until almost ten.

  "Shh!" Taylor instructed her sister when they converged into my office that morning. "Daddy's calling a bookstore in Atlanta to see if they have his book."

  "He picked Georgia today?" Hayley asked, a towel wrapped around her head as proof that she had showered and washed her hair. "It was my turn to pick the state."

  It was the one area to which I would admit I was somewhat obsessed—after Googling my own name. I wanted to know if my books were doing well and I used my girls' Wonderful United States flash cards to pick the state that I would call at random to check on a title's availability.

  My first call went to a Barnes & Noble that had closed four months earlier—a store that had filled the space left behind by a Borders that had closed two years before that. My second call went to a mystery bookshop that was open only three days a week, and today wasn't one of them, according to the answering machine. But my third call was answered by a live human being.

  "Hi," I said to a clerk at a Hastings. "Have you got any copies of Murder Cruise? I think the author's name is Ryan."

  Though I felt silly, I thought it was clever that I was unsure of the author's name. My name.

  "I'll check the computer," the girl said, coming back on the line after a few bars of Muzak tune I could not pin down.

  "We do! Want us to hold a copy?

  I thought of the box of a hundred copies I kept
in my garage. Copies that would never see the light of day, never be taken to the bathtub or beach to be read. Never be sold at a garage sale.

  "Oh, that would be great."

  "Name?"

  "Lyons," I said, wondering why I hadn't come up with a better book-buying name than one that so closely resembled my own.

  "Mr. Lyons," the girl said, her voice radiating as much enthusiasm as a video store clerk, "we'll hold it for three days."

  I thanked her and asked her how the book was selling. "It's based on a true story that happened in my home town," I said, instantly feeling like an idiot. Murder Cruise was a murder on the high seas case and there was no town. My embarrassment faded when I remembered that most chain bookstore clerks didn't read.

  "Sounds cool. We have quite a few; they're not exactly flying out of the store. Bye."

  I had wanted a title like The End of Melinda. Melinda Moser's husband, Dan Moser, and his lover (and Melinda's best friend) Maddie Andretti conspired to kill Melinda while vacationing together on their boat in Hawaii. While “Aunt” Maddie waited in a rental car with the Mosers' little boy, Dan took Melinda to a fern-shrouded canyon and bludgeoned her with the back end of a sugar cane machete. Two days later, Dan and Maddie came back to retrieve the already decomposing body because they were worried someone would find her, with Dan and Melinda's only child, an infant daughter, asleep in the back seat. Criminals were always doing things like that. It always made me laugh when someone would remark at how “diabolically clever” the subjects were in any of my books. Smart killers were those no one wrote about; the ones who never got caught. Not a single true crime book had ever been written about a clever criminal. I'd also thought of calling the book Tropic Blunder: The True Story of Love, Madness and a Machete.

  The murderous duo dumped poor Melinda's body in the sea and claimed she had been attacked by sharks.

  My editor remarked that he was certain the Murder Cruise title would appeal to boating enthusiasts.

  "It seems kind of odd to me," I told him, "but you guys know better. " I didn't argue because I didn't know how many of those boaters actually read books in the true crime genre.

  Later, I found out there were about fifty such readers.

  Murder Cruise sank like Paula Abdul's career after her firing from American Idol.

  But I kept trying.

  Monday, July 29

  SEVENTEEN DAYS AFTER I MET with Connie Carter, the Community Relations specialist from the prison left a message on my answering machine.

  "Kevin? This is Muriel Constantine from Riverstone. Janet has reconsidered your offer for an interview. I've scheduled you for four tomorrow afternoon. If you want to see her anytime soon, that's the best I can do. Bye."

  I was elated. Of course, I knew she'd come around. I called it the true crime domino or TCD effect. One important source begets another important source. One side of the story leads to the other. No one wants anyone else to speak for them.

  TCD was proof that no one ever wanted to be left out of a story.

  Janet had undoubtedly talked with her mother and Connie probably mentioned I was out interviewing everyone who knew her daughter from the day she came home from the hospital to the day she was shipped off to serve her time in prison.

  I could hear mother and daughter now:

  "Jan, he's one of those investigating types...there's no telling what he might find. Best be on his side and cooperate. He can help us and you don't have to tell him anything you don't want him to know."

  "Yeah, like the producer from the Rita Adams Show. She wanted the true story. She said she'd look into things for us. She said she'd send us a goddamn transcript and an autographed picture of Rita! She promised to tell our side, too, and look where it got us?"

  "It got us to Kevin Ryan, that's where. Either we talk or we sit in here and rot until an appeal comes through or we die."

  "Why do I even ask you? It's not like listening to you has done me any good."

  "I'm your mother. That's why you listen to me."

  Tuesday, July 30

  PRISON FOOD HAD FATTENED HER UP. It did to so many. When I finally came face-to-face with Janet Lee Kerr in Riverstone's special visit room, I could see the pounds that months of double scoops of mashed potatoes with hamburger gravy and bowls of Riverstone Casserole had done to the young woman's figure since she had been on the Rita Adams Show. I estimated at least a twenty-pound weight gain. Maybe more. Her long brown hair had been cut short on the sides, a kind of modified Jane-Fonda-in-Klute shag. It looked a little—I hated to think—butch. It was not an especially attractive hairdo.

  I hoped Angela, her cellmate, liked it. I assumed it had been styled for her.

  "Pleased to meet ya," she said, extending her hand.

  "Okay to shake?" I asked an enormous male guard who sat at the end of the table like some denim-clad Buddha.

  "Yeah. No monkey business, though."

  Monkey business? What was I going to do, pull something out of a body cavity and hand it over to her?

  Janet rolled her eyes and we shared a little laugh.

  Over the course of the hour, my recorder consumed a mini-tape as we talked about Janet's life and her cocksure insistence that she had been framed. She had been tricked. She had been hoodwinked.

  I could see that she was likable enough, though, certainly not anyone I'd want to pal around with. She was more like someone I might ask how to change the oil on the LUV. I wondered what power she had over these men that would make them contemplate and attempt to kill on her behalf?

  "Danny was in love with me. Still is," she said, tugging at the collar of a shirt that was too tight. "He wanted Deke out of the way so he could have me to himself."

  "Were you in love with him?"

  "You gotta be joking! He was a loser that I felt sorry for. I hung around him, but I never led him on."

  "Lovers?"

  Again, Janet let out a snicker of denial. "Have you seen him?" she asked skeptically.

  "Just the photo on television. You know, the talk show."

  "Let me tell you, they did him a favor by cutting Danny's puzzle piece smaller than the others. With as big as he is, he'd need a 500-piece jigsaw of his own."

  "You were never boyfriend/girlfriend?" I asked one more time.

  Her denial stayed firm. "Never. Never in a zillion years. I never even let him touch my hand."

  "So this whole mess was caused by Danny? Misguided goofball Danny?"

  She lowered her gaze. "And Deke. Deke's at fault here, too. He was weak and let those bastards in the DA's office pressure him into lying at my trial."

  "What about you, Janet? Are you responsible for any of this?"

  Like flipping a switch, Janet's eyes welled up with tears. She brushed aside her shaggy, brown hair with a finger accented by a coiled snake ring.

  "Yeah, I am," she said, her chapped lip now quivering. "I made a mistake by loving the wrong man. That's my only crime."

  I nodded as I thanked her and packed up my recorder, the time allotted by the prison over. There was always a little truth to that statement. Through my work, I knew that it was frequently the combination of people that led them to the unthinkable. On their own, they'd have brewed in their contempt for their target. With some urging, however, plans were swung into action. Murder or violence was like an eBay auction or drinking game, with the sway of others pushing you to do more than you wanted.

  Or should.

  ♦

  Another letter came earlier that day. I recognized the envelope: gray, unremarkable. No return address. Simple lettering that looked more creepy than cursive. Inside, the single sheet wasn't a direct threat. Those are easy to handle. You know what to expect. But this was veiled in the most insidious manner possible.

  Just four little words.

  PRETTY WIFE PRETTY GIRLS.

  It was like cancer, I supposed. If you felt all right, you could ignore it. It was there eating away at your body. But as long as there were no outward in
dicators, you were fine. Denial was so very powerful. But every now and then, as I typed I thought about the letters. It was like a dripping faucet mocking every click of my keyboard.

  I finally had to tell Val about the letters. I found her upstairs buried in a stack of laundry. She set down Taylor's pink and purple swimsuit, regarded the letter and shrugged. She didn't seem to get the seriousness of what I was showing her.

  “I'm concerned and a little creeped out,” I said, coolly as I could.

  Val handed the letter back and turned her attention to the laundry. "I thought you'd be happy to have a stalker," she said. "I mean, finally, about time, Kevin."

  She was deadpan, but I knew it wasn't how she really felt.

  Chapter Ten

  Saturday, August 3

  JETT CARTER CALLED MY OFFICE LINE SATURDAY MORNING with bad news. Her sister had taken ill at the prison the night before and had been shuttled off to the infirmary under the care of sadistic nurses who—according to Janet—enjoyed probing and poking and sticking their rubber-gloved fingers where they weren't supposed to. As Jett recounted it, Janet had choked on the rice pudding at dinner the night before. Another prisoner rushed to her aid and administered the Heimlich maneuver, but apparently had done so with such force it cracked two ribs.

  "She's real upset because she won't be able to work in the sewing shop for at least a week. She needs the money to pay for her appeal."

  The sewing shop offered the creme de le creme of prison jobs, paying almost five dollars an hour. The prison shop made sleeping bags, duffel bags and totes. Each was tagged MADE BY THE LADIES ON THE INSIDE. Years ago, MLI designs were highly coveted by college students for their prison cachet. A major Northwest sportswear company jumped on the idea and created a line of apparel and accessories called Jail House Frocks. The "prison-inspired" line sold like gangbusters at JC Penney's and Kohl's. In a matter of weeks, the Jail House Frocks success turned the MLI product line into has-been, hand-me-downs. No college or high school student wanted to wear or tote something that even suggested Penney's.