Shocking True Story

by Gregg Olsen

  Danny smiled broadly. He sat straight up with his hands folded on the table in front of him like a first-grader. "Yeah. Thank you. Sounds good."

  While Danny admitted to a great deal, he didn't give up Janet Lee Kerr. Every time her name was broached, he shook his heavy frame with firm denial. He had shot Deke. It was his idea. He fled the scene. He ditched the weapon. He tossed Janet's shoes in the Dumpster. Everything was his doing. His alone.

  Raines knew better. He had been this route before many times in his career.

  "Come on, Danny, we know Janet put it all together."

  "Did not."

  "Did too."

  "Janet's not like that," the young fat man said. "You don't even know her."

  ♦

  Note from Val: I feel sorry for Danny. Your description of him seems a little harsh —“the young fat man said.” Hasn't the guy been used and abused enough? Maybe you could say he had an engaging smile? Straight teeth? A dog? Or nice eyes? As written he seems like a lovelorn Quasimodo without a hump. Besides, a lot of your readers are on the heavy side of thin. In fact, YOU get a little chunky before you finish a book. Stress eater! —V

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tuesday, August 27

  MARTY RAINES DIRECTED ME TO WAIT in his den. Something had come up and he would take care of it on the phone in the kitchen. I drank tepid coffee and looked around. April Raines had decorated her husband's lair in a lodge and fishing theme. Antique fishing gear, lures and floats mostly, lined a shelf that went from one corner of a wall to the other. A finial on top of a dark green paper lamp shade was a tiny salmon breaching the surface of a river. It was the kind of decorating an interior designer would dismiss as hopelessly kitschy. But I thought it was wonderful. It was more about what April Raines had wanted to do for her cop husband than it was about making the pages of House Beautiful. She had wanted to create a sanctuary where the spectre of murder and violence was remote. Plus, I loved salmon.

  Raines breezed into his den and swung the door shut. He wore a yellow and black striped shirt and jeans. He looked like an overstuffed bumblebee.

  "Off the record, okay?"

  He had uttered my least favorite words.

  "It's too late for that," I answered, somewhat defensively. "We've taped hours of interviews, and what you've said has already been incorporated into my book. You know that, Marty."

  Martin sat behind his desk and regarded me with a nod. He was serious. Stone cold. "That's fine," he said. "I'm talking about what I'm going to tell you now. Do you want to hear it?"

  I didn't blink. "Am I stupid? Of course."

  "Nothing leaves this room."

  "Right. Agreed. " I didn't like it, but I wanted to hear what the man had to say.

  Raines paused for dramatic effect and cleared his throat.

  "June Parker was already dead or about dead when the killer slit her throat. Slit, that's almost a joke when you think what was done to her. The knife cut clean into her vertebrae. Cut the bone. An OJ slice. Whoever did that was strong, very strong. But that's not the freakiest part."

  "What is then?" I asked. I reached for my neck, a reflex, a reaction, to his description of the slashing. I did not want to shave ever again.

  He paused again. "The tox screens came back, cyanide."

  "Cyanide?" I was dumbfounded. It didn't make sense.

  Raines studied me and my reaction. "That's what the medical examiner says. Lethal amounts of the stuff."

  "But what about the cuts? The blood?"

  "Maybe done to cover up the identity of the killer. To confuse us? In reality, there wasn't much blood. What there was had been carefully spread around."

  I thought about the smearing of the blood, how oddly it showed paint through the baseboard. How thin it had been, how much coverage it had commanded in the hallway.

  "Then who?" I asked.

  "Well, if it isn't you and it isn't Mr. Parker—"

  "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

  "—then it's someone June Parker knew. Someone who wanted us to see a brutal act that could have been committed by a husband."

  "Or a lover," I said, feeling foolish that I had suggested such a thing about a woman who, by all accounts, was a saint and completely devoted to her husband on wheels.

  Raines shot an icy stare. "Didn't have any."

  "Sure?" I gulped.

  "Positive."

  Beads of sweat started to collect under my mustache. "Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

  "Two reasons. Because you know these characters better than just about anyone."

  "So? The two I know who are capable of anything remotely as evil as murder are in prison already. What's the second reason?"

  Martin Raines waited a good five seconds before he answered. I couldn't tell if it was because he was going to tell me something highly confidential or if it was because he was trying to think of a second reason when there really hadn't been one.

  "Because your name was on a note found inside the dead woman's hands."

  My heartbeat quickened. "I was coming to see her."

  "We know. But, Kevin, isn't it possible that someone didn't want you to talk with Mrs. Parker?"

  "For God's sake, Marty, she was just the mother of the shooter. She isn't—wasn't—even important to the book. She was someone's mother, that's all. I only wanted to speak with her for background on her son."

  We went around and around for another half hour. I looked at the crime scene photos and felt nausea wash over me all over again. It wasn't what I was seeing that made me sick, it was the recollection of being there and finding her. I could remember the smell of her blood, the running of the tap water, the dimness of the hallway. I was there again. Photos never made me sick. It was true that they often brought a reaction of shock, but I covered that up well. I could act. I could pretend to cough to deflect my facial response to what I had seen.

  The photos were haunting because they were from my own reality. I had seen what had happened in that photo. I had been there. For the first time in my career, I felt truly ashamed. I was ashamed at how I had so callously interviewed the husband who discovered his wife shot to death or the teenage girl who had discovered the body of her raped and murdered sister. The words they used were from pictures in their minds. Of course I knew that. But I never knew the depth of the emotion, the haunting of the soul that comes from such a discovery. I had not known Mrs. Parker, but I would never forget her. Bloody. Lifeless. The image of her killer recorded in the spongy folds of her dead brain tissue.

  I left the Raines charming home on its tree-lined street in the good part of Timberlake, thinking about the note with my name on it. Wondering what else it said? Wondering why Raines said I couldn't see it.

  "It's in the lab," he had intoned. "There are some forensic possibilities we're looking into."

  Chapter Nineteen

  Late Tuesday, August 27

  When I got home I picked up the file folder of my next Love You to Death chapter for Valerie to read and slid it onto her lap. She began, turning the pages upside down on to each other in a neat stack. I resisted asking what she thought as she read.

  She glared at me whenever I did that.

  ♦

  Love You to Death

  PART FIVE

  GIRLS LIKE JANET LEE KERR were a grimy dime a dozen in Pierce County. Martin Raines had seen more than his share of their ilk, from appearance to attitude. Their propensity for big hair and form-fitting attire was in direct relation to the distance away from Seattle or Portland. With Timberlake stuck equally between the Northwest's two major metropolitan areas, it was surely VO-5 and spandex's last stand.

  Janet Kerr was neither a beauty, nor unattractive. She had a young woman's figure, despite the fact that she had a baby and done nothing in particular to see herself back into good shape. She smoked menthol 100s because she liked the buzz and thought they freshened her breath. She had no real job, no career, no ambition beyond a good time on Friday night. When
it came right down to it, Janet had one thing going for her. And that was the downfall of the men who fell for her. What she had was between her thighs.

  She could also cry like a February rainstorm. Her shoulders heaved in agonized spasms as she made her way to the conference room adjacent to the one occupied by Danny Parker and an officer. She tried to pull her matted hair out from under her sweatshirt collar.

  "I never believed in my life that something could go this wrong... this far," she told Raines as he led her into one of the four hard-as-steel aqua fiberglass chairs. A strip of cloth fluttered from the heating duct. Despite the incoming cool air, the room was hot. Stiflingly so.

  "Janet, we need to know what happened. " Raines was gentle in his approach. He always was at first, though deep down it never left him that a girl like Janet would brandish a box cutter for a six-pack.

  Janet nodded, but said nothing.

  "You know, Deke might not live. Whatever happened out by Ruston is either a tragic shooting or, if he dies, murder," he said.

  The switch went back on. Instantly. Janet started to cry again.

  "Oh," she wailed. "My daughter... Lindy needs me. Let me go to her. Please."

  "We need to know what happened, Janet. If you want to see your daughter any time soon, you need to tell us everything."

  And so over the next fifty minutes, Janet blabbed. She told her inquisitor that Danny Parker was obsessed with her. Head over heels. He had it so bad that he'd do anything to be with her. Anything. She didn't know how far he'd go.

  "Who would have thought he'd shoot Deke?" she said, tears once again flowing down her cheeks. "I thought they were going to fight. That's all. Fight. I didn't know he thought he was Jacob from Twilight, or whatever. We were just friends."

  Raines asked Janet for an official statement. She was told to recount, step-by-step, the hours leading up to the shooting. As they talked, he'd write down what she said and she'd have a chance to go over it to make corrections. Janet agreed to it. She had one question, however.

  "Can I ask you something?" she asked, her tears dried and her attitude much improved.

  "About your daughter?" Raines asked.

  "Well, that, too. After we're done, can I get something to eat?"

  Raines would have rolled his eyes if Janet hadn't fixed her eyes on his with crosshair preciseness. Unbelievable. Danny was in the next room dreaming of a burger and his girlfriend had food on her mind, too.

  "I'm not making any promises," he said casually as he fiddled with his wedding band as it choked the puffy girth of his ring finger, "but we'll see."

  Janet Lee Kerr indicated that Danny Parker had been obsessed with her for seven or eight years. Deke Cameron was also in love with her. And what happened up on the logging road was a battle over who would marry her.

  She said the day had started with several altercations between Deke and Danny and herself. Deke had even hit her in the side of the head during one row.

  "He called me a bitch and pulled my hair!"

  She had been afraid and tried to calm him down. They bought a bottle of Potter's Fine Whiskey and a half rack of Bud and drove to a parking spot under the River Bridge. Deke drank the Potter's and Janet consumed a couple of beers. After that, they went driving, though Deke was so drunk he had to pull over to throw up. Janet took over the wheel.

  She said she made several calls to Danny that evening, telling him Deke had threatened her. She was afraid for her life—and Danny's.

  "Danny said something about how he could shoot Deke, take care of him. I told him how Deke threatened me and him both," she said.

  The detective could see where it was going, but kept his expression flat, steady. He didn't let on. Full and complete control. He simply wrote down what the young woman with the menthol breath said.

  Danny had told her during a telephone call to go up the logging road near the Ruston Tavern. It was interesting, she admitted, because it just so happened that she had been there earlier in the evening drinking with Deke.

  Been there before, scoping the scene. Plotting the murder....

  "Knowing Danny was waiting for Deke, I drove the car going up the hill and all of a sudden I needed to pee. I got out. I heard someone coming to the car, I recognized Danny. Danny told me to move. I moved back and fell down the hill. I didn't see Danny shoot Deke, but I heard two or three shots. I think Deke was in the passenger seat when Danny shot him."

  "Then what?" Raines asked when she stopped talking to draw in a big breath into her menthol-fresh lungs.

  She thinks that this is it. She thinks she's ready to go get the burger.

  With some prompting and the promise of a Big Mac, Janet continued. Deke was calling her name, saying he was bleeding. But she couldn't get to him. In the commotion of the shooting, she had fallen down the cliff that bordered the road. She had tried to claw her way up, only to hear the car start and drive away. Danny, she said, helped her up and the two drove down the hill.

  She seemed shocked all of a sudden.

  "I had no idea Danny would try to kill Deke," she said. "I thought they were just gonna fight."

  Raines asked her to review and sign the statement.

  "Can I go now?" she asked.

  "'Fraid not," he said. "You're under arrest for the attempted murder of Deke Cameron. Janet, you're going to jail."

  "But I didn't do anything. Danny did it. Ask Danny!"

  The officers down the hall would never forget the sound coming from the interview room. It burst through the heating ducts like a twister.

  "Thought those rooms were soundproof," one commented to the other.

  "Haven't had a screamer this good in years. Wonder who Raines has in there."

  "The girlfriend of the shooting victim at Pac-O. And, get this, she's also the girlfriend of the fat guy in room number two. The shooter."

  "OH, GOD, NO..."

  The officer had seen and heard it all.

  "Ain't love grand?"

  ♦

  WITHIN HOURS OF THE SHOOTING, the shotgun used to pump Deke Cameron full of birdshot was recovered. Danny Parker beat Janet Kerr in the race for the burger and led investigators to a weedy ditch along the highway. The weapon was hauled off from underneath a sodden covering of fast food wrappers and fall leaves. There was no way that it could have been hurled there to land in the position as Janet and Danny had both maintained when they made their initial statements. While their stories matched on most key points, it was clear to many in the sheriff's office that the suspects' statements were a little too closely aligned to be regarded as gospel. Everyone thought Danny had been duped by Janet.

  One officer working outside the case scribbled across the local daily's account of the shooting: Somebody's not telling the whole story here.

  Martin Raines was at home snacking on a tuna sandwich and thinking about catching up on his sleep when word came from the Com Center by way of a doctor on rounds at Pac-O: Deke Cameron was agitated and wanted to talk as soon as possible.

  "Be there in ten," he said. He hung up the phone, and grabbed the sandwich.

  On the way to the hospital, Raines learned that two county deputies went fishing in the Dumpster at the mall. Inside five minutes, through the confetti of stale popcorn and dead bedding plants, the men pulled a pair of ladies' green and white LA Gear running shoes from the depths of the Dumpster. The laces were hot pink. They were Janet Lee Kerr's shoes.

  And there was blood on them.

  ♦

  Valerie underlined the word “burger” and wrote in the margin: Reminder! We're out of buns. Get some more veggie burgers, too. Maybe some sprouts or something green and crunchy that we can pile on those oatmeal discs. —V

  ♦

  DEKE CAMERON WAS A REMARKABLE young man. Not in the way any parent would be particularly proud. He had barely held down a job in an industry that only cared if the worker was strong enough to lift sixty pounds, breathe on his own and get to work every day. Deke had worked in the mill off and on since
he dropped out of high school. What made him remarkable was not his looks, his brains or his personality. None of that. It was the very fact that by all reasonable accounts, he should be laid out in a coffin and not a hospital bed. But he wasn't. Deke was sitting up, propped with a pillow, tubes in his nose and his forearm. A Mylar balloon picturing a Band-Aid labeled with SORRY ABOUT YOUR OWEE fluttered from a ribbon tied on the steel tube of the bed rail.

  "Detective Raines," he said, shifting his bulk in the bed and popping an IV line.

  Raines acknowledged him with a concerned nod.

  "Second time this hour," an impatient nurse complained. She reinserted the needle and triple-taped the line.

  "Don't wiggle around so much, okay?" she admonished the patient before shutting the door.

  "Heard you arrested Janet and Danny."

  "That's right, Deke."

  "Set me up, didn't they?"

  "Looks like it."

  "Well, I want to talk to you... I don't think you know what kind of people you're dealing with."

  "We have an idea. A pretty good one."

  "No. There's more. I'm afraid."

  "What about?"

  "I'm a little embarrassed to say it, but considering what happened... I'm afraid of Janet and her mother. They know people...."

  Deke Cameron's voice trailed off as he attempted to wipe some spittle from his chin.

  "What people?'

  "People... who hurt people."

  The detective could see that the victim zonked out in the hospital bed was trying to frame his words carefully. He was so slow. He was pausing so often that the homicide cop wondered if it was the painkillers the man was on—or if it was that he was plain dumb and had a hard time thinking about whatever was on his mind.

  "What are you getting at?" he asked. "Tell me so we can take care of this."

  Deke's eyes drooped and he coughed up a wad of mucus.

  "Those women," he said, "will stop at nothing to get what they want... they wanted to kill Janet's ex-husband so they can get custody of Lindy."

  "How do you know?"

  "Cuz I was gonna do it."