As he suspected, the internal wounds were the real danger. Her belly was full of blood from the liver wound; a lung had also been punctured and she was drowning in blood. The only thing to do was keep pumping more blood and fluids into her—eventually enough to fill five adults—while the team of surgeons scrambled to close the holes.
After a couple of hours, they had to stop. Her body temperature had dropped to a dangerous level, and her blood had stopped clotting. Continuing might have killed her, so all they could do was pack her belly with absorbent material and try to get her warmed up. If she lived, they could finish their work later. But no one expected her to live.
Heather Smith surprised them all. She came to in the recovery room unaware that she was lying on a table still split open beneath a warming blanket. The world was fuzzy. There seemed to be something in her eyes, and it was as though she was peering through a tube. Then she became aware that her father was leaning over her. With a rush, she realized what that meant.
I’m alive. I’m alive. Her mind rejoiced. She couldn’t remember ever having been so happy, just before she passed out again.
In the morning when they removed the packing material, the surgeons discovered to their delight that Smith had stopped bleeding. They could finish their work. She wasn’t out of the woods yet, but every minute she held on was a step closer toward surviving.
Heather not only lived but recovered at an amazing pace. At least physically. But the more conscious she became of her surroundings, the more the fear of her attacker replaced her joy at being alive. She recognized the fear. It was the old terror of monsters who lived under beds and in shadows, who struck in the dark when least expected and for no reason. Only now the monster had a face—blue—eyed, square-jawed, a nice smile.
While she remained in the intensive care unit, managing her fear was a little easier. There was a deputy posted to the unit because of a gang member who had been shot the same night she had been brought in. The police feared his enemies would come back to finish the job so an officer was assigned to his bedside. The deputy wasn’t there for her, but his presence made her feel better.
However, she was recovering so quickly that the hospital soon moved her to another floor. There her fears grew. A Denver newspaper had run an article about the attack using her and Rebecca’s names and addresses. All she could think of was that her attacker was still out there and now might come back for her because she could identify him. All she had to do was close her eyes and she could see his face clearly.
Every time the elevator opened outside her room, she held her breath and waited for the footsteps to pass her room. She expected that someday the footsteps would not pass and the man in a green jacket and blue baseball cap would be standing there in her doorway, looking at her with his blue eyes through those funny square-rimmed, silver glasses. She couldn’t stand being alone. So her mother remained at her side during the day, and every night her dad or brothers would stay with her until she fell asleep and then sleep in the waiting room down the hall.
Fear was one thing. Shock at the sight of her disfigurement was another. When she was strong enough, she went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Instead of the princess, she saw a red-eyed, harrowed-looking woman with a throat swollen like a balloon and a hunched back. An angry red scar ran from her right shoulder and plunged between her breasts. Pulling up her gown, she traced the line of staples and stitches that marched down to her belly. She got back in bed and cried.
She thought she was hideous. That man may not have killed her, but he had taken the beauty and bravado she had hidden behind. Now she felt as though she had nothing left. Except revenge... she knew that the only way she could ever get back what had been taken from her was to stay alive and put him in prison.
Seven days passed from when she was brought into the hospital. She demanded to be released. The resident surgeons didn’t want her to go. If she lived, their opinion was that she would be in the intensive care unit and then a recovery floor for three to four months. But she experienced none of the complications, such as infection, often associated with such wounds.
Smith continued to insist that she be allowed to leave until her attending physician at last deferred to Read. He went in to talk to her. As far as he was concerned, she was a medical miracle... and a testament to the teamwork that made Denver General one of the best trauma hospitals in the world.
Like everyone else, he hadn’t expected her to live. Most people who had lost that much blood, who had suffered not one but several potentially fatal wounds, would have never made it past those first couple of hours.
As the days had passed and she held on, he knew that Heather owed her survival to several factors: her athlete’s body and the fact that on that night everything—from Hascall applying pressure, to the paramedics’ quick action, to the surgeons’ skill—had gone right. But most of all Heather Smith owed her life to her will to survive.
Looking at her in her hospital room as she begged to leave the hospital, Read admired her courage. Her scars would heal, at least the outward ones; with a little plastic surgery, she would be as outwardly beautiful as she had once been.
The rest would be up to her, and those scars, the ones he couldn’t see, weren’t something he could deal with in a hospital. If she wanted to leave, he saw no reason to keep her. “Okay. You can go,” he said, smiling as he caught her in mid-explanation.
The next day, Smith went to the Denver Police Department to give a statement to assault investigator Detective Paul Scott. The detective, a twenty-five-year veteran, was amazed to see her. After all, the file on Heather Smith had been opened as a homicide case. Then he’d been told that even if she survived, she was likely to be brain-damaged, a vegetable, because her brain had been deprived of so much oxygen-carrying blood.
Yet here she was, prepared to give a statement and help the police artist with a sketch of her attacker. Scott was already working the boyfriend angle. They had interviewed her friends and everything pointed to this guy, Jason. He even talked to the young man, but he had an alibi. Still, the detective figured that maybe he had put someone up to it. Why else would the assailant pick Heather’s telephone number out of all the car advertisements in the newspaper?
Scott had another theory to add to Dr. Read’s on why Smith was still alive. He believed that her attacker meant to disable her with the first blow and push her into the open hatchback of her car. But she had fallen to the ground instead and at 5’6” and 130 pounds, she would have been a handful to try to pick up, especially with Heather and her friend screaming bloody murder. The attacker simply hadn’t had the time to take her someplace and finish the job at his leisure.
There was nothing much else to go on. Heather’s friend, Rebecca Hascall, could only give a general description. There were no usable fingerprints from the car. And the man had simply vanished. There was nothing to link this attack to any others that had occurred in the area recently. No reason for him to have called a certain detective in the Lakewood Police Department who at almost the same moment that Heather Smith walked into Scott’s office was getting his first call from Thomas Edward Luther.
After giving her statement to Scott, Heather sat down with the police sketch artist and helped him compose a picture of the man who attacked her. They worked on it for hours. Finally, the artist held up the drawing. It was the face of her monster.
“It’s him,” she whispered. “It’s him.”
Chapter Eleven
April 20, 1993—Fort Collins, Colorado
“If he raped her, the first words out of his mouth,” Scott Richardson said as he stared out the passenger window of the unmarked police car that sped north to Fort Collins, “will be that they had consensual sex.”
Mike Heylin didn’t reply. He just kept his eyes on the road ahead, occasionally glancing at the farmlands on either side of Interstate 25 that ran north and south paralleling the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. It simply wasn’t necessary to say
anything, and his partner was more than likely talking to himself anyway.
Every once in awhile a dedicated cop like Richardson, the kind of cop who went with his emotions, got so involved in a case it was all he could think about. Heylin knew that his partner had sunk his teeth into this case like a terrier grabs a rat. It worried him. He’d seen entire police departments’ morales take roller-coaster rides on the outcomes of cases. Sometimes cops who got too wrapped up in their jobs lost their wives and families, even their own lives, when the stress pushed them over the edge. They drank too much, took chances, contemplated suicide.
So far, Scott was on top of his game. He was dealing with the Elder family’s frustrations and fears, while juggling all the possibilities in his head without losing his perspective. But Heylin knew that Scott wasn’t likely to let go of this one until he solved it or was broken by it.
The videotape was a stroke of luck, thanks to his partner’s quick thinking and instincts. If Scott had delayed starting in on the case at the beginning, even by a day, the tape might have been erased. But they still didn’t have a case, or a body, or even a clear idea of what happened to Cher Elder. They had no clear picture of who all was involved or how. This asshole, Luther, said he had witnesses—the Eerebout boys—who could corroborate his story about bringing Cher back to the apartment.
But Luther was an ex-convict, a violent sex offender, and to cops that pretty much meant he was a born liar. There was the sexual assault in Summit County eleven years earlier—Scott said the sheriff up there told him that Luther beat up that girl pretty bad. Lucky to be alive, he’d said. Guys like that didn’t suddenly change in prison. If anything, they got worse—more angry, more dangerous.
Heylin glanced over at his partner, but Richardson was looking east at the flat farmlands that stretched beyond the horizon to Nebraska. Cotton-puff cumulus clouds floated one after the other above the ground. The land between the Denver metropolitan area, which included Lakewood, and Fort Collins was rapidly filling in with housing projects and new malls as the cities expanded toward each other. But there were still great open spaces that in the spring looked like a brown and green quilt with newly plowed fields alternating with those in which the first tips of wheat poked through.
At the moment, Richardson was wishing he was zipping down some county highway between those patchwork fields on his Harley. Perhaps then he could, for a moment, forget Cher’s face as the wind whipped past and he coaxed the bike into more speed.
Heylin had been right that he was mostly thinking outloud when he made his comment about Luther volunteering that he’d had “consensual” sex with Cher Elder. If she was dead and then her body was found, Luther would want to have a reason why his semen might be found in her. Killing someone to cover up a rape made it a capital crime and that meant the possibility of the death penalty.
Slow down, bud, Richardson cautioned himself for the hundredth time as he tore his eyes from the east to look north. His instincts told him that Luther was tied to Cher’s disappearance, but they couldn’t tell him how and hunches didn’t mean squat in a court of law.
Maybe the guy was telling the truth. Richardson tossed the possibility up in the air. Maybe none of them were involved. Or maybe Luther was just being set up by the Eerebout boys as the fall guy. Then again, that was giving Byron and his brothers, none of them rocket scientists, a lot of credit for imagination.
The car reached the top of a hill. The detectives could see Fort Collins in the distance. Richardson took a deep breath and let it go like a prayer to calm himself. This interview might be their only shot. They wanted to keep him talking for as long as possible, let him make a mistake that the whole case might rest on a few months down the road. If they alarmed him, he’d demand a lawyer and that would be it. A lawyer would shut him up tighter than a rusted nut.
Apparently, Luther was already getting cold feet. He’d called just before the detectives left the Lakewood office to say he’d made a mistake and given them the wrong information. He said he’d accidently given them directions to his girlfriend’s place. “Meet me at my place instead.”
When they arrived, Luther answered their knock on the door. There was no sign of anyone else.
Entering, Richardson looked around, making mental notes that he’d later write down on a legal pad. It was a tiny apartment with few furnishings. He tried to commit even the smallest detail to memory, like the pair of silver, square-rimmed glasses that lay on the kitchen table where Luther invited them to sit.
Richardson looked at Luther. They were about the same height, 5’10” or so, but the ex-convict was thicker, as though he worked out a lot. About all those guys in prison do is pump iron and plan crimes for when they get out, he thought.
Luther didn’t seem particularly hardcore, certainly no biker type with tattoos, long hair, and missing teeth. Except for the prison pallor that even a few months of freedom hadn’t overcome, he looked like a good ol’ country boy—laid-back, in a flannel shirt with a friendly smile. But his blue eyes weren’t friendly, they were coldly sizing him up, too.
Luther’s paranoia was already working in Richardson’s favor. Often if the detective wanted to tape a conversation with a suspect, he had to hide the tape recorder, which presented a logistical problem every thirty minutes when the tape ran out and needed to be flipped. But he told Luther when he called back that he wanted to record the conversation so that the ex-con wouldn’t have to worry about being misquoted. Luther, ever fearful of the police, agreed.
When Richardson set his tape recorder on the table for the interview, Luther pulled out one of his own. Amused, the detective laughed and said, “Yours will probably work and mine probably won’t, and I’ll say, ‘Hey, Tom, I need a copy of that tape.’ ”
Luther grinned. He leaned forward and turned on his machine as Richardson hit his own start button. “We’re gonna say it’s, uh, six-forty, and today is four-twenty-ninety-three. Present is myself, Tom Luther, and also is Detectives ...”
Despite the outward joviality, the men were immediately on guard, like fencers crossing blades for the first time, testing for weaknesses and strengths. Luther repeated his account of how he ended up in Central City with Byron’s girlfriend, “Shari.” They’d stayed until closing and then driven back to Byron’s. There Shari, or Cher, he corrected himself, walked in on Byron and Gina. “She started cryin’ and stuff, you know.
“And I think she said somethin’ to the effect of—to Byron—‘See you later,’ or, you know, ‘Kiss my ass,’ or some kind of shit like that, and she went stormin’ out.... I caught her at the bottom of the steps going out of the apartment, you know what I mean? ... She was cryin’ and, uh, so I gave her a hug, told her, ‘Just calm down a little bit.’ ”
Cher left to go call her friend, Gary. J.D. Eerebout saw her leave, he said, but he wasn’t sure if Byron got out of bed in time. Himself, he didn’t see her get in her car; he wasn’t even sure what kind of car she had... just something small, she told him, like his.
When he went back into the apartment, the others were up. “We were all laughin,’ you know, bein’ a bunch of assholes. We made kind of a joke about it, you know what I mean? How she could’ve just jumped into bed with the two of ’em, some shit like that, that old rhetoric joke-type stuff.”
Richardson let Luther do most of the talking, just tossing in a question or comment here and there to keep the pump primed. “When did you find out that Cher was missing?”
Luther appeared to give it some thought before he responded, “Um, the time before this last time that you talked to Byron.”
Richardson made another mental note. Luther had slipped again, apparently without noticing: when they talked earlier that afternoon, Luther had said that Byron had just that day told him about Cher Elder being missing. He had made a big deal about the boys trying to keep him out of the investigation.
Fortunately, Richardson thought, these guys can’t keep the little things in their stories straight. They’d set u
p the big alibi, like, “We all went into the convenience store,” but could never remember to agree on who purchased what or what they were doing there in the first place. Interview them alone and there’d be as many stories as there were suspects.
“Why didn’t you come forward?”
“What do you mean, why didn’t I come forward?” Luther replied, then laughed. “Forward for what?”
“To let us know that you’d been with her that night, or somethin’ ...”
Because of his past, Luther said, the Eerebout boys wanted to protect him from “the cops harassin’ me.”
Richardson scowled. This was going in circles. “That don’t make sense.”
“It might not make sense to you,” Luther said, “but it makes perfect sense to me. You don’t know the kind of bullshit that I went through on this case that I was in the penitentiary on. You know, I was suspected of every murder, everything that happened in that fuckin’ county up there for a year and a couple years before that.”
“Where’s that?” Richardson asked, playing dumb. Underneath he was seething; this low-life had raped a young woman with a hammer and nearly beat her to death and yet he thought that he was the victim.
“Summit County,” Luther spat. “Breckenridge. They hassled my girlfriend to death over the Overalster [sic] and Scheme [sic] murders. I was initially a supect.”
Richardson knew a little of this. Morales told him that Luther had been on the list of suspects in the unsolved murder of two girls before the sexual assault. If Luther wanted to volunteer something else, maybe it’d help Morales solve his cases. In any case, he wasn’t going to stop Luther from blabbing. “That don’t mean nothing to me, I—”
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