by Laurel Dewey
“You working the angles to what? Keep Lou in or out of prison?”
“You know he’s out on bond?” Jane asked, taking a deep draw on her cigarette.
“Yeah. I caught wind of that last year. I still keep my ear to the ground.”
Jane couldn’t determine whether Sawyer was happy, angry, or indifferent about the news. She wanted to work the conversation carefully, but she also needed to get information before Kit emerged from the store. “I realize the Peters case was a while back and everybody’s memory gets foggy—”
“Yeah, but I kept good notes. You want to hear something weird?”
Jane hesitated. “Okay.”
“I was in the garage a few weeks ago and I ran across a box of files that I took after I left the job. Half the files in that box had to do with Lou Peters. Quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”
Jane was hearing the word “coincidence” too much lately. “I guess so.”
“I’m standing in the garage looking at the files as we speak. I ruminated about that boy for years after it was over. He’s the kind of kid who sticks in your craw.”
“You doubt his guilt?” Jane offered, figuring it was time to cut to the chase.
“Hell, I’ve asked myself that question over and over. I doubt the evidence, but back then we didn’t have the solid DNA we have now.” Sawyer reiterated much of the data Jane already knew about how Ashlee was found. “A lot of minutia was lost or simply not discovered. Plus, it’d been raining hard for half a day with a summer wind that howled like a banshee. Between the rain, the limestone, the sand from the creek bed, and the lack of scientific technology, the circumstances gave some leeway to the perp.”
“Anything stand out to you?”
“Sure. Plenty. There was the condom that was recovered. The crime scene guys reported finding a particle of something shiny on it. I’m reading here...‘Particle is dark green, akin to mica.’”
“Mica? Okay. What’s the significance of that?”
“She was lying on limestone. While there may be mica residue in limestone or cross-contamination from the sandy creek bed, mica isn’t dark green. It’s typically black or white in color, sometimes cloudy clear.”
“The report said, ‘akin to mica.’ Not that it was mica.”
“Yeah. Shiny. Dark green.”
“Limestone particulate?”
“Limestone is gray with very light green flecks. Not dark green.”
“So why your intense scrutiny of the particle?”
“It was found on the condom. How did a particle with no inherent connection to that immediate area get transported onto a condom? There was nothing rocklike in the closet where Ashlee was held. I don’t know....” Sawyer’s voice trailed off.
“What is it?” Jane sensed Sawyer wanted to offer more.
“You know that gut feeling you get when some supposedly insignificant discovery is more than what it appears to be?”
Jane knew that familiar feeling all too well. “Yes.”
“That’s what this dark green particle was to me.”
“So what happened when you went further with the information?”
“I didn’t. I was brought in as part of the ‘B’ team. I didn’t have the stature to go further with things.”
“You think this green particle could have exonerated Lou?”
“Exonerated or maybe been the solid proof of guilt they were looking for. Maybe I’m putting too much emphasis on the thing. My wife’s always after me for not letting things go from the past that pull on my mind and keep me awake at night.”
“Does the Lou Peters case still keep you awake at night?”
There was a significant pause on the other end of the line. “Sometimes,” Sawyer responded in a quiet, somewhat troubled manner.
“What else pulls on your mind about Lou Peters?” Jane asked, blowing out a stream of smoke into the icy morning air.
Sawyer let out a hard sigh, as if dredging up the past was too painful. “Well, frankly, Lou Peters. Have you met him?”
“No.”
“I wonder what the kid looks like now? He’d be what? Thirty?”
“Thirty-three.”
“There was always something about that kid. Something... hinky.”
“Hinky. Yeah, got you.” Hinky was a popular word cops liked to use when describing a person or situation that didn’t seem quite right but they didn’t have enough evidence to prove anything more nefarious. Hinky was like a cop saying, “My gut says something ain’t right here.”
“Brass remarked how intelligent he was,” Sawyer continued, “and I’m not saying he wasn’t. It’s just that he seemed to be intelligent by proxy.”
“By proxy?”
“That’s the best way I can describe it. You’d look at the guy and some of the words he used just didn’t seem like the vocabulary of a nineteen-year-old kid with his background. And his theories, or whatever you’d call them...they seemed to have a ring of something else.”
“Something else?” Jane was trying to get Sawyer to be more specific while keeping one eye on the door to the health food store.
“He went on about ‘The Power of Fourteen.’ How fourteen-year-olds are vulnerable to the secular world’s temptations and must be strongly persuaded to follow God in order to be saved. That certainly raised a few eyebrows with the boys at Headquarters. The prosecution ended up using Lou’s words against him in court by pointing out that Ashlee was fourteen and she was held exactly fourteen days before she was murdered.”
“Is that concrete? The data I read put the time of death between June 20 and 21.”
“No, it was determined to be fourteen days from her disappearance to her death.”
There were so many questions Jane had for Sawyer and so little time to squeeze them in before Kit returned. “From what I read, you guys nabbed Lou very quickly. What led everybody to Lou?”
“Right off the bat, he seemed too cool in his shoes. The guy was a good-looking young man and I have a feeling that he’s used it in the past to his advantage.”
“In what way?”
“There were rumors, completely unsubstantiated, that Peters raped two fourteen-year-old girls prior to Ashlee’s death.”
“You believe that?”
“There was no proof. Just small-town talk. You can’t connect the dots on gossip. I looked into it, but I could never definitively find the missing link. God, I’m gonna sound like one of those whacked-out conspiracy theorists, but I wonder if there was some major cover-up on Peters’s behalf.”
“For what purpose?”
“I’m not sure. The female individual I talked to was 100 percent clear that the rapes happened but refused to testify.”
Jane’s mind immediately focused on Genevieve Paulson, Kit’s “zaftig,” drugged out, nude model. “Was your source Genevieve Paulson?”
“I don’t know what her name was. She called Headquarters and I picked up the phone. We talked for less than three minutes. She wouldn’t give her name and she sounded scared to death. She had a high-strung quality in her voice. When I asked her to come down to give a written statement, she told me to go ‘F’ myself, but she didn’t say ‘F.’ Then she hung up. It was the first and last call I got from her.”
Sawyer’s description of “high-strung” mirrored the exact words Kit used to describe Genevieve. “Was the voice young or old?”
“Hell, I can’t remember. I just recall that the woman sounded terrified.”
“Terrified of what?”
“Death.”
“Death?”
“Yeah. But there was that dichotomy of her salty tongue. She was scared but she was tough. It was like, ‘Nobody’s gonna tell me what to do.’”
“What else about Lou Peters raised suspicion?”
“His syrupy charm, for one. That wasn’t working on the investigative team. His story would change. He kept getting his times wrong regarding his whereabouts. First he said he vaguely knew Ashlee, and then when we
pressed harder, he admitted that she was a passing friend.”
“So, I don’t get it. He kidnaps Ashlee and—”
“Personally, I don’t think he kidnapped her. I think she went willingly. There was no sign of a struggle at Ms. Clark’s residence near Jade Cove, so we all agreed she wanted to go with him. He had a motorcycle. What fourteen-year-old girl isn’t gonna feel special if some good-looking nineteen-year-old guy pays attention to her and offers a ride on his motorcycle?”
“So he took her for a ride without a struggle. Then what?”
“Maybe he told her he was going to take her for a romantic drive on Highway 1. Maybe he told her he wanted to show her a special place. Whatever happened, he ended up driving about an hour north until he turned into Pico Blanco. He obviously knew about the abandoned cabin. The church conducted Christian Youth outings at Pico Blanco. The cabin was a favorite place for the kids to congregate and share their love of God. Certainly, nobody was staying there overnight. The cabin was falling apart and filthy. It was more a place or point of reference for the kids when they were at Pico Blanco or a shelter to go to in case of storms.”
“Lou conducted these Christian youth outings?”
“Yes, most of them. He was a huge draw for kids. Let me rephrase that: girls.”
“Right. Was there any paper trail tying Lou to the crime?”
“Yeah. Receipts. Peters bought five battery-operated camp lanterns that were found in the closet at the cabin. Paid cash for them and kept the receipts for some reason. We found the receipts in his house and traced them back to a camping store in Monterey. The gal who sold him the lanterns testified in court that Lou Peters bought those lanterns from her, along with the rope and padlock they found at the scene. The date on the receipts was exactly a week before Ashlee’s disappearance. So we figured he was buying this stuff and shuttling it to the cabin in preparation for what he planned to do.”
“And the Valium?”
“We never sourced it. He could have purchased it on the blackmarket, stolen it from a friend, or just had someone give it to him.”
“The lanterns and rope with receipts in his possession are considered circumstantial evidence?” Jane offered in an attempt to elicit a telling response.
“Every time we’d get a good indication that he was doing what we thought he was doing, there’d always be a viable reason for the evidence. That’s one of the reasons why his attorneys had such a slew of ammo for the appeal.”
“Give me an example,” Jane said, squashing her cigarette butt into a pile of fallen snow with the heel of her boot.
“Peters’s attorneys claimed that Lou purchased the rope and padlock to secure the cabin and the lanterns as backup light if the kids got stuck there during a storm. And, of course, Lou’s prints were all over the cabin. But there were also close to twenty or twenty-two other prints from teenagers and others who all belonged to The Lamb of God Congregation. Lou’s tire tracks from his motorcycle were also there. But so what? He was up there all the time conducting these Christian Youth outings.”
“Wait a second, there were mirrors mentioned in the crime report. Several four-foot-long mirrors that were affixed in the closet where Ashlee was kept. And the hammer she was raped with.”
“No receipts in his possession on those items, unfortunately.”
“Fingerprints on the hammer?”
“Not conclusive. A lot of the blood was wiped off the handle.”
“What was your take on those mirrors?”
“Humiliation. Ashlee was naked and tied up in that closet. We assumed she was in a fog because of the Valium. But when she woke up, she’d see her nude body and the blood and, I imagine, feel total degradation and terror. It was an in-your-face attempt to jolt the child.”
“Jolt her into what?”
“Submission, maybe. Or....” Sawyer considered the idea. “If Lou was tied to this, then maybe the mirrors were a twisted attempt to convince her to convert to his form of Christianity out of shame for what she was.”
“She was fourteen and a virgin.”
“Maybe he assumed she wasn’t a virgin because she looked mature for her age. People with sick minds make assumptions about young girls who develop early. She was also a free spirit. To a hardcore fundamentalist like Peters, Ashlee was a dangerous girl.”
A thought suddenly came to Jane’s mind. “Were Lou and these kids from The Lamb of God Congregation up there constantly, or were there breaks? And if there were breaks, were Lou’s tire tracks found during those breaks when he could have been setting something up or holding Ashlee?”
“There were plenty of breaks and there was abstract evidence of Lou’s presence during those breaks. That was the main drive of the prosecution’s case against Lou. The tire tracks were fresh enough when we found them to make good imprints of them. But then we found out that there were at least 185 other people in the general area who had the same tires on their motorcycle. The defense really got a leg up when they found a camper who had been in Pico Blanco during Ashlee’s disappearance. He had a motorcycle with the same tires on it. Now, there was a reliable witness who claims he saw Peters coming and going during Ashlee’s disappearance—”
Jane informed Sawyer of Bruce Zatkin’s death.
“Oh, Christ,” Sawyer said with a heavy sigh. “He was the only credible link that put Lou at the cabin during that time. God, Peters seems to have such luck. He was always good at explaining away a lot of things. He could explain his prints by saying he was there many times with the kids. But on the other hand, it also gave us a reason to believe that he chose the cabin for its obscure location and because he knew how to get in and out without being seen.”
It was Jane’s turn to let out a hard, frustrated sigh.
“Hey, I hear you,” Sawyer softly responded. “This case will make you sigh a lot.”
Jane looked through the double glass doors of the health food store and saw Kit standing in the checkout line. She knew her time with Sawyer was limited. “Anything else about the case stand out to you as significant?”
Sawyer gave a thoughtful pause. “When I saw the photos of Ashlee’s body and the crime location, the first word that came into my head was ‘sacrifice.’”
“Sacrifice?”
“It looked like some perverted offering to the gods. Do you know the story of Pico Blanco?”
“No.” Jane was feeling edgier as she watched Kit move up one place in line.
“It’s known as The Sacred Peak. There’s a story about Pico Blanco that involves the destruction of the world in a great flood. Very Biblical in nature, although it’s told from the Native American point of view. The story goes that when the waters rose, the summit of Pico Blanco was the only land that remained exposed. At that place, the sacred birds met.” Jane’s attention was suddenly focused on Sawyer’s words. “The Eagle, Crow, Raven, Hummingbird, and....“
“Hawk....” The words spilled out of Jane’s mouth before she could contain them.
“Yeah. You know this story?” Sawyer sounded duly impressed.
“No. I just—” Jane felt a strange shift around her. “So the Hawk?”
“Well, Hawk is the main character in the story. Hawk plucked a magical feather from the head of Eagle, and carrying it, dove to the bottom of the sea. He then planted the feather in the earth. This caused the waters to recede and recreated the world. Hey, I’m no scholar in Native American beliefs, but I do remember reading something about how Hawk is the messenger and signifies paying attention to signs....”
Jane was silent. It was too bizarre. Certainly there was a viable explanation for this odd callback to that damn story Kit told her. And The Red Tail Hawk Bar.... No, the whole thing was a convoluted coincidence, Jane thought to herself as an electrical pulse ran up her spine.
“Anyway, like I said, it looked like an ancient sacrifice to the gods of Pico Blanco, the way Ashlee was laid out on the rock.”
There was a thick silence between Sawyer and Jane. Jan
e caught a glance of Kit paying the cashier. “So,” Jane said in a last ditch effort to drag information out of Sawyer, “you think Lou killed Ashlee?”
“I wouldn’t put money on it. But I also wouldn’t want to be alone in the same room with him.”
“So, say he killed Ashlee. Given what you know about him... what does your gut tell you? Could he do it again?”
“Again? What do you mean?” Sawyer’s voice was suddenly agitated.
Jane was afraid that her driving desire to learn more had forced her hand. She retreated. “It’s just a hypothesis. I have to look at all possibilities given the retrial that’s coming up for Lou.”
“Oh, I see. Okay.” Sawyer seemed satisfied with that answer. “I don’t know. Given the right circumstance...the right prodding... maybe he could kill again.... That’s saying if he indeed killed the first time.” Sawyer let out a soft chuckle. “God, I envy you,” he said in a confidential tone. “I hear the fire in your voice and I get that gurgle in my belly again. Jesus, I hope my wife didn’t hear me say that. She’d have a fit if she knew I was shaking loose old ghosts from the past.”
“Hey, I always say that I’m the job. But only another cop understands that.”
“I hear you!” Sawyer chimed in with a familiar camaraderie. “You know what I say? I tell people I worked the job until the job worked me.”
Jane related well to that statement. “Nightmares?”
“Sure. But then you figure out how many shots it takes to make them stop.”
Jane felt the unintentional sting of Sawyer’s words. “How many does it take now that you’re off the job?” Jane asked in an uncharacteristic familial tone.
“Zero,” Sawyer replied in a proud tone. “I have thirteen years.”
Thirteen years? Jane couldn’t imagine being sober for thirteen years. She was a day shy of six months and still felt that she was struggling to crest a very steep hill. Jane sensed her professional guard slipping. The only other time she let herself do this was during conversations with Sergeant Weyler. There was something comfortable about Sawyer’s voice, like a soft place to fall. “Thirteen years,” Jane said, her words stumbling out of her mouth. “That’s a goddamn lifetime.”