“Come with us,” Erika said. “You drive us.”
“No, no, no. You guys should really go. Call a taxi.”
The Rainbow wasn’t far: a straight shot, south on the Coastal Highway for about five miles. Erika and BJ could take a taxi home, then get a ride back in the morning to pick up the Jeep.
“Please, can you just follow us back to our condo?” Erika pleaded. She sounded desperate.
“I don’t know.... Let me go talk to BJ,” Karen said. She wanted to see if BJ was in any shape whatsoever to drive. Maybe he could drive and she’d stay close behind. Once they got to the Rainbow safely, Karen could take off with Todd and call it a night. Get away from this crazy drunken couple.
But after taking one look at BJ, Karen could tell he was in no shape to get behind the wheel of his Jeep.
“Trashed,” Karen later said. “Intoxicated beyond belief.”
Erika, whom Karen was already calling “Lainey,” after Erika insisted that she be called by her nickname, was in far better shape. She seemed up and more alert.
“I cannot control Erika,” BJ said to Karen as they talked.
“What?” Karen said. It made no sense. “What are you talking about, BJ?” Erika was in far better shape than he was, Karen thought, to drive a vehicle.
But that’s not what BJ meant.
“Erika, my wife,” BJ continued. “I can’t control that girl. If she wants to drive and . . . and . . . she gets pulled over, my girl packs heat.” BJ slapped himself on the side where he kept his gun in his shoulder holster. “Heat, I said. She’ll kill a cop.”
Karen realized at that moment that she was entirely out of her element. She couldn’t believe what she was involved in. Or what she was hearing. It was clear that one of them—either BJ or Erika—was going to drive back to the condo. And there was nothing she could do to stop them. So the best thing she could do for the situation was to follow them and make sure they made it back without killing themselves or someone else. How, in fact, she was going to do that was another question entirely.
“Follow us, Karen, please?” Erika pleaded. She was begging again.
“Well, listen,” Karen said, “if you guys are going to drive, I might as well follow you.”
And so they left. BJ and Erika in their Jeep, and Todd and Karen in her vehicle.
Karen kept her distance. BJ was driving, or, rather, trying: swerving in and out of lanes, slowing down, speeding up, riding the brake, and just bouncing the Jeep all over the road.
Todd was sitting next to Karen. He was totally out of it. “His eyes were rolling back in his head,” Karen said of Todd.
When they pulled into the parking lot of the Rainbow about eight minutes after leaving Fish Tales, BJ ran up to Karen’s driver’s-side window. He looked like he wanted her for something, and didn’t want her to leave.
“Hey,” he said, “I need your help. Lainey is totally out of it. Can you help me carry her upstairs?” Erika and BJ were staying in the penthouse, the top floor of the Rainbow, he explained to Karen. If she could just help get Erika into the stair well and into the elevator, he would greatly appreciate it.
“Let me go talk to her and at least say good-bye and see how she is,” Karen said, putting her car in park and shutting it off. The last thing she wanted to do was extend the night.
When Karen got out of the car, Todd came to and fell out of the passenger-side door and onto the pavement. The three of them then walked over to BJ’s Jeep, and BJ opened the door and grabbed Erika, who appeared to be unconscious. When BJ tried picking her up, she slipped from his grip and hit her head on the Jeep door.
“Hey, you guys need to be careful,” Karen said. “This is your wife, man. You’re tossing her around like a rag doll.” It seemed that BJ didn’t really care about Erika’s well-being, or he was too drunk himself to notice what he was doing. Either way, it seemed he was struggling to hold Erika up, making it appear as if there was no way he could manage getting her into the elevator and up to the condo by himself.
Perhaps it was part of BJ and Erika’s plan all along: to get Karen and Todd upstairs. All things considered, BJ was a powerfully built man compared to Erika’s deteriorating frame of approximately one hundred pounds. If he had wanted, BJ could have picked her up with one arm, Karen with the other, and carried both of them to the elevator himself, drunk out of his mind or not.
Inside the lobby, BJ talked Karen into helping him get Erika upstairs. Todd was right behind them, stumbling along, mumbling to himself.
When they got to the door on the top floor, Erika suddenly came out of her drunken stupor and started rummaging through her purse, looking for her keys, as if she had been alert the entire night. She grabbed her keys out of her purse and opened the door on the first try. No problem.
It was strange how she had just snapped to attention. Quite a bit different from just moments ago when she was deadweight and seemingly unconscious.
As they walked into the penthouse, Erika placed her purse on the table and went straight for the laundry room, where she noticed that the washing machine wasn’t working. She’d apparently put some wash in before she and BJ had left earlier that night, and the clothes were still soaking wet.
“You need to fix this, Beej,” she yelled into the other room, where BJ and Todd were waiting, “so we can finish the laundry.” Little did Erika know then that Geney and Joshua’s hair had clogged up the machine; they had washed some of the clothes that had been lying on the bathroom floor at the time BJ cut up the bodies.
Once inside the condo, Erika took Karen by the arm and led her into the living room.
“How ’bout a tour?” Karen asked. She was amazed by the size and splendor of the penthouse. She had never seen anything like it before.
Erika smiled. “Sure, come on.”
As they walked around, Erika began to talk about the building itself. “My dad built this building and made this penthouse just for me,” Erika bragged. She seemed completely sober now. It was strange. Just a moment ago, Erika was passed out in the Jeep. Now she was playing Martha Stewart with Karen, showing her around the penthouse as if she owned it.
“Really? No kidding.” Karen was impressed. What a place.
“Yes.”
“I run a [clothing business],” Karen said.
“Well, let me show you some of my bathing suits and blouses.”
By this time, BJ and Todd had grabbed a few beers and were sitting at the kitchen table drinking. Erika came out of another room with all sorts of different shirts and blouses and bathing suits. She and Karen then walked into another room, where they started going through the clothes and talking about their favorite pieces of jewelry.
Girl stuff. It was the first time that night that Karen had felt a connection with Erika. They had something in common.
“I have this ring my grandmother gave me,” Erika explained. “It’s in my purse.”
Erika then started searching around the room for her purse, but she couldn’t seem to find it.
Karen was curious. She thought Erika had put it on the table when they walked in. But, then, maybe Erika had put it in her bedroom upstairs?
“Look, we really need to find this purse,” Erika said. She was becoming quickly unraveled. Anxiety settled on her like bad news. “It’s very important that we find this purse,” she said again. And then a third time. “My grandmother’s ring is inside it.”
There were other items inside that purse Erika was worried about: Joshua and Geney’s IDs, for starters.
By now, BJ and Todd were part of the conversation. “What’s going on?” BJ wondered, taking a pull of his beer. Todd was still drunk, falling in and out of it.
Erika was now completely animated and disheveled. “Beej, we need to find my purse.... Those people, their IDs are in my purse.”
Those people? Karen wondered. What did Erika mean by “those people”? Yet, she could tell the phrase had some sort of dark, important meaning to Erika and BJ that they both understoo
d by the mere mention of it.
“We need to find that purse,” BJ said.
“Let’s spread out,” Karen suggested.
They began looking around the main floor of the condo, overturning pillows from the couch and cushions, underneath the kitchen table, in the kitchen, wherever they had been after they walked into the condo. Karen thought maybe someone was being funny and decided to toss the purse over the balcony, so she walked outside and looked down.
She couldn’t see anything but a long, shadowy drop to the beach; she heard the subtle sound of the ocean waves crashing into the sand and the constant swoosh of the wind.
After hunting through the main floor, to no avail, Karen and Erika went upstairs and started looking around. When Karen came to the bathroom, where the hot tub was located, she noticed that the bathroom door had been taken off its hinges and placed there next to the door frame.
“It had what appeared, to me, to be a bullet hole in the door,” Karen said later, recalling that moment when she saw the door for the first time. “But I didn’t realize it was a bullet hole until later, when things began to make more sense.”
30
Purse Strings
BJ came upstairs as Erika and Karen were searching for Erika’s purse and suggested that someone go down and look in the Jeep. Standing there and thinking about it for a moment, Karen knew Erika’s purse was not in the Jeep.
“We couldn’t have gotten into the condo without her keys, which were in her purse,” she said.
Indeed, Erika had opened the door to the condo. To do that, Karen remembered specifically, Erika had to go into her purse to find the keys.
Nonetheless, Karen and Erika went downstairs under BJ’s persuasive urging and began digging through the Jeep. By now, Erika was frantic.
Hysterical.
Manic.
She needed to have that purse. It was as if losing it had sobered her up completely. She was in a seemingly possessed state now, wildly running around, mumbling things to herself, stressing to Karen that there was nothing more important than finding the purse.
After not finding it in the Jeep, Karen and Erika rushed back upstairs. Karen walked in first. Looking toward the stairs leading up to the bedroom and bathroom, where the hot tub was located, she saw BJ and Todd standing there on the small landing. BJ was standing in back of Todd. He had a weird look about him. Cocky and peculiar, like he knew something that no one else did.
Karen looked at BJ closer. Inside the front of his trousers, he had a large handgun tucked into his pants.
It startled her. What is this? Karen hated guns of any sort. How did a gun become part of this night all of a sudden?
Karen was not one to react with great drama to situations that terrified her, she later explained in court. So she said nothing and instead continued hunting for the purse. And as they turned over couch cushions and looked behind appliances once again, BJ walked up to Karen and grabbed her by the face with his large hands and pulled her, nose to nose with his face, as if he was about to kiss her. But the force he used and the agility of the gesture made her aware that it wasn’t meant to be comforting or even erotically romantic.
“It’s very, very important that we find this purse,” BJ said stoically, with as much fear as he could manage to put into the words. He seemed stone-cold sober. Intimidating and frightening. There was no doubt, Karen now knew, that BJ needed to recover his wife’s purse, or there was going to be a major problem.
More than that, Karen had a sinking feeling as BJ held her face in his hands that he was now implying that she or Todd had stolen the purse.
“BJ, look, there’s no reason for me to take her purse,” Karen said as BJ released the firm grip on her face. “I helped you put your vehicle back on the road.... I’m not a liar or thief.”
BJ reminded her that it was very important to him and Erika that they locate the purse. Nothing else mattered at this point.
Furthermore, there was nothing she could say to change that.
“Why would I steal it? I have my own money,” Karen said.
After a while, they were all upstairs near the bathroom. BJ was getting angrier by the moment. Stomping around. Mumbling things to himself. Making sure Karen and Todd were well aware of the fact that he had a gun. He’d take the gun out and hold it for a time, then put it back into his trousers. Todd was standing by Karen’s side.
Erika was rubbing her head. Thinking. Not saying anything. She and BJ and Geney and Joshua were in this same predicament, not even five nights ago, and she knew how that night had ended. Yet she stood and she didn’t say a word as BJ worked himself into a state she knew would ultimately lead down one road.
“If you’re ripping us off,” BJ said in a terse, harsh, threatening tone, “we’ve had other people try ripping us off. If you’ve ripped us off as the other people who were here, I’ll do the same damn thing to you that I did to them.” BJ was now staring at the bullet hole in the bathroom door, which they were all standing near. The danger was clear. “These people,” he continued, “were bad people.... I’m ridding the earth of bad people. They came into my place and ripped me off! No more will they do that.”
Karen and Todd would die the same way as the other couple had, BJ implied, if it turned out that they were thieves. According to what Karen later said, BJ wanted to make it clear that there was a price to pay in his world for thieves and liars.
A deadly debt.
At this point, BJ had his gun in his hand, but, Karen said, he never pointed it directly at her or Todd. He waved it around and used it as an instrument of intimidation. Just the sight of it was enough to quiet Karen and Todd down.
BJ became calm for the moment and ordered everyone to get back downstairs and continue searching.
“Now!”
After they spread out, Karen noticed that Erika was in the bathroom by herself, so she worked her way into the same room and cornered Erika. She wanted to talk to her privately about her concerns. This wasn’t right. BJ walking around the house with a gun, threatening everyone. Maybe, Karen thought, if she just spoke to Erika, woman to woman, Erika could “get a handle on BJ.” Maybe she could even talk some sense into Erika about what was happening. It seemed to Karen that Erika could perhaps tell BJ what to do and he’d oblige. Like she held some sort of power over him.
“Hey,” Karen whispered, “I don’t like to be around guns. They scare me. They make me really uncomfortable. I’ll do whatever I can to help you find your purse, but you’re going to have to ask BJ to put that gun away.”
Erika walked out of the bathroom without saying anything. It was as if she didn’t care, or didn’t even hear her. And when she ran into BJ in the living room a moment later, Erika patronizingly said loud enough so everyone could hear, in a whiney type of voice, mocking Karen, “BJ, can you please put your gun away?”
Then Erika laughed.
“She spoke very nonchalantly,” Karen recalled later, “like it was nothing for him to be holding this gun like this.”
BJ put the gun back into the front of his pants. “Keep looking,” he said.
A while later, as they searched every nook and cranny of the suite, Karen was in the front bedroom frantically searching, when she heard a loud voice coming from another room.
“Oh, look . . . what . . . I . . . found. . . .”
Karen walked out of the bedroom and saw that BJ had pushed a cushion from the couch forward and pulled the purse out.
Thank goodness it was over. The purse had been in the couch the entire time.
Or had it?
Although Karen was thrilled, the find made little sense to her. Karen had looked in that same area of the couch several times. Inside and out. She’d turned up nothing.
31
Guns Don’t Kill People . . .
Erika and Todd went out onto the balcony on the first level of the condo and sat down on the lawn furniture to chill out for a while after the stress of finding the purse was over.
Kar
en and BJ sat down at the glass table, off the kitchen. The table was large, with four chairs. In the middle was a wicker basketlike pot with sand and seashells. You could look down through the center of the table into it. The atmosphere in the condo was a bit more calm, now that BJ had located the purse. As they got settled at the table, BJ asked Karen, “So why are you so afraid of guns?”
Karen didn’t hesitate. “Nobody likes a gun pointed at them, you know.”
Who could argue with such a statement?
BJ kind of laughed a little bit. He was thinking how to answer. Then, “Well,” he said, “guns are portrayed as bad on television. Most people don’t understand how they work.” BJ pulled himself closer to the table, took the gun from his waistband, placed it on the table in the middle of the two of them, and started to take it apart. “Let me show you how this works,” he said. “This is a SIG SAUER nine millimeter. It’s my gun.” BJ then got up and went into one of the other rooms and pulled out Erika’s .357 Magnum and placed it on the table beside his, adding, “This is a revolver. . . .”
Karen could have cared less. She didn’t like guns. Did the guy not get it?
As they sat and talked, BJ took the Altoids tin on the table in front of him and a bag of cigarette tobacco next to it and opened both. He explained there was marijuana in the tin. Then he started to mix the two—the marijuana with the tobacco—into a rolling paper he had cradled into a V in one hand. As he was rolling the joint, he said, “This is a little gift left over by the people who were here the other night.” He gave Karen an eyebrow raise.
Karen knew who BJ was talking about when he said “the people,” because, she recalled in court later, “he had made several references throughout the night regarding two people being over to [the condo] a night or two [before].” These were the people he needed to “rid the earth of,” he had made a point of saying throughout the night.
On the glass table to the left of where BJ was sitting was a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill and what appeared to be some white lines of powder, which Karen took to be cocaine. BJ cleared up the confusion.
Cruel Death Page 12