Monster (27 page)

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 up 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—”

Luther wasn’t through. “They found two giris murdered up there the month before I got arrested.”

“Up at the ski resorts?” Richardson asked, looking puzzled. “I’m not from Colorado, so I wouldn’t know nothin’ of those murders.... How many murders did they try to pin on you?”

“Well, those two,” Luther said. “I was a suspect. They didn’t really try to pin me, you know, but they questioned several people, like I say, you know, they’d go down where my girlfriend at the time worked, and they would ask her questions and get her upset, and leave her there cryin’.”

Richardson asked about the sexual assault. Luther shook his head, “Well, I’m not gonna go into all the details on that, but I picked a girl up at a bus station, you know what I mean, and, uh, you know, it ended up in an assault. It was more of an assault than it was a sexual assault, but you know how they do things.”

Luther complained that he’d been screwed by the system. He was due for mandatory parole after about six years, but ten hours before his release they changed the rules on him. “I ended up serving ten years, ten months and three days.”

The ex-convict squirmed in his seat and mentioned that he’d have to leave for work soon. Richardson knew he needed to speed things up. In trying not to alarm Luther, he had gone slow, but if he didn’t get it done now, chances were the next time, if there was a next time, it’d be with a defense attorney present.

Maybe if he could convince Luther that the investigation still centered on Byron and his brothers, he could buy a little more time. “Could you come to Lakewood tomorrow, so we can sit drown and talk some more? Byron, J.D., Tristan—all these people have lied to us. Now, we gotta go back and talk to them again.”

Luther grimaced like he’d eaten something rotten. “Like I told you, they know that there was no foul play on my part. They know they seen her leave there. You know, even if there is foul play, they suspect that, you know, she’s lyin’ up somewhere. She’s a girl that had a serious drug problem in her past, you know that, right?”

Richardson struggled to keep the anger out of his eyes. “No,” he said. “What kind of drug problem?”

“She hung around with a couple of dealers,” Luther said. “Snorted cocaine, was, uh, you know, heavily addicted to the chemical...”

“Was she snorting that night?” Richardson asked.

“No. No. Not in front of me if she did,” Luther said, shaking his head.

Richardson decided it was time to ask the question that had been hanging fire ever since his telephone conversation with Luther was interrupted by the presence of Debrah Snider. “What kind of sexual contact did you two have up on the hill? Honestly. I’m not gonna call your girlfriend up and say, ‘Debbie, guess what?’ But I want you to be honest with me.”

Luther nodded. On the way back, he said, they turned off the highway and went to a little parking spot on the mountain above Golden. Richardson pictured the dry and barren hills outside of the town; one had a large “M” painted on its side for the Colorado School of Mines, a top-notch engineering college.

It was cold and windy, Luther continued. He smoked a joint. “Then we did some kissin’ and some pettin’ and stuff, which led to a little quick intercourse thing, you know what I mean?”

Well, they hadn’t been the first words out of his mouth, Richardson thought, but just about the first chance he got. A quick little intercourse thing? Luther made it sound like an afterthought.

“In the car?” the detective asked.

“In my car.”

“Front seat? Backseat?”

“Front seat. They fold back.”

“Passenger side? Your side?”

“It was on her side. She was drivin.’ It was just a little quick intercourse thing. She got very upset about it.”

Suddenly, there was the sound of the front door opening. Luther said it would probably be his girlfriend, Debrah Snider.

Quickly, Richardson asked if he could get her to stay outside for a few minutes. He pretended it was because he didn’t want Luther’s girlfriend to hear about the sex with Elder, but he had another reason. Someday, he might want to question this woman, and he didn’t want her trying to recall Luther’s version of this conversation.

A moment later, a woman came into the kitchen. She was a slight woman with long, curly brown hair that hung nearly to her waist. She wasn’t beautiful nor unattractive, just plain, sort of outdoorsy.

The woman he assumed to be Debrah Snider didn’t seem particularly surprised to find her boyfriend talking to a couple of guys who introduced themselves as Lakewood cops, only that Luther hadn’t left for work yet. He laughed. “It’s ’cause I’m being questioned. Um, they’d like you to leave for just a few minutes. Can you go take a run around the block maybe?”

Debrah Snider stared at him for a moment, then nodded. When she left, Richardson rolled his eyes like they were prepubescent boys caught by their mothers with a Playboy magazine. “Geez, terrible timing for a girlfriend walking in.”

Luther laughed and shrugged, then got back to his story. “Like I say, Cher got upset about it. She had these feelings for Byron, and she did it kinda out of spite. Evidently, she, you know, she made me believe that she didn’t sleep around a lot, although we did a little quick thing in the front seat of a car. In fact, afterwards she threw up on my back seat.”

Richardson’s mental notebook was working overtime. People with head wounds or concussions often vomited. Another possibility was forced oral sex, which usually produced the same reaction.

An ex-convict like Luther knew that if the police laboratory crews ever started going over his car, they’d find the vomit and possibly be able to trace it back to Elder. He needed a good story to explain its presence.

“How come she threw up?”

“She just got sick to her stomach.”

“No oral sex?”

“No oral sex. It was just straight intercourse. Neither one of us were fully unclothed... it was just like a heat of passion thing. Real quick.” She drank a few beers up in Central City, he added, and then she helped him drink a bottle of cheap red wine.

Richardson changed the subject to what happened after Luther brought Cher back to Byron’s apartment. He didn’t want his quarry settling in on any one part of his story.

“She left after saying something to Byron.”

“Never wrote a note or nothin?” Richardson asked innocently.

“No, she didn’t write no notes. She was there like about thirty seconds.”

Richardson nodded. He looked at Heylin, who had remained quiet during the interview, as if to ask if he wanted to ask any questions. When Heylin shook his head, Richardson said they were about done but might need to contact him again.

“What for?” Luther asked. Now it was his turn to scowl.

Because, Richardson said, with all the new information he’d have to talk to the Eerebout boys again. He shook his head and said he couldn’t quite figure out why they said some of the things they had.

“When you get a simple case,” he went on, “like a missing person, I mean, this is a simple case, and you go talk to the—her boyfriend, who’s the last person to see her, and they sit there and lie to ya and give you this whole story...” Richardson threw up his hands.

Luther tried to explain. “Well, they didn’t necessarily lie to ya, you know what I mean?”

It was the opening Richardson was waiting for, a good opportunity to demonstrate just how angry he was with Byron Eerebout. “Oh no,” he said, “he lied like hell...”

“He just didn’t put my name into the—”

Heylin jumped in. “He denied knowing you.”

Richardson quickly added, “He denied everything. He denied her comin’ in. He denied the whole shootin’ match. That’s what I’m sayin’. He wasn’t just a little lyin.’ He was deceptive from day one on this thing.”

The detectives figured that if they continued to heap the manure on Byron Eerebout, Luther might start worrying about what his young friend would do if the cops turned up the heat. Sow a few seeds of distrust. At the same time, they kept up the pretense of taking Luther into their confidence.

“What’s relieving is to talk to somebody that’s... that’s talkin’ to us, and tellin’ us the truth,” Richardson said, “because we been poundin’ walls down tryin’ to figure out what in the heck’s goin’ on, and why is Byron tellin’ us one thing, and someone else tells us another, and nothin’s addin’ up ... and then you come into the picture...”

Obviously, he added, it was now going to take some time to unravel all the different stories. He needed Luther to come to Lakewood after the detectives had a chance to talk to the Eerebouts again.

Luther shook his head. No, he didn’t really think that’d be necessary. He’d been cooperative, but like he’d said from the beginning, he didn’t trust cops... not since his experiences in Summit County. “This fuckin’ guy bald-faced sat right there and lied that I gave him a fuckin’ confession when I didn’t. I mean, I’ve given you guys a statement. I have nothin’ further to say...”