Monster (50 page)

Babe snorted derisively. “Nobody believes that, Deb.” But it wouldn’t matter, she added; she was sure Byron was going to win his appeal and get out of prison. As long as Tom didn’t talk, everything would be fine. “If he does,” she added, “he’s gonna dig himself a grave.”

Snider said that Luther considered Byron “a loose end.”

“Byron ain’t doing nothing to Tom.”

“Well, I know that but Tom is scared. You know, you’ve seen his paranoia. I mean, he looked out the kitchen window at every goddamn car that drove down the road because he thought the cops were watchin’ him.”

Babe Rivinius said it was all Richardson’s fault. Now he was trying to pressure Byron. “He showed up at Buena Vista out of the blue,” she said. “He says ‘If you don’t cooperate, we’re gonna bust J.D. We’re gonna charge him with murder.’ He knew that he was putting the needles in the right place.”

It wasn’t fair that Byron was in prison, Babe said. It was Luther who shot at Makarov-Junev to set her son up to take the fall on Cher Elder. “If the cops thought it was Byron with the violent tendencies, it would take the heat off himself. And for that, I cannot forgive him. If Tom ever shows up here again, he’s gonna be six foot under pushing daisies.”

The conversation turned back to the West Virginia assault case. Luther’s trial was coming up in a few weeks. Neither woman could figure out why he had taken Jones to his cabin if he planned to rape her later.

“Unless he’d wanted to kill,” Snider said.

“He never intended for her to live to tell the story,” Rivinius agreed.

But then why, Debrah asked, if he intended to kill Cher, why did he take her to Central City where he knew he would be seen with her? “He’s not stupid.”

“The person that you know took her up there, isn’t the person who came back with her,” Babe replied. “Something happened in his head. Something goes wrong and it’s a response to something she does. Something, something, something happens in his head that changes him.

“Now, he has never threatened me. I think, telling the truth, he’s scared of me. He could not look me in the eyes. And I’m telling you right now the reason he couldn’t look me in the eye is a killer can’t look another killer in the eye. You see yourself in their eyes and that is what frightens you.”

Back in the car, Richardson thought the women sounded as if they were getting drunk. Especially Rivinius, who was becoming just plain weird. He had suggested to Snider they have a couple of beers, but now as their conversation continued, their voices had grown slurred and there were large gaps of silence—one so long that he worried that they had passed out.

Then Babe snapped out of it and told Debrah, “If you need anything, tell me, and I’ll help you.”

“I want this bullshit with Cher Elder settled.”

Richardson and Rose sat up. This might be it.

“There’s only one way we’re gonna be able to do that. We have two choices,” Babe slurred. “Our first choice is that we get really stupid and we say now let’s go dig Richardson and tell him all these little details.”

“Babe, I already told you that I did that.”

But Rivinius wasn’t listening. “Let’s put ’em all together and let’s say they possibly charge Tom and they rake things through the mud and whatever. Maybe they get lucky and they get a conviction, but I’m sure they won’t. What have we accomplished? Nothing. Now, it’s never really gonna go away, because you got a cop with a hard-on and they don’t go away.”

Thinking of Richardson sitting in a car listening, Debrah laughed. Encouraged, Babe continued, “They’re crooked. They’re macho. They stick together like freakin’ glue, and they cover for each other all the damn time. You just can’t get rid of him. So what’s the next best thing? You go away someday.”

Babe said that when Byron won his appeal, she planned to get her boys out of the state, then they wouldn’t care about “Richardson’s bullshit. I don’t mean this to sound crass and crude because obviously somebody’s daughter is missing or dead, but I’m not responsible for somebody else’s daughter.

“Richardson is scared of me. He says, ‘Yes ma’am’ and ‘No ma‘am’ when he sees me. He’s a bald-headed fucking bastard, and he makes me sick. I can’t stand being in the same vicinity with him. God, he gives me the willies. I just wanna rip his heart out.”

“Why?” Debrah liked Richardson and while Babe’s descriptions were somewhat humorous, she thought it was Babe who was afraid of the detective, not the other way around.

“Because he didn’t do his job. Detective Richardson did not follow procedures. Richardson followed a vendetta.”

Snider was suddenly tired of it all. Of Babe. Of Tom. Of Richardson. “I just wanna know the truth,” she said. “I want the truth to come out. If that means Tom needs to take a fall, then Tom needs to take a fall. If that means your sons need to take a fall, then they need to take a fall.”

Babe looked at her bleary-eyed. She leaned closer. “I’m gonna tell you the truth,” she said quietly, as if she knew someone else was trying to listen. “I asked Byron if he or his brother had anything to do with Cher Elder’s disappearance, and I know he was telling me the truth when he said no.

“I asked him if Tom had anything to do with Cher Elder’s disappearance, and he said, ‘Mom, you’ve got to stop asking these questions.’ He never said yes or no. If it’s not Tom, Tom knows who did.”

The conversation lasted five hours. Little of it was any use to the investigation. Richardson went home disappointed. The next morning, he called Debrah and asked if she would try again. Maybe this time with a little less beer and more direct questions. She agreed.

Three evenings later, he and Rose were sitting in a van in another parking lot, this time listening to the women who had gone to a pizza parlor.

Rivinius was bragging again that Richardson was scared of her. “Byron’s attorney is going to kick his ass in court,” she said. “Leslie Hansen told him, ‘Don’t ever talk to my client again or I’ll slap you with a lawsuit. I called District Attorney Dave Thomas and told him he better distance himself from that rogue cop Richardson and to leave Byron alone.”

Debrah was her friend, Babe said. And that’s why she wanted to warn her that her son, J.D., was saying she better keep her mouth shut “because all they’re trying to do at this point in time is a find a way to get rid of you.”

Debrah nodded. She knew everyone, except maybe Richardson, would be happier if she just went away or disappeared like Cher. “I know how you feel about Tom,” she said to Babe, “but more than the way I feel about Tom is the way I feel about life. I have a greater understanding of what happened with Cher than I had whenever I first got involved in this. And what happened to Cher shouldn’t happen to anybody, and I want it stopped. And I think anybody that’s involved with it, including Tom, needs to pay the price.”

“I agree,” Babe said. “I think Tom would do anything he could to cover his own ass. I think he’d sell his mother to the devil.”

“He wouldn’t even ask much for her,” Snider said. They both laughed.

Debrah was curious about the ring. She had overheard a conversation a long time ago between Tom and Mortho Kreiner about a ring. Kreiner wanted to know where he got it from and Tom had said he got it from a girl.

Richardson almost spilled his coffee on himself with Babe’s next comment. “The fact of the matter is, I know exactly what Byron saw to the letter. And Tom knows, or suspects, that Byron could implicate him. They told Byron that they cut one of her fingers off that had a ring that he gave her and that they were gonna place it in a conspicuous spot to frame him if he talked.”

Snider sighed. “I don’t know why I’ve stayed with him so long.”

“You love him,” Babe shrugged. “The thing is, Deb, your problem is that you love the other one and there’s two of ’em. You love Tom, the Tom that you wanna believe in, the Tom you fell in love with. But you don’t know the other one. You’ve never been maybe beat half to death. The point is he has everybody fooled.”

“Yeah, they see the charming, do-all-I-can-for-you guy.”

“I hate Richardson but not because of what he’s doin’ with Tom,” Rivinius said, “but because of what he’s doing to my family. Because to me that makes Richardson as bad as Tom. Not because he’s trying to help Cher’s family but because he’s helped destroy my whole damn family in the process.”

“I think you’re placing blame in the wrong place,” Snider said.

Babe looked at her closely, but she was already onto another subject. “Has Tom threatened you? He has, hasn’t he? I can see it in your face.”

Debrah nodded. “I don’t know. When it’s all settled, I’m still hoping that Tom will see that I just did the right thing. I told him, ‘Don’t put me in a position where I gonna have to choose ’cause I’m gonna do what’s right.’ Now I need you to help me figure out where Cher Elder is.”

“I know where she was,” Babe said, as the detectives in the van held their breath. “I don’t know if I know where she is. Byron never saw, but if he knows it’s because someone told him. And that means my kids are in danger if Tom ever gets out. Skip told me that Byron better keep his mouth shut and do his time; he cares more for Tom than he does his own sons.”

Suddenly, Babe Rivinius looked old and desperate. She gripped Snider’s arm. “How can I protect them from Tom?”

“Well, we know of two ways,” Debrah said. “The first one’s not a possibility ’cause, you know, we can’t do that and I don’t want that to happen.”

“You mean off him?”

“Well, that’s one way.”

“It is a possibility,” Babe said.

Debrah shook her head. “It’s not a possibility. That ain’t what I mean.”

Babe nodded. “I don’t want to do that. Who am I to be judge and jury for Tom Luther? I don’t think anybody needs to get by with what the hell happened to Cher. But who am I to judge? If I thought for one minute that Byron was the kind of person who could just viciously kill another human being, I would be glad that he’s where he is. But I know he isn’t.”

“The second way is ...” Snider stumbled looking for the right words. “If we could get J.D. to tell us where the hell he took him.”

Rivinius frowned. “There was something about a restaurant, about them going into the mountains and stopping by a freakin’ restaurant.”

Richardson took note. The Marietta Restaurant was where the dogs had lost Luther’s tracks. Was that it? But Debrah and Babe had gone on to the topic of Luther’s other possible victims.

“Have you ever wondered if there are any others?” Babe asked.

“Other women? Oh yeah. Just recently there was this girl at a campground where we stayed; now there’s a picture of her in the post office that says she’s missing. There were times, lots of times, when he would be AWOL from home, and I wondered. And, you know, he knew all the porno places—the X-rated motels and stuff like that. And he had these cards with pick-up lines like ‘I’m shy,’ that he would hand to women.”

Rivinius was biting her lip now as she looked at Snider, as if trying to make up her mind about something. Then she blurted out, “I’m gonna tell you point blank. I have often thought that Tom either showed J.D. something or J.D. helped with something.

“I have wondered about it at times because of how emotionally upset he was for so long and none of it made that much sense to me. Every time I would bring it up, he would get extremely angry at me and tell me not to ask questions. And when I would say anything really to him like, you know, ‘If you know that Tom did something, you need to tell me.’ And his answer to shit like that would be, ‘Mom, you could be putting a lot of people’s lives in danger.’ And I often wondered if Tom didn’t deliberately put J.D. in that kind of a situation on purpose.

“We don’t know where it happened is the thing. All I know is that when Byron got up, he heard people out in his living room arguing. And he knows Tom was there—that he came back to the apartment. And the other unknown female was there and he thought it might have been one of Southy’s sisters.”

The women were quiet again. Then Debrah Snider spoke about something that had been troubling her for some time. “After he attacked that girl in Summit County, he went back to his girlfriend and they made love,” she said. “How could you sexually assault somebody, beat them half to death, and then go crawl in bed with your girlfriend. But he did that again in West Virginia. He assaulted that girl and came to the campground that next day and got in bed with me.”

Babe shrugged. That’s just how men used women. “Maybe that’s what turns him on. He seems to think that no matter how violent or vicious his sex gets, it’s perfectly normal.”

“Well, he thinks of women like that. He used to make me read porno magazines to ‘broaden my perspective.’ I can remember when we would go shopping, I would watch him watch women like he was taking their clothes off. We could hardly watch a movie together because he was always talking about how good it would be to take some actress, like Michelle Pfeiffer, to bed.

“I wanted to tell him one time, ‘What do you think Michelle Pfeiffer would think if I was to tell Michelle Pfeiffer your history. You think she’d want to go to bed with you?’ But I didn’t have the courage to do that. I knew it would be suicide.”

The two women didn’t say anything for a long time. Then Debrah spoke. “The thing that kills me is, I think it’s unfair to make Cher’s family suffer like this.”

Babe nodded. “I’ve often wanted to go over and talk to them myself,” she said. “I wanted to tell them what Byron saw, what he knows, so that they can at least be in peace understanding that the friend that their daughter was with didn’t hurt her.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

January 4, 1995—Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office

For all of Babe Rivinius’s bravado, Byron Eerebout’s attorney, Leslie Hansen, wasn’t talking about kicking anyone’s ass in court. In fact, she was pleading with Dennis Hall, Mark Minor, and Scott Richardson to make a deal.

“Byron’s willing, but he wants community corrections and he wants to serve it out of state,” Hansen said.

“What do we get?” Hall asked.

“Byron knows the location of Cher’s body,” Hansen answered. “It’s not firsthand knowledge but from another source who he will not disclose or testify against.”