Shocking True Story (13 page)

"Is there anything else you can tell us? Where can we find them?"

"I don't know, if they're not in town, they're hiding out on a logging road somewhere."

"A logging road someplace?"

"Uh-huh. Back roads from here to uh, shit, where he is, it's near where his mom and dad live at."

"You probably better rest now. Be talking to you a little later. Okay, Deke?"

"Thank you, sir."

"You say you were at the old Edge Road?"

"I think so."

"By Ruston?"

"Uh-huh."

"Thank you very much, Deke. See you later. Good luck."

The man in the bed mumbled a thank-you as his eyelids dropped to a thin slit. In a second, the sound of snoring mixed with the beeps and tones of a hospital room.

Detective Raines felt his pockets for a roll of Tums. Looking at Deke Cameron and his gargantuan wounds turned his stomach even more so than the enchiladas. Blood oozed from the dressings. And the corrosive smell of vomit coated every word he uttered. It was too early in the morning for the sights, sounds and stomach-turning smells of a crime scene. Violence, he knew, did not punch a time clock.

"The clothes and personal effects from our guest," a pretty young nurse said as she and Raines walked toward the doorway out of the recovery room.

She handed the detective a Santa-sized bag, the kind with a yellow drawstring used in summer for hauling lawn clippings and in winter, soggy leaves. Inside were Levis, men's bikini briefs, a long-sleeved shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, some work boots, socks, and a bloody pair of ladies' slippers. Everything had gone into clear plastic bags before being placed in the larger black bag. The procedure was in accordance with Pac-O and sheriff's procedure for the preservation of evidence.

Raines did a double-take on the last item.

"What gives with the fuzzy slippers?"

"Like I would know?" the nurse said with a half-laugh. "I only work here."

♦

The next morning, I found my pages marked up, the coffee still hot, and a note from Val:
Like it. Glad you skipped starting with the Michener-style “Two million years ago, glacial ice carved the valleys of what would be Timberlake, Washington...” Also, thanks for mixing the words
blood-oozed, corrosive smell of vomit
AND
enchiladas
in the same paragraph. I'll never eat Mexican again. I'm sure you'll answer, but what's up with those slippers? —V

Late Sunday, August 18

WHO KNEW JOAN JETT COULD BE SUCH AN INSPIRATION? Her greatest hits owned my iPod as I finished my latest chapter of
Love You to Death
. The rock anthem that made her name—"I Love Rock 'n Roll"—was probably the best tune I'd ever typed to. I downloaded the album from iTunes and must have hit replay ten times.

And as always, in my head, I changed the lyrics.

I love true crime books!
Write another chapter about some serial killer, baby!
I love true crime books!

I Googled a bit while I waited for the new chapter to roll off my printer, stopping once to shake the toner cartridge to eke out a few more pages. The last thing I needed was Val saying that the type was too faint to read—glasses or not.

TODAY'S LIST

Google
: Crime case in the news with the most hits: Rick Rosen, an Ohio doctor, was arrested for the murder of his wife, Carlene. Carlene Rosen reportedly slipped on a layer of bath beads when getting into tub. She hit her head, slipped under the water, and drowned. Turns out the doc's first wife, Shannon, met a similar fate—she drowned during a boating accident on Lake Erie.

Possible book titles
: “
The Depths of Evil
” or “
Slip 'n Die
.”

Amazon ranking for backlist
: No change. But a two-star review on my first book made my blood boil. The reviewer "didn't like" the ending! Jesus! This is a true story! I can't change the damn ending!

Need from the store
: Printer toner and Kit Kats.

To do:
Take Hedda to Shampooch. Advertise on Craigslist for a new web person to replace Jeanne Morgan.

♦

Love You to Death

PART THREE

ADRENALINE AND CAFFEINE PROVIDED THE RUSH to keep the sleep-deprived Martin Raines and his fellow officers awake as they made their way to the Parker residence in search of a big dumb kid named Danny. It was 3:30 a.m. when four cars—two marked, two sneaker—cut their headlights and pulled up the road fronting the Parker's address. November gusts off the ocean had knocked several large limbs on to the driveway.

No one knew what kind of reception the law would get in the backwoods part of a county so rural its largest city was a paltry 14,000. Most who lived in the woods were folks who had something to hide, didn't like people, or couldn't afford better. None particularly cared for the police. The cops, they figured, meant bad news was coming their way.

A couple of officers stepped out of their cars to pull the impeding Douglas fir branches aside. The wind howled through the foothills and rain pelted their faces with needle-sharp pricks.

Raines dialed the Parker phone number from his cell phone. A moment later a light came on, illuminating the figure of a man lumbering toward the incessant ringing of a telephone.

"Hullo?" a groggy young man said.

"This is the county sheriff," Raines announced with firm, practiced authority. "We have surrounded your residence and we want everyone outside now. Hands in the air. We want you to come out and lay down on the grass, face down."

"Huh? This is a joke?" the young man said.

"This is no joke. We want you and everyone outside right now." Raines flashed his headlights as proof that there was somebody out there to make good on his implied threat.

The man on the line mumbled something about getting dressed and hung up. A few seconds later, more lights went on.

Raines didn't ask if the man was Danny. He figured it had to be.

Three minutes after the call, the front door swung open and the group of officers tightened their grip on their guns, now pointed at the house. Three figures emerged from the flood of light: The man who had answered the phone, presumably, along with an older woman in her nightgown, and an old man in a wheelchair. The woman was crying.

"Don't shoot! We done nothing wrong!" the younger man called out.

The woman pushed the wheelchair onto the grass, cutting parallel slices through what in the spring had likely been a lovely flower garden. Dogs circled the three and barked in the direction of the intruders.

"My husband can't walk! He can't get onto the grass!"

Jesus!
Raines thought.
The woman was trying to pull the man out of his chair.

The lady in the nightgown was frantic. The investigator wanted to tell her that she didn't have to put the invalid on the wet, cold lawn. It was too late. It was all happening so fast.

"Don't shoot!" she cried out again, yanking on the old man's arm as he tumbled onto the lawn without making a sound.

"Danny Parker?" Raines called from his car.

"Danny ain't here. I'm Davy. Danny's my big brother," the younger man said.

"My boy's been gone all night long!" the woman sobbed. "My husband and I are worried. Is he all right?"

"That's what we want to know. Where is he?"

"We don't know."

In the dark, the light from the house and flashlights and headlights converged on three members of the Parker family as they huddled, shivering in the wet of November. The woman, identified as June Parker, was fiftyish. She had patches of dried-on Noxzema on her face and her hair was a medium-length mess that made her thin frame resemble a Joshua tree. She wore an ecru-colored flannel nightgown with a thin, white chenille robe—now stained from mud, grass and the indignity of what was occurring on her property.

Raines was awash in empathy. She had probably never done anything wrong in her entire life and yet there she was suffering the humiliation of wearing nightclothes while uninvited company pointed guns and high-beamed flashlights in her direction.

The man in—and out of—the wheelchair, Dwight Parker, never said a thing. He apparently
never
did. Mr. Parker had been falling apart piece by piece for better than twenty years. He had lost both feet in a terrible logging accident. His larynx was removed when cancer stole his voice at forty-seven. At a hard-living sixty-five, his hearing was lousy and his eyesight was failing by the month. Mrs. Parker used to tell friends that if her husband lost the use of one more part of his body, she'd strap him in his chair and wheel him into the Pacific Ocean to put him out of his misery.

"It would be an act of love," she said.

There wasn't much left for Dwight Parker.

Raines looked on as a pair of young cops hoisted Mr. Parker back into his chair and pushed him in the direction of the house.

Davy Parker wore a red auto supply company T-shirt and jeans that fell so low that the top third of his butt hung like two loaves of unbaked bread. He was in his late twenties, with thin, oily brown hair and a tattoo of an anchor on his right forearm. He had the tattoo made when he was seventeen in anticipation of going into the Navy after graduating from high school. Instead, he got a girl pregnant and took a job at the Wendy's stocking the Garden Spot salad bar in the mornings before the lunch crowd arrived. The girl had the baby, but refused to marry Davy. By that time, Davy had spent so much on household items getting ready for a family that didn't want him that he owed Visa and MasterCard more than four thousand dollars.

The anchor tattoo was an indelible reminder of what might have been.

Fifteen minutes after the phone call that rocked their neat little house, when it was clear there was no Danny around, the Parkers and the cops went inside to the living room. Bowling trophies gleamed from a corner cabinet, the
TV Guide
was spread open to the programming log for ESPN, and motor oil had stained the carpet where one of the Parker sons had worked on his mini-bike. It was the house of men; the kind whose interests had stayed frozen in the seventh grade.

"I knew something bad was going to happen," June Parker stammered as she fought for composure. She pulled her robe tight against her chest and absentmindedly re-stacked the newspapers on the coffee table. "I had a bad feeling about tonight."

"Ma'am, tell me what you know," Raines said, softly, leaning closer.

Mrs. Parker put her fingertips to her thin lips and tapped. For a few seconds she said nothing. She was reviewing the night before she spoke.

"It started around ten tonight," she said. “My son's fiance Janet called every fifteen minutes. Her old boyfriend was hitting her... beating her up again. Danny was fit to be tied. He had it in his mind that he'd go beat up Deke to give him a taste of his own medicine."

"Janet Lee Kerr and your son were going to get married?" Raines asked, trying to hide his surprise.

"Yes, in Vegas. Before Christmas. For Thanksgiving dinner, we had Janet and our daughter over and she and Danny got online to pick out wedding rings from the Sears web site."

Raines asked Mrs. Parker to fast forward to the events of the night.

"Danny was pacing the floor after every call. Goodness, the girl called every twenty minutes. He wanted gas money to go see her, but I refused to give it to him. He makes good money driving a truck. He just doesn't know how to hang on to it. I didn't want him to go beat up anyone."

"When did he leave?"

"About midnight, I guess. My husband and I had gone to bed. Danny's okay, isn't he?" She asked once more.

The detective felt sorry for her. "We don't know. We don't know where he is."

When asked to see if any of the Parker family's guns were missing, son Davy led the officers to the closet. A sixteen-gauge shotgun was propped up against the back corner. A quick sniff of its barrel suggested it had not been fired recently.

"What was Danny driving when he left?"

"His '84 Escort," Davy answered.

"Hatchback wagon?"

The brother and mother nodded in unison.

"Blue and white?"

"Uh-huh," June Parker answered. "The 'New Wave' package with a splattered interior and a row of distressed stars etched on the back window. There aren't many like them left on the road. Danny is real proud of his car."

Mr. Parker tugged at his wife's arm.

"Potty?" she asked sweetly.

The man in the wheelchair nodded and said “yes.” It was the only thing he said during the interview. Mr. Parker was a man of few words.

Note from Val:
The description of June Parker needs a fix. The dried-on Noxzema on her face is good (mom used to wake up with that caked on, cracked mask every morning), but a Joshua tree? Jeesh, honey, no one outside of Arizona will know what that looks like. I'm not even sure and I've been there. The line: “Raines was awash in empathy?” Is that meant to be ironic? A pun? Last thought... I feel sorry for these people. I'm not sure if you want me to. But I'm just saying. —V

Monday, August 19

ONE DROP FALLS, THEN ANOTHER. It starts the same way every time. Rain again. Being a native Northwesterner, I knew that as well as anyone. I only wished I had new tires as I drove off the interchange and felt the road slip beneath the old white Chevy LUV. I was on my way to more interviews, and while it was more of the same, it's what I loved more than anything. First up was June Parker, Danny's mother. I also made plans to get together with Jett for a tour of Timberlake, after hours.

"Wait 'til you see the Poodle Dog Inn!" she had said the night before. "I'll meet you there after you're done with Mrs. Parker."

"I can hardly wait," I said in a jokey, sarcastic manner.

"What time are you going out there?"

"About five-thirty... I asked her what time she ate and I'd show up afterwards. Her husband has physical therapy on Mondays and Wednesdays."

I told Jett that I had written what I called "update notes" to her sister and mother, letting them know that I was busy on the book and would see them at Riverstone soon—possibly as early as the following week. Provided, of course, the prison media flack wasn't too busy and could accommodate a special visit into her schedule. Jett seemed so happy that someone was writing to Janet and their mother. No one else did, and mother and daughter were very lonely.