Shocking True Story (16 page)

Detective Martin Raines had conducted hundreds of interviews in the little room in his dozen years at Pierce County, which neighbored my own Kitsap County. He had interviewed suspects from all walks and all
crawls
of life. He remembered them all. The teenage girl with the heavy-mascara raccoon eyes who had stabbed her mother because she wouldn't let her go on an overnight beach campout with her boyfriend. The old man who had backed his Pontiac Fiero over a little boy in a grocery parking lot. The neighbor who poisoned another's dogs because the damn animals barked all hours of the night.

Raines had played host and antagonist to many in that little room. In the first minutes after the door closed, he calculated an approach that would net him the best results. Good cop? Bad cop? Father Confessor? Skeptic?

With Danny Parker, it was easy.

Danny was thirty-two, a hundred pounds overweight, legally blind in one eye and slower than a stopped clock. He had the manner of an apologetic, big, stupid kid. He always said "sir" and "thank you. " He took every breath through a gaping mouth that could have benefited from orthodontics. Yet as disconcerting as his appearance was, Danny seemed a nice enough fellow—for an attempted murderer. He listened intently to each question Raines posed over the course of the two hours he would spend facing him across the table.

Ten minutes into the interview, Danny volunteered that he was hungry.

"Haven't eaten since a couple of doughnuts for breakfast," he said, his good eye staring at the investigator.

Raines nodded.

"How 'bout a Big Mac when we're done here?"

Danny smiled broadly. He sat straight up with his hands folded on the table in front of him like a first-grader. "Yeah. Thank you. Sounds good."

While Danny admitted to a great deal, he didn't give up Janet Lee Kerr. Every time her name was broached, he shook his heavy frame with firm denial.
He
had shot Deke. It was his idea. He fled the scene. He ditched the weapon. He tossed Janet's shoes in the Dumpster. Everything was his doing. His alone.

Raines knew better. He had been this route before many times in his career.

"Come on, Danny, we know Janet put it all together."

"Did not."

"Did too."

"Janet's not like that," the young fat man said. "You don't even know her."

♦

Note from Val:
I feel sorry for Danny. Your description of him seems a little harsh —“the young fat man said.” Hasn't the guy been used and abused enough? Maybe you could say he had an engaging smile? Straight teeth? A dog? Or nice eyes? As written he seems like a lovelorn Quasimodo without a hump. Besides, a lot of your readers are on the heavy side of thin. In fact, YOU get a little chunky before you finish a book. Stress eater! —V

Tuesday, August 27

MARTY RAINES DIRECTED ME TO WAIT in his den. Something had come up and he would take care of it on the phone in the kitchen. I drank tepid coffee and looked around. April Raines had decorated her husband's lair in a lodge and fishing theme. Antique fishing gear, lures and floats mostly, lined a shelf that went from one corner of a wall to the other. A finial on top of a dark green paper lamp shade was a tiny salmon breaching the surface of a river. It was the kind of decorating an interior designer would dismiss as hopelessly kitschy. But I thought it was wonderful. It was more about what April Raines had wanted to do for her cop husband than it was about making the pages of
House Beautiful
. She had wanted to create a sanctuary where the spectre of murder and violence was remote. Plus, I loved salmon.

Raines breezed into his den and swung the door shut. He wore a yellow and black striped shirt and jeans. He looked like an overstuffed bumblebee.

"Off the record, okay?"

He had uttered my least favorite words.

"It's too late for that," I answered, somewhat defensively. "We've taped hours of interviews, and what you've said has already been incorporated into my book. You know that, Marty."

Martin sat behind his desk and regarded me with a nod. He was serious. Stone cold. "That's fine," he said. "I'm talking about what I'm going to tell you
now.
Do you want to hear it?"

I didn't blink. "Am I stupid? Of course."

"Nothing leaves this room."

"Right. Agreed. " I didn't like it, but I wanted to hear what the man had to say.

Raines paused for dramatic effect and cleared his throat.

"June Parker was already dead or about dead when the killer slit her throat.
Slit,
that's almost a joke when you think what was done to her. The knife cut clean into her vertebrae. Cut the bone. An OJ slice. Whoever did that was strong, very strong. But that's not the freakiest part."

"What is then?" I asked. I reached for my neck, a reflex, a reaction, to his description of the slashing. I did not want to shave ever again.

He paused again. "The tox screens came back, cyanide."

"Cyanide?" I was dumbfounded. It didn't make sense.

Raines studied me and my reaction. "That's what the medical examiner says. Lethal amounts of the stuff."

"But what about the cuts? The blood?"

"Maybe done to cover up the identity of the killer. To confuse us? In reality, there wasn't much blood. What there was had been carefully spread around."

I thought about the smearing of the blood, how oddly it showed paint through the baseboard. How thin it had been, how much coverage it had commanded in the hallway.

"Then who?" I asked.

"Well, if it isn't you and it isn't Mr. Parker—"

"Thanks for the vote of confidence."

"—then it's someone June Parker knew. Someone who wanted us to see a brutal act that could have been committed by a husband."

"Or a lover," I said, feeling foolish that I had suggested such a thing about a woman who, by all accounts, was a saint and completely devoted to her husband on wheels.

Raines shot an icy stare. "Didn't have any."

"Sure?" I gulped.

"Positive."

Beads of sweat started to collect under my mustache. "Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

"Two reasons. Because you know these characters better than just about anyone."

"So? The two I know who are capable of anything remotely as evil as murder are in prison already. What's the second reason?"

Martin Raines waited a good five seconds before he answered. I couldn't tell if it was because he was going to tell me something highly confidential or if it was because he was trying to think of a second reason when there really hadn't been one.

"Because your name was on a note found inside the dead woman's hands."

My heartbeat quickened. "I was coming to see her."

"We know. But, Kevin, isn't it possible that someone didn't want you to talk with Mrs. Parker?"

"For God's sake, Marty, she was just the mother of the shooter. She isn't—
wasn't
—even important to the book. She was someone's mother, that's all. I only wanted to speak with her for background on her son."

We went around and around for another half hour. I looked at the crime scene photos and felt nausea wash over me all over again. It wasn't what I was seeing that made me sick, it was the recollection of being there and finding her. I could remember the smell of her blood, the running of the tap water, the dimness of the hallway. I was there again. Photos never made me sick. It was true that they often brought a reaction of shock, but I covered that up well. I could act. I could pretend to cough to deflect my facial response to what I had seen.

The photos were haunting because they were from my own reality. I had seen what had happened in that photo. I had been there. For the first time in my career, I felt truly ashamed. I was ashamed at how I had so callously interviewed the husband who discovered his wife shot to death or the teenage girl who had discovered the body of her raped and murdered sister. The words they used were from pictures in their minds. Of course I knew that. But I never knew the depth of the emotion, the haunting of the soul that comes from such a discovery. I had not known Mrs. Parker, but I would never forget her. Bloody. Lifeless. The image of her killer recorded in the spongy folds of her dead brain tissue.

I left the Raines charming home on its tree-lined street in the good part of Timberlake, thinking about the note with my name on it. Wondering what else it said? Wondering why Raines said I couldn't see it.

"It's in the lab," he had intoned. "There are some forensic possibilities we're looking into."

Late Tuesday, August 27

When I got home I picked up the file folder of my next
Love You to Death
chapter for Valerie to read and slid it onto her lap. She began, turning the pages upside down on to each other in a neat stack. I resisted asking what she thought as she read.

She glared at me whenever I did that.

♦

Love You to Death

PART FIVE

GIRLS LIKE JANET LEE KERR were a grimy dime a dozen in Pierce County. Martin Raines had seen more than his share of their ilk, from appearance to attitude. Their propensity for big hair and form-fitting attire was in direct relation to the distance away from Seattle or Portland. With Timberlake stuck equally between the Northwest's two major metropolitan areas, it was surely VO-5 and spandex's last stand.

Janet Kerr was neither a beauty, nor unattractive. She had a young woman's figure, despite the fact that she had a baby and done nothing in particular to see herself back into good shape. She smoked menthol 100s because she liked the buzz and thought they freshened her breath. She had no real job, no career, no ambition beyond a good time on Friday night. When it came right down to it, Janet had one thing going for her. And that was the downfall of the men who fell for her. What she had was between her thighs.

She could also cry like a February rainstorm. Her shoulders heaved in agonized spasms as she made her way to the conference room adjacent to the one occupied by Danny Parker and an officer. She tried to pull her matted hair out from under her sweatshirt collar.

"I never believed in my life that something could go this wrong... this far," she told Raines as he led her into one of the four hard-as-steel aqua fiberglass chairs. A strip of cloth fluttered from the heating duct. Despite the incoming cool air, the room was hot. Stiflingly so.

"Janet, we need to know what happened. " Raines was gentle in his approach. He always was at first, though deep down it never left him that a girl like Janet would brandish a box cutter for a six-pack.

Janet nodded, but said nothing.

"You know, Deke might not live. Whatever happened out by Ruston is either a tragic shooting or, if he dies, murder," he said.

The switch went back on. Instantly. Janet started to cry again.

"Oh," she wailed. "My daughter... Lindy needs me. Let me go to her. Please."

"We need to know what happened, Janet. If you want to see your daughter any time soon, you need to tell us everything."

And so over the next fifty minutes, Janet blabbed. She told her inquisitor that Danny Parker was obsessed with her. Head over heels. He had it so bad that he'd do anything to be with her.
Anything.
She didn't know how far he'd go.

"Who would have thought he'd
shoot
Deke?" she said, tears once again flowing down her cheeks. "I thought they were going to fight. That's all. Fight. I didn't know he thought he was Jacob from
Twilight
, or whatever. We were just friends."

Raines asked Janet for an official statement. She was told to recount, step-by-step, the hours leading up to the shooting. As they talked, he'd write down what she said and she'd have a chance to go over it to make corrections. Janet agreed to it. She had one question, however.

"Can I ask you something?" she asked, her tears dried and her attitude much improved.

"About your daughter?" Raines asked.

"Well, that, too. After we're done, can I get something to eat?"

Raines would have rolled his eyes if Janet hadn't fixed her eyes on his with crosshair preciseness.
Unbelievable.
Danny was in the next room dreaming of a burger and his girlfriend had food on her mind, too.

"I'm not making any promises," he said casually as he fiddled with his wedding band as it choked the puffy girth of his ring finger, "but we'll see."

Janet Lee Kerr indicated that Danny Parker had been obsessed with her for seven or eight years. Deke Cameron was also in love with her. And what happened up on the logging road was a battle over who would marry her.

She said the day had started with several altercations between Deke and Danny and herself. Deke had even hit her in the side of the head during one row.

"He called me a bitch and pulled my hair!"

She had been afraid and tried to calm him down. They bought a bottle of Potter's Fine Whiskey and a half rack of Bud and drove to a parking spot under the River Bridge. Deke drank the Potter's and Janet consumed a couple of beers. After that, they went driving, though Deke was so drunk he had to pull over to throw up. Janet took over the wheel.

She said she made several calls to Danny that evening, telling him Deke had threatened her. She was afraid for her life—and Danny's.

"Danny said something about how he could shoot Deke, take care of him. I told him how Deke threatened me and him both," she said.

The detective could see where it was going, but kept his expression flat, steady. He didn't let on. Full and complete control. He simply wrote down what the young woman with the menthol breath said.

Danny had told her during a telephone call to go up the logging road near the Ruston Tavern. It was interesting, she admitted, because it just so happened that she had been there earlier in the evening drinking with Deke.

Been there before, scoping the scene. Plotting the murder....

"Knowing Danny was waiting for Deke, I drove the car going up the hill and all of a sudden I needed to pee. I got out. I heard someone coming to the car, I recognized Danny. Danny told me to move. I moved back and fell down the hill. I didn't see Danny shoot Deke, but I heard two or three shots. I think Deke was in the passenger seat when Danny shot him."