It was a mission he took personally, even if it hadn’t started that way. And it was a damn good thing he’d listened to his instincts and picked up a telephone or he might have missed the one piece of evidence that would allow him to someday, soon he hoped, take Cher Elder’s picture off the wall.
Just that morning Heylin reminded him, “You said if you didn’t call on it, sure enough, it’d turn into a homicide. You called, but it looks like that’s what we got anyway.”
Richardson had nodded. There was no use denying the obvious. In his heart, he’d known almost from the beginning ... when the Eerebout boys started lying. He’d known for sure three days ago when an officer found Cher’s car abandoned in a grocery store parking lot.
While some homicide cops made a big show of not getting emotionally involved in their cases, he approached his work from the opposite direction. He wanted to know everything he could about the victim. In the past three weeks, he had learned as much as he could about Cher Elder, and what he learned had convinced him that she wasn’t the sort of girl who dumped her car and ran away without contacting her family and friends.
“Slow down,” he told himself periodically. “She may be on that beach in Mexico.” It became almost a mantra and it was a good practice in theory: avoid putting on blinders, consider everything. But he knew better.
This case just plain bothered him more than most. He’d seen his share of victims walk to their fates with their eyes open. It wasn’t uncommon for one of them to be portrayed as some kind of choir girl by her family and friends only for him to find out that she’d been running dope, or prostitutin’, or a hundred other dangerous and illegal things. But this case was different. Cher was different. Her mistake, he believed, was that she had fallen in love with Byron Eerebout, a petty thief and small-time drug dealer.
Now nobody would admit to having seen Cher since the early morning hours of March 28 when, according to Byron, he peeked out his apartment window and watched her drive away. Of course that all depended on which version of the story Byron, or his younger brothers, J.D. and Tristan, were telling on any given day.
Richardson didn’t mind the changing stories. The Eerebouts were a convict’s kids. They weren’t going to fall down on their knees and confess just ‘cause he looked at ’em cross-eyed. But let them run off at the mouth and, sooner or later, they’d slip. “Get their lips movin’,” was his motto, and sure enough, he’d caught Byron in several lies and that told him a lot. After all, why lie about a missing persons case?
If he hadn’t missed his guess, this Tom Luther fellow was the grey-haired mystery man caught on a videotape with Cher by a casino security camera on the night of March 27, a Saturday. It was a piece of the puzzle, one he’d almost missed.
The grey-haired man, according to witnesses, was a friend of Byron’s. But that morning, Byron denied knowing him.
Richardson hadn’t called him on the lie. “Guess I’ll have to give this to the news media,” he shrugged instead, pulling the tape from the VCR, “and get this guy’s face plastered all over the television and newspapers. See if anybody knows who he is.”
The ploy worked faster than he dared hope. Byron walked out of the interrogation room, promising to contact him if “anything else comes to me.” An hour later, while he was out for a spin on the motorcycle, Donna took the call from Tom Luther. “I’m the one he’s lookin’ for,” Luther had told her.
“You’re right, bud,” Richardson muttered as he lifted his boots off the desk, picked up the telephone, and punched in the number left by Tom Luther. “You’re the one I’m lookin’ for—but for what?”
The telephone rang. “Hello?” a male voice answered. Just get his lips movin’, Richardson told himself, and this will be over in nothin’ flat.
“Hello, Mr. Luther, please,” Richardson said.
“Yeah. This is he.” The voice from the other end of the line was cautious.
“Hi. How you doin’? I gotta message here that you called.” Richardson tried to sound friendly and confused, as if he couldn’t figure out why he’d been contacted.
“Okay. And you?” Luther responded. “The Eerebout boys called and told me you guys had a picture of me, uh, you know, and were going to plaster it all over the news and stuff. So I figured I better give you a call.”
Richardson listened carefully. Luther had no regional accent that he could discern, maybe a little country, but there was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Keep him talking,
he thought,
and see what shakes.
He started by asking innocent questions—like Luther’s address, which was in Fort Collins, a college town 60 miles straight north of Denver, and the correct spelling of his name.
After a couple minutes of this, it was Luther who cut to the chase. “The reason the boys were playing stupid, all right, is ’cause I just was recently released from the joint.”
There we go,
Richardson thought,
somethin’ right off the bat. The guy’s an ex-con. That’s what I was picking up in his voice
—
that ol’ prison tough guy bullshit.
He wondered what the charges had been but let Luther keep talking.
“They were playin’ stupid, hopin’ that maybe this girl would just pop up somewheres or somethin’, or ... call her people, you know what I mean, to let everybody know that she’s okay, see? I-I-now, I don’t trust, uh, the cops. I mean, I’m gonna tell you that straight up. You know I’ve had some bad experiences with ’em. You know, prison guards. The detectives that originally arrested me on my case, you know what I mean, said that I made a statement which I never made ...”
Richardson scowled, his dark eyebrows knitting a solid line above his eyes. Another innocent “victim” of the system.
How many times have I heard that one?
he thought. Ain’t no criminals in prison, just a bunch of innocent guys who got railroaded by crooked cops, grandstanding DAs, bad judges, and ignorant juries.
Next, he’ll start talking about his poor, abused childhood,
Richardson thought.
Well, mine wasn’t so all-fired happy either, buddy.
Richardson’s father, an alcoholic who had abused his wife and two sons, shot and killed himself shortly before Scott’s 13th birthday. Doyle Richardson had drilled a heightened sense of moral duty into his boys (“There’s right and there’s wrong, and you gotta choose where you stand”), but along the way forgot to tell them that he loved them.
Richardson’s teenaged years had been spent hell-bent for leather, and those who knew him, including his mother, had wondered which side of the law he would wind up on. He’d been on his own at 16 with a fast car and not much else to his name except a reputation for wildness. But then he had gone to Gladewater to visit his father’s grave, and met Sabrina.
So he’d stayed and, working two jobs, put himself through community college as a criminal justice major. He was a cop by 19, so young that his partners had to buy his bullets for him, the same year Sabrina’s parents finally let them go out on a date.
Everything he had, everything he was, he got by working hard and patience; nobody had handed him anything. So Richardson didn’t put much stock in the stories of criminals who whined that they’d had a rough childhood.
l somehow managed to stay out of prison,
he thought when Luther began complaining about the police hounding him,
and no one’s lookin’ at me now ’cause some girl’s missin’.
Out loud, he sympathized, which seemed to encourage Luther. The ex-con repeated himself. “You know, they said I made a confession, which I never made.”
Now, Richardson thought, get him while he’s on the defensive. “Let’s break the ice right off the bat,” he interrupted. “I’m not gonna jack with you, I’m not gonna jack with anybody. All we’re concerned about is findin’ Cher and makin’ sure Cher’s okay.”
Luther relented a little. “Now I can understand that, you know what I mean, but like I say, now the boys, you know, see I just—I just did ten years, ten months, twenty-three days. All on an assault.” Luther paused. “On a sexual assault case,” he finally added. “That’s why they were bein’ protective of my identification.”
Bells and sirens began going off in Richardson’s head. A sexual assault?
No sense getting caught hiding that skeleton in the closet, eh Luther?
The questions were popping up in his mind so quick, he could hardly keep up with the other man’s explanation of how he’d met the Eerebout boys through their father, Jerald “Skip” Eerebout. Skip had been his cellmate and best friend in prison, he said.
“All I wanted to know,” Richardson interjected, “was more about what Cher was doing the night of March 27.”
Luther was prepared for the question. “What happened was, you know, she was at Byron’s house. Okay? And Byron came over with this other girl named Gina. Well Cher, she thought she and him, Byron and her, had a little more of a thing goin’, you know what I mean?”
Richardson grunted affirmatively. He’d already heard that Byron and Cher had been fighting over Gina Jones. That much he figured was true. Now, where was the truth going to make a U-turn into fiction?
“So what I tried to do, is I tried to calm the situation. I tried talkin’ to her, tellin’ her, you know, ‘Just hold off,’ you know, ‘Let him spin his oats. He’ll come back to you.’ I wanted to get her away from the apartment. I made several suggestions. ‘Well, let’s go to a bar.’ ”
But Cher, he said, who he’d met at Byron’s on a couple other occasions, wanted to go see a friend who worked in a Central City casino in the mountains northwest of Denver. So he had offered to go along for company.
In fact, he let her drive his new car, a sporty blue Geo Metro, he said, while he sat back in the passenger seat and downed a few beers. They got to the casinos, met up with Cher’s friend, drank a couple more beers, played the slot machines.
“We closed the place down. Then she drove us back to Byron’s. She went in to talk to him, but he was in bed with Gina. So, you know, she leaves very upset. So I follow her out of the apartment. I’m tryin’ to talk to her, you know, she’s cryin’ and stuff.”
Cher told him she was going to call an old high school buddy named Gary. “That was the only guy that she ever could trust. You know what I mean?” She left, and he went back into the apartment. “I slept for three hours on the floor then got up and drove home to Fort Collins.”
When Luther ran out of steam, Richardson asked if he could meet with him. Experience taught him that it was harder to lie face-to-face and man-to-man, and easier for him to judge a suspect’s reactions. But the ex-con danced away from the question by saying he’d be happy to answer any questions—over the telephone.
To give himself more time to find a way to set up a meeting, Richardson asked Luther for the registration number on his car. He heard Luther speak to someone else in the room before responding.
“Who you talkin’ to there?” Richardson asked. He wanted to know as many of Luther’s associates as possible; no telling who would be the key to this thing.
“My lady friend, Debrah,” Luther replied.
Richardson made a quick note. “So when was the last time you saw Cher?” he asked. He didn’t want Luther guessing at which things he might think were important—like girlfriends.
“When she left that morning ...”
“Did you stop anywhere on the way back?”
Luther hesitated before replying. “Yeah. We did.”
“Where’d you stop?”
“Um, in Golden,” Luther replied nervously.
Golden. Richardson pictured the little town to the north of Lakewood and just off the highway that ran up into the mountains to Central City. He noticed the reluctance in Luther’s voice. Got
to be the girlfriend,
he thought.
Ol’ Tom doesn’t want to talk in front of her about stopping to park with Cher Elder.
It was the opening he was looking for. “Is your lady friend sittin’ right there?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Luther laughed. He sounded relieved that the detective had finally caught on.
Richardson laughed, too, just like they were best friends pulling one over on their wives. “Let’s stop that conversation. That’s gonna get you in a tight spot, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” was the good-humored reply.
The moment was ripe. Richardson again pressed for a meeting. Just one good ol’ boy who knew how to keep a secret from the women to another. This time Luther was agreeable. But with a caveat. “Like I say, I don’t trust cops ...”
“I’m not gonna jack with ya, Tom,” Richardson interrupted as he felt his fish trying to wriggle off the hook.
Quick as a bullet, Luther was angry. “That’s what everybody says. ‘I’m not gonna jack with ya, I’m not gonna give you the runaround.’ But as soon as you run my, you know, my credentials
... I’m gonna be like a suspect on your missing person.”
Richardson was surprised by the suddenness of the change. Cool one moment, hot the next. He noticed that as Luther’s temper rose, so did his prison-speak. He had to head this off quick before Luther remembered that convicts aren’t supposed to talk to cops.
“I don’t care what the background is,” the detective interjected. It was a white lie; he actually cared a lot, but he said, “I care about today.”
Luther turned his anger off as quickly as he had turned it on. He said that Richardson could come meet him in Fort Collins if he could get there before he had to go to work that evening.
But maybe it wasn’t even necessary? he ventured. After all, he’d told the detective everything he could think of. But had Richardson checked out a former boyfriend of Cher’s, went by a funny name, a guy named Garfus? “She had quite a lot of trouble with him. He wanted to be physical with her.” He suggested turning up the heat on Garfus.
Richardson recognized the deflection attempt. This had to be another part of the story they’d rehearsed, he thought. He’d already heard about Garfus from Byron, but Garfus had an airtight alibi—he’d been out of the state when Cher disappeared. He turned the conversation back to Luther’s girlfriend. “How’d you meet Debbie?”
“I’ve been with
Debrah,
” Luther corrected him on the name, “for about two and a half years. I met her while I was locked up at the state hospital in Pueblo, Colorado. She was a nurse there on their surgical unit.”