Monster (24 page)

It did not take her long now to spot her friend and the man who had accompanied her that night as they wandered through the casinos or sat at one of the gambling machines. “That’s him,” she said. “That’s the guy.”

Richardson looked closer. The tapes were grainy but the grey-haired mystery man looked like a normal, middle-aged guy—clean-cut, in shape, maybe even handsome. The mystery man now had a face.

Still, it was obvious to him that Cher and the man weren’t on a “date.” Cher practically ignored her companion while she gambled or talked to Knott. He just seemed to be tagging along, watching other casino patrons. Especially good-looking women, Richardson noted.

After viewing the videos, Richardson asked Knott if she could recall anything else about that night. “Just that the last time I saw Cher, she was getting into the passenger side of his car. He’d only had one beer, so he wasn’t drunk, otherwise I wouldn’t have let her go with him,” Karen said. Then she burst into tears. “That’s the last time I saw Cher.”

Richardson now had a definite link between the man last seen with Cher and Byron. After his first conversation with Knott, before he had the tape, he had asked Eerebout’s neighbors if they had seen a man fitting the description and his new blue Geo. Several of the neighbors recalled such a man and the car; one even recalled that the license plate frame had been from a dealership in the Fort Collins area.

With the tape in hand, Richardson asked the neighbors to come to the police station the morning after the day he met with Karen Knott. “Is that the same man you saw at Byron Eerebout’s apartment?” he asked pointing to the gray-haired man following Cher around on the videotape.

“Yep, that’s him,” said one neighbor. “My husband got into an argument with him about a parking space. That’s him, all right. What’d he do?”

Later that morning, Richardson asked Byron Eerebout to report to the Lakewood Police Department. The young man arrived and asked if the detective had any good news about Cher.
He’s a cool one,
Richardson thought, full of the “outlaw” bravado that Cher had probably found romantic. He took Eerebout back to the video room and ran the tape, watching his reaction.

Pointing to the mystery man, Richardson asked, “Recognize him?”

“I’ve never seen that guy before,” Byron replied.

Without changing his expression or tone of voice, Richardson ran the videos again and again asked the same question.

“Nope,” Byron said again. “I might if I saw him in person, but that—” he pointed at the television set “—is too grainy.”

Without revealing that he knew that Byron was lying, Richardson asked the young man to describe his relationship with Cher-Elder and the events of the weekend that Cher disappeared.

“We were just friends,” Eerebout said, correcting the detective’s reference to Cher as his girlfriend. “I had sex with her but that doesn’t make me her boyfriend.”

Cher dropped by unexpectedly Saturday evening, he said, and then got angry when he showed up with his new girlfriend, Gina Jones. The girls shot each other “dirty looks,” and then Cher began yelling when Byron announced that he was going to a bar with Gina.

“Then when I got home, there was a note, see, and there’s two notes—in the bathroom on the mirrors.” He and Gina had passed out but sometime in the early morning on Sunday, Cher had poked her head in the door and said, “ ’Bye.”

“Who was there when you got there with Adriel and Gina?” Richardson asked. He noticed that now the sticky notes had appeared that night rather than in the morning, as previously reported by Byron.

“J.D. and Tristan,” Byron answered.

“So she says ‘bye’ and that’s it?”

“That’s all she said.”

“Did you get up then?” Richardson asked recalling that Byron had originally told him about watching Cher leave from his apartment window.

“No. I just went back to sleep. It was just getting light outside.”

“Did you look out to see if she was by herself or anything?”

“No,” Eerebout said. He was starting to squirm in his seat, his eyes darting around as he licked his thin lips. He tried changing the subject. “This is what the note says. It says, ‘Call me. We’ll talk.’ ... And one says something to the effect of, ‘Now you know why I haven’t been with a guy for four years.’ ”

Eerebout decided that anger might throw the detective. Suddenly, he was blaming Karen Knott for telling the news media that he was Cher’s boyfriend. “I ... my mom and my lawyer ... they’re gonna call the news and these places to get that boyfriend crap taken off, ’cause I was an acquaintance, you know. I had sex with her, but that doesn’t make me her boyfriend. She came over to the house and, big deal, she left.”

Angry about the callous way the boy dismissed Cher, Richardson decided it was time to turn the screws. “I don’t know why you’re making a big deal out of it. All this is, is a missing person.”

Byron nodded. “Yeah, a missing person.” He said he didn’t even know Cher was missing until her family and friends started calling. “I’m worried, too.”

Then why, Richardson wanted to know, was he acting so nervous?

Eerebout denied it. “I can understand you guys comin’ there, but you know, walking into the house asking questions about how the medicine cabinet got broke and stuff like that’s a little—”

Richardson cut him off and pulled his chair closer. “Well, you’re acting like we’re... we’re draggin’ you in here...” he began, his voice even and reasonable.

“No, I—” Byron protested, laughing nervously.

“... like we’re accusin’ you...”

“Don‘t—that’s not what I’m sayin’.”

“... of all these hideous crimes...”

“No, I’m not saying that,” Byron said, holding his hands up as if to ward off the detective. “I’m sayin’ ...”

Richardson was relentless. “Well, yeah, that’s what you’re sayin’.”

Desperately, Eerebout tried to shift the focus. He’d heard something about an unknown drug dealer that Cher had maybe mentioned to someone that she was going to visit. Richardson just stared at him, his dark eyes boring into the young man’s blue ones.

“Wasn’t she... she seen at a bingo parlor?” Byron stammered.

“Well,” Richardson said, keeping his eyes fixed on Byron’s as he leaned closer, “we don’t think that’s good information.”

Byron swallowed hard. He complained that someone was spreading vicious rumors. People were starting to avoid him.

Richardson smiled. “Man, you’re sounding psychotic now.”

“No,” Eerebout said, laughing nervously.

“Are you hearin’ voices at night while you’re sleepin’, too?”

“No, it’s... come on,” Byron stuttered, “this ain’t bullshit.”

Just as suddenly as he had turned up the heat, Richardson backed off. He asked Byron what Cher was wearing that Saturday night.

“She has my ring,” Byron volunteered. “It’s her right finger she wore it on.”

Richardson asked if Cher had told him that she was going to Central City. The younger man denied it. “And,” Richardson said, pointing at the frozen image of the mystery man from the videotape, “you’re telling me that you’ve never seen this guy before?”

Eerebout shook his head. “I can’t recognize him from that thing.”

He protested that his injury from the Gulf War made it difficult for him to remember things clearly. He’d suffered head injuries which, he said, led him to mess up during his Army stint—larceny, deserting, all sorts of things. He’d gotten a medical discharge.

“They said I was psycho. That I didn’t know right from wrong.” It was the first thing the young man said that Richardson believed.

Byron went on to talk about how easily he got angry. Just recently, he had broken the wrist and knocked out several teeth of a man who had picked a fight at a party. “And I beat the hell out of a guy with a stick last week. He had a knife and about eight other Mexicans with him...”

Richardson grew impatient. This punk knew more than he was saying and was trying to steer the conversation in another direction. “Did you ever tell anybody that, uh, Cher and this older guy came back from Central City, and the older guy stayed in your apartment, and Cher got her car and left?”

“No.” Eerebout was shaking his head again. “Nope. See that’s what I don’t understand. People keep tellin’ people stuff, and that ain’t true.”

Richardson waved his hand as if to dismiss Byron’s remarks. He decided it was time to let Byron know that he’d been caught in at least one lie. “You remember when I first talked to you?”

Byron nodded so Richardson went on. “You told me she never came into the apartment. She never talked to you and that you saw her get in her car and leave. Then I talked to you again, and you told me, ‘Well, she came in, woke me up, and told me ‘Bye.’ ”

Eerebout sat for a moment looking like he’d been hit with a bat. Then he rubbed the back of his head and complained that he couldn’t remember details.

Richardson gave him some more rope to hang himself with. “Well, lemme put you to rest here,” he drawled, back to his good ol’ boy demeanor. “I’m just pounding my head against the wall trying to figure out who this guy is that she’s with up at the casino. Don’t you find that odd?”

Byron brightened and acted like he wanted to be helpful. Maybe she stopped at a bar first and picked the guy up. “If you ask everybody, Cher’s an open person. She was always, ‘Hi, who are you?’ ”

Richardson stared at Byron until he began to shift uncomfortably and look at the door out of the interview room. “You can go,” the detective said at last. Visibly relieved, Eerebout stood up only to have the detective point once again to the videotape picture. “You’re sure you don’t know this guy?”

Byron’s mouth hung open, then he started to speak, but the detective didn’t give him a chance to answer. “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 color drained from Eerebout’s face. There was no way Richardson would have given such a critical piece of evidence to the media. But the younger man was apparently no poker player. Now, if everything went as planned, the gray-haired mystery man would soon get a telephone call from an obviously frightened Byron Eerebout.
Then we’ll see
, Richardson thought grimly.

Two hours later, he was wishing he could be out riding on his Harley, away from people like the Eerebouts, when Donna handed him that slip of paper with a telephone number on it. “Some guy named Tom Luther called, said he’s the one you’re looking for,” she said.

Chapter Ten

April 12, 1993—Denver, Colorado

About the time that the Lakewood Police Department was issuing a press release about a missing girl for the evening newscasts, 27-year-old Heather Smith stood looking out the picture window of her living room. Large, heavy snowflakes mixed with equally large raindrops fell outside as if the weather couldn’t quite decide if winter was really over and spring had truly begun. The day had been sunny and warm, and although it was now evening, the flakes melted as soon as they landed on the street turning it dark and shiny beneath the streetlight.

Heather had never even heard of Cher Elder. She knew nothing of Detective Scott Richardson. Even if she had read something, or someone had told her about the mysterious disappearance of a young woman only a thirty-minute drive from her house near downtown Denver, she wouldn’t have paid much attention. It was just one of those things that happened to other people. A young woman must have made a mistake that put her into a bad situation—an error in judgment.

Smith worked as a bookkeeper at her father’s company, had numerous girlfriends with whom she regularly frequented nightclubs on Friday and Saturday evenings, and was pleased to receive the admiring looks of men attracted to her green eyes, shoulder-length chestnut hair, and trim, athletic body.

All of her friends thought Heather led a charmed life. She could have almost any man she wanted. She owned a pretty little Victorian home in an older but well-kept Denver neighborhood. She always seemed so strong, so self-confident. Few knew that much of it was an act.

Most of her friends were unaware of her battle with her self-image that had resulted in bulimia, an eating disorder characterized by excessive overeating followed by self-induced vomiting. It had begun when she was 14 years old. Her swimming coach had scolded her for not doing better at a national competition. She had swum well enough to move into the higher echelons of her sport, but it wasn’t good enough for him. Like many teenaged girls, she was already struggling with her self-image. With her coach’s words still ringing in her ears, her esteem plummeted. That night she went to an all-you-can-eat buffet with the team, gorged herself, and then walked into the restroom where she stuck a finger down her throat to throw up.

Thirteen years later, she was still dealing with the same insecurities, although she had beat the bulimia after a half-dozen years of counseling. She managed to hide from her fears by playing the role everyone expected of her: Princess of the Ball. The outside world saw brave, strong, independent Heather.

No one guessed that behind the flashing smile and outward elan, was still a little girl afraid of monsters who lurked in the dark. She did not like sleeping in a house alone and would often start awake at the slightest sounds, trembling in the darkness and wishing that she could call for her mother, sure that she could hear someone breathing in the shadows.

There was only one problem her friends were aware of—her ex-boyfriend Jason. She and Jason had dated for four years. She had been attracted to his dark good looks, his air of mystery, and his moody artist persona (he painted but destroyed his works almost as soon as they were complete, which was so, she thought, romantic). He once told her that he had friends who “were into revenge,” but he didn’t elaborate. She had liked that little bit of outlaw in him. At first. But, always jealous and possessive, Jason had grown increasingly abusive.

One dark night after an argument, he ordered her out of his car in a downtown Denver alley. She had to plead in tears for him not to leave and let her back into the car. Another time when she threatened to leave him, he held a gun to his head and said, “Now you know what I have to live with every day.” Frightened for him and herself, she had agreed to stay in the relationship.