She walked back out and found the telephone bill. It said Will Busenburg. Lisa Pace gasped.
He is living with Will Busenburg! Yuck. I hate that guy.
She remembered how in high school Will Busenburg had given her the creeps, how—in her opinion—he had never had anything nice to say, how he had asked Chris to skip school, how he had asked Chris to go to Hooters.
But she couldn’t dwell on that. Minutes were ticking and she had to continue her search. Pace checked the refrigerator and looked in the cabinets to see what kind of food they had, if any. If one of them had a girlfriend, she believed, there would be more food in the house.
She opened the pantry doors. All the items in the pantry were from her pantry with Chris, with her handwritten labels in her handwriting.
He couldn’t take everything in the house. He had to take everything in the pantry, too.
She wanted Chris back at the apartment, right then, so she could just leave.
Fifteen minutes after her investigation began, Chris Hatton returned. “I took some videos back to Blockbuster,” he said. “Plus, I had to give you time to go snoop through everything, didn’t I?”
She sighed, “Yeah.”
The day before Lisa’s birthday, she and Chris walked down his apartment steps, heading for their truck and dinner at the Olive Garden Italian restaurant, when they ran into Will Busenburg and Will’s girlfriend.
“Hey, how are you?” said Busenburg graciously.
“Hi,” said his girl, blond hair curling around her shoulders. “Nice to meet you.”
She seemed pleasant enough. But Lisa Pace didn’t really notice. She kept hearing Busenburg’s words from high school. “We need to wipe out all the niggers,” he had said. She just wanted to get out of there. She and Hatton exited quickly.
But not long thereafter, Lisa Pace was back over at the Aubry Hills Apartments seeing Chris. But Chris Hatton wasn’t telling anyone he was seeing Lisa Pace, especially not Glenn Conway and his family.
He wrapped his arms tightly around her voluptuous body. “What do people act like when they’re on acid?” he said. “What do people act like when they’re on cocaine or speed?”
“People on speed get nervous, jittery. They talk a lot,” she answered. “They move around a lot. Up and down a lot. Cleaning. Tidying things. Just nervous behavior. Or they look around, blink a lot.”
“Oh,” he said, “uh-huh,” as if making a connection.
She turned around and looked him deep in his dark eyes. “Why do you want to know about these things?”
“Just curious.”
“Why? Were you thinking about doing drugs?”
“No.” He didn’t hesitate. “I was just wondering. I think Will might be involved in some drugs. There’s a lot of traffic in and out of the apartment, and I don’t like it. I want him to move out. He’s a slob. He doesn’t clean up his share.”
As Hatton walked Pace to her truck, Busenburg drove up, drinking Hot Damn cinnamon schnapps out of the bottle. Pace sniffed with disgust. Every time she saw Busenburg he was drinking.
“Hey, man,” he cried, “you oughta have a shot of this.”
“Nah, I don’t want any,” Chris said, looking at Lisa.
“This is really good.”
Hatton looked again at Pace.
“I don’t care if you drink,” she said. “You can do whatever you want. I don’t tell you what to do.”
He took the bottle and swigged some down.
Busenburg offered Pace the bottle; then he realized he’d interrupted a conversation. “Oh, I’ll see you later.” He walked up the stairs but called back to Chris, “Are you coming?”
“I’ll be there in a little bit.”
It wasn’t much later that Hatton once again asked Pace about cocaine.
“Why do you keep asking me about cocaine? Are you doing drugs?”
“No,” he answered.
“People get hooked on it real easy, and it’s not anything you want to have in your life.”
They never talked about it again.
Around 10
A.M
., on an October Saturday in 1994, Pace knocked on the door of Hatton’s apartment. He had promised to make a small recall repair on their truck. No one answered the door. She leaned close to it. She heard voices and a TV inside. She knocked louder, and she knocked longer. She knocked for minutes. Still, no one answered. She was getting ticked.
Finally a bed-headed Hatton came to the door. “What!” he said.
“You said I could come over this morning,” she griped loudly, “and you were going to do this. Now, what the hell? Nobody’s answering the stupid door.” She chewed him out long and vigorously.
He yelled back.
“Are you going to hit me or something!” she screamed. “You’re right up in my face!”
He grabbed her shoulders and shook her against the iron railing. “I feel like throwing you down those stairs.”
“Okay. Go ahead. Just go ahead, do it, Chris.”
He pushed her toward the door. “You’re not worth my time.”
“Hey,” a dark-haired girl called from the doorway, stove smoke billowing behind her. “Would you like some pancakes?”
“No. No,” said Pace tersely. “We don’t want any pancakes. Thank you.”
The girl walked back inside.
“Who is
that?”
said Lisa.
“That’s Will’s girlfriend. You met her.”
“That’s the same girl?” She wore big, ugly, schoolboy glasses and her hair was dark rather than blond.
Lisa Pace said her last piece and left.
By the last week of October, Hatton and Pace were no longer speaking. Still, every time the phone rang, her stomach dropped as she hoped, just hoped, that it was Chris on the other end.
But Hatton wasn’t there. He was over at the Conways, and the Conways liked that just fine. June Conway, Glenn’s mother, was a heavyset country woman, with short hair and glasses, who was nice, open, talkative, and easygoing. She was just what Chris Hatton needed—she mothered him well.
Glenn’s younger sister, Cathy, loved having Chris around, too. She almost melted when he smiled. At the Conways’, Chris Hatton smiled a lot. He felt like family.
When Hatton said something there that seemed like baloney, June Conway looked deep into his brown eyes and said, “Aaaah, excuse me.” It was much better than being bitched at by Lisa Pace or punished by Bill Hatton.
At the Conways’, Hatton could wrestle on the furniture and only get a mild rebuff from June. Like Holly, June Conway loved to tease Chris about his shyness with the girls. By Halloween, shyness wasn’t the worry.
Hatton looked into June’s eyes, kind behind her glasses. “This girlfriend of Will’s,” he said, “I don’t like her. And I don’t trust her.” Chris wasn’t smiling. “One time she came on to me. I told her to back off and get out of the apartment, Will’s not here. I don’t want anything to do with her.”
In November, Hatton and Pace spoke once or twice on the phone and once or twice at H-E-B. Hatton had survival on his mind, not Lisa. One night, while riding his bicycle home from Capitol Beverage, he was run off the road. After that, his boss, Gary Thompson, let Chris borrow a company truck to drive during his personal hours.
Thompson liked Hatton, and Hatton liked Thompson. He was a loving Christian man who listened patiently.
In December, Hatton phoned Pace to say Merry Christmas. She asked him about his Thanksgiving. He said he went to his grandparents; he drove a company truck to get there.
A few nights later, he was out drinking with Glenn Conway and Glenn’s mother. June was driving when Chris demanded that she stop the truck. He jumped out, grabbed a huge Christmas wreath from a storefront, and handed the wreath to June. It was his gift to her.
June Conway got Chris Hatton a Christmas stocking to hang with the rest of the Conway family’s.
Chris gave June and Holly each a red metal vase with a candle in the middle and fresh flowers around the candle. He tried to hide the flowers behind his back as he walked up to the Conways’ front door. But Chris’s big grin couldn’t hide anything.
June set the flowers on her entertainment center and kept them there until they started dying. Then she moved them into the bedroom and placed them by the headboard of her bed.
Hatton talked to Glenn and June Conway more and more about his concerns about Will Busenburg. “Will drives to San Antonio or Houston, gets out of the car, goes to lunch, comes back to the car, drives home and makes one thousand or five hundred dollars. He brags about it all the time. It’s easy money.” He worried more that Busenburg was into dealing drugs.
Time and again, Chris Hatton told the Conways that he despised Will’s girlfriend. The Conways tried to convince him to move in with them.
“Pack your stuff. We’ll move you out tonight. Just get your stuff.”
He laughed. “I’ll be fine.” Chris Hatton wasn’t about to let Will Busenburg get him down.
Eventually Hatton paid Pace back $400 of the $2,500 he’d taken from her. Then his phone was disconnected.
But he could still smile. Chris, Glenn, Marnie, and June went out drinking at Dance Across Texas. They laughed, acted silly, and Hatton got up enough nerve to ask a girl to dance. Then Marnie got into a fight, and they had to leave, again.
“Damn,” said Hatton, “and I just met this girl.”
“I know,” joked June, “and I just started dancing.”
Two days later, he and Conway went out looking at used trucks for Hatton to buy. He phoned Lisa Pace one last time. It was January 5, and he called to tell her he was selling their furniture. He sold the couch for $20 to help pay the rent.
On January 6, he drove the Capitol Beverage truck up to Holly’s. He brought her flowers. He and Jim Fletcher, Holly’s fiancé, fried chicken tenders, one of Chris’s favorite foods. He told Holly how lucky he was to work for Gary Thompson.
She walked Chris to the truck and gave him a huge hug good-bye.
Hatton bought a pickup truck. It was an ugly, dented, scratched-up, beat-up clunker of a brown 1979 Chevy, which his grandparents helped pay for.
He drove straight over to the Conways’. “How do you think I should fix it up?” he said, giddy. “You gonna help me?”
He drove over to his uncle’s to show it off, then retreated to the Conways’ for support. “Uncle Bill said, ‘How can you afford this? Why did you ask your grandparents?’ ” Chris shook his head. “He was down on everything about it. When I asked him to come outside to look at it, he didn’t want to.”
Chris, Glenn, and Glenn’s father started cleaning up the truck’s engine and talked about how they could repaint the vehicle.
Hatton spent the night. With Busenburg as a roommate, Hatton had become a regular overnight guest at the Conways’. He spent the next few nights there, working on his truck each time until 1
A.M
.
On Monday evening, January 9, 1995, Chris Hatton was again with the Conways. They shared dinner from McDonald’s, and Chris shared his heart with June Conway. “Guys come over, they leave packages for Will, and Will leaves a brown paper bag for them,” he said.
About 10
P.M
., Glenn walked in. Exhausted, he went straight to bed.
June continued listening to Chris.
“Will brags all the time about making all this money.”
June Conway grew more concerned and begged Chris to spend the night.
“I’ve gotta go to work in the morning and I don’t have a uniform here.”
“I’ll get you up in time to go home and get cleaned up.”
“No, I’ll be all right. I’ll go on home.”
She begged him to move in with them. She wanted him away from Will Busenburg. “We’ll move you out tonight.”
Hatton just laughed and smiled. Besides, Will Busenburg was in the process of moving out his belongings.
“Move in here with us,” said June, again. She just didn’t trust that Busenburg, moving out or not, especially not if he was dealing drugs.
“I don’t know,” Hatton answered.
“Well, you need to at least go down to the manager’s office, explain to them the situation, about Will moving out, and say you need to get the locks changed, that you want it done immediately.”
But she knew the manager had recently installed a dead bolt and Hatton didn’t think he needed anything else.
Around one in the morning, Chris Hatton got into his beat-up pickup truck and left the Conways’ home. He never returned.
Seven
On Saturday, January 14, 1995, Holly Frischkorn’s doorbell rang. Tired, worried, she opened her apartment door to find Lieutenant Dan LeMay of the Round Rock Police Department. She knew this wasn’t good. Holly lit a cigarette as her dogs ran anxiously around and between her long legs.
“They believe the body is Michael’s,” said LeMay. “You need to get dressed and come down to PD.”
Frischkorn inhaled deeply as she sat down across from Detective Manuel Mancias. It was a typical nondescript law enforcement room—papers, clutter, cases. She didn’t even notice.
Calmly she told him about Chris’s background—that his family called him Mike; that Deputy Bill Hatton had legal custody of Mike and his brother, Brian; that despite her divorce from Bill Hatton, Holly was still close to Michael.
She spoke about Mike’s relationship with Lisa Pace; that she didn’t know Mike’s roommate’s name but she did know they weren’t getting along; that Mike had complained about the roommate not paying his share of the bills and rent.
Holly wanted to light a cigarette. She talked about Glenn Conway being Mike’s best friend, and that she last saw Mike on January 6.
“He told me he was going to purchase a pickup truck.” She told Mancias that TCSO deputy John Phillips, who was a corrections officer at the Del Valle corrections facility, was also a high school friend of Mike’s.
Then Corporal Holly Frischkorn lost her police composure. She began to cry. “Michael’s roommate dated a topless dancer. He brought other dancers to the apartment on a regular basis. And Michael didn’t like that.”
She shook her head. “Michael didn’t have an enemy in the world.” Holly recalled the sweetness of her nephew, the way he’d carried the bags on his first day in her home:
“Aunt Holly, with me around, you’re never gonna have to worry about anything again.”
The words rang in her head. “His roommate could be involved in his murder.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The ill feelings between them . . . that they weren’t getting along.”
Holly Frischkorn was told she could leave. She asked to see the body of her nephew.
The TCSO detectives didn’t want her to view him. Chris Hatton’s burned head looked more like that of a dead coyote’s picked over by the buzzards. The Medical Examiner’s Office refused her.
But Holly Frischkorn, the former military woman, was determined—she didn’t believe anyone had the right to make the choice for her. She pressed on.
She was told that there wasn’t a private room at the ME’s office to view the body without other bodies around.
Don’t you think that should be important enough to make a room for viewing by family members?
she thought.
Sergeant Gage called Bill Hatton and arranged to meet him at TCSO headquarters.
At 3:50
P.M
., Saturday, January 14, 1995, Deputy Bill Hatton arrived at the downtown office to learn that his nephew had been brutally murdered, mutilated, and burned.
“Mike was a very quiet person,” said Hatton. “I knew he had a roommate, but Mike never told me who he was.” Hatton looked down at his large hands and told Detective Mancias that his nephew’s roommate dated a topless dancer, brought dancers to the apartment, and Mike hadn’t liked that.
Mancias listened carefully as if this were his first time hearing this information. Confirmation was always good. Mancias leaned back in his chair.
Stoically Hatton said that Mike’s roommate had moved out without paying his share of the rent or bills. “Mike recently bought a truck,” he noted. “I think it was a 1979 Chevrolet and was brown in color.”
“When did you last see your nephew?”
“It was Tuesday.”
That was January 10, the day before the body had been found.
“I received a call from him,” Hatton continued. “He asked me to help him get his truck started. After I helped him get it started, Mike left, and that was the last time I spoke to or saw him.” He sighed. It was the heavy sigh of a big man in loss.
At 4:35
P.M
., Deputy Richard Hale sat in his unmarked vehicle watching the Aubry Hills Apartments. Backed into his parking spot, he’d been sitting there for six long, boring hours, staring at the steps that led up to Hatton’s apartment.
Suddenly Hale shifted in his car seat to full alert. A black pickup truck drove up and parked six or seven spaces from the apartment, despite closer parking being available. A white male, with a white female, got out of the truck and walked toward the apartment of Chris Hatton.
Hale glanced at a driver’s license photograph of Will Busenburg and reached for his radio. He called Deputy Bruce Harlan. Harlan sat in his unmarked vehicle watching the back side of the apartment.
“The suspect has arrived. Cover the south side of the apartment. When the location of the suspect is determined, we’ll both take him into custody.”
But Harlan didn’t respond. Hale tried again. He needed to get out of his vehicle, fearing he was about to lose his suspect. With one leg almost out the door, he tried Harlan one last time. Harlan had been in the middle of changing his radio battery.
Hale, quietly and quickly, exited his car and walked close to the stairwell that led up to the apartment. His suspect unlocked the door and entered. Hale stayed downstairs. Harlan joined him. “A white female and a white male have entered the apartment,” Hale whispered to Harlan as they stood underneath the stairs.
Hale knew that the suspect would immediately know that the police had been there—a search warrant lay in purposeful open view in the apartment, rubber gloves left by the crime lab team were in the trash, a section of the carpet in the bloody bedroom was missing.
“I’ll talk to Busenburg if you’ll talk to the female,” he continued whispering.
The deputies heard the apartment door open. Hale stepped out from beneath the stairs and watched the couple exit the murder site, then lock the door behind themselves. The suspects began walking down the steps. The woman, empty-handed, passed Hale. Harlan stepped between her and Hale so that she was separated from her companion.
Nonchalantly Hale pulled his badge out from beneath his plainclothes shirt and drew his weapon, while keeping it tucked behind his back. Harlan pulled his weapon and held it close to his leg, its barrel pointed toward the ground. Hale stepped in front of the man.
“Travis County Sheriffs department,” he called. “What is your name?”
“Will Busenburg.”
“You’re being placed under arrest for suspicion of murder. Place your hands behind your back.”
Busenburg did, and he was cuffed.
Hale secured his weapon. Harlan tucked his in his belt line behind his back. Then Hale read Busenburg his rights. “Do you understand your rights?”
“Yes. Murder?” Busenburg was emotionless. “What’s going on?”
“I’ll talk to you about it in a minute,” Hale said.
“Murder?” the female companion chimed in. “What are you talking about? What murder? I don’t know what you’re talking about? I don’t understand. Who’s been murdered?”
Hale glanced up at the apartment.
Yeah,
he thought. The yellow crime scene tape pulled down by Sergeant Gage lay by the front door.
He patted down Busenburg. In the suspect’s right front pants pocket was a small, folding knife. Hale walked the cuffed young man over to the unmarked vehicle and called Sergeant Gage.