05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (19 page)

“What happened?” Melissa asked the bouncer. “Why didn’t they come in?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Melissa thought about it, figured Colton had convinced Jennifer to go with him to get his eight ball of drugs, and went back to the table to join her friends.

Just after midnight, Jennifer called Michael Rodriguez, who lay on the couch watching television. “What’s up?”

“I’m still out with my friend Colton. He’s upset,” she said. “He’s in trouble and the only people who can help him are in jail.”

“Everything okay?” Rodriguez asked.

“Yeah,” Jennifer said. “It’s fine. I’ve got to get home soon. I’ve got to work in the morning.”

An hour later, at 1:05, Michael’s phone rang again. At first, Jennifer sounded as if she just wanted to talk. “What’re you doing?” she asked.

“Watching TV. What’re you doing?”

“We’re leaving, I have to get home,” she said.

Then all of sudden, she shouted, “Hey, that’s not my car.”

“My God, Colton’s trying to bust in a car window,” she said to Rodriguez. “He’s upset because he lost his cell phone. I’m helping him look for it.”

“What’s happening?” Rodriguez asked.

“We’re walking to my car,” she said. Then, sounding exasperated, “Oh, great, now he’s pissing on a car.”

“Are you okay?” Rodriguez prodded. They didn’t know each other well, and he didn’t want to pry, but he was getting worried. Still, he’d been to Sixth Street with friends who got drunk and did stupid things. That wasn’t unusual, rarely anything to be concerned about.

“Everything’s okay,” Jennifer said. “I’m going to help him find his phone. I’ll call you when I get home.”

“Okay.”

With that, Jennifer Cave hung up the telephone. Michael Rodriguez thought about that telephone call for a moment. Jennifer sounded confident, insisted she wasn’t in any danger. There was no reason to agonize. Feeling satisfied all was well, Rodriguez turned back to the television, and soon fell asleep. When he woke the next morning, he wasn’t concerned that Jennifer hadn’t called him when she got home, as she’d said she would. It was late the last time they talked, and he assumed that she probably hadn’t wanted to wake him. Later, he’d look back at that night and reconsider: Was Jennifer trying to tell him something? Did she want him to look for her if she didn’t call? Was she trying to make sure someone knew where she was that night, with whom, and notice if she didn’t check in?

“I don’t know,” Michael would say more than a year later, combing through his dark hair with a thick hand, his eyes regretful. “I’ll always wonder. I’ll always wish I’d insisted I’d go get her. But she said she was okay. How could I have known?”

Fifteen

Less than an hour after Michael Rodriguez hung up the telephone with Jennifer, Vanessa, the oldest of the Cave sisters, woke up feeling tense and anxious. It was dark out, and she looked at the clock. Later, she’d remember it was about 2
A.M.
She’d been out the night before celebrating a friend’s birthday but had only two drinks. Home early and to bed, she’d fallen asleep quickly. Looking about the darkened room, she couldn’t understand her apprehension. Then, suddenly, Vanessa gripped her abdomen and ran to the bathroom, with the room spinning around her. For an hour, she could barely sit up. In the wee hours of the morning, as abruptly as it started, the nausea passed.

Afterward, Vanessa went back to bed, where she fell into a deep sleep.

At the Orange Tree at 3
A.M.
, Nora Sullivan was wide awake, unpacking boxes, when someone knocked on her condo door. She looked out the peephole and saw Colton. She opened the door, and he burst through, looking agitated. “Did you hear gunshots?” he asked.

“No,” Nora said. “Why?”

Excited, Colton launched into a tale about Mexican drug dealers and how he’d gotten into a fight where bullets were exchanged. Nora half listened. She didn’t like nonsense, and that’s what it sounded like to her, like fiction. She had the same impression she’d had back in California in high school, when a guy she knew insisted he’d killed a woman and dumped her body. In that case, too, Nora figured the kid was making it all up.

As he talked, Pitonyak said he’d lost his cell phone, and asked to use Nora’s. He wanted to call Evan, a guy in Colton’s circle of friends, one everyone knew they could count on in a jam, a nerdy kid who would do anything for a friend. Colton tried Evan’s phone number twice, but his friend didn’t answer. Unconcerned, Nora sat down on the floor and went through another box, unpacking, while Colton paced the small room, jabbering on and on about the gun battle. She paid little attention, scoffing at the very notion that rounds of gunfire had been exchanged just six doors from her apartment. “I would have heard it. I didn’t want to waste my ears on garbage like that,” she’d say later. “So I kind of tuned him out.”

Despite Sullivan’s disinterest, Colton rattled on, claiming he’d shot someone, one of the drug dealers. As if to prove he’d told the truth, Colton pulled a handgun out of the waistband of his shorts to show her. Holding the gun up, he slipped out the black magazine holding the bullets, saying he didn’t want it to go off accidentally.

“Do I have blood on me?” he asked a short time later.

Nora glanced up and saw a smudge of what could have been blood on Colton’s forearm. As she listened, Nora thought again about how close the two apartments were and concluded that she was right the first time; she would have heard shots if a gun battle had gone on so close.

“Sure, Tupac,” she said, sarcastically addressing Colton as Tupac Shakur, the infamous rapper murdered in 1996 in a Las Vegas drive-by shooting.

When Colton calmed down, Nora got two beers, and they stood on her balcony drinking and smoking cigarettes. When he left, Colton said, “I’m going to my apartment, to clean up.”

Later it appeared that Colton Pitonyak got little sleep that night. An hour or so later, at 4:28
A.M.,
he logged onto his computer and clicked over to www.sherdog.com, a martial arts Web site that promotes brutal ultimate fighting competitions. Somewhere he found his cell phone, and he used it off and on, trying unsuccessfully to reach his friend Evan. Early that morning, before the sun came up, Colton was back on his computer, this time clicking onto Facebook, working on his profile, the one where he listed his favorite gangster movies, and then at 5:34 he text-messaged Laura Hall.

“What do you mean?” she responded.

The alarm clock in Denise Winterbottom’s bedroom buzzed at 6:15 that morning. She turned it off. Her boyfriend slept beside her, and she got up, grabbed her clothes, and walked through the living room to the second bathroom, the one across from Jennifer’s room, the bathroom the two women shared. As she passed Jennifer’s bedroom door, Denise knocked.

“Hey Jennifer,” she called out. “Time to get up.”

Then she heard Jennifer’s alarm clock go off.

Denise ducked in the bathroom and grabbed her toothbrush. She started brushing her teeth, but still heard the alarm clock. She wondered why Jennifer didn’t silence the alarm. Still brushing, she stood outside Jennifer’s door, listening. “Jennifer,” she called out again, knocking harder on the door. “Wake up, girl. You’ve got to get to work.”

The alarm droned on, incessant, and Denise stood outside Jennifer’s room staring at the door. For some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to open it, but she didn’t know why. She had the unmistakable impression that she didn’t want to see what was inside. Finally, she had no other choice. She had to open the door. The last time she’d seen Jennifer the evening before, she had been going to bed, but when Denise opened Jennifer’s door, the room was immaculate, the bed made, Jennifer’s clothes laid out for work, but Jennifer wasn’t there.

Denise scanned the room, walked over, turned off the alarm, and looked about the bedroom again. Jennifer had to be there. But she wasn’t. Suddenly, Denise experienced a wave of dread.
Something’s wrong
, she thought.
Something’s terribly wrong
.

Yet, what? She decided to go to her babysitting job, and call the law firm later, to make sure Jennifer had arrived safely. But then, she had second thoughts. “I’ll feel silly when she picks up the telephone,” she told herself. “She’s fine. She probably just stayed overnight with a friend.”

Forty-three minutes later, Colton called Laura Hall. She’d spent the night at a friend’s apartment, a thin, dark-haired guy with a manicured goatee whose name was Ryan Martindill. Laura and Martindill had worked together in the workers’ compensation department at Pena’s law firm and remained friends, going out off and on, sometimes with Martindill’s roommate, a heavyset guy named Star Salzman. When Colton hadn’t called her back to get together the night before, she called Martindill, and he picked her up at her apartment. She had a bottle of rum with her, and at his place in south Austin, they drank while they talked and watched television. Sometime between 11 that evening and 1
A.M.
, they fell asleep on separate couches in front of the television. Martindill was still asleep when Laura’s cell phone rang.

Colton and Laura talked for thirteen minutes, and then Laura shook Martindill, eager for him to wake up. “Colton called,” she said. “I need a ride to my car.”

Martindill wasn’t surprised. He’d watched the power Colton Pitonyak had over Laura. He’d never met him, but he believed that Hall was obsessed with Pitonyak. So Martindill got up and drove Laura to her apartment to get her car. Hall seemed intent on getting to Colton’s quickly.

At 8:30
A.M.
, Bill Thompson was working at his desk at Grissom & Thompson, when he realized Jennifer Cave hadn’t shown up for work. It seemed odd. She’d been so gung-ho the day before, so into the job. He thought about it, but assumed she was just running late. When another half hour passed and she still wasn’t there, he dialed her cell phone. Her voice mail came on, and he left a message.

At 10:30, Scott text-messaged Jennifer: “Have a good day at work.” He didn’t think much about it when she didn’t reply, assuming she was busy at her new job. He hoped it was going well, and he smiled, thinking about the night before, glad that they’d talked.

Meanwhile, when Jennifer still wasn’t at the office at eleven, Thompson thought over the situation. He didn’t believe he’d read Jennifer wrong; she was excited about the job, eager enough that he knew she would show up.

Concerned, Thompson called in his office manager and asked her to check on Jennifer. The woman drove north out of Austin to Denise’s apartment at Brook Meadow Village, Jennifer’s address on the job application. When no one answered her doorbell, the office manager wrote a note asking Jennifer to call the firm, tucked it in the door, and then drove back downtown to the office.

At 11:45 that morning, Michael Rodriguez arrived ready for his day’s work at Progressive Insurance. The first thing he did was call Jennifer to make sure she’d gotten to work all right. In the back of his mind he replayed their conversation from the night before. Jennifer didn’t pick up her cell phone, and it switched to voice mail. “Wondering how your day is going. Give me a call,” he said.

Around two that afternoon, Bill Thompson’s concern had grown into worry. Where was that girl? Why hadn’t she come in? Why didn’t she call? He pulled out Jennifer’s application and tried her cell phone again. Still no answer. He left a message and then, an hour or so later, he called the only other phone number on the application, Sharon’s cell phone.

“Mrs. Cave, I don’t mean to alarm you,” Thompson said, after introducing himself. “It’s just that Jennifer didn’t come in today. Have you talked to her?”

Sharon wasn’t sure what to think. Her first thought was that she’d been foolish the day before to believe that Jennifer had changed. But then she thought back to the conversation. It was true that Jennifer had disappointed her in the past, but she didn’t believe she’d lied to her about the job. Jennifer was jazzed, absolutely thrilled about working at the law firm.
She wouldn’t have not shown up
, Sharon thought.

“I’m going to make a few calls,” she told Thompson.

The first person Sharon called was Scott. When she told him that Jennifer hadn’t shown up at work, Scott was immediately surprised, then quickly disappointed. Everything she’d said about wanting to change her life, he reasoned, was just another lie. The most likely scenario was that Jennifer had gone out after he left and gotten high or drunk and hadn’t sobered up in time for work. “Jen probably stayed out late partying,” he told Sharon. “I wouldn’t be concerned.”

“Scott, something’s wrong,” Sharon said. She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but she did. She felt certain of it; something was very wrong.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, shrugging it off. “She’s fine. She’s just out somewhere with friends.”

“I have to find Denise,” Sharon said.

“Have you seen Jennifer?” she asked when she got Denise on the telephone.

Denise had brought Gracie to her house to nap, wanting to check for Jennifer. Nothing had changed. Jennifer’s work clothes were still laid out and the room was untouched. When Denise saw the note on the door from the law firm, she was flooded with regret for not following up on trying to find Jennifer. The first one she called was Eli, but he hadn’t seen Jen. When Denise thought about calling Sharon, she hesitated. She’d never met Sharon and had only talked to her on the phone, at times when Sharon called for Jennifer and took the opportunity to thank Denise for taking her daughter in. She was worried, but Denise didn’t want to get her friend in trouble.

“Jennifer wasn’t here this morning when I went to wake her up,” Denise said.

She then told Sharon about the previous night, how Jennifer washed clothes, watched a TV movie with her, and then went off to bed, asking her to wake her the next morning.

Sharon had to ask. There was no way not to. “Is Jennifer on drugs again?”

Denise thought for a moment. Jennifer had used drugs but never seemed to be overdoing it. If she told Sharon that Jennifer was back on meth, even a little, how would it help? “No,” she lied. “She’s not.”