Monster (23 page)

Byron was a tall young man, red-haired and blue-eyed—good-looking in a raw-boned sort of way. Richardson noticed he had cut his finger, which still had dried blood on it. The detective also noted that the bathroom’s vanity mirror was broken.

“It happened a couple of weeks ago,” Eerebout explained in response to the detective’s questioning look. “I was pissed off about what’s going on with the army.

“I was in the Gulf War, you know, and got accused of bringing back some rifles and grenades and a couple pistols. I got hurt over there. I was hit in the back of the head by a tent pole. Sometimes I don’t remember things so good. Now, they’re gonna discharge me for medical reasons, ’cause of that accident.”

Eerebout volunteered that he had been arrested by Denver police on several occasions—burglaries, assault, that sort of thing. He quickly shifted the conversation away from his troubles to Cher. “You know she had this good friend, Garfus, that she could talk to, you know, as just a friend. Maybe he knows where she is?”

Richardson had already heard about Garfus from another of Elder’s friends, but for the moment he had other things on his mind. “So tell me about Saturday night?”

Byron nodded as if he had been waiting for the question. “Well, I last seen her about eight o‘clock—that’s when I left with my friend, Adriel, to go to Whiskey Bill’s. We stayed there ’til it closed.

“Cher went to Central City and came back to my place about 6:30 in the morning. She came into my bedroom and said ’bye. Then she left.”

When he got up later that morning, Eerebout said, he found two “sticky notes” on the living room window. “They were from Cher. I ... I don’t remember exactly what they said, something like, ‘Now you know why I haven’t been with a guy in four years,’ something like that. J.D. was awake when she showed, and he saw her leave the notes. I’ll try to find ’em for you.”

Richardson nodded. “So what do you think happened to Cher?”

Byron shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she went back to Missouri?”

The detectives were getting ready to leave when Byron’s younger brothers, J.D. and Tristan, arrived. The detectives split the boys up and took them aside to talk.

Richardson got J.D. The teenager said he first met Cher a month or so earlier at a party that his older brother, Byron, had also attended.

“Cher left here about seven o’clock and went to Central City to visit her friend, Karen,” J.D. said. He shook his head at the detective’s next question, “No, I didn’t go with her. I went to sleep.

“She came back early in the morning, like four o’clock. I heard this knocking on the door and when I opened it up, there she was. She came in, got her coat, and left.”

“Did she go into Byron’s room?” Richardson asked.

“No,” J.D. answered, then looked up quickly, blushing as if he’d missed something. “Or maybe she did,” he stammered, “I’m not sure.”

“Was anyone with her when she came into the apartment?”

Again, the question seemed to strike a nerve. He shook his head again. “No. No one... she wasn’t with anybody.”

Heylin’s conversation with Tristan revealed nothing of importance. But Richardson left the apartment pleased.
Get their lips moving,
he repeated to himself. He’d just caught Byron in a lie.

When he interviewed Byron that first time over the telephone, the young man had been absolutely sure that he’d had no contact with Cher on Sunday morning. She hadn’t come into the apartment, he’d said, he’d only watched her leave from his window. Now his story was that she’d not only come into the apartment, but into his bedroom to say goodbye, taking the time to write and place two notes before leaving.

Then there was J.D. He said Cher had come into the apartment, retrieved her coat, and left. The younger brother came across as someone desperately trying to keep a story straight, and not doing very well at it.

Richardson drove back to his office more convinced than ever that the mystery of whatever happened to Cher Elder could be solved by the Eerebout boys. It didn’t bode well for her, he thought sadly. After all, why lie about a missing person case—if that’s all it was?

Still, Richardson wasn’t ready to put on the blinders. He placed a flag on Cher’s credit cards and bank accounts; officials were to notify him immediately if there was any activity. There was nothing. He contacted the border patrol and the airlines. Again, nothing, but he hadn’t expected much—her passport had been left in her room.

Nothing made sense except growing certainty that Cher was more than just missing. If anything, she was an overly responsible kid, staying in contact with mother and father, acting as a surrogate mother to Beth, her half-sister by her father’s failing second marriage. She had called or visited her best friend, Karen, every day until that Sunday.

Everywhere Richardson looked—California, Colorado, Missouri—he never found anyone with anything bad to say about Cher. The deeper he dug, the cleaner she got.

Something had happened to Cher Elder between the time she left Byron’s apartment, showed up in Central City with the mysterious older man, and the next morning. Why else were the Eerebout boys lying if she really had driven away from the apartment and into the blue that morning? The only item in his theory that didn’t make sense was the co-worker who had seen Cher at the bingo hall on Sunday night.

On April 17, he called Carrie Schieffer and asked her again if she was sure of the date she saw Cher. “Well, let me ask my husband,” Carrie replied. A minute later she came back to the telephone, chargrined. “Actually, he says it was Friday, not Sunday.”

A major piece of the puzzle slammed into place. Another piece was added that afternoon when a Lakewood patrol officer called in to report finding Cher’s silver Honda in the parking lot of a grocery store.

The car appeared to have been there for some time, as there was a coat of dust on it that had not been disturbed. A taillight had been broken at the scene. The car was locked, but he could see her winter coat lying on the back seat.

The discovery of the car told Richardson several things. For starters, if Elder had run away, why’d she leave her car in a grocery store parking lot? She’d either take it, or sell it, or maybe give it to a family member.

Also, the night Cher disappeared was cold and snowy. If she had picked up her coat at Byron’s, as J.D. had said, she would have worn it to her car, Richardson thought to himself.

The fact the car was locked told him something else—one of those tiny, seemingly insignificant clues about the person he was seeking. If whoever brought her car to this spot was a stranger, he wouldn’t have bothered to lock the doors. However, the act fit the psychological profile of “an associate murder”—the person had known Cher and locked up, probably subconsciously, much as a friend would have. Such profiles weren’t 100 percent infallible, but they were right much more often than they were wrong.

The most important clue regarding the car was the grocery store’s proximity to Eerebout’s apartment. If Cher had met with foul play, the location of the car only four blocks from the apartment meant one of two things: Cher had driven her car there and then was abducted by a stranger in a well-lit parking lot, or someone connected with Eerebout’s apartment was responsible for driving the car to the grocery store.

Added together with the locked doors, he believed the latter scenario. And that meant that whoever he was looking for was clever enough to leave the car in a busy parking lot of an all-night grocery where it wouldn’t be noticed for a long time, but also a lazy son-of-a-bitch who didn’t want to have to walk too far to get back to the apartment.

And that meant that whoever took Cher was probably acting alone, Richardson thought as he drove back to the office. Otherwise, he’d have an accomplice follow him in another car while he abandoned Cher’s car on the other side of the state, or at least downtown Denver.

lt doesn’t prove anything,
the little voice in his head cautioned. Maybe she was angry enough at Byron to want to make it look like she was in trouble. Then he thought of the photograph of Cher that hung on the wall of his office and considered everything he had learned about her. A devious, bitter woman, angry enough to put her family and friends through this wringer simply wasn’t part of that picture.

Richardson got back to the office and filled out a roll call report to be handed out to patrol officers and detectives as they came on duty. He noted that Cher Elder’s car had been found and impounded for testing. Then he hesitated before writing anymore, as if committing what he believed to be the case to paper would make it so. But there was no denying the obvious anymore. Cher was dead. He didn’t have a body, there were no eyewitnesses who had come forward to say they had seen her die. But he knew.

He looked at the roll call report, sighed, and then added, “Foul play is feared.” The Cher Elder case was unofficially a homicide investigation.

As far as Scott Richardson could tell, Elder’s “illegal activities” consisted of using her older cousin’s driver’s license to get into bars and, according to her friend Karen Knott, whom he interviewed the evening after Cher’s car was found, to get into Central City casinos on the night of Saturday, March 27.

Knott explained that she worked as a bartender and cocktail waitress at the Tollgate Casino. She was on duty that Saturday night when Cher walked into the casino accompanied by a man Knott did not know. She couldn’t remember his name... only that Cher introduced him as a friend of Byron’s.

“He was a white guy,” she said, “forty maybe. But nice looking. Six feet or a little taller and maybe 200 pounds. He had light gray hair and kinda a square face. Oh, and he drove a nice, new blue Geo. I remember ’cause Cher talked about it.”

Cher and the gray-haired man arrived about ten o’clock. After confiding that she and Byron had been fighting, Cher and the man left for another casino. Karen got off work early and joined them at the Glory Hole casino a few blocks away.

While she and Cher gossiped, Byron’s friend had just hung out in the background, sipping a beer. “I talked to Byron when Cher was first missing, and he said the guy and Cher came back to his apartment Sunday morning,” Knott recalled. “He said Cher left, but the guy stayed.”

Richardson could almost feel the face of his suspect beginning to materialize in front of him. If what Karen Knott had said was true, Byron and his brother J.D. had been caught in yet another, much bigger, lie. Determining who the mysterious gray-haired stranger was had become even more important.

In a sense, there was a feeling of relief as Richardson drove the winding, narrow road back from Central City. At least the mystery man wasn’t some untraceable stranger from out of state. He was a friend of Byron’s and enough of a friend, or a threat, for both Eerebout boys to lie to protect him.

Back at the office, he received a call from Rhonda Edwards who had just learned what her daughter and Byron were fighting about. Apparently, Cher had purchased a $700 waterbed for Byron’s apartment only to catch him in it with another girl.

Eerebout’s painting his apartment walls and steam-cleaning the carpet were just the sort of things one might do to hide evidence of a murder. Richardson had had to wait for Byron to leave the apartment so that he wouldn’t need a search warrant. He hadn’t wanted to alert him or his associates.

The landlord had let Richardson into the now-vacated apartment with the crime lab crew. They had found hairs that they at first believed belonged to a dog but later confirmed were wolf hairs. They had used Luminol, a chemical which reacts with rust in blood and can be seen using a black light, and had found evidence of two types of blood.

Richardson wasn’t overly excited about the blood traces they had found that day. He believed that whatever had happened to Cher Elder, happened away from the apartment. However, it would be just as important in a courtroom to prove that they had made every effort to investigate all possible suspects and crime scenes to rule out other possibilities.

Ever since he realized the case was more than a missing person, Richardson had spent every waking moment trying to make the pieces fit. Even eating dinner with his family, he was turning the facts over in his mind and hardly noticed when Sabrina or the boys demanded his attention. It wasn’t like him, Sabrina thought, he was always so determined to not be like his own father when it came to his family. But the Cher Elder case was consuming him. She prayed it would all be over soon.

Her husband was hoping for the same thing, for a different reason. The longer a murder goes unsolved, the more likely it will remain that way. Trails grow cold. Witnesses move away or disappear. Suspects refine their stories. Bodies decompose, the evidence disintegrating with the flesh.

Richardson desperately wanted to find Cher’s body. Nobody was going to freely admit what had happened. As far as he could tell, neither the Eerebouts nor anyone else connected to this case, had a shred of conscience. It was frustrating. Likely as not, the case rested on some tiny clue, perhaps something he had already looked at or something that would be found with Cher’s remains.

For the hundredth time, he went over all the conversations, the telephone calls, the possible scenarios. He was reviewing the interview with Karen Knott when suddenly he saw the casino in his mind. It was like being hit with a lightning bolt.

Hell, there were security cameras all over those places, designed to catch cheats and robbers. With any luck, he thought, they may also have caught Cher on film with the mystery man.

But even as his hopes began to rise, so did fear. He knew that security videotapes were often recycled... on what timetable he didn’t know. He dialed the casinos’ security offices and explained what he was after.

“Well, you are in luck,” said the first security chief, “those videos are scheduled to be erased tomorrow. If you—”

“Hold on to them,” Richardson interrupted, “I’m on my way.”

In the late afternoon of April 19, Karen Knott sat in a Lakewood Police Department interrogation room watching the videotapes Richardson had seized from the casinos. She had helped the security personnel and Richardson narrow the possibilities by recalling the areas of the casinos where Cher Elder had been.