Monster (26 page)

Most patients brought into the inner-city hospital’s ER for stabbing or gunshot wounds were right off the streets, usually intoxicated or high on something, and probably involved in some sort of criminal activity. Prostitution. Drugs. Robbery. It was no surprise to anyone in the ER when a drug dealer or a gang member came in full of holes. It was expected.

However, this young woman had been savagely stabbed and left to die outside of her own home on a quiet street not far from where many in the emergency room that night, including Read, lived. It was a nice neighborhood and she looked like a nice girl. No needle tracks. No evidence of drugs or alcohol in her blood. She was someone everyone in the ER could identify with.

“One of our own,” he would later say. “It was a shock to realize as we were working to save her life that this could have happened to any one of us.”

The less-experienced doctors wanted to devote the first order of business to the most obvious wound on her neck. But Read had taken a quick look and decided that whatever damage had been done there, it was not life threatening once the bleeding had been stanched. Instead, he decided to open her up, essentially splitting her from collarbone to navel.

As he suspected, the internal wounds were the real danger. Her belly was full of blood from the liver wound; a lung had also been punctured and she was drowning in blood. The only thing to do was keep pumping more blood and fluids into her—eventually enough to fill five adults—while the team of surgeons scrambled to close the holes.

After a couple of hours, they had to stop. Her body temperature had dropped to a dangerous level, and her blood had stopped clotting. Continuing might have killed her, so all they could do was pack her belly with absorbent material and try to get her warmed up. If she lived, they could finish their work later. But no one expected her to live.

Heather Smith surprised them all. She came to in the recovery room unaware that she was lying on a table still split open beneath a warming blanket. The world was fuzzy. There seemed to be something in her eyes, and it was as though she was peering through a tube. Then she became aware that her father was leaning over her. With a rush, she realized what that meant.

I’m alive. I’m alive.
Her mind rejoiced. She couldn’t remember ever having been so happy, just before she passed out again.

In the morning when they removed the packing material, the surgeons discovered to their delight that Smith had stopped bleeding. They could finish their work. She wasn’t out of the woods yet, but every minute she held on was a step closer toward surviving.

Heather not only lived but recovered at an amazing pace. At least physically. But the more conscious she became of her surroundings, the more the fear of her attacker replaced her joy at being alive. She recognized the fear. It was the old terror of monsters who lived under beds and in shadows, who struck in the dark when least expected and for no reason. Only now the monster had a face—blue—eyed, square-jawed, a nice smile.

While she remained in the intensive care unit, managing her fear was a little easier. There was a deputy posted to the unit because of a gang member who had been shot the same night she had been brought in. The police feared his enemies would come back to finish the job so an officer was assigned to his bedside. The deputy wasn’t there for her, but his presence made her feel better.

However, she was recovering so quickly that the hospital soon moved her to another floor. There her fears grew. A Denver newspaper had run an article about the attack using her and Rebecca’s names and addresses. All she could think of was that her attacker was still out there and now might come back for her because she could identify him. All she had to do was close her eyes and she could see his face clearly.

Every time the elevator opened outside her room, she held her breath and waited for the footsteps to pass her room. She expected that someday the footsteps would not pass and the man in a green jacket and blue baseball cap would be standing there in her doorway, looking at her with his blue eyes through those funny square-rimmed, silver glasses. She couldn’t stand being alone. So her mother remained at her side during the day, and every night her dad or brothers would stay with her until she fell asleep and then sleep in the waiting room down the hall.

Fear was one thing. Shock at the sight of her disfigurement was another. When she was strong enough, she went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Instead of the princess, she saw a red-eyed, harrowed-looking woman with a throat swollen like a balloon and a hunched back. An angry red scar ran from her right shoulder and plunged between her breasts. Pulling up her gown, she traced the line of staples and stitches that marched down to her belly. She got back in bed and cried.

She thought she was hideous. That man may not have killed her, but he had taken the beauty and bravado she had hidden behind. Now she felt as though she had nothing left. Except revenge... she knew that the only way she could ever get back what had been taken from her was to stay alive and put him in prison.

Seven days passed from when she was brought into the hospital. She demanded to be released. The resident surgeons didn’t want her to go. If she lived, their opinion was that she would be in the intensive care unit and then a recovery floor for three to four months. But she experienced none of the complications, such as infection, often associated with such wounds.

Smith continued to insist that she be allowed to leave until her attending physician at last deferred to Read. He went in to talk to her. As far as he was concerned, she was a medical miracle... and a testament to the teamwork that made Denver General one of the best trauma hospitals in the world.

Like everyone else, he hadn’t expected her to live. Most people who had lost that much blood, who had suffered not one but several potentially fatal wounds, would have never made it past those first couple of hours.

As the days had passed and she held on, he knew that Heather owed her survival to several factors: her athlete’s body and the fact that on that night everything—from Hascall applying pressure, to the paramedics’ quick action, to the surgeons’ skill—had gone right. But most of all Heather Smith owed her life to her will to survive.

Looking at her in her hospital room as she begged to leave the hospital, Read admired her courage. Her scars would heal, at least the outward ones; with a little plastic surgery, she would be as outwardly beautiful as she had once been.

The rest would be up to her, and those scars, the ones he couldn’t see, weren’t something he could deal with in a hospital. If she wanted to leave, he saw no reason to keep her. “Okay. You can go,” he said, smiling as he caught her in mid-explanation.

The next day, Smith went to the Denver Police Department to give a statement to assault investigator Detective Paul Scott. The detective, a twenty-five-year veteran, was amazed to see her. After all, the file on Heather Smith had been opened as a homicide case. Then he’d been told that even if she survived, she was likely to be brain-damaged, a vegetable, because her brain had been deprived of so much oxygen-carrying blood.

Yet here she was, prepared to give a statement and help the police artist with a sketch of her attacker. Scott was already working the boyfriend angle. They had interviewed her friends and everything pointed to this guy, Jason. He even talked to the young man, but he had an alibi. Still, the detective figured that maybe he had put someone up to it. Why else would the assailant pick Heather’s telephone number out of all the car advertisements in the newspaper?

Scott had another theory to add to Dr. Read’s on why Smith was still alive. He believed that her attacker meant to disable her with the first blow and push her into the open hatchback of her car. But she had fallen to the ground instead and at 5’6” and 130 pounds, she would have been a handful to try to pick up, especially with Heather and her friend screaming bloody murder. The attacker simply hadn’t had the time to take her someplace and finish the job at his leisure.

There was nothing much else to go on. Heather’s friend, Rebecca Hascall, could only give a general description. There were no usable fingerprints from the car. And the man had simply vanished. There was nothing to link this attack to any others that had occurred in the area recently. No reason for him to have called a certain detective in the Lakewood Police Department who at almost the same moment that Heather Smith walked into Scott’s office was getting his first call from Thomas Edward Luther.

After giving her statement to Scott, Heather sat down with the police sketch artist and helped him compose a picture of the man who attacked her. They worked on it for hours. Finally, the artist held up the drawing. It was the face of her monster.

“It’s him,” she whispered. “It’s him.”

Chapter Eleven

April 20, 1993—Fort Collins, Colorado

“If he raped her, the first words out of his mouth,” Scott Richardson said as he stared out the passenger window of the unmarked police car that sped north to Fort Collins, “will be that they had consensual sex.”

Mike Heylin didn’t reply. He just kept his eyes on the road ahead, occasionally glancing at the farmlands on either side of Interstate 25 that ran north and south paralleling the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. It simply wasn’t necessary to say anything, and his partner was more than likely talking to himself anyway.

Every once in awhile a dedicated cop like Richardson, the kind of cop who went with his emotions, got so involved in a case it was all he could think about. Heylin knew that his partner had sunk his teeth into this case like a terrier grabs a rat. It worried him. He’d seen entire police departments’ morales take roller-coaster rides on the outcomes of cases. Sometimes cops who got too wrapped up in their jobs lost their wives and families, even their own lives, when the stress pushed them over the edge. They drank too much, took chances, contemplated suicide.

So far, Scott was on top of his game. He was dealing with the Elder family’s frustrations and fears, while juggling all the possibilities in his head without losing his perspective. But Heylin knew that Scott wasn’t likely to let go of this one until he solved it or was broken by it.

The videotape was a stroke of luck, thanks to his partner’s quick thinking and instincts. If Scott had delayed starting in on the case at the beginning, even by a day, the tape might have been erased. But they still didn’t have a case, or a body, or even a clear idea of what happened to Cher Elder. They had no clear picture of who all was involved or how. This asshole, Luther, said he had witnesses—the Eerebout boys—who could corroborate his story about bringing Cher back to the apartment.

But Luther was an ex-convict, a violent sex offender, and to cops that pretty much meant he was a born liar. There was the sexual assault in Summit County eleven years earlier—Scott said the sheriff up there told him that Luther beat up that girl pretty bad. Lucky to be alive, he’d said. Guys like that didn’t suddenly change in prison. If anything, they got worse—more angry, more dangerous.

Heylin glanced over at his partner, but Richardson was looking east at the flat farmlands that stretched beyond the horizon to Nebraska. Cotton-puff cumulus clouds floated one after the other above the ground. The land between the Denver metropolitan area, which included Lakewood, and Fort Collins was rapidly filling in with housing projects and new malls as the cities expanded toward each other. But there were still great open spaces that in the spring looked like a brown and green quilt with newly plowed fields alternating with those in which the first tips of wheat poked through.

At the moment, Richardson was wishing he was zipping down some county highway between those patchwork fields on his Harley. Perhaps then he could, for a moment, forget Cher’s face as the wind whipped past and he coaxed the bike into more speed.

Heylin had been right that he was mostly thinking outloud when he made his comment about Luther volunteering that he’d had “consensual” sex with Cher Elder. If she was dead and then her body was found, Luther would want to have a reason why his semen might be found in her. Killing someone to cover up a rape made it a capital crime and that meant the possibility of the death penalty.

Slow down
,
bud
, Richardson cautioned himself for the hundredth time as he tore his eyes from the east to look north. His instincts told him that Luther was tied to Cher’s disappearance, but they couldn’t tell him how and hunches didn’t mean squat in a court of law.

Maybe the guy was telling the truth. Richardson tossed the possibility up in the air. Maybe none of them were involved. Or maybe Luther was just being set up by the Eerebout boys as the fall guy. Then again, that was giving Byron and his brothers, none of them rocket scientists, a lot of credit for imagination.

The car reached the top of a hill. The detectives could see Fort Collins in the distance. Richardson took a deep breath and let it go like a prayer to calm himself. This interview might be their only shot. They wanted to keep him talking for as long as possible, let him make a mistake that the whole case might rest on a few months down the road. If they alarmed him, he’d demand a lawyer and that would be it. A lawyer would shut him up tighter than a rusted nut.

Apparently, Luther was already getting cold feet. He’d called just before the detectives left the Lakewood office to say he’d made a mistake and given them the wrong information. He said he’d accidently given them directions to his girlfriend’s place. “Meet me at my place instead.”

When they arrived, Luther answered their knock on the door. There was no sign of anyone else.

Entering, Richardson looked around, making mental notes that he’d later write down on a legal pad. It was a tiny apartment with few furnishings. He tried to commit even the smallest detail to memory, like the pair of silver, square-rimmed glasses that lay on the kitchen table where Luther invited them to sit.