Redemption (7 page)

“Yeah, I hear you. But you’re telling me it’s common knowledge that two fourteen-year-olds are raped in your community by the same guy and nothing is done about it?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

“Why would you rent your guesthouse to a guy who raped two fourteen-year-old girls and then allow your own granddaughter to fraternize with him?”

Kit lowered her head. “First off, I didn’t know he raped those girls until
after
Ashlee’s murder. However, we spent a great deal of time together talking. I’d have him to the house for dinner or coffee and we got to know each other. He had issues—”

“Issues?”

“He had problems...
severe
problems rooted in his childhood, which he openly shared with me in great detail.”

“Like what?”

“He suffered horrific physical, mental, and sexual abuse at the hands of his mother—”

“Sexual abuse by his
birth
mother?”

“Yes. The woman was insane. She should have been locked up.”

“Why would a nineteen-year-old guy tell you, his
landlord
, something that personal?”

“Look at me, Jane P. I give off that ‘Earth Mother’ vibe. I was always the ‘cool gal’ who lived in Big Sur. I made a good living as an artist. I did my share of Big Sur seascapes, but I was famous for my nudes. Both men and women. Sometimes together in the same painting. I was cutting edge.”

“Yeah. Right. Cutting edge,” Jane said, not impressed.

“I was an outspoken militant against anything that stifled human development. I still am! I marched in Salinas for migrant farm worker reform and boycotted any number of items to draw attention to injustice. Most important, I was respected as one who would not condemn you, no matter your sexual preference, religion, lack of religion...you get the point. People could tell me anything.
Anything.
They knew I could be trusted to keep their secrets and I wouldn’t turn them in—”

Jane’s ears perked up. “Turn them in?”

“For drugs,” Kit said, being more specific. “You know, pot, coke, whatever.”

“Yeah, right.
Whatever
,” Jane said, a stinging tenor of judgment in her voice. Jane hated drugs. They had become the defining core of most crimes she investigated. “It’s always wise to keep your personal supply line running smoothly, isn’t it?”

Kit regarded Jane with a sideways glance. “I smoked pot. No hard drugs.”

“In front of your granddaughter?”

“No, of course not!”

“And she never smelled it on your clothes or your furniture or in your house?” Jane was quickly turning the conversation into an interrogation.

Kit’s back stiffened. “I always smoked it outside, and what in the hell has that got to do with the reason I’m here?”

“Just trying to get an accurate visual, Kit,” Jane said in a cool tone. “So, back to you being the ‘Earth Mother’ and Lou confessing his deep, dark sexual secrets to you.”

Kit took a moment to organize her thoughts. “I was aware that his childhood trauma created some twisted ideas in his head, much of them circling around fanatical Christian fundamentalist religion, sex, violence, the Devil, and on and on.”

“Sex, violence, God, and the Devil? This shit didn’t send up a red flag to you?”

“Back then, I bought into the New Age sermons about not judging others. Like I said before, I sadly confused proper discernment with judgment. So while my left brain was concerned about Lou’s disturbing comments, my right brain kept admonishing me to not judge him!”

Jane had to force herself not to roll her eyes when she heard right brain/left brain. She understood the difference between the logical mind and the creative mind, but she hated the New Agers and their patent terminologies. “Okay, after Ashlee’s murder, you hear stories about two fourteen-year-old girls supposedly raped by Lou—”

“Not
supposedly
! He raped those girls, Jane!” Kit stressed, jabbing her index finger several times onto Jane’s desk. “Those rapes proved that Lou Peters had a criminal mind as well as a criminal pattern. That’s the most important part of all of this!
Lou has a definite pattern
. The two girls he raped were both fourteen years old. Ashlee was fourteen years old. The girls were brunettes. Ashlee was a brunette. The girls had hazel eyes. Ashlee had hazel eyes. The pattern is a complicated, psychological mesh of Lou’s tweaked perspective. Lou’s mother was a brunette with hazel eyes. I know it sounds like bad, cookie-cutter psychology, but there it is. Choosing a fourteen-year-old also had meaning. Lou was fourteen years old when his mother raped him.”

“His mother actually physically raped him?”

“I already told you that!” Kit replied, sounding a bit irritated.

“You said she sexually abused him. That’s a broad umbrella term these days. It can run the gamut from fondling and masturbation to exposing him to porn or making him watch her have sex with another guy.”

“Well, Lou’s mother did all that
and
she raped him with her own goddamned body. Get the picture?”

“So, what’s the meaning around the number fourteen?”

“I was getting to that. During our conversations, Lou mentioned a saying to me many times: ‘The Power of Fourteen.’ It was a strong belief he had. He said that when a boy or girl reached fourteen years old, it signified a pivotal moment in his or her development. It was at that age, he said, that a child was highly impressionable and could easily be altered spiritually, mentally, physically, and emotionally. His feeling was that whatever occurred in your fourteenth year framed and defined who you would become as you grew into an adult. As much as I hate to admit it, ‘The Power of Fourteen’ theory has merit. I’ve paid more attention over the years, and I have noticed that it
is
a defining age. Look at that little girl in Utah who was kidnapped and held captive for all those months. What was her name? Elizabeth.... Elizabeth Smart. She was fourteen years old when that occurred. I know that tragedy and trauma can strike at any age, but there
does
seem to be something to the whole ‘Power of Fourteen’ idea.”

Jane nervously rubbed the old scar on the right side of her forehead. She had been fourteen when that defining moment in her young life occurred. And that runaway kid on the street in front of The Red Tail...she was fourteen. Coincidence? Jane wasn’t about to entertain a warped theory from the mind of Lou Peters. “You believe that shit when a Devil incarnate like Lou says it?”

“Even the Devil speaks the truth sometimes, Jane P. He just doesn’t couch that truth in love. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that truth or insight can pour from his lips.”

“I’m afraid I see the world as a bit more black-and-white than that, Kit.”

“This is not a black-and-white world. If you see it that way, you create polarity. And when you do that, you’re not open to the wonderful, frustrating, enlightening gray middle part.”

“Cops don’t see gray. We can’t. It would eliminate that ‘polarity’ we call ‘guilt.’”

“Lou’s own experience proved his theory. He was actually speaking about himself. His mother raped him when he was fourteen, and that event altered and twisted him and turned him into what he became. It’s the classic cycle of victimization.”

Jane had listened to the “abuse excuse” too many times during her career. If she applied that reasoning to her own violent childhood, she would be working the other side of the law instead of enforcing it. “Do me a favor, Kit. Don’t use Lou’s childhood trauma to sell your appeal. A lot of us got the shit kicked out of us and we’re not out there raping and killing people.”

Kit eyed Jane carefully. “I was right,” she said, more as an acknowledgment to herself than a statement to Jane. “I saw it in your eyes during that Larry King interview. I saw your pain. I just wasn’t aware where it came from.”

Jane was not used to anyone so readily peeling away her well-built, protective armor. Sergeant Weyler was the only other person who saw through Jane’s tough shell, and that pissed off Jane no end. She leaned forward, digging her elbows into the desk. “Cut to the chase, Kit. You said that Lou has a pattern?”

“Yes. First, I have to tell you what happened last year. Lou’s lawyers fought hard and were able to convince the court to reexamine the semen from the condom. The DNA proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was
not
Lou Peters’s semen. That opened up the door. There were four weeks of emotional court appearances, all of which I went to and witnessed in California. Barbara and Paul, her husband, didn’t attend. They live in Henderson, Nevada, now and can’t go through the pain all over again. There were the same attorneys and the same asinine ‘expert witness/ doctor’ who testified that Lou Peters was a good Christian who had been wrongly accused. I wanted to offer my two cents, but the
prosecutor felt I was too much of a loose cannon. The judge ruled that reasonable doubt existed, and Lou was ordered out of prison on bond. He’s set to have a new trial in twelve months, and will probably get off, knowing his luck.”

Jane looked down at the newspaper and Charlotte Walker’s school photo. “So he’s out on bond and suddenly he’s responsible for Charlotte Walker’s kidnapping?”

“I took a good look at Lou Peters in that courtroom last year. I listened carefully to the personal testimony he gave to the judge. I was completely open to the idea that he was reformed and not a danger to society anymore. But every time I looked into his eyes, I saw darkness and a willfulness to repeat his past behavior. I knew he was going to do it again. I didn’t know when or where, but it was only a matter of time. That’s why I’ve kept my eyes wide open this past year. When I saw the bulletin about Charlotte Walker yesterday afternoon, my gut told me to act on what my heart felt. And believe me, my intuition is a lot sharper these days.”

“Well I’m not getting the hard and fast connections between Lou and Charlotte.”

“After his release from Chino Prison, he moved to Mariposa and then over to Oakhurst, California.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“His bondsman told me.”

“
You know his
—”

“I made a point to get to know the guy, and he liked me as much as he hated Lou. He was more than happy to share Lou’s relocation destination with me, off the record.”

Jane leaned back in her chair and observed Kit. Up to this point, Kit’s kooky, pot-smoking, New Age spouting attitude had lowered her credibility in Jane’s eyes. But now the word
chutzpah
was warranted as a description, and Jane respected people with
chutzpah
. She attempted to picture Kit, with her long hair in a braid and ‘Earth Mother’ aura, walking into the coarse environment of a bail bondsman and winning him over. That took guts and the kind of unflagging determination that Jane rarely saw anymore.
But still, she had questions. Serious questions related to supposed patterns. “Charlotte Walker is twelve years old. And she’s blond. That kind of blows your ‘Power of Fourteen’ theory. Not to mention the pattern of choosing brunettes—”

“I’m aware of that. But I’ve also done a great deal of study on the criminal mind and those who choose patterns versus random hits. A criminal doesn’t start off with the same pattern he ends up using. The pattern builds upon itself as the criminal feels more confident in getting away with his crime.” Jane was well aware of this fact, but was interested to see exactly how much research Kit had done. “Lou started out raping two girls who were both fourteen. Unfortunately, I don’t know if there were differences in his approach between victim one and victim two. What I was able to gather from reliable sources years ago was that victim one was raped and let go immediately. Victim two was held for a period of several hours before he let her go. He realized he could get away with it, and so he decided to add to his pattern with Ashlee. This time, he held his victim in a remote location and for a longer period of time. He didn’t stay with Ashlee twenty-four hours a day during the two weeks he had her. He’d ride his motorcycle to the cabin where he had her tied up, spend a few hours there, and then motor back to town. He worked his maintenance job, went to the market, and ate at the coffee shop—all with the premeditated intention of creating alibis during those fourteen days. Finally, after fourteen days, for whatever reason, it was time to add to his criminal pattern. He raped her with his penis, not the hammer handle, and then he killed my Ashlee.” Kit eagerly dug into her satchel. “I’ve got reams of information on this kind of offender—”

“That’s okay. I know the beast,” Jane assured Kit. “So why would Lou now go for a twelve-year-old blonde?”

“I’ve given that great thought. Once criminals get away with a certain crime, they don’t so much change their patterns, they
add
to them. I have a very strong feeling that Lou is adding something different to this one. Something twisted. I can’t explain it. As I
said, my intuition is stronger these days. Maybe Lou’s prison time convinced him to alter his ‘Power of Fourteen’ theory.”

“What does his bail bondsman say about his behavior since he got out?”

“The gentleman told me that Lou called him to let him know he moved from Mariposa to Oakhurst. Then he called him again a couple months later to let him know he was having phone problems but it would be resolved soon.”

“Why would Lou call his bail bondsman about a phone problem?”

“That’s what makes Lou’s mind so criminal. He understands what is expected of him and he goes out of his way to do things that he doesn’t have to do in order to earn points with those in authority. But it’s all done with a highly manipulative motive. He is an A-One class charmer, believe me! Lou once alerted one of the guards at Chino Prison that his cell door wasn’t locking correctly, knowing full well that alert would get back to the warden and make him look like an up-front fellow! It’s all about external impressions with Lou. He professes to be a strict, fundamentalist Christian who believes in the importance of family because he knows that sort of posturing will work in his favor.” Kit was obviously tiring quickly. “Look, we’ll have plenty of time to talk about Lou when you and I travel to California.”