Protector

by Laurel Dewey

  The woman lowered the pistol. Jane carefully slipped it out of the woman’s sweat-soaked hands and gave it back to the patrol officer. She turned to Weyler. He didn’t say a word—he just stared at her with a look that bordered somewhere between apprehension and disbelief. Jane picked up her leather satchel and walked to the elevator, punching the “down” button with the side of her fist.

  Everyone turned their attention to the woman. Everyone, that is, except for Emily, who watched Jane enter the elevator and disappear behind the steel doors.

  Chapter 5

  It was just after 10:15 a.m. when Jane sped out of the DH parking garage. As she rounded her Mustang onto 14th Street and curved around the Civic Center, she noted that it had taken just over an hour for her life to fall apart.

  Jane saw the look on Weyler’s face after she disarmed the Mexican woman. She noted how he appeared genuinely guarded by her actions, as if it was something only a nutcase would do.

  Nothing made sense to Jane anymore. When she woke up that morning, she had a plan. She always had a plan. It may have been a little blurry due to the alcohol burn off, but there still was a plan. Jane figured she had three or four legal-sized yellow pads filled with angles, motives, wild theories and other sundry notations regarding the death of Bill Stover, his wife and daughter. Every time Jane awoke from that blistering nightmare filled with fire and Amy’s dying eyes, she’d jot something down on one of those pads. When she’d reread her scribble in the morning, sometimes she could only make out a word here and there.

  One thing was for sure, if this was the work of the Texas mob, it went against their usual pattern. Then again, it was hard to pin a hard-and-fast MO on a group that was still an unknown to law enforcement. In the end, Jane had only her gut intuition that had never failed her. After all, it was her gut intuition that told her that Mexican woman was up to something. That same gut intuition told her the Stovers’ death was not entirely the work of the Texas mafia. There was something or someone else. She could feel it.

  She could also feel that numinous nudge creeping up on her—that sensation that she was balancing on a slim blade between sanity and illumination. She thought back to the Mexican woman and the outstretched Glock. Twice before that morning, the image of an outstretched Glock flashed like flint in front of her eyes. But there was something attached to the jarring, disturbing image—a swath of navy blue and bright lights. And that sharp tug on her sleeve; the tug she physically felt in the stairwell.

  Jane pulled in front of her house just past 10:25. It was six hours before RooBar, her nightly watering hole in the center of Cherry Creek, opened for business. She hadn’t been there in a few days, preferring to get a load on at home. But most drunks like the comfort of a familiar bar and RooBar fit the bill for Jane. There was never a chance of running into fellow cops since they were more partial to the gritty downtown taverns. And it didn’t hurt that RooBar was located about a mile from her house.

  She sat in her car and stared into the void. A gentle breeze slipped through the car bringing with it the sweet smell of lilacs that were coming into full bloom. Jane started out of her car when she felt the concentrated beat of her pounding head. She cradled her forehead in her hands, attempting to press the pain back into her body. That eerie disconnect began to surface again but this time she fought hard to drown it. An old cop adage crossed her mind; a saying that was bandied around the Department when joking about borderline loonies: “They’re not crazy enough to check into the nut house, but they can see the front door from where they’re standing!” At that moment, Jane could clearly see that door.

  Standing on the front porch, Jane stared at the collection of rolled up newspapers, along with clumps of wind-blown leaves, dandelion fuzz and the mass of cobwebs. If her dad could see the mess, he’d have something to say about it. “Clean up your fuckin’ mess,” is what he’d say. Jane quickly shut off his voice. It was bad enough that she was going to have to visit his house at 6:00 that night. She didn’t need to have that voice inside of her head just yet.

  Once inside the house, Jane quickly poured herself two shots of Jack Daniels, downing them one after the other. Within minutes, the ache in her head became bearable. Jane opened the living room windows to release the pent-up stench of beer, rotting leftovers and other debris. She moved with purpose around the living room and worked her way into the kitchen, collecting discarded beer and whiskey bottles, cardboard take-out boxes and chucked them into a large garbage bag. As always, the repetitious movement put her into a kind of Zen state. Once there, her focus was on whatever memory chose to rear its ugly head. To drag her out of this trance was pointless. She was thrust back in time to a place that was as real as when it happened. The smells and sounds were as acute as when the misery was fresh. It had gotten so bad lately that anything could trigger the memories. To be back in the moment again—this time as a witness to the vicious beating—was like reliving the trauma anew. Every time she emerged from the memory, she felt that she was missing a piece of herself. Post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s what the psych counselors at DH called it. But Jane balked at the label. For her, it was just another tight fitting box that somebody wanted to force her into.

  Suddenly, another memory snuck up on Jane. It wasn’t the usual one that haunted her soul. She’s twelve. She and her father, Dale, are in the living room watching To Tell The Truth on the TV with the tobacco-stained screen. They sit apart, Jane on the sofa and her father in his recliner, puffing on his cigarette and knocking back his fifth whiskey of the night. It’s not just a television show; it’s a study in human personality traits. It’s two people lying and one telling the truth.

  “Watch the fucker on the left,” her father says pointing at the screen with the lit end of his cigarette. “See how he licked his lips when Kitty Carlisle asked him that question about how long he’s been in business? That’s nerves. It’s a simple question. And there! Watch! Did you see that? The fucker looked to the left for a second. He’s not telling the truth. Neither is the bastard in the middle. It’s the one on the right. The one on the fuckin’ right!” he yells toward the screen.

  Young Jane leans forward, elbows embedded into her thighs, studying the television screen and waiting patiently for the subtle nuances that pinpoint those who lie from those who don’t. She is learning at the foot of the master. Her father lights another cigarette off the one that’s about to go out. It’s time to find out who is telling the truth. Finally, the man on the right stands up and her father lunges forward. “I told you! The goddamn fucker on the right!”

  He never missed an episode of To Tell the Truth and he always picked the right guy.

  As quickly as that memory clicked into Jane’s head, it was over. She was in her bedroom and all the scattered debris was in the trash bag. She stood silently for a moment and felt the numbness wash over her.

  Jane left the house at 4:30 to beat the traffic out to her dad’s place. Before leaving, she changed the bandage on her burned hand and coated it with the burn gel. It was a good hour’s drive to her dad’s house and she had to pick up the beer. She knew Mike would drag his heels after work. The only thing that guaranteed her brother’s appearance at their father’s house was a cold, six-pack of Corona. Call it bait to the trap.

  At thirty years old, Mike was five years younger than Jane, but he acted more like twenty years her junior. He had a reticence to his step and a soft, unassuming voice that spoke volumes to anyone who was perceptive. Mike had shuffled from one construction job to another, always cutting out when the boss got too demanding. No matter how often Jane encouraged Mike and told him to stand up to whomever was bothering him, Mike never followed through. She was his older sister but she was really his mother and she treated him as such.

  The traffic going east on I-70 toward Tower Road was surprisingly light for a Monday night. By the time Jane drove past the Denver International Airport exit, there were only a few other cars sharing the highway with her. By this point of the dri
ve, the scenery became desolate and isolated. Flat, dry plains stretched into the distance until they met the cloudless sky. There was a starkness and emptiness to the area, even back twenty years ago when Jane called it home. Turning off on Tower Road, Jane gunned the Mustang down a lonely ribbon of road dotted by rural electric light poles, precariously balancing the never ending miles of electric lines that looped one after the other. The soulful voice of Gladys Knight singing “Midnight Train to Georgia” blared from the Mustang. Jane drove on Tower for several miles, almost to the line that separated Denver City and County from Adams County, and turned right onto a dirt road. She passed several old homes before turning left into the gravel drive, past the black mailbox that said “DALE PERRY” in stark white block letters.

  Her father’s bleached, single-story white house stood on the left side of the wide driveway, shaded by a ring of weeping willows. Directly ahead of the driveway was a narrow, wooden building with small windows that served as her father’s workshop. When he wasn’t knocking back booze or hunched over the kitchen table perusing photographs of mutilated bodies, you could find him inside the workshop. It was a place where he could clean his guns and listen to eight tracks of Tony Bennett, Nancy Sinatra and Dean Martin. Jane brought the Mustang to a halt ten feet from the workshop and turned off the engine. It was 5:30—a good forty-five minutes before Mike would wander down the road in his beat-up pickup truck. Forty-five minutes to be alone in a place she despised.

  Jane got out of the car, grabbing the Corona from the front seat. She stared at the workshop. Her pulse quickened and that familiar rage welled up inside of her. She canvassed the squares of dusty windows and finally the tin roof, searching for “the mark.” Through the filtering rays of the setting sun, she found it—a hole just big enough for a .38 bullet to exit.

  Her dad bought the house and the weed-filled acre it sat on for $25,000 in the early sixties. That was back when Denver detectives weren’t given city parameters in which they had to reside. There was a small circle of neighbors who lived nearby in this desolate corner of Denver County. As Jane liked to put it when she was growing up, you were close enough to the neighbors to ask for help, but far enough away so they couldn’t hear you scream. Dale Perry didn’t care if his wife had to drive over 30 miles one way to pick up a quart of milk or that his son and daughter had to wake up an hour and a half early each morning to make the long journey into school. In Dale’s world, he was king and the human beings who were unlucky enough to exist in his shadow were told to do whatever he said and then shut up.

  Jane entered the house, letting the screen door slam shut. Everything was in a kind of suspended animation—a visual portrait of the moments leading up to the heart attack. There was the half-washed pan in the sink. The dishcloth on the floor. The half drunk whiskey teetering on the arm of the recliner. The littered ashtray filled with cigarette butts. The three-week-old newspaper, opened to the “Crime Blotter.” For Jane, it was like visiting a crime scene, except this victim unfortunately didn’t die. There was an uneasy silence in the room that lay heavy in the air. Jane turned on the TV, flipped over to the Denver early evening news report and adjusted the volume so it was just loud enough to create background chatter.

  Checking out the hall closet, Jane found stacks of cardboard boxes filled with the remnants of homicide notes, photos, and volumes of crime scene textbooks. It was the stuff of her childhood. She popped the lid off one box and uncovered a neatly arranged selection of old homicide manuals. Hoisting the box off the stack, she took it into the kitchen and set it on the tiled sideboard near the sink. The homicide manuals covered everything from crime scene surveillance to protecting the integrity of evidence. Interspersed between the dry text were pages of black-and-white crime scene photos, depicting gunshot wounds, stabbings, hangings and the occasional decapitation.

  Jane lit a cigarette. As she lifted a large manual out of the box, several dozen color Polaroid photos slid out from the book and spread across the kitchen floor. The photos showed in great detail the dead, decomposing bodies of a husband and wife in bed. The husband had shot the wife and then turned the gun on himself. They’d been dead for three weeks in the middle of July before someone found them. When Dale Perry arrived on the scene, a bedroom taken over by thousands of cockroaches and maggots greeted him. They were everywhere—on the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the bed and inside of each black, bloodied and bloated victim. The roaches had made a permanent trail inside the head of the husband, entering through his eyes and nose and exiting through his mouth and the hole where the bullet entered. It was all there in each grisly close-up, down to the trace markings of excrement left by a roach on the woman’s wedding ring. The photos were twenty-one years old, but they were as disturbing as the first time Jane saw them. Instantly, it triggered the memory.

  She’s in the same kitchen with the same furniture, except she’s fourteen years old. She’s seated at the kitchen table under the piercing overhead lamp she half-jokingly referred to as “the third degree bulb.” Her brother, nine years old, is seated next to her. Her father sits across from her. The Polaroid photos of the roach-covered bodies are strewn across the table. It’s February and there’s an icy chill in the air. Pellets of hail mixed with snow bounce off the kitchen window in a steady rat-a-tat-tat. Jane is serving her father and Mike dinner, doling out macaroni and cheese onto mustard yellow plates. Her father’s cigarette dangles precariously from his lips, heavy ash hanging from the tip. He examines the crime photos as Mike grimaces at the gruesome images.

  “I don’t feel good,” Mike says with a soft whine.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Dale says, eyes still examining the Polaroids.

  “My tummy hurts,” Mike says, sitting back in his chair.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you!” Dale says brusquely. “Eat your food!”

  “Come on, Mike,” Jane quickly interject. “It’s okay. Take a little bite.”

  “Noooo,” Mike replies.

  Dale smacks Mike’s head. “Stop whining and eat your goddamn dinner!” Mike reacts with a muffled cry. “Did you hear me?” Dale screams as he leans over to Mike, inches from his face. “Shut up! You understand? You understand me?”

  Mike sinks down into his chair and cries out, “Don’t. Don’t . . .”

  Dale stands up and his chair skims across the floor. Jane bolts out of her seat.

  “Goddamnit, you weak little fuck!” Dale yells. “You want something to cry about?” Dale grabs Mike by the back of his shirt and yanks him out of his chair.

  “Janie!” Mike screams, trying to reach out to her. “Janie!”

  Dale gives Mike a hard slap across the face, sending his son onto the floor. “I said shut up! You understand?!”

  Mike screams as he rolls into a fetal position and covers his ears. “Janie!”

  “Janie?” Mike’s voice shook Jane out of her daze. “You okay?”

  It took Jane a second to put herself back into the moment. “Sure,” she said, quickly gathering up the fallen photos from the kitchen floor.

  “Here, I’ll help,” Mike offered.

  “No!” Jane barked. “I’ll do it.”

  Mike stood in the doorway, wedging his body against the frame. “Sorry I’m late. Traffic, you know?”

  “Right. Traffic,” Jane said as she slid the last Polaroid off the floor and buried the bundle in the box.

  Mike looked around the room with an uneasy stare. His thick shock of blond hair fell over his eyes. With a nervous jerk, he flicked his head backward, forcing his hair in place. Although Mike was thirty, he still had that doe-eyed, innocent look, with a tinge of adolescent awkwardness. Even his body, with its soft muscular tone, seemed underdeveloped. “It feels weird in here. I mean, like, him not being here, you know?”

  Jane slammed the lid onto the cardboard box. “He might be horizontal in a hospital bed right now. But take my word for it, the bastard’s still here.”

  “You bring the Corona?” Mike
asked, keeping his priorities straight.

  “Have I ever let you down?” Jane said, pointing to the six-pack.

  Mike broke into a wide, toothy grin. “I can always count on you.” He crossed in front of the television. “Hey, Janie, look! Chris is on TV.”

  Jane let out a long sigh. “Oh, God. Turn off the asshole.”

  Mike was drawn into Chris’ commentary. He was standing outside a home, a mass of microphones in front of him, addressing the media. “Hey, Janie. You know anything about that double murder last night?”

  “People get killed every day. Turn him off!”

  Mike poked his head into the kitchen. “Think that little girl saw anything?”

  Like an irate parent, Jane walked with purpose into the living room. “Jesus, Mike! Turn it off!” With that, Jane angrily slammed off the TV.

  Two hours later, the hall closet was empty of all the boxes. Jane pulled out a few classic crime scene text manuals for her home library and dumped the leftovers into garbage bags. The rest of the house would have to wait for another day. Besides, after she and Mike downed three Coronas each, there wasn’t much desire to continue.

  They sat outside on the cement steps that led from the kitchen to the workshop. The heat of the late May day had burned off, leaving a stippled layer of Denver pollution against the pink-stained sky. Jane lit two cigarettes, handing one to Mike. She took a swig of Corona and let out a low sigh.

  “Does your hand still hurt?” Mike asked.

  “I don’t know. I stopped connecting to the pain a few days ago.”

  Mike grinned. “Thanks to a fifth, eh?”

  “You got it,” Jane said with a half-smile as she took another sip of beer.

  There was a moment of silence between them before Mike spoke up. “Hey, I got news for you!” Mike said brightly. “I made a decision.”

  “Oh, god, you made a decision. And what would that be?”