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.
It did not take her long now to spot her friend and the man who had accompanied her that night as they wandered through the casinos or sat at one of the gambling machines. “That’s him,” she said. “That’s the guy.”
Richardson looked closer. The tapes were grainy but the grey-haired mystery man looked like a normal, middle-aged guy—clean-cut, in shape, maybe even handsome. The mystery man now had a face.
Still, it was obvious to him that Cher and the man weren’t on a “date.” Cher practically ignored her companion while she gambled or talked to Knott. He just seemed to be tagging along, watching other casino patrons. Especially good-looking women, Richardson noted.
After viewing the videos, Richardson asked Knott if she could recall anything else about that night. “Just that the last time I saw Cher, she was getting into the passenger side of his car. He’d only had one beer, so he wasn’t drunk, otherwise I wouldn’t have let her go with him,” Karen said. Then she burst into tears. “That’s the last time I saw Cher.”
Richardson now had a definite link between the man last seen with Cher and Byron. After his first conversation with Knott, before he had the tape, he had asked Eerebout’s neighbors if they had seen a man fitting the description and his new blue Geo. Several of the neighbors recalled such a man and the car; one even recalled that the license plate frame had been from a dealership in the Fort Collins area.
With the tape in hand, Richardson asked the neighbors to come to the police station the morning after the day he met with Karen Knott. “Is that the same man you saw at Byron Eerebout’s apartment?” he asked pointing to the gray-haired man following Cher around on the videotape.
“Yep, that’s him,” said one neighbor. “My husband
got into an argument with him about a parking space. That’s him, all right. What’d he do?”
Later that morning, Richardson asked Byron Eerebout to report to the Lakewood Police Department. The young man arrived and asked if the detective had any good news about Cher. He’s a cool one, Richardson thought, full of the “outlaw” bravado that Cher had probably found romantic. He took Eerebout back to the video room and ran the tape, watching his reaction.
Pointing to the mystery man, Richardson asked, “Recognize him?”
“I’ve never seen that guy before,” Byron replied.
Without changing his expression or tone of voice, Richardson ran the videos again and again asked the same question.
“Nope,” Byron said again. “I might if I saw him in person, but that—” he pointed at the television set “—is too grainy.”
Without revealing that he knew that Byron was lying, Richardson asked the young man to describe his relationship with Cher-Elder and the events of the weekend that Cher disappeared.
“We were just friends,” Eerebout said, correcting the detective’s reference to Cher as his girlfriend. “I had sex with her but that doesn’t make me her boyfriend.”
Cher dropped by unexpectedly Saturday evening, he said, and then got angry when he showed up with his new girlfriend, Gina Jones. The girls shot each other “dirty looks,” and then Cher began yelling when Byron announced that he was going to a bar with Gina.
“Then when I got home, there was a note, see, and there’s two notes—in the bathroom on the mirrors.” He and Gina had passed out but sometime in the early morning on Sunday, Cher had poked her head in the door and said, “ ’Bye.”
“Who was there when you got there with Adriel and Gina?” Richardson asked. He noticed that now the sticky notes had appeared that night rather than in the morning, as previously reported by Byron.
“J.D. and Tristan,” Byron answered.
“So she says ‘bye’ and that’s it?”
“That’s all she said.”
“Did you get up then?” Richardson asked recalling that Byron had originally told him about watching Cher leave from his apartment window.
“No. I just went back to sleep. It was just getting light outside.”
“Did you look out to see if she was by herself or anything?”
“No,” Eerebout said. He was starting to squirm in his seat, his eyes darting around as he licked his thin lips. He tried changing the subject. “This is what the note says. It says, ‘Call me. We’ll talk.’ ... And one says something to the effect of, ‘Now you know why I haven’t been with a guy for four years.’ ”
Eerebout decided that anger might throw the detective. Suddenly, he was blaming Karen Knott for telling the news media that he was Cher’s boyfriend. “I ... my mom and my lawyer ... they’re gonna call the news and these places to get that boyfriend crap taken off, ’cause I was an acquaintance, you know. I had sex with her, but that doesn’t make me her boyfriend. She came over to the house and, big deal, she left.”
Angry about the callous way the boy dismissed Cher, Richardson decided it was time to turn the screws. “I don’t know why you’re making a big deal out of it. All this is, is a missing person.”
Byron nodded. “Yeah, a missing person.” He said he didn’t even know Cher was missing until her family and friends started calling. “I’m worried, too.”
Then why, Richardson wanted to know, was he acting so nervous?
Eerebout denied it. “I can understand you guys comin’ there, but you know, walking into the house asking questions about how the medicine cabinet got broke and stuff like that’s a little—”
Richardson cut him off and pulled his chair closer. “Well, you’re acting like we’re... we’re draggin’ you in here...” he began, his voice even and reasonable.
“No, I—” Byron protested, laughing nervously.
“... like we’re accusin’ you...”
“Don‘t—that’s not what I’m sayin’.”
“... of all these hideous crimes...”
“No, I’m not saying that,” Byron said, holding his hands up as if to ward off the detective. “I’m sayin’ ...”
Richardson was relentless. “Well, yeah, that’s what you’re sayin’.”
Desperately, Eerebout tried to shift the focus. He’d heard something about an unknown drug dealer that Cher had maybe mentioned to someone that she was going to visit. Richardson just stared at him, his dark eyes boring into the young man’s blue ones.
“Wasn’t she... she seen at a bingo parlor?” Byron stammered.
“Well,” Richardson said, keeping his eyes fixed on Byron’s as he leaned closer, “we don’t think that’s good information.”
Byron swallowed hard. He complained that someone was spreading vicious rumors. People were starting to avoid him.
Richardson smiled. “Man, you’re sounding psychotic now.”
“No,” Eerebout said, laughing nervously.
“Are you hearin’ voices at night while you’re sleepin’, too?”
“No, it’s... come on,” Byron stuttered, “this ain’t bullshit.”
Just as suddenly as he had turned up the heat, Richardson backed off. He asked Byron what Cher was wearing that Saturday night.
“She has my ring,” Byron volunteered. “It’s her right finger she wore it on.”
Richardson asked if Cher had told him that she was going to Central City. The younger man denied it. “And,” Richardson said, pointing at the frozen image of the mystery man from the videotape, “you’re telling me that you’ve never seen this guy before?”
Eerebout shook his head. “I can’t recognize him from that thing.”
He protested that his injury from the Gulf War made it difficult for him to remember things clearly. He’d suffered head injuries which, he said, led him to mess up during his Army stint—larceny, deserting, all sorts of things. He’d gotten a medical discharge.
“They said I was psycho. That I didn’t know right from wrong.” It was the first thing the young man said that Richardson believed.
Byron went on to talk about how easily he got angry. Just recently, he had broken the wrist and knocked out several teeth of a man who had picked a fight at a party. “And I beat the hell out of a guy with a stick last week. He had a knife and about eight other Mexicans with him...”
Richardson grew impatient. This punk knew more than he was saying and was trying to steer the conversation in another direction. “Did you ever tell anybody that, uh, Cher and this older guy came back from Central City, and the older guy stayed in your apartment, and Cher got her car and left?”
“No.” Eerebout was shaking his head again. “Nope. See that’s what I don’t understand. People keep tellin’ people stuff, and that ain’t true.”
Richardson waved his hand as if to dismiss Byron’s remarks. He decided it was time to let Byron know that he’d been caught in at least one lie. “You remember when I first talked to you?”
Byron nodded so Richardson went on. “You told me she never came into the apartment. She never talked to you and that you saw her get in her car and leave. Then I talked to you again, and you told me, ‘Well, she came in, woke me up, and told me ‘Bye.’ ”
Eerebout sat for a moment looking like he’d been hit with a bat. Then he rubbed the back of his head and complained that he couldn’t remember details.
Richardson gave him some more rope to hang himself with. “Well, lemme put you to rest here,” he drawled, back to his good ol’ boy demeanor. “I’m just pounding my head against the wall trying to figure out who this guy is that she’s with up at the casino. Don’t you find that odd?”
Byron brightened and acted like he wanted to be helpful. Maybe she stopped at a bar first and picked the guy up. “If you ask everybody, Cher’s an open person. She was always, ‘Hi, who are you?’ ”
Richardson stared at Byron until he began to shift uncomfortably and look at the door out of the interview room. “You can g
o,” the detective said at last. Visibly relieved, Eerebout stood up only to have the detective point once again to the videotape picture. “You’re sure you don’t know this guy?”
Byron’s mouth hung open, then he started to speak, but the detective didn’t give him a chance to answer. “Guess I’ll have to give this to the news media,” he shrugged instead, pulling the tape from the VCR, “and get this guy’s face plastered all over the television and newspapers... see if anybody knows who he is.”
The color drained from Eerebout’s face. There was no way Richardson would have given such a critical piece of evidence to the media. But the younger man was apparently no poker player. Now, if everything went as planned, the gray-haired mystery man would soon get a telephone call from an obviously frightened Byron Eerebout. Then we’ll see, Richardson thought grimly.
Two hours later, he was wishing he could be out riding on his Harley, away from people like the Eerebouts, when Donna handed him that slip of paper with a telephone number on it. “Some guy named Tom Luther called, said he’s the one you’re looking for,” she said.
Chapter Ten
April 12, 1993—Denver, Colorado
About the time that the Lakewood Police Department was issuing a press release about a missing girl for the evening newscasts, 27-year-old Heather Smith stood looking out the picture window of her living room. Large, heavy snowflakes mixed with equally large raindrops fell outside as if the weather couldn’t quite decide if winter was really over and spring had truly begun. The day had been sunny and warm, and although it was now evening, the flakes melted as soon as they landed on the street turning it dark and shiny beneath the streetlight.
Heather had never even heard of Cher Elder. She knew nothing of Detective Scott Richardson. Even if she had read something, or someone had told her about the mysterious disappearance of a young woman only a thirty-minute drive from her house near downtown Denver, she wouldn’t have paid much attention. It was just one of those things that happened to other people. A young woman must have made a mistake that put her into a bad situation—an error in judgment.
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