Monster

by Steve Jackson

  Richardson knew the sign was still down, but he wanted to see how Byron would react. They drove up to the turn-off and Eerebout started to point again, but then his finger dropped. He looked confused.

  “I’m not sure if it’s this....” He looked anxiously at Richardson, who frowned. “Please don’t get grumpy with me, detective,” he whined. “This is hard enough as it is.”

  Richardson shrugged. “Oh, I’m not. I haven’t said a thing.” They continued driving past the turn-off but got only a little farther up the road before Eerebout told them to go back. “I was right the first time,” he said. And when they returned to the turn-off, he added, “This is it. I didn’t recognize it ‘cause the sign’s gone.”

  “I’ll tell ya now, Byron,” Richardson said, “they remove signs in the wintertime to keep ‘em from weatherin.’ They put ’em back up in April.”

  The ground was covered with another layer of fresh snow, but the sky overhead was clear and blue as a robin’s egg. A lot of traffic was passing by, most of the cars topped with skis and heading for Winter Park. The police officers waited until there was a break in the traffic before jumping out of their cars and pulling on the coveralls. They didn’t want to attract attention; in particular, they didn’t want any media nosing around. In 1993, while searching the area with bloodhounds and dozens of people, they’d told curious onlookers that they were practicing search and rescue techiniques. Most would wander on after a few uneventful minutes.

  Byron Eerebout pointed to the path that led up past the grey rock formation. “See, I told you,” he said to Hansen as the detectives dressed.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, this is it. I was standin’ there,” he said, sounding annoyed. “I was lookin’ through the dark, okay.”

  “Okay, I believe you, Byron,” Hansen said. “I’m not doubting you, I just wanted to make sure. They said this is a one-shot deal.” Hall had reminded her that Eerebout was to take the detectives directly to the grave, no more games, or he was getting a one-way trip back to prison.

  “I know, but I will stay up here all day until I find it. Okay? You can go, I will stay up here until I find it.”

  Richardson came up to the car and hauled Eerebout out by his arm. “I’m gonna walk him up into the trees,” he said to the other officers, “so we don’t have people seein’ him.”

  The crook and the cop immediately began heading up the trail. When they were joined by the others, Eerebout set off on the left fork. “Right here, my friends,” he said as they came upon the clearing. “I believe this is it.”

  The tall redhead stood still for a moment, then moved off the trail and a little behind the rock formation while looking down on the clearing. He seemed to be trying to get his bearings. “I was standing over here lookin’ over the rocks and watching him. It was two in the morning,” he said. “My car was parked on the other side of the road. Tom’s little blue Metro was parked right by the sign.”

  He licked his lips nervously. It was dark the last time he was there, he complained. But then he pointed to where the pile of rocks had been. “Yeah, this is it. It wasn’t no further.”

  He looked at his lawyer. “Should I say it? I got to say it one time or another.” Hansen nodded.

  Eerebout took a deep breath. “He came up here to put rat poison on the body so the dogs and the wild animals wouldn’t dig it up. He said it wasn’t too far down, it wasn’t deep enough, and he wanted to come up here to dig it deeper.

  “But then he said to stay out of his fuckin’ business.”

  Richardson and Connally took Eerebout and his attorney back to the Jefferson County Jail while Girson and the crime lab technicians stood guard in the clearing. On the way back up, the two detectives stopped to pick up Ireland and Diane France, a NecroSearch forensic anthropologist.

  When he got in the car, Ireland stretched out and pulled his cap over his eyes as if to take a nap. “Another Richardson pleasure cruise?” he yawned.

  Richardson smiled. “This time we got a body. I guarantee it.”

  Ireland looked up skeptically from under his cap. But he said nothing.

  They arrived at the site to find that the technicians had already photographed the scene and established a perimeter. France began to drill into the same hole they had created in January. Three inches further down she found adipocere, a whitish, fatty substance produced in decomposing bodies exposed to moisture, such as the snows and spring runoff that pooled in the bowl-shaped clearing.

  They knew they had a body. Still, they couldn’t be absolutely certain it was Cher Elder, or how much of the body remained in the grave. She might have been moved. Or it could have been an unknown body that Luther used as a red-herring for the Eerebout boys. There’d been so many lies.

  Under the direction of France, the tedious process of exhumation began. The forensic anthropologist was a tiny woman, but Richardson noted that long after a man would grow tired from the digging, she kept going. She and her assistants went about their business like they were unearthing the tomb of some ancient queen.

  First, the gravesite was sectioned off into grids, delineated by pieces of string tied to stakes. Every bit of dirt was sifted through a screen and examined. Everything that came out of the excavation went into buckets marked for the appropriate grid space. The process of digging was made more difficult by permafrost—the first six to twelve inches of soil was frozen, which probably explained why the cadaver dog hadn’t detected anything. A special torch system was brought in to warm the ground.

  By the end of the first day, they had exposed one of the walls of the original grave. France was so precise, using toothbrushes to clear away dirt, that they could see the tool marks left by the gravedigger’s shovel. The sun was going down behind the nearby hills when they called it a day.

  After the others left, Richardson and Connally stayed behind to spend the night in their car. They couldn’t take the chance that some curious local would come on the site now and call the media, or that one of Luther’s associates might have seen them and try to remove the remains. Richardson wasn’t worried about the local mountain lion. Cougars won’t eat decayed flesh. But there were also bears in the area, and they would. Both detectives were exhausted.

  “What if it ain’t Cher?” Connally asked as they tried to get comfortable in the cramped vehicle.

  “I don’t want to think about that,” Richardson said. It was a good thing, he pointed out, that they hadn’t found Cher when he first stumbled on the grave in January. If they had, they wouldn’t have been able to make a deal with Eerebout, who would have had no reason to come clean, and they were going to need his testimony at trial. And this way, there were two different witnesses—Southy and Byron, who by all accounts hardly knew each other and yet took them to the grave area independent of the other.

  However, there remained the issue of which one was lying. Southy Healey said he came up with Byron and Luther in the daytime; Eerebout made no mention of Southy and said he spied on Luther at 2 A.M. “I don’t want to think about that either,” Richardson said and each detective turned to his own thoughts as he tried to get some rest.

  Neither slept much and they both greeted the dawn stiff and cold. They were soon joined by the police and NecroSearch teams, who brought coffee and breakfast.

  During the day, France and her assistants exposed all the walls of the original grave. NecroSearch botanist Vickey Trammell pointed out where roots from the plants above the grave had been cut by the gravedigger and other roots had since grown. “We’ll be able to get a pretty good idea on how old the grave is from that,” she said.

  By late afternoon, they knew that most of a human body remained in the grave under the light-tan soil. About 4 P.M., France bent over and tugged at a small root in the bottom of the pit. It came up along with a small lock of dark brown hair.

  The searchers were silent. Then Richardson said quietly, “It’s Cher.” Everyone cheered. Hands clapped him on the back. Voices said, “Congrat
ulations, you got her.” They all knew what this case meant to him and its enormous personal toll. But Richardson just wanted to get away from the celebration.

  Numb, he walked off. On the other side of the clearing, he sat down on a rock outcropping that offered a view of the mountain that rose above the gravesite and the chapel-like clearing that held the remains of Cher Elder. Clear Creek sang in the valley below, different sounding now as it appeared and disappeared beneath an icy sheath.

  It’s so beautiful, he thought again. Peaceful. A shame we have to take her away—except that Thomas Luther put her here. Anger filled his mind. Luther’s presence could stain even the most heavenly place; he sullied everything he touched. Richardson hated him for it.

  The detective sat for a long time trying to sort out his feelings. I found her, his mind exalted one minute, only to be overwhelmed by sadness the next. He was surprised to discover that even he had held out the tiniest hope that Cher was alive somewhere. She’s dead, he told himself. She’s dead. It sounded so final, so unfair.

  He stood up as the last light from the west bathed the snows on the mountain above briefly in pink before leaving the world in gray twilight. A chill wind swept down from the slopes with the setting of the sun, and Richardson shivered. But not from the cold.

  I found her, he thought, only now I have to tell her family.

  The sleepless night in the car, the cold, and the emotional toll of the discovery had done in both Richardson and Connally. They were nearly asleep on their feet when the crew called it a day. Although they argued to remain behind, Sgt. Girson ordered them both to go home and rest.

  When he got home, Scott was pumped up. He could hardly stop pacing. Finally, he was going to nail Tom Luther’s hide to the wall for what he’d done to Cher.

  Sabrina was relieved. In part for Scott’s sake; he’d put himself under a lot of stress juggling the investigation, keeping it fresh, while giving Cher’s family a shoulder to cry on. He’d lost a lot of weight and wasn’t sleeping well—waking up in the middle of the night to write a note to himself, then lying awake with his mind going over next steps.

  But it was also in part because she was fed up with their lives. Luther was like a ghost in the house, always there. Scott couldn’t seem to think of anything else. If they went somewhere, the Luther case became a topic of conversation, nothing else mattered. Scott was always tired; he had no energy for the boys. About the only time he seemed like his old self was riding with her on his Harley.

  Now, she thought, maybe we can go on with our lives. She had no idea that the ordeal was not even close to being over.

  Richardson still could not call Cher’s parents. The formal identification by a coroner would have to come first. There was always the remote possibility that it might be someone else buried in the grave, and he didn’t want to tell the family and then have to reverse himself.

  He was still pondering how he would tell them when he got the message from a police dispatcher that Debrah Snider had called that afternoon. Wearily, he picked up the telephone and called her back.

  “I’m movin’ back to Fort Collins,” she said sadly. “It’s over between me and Tom.”

  There wasn’t much he could say. He couldn’t tell her he’d found Cher Elder’s body. That had to remain a secret as long as possible. And he didn’t have the heart to tell her that now that he had a body, her relationship with Thomas Luther would soon be entering a whole new phase. One that would tear her heart and challenge her conscience.

  Richardson and Connally returned to the site early the next morning only to face a new problem. An avalanche had swept across the highway further up the pass, burying two people, and slowing traffic down to a crawl past the turn-off. When the occasional curious skier poked his head out the window to ask what they were up to, the detectives pointed up the road and yelled, “Avalanche.”

  Near panic gripped the searchers when a television news helicopter began circling overheard. It was there to record the effects of the avalanche, but had a bird’s eye view of the partially exposed gravesite through the trees. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the road was opened and the skiers and the helicopter went away.

  It wasn’t until six that evening that France finished for the day. The skeletal remains of a nude woman lay exposed, looking like a mummy encased in dirt. For the most delicate work near the body, France supplemented her toothbrushes with thin bamboo sticks. Bamboo, she explained to Richardson, wouldn’t scar bone as would a metal pick.

  The man who buried Cher Elder had not made the grave long enough, and she was lying awkwardly on her back with her head bowed by the wall of the grave. Her left arm lay across her stomach, her right under her.

  All that remained was to dig beneath Cher to gently loosen her from the ground on which she’d rested for two years. Before France left, she and Richardson gently laid a plastic tarp over the remains, folding the edges under the remains.

  Stepping back, France looked up at Richardson’s sad, dark eyes and reached out to touch him on the arm. He looked at the small woman at his side and smiled wistfully. “It’s like we’re tucking her in for the night.”

  France nodded. “I understand now why you took this so personally,” she said. Addressing the grave, she added, “We’ll be back in the morning, Cher,” and walked off to her car.

  Richardson and Connally again spent the night. “There’s a mountain lion living around here and there’s always the possibility of bears,” Richardson told Sabrina when he called. But the real reason was he couldn’t bring himself to leave Cher alone one more night.

  They slept next to the grave in sleeping bags, one on either side. In the morning, Richardson was awakened by something wet that dripped onto his neck. He opened his eyes, puzzled that all he could see was white, and wondered for a moment if he was still dreaming of death and heaven.

  It took a moment to realize that it had snowed again, so gently that it didn’t wake him when several inches piled up over the small space he’d left open in his bag to breathe. He sat up to a world pure and innocent; even the horror of the grave was disguised beneath the white cover.

  That night they placed the remains in a body bag and transported them to the Jefferson County coroner’s office. There the dirt was carefully removed and the skull X-rayed. Comparing the X-ray to dental records, the coroner was able to make a positive identification: Cher Elder.

  It was time to tell her parents.

  When it looked like a deal with Byron Eerebout was imminent, Scott Richardson arranged with the Grand Junction Police Department victim’s advocate to be ready to contact Rhonda Edwards. He wanted both parents told simultaneously so that one wouldn’t be the first to break the news to the other.

  Now Richardson, accompanied by Girson and representatives of the Jefferson County coroner and victim’s advocate offices, drove to Earl Elder’s home. Pulling into the driveway, he called the advocate’s office in Grand Junction. “We found Cher,” he said. “Tell Ronnie right now. And take her over to the police department and I’ll call in an hour.”

  Drawing a deep breath and letting it out slowly, Richardson got out of the car and walked up to Earl’s door. He’d investigated a lot of homicides in his seventeen years as a police officer and dealt with a lot of grieving families. But this was by far the hardest thing he had ever done.

  Earl’s car was in the drive, but there was no answer to the doorbell. “I think he’s working nights,” Richardson said. “So he’s probably sleeping. Keep knockin’ and I’ll go around back.”

  Earl Elder was indeed asleep in his bedroom with a fan on to drown out daytime noises. He didn’t hear the pounding on his doors, but was finally awakened by his dog barking.

  Walking sleepily down the stairs, he looked up and saw Richardson at the back door. He knew right away why the detective was there.

  Over the past two years, they had talked often. Richardson was always keeping him abreast of the investigation’s progress, even when there was litt
le to report and in the darkest days when he had to admit that he didn’t know if they would ever find Cher. But he never gave up and now that he was banging on Earl’s back door, it could mean only one thing.

  Elder let Richardson and the others in. They sat down as he fought to keep his emotions in check. “Earl,” the detective said, “I’m real sorry to have to tell you this. But we found Cher.” He shook his head at the father’s unasked question. “She’s dead.”

  Earl sat quietly, struggling with the tears that sprang into his eyes. He was a private person who preferred to be alone when he got bad news so that he could absorb it in his own way. He appreciated that the others were there to try to comfort him, but he wished they would leave.

  There was a searing feeling in his heart, like someone had touched it with a knife. He tried to picture Cher—always laughing, always smiling from the days she was an infant to the last time he saw her two years earlier. Even when he knew it was hopeless, he’d held on to the hope that his oldest child had simply run off on some wild, 20-year-old whim. That someday he’d hear the door open or the telephone would ring and there she’d be.

  Elder escorted the others to the door. There he took Richardson’s hand and shook it. “Thanks,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Thanks for finding her.”

  He closed the door and began to weep. But gradually the sadness was replaced by an anger greater than any he had ever known. That little bit of hope was now gone, snuffed out by a monster named Tom Luther. If it took the rest of his life, he would make sure that Luther paid the price.

  Just six days earlier, Rhonda Edwards had reached the end of her rope. Her own mother, Cher’s grandmother, was about mad with grief, sure she would die before her granddaughter was found. Neither woman could understand what was taking so long.

  The previous fall, when Byron Eerebout was sent to prison, Richardson called to say he was working with an FBI psychologist to break Cher’s former boyfriend down. He was sure that Byron knew where Cher’s body was and what happened to her. “We might have worked out a deal already, except Byron’s lawyers keep gettin’ in the way,” he said. “But I think we’re close.”