by Laurel Dewey
“What are you, a detective groupie?”
“Far from it. I’m deeply interested in any story that deals with a child and a murder. I saw you on Larry King’s show. I looked into your eyes and I saw a kindred spirit. You can stiffen your back and say ‘fuck you’ until the cows come home. I know it’s all a comfortable front to hide your pain and disarm stupid people so they don’t see how sensitive you really are.” Jane cringed at Kit’s backhanded compliment. Having her vulnerability exposed skewed her normal leveraging capabilities. “I don’t want you to think I’m sucking up to you, because I don’t suck up to anyone. Now, I do need to get to the point of my visit. It’s a matter of life and death and time is running out.”
Jane didn’t know what to make of Kit’s disturbing appeal. “Life and death?”
“I assume you’re aware of the breaking national news story of the moment?”
“What?”
Kit removed the Denver Post from her satchel and slid it toward Jane. “Charlotte Walker, age twelve, kidnapped from her hometown in Oakhurst, California.”
Jane stared at the photo of the hazel-eyed child. “What about it?”
“I think I know who has her,” Kit replied in a shaky voice.
Jane furrowed her brow like a judge debating the sanity of a defendant. “Yeah?”
“I’m not 100 percent sure, but my intuition is a helluva lot sharper these days. And it does add up if you look at his pattern.”
“Whose pattern?”
Kit leaned forward and spoke with defining authority. “Lou Peters . He’d be thirty-three years old now. He’s slim, has sandy brown hair, resembles a Greek god or Brad Pitt, take your pick. He’s utterly charming and smart. That’s who Lou Peters is. What he did was kidnap, rape, and kill my granddaughter, Ashlee, fourteen years ago in Northern California. Big Sur, to be specific. That’s where I used to live until I couldn’t live there anymore. Too many memories. Too much pain. I live in Boulder now.”
Boulder. To Jane, this pronouncement was akin to saying, “I’m a Leftist and proud of it!” When Jane was a member of the Denver PD—traditionally, a conservative band of folks—they delighted in a running jag of derisive comments about the 100 percent organic, free-range-thinking town that sat twenty miles northwest of Denver. Comments such as “He’s from the People’s Republic of Boulder,” “Welcome to Boulder, where the streets run red from all the bleeding hearts,” or “There’s only one age in Boulder: New Age” offered an example of what cops thought of the town.
“Here,” Kit handed Jane a photo. “That was taken of Ashlee and I just a week before Lou kidnapped her.”
Attached to the photo with a paper clip was a business card made on a home computer. Kit had found a yin-yang symbol in her clipart and positioned the small circular design above her name, address, phone number, and e-mail. Jane sat back and looked at the photo. A younger, more vibrant Kit was seated cross-legged on the grass, her back against a giant redwood tree. Ashlee lay across her grandmother’s lap, comfortably leaning into Kit’s body and tilting her head lovingly toward her shoulder. Her slim, agile body wrapped around Kit’s rounder frame, showing off her tanned legs and bright red toenail polish. The child’s shoulder-length brunette hair was parted into two braids with crimson ribbons tied on the ends. Her form-fitting yellow T-shirt showed off her well-developed breasts and the subtle outline of bra straps. Ashlee’s frayed shorts were also tight fitting, but cut modestly several inches above her knee. Jane looked into the child’s hazel eyes and saw a kid with a beautiful inner light. There was a sweet joyfulness about her—an incredible effervescent quality that literally vibrated off her body. It seemed almost incongruous that the girl was no longer on this earth. She handed the photo back to Kit.
“You keep it. That’s a copy,” Kit instructed. Jane reluctantly slid the photo under the flap of a nearby file. “Lou Peters went on trial for Ashlee’s murder. There were the usual attempts to create as much reasonable doubt as possible, thanks to devious defense attorneys who bully elderly witnesses until they doubt what they know they saw, and then put so-called ‘experts’ on the stand who have no business being there....” Kit took a breath, her emotions getting the better of her. “Lou was rightfully convicted of Ashlee’s murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, there was always a cloud of doubt that his attorney kept encouraging throughout the appeals process, focusing mostly on the semen left on a condom that was found near Ashlee’s body.” Kit handed a stack of manila folders to Jane, each bursting at the seams with newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, and police reports. “Every last detail you need to know about Lou Peters’s trial is in here. I was there in that courtroom every day. When I wasn’t in the courtroom, I was making myself at home with the detectives on the case, getting them to make copies of any relevant material they could release to me.”
Jane gave the bulging files a cursory exam and surmised that Kit must have been a veritable treat to deal with during the trial. In scanning the files, Jane found a mug shot of Lou, dated June 26, 1990. Here was the photo of a nineteen-year-old guy who allegedly raped and murdered a fourteen-year-old girl, and yet he looked more like a Calvin Klein model in a T-shirt ad. Between his tousled light brown hair and piercing blue eyes, Jane knew that Lou could easily beguile and infatuate any number of girls. In her years at DH, Jane had viewed a lot of mug shots. But this one was different. Jane detected a profound heartache behind Lou’s eyes. That brief but nagging perception disarmed Jane. Criminals were criminals. There were no shades of gray allowed in her book.
“I couldn’t let go of it,” Kit interjected, taking Jane’s attention away from Lou’s photo. “I had to know what Lou did to my beautiful girl. Every ghastly detail. I know that sounds sick, but I was responsible for what happened.”
“How were you responsible?”
“Ignorance. Stupidity. Confusing discernment with judgment.” A deep gulf of emotion caught in Kit’s throat. “My daughter, Barbara, has never forgiven me for what happened to her only child. But no one will ever know how I’ve punished myself over the years. When the prosecutor showed the photographs of Ashlee’s battered body, her face bashed in with a rock to the point where you couldn’t identify it as a face any longer, I made myself look at the photos and carve those images into my mind. I listened to the testimony of the medical examiner when he described how she had been raped repeatedly with the handle of a hammer over the fourteen days that Lou held her captive, and finally how Lou had raped her before he killed her. They always threw in the word, ‘allegedly’ because the goddamned condom they found wasn’t a solid match to Lou’s semen. Tried to make my Ashlee out to be a whore at fourteen years—”
Jane tried to get a gut feeling for Ashlee’s case. Drawing a cigarette out of a nearby pack, she was just about to light up when Kit raised her voice. “Please don’t smoke. I can’t be around the toxins. Besides, there are No Smoking signs posted all over this building.”
Jane lowered her lighter and plucked the cigarette out of her mouth. Yes, there were signs all over the place, but Jane never let a pesky sign stop her from doing anything. “Fourteen years ago,” Jane said, thinking out loud, “the DNA technology—”
“Wasn’t what it is today,” Kit said, finishing Jane’s sentence. “That was one of the big problems. All they could surmise was that there was a one in a hundred chance that Ashlee and Lou had been in close contact. They determined that from a drop of blood found on her hip. But because Ashlee and Lou knew each other, the defense shrugged it off as opportunistic contact.”
Jane’s ears perked up. “They were friends?”
Kit let out a long, tired breath. “Friends...I don’t know. Lou rented a guesthouse that sat behind my house off Highway 1. He liked the place because it was quiet. It was tucked in a stand of trees and skirted the creek down below. It was the one and only summer he lived there. Ashlee always came to visit me from San Diego for the month of June. She loved Big Sur. She loved the ocean, the people, and the
freedom. My daughter and son-in-law were really strict with her. Barbara tends to be repressed, just the opposite of her ol’ mom. But Ashlee was a free spirit who couldn’t be contained.” Kit’s eyes moistened with bittersweet tears. “She was an old soul. It sounds arrogant, but Ashlee flourished with me. She was my twin flame. I bought her clothes that her parents would never buy her. Other things, too, like bright blue eye shadow and red nail polish. Every fourteen-year-old girl needs those! I taught her how to meditate and do yoga and to understand the significance of Native American animal totems. We’d knock back shots of wheatgrass juice and burn Nag Champa incense. I gave her books on the Dalai Lama and love poems by Rumi. Ashlee lived a bread-and-butter existence at home. She yearned to break out and taste life! Thankfully, I could give that gift to her. I took Ashlee to her first R-rated movie.” There was pride in Kit’s statement. “There wasn’t violence in the film, just nudity. I think violence is abhorrent, but nudity is beautiful. All the things we shared together were our little secrets. It made me feel very special, and I wanted to continue that relationship with her. So I didn’t create a lot of boundaries for her.”
Boundaries. God help us, Jane thought. Yet another buzzword of the New Age community.
“When she first laid eyes on Lou, she was smitten. She was fourteen and coming into her sexuality. And like I said, Lou was nineteen, built like a Greek god, and walked around half the time with faded jeans and no shirt so everyone could see his tanned physique. She’d talk to him and he would talk to her. It was always innocent, at least on Ashlee’s part. Lots of girls were taken with Lou Peters. That’s how he lured them into his web.”
“There were other girls?”
“Oh, yes! Ashlee wasn’t the first. She was the first he killed. But he raped at least two other fourteen-year-old girls before Ashlee!”
Jane observed Kit’s presumptuous attitude. “Was that proven?”
“It was never used at his trial because the assaults took place when he was under eighteen. And since the two girls in question never pressed charges, it became a moot point.”
“You knew these two girls?”
“No, I just know it happened. I had a very reliable source.”
“Hold on. Two fourteen-year-old girls get raped and there are no charges? What about the girls’ parents? Weren’t they at all interested in justice?”
“Justice? Please. There’s no such thing as justice in our court system!”
“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 w
ho 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.”
