Protector - Laurel Dewey [20]
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