STYLIST: A Psycho-Sexual Thriller Page 8

  “She didn’t?”

  “No. She never told me that.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you knew your lover was about to commit a murder for money. You know the law. You’re a cop. Surely you must have talked with her about it. Or am I wrong about that?”

  “No. You’re right. I talked with her.”

  “And?”

  “I told her I didn’t think it was a very good idea. I told her she’d probably get caught.”

  “And?”

  “She said she had it all worked out and no one would ever find out she did it.”

  Tina shifted uneasily in her chair.

  “So, tell me what else Tammy said about how this was all supposed to happen.”

  “There’s not much more to it. She told me she was going to kill someone and she’d get a lot of money. She promised she’d give me half the money. We were going to use it to retire early and leave the country.”

  “Where were you going to go?”

  “I don’t know. She hadn’t decided.”

  “So, Tammy was calling the shots?”

  “Yes. She always called the shots.”

  “Did she give you some money?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much?”

  “Two-hundred fifty-thousand dollars.”

  “What. A check or cash or what?”

  “It was cash.”

  “What did you do with the money?”

  “We kept all of it at Tammy’s house. She said if we tried to bank it in our personal accounts, the banks would report us to the IRS. So, we didn’t. She took me to some guy at an office down in Denver. We gave him the cash and he helped us set up offshore bank accounts. One for each of us.”

  “Where was the offshore bank?”

  “I think it was in the Cayman Islands or something. I’m not sure.”

  “Do you remember this guy’s name? The one who helped you set up the offshore bank accounts?”

  “No.”

  “Did she say who gave her the money for killing Emma?”

  “No.”

  “No? You’re sure about that, Tina?”

  “Yes. I’m sure. She never told me that.”

  “Did you ever try to stop her from going through with the killing?”

  “You mean other than telling her it wasn’t a very good idea?”

  “Well, yes. Let’s start there.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Did you believe her when she told you what she was going to do? Did you really believe she’d kill someone?”

  “I didn’t know if she’d really do something like that or not.”

  “Where were the two of you when she first talked about it?”

  “In bed.”

  “I see. Pillow talk?”

  “Yes. I suppose you could say that.”

  “Where?”

  “At her place.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you put a date on that conversation?”

  “Not exactly. No. Like I told you, it was about three weeks before she went on vacation.”

  “After Tammy came home from her vacation and showed you the cash, whenever that was, did you ever tell anyone else what had happened?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? You’re a cop. She’d killed a woman.”

  “I told you. We were going to retire. We were gonna get out of here. I was in love.”

  “In love.”

  “Yes. I was in love. You probably have no concept of that.”

  An image of his dead wife flashed through Terryfield’s mind.

  “Can I have a tissue?”

  Tina’s tears came. Real tears. Glendowich handed her a tissue from a box placed atop his desk. She took it from him and dabbed at her eyes.

  “Tina. I’m going to ask you one more time. Are you sure you don’t know anything about who gave that money to Tammy? ‘Cause I’m having a really hard time believing that part of your story.”

  “Well, that’s too bad. Yes. I’m sure. She didn’t tell me. I’d have to take a guess at who gave her the money.”

  “Well, give us your best guess.”

  “I’d say you should look at the husband. It’s always the husband. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Of course it is. Thank you. Okay. I’m going to ask you to wait outside for just a moment. I need to speak with Sergeant Glendowich.”

  Terryfield arose and opened the door. Tina stood slowly, walked into the small lobby and sat down where she’d begun this ordeal. She heard two muffled voices within the office, but she couldn’t understand anything they were saying to each other. A few minutes passed before the door opened again. It was Terryfield.

  “Come back in, Tina. But don’t sit down. I need for you to stand there.”

  “Thank you.”

  I guess.

  “Tina, I’m placing you under arrest for conspiracy to commit first degree murder by complicity and as an accessory after the fact. Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

  28

  Jail

  Tina Olivares rode in silence to the Roberts County Detention Center, colloquially known as a jail. Seated uncomfortably in the rear of a marked sheriff’s office car, her hands cuffed behind her back, her knees were hurting from pressing against the front seat. She was not at all accustomed to looking at the world from her present vantage-point, through the plexi-glass shield which separated her from the deputy in the driver’s seat.

  She lapsed deeply into thought, trying to recall the beginnings of her love affair with Tammy Lenkovsky. She wasn’t sure which of them had first taken an interest in the other. After thinking for few minutes, it came to her that Tammy spotted her as a rookie recruit in her first day on the job and made the first moves.

  Yes. That was how it had happened. Tammy introduced herself and offered her assistance to the fresh, beautiful, well-conditioned newbie.

  Thus, the seasoned, older officer took the younger inexperienced one under a wing and befriended her. Tammy introduced the fledgling cop to other senior officers and division supervisors.

  Tina knew very soon after they had spent a little time together that Tammy, too, was a lesbian.

  Off-duty meetings for morning coffee eventually, inexorably, led to evening dinners in nice restaurants. Their lovemaking began late one night, following some after-dinner wine. They ended the evening at Tammy’s home, in her king-sized bed, their mouths locked together, their arms and legs wrapping and sliding around each other like the coiling of two struggling constrictors. While their kisses were tender, their bodies tested each other’s strength, as though lovemaking were some kind of contest.

  For Tina, their first time in bed was like something she had never imagined. She found Tammy’s strength and relentless endurance beyond arousing.

  The couple quickly became inseparable and began to spend more time together. They bought memberships in a local gym and worked out as a team. Their relationship was no secret at the Sheriff’s Office building. Neither made an attempt to disguise or hide it from anyone. Not that anyone would have cared about their sexual preferences.

  What could have brought Tammy under some professional ethical scrutiny was that she was a senior deputy, and a training officer at that. Getting involved with a rookie-in-training, freshly out of the sheriff’s academy, might have raised some supervisory eyebrows. If any eyebrows were raised, no one mentioned it to either of the lovers.

  Everything had gone so beautifully. After a couple of years together, the pair frequently talked in secret about retiring far, far away. All they would need would be money – a lot of money. Tina didn’t have a clue that Tammy had already begun negotiations that would someday result in putting that money into their hands. By the time Tina did know that something was going to happen which would financially set them up for life, she felt powerless to stop any of it. She f
elt propelled along by her passionate love for Tammy Lenkovsky.

  Now, Tina Olivares was stepping out of the back seat of a marked sheriff’s car, walking with her hands restrained behind her back through the rear door of the Roberts County jail. The transporting officers walked her into the receiving sally-port. This time she was not the one who escorted a prisoner for booking and processing. Two of her soon-to-be former colleagues walked beside her, firmly holding her upper arms. Nothing could have prepared her for the sinking sense of powerlessness and fear which gnawed at her insides and caused her upper leg muscles to tremble.

  She was about to be fingerprinted, mugged, and booked for a couple of crimes that could revoke her freedom to move about in the world for the rest of her life. As she had surmised, following her processing and entry interview with the inmate classification personnel, she went immediately into Administrative Segregation, or as the seasoned criminals call it – The Hole. As a law enforcement officer charged with any crime and incarcerated with people she may have arrested, Tina presented a huge amount of civil liability to the jail administrators and thereby to the Sheriff, himself. The powers that be knew too well that if any injury befell her, or should she die a violent death while in custody, a world of trouble in the form of a very winnable lawsuit filed by Tina’s family would land on their desks.

  Standing in the booking room she was in a sort of fog as to what was really happening to her. The fingerprinting, mugshots, and all of the questions she answered were soon lost in her short term memory. She was in a state of emotional shock, induced by the recent events which had turned her life upside down. The love of her life was gone forever. And she had become a prisoner inside the Hell that is called a jail.

  She endured handing over all of her clothing and standing naked for a strip search. She dressed in the jail-issue uniform handed to her by the female deputy who had conducted the strip search. Another deputy clipped a laminated inmate ID tag to her jumpsuit. Lastly she picked up the blue collapsible property box that held all of the clothing she’d wear and her few toilet articles. Then came an escort by two jail division deputies through a maze of hallways.

  The entire facility was locked down and all inmate movement stopped from the time she stepped out of the booking room until she entered the Administrative Segregation housing pod. The idea was to expose her face to as few people inside the jail as possible. It was inevitable that some prisoner would eventually recognize her as a cop, but the lockdown until she’d arrived at her housing unit was to postpone that eventuality for as long a time as possible.

  There is a very rapid mouth to ear communications system inside jails and prisons. A report that an officer or deputy is in custody travels at unbelievable speed through the inmate news network. It’s not long before everyone in the facility knows that a cop has fallen. The predators prepare to move in.

  High-level administrators knew too well what Deputy Tina Olivares’ presence in their jail meant. Phone calls to other county sheriff’s institutions far away from Roberts County were already under way to make arrangements for her transfer and temporary detention – to protect their prisoner and to protect themselves.

  As Tina entered her cell deep within the bowels of the jail, the door slammed closed, leaving her alone in a small concrete and steel room, sitting on a steel bunk with a thinly stuffed plastic pad as a mattress. After a period of time which she could not measure and would not recall later on, Tina began to come out of the fog and the shock. She looked at her surroundings – and figured she had said far too much to Detective Miles Terryfield. He’d taken advantage of her in her state of bereavement.

  Soon-to-be former deputy sheriff Tina Olivares decided that she was finished talking to the cops. She wanted to talk with a lawyer.

  29

  Terryfield

  Getting a search warrant signed for Jack Saunders’ bank records was not a difficult task. Any local judge, yearning to break free from the mundane obscurity of his daily tasks – still hoping to make his mark on jurisprudence, would have leapt at the chance to put his name on that document. Colorado’s judicial history was in the making. By the time Terryfield had his search warrant in hand, news outlets and broadcast media throughout the western states were in a state of high hysteria over the sensational revelation that two lesbian law enforcement officers had been accused of being involved in a contract murder on the high seas.

  The reports which were inevitably leaked from the District Attorney’s Office and from the Sheriff’s Office were seeded with sexual innuendos. It was the material that reporters dream about for years – for lifetimes. What could be more stimulating to readers’ imaginations than murder, sex and greed – involving two female cops? Every story that was filed for publication and public consumption carried with it the writer’s hopes for journalistic immortality – and beyond that lay the possibility of a Pulitzer Prize. What more incentives could news people ask for? A respected woman, a wife, the mother of a United States Marine, had been murdered in a most terrible way. The confessed killer was a cop who had been paid a small fortune for committing the murder while the victim was aboard a Portuguese cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea. To make the story even more sensational, the hired murderer had killed herself after confessing to the crime. And now the lesbian partner of the killer was herself a cop, charged as a complicitor in covering up the killing.

  Elected political officials and law enforcement administrators made themselves available for public comment on the horror and depravations involved in the unraveling plot. As more details about the case slowly trickled out in news reports, families throughout the state sat glued to their televisions, night after night.

  Editors and publishers of local Colorado newspapers were ecstatic. They’d never seen such brisk sales, both at newsstands and online. Oh, how they reveled and celebrated the potential profits to be turned by the twisted misery which the murder of Emma Saunders promised to provide at trial.

  But the news people and the public hadn’t seen the half of it. Not yet. This case was far from finished.

  Miles Terryfield avoided the press corps at every opportunity. Reporters and photographers dogged him, trailed him, hounded him, even as he drove to his home after his work day ended. He could no longer go out to a local restaurant for a daytime meal. No ordinary cop ever knows when he will be suddenly thrust into the limelight of television cameras, with microphones thrust at his face, and the sleepless nights that frequently result from that kind of attention.

  Terryfield served his search warrant on Jack Saunders’ bank. It was a few days of anxious waiting until he got his hands on those documents. A review of Saunders’ bank records showed the detective exactly what he’d been looking for – two separate five-hundred thousand dollar cash withdrawals, recorded within days of his receiving and depositing the death settlement check from the Clendennon Life Assurance Company of Rhode Island.

  So, he gave one of the bundles to Tammy. But who got the other half million?

  Tammy Lenkovsky and Tina Olivares had played it smartly by not putting their money into regular bank accounts. A two-hundred fifty-thousand dollar cash deposit made by each of them would have drawn some intense scrutiny from the bankers and from the IRS. Lenkovsky was no dummy. She knew too well that today’s American bankers are de facto spies for the Internal Revenue Service. Any time a client’s balance reaches the amount of ten-thousand dollars or more, all banks are required by federal law to notify the Internal Revenue Service.

  Terryfield wasn’t too optimistic about finding either the man who had arranged for the offshore bank account to which Tina made her allusion, or the name of the bank. Even had he discovered where Tammy and Tina had deposited their funds, he refused to contemplate the nightmare of bureaucratic hurdles he would have to navigate in order to gain access to the records.

  No. Where the money had been placed was not of importance at the moment.

  With Tina Olivares’ statement and Jack Saunders’ bank records in h
is sheriff’s case file, Terryfield was fairly certain that he might just have enough probable cause to get a warrant to arrest Saunders for soliciting the murder of his wife.

  30

  Saunders

  “Do you understand each of these rights I’ve explained to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Having these rights in mind, are you willing to talk to me now and answer questions without an attorney being present?”

  “No. I want to talk to an attorney.”

  Terryfield and several uniformed deputies had arrested Jack Saunders at his home. The detective knocked on the door of a spacious ranch style custom-built frame house located on a fifteen acre tract of land miles away from the nearest Roberts County town. Wearing slippers, a pair of tan slacks and a white “wife-beater” undershirt, Saunders answered the over-sized oaken double-door. He looked at the uniformed men who stood on his front porch and said not a word. If he was in fear, it didn’t show on his ruddy, wrinkled face. His white, thinning hair was tousled, as though he had just gotten out of bed. It was one o’clock in the afternoon.

  Terryfield had made the simple announcement.

  “Mr. Saunders, I have a warrant to arrest you for the crime of criminal solicitation for first degree murder. Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

  Saunders offered no resistance and didn’t look surprised – in the least. Seated in the back of a marked car with Terryfield beside him, the once-aggrieved husband of the murder victim who had suddenly become the defendant rode to the Roberts County Sheriff’s Office in abject silence.

  Terryfield made all of the correct moves which skilled, careful detectives have been trained to do. There was no immediate Miranda Rights advisal during the handcuffing, as television shows so often depict. At the sheriff’s office Terryfield removed the restraints and sat his suspect on a comfortable chair in an interrogation room. He gave Saunders a cup of hot coffee, and made some small talk. He wanted to make his arrestee as at ease as possible, under the circumstances. Then he got around to the business at hand and read Saunders his Miranda Rights.