I would be negligent not to mention all the booksellers throughout North America and beyond—those indy stores and the chains—who have supported me and talked up my books to customers (thank you from the bottom of my heart).
Lastly, my immediate family—Regina, April, Mathew Jr., and Jordon—who have stood behind me forever. I could not close any book without speaking directly to my readers: Thank you! You are the most important part of this for me. I am grateful to each one of you for coming back, book after book. You are all constantly on my mind as I write these books.
And, of course, my readers. I love each and every one of you.
Read a preview sample of M. William Phelps’s
next riveting real-life thriller
Bad Girls
Coming soon from Kensington Publishing Corp.
Turn the page . . .
1
“S
OMETHING BAD MAY
have happened.”
It was the only fact she was certain of. Beyond that, the woman thought the victim might be “a friend of her niece’s.” His name “might have been” Bob. But that was all she knew. She feared the worst, however: that Bob Something was dead. She didn’t know the exact address where the police could find him, but she could explain how to drive there, and she would escort cops to the house if they wanted to meet her somewhere in the neighborhood.
On a quiet evening, May 5, 2004, forty-eight-year-old Richard “Rick” Cruz called the Mineral Wells Police Department (MWPD) and explained what his wife, Kathy, had just told him. Both Kathy and Rick were in somewhat of a panicked state. Not freaked out. But their feelings were more of a puzzled, what’s-going-on–type thing they didn’t quite understand.
“Have you heard anything about someone being shot on Eighteenth Street?” Rick asked the 911 dispatcher.
Rick had the street wrong. It was actually Twentieth Street. Still, dispatch wasn’t in the business of sharing information with worried callers phoning in to report gunshots fired at people.
“What other information do you have?” the 911 operator asked.
Rick explained the layout of the neighborhood best he could. He said he and Kathy weren’t all that familiar with Mineral Wells and this particular neighborhood where Bob supposedly lived. They had only heard about it.
The operator said they’d send an officer out to Eighteenth Street to check things out.
Rick and Kathy Cruz lived in Graford, Texas, directly next door to Kathy’s mother, Dorothy Louise Smith. Graford is about fifteen miles from Mineral Wells, where the shooting was said to have occurred. Kathy and Rick had arrived home at about 4:30
P.M.
Rick was driving. As they exited the vehicle after Rick parked, Kathy’s mother, Dorothy, standing on her porch next door, waved them over.
“Come here,” Dorothy said. She seemed frazzled and agitated, as if in a hurry to get them over there so she could speak her mind about something.
“What is it?” Kathy asked.
Dorothy was “very upset,” Kathy Cruz later explained in a police report. Kathy and Rick noticed Dorothy was on the telephone. Apparently, Kathy found out after walking over and assessing the situation, Dorothy was talking to her other daughter.
Something terrible was happening.
“What is it?” Rick and Kathy asked.
A pause. Then a bombshell: Somebody shot Bob.
Dorothy got off the phone and clarified what she knew. As the story went thus far, somehow, Dorothy explained, Kathy’s niece (Dorothy’s grandchild)—who had been living with Dorothy intermittently throughout the past year—might be involved in the shooting. Nobody really knew how or why, or any of the circumstances surrounding the story. Just that it was urgent someone get over there to this Bob Something’s house immediately.
Rick walked into Dorothy’s house. Without explaining what he was doing, according to what he later told police, he headed into his niece’s room to have a look around.
“You stay here,” Rick said to Kathy, who was becoming more upset by the moment. Kathy’s niece had lived with the Cruzes for a while as well. Kathy had been close to her.
The idea Rick had in mind was to see if he could find something in the house that might clarify just what the hell was going on. A note. An e-mail.
Anything.
There was probably a simple answer. Usually there was. People overreact. Perhaps Dorothy, in all of her excitement, had totally misinterpreted the situation and blew it out of proportion. Drama—every family, in some form or fashion, had certain members that thrived on it.
Upon immediately entering the young girl’s room, Rick found an empty gun holster. Exactly what he did not expect.
Where is the weapon?
Then he found an unloaded pistol in a second holster.
This alarmed Rick. The report of a shooting. A gun missing from a holster. Another weapon on the bed in a holster. Rick wasn’t Magnum, P.I., but then again, he didn’t need to be a private investigator to figure out that something was up. And it didn’t look good.
Rick ran out of the room, then out of the house. While outside in the front yard, Rick called the MWPD back on his cell phone.
“Have you found anything?” Rick asked the operator. He sounded more serious.
“No. The officers out at Eighteenth Street haven’t located anything suspicious.” The dispatcher wondered what was going on. Was this guy—Rick—playing games with the MWPD?
Rick hung up. Then he grabbed Kathy’s attention. “Listen, we have to head out to Mineral Wells ourselves and find out what’s going on.”
Kathy thought about it.
Good idea.
They took off.
On the way to Mineral Wells, having no clue, really, where in that town they were headed, Rick phoned Kathy’s sister, her niece’s mother, Cindy Meyer (pseudonym), and asked for directions to a house in Mineral Wells that Kathy’s niece had been hanging out at and even living in lately. There was even some indication that the niece was working with the guy, Bob, who lived there. Cindy had been to the house.
After getting more detailed directions, Rick decided that he’d better stop first at the MWPD and relay to them what he had uncovered.
“I have the gun,” Rick explained, referring to the pistol he had taken out of the room in Dorothy’s house. “Do you want it?”
The cop was a bit taken aback. “We need to find that house first, Mr. Cruz. And we need to see if anything happened—then we can take it from there.”
Kathy’s niece was young—nineteen years old. According to Kathy and Rick, she liked to “get on drugs and exaggerate things.” Others had said she liked to brag about being a tough, gangsta-type chick. Although she had been in a relationship with a man, engaged to be married, and had a baby, she was an open and admitted lesbian with scores of sexual partners and girlfriends—plus, drugs had become her life. Who knew what she was into now? Could be just about anything.
They left together, the cop following Rick and Kathy.
Rick pulled onto Eighteenth Street first and didn’t seem to know where he was going. He was driving slowly past each house, checking to see if he recognized any of them. In back of him, the cop became more impatient as each block passed. The officer threw up his hands, beckoning Rick to tell him what in the hell was going on here. Was this some sort of a joke?
After a time of Rick’s stop-and-go game, the cop got on the telephone with Kathy’s sister; she talked him directly over to Twentieth Street.
Finally they arrived at the right house.
Bob.
Patrol corporal Randy Hunter, the participating officer, got out of his cruiser and told Rick, “You stay here by your truck and wait.” Hunter said he needed to approach the door by himself.
Procedure.
Hunter knocked on the front door as Rick and Kathy looked on.
No answer.
“I’m going around back,” Hunter said. “Stay where you are.” He held up his hand as to indicate stop. The plan was, Hunter later said, “to check and see if anybody may have been in the backyard, look around. . . .” See what he could find out.
Nobody seemed to be home, but Officer Hunter noticed something peculiar as he focused on the back door of the home.
One of the windowpanes had been smashed.
“Something may have happened inside,” Hunter recalled later, speaking about that moment he spied the broken back window, “that we needed to investigate a little further [and] check the welfare of the people inside.”
Several additional officers arrived. Officer Hunter approached the house slowly, his weapon drawn, reached for the knob and opened the door.
“Mineral Wells Police Department!” the veteran cop yelled as he walked in. “We’re here with Richard and Kathy Cruz. We’re coming in.”
Not a peep.
Hunter announced himself “four or five times” before heading into the kitchen.
As he made his way through the kitchen stealthily, as if expecting to be ambushed at any moment, Hunter heard music. A radio or television was on.
Coming out of the hallway from the kitchen, Randy Hunter spied a “subject,” as he described the person, “somebody lying on [a] bed. . . .”
He pointed his weapon toward the subject and shouted pointedly: “Mineral Wells Police Department!”
No response.
“The size of the body . . . it appeared to be a male,” Hunter recalled.
But Randy Hunter couldn’t be 100 percent certain, because the bottom half of the subject was covered with a blanket. And from his neck up, the subject’s face was covered with a pillow or bag of some sort.
Randy Hunter carefully approached the subject, bent down, and placed two fingers on the man’s carotid artery to check for a pulse.
No sign of life.
Then, as Hunter grabbed his radio to call in additional backup, he saw blood.
“We’re going to need an ambulance over here . . . ,” Hunter said into his handheld. “Send Captain [Mike] McAllester and Sergeant [Brian] Boetz, too.”
Hunter worked his way around the corner from that small bedroom and located a second back bedroom, which he also approached with caution.
The door was slightly ajar. Hunter pried it open slowly and saw a “hospital-type bed . . . with all kinds of stuff piled on it.” As he walked toward the bed to check the other side, “an arm fell out from underneath a blanket. . . .”
2
S
HE BELIEVED IT TO BE
some sort of celestial “sign.” Those incredibly vivid dreams invading her sleep were coming “for a reason,” she felt. They were fuzzy images, certainly, filled with metaphors of “which path to take,” she later explained. In one, Jennifer Jones believed she was setting herself up for failure simply because she had been born (as they might say in Texas)
kin
to Clyde Barrow, half of the infamous Bonnie and Clyde murderous duo. Indeed, according to her grandmother, who was said to have made a shrine in her house dedicated to the old murderer and bank robber, Jennifer had that bad blood of the Barrows coursing through her veins, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Jen’s mother before her, Kathy Jones, had set herself on that same path. Kathy was tough as rawhide, a bar bruiser and career criminal, in and out of jail. Kathy had even come close to death a number of times, stabbed and beaten. Jennifer never saw herself in that manner; but coming from that sort of pedigree, a woman can’t help but develop a thick exterior and disastrously unhealthy inner dialogue. She begins to convince herself that she
can’t
do anything. And all of those dreams she was having lately, well, they fit right into the madness that had made up her life. She felt doomed, in other words.
Destined to fail, that is.
“I found a list once,” one of Jennifer’s sisters explained to me. “Jennifer was like just about fourteen. It was a list of all the guys she had slept with. She stopped at one hundred. I asked why [the list abruptly ended]. She said she lost count. The list started with names. As it continued, she dropped the names. I asked why. She said she didn’t even know some of the names of the guys she’d had sex with.”
Because of that Clyde Barrow connection and a mother she viewed as destructive, unavailable, and quite caught up in a world of drugs and crimes to support bad habits, Jennifer Jones obsessed over the self-prophesized fact in her head that her life had been paved by a road already chosen for her. No matter what she did—no matter how hard she tried—Jennifer believed nothing could get in the way of this tragic evolution that became her fate.
So why fight it? Jennifer decided. Why not embrace its ambiguity and dark side? Years ago, Jennifer wrote about her chosen future in a journal that had become her best friend at the time. On December 28, 2000, just five days after her sixteenth birthday, Jennifer sat down and confirmed the inevitable:
These dreams are coming to me for a reason. . . .
The Jennifer Jones of sixteen years old had no idea how visionary—call it wishful thinking, a self-fulfilling prophecy, creating one’s own reality, whatever you want—those dreams of her future were to become. The baby-faced, clear-skinned, attractive Texas teen, with long brown hair and a Colgate smile, had set herself on a dangerous and deadly course, indeed. She didn’t know it, but in front of Jennifer was a carefully chosen path that her mother had tried to manage before her. It was one that Jennifer had herself predicted years before, and the new “love” of her life—a tomboyish (but deceivingly pretty), petite, butch blonde, whom friends called a “little boy”—would end up becoming the proverbial scapegoat for it.
3
I
T WAS 7:30 P.M. ON
May 5, 2004. By most accounts it was a quiet night in Mineral Wells, Texas. Mineral Wells is a mostly white, bedroom community of about sixteen thousand, located in the northern central portion of the state pushing up toward the Oklahoma border. Fort Worth is the closest major city; Dallas and Irving are not too far east from there.
Before Rick and Kathy Cruz had telephoned into the MWPD what appeared to be a murder, the town had enjoyed a near nonexistent homicide rate: between 1999 and 2004, for example, there had been three murders. So people killing one another was not what Mineral Wells residents worried all that much about. When the locals were asked, the main problems in Mineral Wells dated back to 1973, when the military installation known as Fort Wolters transferred its last remaining helicopters out of the popular base and began the economically devastating process of closing. At one time Fort Wolters kept Mineral Wells bustling with plenty of military money floating around in bars and petrol stations and every other type of financial mainstay holding up a small community.