Mortal Danger (20 page)

“We need to get some palm prints,” Benson told Mary Lou Hanson-O’Brien. “Let’s contact Jennifer and Daniel and Jeff and his wife, and tell them we need to get clearer prints. When we get there, we’ll find a way to get their palm prints, too.”

Neither the Freitases nor the Tavareses objected to being fingerprinted. Mary Lou Hanson-O’Brien was matter-of-fact as she daubed ink from their fingertips up halfway to their elbows. The subjects didn’t question her, and she and Ben Benson kept the conversation going, hoping they wouldn’t notice what she was doing.

She pressed all of their fingertips to cards and labeled them. Then she pressed several sections of their palms to cards. Her eyes met Benson’s and he nodded slightly.

Somewhere among those cards, Benson believed they had the print they needed to compare with the one on the doorjamb in the Maucks’ house.

No one in the Freitas family seemed to know
exactly
what Jennifer’s new husband had been in prison for, or how much time he’d served. Maybe Jennifer didn’t really know. Daniel didn’t seem eager to talk about it, but who could blame him for that? He’d come out west to a new wife and a new life, and he probably wanted to forget the past.

Although it was the weekend and many law enforcement records departments were closed, Benson contacted the Massachusetts State Police to check on what crime had sent Daniel Tavares to prison. He received word that it had been manslaughter in 1991. There was a warrant out for him for leaving New England without informing his parole officer or getting permission to cross state lines, but Massachusetts had declined to extradite him to their jurisdiction.

Manslaughter can mean a lot of things: He might have been responsible for a car crash that had caused a death. It might have been involuntary—an unplanned—manslaughter. For the moment, Daniel Tavares didn’t come across as a dangerous felon.

One of the other possible suspects was the neighbor’s nephew. But efforts to locate Billy Jack were fruitless. When detectives went to the last address given for him,
they found that the building had been demolished. They eventually located him, jobless and living with his mother in a small town some miles away from Graham. He had an alibi for the early morning hours of November 17.

Ben Benson asked Jennifer and Daniel to come into the sheriff’s offices to work with a police artist and attempt to come up with likenesses of the men they’d seen in the red truck. He would send an officer to pick them up. They agreed readily, saying they would be glad to help. Deputy Nick Hausner picked them up at their trailer at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday night.

Benson didn’t believe there had been any strangers at the victim’s house the morning they died, but the police artist request gave him a reason to bring the Tavareses in.

It was raining when Jason Tate followed Ben Benson and Daniel Tavares into the sheriff’s office for further questioning, and they had to walk through puddles. As they stepped onto a covered cement walkway, Tate happened to look down. There, just in front of him, were the wet shoe prints from Tavares’s shoes. All of the investigators who had seen the shoe prints in the victims’ blood had memorized the distinctive zigzag pattern of the killer’s shoes. Tate knew he was looking at the same pattern—not in blood, but in rainwater on a stretch of dry sidewalk.

Ben Benson immediately contacted Mary Lou Hanson-O’Brien and had her take digital photos of the prints Daniel Tavares had just made. It was essential to get clear photos before the ephemeral images dried and were lost.

She responded at once, adding those digital images to the piles of evidence they already had. She had seen the bloody footprints at the murder scene, and these prints in
rainwater looked the same to her, too. When she matched up the two images, they were as close to identical in their zigzag patterns as anything could be. She notified Ben Benson.

Whatever Tavares had done in Massachusetts, he was looking more and more like a good suspect in Washington.

Benson directed Daniel Tavares toward one interview room and Jennifer to another. Tavares was calm and cooperative; he actually seemed to enjoy answering Benson’s questions during the first part of their interview.

Benson, with Detective Tom Catey looking on, began by asking Daniel Tavares when he had moved to Washington. It had been July and he’d moved from Massachusetts to meet Jennifer in person. “I met her online,” he volunteered.

When they met in person, they had hit it off and were married on July 31. Daniel said he’d gone to work for Jeff, his new brother-in-law.

Asked how he met Brian and Bev, he said Jeff had introduced them. “They go to Jeff’s house every Friday to play cards—so every Friday we used to get together to play cards. All of us—me, my wife, her brother, Jeff, and his wife, Kristel—and then two more friends, which is Pat and Marlene.”

Tavares said that he and Jennifer did more than play cards with their neighbors. He made it sound as if they were close friends. They always stopped and talked when they met on the private road between their residences, especially about Brian’s motorcycles. “One time we went for a Harley ride—me and him—for about an hour.”

“How about the tattoo stuff?” Benson asked.

“He knew I was doing tattoos, and he wanted one…what do you call it? Your sign, like a Taurus, Scorpion—your
birth sign
—so he wanted a scorpion. I told him that I’d draw him up one, and if he liked my drawing and wanted it, I’d have no problem doing it for him. I did that for him.”

“Did you just put one tattoo on him?”

Daniel Tavares nodded. “And his initials: B.A.M. Brian—I forgot his middle name, but it was a scorpion with ‘B.A.M.’ above it. That’s the first tattoo he has, I think.”

He said that Bev had shown interest in having a tattoo, too. She was drawing up an angelfish she wanted. “’Cause they scuba dive.”

Ben Benson noted that Daniel spoke of the dead couple as if they were still alive.

“So what was the agreement about the tattoo?” Benson asked. “Just doing it because you were a buddy of his?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Or was he paying you to do it?”

“No, he paid me a hundred bucks to do it.”

There was no money paid up front, according to Daniel, but he had been paid in full after he’d tattooed the whole outline and colored it in. He had wanted to “soup it up” a little by adding more red after it had healed enough, but Brian said he was happy the way it was. He’d finally agreed to have more color as Daniel recommended. That was to cost another fifty dollars.

“When was the last time you saw Bev or Brian, or both of them?”

“God, let me see—it’s been a few days.”

“Try and think for me,” Benson urged. “See if you can pin it down.”

Finally, Tavares said he thought it must have been in the middle of the preceding week. He and Brian had spoken as he turned into the driveway leading up to his trailer. “I asked him when he wanted to do the rest, but he told me he was so busy, had things to do. He was going to a birthday party, and maybe going hunting. He would call me and let me know.”

Daniel said he hadn’t seen Bev for more than a week.

Daniel Tavares was speaking in a more agitated way, his words tumbling over Ben Benson’s before the detective sergeant could complete his questions.

Asked to describe the Maucks, he said, “Nice people. Good people. Good people. Good, good people.
Drunks
.”

“They like their alcohol?” Benson asked, surprise in his voice.

“Oh, they love their alcohol.”

Tavares paused, and with a sanctimonious expression on his face, he offered that Bev often started fights in taverns and could be wild. That didn’t fit with what others had said about Bev Mauck.

With what the Pierce County investigators had learned so far about Tavares’s drug and alcohol usage, he hardly seemed in a position to be painting the dead couple as “drunks” and worse. By now, the detectives had discovered that Tavares had bought at least four hits of meth within hours of the murders.

Still, Ben Benson said nothing, more than “um-humm.” He could see that his subject believed that
he
was the one controlling the interview. That was fine with Benson.

“Did Bev ever flirt with you—or anything like that?”

“No…no.” Tavares seemed taken aback by the question. He was in full saintly mode, but Benson wondered if he had had lustful feelings for the pretty bride.

Now Benson asked Tavares to go over his activities on Friday night, November 16. He had told other detectives that he and Jennifer were doing a puzzle together in their trailer. Yes, that was true, he said—but earlier on Friday evening they had been in Tacoma at a friend’s house.

“Your wife was with you?” Ben Benson caught the disparity in Daniel’s story. She hadn’t been with him at the Roundup or when he took Carl Rider for a drive to smoke meth.

“Yeah, yeah,” he lied now. “Well, she drives everywhere. I mean we are always together. So, yeah.”

Tavares had talked his way into a dead end, and he struggled now to break out. He remembered that Jennifer wasn’t with him on Friday night, but he’d had to call her on his cell phone to ask where the spare tire to her Ford Explorer was after he discovered a flat tire. He’d struggled with the lug nuts, and
that’s
when he’d been attacked by her ex-boyfriend and another man, bruised and cut, and had another tire slashed.

He admitted he’d never seen his wife’s ex-boyfriend before, but he knew his name was Eddie. He thought he would recognize a photo of Eddie. Now he added another person on the scene of the attack. Some young kid from a bar had come over to ask if he was okay.

“I’m like, ‘No, I’m all set,’ and he just got in his car and left.”

His assailants had given him a message:
“It would be good advice for you to leave Jennifer.”

The more he talked, the more Daniel Tavares was making things worse for himself. He said he’d been attacked about eight to eight thirty, but Carl Rider had seen him last just after midnight on Friday night–Saturday morning and he had no bruises or cuts then. The details he kept inserting into his story warred with what he had told the sheriff’s staff and his brother-in-law earlier.

Didn’t he know that every time he gave a statement it had been preserved either on tape or in investigative notes?

Now, to add to the mysterious red truck, he recalled that a green and silver truck had been parked in the Maucks’ driveway when he drove past, heading up the road to the Freitas property at 8:40 p.m. on Friday, inching along on two flattened tires. He told Ben Benson that he had replaced the tires but thought he could find the slashed and punctured tires somewhere on Jeff’s acreage.

“Okay,” Benson said. “This was about eight thirty. Did you leave again that night?”

“No. My wife told me, ‘Look what I got,’ and she showed me she picked up a puzzle at Goodwill. So we started, and it was like, ‘Oh man, let’s do this.’ It was a real nice puzzle.”

The puzzle that they’d allegedly worked on together was the image of a wolf. Except for the animal’s penetrating and unfathomable yellow eyes, the rest of the evening sounded as benign and cozy as newlyweds at home could be.

Unless he was lying.

Nothing matched the facts
or
Daniel Tavares’s earlier statements. He had said that the Mauck house was completely dark when he got home at 8:30 p.m., but both their cars were there so he knew they were home. Besides, the Freitas dogs always barked when someone outside the family drove up. And they hadn’t barked.

Benson knew the Maucks weren’t home; they’d been out to dinner with Brian’s parents. Both of their vehicles could not have been there around 8:30 on Friday night.

Daniel said that he and Jennifer had worked on the puzzle for a few hours. A few minutes later, he estimated they had gone to bed at three or four in the morning. That was six or seven hours after he said he came home. Another slip.

Then he said they had had intercourse because they both wanted to have a baby. He’d gone to sleep about four and wakened shortly after seven when he heard the gunshots. One more slip. Both he and Jennifer had stated they were not asleep, but making love, when they heard the shots.

And this time, Daniel remembered that the dogs had “gone crazy” at the same time…and
that’s
when he looked out and saw the “big, greasy-lookin’ dude” down at Brian and Bev’s.

Now he gave an even more exact description of the driver. He’d had on a red hat, but it was a baseball cap. He “walked kind of funny. His shoulders were hunched up so high that it looked like he didn’t have a neck.”

Daniel said he hadn’t called the sheriff because he wasn’t sure just where the gunshots were coming from, and Jennifer told him not to worry about it, that it was probably just duck hunters.

He had rolled over and gone back to sleep for a couple of hours.

Later that morning, he’d called the fire department because he’d had a fire under his fifth-wheel RV that was parked out in a nearby field. Daniel said he was repairing it for him and Jennifer to live in, and he’d accidentally set fire to the flashing near where part of the floor needed replacing. “I heated it a little too much, and it [the rubber flashing] caught on fire, and it dripped into the dry grass under the trailer. It just made a lot of smoke.”

This was well before his brother-in-law had discovered the Maucks’ murders. Benson and Catey wondered what else Tavares might have been burning. Bloodied clothing? A weapon?

Ben Benson asked about Daniel Tavares’s prison time, and he said he was in for manslaughter. At least that was the truth.

“Somebody told me that they thought they saw that you’d been sentenced for fourteen years, but you served seventeen. So they thought maybe you had problems while you were in prison, ’cause your time had been extended?”

“Oh, yeah,” Tavares said easily. “I lost good time. I lost statutory good time…for fighting.”

Benson was just as casual. He knew Tavares had been inside the walls on a manslaughter charge, but he didn’t know who the victim was yet—or the circumstances of that crime back in 1991. He was waiting for Tavares’s complete case file to be sent from Massachusetts. Daniel volunteered that he’d lost his good time for assaulting a corrections officer.