Sex. Murder. Mystery. (2 page)

“It’s finally over,’’ the older sister said.

At 33, Lorri wanted more than anyone to believe that the words were true. The blond wife and mother of two had been through so much. She dropped the phone and went to hug both her husband and a family friend who was visiting at the time. She felt joy tempered with sadness. Lorri had never said good-bye to her father.

Whatever labels affixed to her—Black Widow, ambitious gold digger, insatiable slut—she was a killer. Much more, but never less than that. If Sharon envisioned her life as one big movie, in which she was the star, she was mistaken. If she thought she could sweep away the hurt left as a grim remnant of her insatiable greed, she was wrong.

Dead wrong.

Lorri saw it. Others did, too. Yet no one had been able to stop Sharon. No one could even slow her down. From the ranchers, to the deputy, to the office secretary who suspected the worst, none could do a thing to bring the woman to justice.

In the end, only she could do it to herself. It was so fitting. It was almost funny, if it had not been so tragic.

Only Sharon Lynn could screw herself.

In Canon City, Colorado, in a prison that rivals the best the world of punishment has to offer, Sharon repeats her broken-record claim that she is innocent. The frosted-coiffed babe in the orange coveralls didn’t do anything wrong. This is a free country. She is an American, for God’s sake. She was misunderstood. She made bad choices, but she wasn’t a killer.

She asks herself over and over how it turned out so bad for her.

“What good has all of your goddamn wanting to be good and moral gotten you, Sharon? What has it gotten you? I can’t answer that yet. Sometimes part of me wants to be the biggest bitch in the penitentiary. When someone is talking at night, go down the hall and say, ‘You goddamn motherfucking slut why don’t you shut your goddamn mouth?’ I can’t do that, because my anger and the words would cause that person hurt. There are times when this whole thing gets to me so bad that I want to turn into the bitch that everyone thinks I already am. I don’t know how to do it with no conscience. I wish I could. It would make my time so much easier, I think. ”

Yet one summer afternoon in 1996, it suddenly no longer mattered what Sharon hoped, wished or wanted. It didn’t matter one bit about her at all. As the dust settled on a two-decade-long nightmare of sorrow and dreadful consequences, Lorri Nelson Hustwaite was finally able to rest knowing her stepmother had not gotten away with everything. She could finally say good-bye.

PROLOGUE

FOR A PLACE WITHOUT AN OCEAN, THERE IS nowhere in the world more lovely than landlocked Colorado. Mountains of unbelievable mass spray upward from spruce-covered foothills with exhilarating force. Stands of birch and aspen shimmer; their leaves moving like silver schools of fish. Snow clings to the tops of the highest peaks throughout the warmth of summer. Rocky Mountain high. John Denver. Coors Beer. The Broncos. Rugged. West. Unspoiled.

Folks who live in Colorado know all of that. Old-timers and newcomers alike know that theirs is the state that holds truest and firmest to the call of the Old West. Colorado is western without the trendy goofiness of California; the granola zealotry of Oregon; the drippy weather of sodden Washington.

And forget Utah, Coloradans opine. Utah, they know, is its own planet.

While those who ran other state tourism boards tell postcard printers to “punch up the color,” no such effort is needed for the images of the Rocky Mountain State. Skies are sapphire, rich and deep. Look to the heavens day or night and feel a sense of falling up. Foaming rivers hastily ran through chiseled chasms like Christo-inspired aquamarine ribbons stretched from boulder to boulder, canyon wall to canyon wail.

Colorado is the place where the great prairies are stopped by the Rockies. Denver, the state’s largest urban center, is bunched against the mountains. Like Denver, most of the state’s major cities—from Ft. Collins in the north, south to

Colorado Springs, Pueblo and Trinidad, the smallest of the big four—are strung along north-south Interstate 25.

Yet, as is true of any place, after the passage of time the splendor can fade in the eye of the beholder. Mountains can be an encumbrance that forces additional hours from Point A to Point B. Raging rivers overflow in the blink of an eye during lickety-split spring melts. And the trees? They are no longer things of beauty, but disparaged because of a sudden drop in lumber prices. Excitement wanes. Interest falls. Time to move on.

Love can be like that, too.

The man poking through the stinking, smoldering remnants of the living area of the house at 12370 Columbine Court had seen his share of such scenes. Thornton, Colorado, police criminalist Bob Lloyd had personally handled more than 1,000 death investigations. All but what could be counted on two hands had taken place in Detroit.

Detroit. The name no longer brought residual feelings of goodwill and recognition. No more did Detroit conjure the sounds of Motown to reverberate in his head or the smell of a new car inspire him to smile. The Detroit of Bob Lloyd’s tenure as an officer there meant only one thing: death.

He kept a black plastic binder of grisly photographs he’d taken over his twenty-year career in the Motor City. He called it his D-book. If it meant “Detroit” or “Death” it didn’t really matter. They were one and the same. Images on the pages revealed dead eyes fixed in lifeless terror, blood-spattered walls and coagulated pools of mahogany… all were the reality of the job that took more than it gave.

The veteran criminalist made up his mind that enough was enough when a twelve-year-old girl was shot in the head a couple of blocks from his supposedly safe neighborhood. Drug violence knows no boundaries. The little girl had been riding her bike down her street when gunfire ripped through the air and killed her. Bob Lloyd’s daughter was the same age, his sons were fourteen and sixteen. The father and husband knew it was time for the cop to move on.

Suburban Denver was safe, clean, friendly. If none too exciting, then he knew he’d have to buckle down and get used to it. At least he would not need to bring two guns to protect himself during a crime-scene investigation. At least he could go to sleep at night without the worry that the lead spray of a drive-by shooting would shatter his daughter’s window and kill her as she slept in her bed. He arrived in the snow-crunched month of February 1986 and the months flew by without a murder. Not several a night nor a handful a week—zip.

“This is the way people are supposed to live,” the 46-year-old told a friend.

It was still dark when Bob Lloyd and the others first arrived on the scene, following reports the home had been burned while the owner was away. Arson, they all suspected. It was a good guess. A cursory examination, even in the black of the early morning hours of November 20, 1988, indicated the fire had been isolated to an area off the garage entry into the house. Firemen with beard-stubbled, smudged faces and wet boots told the investigators that charred “pour” patterns around an open pit in the floorboards indicated an accelerant had more than likely had been used by the arsonist.

Criminalist Lloyd walked the perimeter of the residence. It was a one-story, a brick ranch house with neatly groomed landscaping, and, even in winter, a flawlessly clipped-on-the-bias front lawn. Real estate agents love to call such attention to detail as “pride of ownership.” He walked along the sidewalk noting nothing unusual, with the exception of an iron security grate having been removed from a window well that fed a diffused column of light into the basement level. A drift of curly, brown cottonwood leaves nested in the depth of the well.

A quick round of questions confirmed the security grate had not been removed by firefighters in an effort to make a rescue or to gain access to extinguish the blaze. The criminalist knew, firsthand, that sometimes the very best “clues” turned out to be nothing more than a misinterpretation of what had been done to the fire scene—before it was roped off as a crime scene.

The beam of his portable light knifed through the air, catching the dusty filaments of a spider web.

No one had come in or out of the house through the window well.

Without exception, investigators from all divisions of law enforcement feel the jolting surge of adrenaline when suspicions rise at a crime scene. But it is not a thrill. It is not merely a reaction to the excitement of a discovery. For many, it is far deeper. It is the rush of the hunt. The feeling of pursuit seizes them and propels them. No one who works the scene of a terrible fire or murder is bored. No matter what time a cop is hauled out of the quiet and warmth of a bed or out of the arms of a wife or husband, they readily go. All investigators are hunters.

Bob Lloyd followed his beam of light around the house. The three-car garage had two vehicles parked inside. The largest of the garage doors had been open when the firemen first arrived. A beautifully restored white Camaro and what had become many suburbanites’ everyday auto, a pickup track, sat waiting for their driver.

“Where is Glen?” asked a fireman who knew Glen Harrelson, the owner of the burned home. Harrelson was known to many who had arrived on the smoldering scene. As it turned out, Harrelson was a veteran Denver firefighter.

It was Glen Harrelson’s house, for Christ’s sake. A goddamn fire had ruined the house of one of their own. A goddamn arsonist had targeted one of their own.

As far as anyone knew, Glen Harrelson wasn’t home. The fireman was nowhere to be seen.

Further searching of the smoky confines of the house turned up nothing to indicate he had been home. A firefighter’s shield and a packet of photographs were on the nightstand. The bed was made. The clothes in his closet were hung in the starched precision that commonly suggests military training. If he wasn’t home, where was he?

A call to his fire station revealed the missing man was not scheduled for duty until 6:30 that morning. He had a good work record and was never late. It was more than likely he was still down south in Trinidad with his wife, Sharon.

A few on the scene allowed themselves a sense of relief when they heard their colleague was not there, and that he often was gone for several days at a time.

Bob Lloyd stepped around a scattering of coins in the living room as he walked through the house.

“Maybe a burglary?” a young officer suggested.

The criminalist, nicknamed “Dr. Detroit” by his coworkers, didn’t think so. Beyond the coins, nothing had been disturbed. The drawers in the master bedroom had been left alone. No one had ransacked the closet. No one had taken the firearms neatly arranged on a shelf. The bureau in the guest room was untouched.

The coffeemaker, the smoke detector, the television, everything plastic had been melted into Dali images by the heat of the fire.

In the basement, a chair pushed over to the window with the missing grate indicated a point of entry.

But the spider webs are still intact, Lloyd reminded himself. No one got in or out of here through the basement.

Whoever set the fire, he reasoned, had come in through a door, and with a house so secure—burglar alarms, window grates with panic buttons for emergency release—it had to have been with a key.

Or an invitation.

If it had been an invitation, then where in the world was Glen Harrelson?

Just inside the garage entrance to the inside of the house was the charred depths of the crawl space. Bob Lloyd knew he would return to that area. He knew most of the answers to the questions police and firefighters were asking would be contained in the blackness of that hole. Since most certainly an accelerant had been used, analysis of the burned-out flooring would yield the answer to what it was. He directed his flashlight through the darkness, but saw nothing but debris.

He had stood in that spot before. Too many times. He leaned forward, craning his neck.

“There’s something down there,” he said, indicating that halogen lights from his truck would be needed. In a few minutes, a power cord from the police generator snaked its way through the garage, past the Camaro, through the entry door and into the area adjacent to the smoldering flooring.

Six halogens blasted into the hole. Eyes focused on the mess below. It took a few seconds for Bob Lloyd to adjust his vision as the white beam eradicated the dark. What appeared to be a seared gasoline can caught his eye. Of course. The beam of light plunged deeper, revealing charred fabric, probably clothing and melted carpet bunched up in a pile. Then he saw a twisted figure.

It was a man.

“We’ve got a homicide,” he said. His tone was flat, matter-of-fact. Still, his heart pounded.

It was Glen Harrelson, 45, blackened like a briquette, contorted in the pugilistic position that is the result of incineration of muscle and tendon: his arms pulled up to his chest; his legs stiffened and tight. He was on his back, his head fully intact.

“The skull didn’t explode,” someone remarked.

Bob Lloyd nodded. He knew it was more likely than not that the man in the crawl space had died from a gunshot wound to the head. Without the piercing by a bullet or the fracture by a hard instrument, the human head almost always explodes in the heat of a fire.

Though not much was left of his face, it was clear that it was still there. Like Edvard Munch’s famed painting Scream, Glen Harrelson’s mouth was open as if to shriek.

But of course it did not. He could make no sound. Never again.

Notifications to the Thornton Police Department were made that the arson investigation at Columbine Court was now a murder case. The victim, more than likely, was the owner of the house, a fireman named Glen Harrelson.

Later that morning, two shell casings were picked up by detectives; one was found by the television set, another closer to the door, near the sofa. After necessary warrants were procured, a fireman went into the hole and gingerly put the dead man’s remains onto a board for removal. The victim’s bones were so brittle, his skin so charred, that the fireman held his breath so as not to break the corpse into a million pieces. Bob