Sex. Murder. Mystery. (34 page)

“Sher, give me the key!”

In a second, the line was crossed again. Sharon's voice began to rise from deep within.

“Here's the goddamn key! Get out of my face!” she screamed.

She didn’t know with any certainty if it was a game or reality. She didn’t know if he was playing the macho man to her damsel in distress. Later, she would insist that if she had thought for one minute that Gary would really kill Glen, she would have driven down the mountain and called for help. She would have warned him.

She would later say she wasn’t sure if Gary Adams was a killer or a big talker.

Long after it barely mattered to anyone, she told a sympathetic ear where her doubt came from.

“You haven’t seen the tender side of him,” she said. “You haven’t been in bed with him. I can’t imagine being in bed with a killer. The tender man that he could be could not be a killer.”

Diann Browning was glad Friday had arrived, payday had come and she was able to get to Trinidad and do the week's grocery shopping. For the mother of four, it seemed like payday never came fast enough. Her arms brimming with bags and boxes, Diann unloaded her groceries in front of her little house at the Robinson sawmill where her husband, Mike, worked. She wanted to put things away and relax. She even had a couple of videos for Friday-night entertainment,
Pippi Longstocking
and
E.T.

It was 4 P.M., November 18, 1988, and the sky was starting to spit snowflakes.

When Sharon and her two children pulled up, Diann had not yet unloaded everything from her shopping trip. She smiled warmly at her three visitors. She knew the family was alone that weekend; Diann had waved to Glen Harrelson on the road near the tiny town of Segundo. He was heading toward Denver, back to work, away from the mountains.

By the way she invited herself in, it was clear to Diann that Sharon wanted to stay for a while. Sharon was in good spirits, happy with her marriage. She was wearing a Denver Fire Department T-shirt.

“Glen gave it to me this week,” she said.

Diann said she thought the shirt was nice as she went about the business of making hot dogs and heating up a can of pork and beans.

Sharon and her kids had invited themselves for dinner.

When the snow started dredging the roadway in white, Diann figured her visitor would leave. Sharon hated driving up to Round House when the roads got slick. Without exception, whenever Sharon had been around and it started to snow, she would hurry home.

Except that night. That night, the snow didn’t bother her. She planted herself on the couch, munched popcorn and watched the videos.

And she talked about how wonderful her marriage was to Glen. She was so much in love with him. Everything was wonderful. She complained about how she and Glen just couldn’t get enough of each other.

“Glen and I had the best sex last night,” she said.

Around 9 P.M., the last tape ended and Sharon stood to leave. It was nearly as abrupt as had been her surprise visit. She packed up Danny and Misty and drove off to Round House.

Chapter 27

HOURS LATER, MILES NORTH OF SHARON’S Round House, the wetness she had left on Gary had dried to a noticeable itch. It was a sweet annoyance, a niggling reminder of the hours Sharon and he had spent together under sheets dampened by their careless passion. Of course, no reminder was really necessary. The world spun on an axis created by the two from Wet Canyon and the promises they had made to each other. The smell of her still lingered on him. It aroused him when he smelled her.
When he thought of Sharon.
He shook his head as if the abrupt action would sift her image from his consciousness. There was no chance of that.

Gary Adams tried to re-focus his weary eyes. Once again, he was a man on a mission, a soldier for love.

Gary parked about a mile away at a bar, and walked the rest of the way to the house. He followed the map made out by Sharon, her handwriting curving in schoolgirl loops and swirls. Seductive, sweet. She had also passed on the key. Gary was glad she had made things so easy. He didn’t want to be found out. He didn’t want to attract attention. He had a job to do, a promise to keep.

It was 8:30 P.M. The Colorado night air was black and cold; as still as a frozen lake.

His mind was racing by the time he stood outside Glen Harrelson's tidy blond brick-faced ranch home at 12370 Columbine Court in Thornton. Though he shouldn’t have, he had a hell of a time finding the place, and had nearly panicked when he passed a fire department only a few minutes from the house.

The same fire department where Glen worked as a firefighter and dispatcher.

With sweat spreading from his armpits down his sides, Gary knew he’d have to get away quickly once he struck the match. After—of course—he had done what he had promised to do.

Gary patted his jacket pocket, confirming the pistol was still there. An eighteen-inch lead pipe he’d stuck into his dusty Levis passed his belt-line and pressed hard and cold against the middle of his rib cage. The .22-caliber handgun had been brought along merely as a backup. It was the pipe he intended to use. A pipe, Sharon reasoned during one of their trysts, would make what was about to happen appear as if a botched burglary had taken place.

A fire would lay a black veil over what had happened. No one would ever know the truth—as they had not known the time before.

Gary glanced over his shoulder as he stood in the doorway. So quiet, so still. Though he was short of breath from his hurried walk, his heart picked up a beat as he slid the key into the lock and turned the knob.

Light from street lamps cut through the expansive glass of a picture window in the front room. The room was barren, save for a pair of recliners and a television set. It was the home of a man who had just moved in, or whose wife had left him with the remnants of a broken marriage.

Deep in the shadows, Gary made his way down the hallway. He wanted to know the layout of the house, though it had been described in detail by Sharon. The first bedroom was empty. At the end of the hall, he found the master bedroom. A dark mahogany bed was neatly made up. On the dresser, he saw the glimmer of gold: a man's wedding band. It was just where Sharon had said it would be. He put the ring in his pocket.

“Bring it to me! Bring it when you are done!”

The numerals on the digital bedside clock glowed in the darkness. It was 8:45 P.M. “He is home no later than nine! He is so predictable you could set your watch by him!”

Gary padded softly through the living room to the kitchen, where he checked the back door's security lock. There would be no escape from the rear of the house. Nor would there be a way out through the windows—all were shielded by decorative wrought-iron grates. His only way out would be the way he came in—through the front door.

He could feel his heart thump as he checked his watch. Returning to the living room, he drew the lead pipe from his pants before settling into a recliner to wait.

“‘Do this right and we ‘ll make love all night. Every night. You and me. Forever.”

Minutes passed and the conversations, the promises of sex and money, filled Gary's head, nearly distracting him from the plan at hand. Over and over, he re-focused on the reason he was there. And as it played in his head, Gary became increasingly jittery. He was nervous. He was unsure. He could not do it.

Not again. Not for her.

Acting on impulse, he bolted from the recliner just as headlights swung wide across the driveway and pierced the darkness through the picture window. It was too late. The wheels that had been set in motion so long ago were moving with a speed he could not halt. There was no turning back.

God, he loved Sharon.

As he listened to Glen get out of his car and walk toward the door, Gary Adams crept to wait by the door. If he still had wanted to turn back, it was too late. He had to do what Sharon had begged him to do.

Gary raised the lead pipe and swung at Glen Harrelson's head. Glen went down, but just as Perry Nelson had done, he tried to stand to fight. He was not out cold. And this time there wasn’t the icy water of a raging creek to revive him. It was fear and the instinct to survive that gave him the burst of strength to fight his attacker.

Gary hit him once more with the bloody pipe.

It didn’t put him out. Thought he’d be out like a light.

Glen Harrelson grabbed Gary Adams's arm and forced him to the floor, flipping him onto his back.

With the light streaming in from the garage door, they could see each other. Two men brought together by the same woman. Their eyes met. Glen Harrelson had the look of a man who was fighting for his life. It was the same wild-eyed look Perry Nelson had that night along the edges of Clear Creek five years before. Glen kicked Gary's leg and knee. Hard, with a force of a man that was going to kill the killer.

The pipe was not going to work and Gary knew it.

He reached for the gun, which he had set off to the side as his insurance policy for such a moment as what was taking place in Glen Harrelson’ s house. The gun fired two times.

It was over. It had gone all awry. Murder is like that. Gary Adams knew that there was no way he could make it look like an accidental death. It was going to have to resemble a botched burglary. He heaped a pile of clothing about the room to make it look as though the place had been ransacked.

Sharon had told him that the grates over the basement windows could be removed. Glen went downstairs and confirmed that one, in fact, was loose. He moved a chair to the window, got up and pulled the grate off, quietly setting it to the side. There had been enough noise coming from the house. Gary went back upstairs and took a jar of coins from the closet and scattered its contents. He went into the garage where Sharon had said Glen kept a supply of gasoline. When he returned he stepped over Glen's body and doused the area with the liquid.

Before he struck a match, Gary decided he needed a delayed fuse. He lit a cigarette and placed it inside a book of matches.
That
, he thought,
would give him the five minutes he’d need to get away.

And he was gone. In a few minutes, Gary was sitting in his truck waiting for the sirens to signal that a neighbor had seen the fire. But five minutes, then ten more, passed. Nothing.

He wondered what went wrong. Did the cigarette go out? Why hadn’t anyone called?

Gary Adams walked back to Columbine Court. He went into the open garage and cracked the door open. Like yardage of black plastic, a curtain of black smoke ripped out of the opening. Gary slammed the door and ran like hell.

Eighteen-inch-deep footprints ran up the ridge from the Dude Ranch to Round House. It was frigid outside, colder than a witch's tit in a brass bra, as the locals liked to say. Sharon had left the yellow light on the deck, casting a warm glow over the snowy hillside. The tracks were left by Gary Adams as he trudged up from his place to tell Sharon that he had taken care of everything back in Thornton.

It was a little after 4 A.M. when Sharon let him into her bedroom.

“It's done,” he said, taking off his coat to let the air of the house warm him.

“Are you sure he's dead?” she asked.

“Everything didn’t go according to plan.”

Sharon smiled. “You look like you’re in one piece,” she said.

Gary shrugged, his attitude remarkably casual for a man who’d just killed another. “I got some bumps and bruises.”

He reached deep into his pocket and brought out a circle of gold. It was Glen's wedding ring, taken off the bedroom bureau as proof that he had been in the house and done as he had promised.

Sharon took the ring and regarded her lover with mock skepticism.

“Are you sure he was dead before you started the fire?”

“Yes. There was smoke coming from the windows, I didn’t see any flame, but I wasn’t going back in.”

He also returned the key and the map. Sharon put the key back on her key ring and threw the map into the fireplace, a small flash of light illuminating their faces as the slip of paper burned to ash.

Gary said that he made it look like a burglary by scattering some coins around her dead husband.

He even remarked that he had to change a tire on the way up to Thornton.

Sharon wanted to make love. She said she wanted to hold her mountain man, the Adonis of the Rockies, the sipper of her special sauce. She pulled Gary closer and ran her tongue over the salty areas of his muscular body. But nothing happened. Nothing stirred. Nothing stood to attention. Gary couldn’t get it up. Their passion had been extinguished like a birthday candle attacked by a fire hose.

Gary muttered how tired he was. He kissed Sharon and put on his Levis and shirt. They’d make love tomorrow.

And every night after that.

When Gary went back down to the Dude Ranch, he told his son he’d been out with friends. He was tired and he went to bed, the images of what he had done for love haunting him as he drifted off to sleep.

Jayne Schindler reached over to stifle the ringing of the telephone. She and her husband were still in bed when Ron Motley, a firefighter from Station 26, phoned to speak with her husband. The time of day and the brusque seriousness of his voice made it clear that his call was business-related.

Jayne sat up while she watched Jim's face.

“It can’t be,” he said. “Glen died in a fire…at his house?”

He repeated the words so that his wife could hear, but also so that they could sink into his no-longer-slumbering consciousness. His mind flashed to his last conversation with a troubled Glen. What had he wanted to say?

In a minute he got off the phone and faced his concerned wife.

“Suicide,” they both said. “Glen must have killed himself.”

A few minutes passed, and their dual first reaction went by the wayside as reason began to set in.

“No,” Jim said, “Glen wouldn’t do that. Something is wrong.”

Jayne agreed.

Both knew that the odds of someone trained in fighting fires actually dying in one had to be extremely remote. Motley had said that Glen had been found in the crawl space.