Then No One Can Have Her Page 4

  “No, I will not,” he said.

  John tried modifying his request, explaining that he and Ruth thought something bad might have happened to Carol. “Why don’t you just drive by and see if everything looks okay?” he suggested.

  It didn’t make any difference. Steve said no, absolutely not, because she might have a date over. He didn’t feel comfortable stopping by at this late hour and infringing on her privacy.

  As soon as they hung up, Steve sent Carol a text at 10:35 P.M., then called her cell phone three minutes later to leave a voice mail with essentially the same message: “Carol, I just left a message on your—out at Bridle Path. Would you give us a call? Your brother called me and he was worried because your mom was talking to you and all of a sudden you guys got disconnected. She said that you exclaimed something and hung up and then they haven’t been able to get a hold of you. So people are a little worried, and they just want to know you are okay. Would you call,” he said, pausing, “excuse me, call us, call your mom. Bye.”

  As Steve emerged from his bedroom wearing a towel, he asked what Charlotte and Jake were making for dinner.

  “Stir fry, rice and vegetables,” his daughter replied as she was cooking.

  Steve asked if they had anything for the laundry, then started the washing machine. It was a small load—just Steve’s workout socks, underwear, shorts and shirt. He told investigators later that he normally did a load of clothes every day.

  Noticing some fresh scratches on Steve’s left arm and leg, which were bleeding, Jake commented that the wounds looked pretty bad. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” Steve said, “just really tired. It was a really long ride.” He mentioned that because of the flat tire, he’d had to walk his bike four miles back to the car and had gotten scratched by some bushes on the trail.

  After Steve finished getting dressed, he came out of his bedroom wearing shorts and a T-shirt. He joined the kids at the table, where he talked about the stock market and made general conversation as they ate.

  “When was the last time you heard from your mother?” he asked.

  Charlotte replied that they’d been texting earlier in the evening. Steve mentioned that he’d gotten a call from Carol’s brother about the line suddenly going dead while she was on the phone with Ruth, and that Ruth was worried about her.

  That comment concerned Charlotte as well, so she texted her mother at 10:48 P.M., asking if she was okay: I’m worried about you.

  She also tried calling Carol’s cell and home phones, around 11 P.M., and left a message: “If you want to text me back or call me or something just to let me know that you’re okay and that everything is okay—otherwise I might drive out to your house to see if you are all right. I love you very much. Bye, Mom.”

  But there was still no response. Charlotte thought that maybe her mother had fallen asleep and just wasn’t answering her cell. However, she also knew that the ringer on the landline was so loud that Carol usually answered it.

  Steve wasn’t sitting down long before he told them that he’d gotten a call from a coworker, alerting him that he’d left his computer logged on at the office, and he needed to go back and log off. Besides, he said, he also realized that he’d left something that he needed. He put on his flip-flops and left the condo. It seemed to Jake that Steve was gone for no more than five minutes.

  Curiously, Steve used his security code to come back through the gate and into the condo three times between 11 P.M. and midnight: first at 11:04, then at 11:21 and finally at 11:51 P.M. (The gate opened on its own when cars leaving the complex approached, so a code or remote activation was only needed to open it when entering the complex.)

  After dinner, Jake and Charlotte started up the video games again while Steve made some calls, pacing back and forth between the living room and his bedroom. To Jake, Steve seemed unusually restless that night, moving around, and getting up and down. Typically, Steve was pretty calm.

  As Charlotte grew increasingly worried about her mom, she and Jake started calling emergency rooms in Prescott and Prescott Valley to see if any patients had come in under the name of Carol Kennedy or Jim Knapp. Maybe something had happened to Carol’s tenant, they thought, and she’d had to take him to the hospital. But there was no trace of either one of them.

  Charlotte and Jake thought someone should go to Carol’s house to check on her, but Steve told them the same thing he’d already told Carol’s brother. Steve felt uncomfortable going there because they’d only just gotten divorced. He’d been dating, so she might be, too, and he didn’t want to intrude. Everything was probably fine, he said. She was either out with someone, didn’t hear the phone, or wasn’t able to get to it in time.

  Steve did come up with a plan for Charlotte to go, however. She could go to the house with Jake, but a half mile before she got there, she had to call Steve and stay on the phone with him as she was pulling up. If the house was dark, if she saw an unfamiliar car in the driveway or if one of the doors was open, they were not to go inside to look for Carol. The implication was that a robbery or home invasion could be under way. Once she got there, they would decide what she should do.

  Charlotte agreed, but Jake was worried. One, they were heading to a remote area that was not well lit at night, and two, he was concerned that he might not be able to prevent his strong-willed girlfriend from going into her mother’s house if she sensed something was wrong. As she and Jake were about to head out, Steve reiterated that he didn’t want them going inside Carol’s house.

  Jake overheard Steve leaving Carol a message as they walked out the door: “People are really worried. If you wouldn’t mind calling . . . I mean, if you’re on a date or whatever, it is totally okay. I just—we don’t want to intrude, but you’re not answering anybody’s calls.... I’m sure everything is fine, but if you could just even text us and let us know that you are okay, that would be great. I think your mom and John are up, back east, worried and waiting to hear. So please call somebody. Bye.”

  Carol’s brother, John, heard back from Steve briefly around 11:30 P.M., which was 1:30 A.M., Nashville time, probably right after Charlotte and Jake had left for Carol’s house.

  “Have you heard anything?” Steve asked.

  John said no. He and Ruth had called the sheriff ’s office again to check in, but were told, “We’re kind of busy.”

  As Charlotte and Jake drove toward Williamson Valley, she continued to try to reach her mother on her cell phone. Once they reached Carol’s neighborhood at 11:55 P.M., Charlotte called Steve, as instructed, and told him they were down the street, approaching the house. Staying on the phone with him, she described what she saw as they got closer: a whole slew of red and blue lights moving against the darkness.

  “I see flashing lights,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” Steve said.

  Closer still, they saw a number of sheriff’s cruisers and yellow crime scene tape blocking the driveway, all signs that something was very, very wrong. Even the driveway, which they would normally pull into, was blocked off with yellow tape.

  Several detectives from the CIU were standing in the road, discussing whom to contact next, when one of them stuck out his hand to stop Charlotte’s approaching car. As she pulled up, still holding the phone with her dad on the line, the officers walked over to stand on each side of the car.

  Rolling down her window to talk to Lieutenant Dave Rhodes, Charlotte said, “This is my mom’s house. What’s going on?” Speaking quickly, she said she was worried because her mother hadn’t been answering the phone.

  When Rhodes told Charlotte that her mother had passed away, she dropped her phone onto the car floor and burst into tears.

  CHAPTER 5

  Jake immediately grabbed the phone, got out of the car, relayed to Steve what the lieutenant had just said, and told him that he needed to come down and be with Charlotte.

  Hearing the news, Steve started breathing heavily and sounded like he was crying. He paused, then a
sked to speak to an officer.

  Jake handed the phone to Detective Doug Brown, who was standing next to the car, while Sergeant Luis Huante pulled Jake aside to talk to him.

  In all the commotion Jake tried to figure out what was going on. “What I’ve been told is possibly an accident, possible foul play,” he said to Huante, who confirmed that they were investigating Carol’s death and foul play was, indeed, a possibility.

  Asked if Charlotte had mentioned Carol being in fear, Jake answered, “To my knowledge, no,” although Carol had invited him and Charlotte to stay at the house that coming Saturday.

  On the phone with Brown, Steve asked to whom he was speaking. “What’s happened?” Steve asked after Brown identified himself.

  “Carol, uh, I’m not really sure what’s going on,” Brown replied. “She’s passed away.”

  After Steve sighed heavily again, the detective said, “I guess she had spoken with her mom and—”

  “Yeah, we’ve been trying to call her. What happened?” Steve asked again.

  “I’m not really sure, and I really don’t have any information right now, so we’re just kind of playing everything by ear. Some kind of possible fall or something. That’s all we know right now.”

  “She’s dead?” Steve asked, explaining that she was his ex-wife.

  Brown said he’d been talking to the man who lived on the property, and had been about to try to contact Steve, but they didn’t know how to get hold of him.

  “Can I come out? I—I mean, my daughter—” Steve said. “She hasn’t—she hasn’t—what kind of state is the body in? She hasn’t seen Carol, has she?”

  “No, no, no,” Brown said.

  “Can I come out?”

  “Yeah, if you’d like to,” Brown said. “That’d be fine. I can talk to you outside or—”

  “Well, I want to be with Charlotte,” Steve said, explaining that her boyfriend didn’t have a license and his daughter would be in no condition to drive home. “I’ll be right out.”

  Steve called Charlotte right back, but she told him she was talking to the deputies and had to go.

  Immediately calling Renee, Steve talked to her for about four minutes. “Carol is dead, Charlotte is out there and I need to get out there. Will you go with me?”

  But Renee was still watching her grandson. “No, I can’t go,” she said. “I can’t leave him.”

  Steve described the voice mail Carol’s mother had left on his answering machine, which he’d checked just before leaving the house. Charlotte had gotten upset hearing it, he said, and wanted to go out right away. After pleading with him for an hour to go, he said, he’d finally let her.

  Between calls to and from Steve that night, John Kennedy continued to call his sister’s house, hoping she would pick up. But there was still no answer.

  John got the last call back from Steve at 2:11 A.M., or 12:11 A.M., Prescott time. He thought he could hear gravel crunching, as if Steve was walking and talking.

  Steve’s tone was flat. Monotone. Emotionless. He offered no preamble or lead-in to soften the news. “John, you need to call your mom and tell her that Carol is gone,” he said abruptly.

  Not injured, not dead, just gone. John thought Steve’s tone was so casual that he could have been informing him that Albertsons had some good ripe melons on sale.

  Although John tried to press his brother-in-law for more information, Steve gave him very little. “She’s gone,” Steve repeated. “She’s dead.”

  “What happened?” John asked.

  “Apparently, she suffered a fall.”

  As soon as they hung up, John woke his wife, told her what was going on, and said they needed to make the short drive over to his mother’s house to deliver the news in person.

  When they arrived at Ruth’s house and knocked on her back door, she was just hanging up with the chaplain from the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, who was on his way over. The chaplain didn’t say why, but Ruth knew what was coming.

  After John confirmed Ruth’s fears about what had happened to Carol, Ruth’s knees collapsed out from under her. Her body crumpled, but John caught her and helped her into a chair before she could fall to the floor. Still in shock, she didn’t cry. Not yet anyway.

  The chaplain arrived shortly thereafter to deliver the bad news again. After he left, John stayed the rest of the night with his mother as they tried to console each other.

  CHAPTER 6

  Steve tried calling his longtime assistant, Barbara “Barb” O’Non, at 12:14 A.M., but she didn’t answer, already asleep for the night.

  Renee called Steve back a few minutes later and they talked briefly before he pulled up to Carol’s house at 12:23 A.M. Seeing Charlotte talking to one of the detectives, he immediately went to hug and comfort his sobbing daughter.

  Scott Mascher, one of two commanders who worked directly under the sheriff, had only just arrived a couple of minutes earlier. He’d been home in bed when he’d gotten the call of a possible homicide from Lieutenant Rhodes, who said they were short-handed.

  “I’ll be happy to come out and help,” said Mascher, who didn’t wear his three-star uniform that night—just a T-shirt and jeans.

  Touring the house briefly with Rhodes, Mascher agreed that the crime scene seemed very suspicious. “Yeah, that just doesn’t seem right,” he said.

  Heading back outside, Mascher waited until Steve had finished consoling Charlotte, then introduced himself. As they were talking, Mascher shined a flashlight on Steve’s legs, illuminating the cuts and scratches on his left arm and leg. They were so fresh they glistened in the light. The cut on his left leg, just above his ankle, was bleeding quite a bit. He also had two thin, horizontal and parallel scratches above his left knee. The scratches and cuts on his forearm varied in length, depth and severity—a tiny one and two medium, deep but narrow gashes. They looked as if they could have been made at different times, maybe in different places.

  “What happened?” Steve asked again.

  Mascher explained that they wouldn’t be sure until the medical examiner (ME) was able to examine Carol’s body sometime in the morning.

  “Am I a suspect?” Steve asked.

  Surprised by the question and knowing that Steve’s comments might be important later, Mascher led him over to Sergeant Huante and Detective Brown, indicating that they should record the conversation.

  Brown took the opportunity to probe Steve, who said he’d been planning to come pick up Katie’s car earlier that evening, but had decided that he would just have Charlotte come get it, instead. He said the divorce had been tense, but things had gotten better between him and Carol since it was finalized. In fact, he said, they’d just met for coffee on Sunday.

  “We were talking about starting to date again,” he said.

  It had been quite a while since he’d been at the house—long enough that he couldn’t recall when, he said. Within a few minutes, however, he mentioned that he’d come over a week or so earlier to drop off some art and pick up a grill. He said he’d spoken with the tenant, Jim Knapp, while he was there, but then left without the grill. He claimed he hadn’t been inside the house in probably six months.

  After he got home from his bike ride that night, he said, he checked his messages and that’s when he saw the voice mails from Ruth and John Kennedy and learned what was going on. (He later said he didn’t listen to them and that the call from John was his first knowledge of what had happened. He also said later, as he’d told Renee, that he listened to Ruth’s message on his home answering machine when he saw the red light blinking—after Charlotte and Jake had left, and just before he left for Carol’s house.)

  Because of poor cell reception in the Granite Mountain area, Steve said, he’d left his phone in the car during his long bike ride, which would have been two to two and a half hours, but had turned into four because of a flat tire. He didn’t turn the cell phone back on until he finished his ride.

  As Brown continued to probe him about his
phone and the text messages he and Carol had exchanged that day, Steve asked if they really had to go through this now. Brown explained that they were trying to find out when she’d sent the messages to build a timeline for the night. Steve conceded, saying he realized why they might be questioning him, given that he and Carol hadn’t been on great terms.

  Sergeant Huante asked if they could go down to the sheriff ’s station to ask Steve some more questions and take a closer look at his phone.

  “So I’m a suspect?” Steve asked rhetorically this time.

  “No, no, no, no,” Huante said, reiterating Brown’s comments about the need to build a timeline. “It’s kind of hard to read in the dark out here.”

  Steve started to tell them about the garage sale Carol had been planning, then stopped midsentence. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is just not real.”

  When Brown questioned him about the neighborhood area, Steve said the girls claimed that Carol’s house, where both daughters had been living during the separation, had been broken into twice. “That’s one of the reasons why Charlotte was so worried,” he said.

  About a year ago, he added, some money was taken from Katie’s room, and they found the rear bedroom door ajar. “That happened another time, stuff was out of place. There was no evidence of anything being taken, but the girls were convinced somebody had been there. I don’t know.”

  Steve expressed regret for allowing Charlotte to go to the house that night, given what John Kennedy had told him about Carol’s aborted call with Ruth. “I shouldn’t have let her come out here.”

  But Carol tended to screen her calls and didn’t pick up sometimes, he said, especially when he was calling, and he didn’t think he should show up there at midnight.

  Mascher reiterated that it would be best if they took these questions down to the station to gather some more basic information. Afterward, they could bring Steve, Charlotte and Jake back for their cars.