Читать книгу Limb from Limb - George Hunter - Страница 26

Alicia, Erik, and his sister, Jeannie, arrived in Metro Detroit Saturday afternoon and met with Kozlowski at the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office. They talked for a while, and then Kozlowski provided dozens of copies of the handouts bearing Tara’s picture. The Ohio trio then began peppering the area with the flyers.

After they’d hung the posters in gas stations and stores for miles along the southwest route to the airport, they headed back to Macomb County to visit Stephen. The plan was to order take-out pizza and brainstorm about what could have happened to Tara.

As Erik pulled his 2003 Saturn SUV into the long driveway, Stephen came outside to greet them. “I knew immediately as we walked up the driveway…that something was terribly wrong,” Erik recalled.

Alicia agreed that something seemed amiss. Stephen tried to hug her, and she felt uncomfortable. She tried to pull away, but Stephen held her tight. “He just wasn’t acting right,” she said. “I got a really funny feeling right away.”

Within minutes of greeting Stephen, Erik began fearing for his sister-in-law’s safety. “It became immediately obvious that Stephen knew it was a waste of time to look for Tara,” he said.

The days of the calendar’s shortest month ticked on, a never-ending February for the Destrampes, the Standerfers, Tara’s friends, and her coworkers as they waited, hoped, and prayed for Tara’s safe return.

The other alternative was the dreaded message: Tara wouldn’t be coming back.

The nonstop media reports, which soon would mesmerize Metro Detroit audiences—prompting them to snap up extra newspapers and dial radios or TVs to catch top-of-the-hour updates—hadn’t yet escalated into the dozens-a-day volleys of information that would climax in a stunning on-the-air twist.

In fact, the metro final edition of Monday’s Detroit Free Press referred to the case only in a brief posting headlined CONSTRUCTION EXECUTIVE STILL MISSING:

The whereabouts of a missing 34-year-old Washington Township woman remained a mystery Sunday, Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackel said…. Police said the woman’s cell phone was shut off, and she hasn’t used her credit card.

No solid information, no suspects, had emerged. No limousine service had stepped forward to identify itself as the one Tara hired the night of February 9. That nugget wasn’t lost on Hackel.

“We realized early on there was no black car,” Hackel later said. “We got no calls. Nobody came forward to say, ‘Hey, that was me.’”

Hackel also knew that Griem made it a practice to polygraph prospective clients before signing on with them. The sheriff said he would have accepted those results if they cleared Stephen, who by then had formally declined through his attorney to submit to a police-administered lie detector test. But no results showing graphs indicating Stephen’s guilt or innocence were proffered to investigators.

Hackel said Stephen pretended not to trust the police polygraph operator, “but that was just his way of getting out of taking the test,” he said.

For a man supposedly hoping to get his lost spouse back at any cost, Stephen was keeping detectives at a distance. “Generally, we work in constant communication with family members,” Hackel said. “We try to embrace them, but he would never get under our arm.”

On Monday, Alicia and Erik were still putting up posters and providing investigators with more information about Tara. They’d spent the weekend taping the flyers—which featured a portrait of a beaming Tara in a softly draped scarf-neck sweater—from Detroit Metropolitan Airport to hotels and gas stations within a fifteen-mile radius from the missing woman’s home.

Despite the dozens of posters and increasing publicity, “we don’t have any leads,” Alicia said. “Everything is a complete dead end. There hasn’t been anything new.”

Stephen—not posting flyers, but holed up in his Carriage Hills subdivision Colonial—ignored the ringing of the telephone and knocks on the door from TV, radio, and print reporters.

That, however, would change soon.