Читать книгу Limb from Limb - George Hunter - Страница 35

Friday, March 2, was a day that no one connected with the investigation ever would forget.

Finally, nearly three weeks since anyone last had spoken with Tara, authorities felt themselves gaining control of the investigation. And, over the next few days, the case would gyrate with one surreal twist after the other—more than making up for the previous weeks’ maddening lack of progress.

McLean and Kozlowski drew up the search warrants for the Grant home and his father’s tool and die shop. Judge Denis LeDuc, of 42–1 District Court, signed them.

At about noon on Friday, Stephen gave a shocking one-hundred-minute interview to the Detroit News in which he openly disparaged his wife and referred to her in the past tense.

“Everything is surreal, like I’m walking around in a dream,” he began. “Nothing feels normal. It’s just…weird.”

He was asked to talk about his wife.

“Well, Tara looked completely different when we met,” he drawled. “She was beautiful. It’s hard to explain. She just looked a lot…different. She had the big hair, and it was a different look.”

When he was asked to describe Tara as a mother, Stephen said, “She loves her kids. But, you know, most mothers don’t travel five days a week. I’ve heard comments from people—‘What kind of mother would leave her babies all week long?’ She’s gone five days a week. She’s there on weekends, but it wasn’t weird for her to come in and kiss the kids and leave again. Well, I’m sorry—is that a good mother? No, it’s not. That’s a bad mother.

“People think she was the perfect mother. I was a better mom than Tara was. There’s no other way to put it. I was the mom in the house—she was gone all the time. If the kids needed someone to take them to swimming, or school, or soccer practice, I took them.

“Some of her family has said in the media how much she loved her kids, and how she would try to fly back in order to attend their functions,” he said. “But that’s not true. I can’t recall one time when she did that. To be honest, as weird as it sounds for me to say this, I was the perfect mom—not Tara.”

Stephen said he and Tara often had “power struggles. You know, both people trying to show who’s boss, and who’s going to run the household. It didn’t need to be that way. In a lot of households, when there’s an argument, that means fists are involved. But Tara and I never did that. It wouldn’t come close to happening. I wouldn’t do it.”

Although Stephen said he had his suspicions about Tara’s fidelity, he insisted he didn’t think she’d ever had a physical relationship with another man—but he kept backtracking.

“Have I thought maybe there was something going on? Yes,” he said. “Tara, over [the] past year, has been text messaging one of her old bosses. I told her it was a strange relationship. They text messaged in code. One day in the car, we were driving somewhere and she sent a text message—you could read it from across the car. It was a smiley face and it said, ‘I’m peeing.’ I asked her, ‘What the hell does that mean? Why would you tell someone you’re going to the bathroom?’

“She explained that it meant she was laughing so hard, she was peeing,” Stephen said. “They text messaged like fourteen-year-old girls. This guy learned text from his fifteen-year-old-son, and he and Tara had all these little codes, the way the kids talk.”

Stephen also discussed a racy e-mail he’d intercepted two years earlier, which, he said, Tara had written to an ex-boyfriend. “That was something I thought was physical with another man,” he said. “It was a former boyfriend of Tara’s. They’d been talking on the Internet. I saw one of the e-mails she’d sent, and it made me think there was something going on.”

Stephen claimed he confronted Tara with the e-mail and that they had a bitter argument, followed by an all-night discussion about their deteriorating relationship. He said they agreed to see a marriage counselor. They attended counseling from February 2005, when he discovered the letter, until the summer of 2006, Stephen said.

“There were thirty sessions,” he said. “We worked it out. It was mostly a lack of communication—we weren’t talking, and she was getting that communication need fulfilled by this guy. But it never became physical, as far as I know, and I checked really hard.

“This was a former boyfriend from high school, and their relationship ended weird. There was no formal ending to it. But in the end, it ended up being nothing. I checked as hard as I could to make sure nothing had happened. This was in accordance to the rules set up by the counselor—that I have open access, and could question anything. The counselor used the term ‘cheating’—even though it wasn’t physical, she considered it cheating.

“It hurt really bad, but it wasn’t like real cheating, like having a full-blown sexual affair. It was simply that she had an emotional thing with this guy. So the counselor said anytime I asked a question, Tara had to answer it. That was the rule, and it worked. She found out it wasn’t the worst thing in the world for her to have to answer my questions and be open with me. We worked through it, but it was hard. It took a lot of long talks into the middle of the night.

“Were there still times when I had questions? Yeah? Did I ever demand she open her e-mail and have her show it to me? Yeah.”

Stephen said he stopped questioning Tara shortly after they’d finished going to the marriage counselor. “I remember the last time I asked, ‘Who are you on the phone with?’ But I really wasn’t worried about who she was talking to. The trust had come back.”

Stephen became defensive when he was asked about Tara’s high-paying job. “It’s not like I don’t make a lot of money myself,” he said. “My job pays really well, too. I work for my dad. It’s a family business—a major auto supplier. It’s a small company, but I make a good salary. It’s not like Tara supports me.”

Then Stephen discussed the events of February 9.

“I was tired,” he said. “I was just exasperated. By the time Tara left Friday night, I was tired. I was tired of the arguing. She walked out the garage door, and all I could do was close the garage door. I didn’t want to have this discussion anymore. I was done. I was tired of bickering about it…the travel…and I gave up.

“My biggest concern that night was, I had to explain to the kids the next day why their mother wasn’t going to be there, like she said she would,” Stephen said. “Before she left, she used those words—‘You can explain to the kids why I’m not going to be here tomorrow.’

“The last words she said to me were, ‘Don’t forget to take my truck in on Monday.’ That really took the wind out of my sails. She was telling me that’s all I was. It was like, ‘You be the valet and take my car in.’”

At about 5:00 P.M., detectives and evidence experts descended on Washington Township. They were armed with ultraviolet lights and luminol to detect the presence of blood. They toted video cameras and other tools of the trade, as well as a sheaf of papers that allowed them legal access to the Grants’ private home.

It was nearing dusk and an evening snowfall was getting under way. Stephen was just pulling into the subdivision in his gray Jeep Commander when police stopped him. Dressed in jeans, casual footwear, and a short dark jacket, Grant was patted down at the back of his vehicle and then led to a police cruiser.

As luck would have it, TV news cameras were rolling. While police had cordoned off the search area, a crew from WDIV Channel 4 already was on the scene, preparing for a previously scheduled interview between Stephen and Channel 4 reporter Hank Winchester.

Winchester later told the Detroit Free Press that he’d been getting as many as five phone calls a day from Stephen, who was obsessed with his own growing publicity.

The conversations had grown odder as the days of Tara’s disappearance wore on, Winchester recounted to the Free Press. At one point, when the reporter asked Stephen for home video of Tara, such as holiday movies, Stephen jokingly alluded to “intimate movies” he and Tara had shot, and said, “Hank, I’m having guy talk with you. Don’t take it the wrong way. That’s the only thing I could think of off the top of my head.”

The reporter said he still was haunted—to the point of nightmares—about Stephen’s last request to him that Friday, March 2: to tape an interview in the Grant home’s garage.

“I think about the garage scenario and try to figure out why he wanted me in there,” Winchester told Free Press reporter Jeff Seidel.

But Winchester’s interview with Stephen never took place. Instead, the news crew was on hand for the most sensational twist yet in the Grant case.

“He’s getting out of the car, he’s getting out of the car,” a newsman’s voice excitedly ad-libbed as the crew unwittingly taped the scoop.

Captain Wickersham met Stephen as he exited his vehicle. “I told him we had a warrant to search his house. Our conversation was civil. He chatted with me like there was nothing out of the ordinary happening. He did ask if we were going to tear up his home searching for evidence.

“He said, ‘You’re not going to tear out the ceiling tiles, are you?’ I assured him we would treat his home with respect.”

After a conversation that lasted about twenty minutes, Stephen handed over his house key. He drove his Jeep into his driveway and let the police into his home.

“The first thing he did was call his attorney, and he put me on the phone with him,” Wickersham said. “Griem asked me if we had an arrest warrant, and I told him we didn’t. We only had a search warrant. He demanded we release his client, so we did.”

Stephen leashed up the dog, Bentley, and headed down the street.

In a decision that would prove controversial, deputies decided not to follow him. “We had undercover officers watching him, but they were told to back off because the news crew was there,” Hackel said. “We didn’t want our undercover people on the TV news.”

As Stephen walked away, a Channel 4 cameraman still had him in sight, but the waning daylight and blustery snowstorm camouflaged the suspect. Even as the videotape reels spun, Stephen and his dog disappeared from view.

By now, there were about fifteen police officers and evidence technicians milling around the Grant house. McLean was among them. “We were hoping maybe we’d find a clue on the home computer,” McLean said. “I wasn’t expecting to find much more than that.”

Stephen trudged east through his subdivision with Bentley in tow. When he got out of sight of the police and news crews, he used his cell phone to call his friend Michael Zanlungo, who lived two miles away.

“He told me the police had executed a search warrant and had impounded his Jeep,” Zanlungo said. “He asked me to pick him up at a crossroads near his house. I didn’t understand why.”

Zanlungo, also known as Mike, had been friends with Stephen since the Grants had arrived in Washington Township four years earlier. After the phone call, he got into the company car he’d brought home that night and met Stephen at the agreed-to location.

Stephen and his dog jumped into the car. Before Zanlungo had driven far, he noticed Stephen was acting strangely.

“He was very nervous,” Zanlungo said. “He was sweating and looking over his shoulder. He asked, ‘Are we being followed? That Taurus is following us.’ I said, ‘What’s going on? You’re not acting like an innocent person.’”

They drove east on 28 Mile Road, Stephen growing more paranoid by the minute. He said he wanted to see Lindsey and Ian, and Zanlungo offered to lend him his personal vehicle, a Dodge Dakota pickup.

“I was in a company car,” he explained. “I didn’t want to loan him the company car because I knew he had a bad driving record.”

Zanlungo said he drove back to his house and gave Stephen the keys to his yellow truck. “He put the dog in the truck and drove away.”