Читать книгу Good Cop/Bad Cop - Rebecca Cofer - Dartt - Страница 13
ОглавлениеBruce Miller awoke to a loud, high-pitched sound just before daybreak. It had to be some kind of siren going off, but where was it coming from? Somewhere outside. He shivered as his feet hit the cold floor. He rose and walked to the window. Maybe he should investigate. His wife, who was still half-asleep, mumbled that it wasn’t a good idea and told him to come on back to bed—which he did.
Elizabeth Regan was awakened by the same shrill, penetrating noise at 6:35 that cold December morning. She woke her husband, Dennis, who realized in his half-awake state that it had to be looked into. The sound was so loud that he thought it was coming from somewhere in their two-story house. Perhaps the severe cold had caused an electrical malfunction in the furnace. Elizabeth remembered hearing something similar a few years before during the winter, when a neighbor’s car horn malfunctioned and went off continuously for twenty minutes.
Getting up, he trudged down to the cellar, searched it, and then began looking all over the house. He opened the door of his daughter Lisa’s bedroom. She was sound asleep. He went to the back of the house and opened the kitchen door. The noise seemed louder, but he didn’t think it was coming from that direction. He walked to the front entrance and opened the door. Then he knew. It was coming from their next-door neighbor’s house about thirty-five yards to the east of them. He saw that one of the garage doors was open and wondered why.
Around 6:40 Bob Armstrong heard an alarm as he put Saturday’s Ithaca Journal in the Harrises’ paper tube that stood next to their mailbox on Ellis Hollow Road. He thought about calling the police, but by the time he finished his route, he had forgotten about it.
Meanwhile, Dennis Regan had walked back to his bedroom. He still was sleepy and now baffled. “It’s over at the Harrises,” Dennis said to his wife. “It’s some kind of alarm.’’
Dennis and Elizabeth hadn’t known that the Harrises had an alarm system, but obviously they did. Why weren’t they shutting it off? Elizabeth assumed they were not home. The family probably had gone to Syracuse to pick up Dodie Harris’s father for the holidays. She had overheard Dodie at her cookie exchange party last Monday night, talking about having him spend Christmas with them. The Regans surmised that the cold weather had caused a water line to freeze and break, setting off the alarm.
But just to be sure, Dennis called the Harrises to make sure they weren’t sleeping through this noise. He let the phone ring about ten times and then called the State Police barracks in the town of Dryden on Route 366, about six miles from Ellis Hollow.
“I don’t know if I should be calling you or the Sheriff’s Department, but the next-door neighbors must have a burglar alarm and it’s going off really loud. I called them and their telephone doesn’t answer.”
The soft-voiced police dispatcher asked Regan for his name and address and the neighbors’.
“It’s next door, further out Ellis Hollow Road toward Route 79 on the same side of the street,” Regan told the dispatcher. “Probably something shorted out, but I don’t know. Their outside lights are on, but no inside lights.”
“Okay, I’ll have a patrol check on that.”
Regan felt better now. The police would handle it.
Fifteen minutes passed. The Regans didn’t hear any car wheels crunch on the Harrises’ gravel driveway, but suddenly the alarm stopped. They were puzzled. Regan called the Harrises a second time. Still no answer. He called the police again and told the dispatcher the alann had stopped, no one answered the phone, and he’d noticed earlier one of their garage doors was open. The dispatcher replied, “We’re checking it out.”
It was now about 7:10 A.M. The alarm was silent, the cops would be there soon, and everything seemed okay. Dennis went back to bed and fell asleep. He and his wife Elizabeth were exceptionally tired, as they had stayed up late the night before, celebrating their daughter Lisa’s early acceptance to Cornell University by having dinner at her favorite restaurant on the outskirts of town. When they got home, Dennis had built a fire in the living room fireplace. He and Elizabeth had some brandy and talked until late.
Sleeping soundly once again as the darkness outside turned to light, the Regans awoke suddenly when they heard more noise. This time it was the sound of cars moving in and out of the gravel driveway next door. They opened the bedroom blinds a bit, peeked out and saw a lot of commotion at the end of the Harrises’ driveway. Police cars and other vehicles were parked along Ellis Hollow Road, men were hurrying up the driveway to the house, and some were in groups near the road. Then they noticed smoke coming out of the far side of the Harrises house. They knew the house was new and well-built and the Harrises were careful people. If the Harrises had gone away, they were not the kind to leave ovens or irons on. How could a fire have started? The Regans decided to throw on some warm clothes as fast as they could and go see for themselves. In the upstairs bedroom that faced the Harris home, Lisa was still asleep.
State Trooper John Beno came on duty earlier than his regular shift. December 23 was his wife’s birthday and they had planned to celebrate it with an afternoon Christmas party at a friend’s restaurant in town. After patrolling in his car, Beno stopped off at the police barracks to have coffee with some other officers. Another trooper, Scott Hendershott, asked if Beno would mind going to check an EID (electronic intrusion device) over on Ellis Hollow Road. It wasn’t Beno’s assigned post for the day, but he was up and ready to walk out the door, so he said he’d go over.
The roads in Tompkins County were slippery—a light snow had fallen during the night—and the back roads still had an icy undercrust which loudly crunched as the patrol car’s tires rolled over it. It was just before daybreak as Trooper Beno proceeded slowly on Route 366, turning onto Turkey Hill Road, which intersects Ellis Hollow after three and a half miles. Beno was glad it wasn’t a real emergency with these terrible driving conditions. He passed Ellis Hollow Creek Road and Peaceful Drive, then crept along behind a Town of Dryden snow plow. He thought Hendershott had said the alarm was at the house after the one with lights on, but when he passed it, there were no other houses on the right-hand side. Beno knew he’d gone too far. He turned around, drove back to the house with the outside lights on, and radioed the barracks for clarification. A new dispatcher verified the address.
Beno parked on the road by a circular driveway. He saw a gray New England saltbox house standing far back from the road in an open field. The house carved a towering presence 011 the barren, white landscape. There were no trees to soften the sharp edges; only Christmas lights strung along a split-rail fence that bordered the road brought relief to the deserted scene.
It was now 7:20 and a pale gray dawn was finally breaking after the longest night of the year.
Beno walked up to the house beside a set of fresh tire tracks, which he noticed were cut through the lawn. His boots made a crunching noise in the snow, the only sound to break the winter silence. The tracks missed the driveway by ten or fifteen feet and he could see they had swung wide out of the garage. By now, the faint stream of light was growing, penetrating the dull gray sky. As Beno turned from the front of the house and started walking around to the back, looking for footprints, he felt a gust of cold wind hit his face and the brim of his hat moved up and down. All he could see were deer tracks etched in the snow.
Beno rang the front doorbell, then walked to the side door and yelled, “Anybody home?” After he found the front and side doors locked, he entered the garage through an open bay and noticed a power tool on top of a dark sedan. Searching the area, he discovered an unlocked door inside the garage and entered the mud room, connected by a narrow hallway to the kitchen. Smoke was in the air, a panel of red lights was flashing on the right-hand wall, and he heard the beeping sound of smoke detectors in the background. He yelled out, “State Police,” as he walked into the kitchen.
It didn’t feel hot inside. Beno thought a chimney damper might have been shut and had trapped the smoke in the house. He stuck his hand next to the fireplace where there were burned logs and ashes, but they were cold. He walked into what he assumed was the family room, passing a Christmas tree. Haphazard boxes lay open underneath, and about them was strewn red and green wrapping paper. He saw a man’s jacket hanging on the staircase banister. Family photographs were displayed on the fireplace mantel. He kept calling out, “State Police, anybody here?” as he moved from room to room. He saw a gas can lying on its side on the carpet in the living room . The room smelled of gasoline, but nothing seemed burned.
Trying to hold his breath, Beno opened the front door and then some kitchen windows to let the smoke out. He lifted the receiver on the kitchen wall phone to call for assistance, but the line was dead. He looked down; the wires had been ripped out
“Jesus, what have I got here?” he asked himself out loud. Beno’s ten years’ experience as a trooper had been routine up to then—giving out speeding tickets, making DWI arrests, handling traffic accidents. With a heavy feeling in his chest, he hurried outside to his car and radioed for help. It was 7:30 A.M.
While waiting for his backups, Beno went back inside to see if anyone was still in the house and needed help. He raced up the stairs to the interior balcony that looked down on the family room. He opened the bedroom door at the top of the landing, but couldn’t see anything in the dark, smokefilled room. He flipped on the light switch and the bulb blew out. Thick smoke hung over the balcony making it difficult to breathe. He continued to call out, “State Police, anybody home?” He continued to call out as he opened doors to closets and looked into a room and bath down a short hall off the balcony. His eyes stung and watered from the smoke. Again and again he tried to catch his breath, finally having to go downstairs for air. A few minutes later back on the second floor, he noticed light coming from the room at the end of the hall. Walking toward it, he saw a demolished telephone and another gasoline can lying to the side of the door.
By this time he heard other cars. Three other troopers had arrived at the scene: Scott Hendershott, who had just gotten off the graveyard shift, and Michael Simmons in one car and William Standinger in another. Beno went downstairs, gave them a fast rundown on the scene, and grabbed Simmons’ flashlight. He returned to the room at the top of the stairs with Hendershott and Simmons. Beno opened the door and pointed the beam into the dark room. Slowly he moved the light around to the right as he took a step inside. “What in the hell’s going on here,” he mumbled.
Blackened mattress coils were protruding from a double bed, and drawers and clothes were strewn around on the floor. He took another step inside, directing the beam to his left. On the floor between a dresser and the bed, he saw the lower part of a human body; the rest of the torso was either covered with something or had burned up. The sight of charred, white flesh of human legs made Beno gasp. A muscle in his throat started to quiver as he screamed to Simmons, standing in the doorway, “Jesus, we’ve got a body in here!”
Beno thought it was a woman’s body they’d discovered. Remembering the family photographs he’d seen on the mantel downstairs, a morbid scenario went through his mind. He pictured the husband leaving in a hurry after he murdered the wife and kids, whom they’d probably find in another room. Domestic violence around the holidays was all too common. There was no sign anyone had been outside the house, and he couldn’t see any indication of a break-in.
Going on ahead, Standinger started to open the door at the end of the hall but quickly closed it after seeing a red glow.
The state troopers taped off the south side of the Harrises’ house before the firefighters arrived. They marked a route through the front door into the foyer, right through a passage in the kitchen, and up the stairs. This was the most direct route for the firefighters to bring equipment and would not destroy evidence downstairs. The troopers helped lay the hoses out. The object was to have as few people as possible inside. It helped to have Simmons on duty. As chief of the Berkshire Volunteer Fire Department, Simmons knew how to work with other firefighters. This saved time and prevented misunderstandings.
In his car on the way to his office to clear up a mountain of paperwork that sat on his desk, Investigator Charlie Porter clicked into the station’s radio service as he headed toward Route 13. Soon he heard John Beno over one of the frequencies going out to check an EID. A little later, Porter heard Beno say something about a fire.
“This can’t be,” he mumbled. “I’ve got too much work to do.” By the time he passed the Cayuga Heights exit, he heard over the radio about the ripped telephone cords and the gasoline can in the living room. Porter was well experienced and a twenty-year police veteran who had transferred to Ithaca in 1988 after a six-year stint with the narcotic unit in Binghamton. Damn, he thought. There’s no way I’m not involved now. An empty gas can made it obvious this was not an accidental fire.
Porter got off at the next exit. Triphammer Road, and headed for Ellis Hollow. He drove through the Cornell campus, still worrying about the desk work he had planned to do that day.
When he arrived at the scene, he pulled up next to Scott Hendershott, who was standing at the end of the driveway.
“What the hell have we got here, Scott?” he barked at Hendershott.
The trooper shook his head. “We found one body and fire engines are on the way.” Porter could see the property was already taped off. He had to make sure the troopers kept as much as they could of the inside scene undisturbed. He could see his own smokey breath as he walked up the driveway and met John Beno outside the front door. It was ten degrees, but with the wind chill factor it felt below zero. Snow had drifted against the doors and windows, and it had started snowing again.
“Well, you better tell me what you found, John. This is one hell of a way to start the day,” Porter complained, still hoping they could tie up the thing quickly. It ran through his mind that this was probably a family affair—people did crazy things at Christmas.
Ron Flynn walked out of the Bangs Ambulance building on Albany Street. He and his brother, both Emergency Medical Technicians, had just gotten off duty. They were trying to decide where to go for breakfast when Flynn’s pager beeped. It was Dryden’s Volunteer Fire and Rescue Squad: “We got a possible 1070 out Ellis Hollow Road, the number is 1886. We’ve been alerted to respond immediately.”
“1070,” Flynn repeated.
The Dryden chief’s assistant didn’t waste any time getting in his car and heading out to the east side of town when he heard about a body. Then a message came over his pager that the Varna Fire Department was to respond to a possible structure fire at the same address. “Okay,” he mumbled, “I’ll have to wait to eat.” He was glad they’d stopped by the donut shop for coffee before their shift ended.
Flynn was the first firefighter at the scene. Firefighters from Vania and Dryden were on the way.
The Harrises’ place was taped off along the split-rail fence that separated the property from the road, stopping at the far side of the driveway next to the Grey Goose gift shop. Trooper Simmons, his eyes reddened from the smoke, met him there and told him hoarsely, “Trooper Beno has found one body. We don’t know if there are more. It’s black fog upstairs. We can hardly breathe in there,” Simmons said coughing. He added, “We gotta keep everybody off the other side of the drive where we found some tire tracks.”
Flynn could see smoke coming out near the peak of the roof on the south side. Radioing Tompkins County Fire Patrol, he reported the visible smoke. He stood on the road a few minutes, waiting to direct the fire trucks to the side. Police wanted them to go in. The first to arrive was a Dryden pumper truck driven by the fire chief.
The fire in the master bedroom smoldered and went out. No water was needed there. Marc’s bedroom at the end of the hallway only took a few minutes to hose down. T he firefighters were surprised the fires hadn’t spread further, but on closer analysis, they realized the arsonist either wasn’t too smart or he panicked when he shut the doors. Fires need oxygen to bum. In Marc’s room there was a small trap door leading to the attic, which may have let enough air in to feed that fire.
Gasoline dumped on the living room carpet, on the furniture, and in the fireplace had not been lighted, and what was spread on the floor outside Marc’s room caused little damage. The solid construction of high-grade sheetrock-lined walls and ceiling helped to keep fires contained. Despite this, if whoever spread the huge quantity of fuel in the living room had torched it, the fire would have been uncontainable.
Flynn relayed to the chief what he’d heard from the state police: “They’ve confirmed one body and don’t know if there are others inside.” The pumper drove up to the house and the men immediately set up their portable pond, the supply of water that firefighters carry with them when there are no fire hydrants available.
The chief divided his firefighters into two teams—search and back-up crews. The guys who already had their air packs on formed the first crew and went inside. Flynn grabbed a fireproof jacket and high boots, put those on and then his air pack. He and his partner were part of the back-up crew. They followed the hose line in through the front door and around to the right and to the bottom of the stairs. Beno told Flynn the fire was in the room at the end of the hall upstairs. “Standinger said there’s a red glow.”
Flynn could barely see the advance team at the top of the stairs. They couldn’t hear each other speak through their air masks, so Flynn started pointing toward the doors, asking if they’d finished searching the rooms. They pointed to the room at the top of the stairs to indicate they hadn’t completed the search as their air bells were going off. While the first crew went downstairs to refill their air bottles, Flynn and his partner searched the master bedroom with a flashlight and saw the partially burned body that Beno had told them about.
Flynn’s body shook slightly. The scene gave him the chills. He noticed that some kind of cloth material hung over the windows, keeping out the daylight. “Someone created havoc in this room,” he murmured. He spotted a dog on the floor near the bath; looked like a small collie. He could see it was dead, probably from smoke inhalation. Searching the adjoining bathroom and closets, he looked for possible survivors. He turned left out of the master bedroom and went down a short hall off the balcony, searching a bathroom and another bedroom at the end of the hall. They came back to the balcony and faced the room where Standinger said he saw the glow. All they could see was smoke coming from under and around the closed door.
Flynn turned to his partner. “Grab the firehose and be ready to use it when I open the door.” He was afraid of a possible backdraft. He pushed the door back as far as it would go. About three quarters open it hit something solid—a piece of furniture, Flynn assumed. There were no flames inside, but thick smoke forced him down on all fours. As he crept inside he bumped into a body. He stretched out his hand, felt the length of it, and knew it was an adult. Crawling a little further, he felt another body, which he decided was also an adult. At that moment his low air signal went off. As he craw led out of the room and shut the door behind him he radioed the Varna fire chief that they had two more bodies. He met the attack crew on the balcony, their fresh air replenished, and pointed to the end room, signaling for them to go in and finish the search.
Downstairs, getting another air bottle, Flynn could not shake off the eerie unreality of the scene. A strange thought struck him. He decided he’d better verify that those were real bodies he felt in there and not stuffed animals. He’d feel like a damned fool if it turned out those were just a child’s toys. When he reentered the end bedroom, two men were trying to open the window; they finally smashed the glass with a crowbar and sprayed water out the window to suck the smoke out. Inching closer he still found it difficult to see clearly, but it looked as if there was some type of material covering the heads of the adults’ bodies. He saw another smaller body away from the adults, which the attack crew had discovered earlier. He bit his lip to push back his uneasy feeling. There was no doubt the carnage was real.
One firefighter with the attack crew who, like the others, found himself on his hands and knees in the room because of the heavy smoke, suddenly wanted to vomit when he realized he was crawling over one body and then another one. He couldn’t take it and got out of the room, clutching his stomach. He lurched through the kitchen hallway, tearing his mask off, his face pale.
“You guys are paid to do this. I’m not,” he said as he hurried out the front door.
After the firefighters were gone, Beno took Charlie Porter upstairs; first he showed him the scene inside the master bedroom. Then they investigated the end room. Beno hadn’t gone in there yet. Most of the smoke had escaped through the broken window panes and now outside light streamed into the room. The men saw two charred humps, slouched forward on the floor, one directly behind the other; they were bound with some kind of wire and cord to the bedposts. The larger body with loafers on was hogtied. The burned shroud over his head made Beno think of fish net tom apart. A child’s body lay along the left wall, attached to another bed. The child’s head was covered as the adult’s were. Porter assumed they had been shot. He stared at the grisly sight unable to look away. Beno couldn’t get the scene out of his mind for days afterwards.
In another neighborhood across town, Tony had arrived with his bicycle at Ithacare to ride home with his companion Joanna. He told her he had burned some people, by which she thought he meant robbed them. He got the car keys from her and waited in the truck until she got off work. On the way home they stopped off at several banks, where Tony said he wanted to get some cash. Joanna saw Tony dump a bunch of credit cards on the kitchen table when they arrived at the apartment around 8:00 A.M. She noticed the name Warren Harris was on one of the cards but said nothing.
Elizabeth and Dennis Regan had moved into their “modem Victorian” house in Ellis Hollow in November 1988. They found the design in a magazine and had the builder adapt it to their specifications. The Regan property was located down a gradual slope from the Harrises’ and on a slight downward grade from Ellis Hollow Road, which added to its feeling of privacy. The Regans were so involved with their busy lives at Cornell that neighbors were not a high priority with them; in fact in other houses they’d lived in, they barely knew who lived next door to them. But the Harrises were too nice to ignore. They were their own “welcome wagon.” Dodie brought a greeting card and a small wall plaque of a miniature Victorian house over to them soon after the Regans had moved in, and she invited them to dinner to meet other Ellis Hollow neighbors.
Now the Regans dressed quickly and rushed next door. Billows of smoke were coming out of the Harris house as they approached the circular driveway. Pink police tape extended around the perimeter of the property. Trooper Hendershott, dressed in street clothes, was guarding the entrance and ordered them to go back. Dennis nodded, explaining they lived next door and he was the one who had called in the alarm.
“Something very bad happened here.” Hendershott said soberly. “We’ll be down there to talk to you in a few minutes.”
Dennis looked into the open garage door and saw their van was missing. He mentioned this to the police. It was clear now that someone had been in the house. Walking home, both the Regans felt badly. They told each other they should have called the police sooner about the alarm, or gone over to the Harrises to investigate in spite of the frigid weather, still under the assumption it was only a fire they were dealing with next door.
When a police investigator knocked on the Regans’ door a short while later asking to use their telephone, they overheard him say, “Homicide,” and request the coroner and an ID person.
Their daughter Lisa came downstairs, awakened by the doorbell and voices in the kitchen.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
Elizabeth Regan put on a large pot of coffee before she answered her daughter. She knew it was going to be a long day.
