Those thoughts quickly slipped away with the relief the physical exorcism brought. I gingerly stepped out of the car and walked to the edge of the asphalt where the light from the passing cars reflected in moving rainbows on the petroleum-exhaust glaze on the February snow. It looked as if we had stopped alongside a grazing meadow but I didn’t know where. I hadn’t been paying attention to how far along to Boulder we were. I took off my gloves and glasses and put them in the pockets of my coat. Then I reached down and dug beneath the spoiled surface to where the snow was white and pure. I took up two handfuls of the cold, clean powder and pressed it to my face, rubbing my skin until it stung.
“You okay?” St. Louis asked.
He had come up behind me with his stupid question. It was up there with How do you feel? I ignored it.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We got back in and Wexler wordlessly pulled the car back onto the freeway. I saw a sign for the Broomfield exit and knew we were about halfway there. Growing up in Boulder, I had made the thirty-mile run between there and Denver a thousand times but the stretch seemed like alien territory to me now.
For the first time I thought of my parents and how they would deal with this. Stoicly, I decided. They handled everything that way. They never discussed it. They moved on. They’d done it with Sarah. Now they’d do it with Sean.
“Why’d he do it?” I asked after a few minutes.
Wexler and St. Louis said nothing.
“I’m his brother. We’re twins, for Christ’s sake.”
“You’re also a reporter,” St. Louis said. “We picked you up because we want Riley to be with family if she needs it. You’re the only—”
“My brother fucking killed himself!”
I said it too loud. It had a quality of hysteria to it that I knew never worked with cops. You start yelling and they have a way of shutting down, going cold. I continued in a subdued voice.
“I think I am entitled to know what happened and why. I’m not writing a fucking story. Jesus, you guys are. . .”
I shook my head and didn’t finish. If I tried I thought I would lose it again. I gazed out the window and could see the lights of Boulder coming up. So many more than when I was a kid.
“We don’t know why,” Wexler finally said after a half minute. “Okay? All I can say is that it happens. Sometimes cops get tired of all the shit that comes down the pipe. Mac might’ve gotten tired, that’s all. Who knows? But they’re working on it. And when they know, I’ll know. And I’ll tell you. That’s a promise.”
“Who’s working on it?”
“The park service turned it over to our department. SIU is handling it.”
“What do you mean Special Investigations? They don’t handle cop suicides.”
“Normally, they don’t. We do. CAPs. But this time it’s just that they’re not going to let us investigate our own. Conflict of interest, you know.”
CAPs, I thought. Crimes Against Persons. Homicide, assault, rape, suicide. I wondered who would be listed in the reports as the person against whom this crime had been committed. Riley? Me? My parents? My brother?
“It was because of Theresa Lofton, wasn’t it?” I asked, though it wasn’t really a question. I didn’t feel I needed their confirmation or denial. I was just saying out loud what I believed to be the obvious.
“We don’t know, Jack,” St. Louis said. “Let’s leave it at that for now.”
The death of Theresa Lofton was the kind of murder that gave people pause. Not just in Denver, but everywhere. It made anybody who heard or read about it stop for at least a moment to consider the violent images it conjured in the mind, the twist it caused in the gut.
Most homicides are little murders. That’s what we call them in the newspaper business. Their effect on others is limited, their grasp on the imagination is short-lived. They get a few paragraphs on the inside pages. Buried in the paper the way the victims are buried in the ground.
But when an attractive college student is found in two pieces in a theretofore peaceful place like Washington Park, there usually isn’t enough space in the paper for all the inches of copy it will generate. Theresa Lofton’s was no little murder. It was a magnet that pulled at reporters from across the country. Theresa Lofton was the girl in two pieces. That was the catchy thing about this one. And so they descended on Denver from places like New York and Chicago and Los Angeles, television, tabloid and newspaper reporters alike. For a week, they stayed at hotels with good room service, roamed the city and the University of Denver campus, asked meaningless questions and got meaningless answers. Some staked out the day care center where Lofton had worked part-time or went up to Butte, where she had come from. Wherever they went they learned the same thing, that Theresa Lofton fit that most exclusive media image of all, the All-American Girl.
The Theresa Lofton murder was inevitably compared to the Black Dahlia case of fifty years ago in Los Angeles. In that case, a not so All-American Girl was found severed at the midriff in an empty lot. A tabloid television show dubbed Theresa Lofton the White Dahlia, playing on the fact that she had been found on a snow-covered field near Denver’s Lake Grassmere.
And so the story fed on itself. It burned as hot as a trash-can fire for almost two weeks. But nobody was arrested and there were other crimes, other fires for the national media to warm itself by. Updates on the Lofton case dropped back into the inside pages of the Colorado papers. They became briefs for the digest pages. And Theresa Lofton finally took her spot among the little murders. She was buried.
All the while, the police in general, and my brother in particular, remained virtually mute, refusing even to confirm the detail that the victim had been found in two parts. That report had come only by accident from a photographer at the Rocky named Iggy Gomez. He had been in the park looking for wild art—the feature photos that fill the pages on a slow news day—when he happened upon the crime scene ahead of any other reporters or photographers. The cops had made the callouts to the coroner’s and crime scene offices by landline since they knew the Rocky and the Post monitored their radio frequencies. Gomez took shots of two stretchers being used to remove two body bags. He called the city desk and said the cops were working a two-bagger and from the looks of the size of the bags the victims were probably children.
Later, a cop shop reporter for the Rocky named Van Jackson got a source in the coroner’s office to confirm the grim fact that a victim had come into the morgue in two parts. The next morning’s story in the Rocky served as the siren call to the media across the country.
My brother and his CAPs team worked as if they felt no obligation to talk to the public at all. Each day, the Denver Police Department media office put out a scant few lines in a press release, announcing that the investigation was continuing and that there had been no arrests. When cornered, the brass vowed that the case would not be investigated in the media, though that in itself was a laughable statement. Left with little information from authorities, the media did what it always does in such cases. It investigated the case on its own, numbing the reading and television-watching public with assorted details about the victim’s life that actually had nothing to do with anything.
Still, almost nothing leaked from the department and little was known outside headquarters on Delaware Street; and after a couple of weeks the media onslaught was over, strangled by the lack of its lifeblood, information.