Empty Promises

and there was enough left to match exemplars of his blood type that were readily available from Marine Corps records.
    When the detectives told Carole that evidence indicated that her husband had expired in the bed they shared, she turned pale. They pointed out the spot they found on the wall, and explained about how the crime lab could match blood types.
    Then Balmer and Cellucci worked their way down the back stairs to the driveway where a shiny pickup truck sat. Oddly, someone had recently washed the truck; the cement around it was still wet. They peered at the bench seat that was upholstered in gray with white stitching. At least the stitching on the driver’s side was white. The stitching on the passenger side was pink—and damp. When they lifted up the floor mat on that side, they saw why. Blood had puddled on the steel floor.
    Teri Depew had already admitted that she was the last person to see David Hargis. The detectives questioned her now. She initially told the same story Carole had—about the wild partyers she and David had met in Black Canyon. When they mentioned the blood they found in the truck, Teri shifted uneasily in her chair.
    “I have no idea how it got there,” she said.
    During the questioning, Teri had volunteered that she was a lesbian and was disgusted when men made moves on her. Joe Cellucci was sympathetic. He commented that he would understand if she had been defending herself against David Hargis that night. “If he was drunk and made advances toward you, it would be understandable for you to fight back …”
    Teri nodded, thinking hard.
    “That would have been pretty upsetting for you, and you say you’d both had a lot of beer,” Joe Cellucci pressed.
    “That’s what happened—” she said. Teri followed Cellucci’s lead; it gave her a way to confess, and perhaps plead self-defense. The San Diego detective doubted that David Hargis would have been attracted to this masculine-appearing woman, but Cellucci listened with an expression on his face that looked as though he believed her.
    Teri said that she and David had originally gone out in the middle of the night to catch rattlers, but when they got to the wilderness area David suddenly became irrational and tried to rape her. “I panicked when he reached for me …”
    Teri said she had fought him off and finally found something to hit him with.
    “What was the weapon you used?” Cellucci asked.
    “I don’t know what the hell it was. There was this thing about twelve inches long.”
    “What was it ? … What are we talking about—twelve inches?”
    “Oh, I guess it was.”
    “Where did you find it”
    “It was down on the rocks. I picked it up and started hitting him with it.”
    “How many times did you hit him?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “What happened after you hit him with it?”
    “He yelled, ‘Carole!’ ”
    “Did he fall on the ground?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then what did you do with him?”
    “I picked him up and put him in the truck. I drove to the bridge and threw him over the bridge.”
    Teri admitted that she had tied David’s hands to his belt loops. She said she took a roll of tape from her car and taped his head, so he wouldn’t “bleed all over the place.”
    The detectives found it odd that Teri would have been so concerned about blood if she had killed David way out in the wilderness. And why had he called out “Carole!” who was allegedly in their house back in San Diego?
    Teri was confabulating; she was telling part of the truth, but she had completely changed the location of the crime. They were already convinced that David Hargis had, indeed, died in his own bed on Laurel Street. They didn’t know what part Carole Hargis had played in her husband’s murder.
    But they soon would. One of Teri Depew’s friends visited her in jail and was outraged to learn that Teri was taking the fall all by herself. The woman walked to the sheriff’s office and confronted Fred Balmer and Joe Cellucci. “Hey, you guys,” she said. “You’d better take a look at Mrs. Hargis because she’s not telling you the whole truth.”
    When her friend told Teri she was being a patsy, she began to talk to the detectives. The floodgates opened. She blamed Carole for having the idea in the first place. With the tape recorder turning, Teri regaled the amazed detectives with almost a dozen wild plots they had considered together to get rid of David, so Carole could collect $40,000 worth of insurance.
    But when