Mortal Danger

the incident where Beverly’s cell phone and a gun had disappeared during a party. He thought the phone had been found in a nearby field. Allen was the one who had given Brian the Glock handgun after that theft, to keep in the house for protection.
    But he didn’t think either Bev or Brian had been truly afraid; it was more that the area they lived in was somewhat isolated, and many of the newly constructed homes weren’t occupied yet.
    Odd. Daniel Tavares had mentioned the party, too. It was Brian Mauck’s birthday party. Tavares thought he’d seen the suspicious Nissan truck parked outside their house during that party.
    Detective Mark Merod talked with Beverly’s best friend, Lisa. She and her husband and Bev and Brian were all best friends, and Lisa said that Beverly had been afraid of two men; one was a stranger Daniel Tavares had brought over one day, and the other was the nephew of a neighbor. “Bev was sure he was the one who took her cell phone—and Brian’s handgun. She found her cell phone by callingher own number and listening for the ring. Someone had tossed it all the way across the road—not the driveway—to where it landed in a field over there. In fact, Bev had to get three new cell phones this year!
    “There was something about those guys—especially Billy Mack—that scared Bev. That’s why she wouldn’t stay alone when Brian was out of town,” Lisa continued. “She’d stay with us.”
    On the night of the party at Brian and Bev’s where the thefts occurred, Lisa found that her new car had been deliberately keyed all the way along one side. Clearly, someone was jealous of the Maucks and their carefree friends.
    “When was the last time you saw her?” Merod asked.
    “Last Sunday. I’m pregnant and sick to my stomach. Bev worried about me, and she came over and cooked for us.”
    Everyone detectives talked to that first day—from relatives to friends who had known the Maucks for many, many years—mentioned how much they loved each other. Their biggest arguments weren’t over anything more serious than who was going to take the garbage out. Did they have financial problems? detectives asked. No. In fact they were admired because they handled their money so well.
    Everything had been perfect. But Beverly had been frightened of something…of someone .
    When the news of Brian and Beverly Mauck’s violent deaths circulated around Graham, many of their peers broke into tears. The shock was palpable.
    There were more than two hundred mourners at their memorial service.

Chapter Three
    Detective Sergeant Ben Benson read over Daniel Tavares’s eyewitness description of the “killer or killers” and something jarred him: The distance from the travel trailer where Daniel and Jennifer lived was three hundred to four hundred yards from the Maucks’ home. That was three or four times the length of a football field! He tested himself to see how much he could see at that distance, and it wasn’t much more than vague shapes. How had the Tavarases—looking out of the little trailer window above their bed, in the darkness of a November morning—been able to describe the strangers in the Maucks’ driveway so precisely?
    Even if they had binoculars—which they hadn’t mentioned—it was just too far between where they lived and where Beverly and Brian lived. And Daniel Tavares had gone so far as to describe the tires on the truck, and said the driver had had a “shady-looking face.”
    “Shady?” Tate asked.
    “Kind of like…pockmarked.”
    “Pockmarked?”
    “You know, when a face is all pocked up. Yeah.”
    “Okay.”
    “Yeah, and I mean, I can see. I got real good vision. So yeah. He kind of looked like he had an acne problem, like red on his face. No beard, no mustache, no hair…that I could see. But it was like red.”
    “Okay.”
    Tavares seemed to be waiting for a compliment on his excellent vision, but he got nothing more.
    “Maybe the color wasn’t red, but it was—certainly wasn’t a white skin color.”
    Ben Benson didn’t say anything either. When he read over the transcript of this first questioning of Daniel Tavares, he thought that Daniel must have Superman’s amazing vision and marveled at the way he kept embroidering his story, adding a few more details than needed.
    “We knew he could not have seen all that from his trailer,” Benson said later, “but we let him talk.”
     
    Brian and Beverly hadn’t gone to the Roundup on Friday night, but