Mortal Danger

Daniel Tavares had been there, and he’d made quite an impression.
    When detectives asked the night manager of the Roundup if there had been a fight or an attack on Tavares on Friday night, he shook his head. However, he recalled that Daniel had appeared to be either drunk or on drugs and was talking loudly about using meth and marijuana. He was annoying regular customers and “didn’t fit in with the crowd.” The manager had considered calling the sheriff or kicking him out of the nightspot, but Tavares had left on his own. When he came back after midnight, he was refused entry. The manager promised to make his security camera videotapes of the crowd the night before available to the detectives.
    Jason Tate interviewed a man who had been with Daniel—or at least sitting at his table—on Friday night: Carl Rider.* Rider said he had been there with his girlfriend about 7:00 p.m., and since it was karaoke night, he’d consumed several shots of whiskey quickly to get up his nerve to sing. It was about nine when he became aware of Daniel Tavares.
    “He was asking people if they wanted to buy drugs,” and then he walked out the front door. Rider had walked out a short time later and seen Tavares in a red Ford Explorer (Jennifer’s car) with Rider’s girlfriend’s son. They were smoking marijuana. His inhibitions lessened by the whiskey, Rider accepted some marijuana from Tavares and smoked it outside the Roundup. Then the party had continued after Tavares had asked Carl Rider if he wanted to “get high,” and the three men had headed southbound on the Mountain Highway. “We were smoking marijuana and meth,” Rider said.
    Daniel Tavares had dropped Carl Rider off at Johnson’s Corner, and he’d walked to where his fuming girlfriend was waiting for him. He himself was full of regret because he hadn’t smoked meth in five or six years, and he had let Tavares talk him into it.
    Whatever else he was, Daniel Tavares was a bad influence on those around him, a man seemingly without much moral fiber.
    Rider was positive that Tavares hadn’t had any cuts or bruises when he’d last seen him after midnight.
    But deputies questioning him near four the next afternoon had seen injuries on his face. Where had he been between leaving the Roundup the previous night and when they interrogated him on Saturday?
     
    The homicide investigation into the deaths of Beverly and Brian Mauck was just a little more than twenty-four hours old on this gloomy Sunday, November 18. As expected, a number of people called the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, with tips they thought might be important, or theories on the case.
    A woman who worked at Baydo Chevrolet with Beverly called to say that Bev had been afraid of some man who had come to her home. “I don’t know Brian, but she said he was getting a tattoo from someone, and the tattoo artist had brought along another man. That’s the one who gave her the creeps.”
    The caller didn’t know the name of either man. But Ben Benson thought the tattoo artist had to be Daniel Tavares, who was a living advertisement for the art of tattooing.
    Ben Benson had been feeling more and more hinky about Daniel Tavares, and so had several of the other detectives. Tavares had a number of very professional tattoos on his body, many of them hidden by his clothing. Even in clothes, the tattoos on his neck showed—a snorting bull on the right side and “Jennifer Lynn” on the left. When he was bare from the waist up, Pegasus (the flying horse of Greek mythology), a clown wearing a hat, two angels lifting a chained body out of a hole in a brick wall, a baby on a cloud, a female face atop a prison tower wrapped in barbedwire and a pig head below, two masks—one happy and one sad—a castle with a mountain road, a genie coming out of a bottle, and some older, less expert ink tracings were visible.
    Tavares even had a pig’s head tattooed on his penis. Some of his tattoos seemed to have been designed to obliterate previous ones. Some were surely prison artwork by somewhat clumsy practitioners who had worked under less than optimal conditions.
    They’d all noticed that Daniel Tavares was inordinately proud of his body enhancements and of his own skill as a tattoo artist. Apparently his bride had also been attracted to his illustrated skin.
    Jeff Freitas thought that his sister had met Daniel Tavares through an online matchmaking service that hooked up convicts with women on the outside. There