Mortal Danger

Marlene.”
    Tavares said that he and Jennifer did more than play cards with their neighbors. He made it sound as if they were close friends. They always stopped and talked when they met on the private road between their residences, especially about Brian’s motorcycles. “One time we went for a Harley ride—me and him—for about an hour.”
    “How about the tattoo stuff?” Benson asked.
    “He knew I was doing tattoos, and he wanted one…what do you call it? Your sign, like a Taurus, Scorpion—your birth sign —so he wanted a scorpion. I told him that I’d draw him up one, and if he liked my drawing and wanted it, I’d have no problem doing it for him. I did that for him.”
    “Did you just put one tattoo on him?”
    Daniel Tavares nodded. “And his initials: B.A.M. Brian—I forgot his middle name, but it was a scorpion with ‘B.A.M.’ above it. That’s the first tattoo he has, I think.”
    He said that Bev had shown interest in having a tattoo, too. She was drawing up an angelfish she wanted. “’Cause they scuba dive.”
    Ben Benson noted that Daniel spoke of the dead couple as if they were still alive.
    “So what was the agreement about the tattoo?” Benson asked. “Just doing it because you were a buddy of his?”
    “Yeah, yeah.”
    “Or was he paying you to do it?”
    “No, he paid me a hundred bucks to do it.”
    There was no money paid up front, according to Daniel, but he had been paid in full after he’d tattooed the whole outline and colored it in. He had wanted to “soup it up” a little by adding more red after it had healed enough, but Brian said he was happy the way it was. He’d finally agreed to have more color as Daniel recommended. That was to cost another fifty dollars.
    “When was the last time you saw Bev or Brian, or both of them?”
    “God, let me see—it’s been a few days.”
    “Try and think for me,” Benson urged. “See if you can pin it down.”
    Finally, Tavares said he thought it must have been in the middle of the preceding week. He and Brian had spoken as he turned into the driveway leading up to his trailer. “I asked him when he wanted to do the rest, but he told me he was so busy, had things to do. He was going to a birthday party, and maybe going hunting. He would call me and let me know.”
    Daniel said he hadn’t seen Bev for more than a week.
    Daniel Tavares was speaking in a more agitated way, his words tumbling over Ben Benson’s before the detective sergeant could complete his questions.
    Asked to describe the Maucks, he said, “Nice people. Good people. Good people. Good, good people. Drunks .”
    “They like their alcohol?” Benson asked, surprise in his voice.
    “Oh, they love their alcohol.”
    Tavares paused, and with a sanctimonious expression on his face, he offered that Bev often started fights in taverns and could be wild. That didn’t fit with what others had said about Bev Mauck.
    With what the Pierce County investigators had learned so far about Tavares’s drug and alcohol usage, he hardly seemed in a position to be painting the dead couple as “drunks” and worse. By now, the detectives had discovered that Tavares had bought at least four hits of meth within hours of the murders.
    Still, Ben Benson said nothing, more than “um-humm.” He could see that his subject believed that he was the one controlling the interview. That was fine with Benson.
    “Did Bev ever flirt with you—or anything like that?”
    “No…no.” Tavares seemed taken aback by the question. He was in full saintly mode, but Benson wondered if he had had lustful feelings for the pretty bride.
    Now Benson asked Tavares to go over his activities on Friday night, November 16. He had told other detectives that he and Jennifer were doing a puzzle together in their trailer. Yes, that was true, he said—but earlier on Friday evening they had been in Tacoma at a friend’s house.
    “Your wife was with you?” Ben Benson caught the disparity in Daniel’s story. She hadn’t been with him at the Roundup or when he took Carl Rider for a drive to smoke meth.
    “Yeah, yeah,” he lied now. “Well, she drives everywhere. I mean we are always together. So, yeah.”
    Tavares had talked his way into a dead end, and he struggled now to break out. He remembered that Jennifer wasn’t with him on Friday night, but he’d had to call her on his cell phone to ask where the spare tire to her Ford Explorer was after he discovered a flat tire. He’d struggled