Mortal Danger

with the lug nuts, and that’s when he’d been attacked by her ex-boyfriend and another man, bruised and cut, and had another tire slashed.
    He admitted he’d never seen his wife’s ex-boyfriend before, but he knew his name was Eddie. He thought he would recognize a photo of Eddie. Now he added another person on the scene of the attack. Some young kid from a bar had come over to ask if he was okay.
    “I’m like, ‘No, I’m all set,’ and he just got in his car and left.”
    His assailants had given him a message: “It would be good advice for you to leave Jennifer.”
    The more he talked, the more Daniel Tavares was making things worse for himself. He said he’d been attacked about eight to eight thirty, but Carl Rider had seen him last just after midnight on Friday night–Saturday morning and he had no bruises or cuts then. The details he kept inserting into his story warred with what he had told the sheriff’s staff and his brother-in-law earlier.
    Didn’t he know that every time he gave a statement it had been preserved either on tape or in investigative notes?
    Now, to add to the mysterious red truck, he recalled that a green and silver truck had been parked in the Maucks’ driveway when he drove past, heading up the road to the Freitas property at 8:40 p.m. on Friday, inching along on two flattened tires. He told Ben Benson that he had replaced the tires but thought he could find the slashed and punctured tires somewhere on Jeff’s acreage.
    “Okay,” Benson said. “This was about eight thirty. Did you leave again that night?”
    “No. My wife told me, ‘Look what I got,’ and she showed me she picked up a puzzle at Goodwill. So we started, and it was like, ‘Oh man, let’s do this.’ It was a real nice puzzle.”
    The puzzle that they’d allegedly worked on together was the image of a wolf. Except for the animal’s penetrating and unfathomable yellow eyes, the rest of the evening sounded as benign and cozy as newlyweds at home could be.
    Unless he was lying.
    Nothing matched the facts or Daniel Tavares’s earlier statements. He had said that the Mauck house was completely dark when he got home at 8:30 p.m., but both their cars were there so he knew they were home. Besides, the Freitas dogs always barked when someone outside the family drove up. And they hadn’t barked.
    Benson knew the Maucks weren’t home; they’d been out to dinner with Brian’s parents. Both of their vehicles could not have been there around 8:30 on Friday night.
    Daniel said that he and Jennifer had worked on the puzzle for a few hours. A few minutes later, he estimated they had gone to bed at three or four in the morning. That was six or seven hours after he said he came home. Another slip.
    Then he said they had had intercourse because they both wanted to have a baby. He’d gone to sleep about four and wakened shortly after seven when he heard the gunshots. One more slip. Both he and Jennifer had stated they were not asleep, but making love, when they heard the shots.
    And this time, Daniel remembered that the dogs had “gone crazy” at the same time…and that’s when he looked out and saw the “big, greasy-lookin’ dude” down at Brian and Bev’s.
    Now he gave an even more exact description of the driver. He’d had on a red hat, but it was a baseball cap. He “walked kind of funny. His shoulders were hunched up so high that it looked like he didn’t have a neck.”
    Daniel said he hadn’t called the sheriff because he wasn’t sure just where the gunshots were coming from, and Jennifer told him not to worry about it, that it was probably just duck hunters.
    He had rolled over and gone back to sleep for a couple of hours.
    Later that morning, he’d called the fire department because he’d had a fire under his fifth-wheel RV that was parked out in a nearby field. Daniel said he was repairing it for him and Jennifer to live in, and he’d accidentally set fire to the flashing near where part of the floor needed replacing. “I heated it a little too much, and it [the rubber flashing] caught on fire, and it dripped into the dry grass under the trailer. It just made a lot of smoke.”
    This was well before his brother-in-law had discovered the Maucks’ murders. Benson and Catey wondered what else Tavares might have been burning. Bloodied clothing? A weapon?
    Ben Benson asked about Daniel Tavares’s prison time, and he said he was in for manslaughter. At least that was the truth.
    “Somebody