Mortal Danger

told me that they thought they saw that you’d been sentenced for fourteen years, but you served seventeen. So they thought maybe you had problems while you were in prison, ’cause your time had been extended?”
    “Oh, yeah,” Tavares said easily. “I lost good time. I lost statutory good time…for fighting.”
    Benson was just as casual. He knew Tavares had been inside the walls on a manslaughter charge, but he didn’t know who the victim was yet—or the circumstances of that crime back in 1991. He was waiting for Tavares’s complete case file to be sent from Massachusetts. Daniel volunteered that he’d lost his good time for assaulting a corrections officer.
    “Now you’re squared away—living a good life, huh?”
    “Trying. I mean, I’m sure you must know what I was in prison for?”
    “I just heard it was manslaughter,” Benson said. “What were you in prison for?”
    “I killed the person who molested my child.”
    “How’d you kill ’em?” Benson’s voice was calmer than he felt, but he didn’t want to put Tavares on guard.
    “Stabbed ’em. It was a her. Family member.”
    “What kind of a family member?”
    “My mother.”
    “ You killed your mother? ” For the moment, Ben Benson couldn’t hide his shock. This casual and cooperative man in front of him had just admitted killing his own mother! Benson regained his composure before Tavares even noticed how astounded he was.
    Daniel explained that he had killed his mother for molesting his daughter, back in 1991 in Massachusetts.
    “Well, that’s too bad,” Benson said carefully. “That’s not good for anyone to go through.”
    “Well, I made it through, you know. I made it.”
    He sounded as if he expected a medal for his bravery.
    Detective Tom Catey had a few questions to ask Daniel. The tattooed parolee had made it sound as if he and Brian Mauck were close friends, and that he and Jennifer and Brian and Beverly had often mingled socially. But, under Catey’s close questioning, he finally admitted that he had visited their home only three times—once when he and Jennifer were “invited down” to see the Maucks’ house, once to start work on Brian’s tattoo, and the third time when Brian asked him to ride motorcycles with him—lending one of his own bikes to Daniel.
    These visits had begun in mid-October, only a month before. Tavares insisted that he and Jennifer had been invited to Brian’s birthday party, but they’d had another engagement that night. All of the poker games had taken place at Jeff and Kristel Freitas’s home.
    Daniel and Jennifer lived in a cluttered, crowded little travel trailer with what looked like hand-me-down furniture, and they had to take showers at her brother’s or her parents’ mobile homes. Their only income was the hundred dollars a day that Jeff paid Daniel. Even though he didn’t say it, it was obvious that the ex-prisoner from Massachusetts was envious of the home the Maucks shared and the life they lived.
    But was it enough to spark murder?
    There in the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department interview room, the first tape ran out at a quarter to midnight. They took a break. Both Benson and Catey were stunned by the news that this seemingly easygoing man had stabbed his own mother to death. His affect and his attitude didn’t jibe with what he had done.
    If he could kill his mother, he probably was capable of killing neighbors he hardly knew.
    They had the matching shoe prints. They had the palm print that matched the print in blood on the interior door at the Maucks’ home. They had caught him in lie after lie, and they had witnesses who could refute his statements. In essence, they had him .
    Their main question was Why? And what, if any, was Jennifer’s part in the cruel crime? She appeared to be besotted with her tattooed bridegroom, and they suspected she would have done just about anything he asked of her.
    Ben Benson put in a fresh tape and they continued.
    “At this point,” Benson said to the man across the table from him, “we’ve got evidence to arrest you for the murder of Brian and Beverly.”
    “ What? ” Daniel Tavares had thought he was doing so well, completely snowing the two detectives.
    Benson continued. “And one of the reasons that we’ve talked to you kind of extensively here initially is because we know the answers to these questions that we’ve asked you, and we know that a lot of what you’ve told us are lies. Now, that being said,