Mortal Danger

he had gone to their house in the morning, after it was light out. Brian had been sitting on the couch, and Daniel said he’d told him what the “people” wanted him to say:
    “‘Brian, listen,’ I said. ‘You owe a lot of money and this has to be done.’ That was it. I shot him.”
    The confessed murderer said that he’d shot Brian in theside of the head first, and then again when he slumped over and fell onto the floor.
    Bev had come running from some room in the back of the house. He had shot her “at close range” as she ran toward the front door.
    She had almost made it.
    “Okay,” Benson said evenly. “Did you physically grab her?”
    “Yeah. By the hair.”
    “Did you rape her?”
    “No.”
    “’Cause you know, we’re gonna find that out.”
    “No.”
    “There was no sexual assault?”
    “No.”
    It was clear that Bev Mauck had tried desperately to get away from Daniel Tavares, to get outside where she could hide or scream for help. But she was a very small woman and he was the “gorilla.” How many times he’d shot her, he didn’t know. He remembered grabbing her by the foot—after he shot her—and dragging her over near Brian’s body. He also recalled that she was nude. He didn’t know why, but he’d covered them both up with the blue blankets.
    Sometime later he had come back to the house to make sure that nothing was out of place.
    Everything was out of place, and the two murder victims lay in their own blood. Benson thought he had covered them up so he wouldn’t have to look at what he had done.
    For some bizarre reason, Daniel said he had attempted to sweep up the blood. They already knew that.
    “Were you trying to get rid of your shoe prints?”
    “No,” Tavares answered. “I didn’t even know I left shoe prints.”
    The suspect said he’d felt as if he “wasn’t really there.” He blamed it on the antipsychotic meds that he’d just begun taking again: Buspar, Klonopin, Effexor, and Seroquel.
    (Pill bottles with prescription labels would be found when a search warrant gave detectives permission to go into the Tavareses’ small trailer. One was to treat seizures, and the rest were for anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder.)
    Add alcohol, marijuana, and meth, and the detectives saw why he might have felt as if he wasn’t there. But that didn’t make him innocent. Diminished capacity doesn’t fly as a defense. Daniel Tavares had used illegal drugs along with prescribed antipsychotic drugs and alcohol of his own free will. And his brain had spun evil scenarios.
    But why ?
    He still claimed he’d been hired to carry out two hits. Somehow, Jennifer had known what happened, but he couldn’t remember how she knew.
    Ben Benson pointed out that it didn’t make him less guilty because he’d been hired to kill, and he agreed that he knew that. He hadn’t returned the gun to the actual conspirators but had given it to a mutual friend. “I was told I’d be getting a call. And I haven’t got no call—”
    “I don’t believe that happened,” Benson interrupted. “You’ve been to prison. You’ve been around the block.”
    The detective sergeant suggested once again that “an obvious smart guy” like Tavares wouldn’t carry out ahit without having some money up front and without getting a guarantee that he was going to get more money. “You’re not gonna go kill two people and then sit around and wait for the phone to ring…. That doesn’t make sense,” Benson said. “I don’t know if Brian owed you money for the tattoo and he didn’t pay. What was the real reason?”
    “I wouldn’t do that for a hundred-dollar tattoo.”
    Daniel finally admitted that he had told Jennifer what he had done, and that she “kind of freaked out.”
    But she definitely hadn’t helped him clean off his shoes or wash his clothing. He’d been wearing a gray hoodie with Sylvester, the cartoon cat, on it, and a pair of jeans. They wondered how he could have walked away from the Maucks’ home without blood on his clothes or himself.
    They didn’t believe him. There was too much bloodshed in the house for him to have escaped getting it splashed on himself. But they hadn’t located any bloody clothing. Somehow, he had to have gotten rid of it.
    Tom Catey had some questions of his own, wondering just where Daniel had met the person who wanted Brian Mauck killed. Tavares continued to be cagey, insisting that he had shot Brian only because he owed “some guy” a lot