Mortal Danger

Daniel Tavares proved once again that a well-trained and experienced detective knows he must avoid tunnel vision. Beverly Mauck had had reason to be afraid, but she’d been afraid of the wrong person. Billy Mack, who had probably stolen from their house more than once, had scared her, certainly, but this misfit neighbor she’d scarcely noticed, a man she had once fixed dinner for, who had left his mark on her husband’s back, the man she and Brian tolerated because they felt kind of sorry for him, was far more dangerous than anyone in the neighborhood could have imagined.
    It was very late on Sunday night, November 18, and Ben Benson next turned his attention to Jennifer Tavares. He was curious to find out if she truly knew her husband’s background, and more curious to know if she had returned to the Maucks’ house with him after the murder to help him “clean up.” She might well have been an accomplice to murder before, during, or after the fact.
    Benson was inclined to think that Jennifer had probably helped Daniel after the fact. She listened to her Miranda rights and was very concerned. She debated phoning an attorney but realized that might mean she would have to stay in jail overnight. When Benson mentioned that she might face time in prison, Jennifer was horrified. Apparently, that had never occurred to her. She wanted to go home, but Ben Benson explained that her trailer would have to be searched thoroughly, and she could not go home until that was done. She asked then if she could go home to her brother’s mobile home.
    That would depend on her attitude and her willingness to tell him the truth, Benson said. He explained that her husband had just confessed to killing Brian and Beverly.
    “He actually said he did it?” she asked in disbelief.
    “Yeah, he did. We knew he did it before we brought him in here; we had evidence that we collected from the house back there and that told us without a doubt that it was him. We didn’t need him to talk to us, but he was man enoughto do that, and that’s good for him to do that—that’s probably gonna help him out in the long run.”
    “I’m trying to protect myself here. I’ve never been through this before—”
    “I need you to tell me what you know,” Benson probed.
    “I only know bits and pieces,” Jennifer said.
    Jennifer Tavares had been fascinated with a man in prison, a man whose description of his assets was an “Albino gorilla with over forty real nice tattoos.”
    “I met him on the Internet, about three years ago.”
    “Did you ever go see him while he was in prison?”
    “No,” she answered. “He was in Massachusetts.”
    Perhaps it had never occurred to her that she could have flown to the East Coast and met Tavares before she invited him into her life, into her family. She was either artless or cunning—or stupid.
    “Do you know what he was in prison for?”
    “He was supposed to have killed two people that molested his daughter…. He said [it was] his stepmother and her boyfriend, but I didn’t think…he would, you know—somebody gets their daughter molested, you think, ‘Yeah that’s understandable,’ you know.”
    Daniel had obviously lied about that to Jennifer Lynn. How she must have rationalized about everything she learned—which wasn’t that much—about Daniel. She had married him without ever having met him before. He had walked out of prison and immediately flown to Washington. Within a day or so, they were married.
    Jennifer seemed never even to have thought about it.
    How could she have expected to find “the prince” withonly that information? She hadn’t. She had aligned herself with evil, and now she was in danger of being sucked into the vortex of that evil.
    Jennifer said that they had been very happy during the first few months. But things had started to go sour when Daniel went to a psychiatrist and walked away with prescriptions that changed him. Three days before the Maucks died, he’d been to his psychiatrist and received a new prescription.
    Jennifer wasn’t sure what it was, but the word she stumbled on sounded like Klonipin or Colotapins; she thought it was some kind of antianxiety med. “He started taking them and he was eating them like candy, and it was just making him act different—real different. I kept telling him, ‘I don’t like these pills—I want to throw them away.’”
    That had made Daniel more agitated. “He turned into someone I don’t even know, and he kept