Mortal Danger

a gun with him, and he’d kept telling her not to worry about it.
    “That told me that he did have a gun with him.”
    It had also been very important to Daniel that the water far below was salt water. She didn’t know why, but the detectives did: If Tavares had thrown the death weapon into the sea, he would have hoped the metal would corrode rapidly.
    Asked about what guns were in the travel trailer, Jennifer said she didn’t know where her .22 handgun was; she thought her mother had it. Daniel had owned an assault rifle until a few days before the double murder. She thought he’d sold it.
    Benson and Merod shuddered at the thought of what a man like Daniel Tavares might have intended to do with an assault rifle. He could have taken out everyone in the neighborhood.
    Now Ben Benson led Jennifer’s focus back to the murder site. He showed her photographs of fingerprints and palm prints in blood, and the ridges of shoes etched in the dried blood. One was Daniel’s; the other was from a smaller foot. She was adamant that she had not been in theMaucks’ home with him. As Jennifer grew more anxious, her language became less than ladylike. She had an extensive vocabulary of four-letter words.
    She accused Daniel of taking one of her shoes down to the murder site and deliberately making a bloody print with it—just to involve her in homicides she had no part in. The person who had vomited in the Maucks’ driveway had probably been Jennifer, but she stubbornly insisted that she had never, ever, walked down to their house—particularly not on the morning they were killed. If DNA tests linked that to her, it was because she’d gotten sick in her own trailer Friday night—into a paper bag—and Daniel must have taken it down there to try to make it look like she was there.
    She had known some things, yes. She knew Daniel had been smoking meth on Friday night and admitted that she had joined him. She had had a problem with drugs sometime back, but she’d been clean for a while.
    Jennifer said she was doing anything she could to calm her husband down. She’d kept working on her wolf puzzle, and they were having a “heart-to-heart talk.” That had led to sex—not in the morning but sometime in the middle of the night.
     
    The detectives didn’t think she had accompanied her husband on his killing visit to Beverly and Brian Mauck’s home, but they did believe she had gone back there with him a short time later at his insistence that she help him clean up the death house. Maybe it had been Jennifer whotried to sweep up the pools of blood, only to become violently ill at the smell of it.
    The short honeymoon of the convict and the farm girl from Graham, Washington, seemed to be over.
    Despite her protestations, Jennifer Lynn Tavares was charged with rendering criminal assistance and booked into the Pierce County Jail at around 2:00 a.m. on Monday, November 19.

Chapter Five
    Convinced that they had the Maucks’ killer locked safely in jail, the investigators continued to assemble new information about Daniel Tavares’s behavior after the crimes and to learn more about his background.
    Jeff Freitas had learned that Tavares had told a few people he was angry that Jeff had found the victims so soon after they were killed.
    “Why was he angry?” Tom Catey asked Jeff.
    “I guess he thought no one would check up on Brian and Bev until Monday, and he supposedly had planned to go down there and set their house on fire—destroy any evidence—before they were found.”
    But Freitas wasn’t sure who had heard that information in the first few days after the murders. He thought that his mother had overheard it, and told his wife, Kristel. It was one of those rumors that seemed to make sense, and yet it was very difficult to track it back to its source.
    An older uncle who lived on Freitas’s land reported that Daniel Tavares had come to his home and asked for some bleach. He had then poured bleach over some jeans he carried. But detectives hadn’t found any bloody or bleach-stained clothing in the fire that occurred shortly after the murders. They had seen the phantom blank spot image on the dining room wall and believed that the clothes Tavares wore during the shootings had to be speckled with back-spatter blood from his victims’ wounds.
    But they hadn’t been able to find them.
    On Monday morning, Ben Benson received an overnight package from the Massachusetts State Police. A mug shot included in the file was