Worth More Dead

would make Alby Brotzweller look far less guilty. Even so, there was the possibility that he might have deliberately cut himself to hide any injuries he suffered when Cheryl was bludgeoned the night before.
     
    This was a case where detectives had felt sure they knew who killed Cheryl. That was her husband, Roland Pitre. Yet more and more suspects kept popping up, suspects they would have been glad to find under other circumstances. They were all veteran investigators and knew the dangers of tunnel vision, so they shoved their gut instincts aside and pursued every lead that came in.
    Hank Gruber and Rudy Sutlovich met with Jim Harris and the reporter Creg Darby. They brought along audiotapes of Alby Brotzweller’s and Roland Pitre’s voices for Darby to listen to.
    Darby shook his head when he heard Pitre’s voice. “I’m pretty certain it wasn’t him.”
    He was even more sure that he had never heard Alby’s voice.
    At the time, none of the detectives knew that Pitre was spreading a rumor that some younger man had been stalking Cheryl only days before her death.

14
    A Port Orchard woman had been wrestling with her conscience for several months. She believed that her ex-boyfriend might be the one who killed Cheryl, but because she herself had been beaten by him so many times she was afraid to report him. In late February 1989, she finally called the police. His name was Jack Short,* and he had a long rap sheet filled with charges for assault and rape. He was also an associate of a wealthy man who once had a financial interest in PJ’s Market.
    Short had been imprisoned on McNeil Island, too, and was paroled in December 1987. Once more, Hank Gruber talked to the security staff at McNeil. He learned that though Short and Roland Pitre were never housed in the same unit, they had worked in prison shops that adjoined each other. There was a good possibility that they had known each other in prison.
    But an intensive check of phone records in and out of the block where Jack Short served time failed to bring up any connections. Detectives were able to establish that Jack Short and Martin O’Brian,* a former owner of PJ’s, were well acquainted. The ex-con with a reputation for hurting and sexually attacking women and the wealthy man who tried countless times to set him on the straight path were both familiar faces at PJ’s Market.
    When detectives talked to O’Brian in his opulent and well-kept home, they asked him about both Cheryl Pitre and Jack Short. O’Brian said he’d known Jack since they were kids when they’d been friends, but they’d taken different paths. He said Short had an “explosive personality” and was “scary” when he was drinking. Even so he had tried to help him. “I gave him jobs,” O’Brian said. “I even set up a work-release job for him, but the past few years he’s just been bad news.”
    He said he’d given up on helping Jack Short because he no longer trusted him.
    “Do you know if he knew Cheryl Pitre?” Hudson asked.
    “I don’t know. He might have seen her at the market.”
    O’Brian had nothing but good things to say about Cheryl. He’d always found her to be an excellent employee and said he’d been planning to ask her to do his bookkeeping for him in his various business ventures.
    “When she worked for me,” he continued, “it was standard procedure for her to call me when she was locking up the store. She’d tell me what the day’s receipts were and assure me that she was okay and ready to leave. I may have been the last person to talk to her. She called me at 11:15 that last night. Everything was fine.”
    O’Brian was able to account for his whereabouts that night. Telephone records verified that account.
    The wild card in the deck was still Alby Brotzweller. His reluctance to cooperate with the investigators made him look guilty. Detective Jim Harris set up an appointment for Alby to take a polygraph test, telling him that that was one way to clear himself. He reluctantly agreed; then, on the March day when he was to be transported to Seattle for the lie detector test, he was nowhere to be found. When Harris called the house where he had been staying, someone who said his name was Harry said Brotzweller wasn’t there. Harris called again. The person who answered the phone said “Wrong number” and hung up. It sounded to Harris just like Alby’s voice.
    Irritated, the Kitsap County detectives drove to the address. The residents said he