Worth More Dead

wanted her to do. Questions kept popping up in her mind. She even began to explore her doubts about her mother’s murder. Cheryl Pitre’s death remained a mystery five years after it occurred, and Bébé could no longer deny her sixth sense that her father might have had something to do with it. She didn’t want that to be true. It was hard enough to have her mother gone. She didn’t even want to think that her father had done something as bad as that.
    Secrets she had been forced to keep for a long time bubbled up to the surface of her consciousness, demanding that she tell someone. Part of her still loved her father, but she was afraid of him. After what had happened to Tim, they were all afraid of Roland and what he might do next.
    Bébé made up her mind to tell the police investigators about her doubts.

17
    On Monday, March 22, 1993, Bremerton detective Lewis Olan was officially assigned to the investigation of the attack or attempted kidnapping or burglary—whatever it was—of Tim Nash and his home. Olan had encountered Roland Pitre, Tim’s stepfather, two years earlier. He was one of the detectives who investigated the theft of the Pitre family safe. That investigation was never successfully concluded, although Roland had recovered some of the jewelry reported to be missing in the murky incident in which he said he was beaten and cut by someone never identified. That had been a strange case. This alleged burglary was even more peculiar.
    Tim Nash appeared to be terribly frightened, but he wasn’t hurt. There was always the possibility that he’d made up the whole thing to get attention. Any experienced detective knows that people give false reports of crimes for all kinds of reasons. With no sign of tool marks or broken windows signaling a forced entry and no one tripping the security system, it was natural to wonder if the kid had done it. Nothing was missing.
    But when Olan talked to both the victim and family members, taping their statements, they told him essentially the same things they told Officers Emm and Bogen the night before. None of them even suggested that Tim Nash might have made it all up. How would he have had access to Roland Pitre’s van and the two bags later found in his bedroom? That didn’t compute at all.
    Tim made a very believable witness. According to all reports, he was a good kid. Olan pursued his investigation on the assumption that someone had indeed lured him away from the house just long enough for the couple in black to sneak in. And he suspected what the Pitre family suspected: that for some reason Pitre himself had crept into his onetime home and threatened his stepson.
    Next, the Bremerton detective searched the two bags that Bébé Pitre had seen in her father’s van at noon on Sunday, then in Tim’s bedroom that night.
    The blue nylon bag, now marked Number One, held a hundred-foot reel of white nylon rope, an open roll of duct tape, two rolls of duct tape still sealed in a package, several large plastic bags, a diver’s knife in a black rubber sheath, foam earplugs, a plastic sack from a Kmart store with a box half full of .44 Magnum bullets, and a receipt dated March 10, 1993.
    Curious, Olan opened another, smaller, Kmart bag. It held a full box of earplugs and more than a dozen greeting cards. There were five more cards in another sack, a package of utility knife blades, and a white handkerchief.
    So far, with the possible exception of the .44 rounds, there wasn’t anything really ominous about the contents of the blue bag. There could be dozens of legitimate reasons for having rope, duct tape, and greeting cards. Even the earplugs and the diver’s knife weren’t suspicious; there were hundreds of people in the Puget Sound area who dove beneath its surface for sport.
    Olan turned next to the Slumberjack bag. Inside he found a bag from a PayLess store. It held three packages of five-by-eight-inch cards. One was open, and several of the cards had printing on them, done with a black felt-tip pen.
    They seemed to be cue cards, meant for someone to read or perhaps to memorize or simply say aloud. It was apparent that Tim was the one who was supposed to read them.
    Basically, the message was the same. Tim’s voice—probably in a phone call—would say he was in some kind of trouble and that the only one who could help him was Roland Pitre.
    One read, “Hi, Mom, this is Tim. I moved out of the house.” Another said, “I’m in trouble this time. I need