Worth More Dead

officers were involved in the year before. They didn’t have to go out on the streets of Denver to investigate; the situation came to them on their own turf, literally in their parking lot.
    Because the principals had acted out an age-old dramatic end to a once-passionate affair, it sounded routine at first. Then I realized that the story Padilla was telling me was not at all the usual scenario of love gone sour.
    When I got home to Seattle at the end of my book tour, I decided to research the case. The more documentation I read, the more interesting the case became. And so I returned to Denver, one of my favorite cities, to learn more about the story of a sensually beautiful young woman who was dumped by a withered old man.
    Her name was Teresa, and she probably could have crooked her finger and had any man she wanted. But she didn’t want just any man; she wanted Justyn, who was nearly 80 while she was barely 40.
    And Teresa was not prepared to just let him walk away from her. As many males have said about the women who try to leave them, “If I can’t have her, nobody can,” Teresa felt the same way.
    If she couldn’t have Justyn, then nobody would.

1
    Denver, the mile-high city, has air so thin that it causes some sea-level tourists arriving at its Bedouin-tent–shaped airport to run out of breath, at least until they acclimate. Although the Denver International Airport’s unique design seems more a mirage than an actual structure, its tough, translucent cloth roof is perfectly designed and withstands summer heat and winter blizzards, welcoming planes that often bounce in the turbulent air currents familiar to Denver. The trip into the city offers glimpses of prairie dogs. They seem like cuddly rodents to strangers, and they maintain a very complex and caring society beneath the ground, even burying their dead. The locals, though, aren’t always as entranced by them.
    Denver is full of history and the ghostly presence of early citizens. The Brown Palace Hotel is scarcely changed from its early days; piano music soars upward through the hotel’s central atrium to the corridors ringing it several stories up. LoDo (Lower Downtown) has been restored to a trendy district, and the Cherry Creek neighborhood is a most desirable place to live. The Tattered Cover Book Store is a must destination for authors on tour.
    Indeed, there are few spots in Denver or in all of Colorado that don’t offer history and beauty to the natives and the increasing number of people who move there.
     
    Teresa Perez was one of the thousands who came to Denver hoping, more than most, to find a new start. Although her final surname was Hispanic, Teresa’s biological parents were not, and she looked more Irish than anything. Looking at her, one would think she had everything in the world. Sadly, her early years had been chaotic, marked by neglect and abandonment. Her parents, Sonya and Jerry, divorced when she was just 3 years old. They lived in California then. For some reason her mother either didn’t want to raise Teresa and her older sister, Monica, or was found unsuitable in custody disputes.
    Their father took the little girls with him when he moved back to Zanesville, Ohio. He soon remarried, but his new wife had no interest in being a stepmother. Their father turned the little girls over to foster home care, and they moved into a house with no running water, a house where ten children lived. Teresa and Monica entered the world of foster care children, a world where they never knew for sure how long they would stay with each new family. If the foster care families had children of their own, youngsters placed with them by public agencies were sometimes made to feel second class. Often, they had to change schools in the middle of the year. Occasionally, Teresa and Monica were placed with families they grew attached to, and that made it worse when circumstances made them move on yet again.
    Teresa particularly longed for a stable father figure she could count on. Of the two sisters, she was the tomboy who loved sports. If someone teased Monica, it was Teresa who stepped up to defend her, even though Monica was older. They were “welfare children,” and there were always cruel kids and bullies to remind them of that.
    Teresa cut her hair short, wore baggy overalls, and loved to ride horses and shoot baskets. Before she reached puberty, sometimes it took a close look to tell whether she was a girl or a boy. The more vulnerable