Beyond Obsession by Richard; Hammer Read Free Book Online Page A

the condo and see if anything was missing, anything present that had not been there before, if anything was not as she remembered it.
    As the conference went on, Karin seemed, Sands thought, increasingly pale, distracted and in some shock, and at one point she broke down and began to cry. They gave her time to recover, which she did rather quickly, and then the discussions went on.
    Sometime after five it ended. Zaccaro led her down to his car and drove her back to Glastonbury, to the Duboises’ house, where she remained for the next three weeks.
    In South Glastonbury that afternoon Shannon Dubois, distraught over what she had been told by her best friend, answered phone calls at the Coleman house and waited, for news, for anything.
    At some point, she couldn’t remember when, Matt Coleman left, and she was alone. About three Dennis arrived home from work. Shannon went out onto the lawn to greet him, and they stood there for a few minutes, “talking about normal things. Then the phone rang, and I answered it. Dennis went upstairs. He was acting weird.”
    When she finished the call, she went upstairs after him. He was in his room. He looked at her and said, “Do you know what happened?”
    Shannon said, “Yes. Karin told me you killed her mother.”
    Dennis nodded and then told her how he had done it, told her the details that she had already heard earlier that day from Karin.
    About five Shannon went home. Karin arrived a little later and moved into Shannon’s room. Through the evening they tried to act as normally as they could, as normally as possible for two teenagers caught in the middle of a murder. But later that night, in Shannon’s room, Karin asked, “Did you talk to Dennis today?”
    â€œYes, and he told me everything.” Slowly Shannon repeated the story Dennis had told her.
    â€œOh,” Karin said, “that’s what he told me last night.”
    For a while they talked about what might happen. “There was,” Shannon says, “a kind of understanding that we weren’t going to say anything to anybody.” It was the kind of compact teenagers are forever making, an essential part of that eternal conflict between the generations. Usually, those secrets are of little interest to anybody else, so it matters little when they are held close. This, of course, was a secret of a different kind, a dangerous one with far-reaching consequences, not just for Shannon and Karin but for many others. Still, for Shannon at that moment and probably for Karin, too, there was something unreal about the whole thing. “I couldn’t believe it had really happened,” Shannon said later. “I didn’t want to believe it.”
    Then Karin went to the phone and called Dennis. “She was consoling him and telling him not to worry,” Shannon remembers.

3
    Joyce Aparo had been dead for two days before Karin went home for the first time. A little after ten in the morning Friday, August 7, Susan Dubois dropped her off outside the condo, watched as Karin went up the walk, unlocked the door and went inside. Then she drove away. For fifteen or twenty minutes Karin was alone.
    About ten-thirty Jeff Sands arrived, and a few minutes later, Mike Zaccaro and Roland Butler showed up. Over the next half hour they roamed through the apartment and went down to the basement to search the file cabinet Joyce kept there, a cabinet containing mainly a mass of personal letters. It was a filing cabinet the police were never aware existed; they were not told of it, and they did not then or later ever investigate the basement. Back upstairs Karin led Sands, Zaccaro and Butler to a closet in Joyce’s bedroom and pointed to a small valise filled with papers—insurance policies, will, title for the condominium, mortgage papers and more. In a dresser drawer in that room, they came upon an American Express card and a number of bills, including an American Express bill