Cruel Death by M. William Phelps Read Free Book Online Page B

station about halfway between Pennsylvania and Ocean City, and Erika picked up a twelve-pack of Bud Light. They could get more when they arrived in Ocean City.
    Bottoms up!
    As BJ drove, Erika popped two Xanax and washed them down with a slug of her Bud Light.
    After the long ride down Route 1, part of which went alongside the Delaware coastline, in through Rehoboth Beach and onto the Ocean City strip, BJ parked the Jeep, then hauled their baggage up to the top-floor penthouse, room 1101, inside the Rainbow Condominiums. He would have made Erika do it, she later claimed, as he generally made her do most of the heavy lifting around the apartment back home, but he was excited to get up in the room and party, and so he helped.
    The room was spectacular. A friend of Mitch’s owned the building. Mitch and his company had done some of the construction work. Anytime Mitch (or Erika and BJ) needed the room, Mitch picked up the phone.
    When they got into the room, BJ filled the fridge with more beer, broke out Erika’s Xanax, and crushed it up on the glass table, just beyond the kitchen. Erika, kneeling over her husband with a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill in hand, started the party all over again.
    BJ didn’t want any. He was more of a joint-and-beer man.
    The view from the penthouse’s balcony was magnificent: something out of a magazine.
    Coastline for miles.
    Sand.
    Surf.
    The infamous Ocean City Boardwalk.
    What more could they ask for? What a life. BJ smiled at his wife. When he was feeling good, BJ and Erika got along well. One could say with certainty that Erika was frightened of BJ on some levels. On others, Erika was the yin to BJ’s yang.
    “Dynamite” was how one source described BJ, “but Erika was the wick.”
    “Without her, he would have been fine. And without him, she would have been fine,” said another source close to the case. “Together, though, watch out. Something happened when they were together.”
    Indeed, Erika and BJ were like a virus, feeding off each other’s weaknesses, while using each other’s strengths to manipulate situations to get what they wanted. Staying at the Rainbow, which was then one of the higher-quality condominiums on the Ocean City strip, turned out to be one of those perks BJ had enjoyed in marrying Erika.
    At one time, Mitch Grace had a large company. He’d started the small construction business a few decades ago and it had grown into a massive workforce of over 150 employees through its first incarnation, but then “averaged about seventy-five for about ten years,” Mitch said later, “and now [2007] with our need for finances at its worst, I am hoping to get back up to fifteen [employees] in the spring [of 2008].”
    Mitch’s company had built the likes of high-rises and hotels and office buildings up and down the East Coast.
    No sooner had BJ unpacked and chopped a few lines of Xanax for Erika to snort, when she said, “I want to go to Hooters, Beej.”
    BJ smiled.
    Erika collected Hooters waitress tank tops (which customers couldn’t buy) like baseball cards.
    “I had some of them with me,” she said later, “and I wanted to go there and see if they would trade me. I didn’t have one from Ocean City yet, so the first place we went was to Hooters.”
    At Hooters, BJ and Erika had two pitchers of beer and some hot wings.
    “Hey,” Erika said to one of the waitresses, “where can a girl go for a good time around here?”
    The waitress thought about it. “Seacrets.”
    BJ and Erika looked at each other. Smiled. Seacrets it was.
    So they drove the Jeep back to the Rainbow and boarded the bus out front, where they ran into Joshua and Geney, who paid their fare, and headed off together to the hottest nightspot on the strip, Seacrets.

10
    Everyone Has Secrets
    The line to get into Seacrets was out the door and around the corner. After one of them in Erika and BJ’s party—which included Geney and Joshua, and now another couple they met on the bus ride