Chapter 21

Best Friends

When Sheriff Dye arrived at their front door, Greg and Mary Lakes invited him in. He had called beforehand, and they weren’t surprised that he wanted to talk. Greg had found the bodies. Mary was Teresa’s best friend. Naturally, Dale Dye wanted to talk. There was also the problem of dealing with Greg, who was not only the only eyewitness to the crime scene but also the only Ravalli County reporter the Missoulian had in Hamilton. This was easily the biggest story of the year, and Dye wanted to keep it under his control, not someone else’s.

Greg showed the sheriff to the living room, where they would sit. Mary offered him a cup of her delicious, stout black coffee, and they got down to business.

“You’re part of the investigation,” Sheriff Dye explained, looking at Greg. “You know what that means? I want your help. I need it on this one. I’m bringing you in.”

It was hard enough for Greg to deal with what had been thrown at him already. First he had found the Shooks dead from a fire that almost had killed the children. Then he learned that they had been murdered. He had to tell Mary about Teresa. Then they had to tell Jesse. He didn’t even want to talk about it. How could he possibly cover it as a story?

That’s what he had told his editor in Missoula, where the first story was written on the desk. Someone else would have to cover this one.

Both Greg and Mary wanted Mike and Teresa’s killer stopped as much as Sheriff Dye wanted their help. So they pledged it to him.

“One hundred percent,” Greg said.

“Yeah,” Mary chimed in.

“You can ask us anything you want,” they told him. “We’ll answer the questions.”

And he did. His questions were answered with unhesitating candor. But as the sheriff proceeded through his line of thought, both Greg and Mary could see where he was headed. There was something in the sheriff’s tone. It didn’t bother Greg as much as it did Mary, but they both honored the pledge, even as they could now clearly see that the answers they gave were leading Sheriff Dye expressly where he wanted to go. They could tell he already suspected someone. It was a man who had been Teresa’s closest male friend, who had actually called her on the day she was murdered, Dye explained. Greg wasn’t sure what to think but Mary was certain Dale Dye was barking up the wrong tree. She knew this man well. He was her friend, too, and she told the sheriff repeatedly that he was on the wrong track.

“Well, how do you know?” he repeatedly asked back.

“I just know,” she said again and again. “I just know.”

Mary was also troubled to see that Sheriff Dye was forging a connection that, in a different way, tied her into it. He seemed to be fixating on Eckankar, the “strange” new religion that had brought Teresa Shook and Mary Lakes together in the first place. The man whom he obviously suspected, who was Teresa’s very close friend, was also an “Eckie.”

His name was David Davis. He lived in Missoula, where he owned and operated a commercial auto body repair shop under the name Spraycraft.

It was not uncommon to see Dave, as everybody called him, around Hamilton, often in Teresa’s company. Dave occasionally visited Teresa at times when Mike wasn’t home. It didn’t surprise Mary that Dave had called Teresa on the afternoon of the day she was murdered. Nor did it surprise her that Mike’s parents would readily accept Dave’s status as a suspect. They weren’t particularly supportive of Teresa’s interest in Eckankar. They didn’t really understand what she was into. And as the saying goes—“born and raised in the Bitterroot and don’t wanna know nothin’ else”—they really didn’t want to know. It was enough to see that when there were out-of-town Eck meetings, Teresa and Mary would take off and leave the children with their husbands. The husbands didn’t mind. Nor did they mind when their wives took the children on Eck campouts.

It was also hard to swallow the fact that Teresa had a close relationship—friendship, not romance—with another man, who was married but not living with his wife, whose name was Merilee.

The circumstance of the Davis’s unconventional marriage also defied Sheriff Dye’s understanding, almost as much as Eckankar did. It seemed that when it was all put together, Dave Davis, a private, sincere man who minded his own business, also happened to be practicing the wrong New Age religion at the wrong time.

To the uninitiated, Eckankar could easily appear to be daunting and far-out. While its stated, simple goal is to give its practitioners a solid spiritual footing on which to base their lives, other, more ethereal aspects, such as astral projection, play a big role. Soul journeys on the Eck, or cosmic current, allow its followers to make out-of-body trips to higher spiritual realms. At bilocation workshops, Eckies learn how to slip in and out of their physical bodies. One can be in two places at the same time, and distance is immaterial—it can be within a single room or around the globe, or beyond.

Two weeks after the murders, Sheriff Dye announced that he had taken a crash course in this strange New Age religion in an attempt to better understand Teresa Shook’s personality, adding that he had concluded that it was not the basis for the crime.

Few people in town knew that Dye was zeroing in on Davis, but Greg and Mary knew, and Mary still maintained that it was the wrong tack. It was also frustrating, because though she never wavered in her view, her husband wasn’t so confident, and as the heads of the household, they both had been put on guard. Even more than most everyone else in town, they had been living in fear since day one. It didn’t help that they failed to see eye to eye on the course of Dye’s investigation.

Two days after the murder, Sheriff Day had showed up at their front door.

“Come out and sit in my car,” he insisted to Greg.

Greg stepped outside and the two of them walked over to the sheriff’s car. After they were inside, Dye turned to him. He seemed to assume the pose of a father figure. He wanted to talk to Greg man to man. Greg could convey the message to Mary, however he chose.

“I don’t want to scare you. I don’t want to make things bigger than they are,” Dye said slowly, “but if anything happened to you guys, I’d never forgive myself.”

The words sank in.

“Okay, Dale.” Greg got the message.

“Be real careful.”

“Yeah, I … we will.”

“Cover your butt.”

That was the end of the conversation, and it was the beginning of an emotional seige laid on the Lakes household that would last for months. The very next day, Greg bought a handgun. It was a .357 Magnum, big enough to stop a bear. He bought a holster for it so he could wear it around the house. He and Mary shot it and shot it and shot it until they mastered the weapon in their hands.

But it still didn’t allow them to sleep at night. Or stop them from getting spooked on snowy nights when they had to walk from the main road up their long, snow-blocked driveway, prepared for someone to jump out of the woods at any moment.