Chapter 17

Twelve Days Before Christmas

Mike lounged on his new Benchcraft sofa. He had kicked his shoes off after dinner and parked in front of the TV. It was his habit to watch a little television or read for awhile during this transitional time in the evening, when Teresa was usually steering the children toward bed.

Matt, a second grader, was already in bed. His mother now sent him off to bed by eight or eight-thirty every night. It was a blessing, they knew, because the two younger children showed no such inclination. Luke, who was still too young for kindergarten, was a night owl, and Megan, who was two-and-a-half, was still up on this Thursday night. They were preoccupied in play and supposedly helping their mother, who was busy in the kitchen baking cookie-dough ornaments.

Teresa planned to decorate the Christmas tree, which they didn’t have yet, with these fancy sugar cookies. Tomorrow would be Friday the thirteenth—only twelve days before Christmas. She was so excited about celebrating the family’s first Christmas in their own house.

The cookies had just been shoved into the oven when the knock came at the door. Mike started, and Teresa was just as puzzled.

“Did you see any lights?” she asked him from across the room.

“No,” Mike said, leaning up. He hadn’t seen any headlights either.

In the fleeting moment of time that both Mike and Teresa paused to wonder who could be at the door, little Luke made one of those quick four-year-old moves. He was already at the front door, and he was opening it.

A man pressed himself inside, standing at the threshold, wild-eyed behind his glasses.

“I’m Conan the Barbarian,” the intruder announced.

Mike was too stunned to think. But he was up on his feet now.

“I want money. Stand back. I want money. Nobody’ll get hurt. All I want is money.”

Mike, who was closer to the man, could see that he had a gun and was wearing a knife in a sheath on his belt. What was this Conan stuff?

No one knows what was said next, or exactly how it happened, but Teresa was almost immediately shot in the leg near the ankle. The intruder may have only intended to fire into the floor to show that he meant business, but instead had accidentally shot Teresa. Did she recognize the face of the man who only two and a half weeks earlier had delivered her furniture? She held her balance on the kitchen counter, bleeding on the floor, directing Luke and Megan to get behind her.

Then the phone rang.

Teresa reached across the counter and answered it.

“Hello.”

“Teresa, hi, Mary.”

“Hi,” Teresa said.

“I’ve been trying to call all week but you’ve been out.”

“Yeah.”

It was Mary Lakes, a friend, who was calling to find out if Teresa could babysit her son, Jesse, tomorrow. Mary immediately detected an odd hesitancy in Teresa’s voice.

“Well, where have you been?”

Teresa didn’t seem to want to talk, even though they hadn’t visited for several days. Usually after they hadn’t talked for that many days, Teresa would sit down and they would chat for a while.

“I’m baking some ornaments for the tree,” Teresa said flatly.

“Well, are you gonna be home tomorrow?”

“I sure hope so,” Teresa answered strangely.

“Can you babysit?”

“Sure, what time?

That was strange, too. Why would she have to ask. Eight o’clock was the usual time.

“Eight o’clock.”

Before Teresa could give a one-word reply, Mary heard Megan scream in the background. Mary knew Megan was a pretty mellow child. She didn’t scream much at all.

“It sounds like somebody needs you,” Mary said.

“Yeah, gotta go. Bye.”

Mary heard the disconnect before she could say good-bye. She knew all too well the rigors of motherhood, and let it pass.

Wayne had come back, living out a fantasy, calling himself Conan the Barbarian. Most likely he tried to hold Mike at bay, trying to convince the leader of his hostage group that all he wanted was money, that he wouldn’t harm anyone if they complied. That he had to tie them up. Whoever started it, whether Mike in his stocking feet grabbed the brass candleholder first or in self-defense, doesn’t matter. There was some kind of struggle and it was clear that Wayne had prevailed. He managed to get Mike’s arms and legs tied. Then he pulled his knife and stabbed his hostage in the chest. Mike fell into a sidelong heap, face down on the floor, dying.

Teresa may have gone for the first available weapon, a tennis racket, because it ended up with the candlestick on the floor next to Mike. Both Luke and Megan witnessed the scuffle between this crazed man and their mother, after they had watched as their father was tied up and stabbed. Matt was still fast asleep in his bedroom down the hall.

It isn’t known whether Wayne tied Mike’s arms and legs before or after he delivered a severe blow to Mike’s head and then stabbed him. Had Wayne been able to convince Mike that he would keep his promise not to harm anyone if he got the money he wanted, Mike might have agreed to the restraints, but if’s not likely. Wayne probably took him by surprise, clubbing him before using the knife.

As Mike lay in a spreading pool of blood, Wayne then turned to Teresa. He took her at gunpoint into the master bedroom. Luke was put in the bedroom where his brother lay asleep, and Megan was placed in her crib, which was still right next to her parents’ bed.

Wayne then forced Teresa onto the bed, face up. He tied her arms and legs to its four corners, and, with Megan watching from the crib, proceeded to commit an atrocity of unspeakable magnitude. When Teresa would be found, a pillow would rest over her face. Her pants would be pulled up, but unzipped. She would be clothed above the waist in the tightly knit sweater she was wearing that night. A bathroom towel would have been placed over a large gash in her leg, near the ankle. Sheriff’s deputies would find her bra and panties on the floor. They would show evidence of having been cut off her body with a sharp instrument in such a way as to allow their removal without undoing the ligatures on her wrists and ankles. She was fatally stabbed in the chest. An autopsy would later establish that she had been raped. The same forensic examination would reveal the nature of the gaping wound at her ankle. The perpetrator had fired a .22-caliber bullet into her leg, and then tried to recover the slug with a knife, creating a wedge-shaped hole as he routed the blade in the flesh and bone.

Investigators knew it was a .22 slug, because Wayne failed to retrieve the bullet. Maybe he began to grow anxious about how much time he was taking. What is believed is that it was about ten o’clock when he abruptly left the house. Mike and Teresa were dead. Matt and Luke were in their bedroom, and Megan was in her crib, in the same room with her dead mother.

A neighbor who had stepped outside to grab an armful of firewood about that time saw a pair of headlights leaving the Shooks’ driveway. Later, possibly as much as two hours later, Wayne returned to the scene. Again, no one saw any headlights approach. Police theorized that Wayne had spent a great deal of time, after he had killed Mike and Teresa, rummaging through drawers, pilfering personal effects. He grabbed a twelve-inch plaster statue of a bugling elk, which he had found in the living-room loft. In the couple’s bedroom he spotted something he couldn’t resist—a handmade, stag-handled hunting knife with a tanned leather sheath. He took it, too. He found Mike’s collection of silver dollars and he pocketed them.

Some time during his return visit, as Wayne zipped through the house, Luke ventured out of his room and watched from the hallway. He saw the man who called himself Conan, who said he wanted only money, move the wooden-legged, vinyl-upholstered kitchen bar stools under the stairwell in the living room. He saw him stuff magazines under the seats of the upturned chairs and light a match to them. Luke scrambled back to his room.

In all the fire-building frenzy, an electric clock in the kitchen had become unplugged. The stopped hands of the clock would later designate the presumed time of the start of the fire—approximately midnight.

As the lime-green and blue flames, colored so by the tint of the magazine ink, licked at the finished wood on the stair treads, Wayne was finally ready to leave. When he closed the front door behind him, he shut it tight. Mike and Teresa were dead, and as the foam and Naugahyde chairs burned, setting the house ablaze, Matt, Luke, and Megan would soon be dead. It is doubtful that Wayne realized that the fumes that emanated from his torch-murder job were lethal cyanide gas, enough to kill even without the flames. Without a doubt, he didn’t realize that by shutting the door so tightly, he had cut off the air supply for his fire. The chairs smoldered most of the night but never ignited the house, because Mike had built the place to be virtually airtight.

Matt was a hard sleeper. He had slept through it all, including the single gunshot, but the high pitch of the smoke alarm woke him. Luke was there with him. Matt knew what he had to do. Remembering what the fireman told him in school, during a class demonstration about fire safety, Matt took charge. First he and Luke tried to open a window. After they couldn’t budge it from the sill, Matt remembered that it was important to get down on the floor, because the smoke, being warmer, was rising. So he and Luke, now feeling tired, lay down on the bedroom floor. Megan was in her crib.

The fire on the stairs smoldered a while longer, then died out. The fire in the family’s wood stove, the only source of heat, would in time burn out and the room temperature would begin to drop. The house filled with cyanide gas that could not escape. Outside, on this clear, starlit night, it was near zero. The children were falling into unconsciousness, and would be hypothermic soon. Megan, who was exposed to more of the toxic smoke, was falling into a coma.

The neighbor across the street who had seen lights leaving the Shooks’ house wasn’t sure if the vehicle was coming or going. He didn’t know if it was a car or truck. But it was indeed a truck, a maroon 1984 Toyota Extra Cab four-by-four with a white camper top, Wayne’s pride and joy. When he finally left the scene for good, heading along a snow-packed McCarthy Loop, turning left on Sleeping Child Road then onto Route 93, he headed north. In a couple of minutes he would encounter his first light, where the speed limit was a crawling 25 miles per hour, and in another few minutes he would come to the next light. At 5.1 miles from the Shooks’ driveway, the third and final red signal light in Hamilton would come up. His speed would have picked up to 35 and he would be headed out of town. As his odometer clocked exactly 33.3 miles from Sleeping Child Road, he would be home free. That’s when he crossed beyond the law-enforcement jurisdiction of the Ravalli County sheriff’s department. He was back in Missoula County, and by close to 1:00 A.M., he would be driving through an empty downtown Missoula. The only people out on the street on this frigid night would be hurrying from their parked cars to the Elbow Room or the Board Room. He would cross the Clark Fork River, head east through Hellgate Canyon along Route 10-200, turn up the grade into East Missoula, then onto Minnesota Avenue to the little light-blue house, number 715. Door to door, it was 53.7 miles. But what he had done on this night drive south would never be measured so finitely. He was on the most ragged edge.

When he got a chance, he would slip his father’s .22-caliber Ruger revolver back where it belonged. There would be plenty of time. Maybe he would do it in the morning. He had the whole day off.

It was a clear cold Friday morning when Greg Lakes said good-bye to his wife Mary and put Jesse on the chilled seat of his red sixty-seven Chevy pickup. Jesse was four years old, the same age as Luke Shook. The engine turned, and Greg headed out the winding dirt driveway to Lost Horse Road, where he would find Route 93 North.

The heater warmed their shins and Greg, nodding as his son talked about nothing in particular, kept an ear tuned to the hum of the old motor. The long straightaway up ahead was perfect for listening to the smooth, even drill of the pistons. They were bound for Mike and Teresa’s, where Jesse would spend the day in familiar play with Luke. Greg himself had a busy day planned. As the Ravalli County reporter for the Missoulian, today he would escort his new boss around town. He was supposed to meet her at eight-thirty for breakfast. Mary had arranged for Jesse to come at eight, but he knew it wouldn’t be a problem if he arrived a little early.

The Shooks and the Lakes were good friends, in many ways because their lifestyles were parallel. Like Mike, Greg was the principal breadwinner. Like Teresa, Mary was principally a homemaker, and on days when she taught school, Teresa babysat for Jesse. The two women were closer than the two men. Teresa and Mary had been friends for about three years. They first met at an Eckankar group meeting, when Teresa walked up and introduced herself, and soon a friendship was born.

Eckankar was a little too much for Greg to swallow, and he hadn’t joined his wife at the meetings. Neither had Mike Shook. They didn’t see any reason to mind that their wives had joined this New Age faith, described by its modern-day progenitor as neither religion nor philosophy, but as a path to God. While it relied on Tibetan and Indian philosophies, and revered certain Himalayan holy men, its self-help orientation seemed pretty down-to-earth and harmless.

Greg considered Mike a friend, but had never gone fishing or hunting with him. Both couples had children, and had been struggling to build their own homes for the first time on shoestring budgets. So they always had lots to talk about.

It was a little after seven-thirty when Greg completed the seven-mile trip to McCarthy Loop, and he was surprised to see Mike’s car. It was a Friday; Mike should have left for school by now. Unless he had a long weekend. Maybe it was a teacher conference day, he thought to himself.

Greg and Jesse stepped out of the truck and walked up to the front door, knocking twice, anticipating it would open any second. But after no one answered, Greg figured they hadn’t heard him. He knocked again, this time a little harder. He noticed that the lights were on inside.

When there was again no answer, he wondered if he actually had come too early. Maybe they were all sleeping in. He looked at his watch again. There was time to drive into town and treat Jesse to a muffin, drive back, and still be on time to meet this new assistant city editor. When they got back, the family would undoubtedly be up, he told his son.

“Matt has school,” he said. “They would have to get up. Right? How ’bout a muffin?” he offered, knowing what the answer would be.

At eight-ten, Greg and Jesse were back. They retraced their steps to the front door, knocked, and waited. But there was still no answer. Greg decided to try the side door, and led Jesse around the house. He could hear the snow crunch under their footsteps. It was only ten above zero. A cold snap had come on the heels of a warm spell, turning the fresh-fallen snow into an icy glaze.

He knocked again, sure this time that either Teresa or Luke or someone would be up. Still there was no answer. He tried the door. It was unlocked.

Smoke caught him in the face. He could see the lights were on, all of them. He sniffed at the queer, acrid air inside, and poked his head in the doorway. He was planning to call out to someone, but the words never came, because his eyes found Mike first, lying on the floor next to a chair near the door.

“Shit,” Greg said to himself, his mind racing to one conclusion, “we got big problems here.”

With shock-horror clarity, he turned to Jesse, who stood right beside him.

“Jesse, I don’t know what’s inside. Just stand right here. Don’t come in. Just stand here.”

Jesse nodded, and Greg went in. He saw Mike lying on his chest, face down, arms off to the side. Greg didn’t bother to take his pulse, or look to see if he was breathing. He just knew Mike was dead.

Jesse, he hadn’t forgotten, was still standing just outside. Greg went out again and hurriedly put the boy back into the pickup.

“Look, I think we’ve got a big problem here,” he told him. “I want you to wait here,” he said, knowing that the truck was still warm. “There’s gonna be sirens. I just want you to wait here.”

Jesse broke into a big smile. Sirens!

Greg’s adrenaline flow was clipping his words, but his voice summoned a firm, fatherly command.

“You stay put, now,” he ordered, and then he walked the few feet back to the house. Inside, he dialed the sheriff. The number was at his fingertips. He called it every day.

“There’s been a fire,” he ordered into the phone, giving the basics to the dispatcher, then hanging up and walking to the back bedroom where he found the two boys, Matthew and Luke, on the floor. He picked them both up at the same time and carried them to the couch in the living room. Vomit covered their clothing. They were both unconscious, but he could see that they were still breathing. He opened the front door and the side door, trying to set up a crosswind.

Then he went into the other bedroom, where he found Teresa lying on her back in the bed, fully clothed and her face covered with a pillow. He saw the gash in her leg. It registered a grisly note, but he didn’t know what to think. It crossed his mind that the family’s new dog, which usually spent the night outside, had somehow done this to Teresa’s ankle. But there was no time to waste.

Megan lay unconscious, but breathing, in her crib next to her mother. Greg carried her to the living room and placed her next to her brothers, and then called the sheriff again.

“There’s two dead adults. There’s three kids that are alive. I don’t know what to do. Get out here!”

He hung up. Then he called right back.

“Tell me what to do with these kids,” he asked. The dispatcher told him to take them outside.

“Jeez, it’s ten degrees outside.”

“Wrap ’em up. But get ’em outside,” the dispatcher told him.

Greg grabbed some clothes from the closets, bundled the children, and moved them outside, where he laid them out in a row. The first deputy to arrive was Sergeant Jay Printz, who had gone to the wrong house on McCarthy Loop. He had stopped at Teresa’s father’s house, thinking the couple was still living there, not knowing they had moved into their new home just three weeks before. So when Sergeant Printz arrived, Teresa’s father was with him, and Greg’s heart sank further. Highway Patrolman Phil Meese arrived, responding to the fire call, because he was also a volunteer fireman.

“Are you okay?” Sergeant Printz asked Greg.

“I guess.” The answer was a mumble, a shiver-filled utterance.

The officers lifted the three limp bodies into Printz’s patrol car and raced out the drive. In less than a mile they met the oncoming ambulance at the turn onto Sleeping Child Road, and transferred the children, who were taken to Marcus Daly Hospital in Hamilton.

Greg stood there trying to put it together. It seemed that there had been a fire. Mike had almost made it outside. It was time to get Jesse out of here, so he took him to a friend’s house, and then had to keep the appointment with the new boss. He was forty-five minutes late, but she was still sitting there drinking coffee when he showed up.

Sergeant Printz had told him to come by the office later, which Greg had planned to do anyway as part of the day’s tour. When he stopped at the office the first time, Sergeant Printz wasn’t there. He was still at the Shook house. When Greg stopped by an hour later, he was told the same thing. The third time, after another hour had passed and all the upper echelon of the office were still out on McCarthy Loop, Greg was growing impatient.

“Jeez, how long does it take?” he wondered to his new boss, who by now was ready to head back to Missoula, but he wasn’t thinking straight, and hadn’t been all day. He went home about three o’clock. After a while, he got a call. It was Sheriff Dale Dye.

“What the hell are you guys doin’ out there?” Greg asked him. “That’s a long time for a fire.”

“Yeah, but it’s not for a double homicide,” Dye answered back.

Greg had gotten the second big shock of the day, and it would be his job to tell Mary that Teresa and Mike hadn’t died in a tragic fire, but instead had been murdered.

Megan nearly died en route to the hospital. Her lungs had collapsed. Matt and Luke, who were in the same room with her, were faring a little better.

At nine in the morning, Bob Shook was at work. His son and daughter-in-law were dead, and his three grandchildren were near death in the hospital, but he knew nothing about it until a fellow worker walked up to him.

“I think you better get to the hospital. I heard something on the scanner about Mike,” he said. “I don’t know if it was an accident or a fire or what.”

Bob was out the door. When he got to the hospital, his son Steve, a local policeman, was arriving, and they both headed inside. Someone told Steve to go get his mother, Georgia, and that’s when the people at the hospital told Bob about Mike and Teresa.

“They didn’t make it. I’m sorry, Bob.”

The tragic news, conveyed as it always is with solemn brevity, seemed unreal to him. When it hit, he was overcome. Out of the blank grief, all he could imagine was that Mike and Teresa were trying to save the children, but were overcome. He took it for granted, and so did Georgia, when he told her they were both dead, that they had died in the fire.

Bob and Georgia stayed there most of the day. When they saw the children, who were not improving much, it seemed that Matt had for a moment recognized his grandfather. But Luke and Megan certainly didn’t. After hours of standing around, they went home, deciding to come back that evening. At five o’clock that afternoon, Sheriff Dye was at their door, and when they invited him in, they supposed he would tell them about the fire. What they had learned. How it had started. But the words were different, and they were just as solemnly blunt.

“Mike and Teresa were stabbed to death,” Sheriff Dye told them. He was sympathetic.

The sorrow had been supplanted by something greater. There were no words for it. Georgia collapsed.

“It was bad enough the other way,” Bob said. “But this …” He broke up.

After Sheriff Dye left, the two gray-haired survivors pulled themselves together and did what had to be done, returning to the hospital. When they arrived, they found Teresa’s parents, Alvin and Marie Schmitt, holding forth. They didn’t know, either, that their daughter and son-in-law had been murdered, so Bob had to tell them. Hard as it was to believe, Mike and Teresa had been stabbed to death.

Late that night, all three of the children were taken by ambulance to Missoula, where they were airlifted to Denver’s Porter Memorial Hospital’s burn unit. Matthew and Luke were admitted in stable condition. Megan was in critical condition. Because there was ample reason to suspect a further threat to their lives, they were put under guard. Sheriff’s Detective Scott Leete was dispatched by Sheriff Dye to be their sentry.

The house on McCarthy Loop was secured. Sheriff’s deputies drained the water pipes to prevent the plumbing from freezing and bursting, and they turned on all the lights. They would be left burning round the clock. They set up an alarm around the perimeter outside. A trip wire would sound a siren placed inside the house.

They found the burned cookie ornaments in the oven—a tray of scorched dough pieces shaped as little Christmas trees. Everything in the house was covered with the gray-black residue of the burned Naugahyde covers and foam stuffing of the kitchen chairs—everything, they saw, except a patch of bedsheet in the crib where Megan had lain. There was the clear outline of a child, the imprint of this tragedy.