Sammy regarded us through his open window with an impatient scowl. What? he looked like he wanted to groan. What do you want?
“We were here yesterday,” Tina said, unbuckling her seat belt and leaning across me. “Visiting Gerald Stevens?”
Sammy sighed in a beleaguered way. He had purple shadows beneath his eyes. Perhaps he had just come off the night shift.
“We were hoping,” Tina said, wearing her most feminine and helpless expression, “that we could buy you a coffee and talk to you, just for a few minutes.”
Sammy’s eyes slid toward the low stone station in his rearview mirror. “What about?”
“We want to know the details of The Defendant’s escape,” Tina said. “From someone who was there.”
“I can’t help you,” he said, and began to roll up his window.
“I think he killed my friend,” I called out at the same time Tina said, “I’ll pay you three thousand in cash.”
Sammy froze, the window just below nose level. He glanced at the station in his rearview mirror once more. Then, robotically stiff, as though someone inside could possibly read his lips, “Wait five minutes. Then meet me at Dinah’s on Eighty-two.”
* * *
Dinah’s was one of those diners with a rotating pie display. When we walked in, the guard was sitting at a booth polishing off a slice of cherry.
“If this comes back to me,” he said when we sat, “I’ll tell the sheriff you stole something from the jail and set it up to make it look real bad for you.”
“Understood,” Tina said. The deal was struck, simple as that.
Sammy thumbed a crumb from the corner of his mouth and looked out over the parking lot, inspecting a Toyota pickup as it chewed up the slush and the grit. He waited until the driver climbed out before deciding he didn’t know him.
“You have to understand,” Sammy said, continuing to monitor the comings and goings of the parking lot, “that the guy never should have been in Colorado to begin with.” He sighed and went all the way back to the beginning.
In March 1976, The Defendant was in Utah, serving a fifteen-year sentence for the kidnapping of Anne Biers from a shopping mall. Prosecutors there were working to tie him to the murder of another Utah woman, a girl, really—seventeen-year-old Barbara Kent, who disappeared after leaving a high school play to pick up her younger brother, mere hours after Anne Biers had escaped her abductor. Investigators had discovered a key in the school parking lot where Kent was last seen that fit the handcuffs used on Biers. The case was strong, but the Colorado DA couldn’t be bothered with anything approaching justice. His name was Frank Tucker, but Sammy told us that everyone around here had taken to calling him Tucker the Fucker after what happened.
Sammy pushed his cleaned plate to the side so that he could periodically jab the table with his pointer finger to punctuate the more outrageous parts of his story. “So the guy escapes again, and everyone is in an uproar, wanting to know how we could have let this happen. The sheriff points the finger at Tucker, saying it’s his fault, that Colorado wasn’t ready for him. And we weren’t.”
“What would you have done differently?” Tina asked.
“There is a protocol you follow around high-profile prisoners,” Sammy said. “So I wouldn’t have acted like I was above the goddamn law. I woulda followed it.”
“Why not just follow it?” I asked, confused.
He flung his hand, miming the act of throwing something carelessly out the window. “Because Tucker had a special election coming up that he knew he was gonna lose.” Sammy smirked. Ready for this?
According to Sammy, Tucker the Fucker had billed two counties to finance the abortion of his eighteen-year-old mistress—grossly hypocritical behavior coming from the elected official whose job it was to prosecute criminal violations of the law, the kind of shit you can’t make up, and I haven’t. In a few years Tucker would be prosecuted on two charges of embezzlement of public funds, but in March 1976 he was in the throes of a heated reelection campaign. So he did what all politicians do when they need to rehabilitate their image—he found a straw man. For Tucker, The Defendant was a godsend.
It happened to be true that Colorado investigators had strong evidence to connect The Defendant to the murder of Caryn Campbell—a strand of her hair was discovered in his car, and the use of his gasoline credit card put him near the scene at the time she disappeared from her Aspen hotel. But it was no stronger than the evidence Utah had for the murder of seventeen-year-old Barbara Kent. Colorado should have waited its turn to prosecute, but Frank Tucker didn’t have time to do things by the book. He wanted to be able to say at his campaign rallies that he was the hero for catching Caryn Campbell’s killer. He needed that, if he had any hope of remaining in office and dodging his own criminal charges.