Worth More Dead

Archer told the investigators that she had been out during the evening. She had driven a friend of one of her children home after baking pizza for her family and the other youngster. She left her children with Dennis so that she could visit a woman friend, Lola Sanchez,* who was also a Latin-American navy wife. Maria said she had intended to stop for a few breakfast items at a convenience store on her way home shortly after eleven but had decided it was too late and she had driven straight home from Lola’s house.
    When she entered the house, the front door was unlocked, Maria said, but that wasn’t unusual. She called out, “Hi! I’m here,” expecting to hear her husband answer. Instead, she heard first silence, then her children screaming from somewhere in the basement.
    “They were screaming, ‘Mommy! Mommy! Daddy locked us in the closet!’ I wondered if my husband had gone out of his mind,” she told Edwards. “Nothing made sense. There was a board across the door to our darkroom, and I wrenched it off to get my children out. The kids said a man came in the house. I looked around, but I was afraid. I was trembling inside, but I’m strong, a mother. I thought maybe someone was in the house, and I had to protect my children. The receiver was off the hook, and I called my neighbor and said, ‘Please come right now.’ The kids were blubbering. I left them with my neighbor, and I went upstairs.”
    Maria Archer told the detective that she found her husband lying in the bedroom with his hand blocking the door. “His eyes were open. His mouth was open, and he was white. I knew he was dead. I kissed him and said, ‘Darling, we’ll always be together now. I’ll never leave you now.’ I moved his hand and shut the door.”
    Maria said she was most concerned about her children and that she’d put them to bed, trying to calm them as they cried, “Daddy, where’s my daddy? Where did they take him?”
    Then she went downstairs and told her neighbor that Dennis was dead and that she must call the sheriff.
    It was a most puzzling case for the Island County investigators. If robbery was the motive, why wasn’t anything missing? Why did the supposed thief leave his loot still stacked in the living room? Had he been frightened off as Maria arrived home? A canvass of nearby homes by deputies elicited little information that might help. One neighbor thought she might have heard a shot approximately twenty minutes before Maria arrived home to find her husband’s body. Other nearby residents had neither heard nor seen anything.
    Dennis Archer had been a well-liked and respected neighbor; no one could fathom why he would have been a likely target for murder.
    The children, almost hysterical, could offer no help.
    Nor could Maria.

    *Some Names Have Been Changed. The First Time They Appear, They Are Marked With An Asterisk (*).

3
    It was a long, long night for Captain Sharp, Sergeant Edwards, and the investigative team as they diagrammed the crime scene, gathered the lethal .357 bullets, vacuumed for fiber samples, and cut sections of carpet from beneath the body. Dusting for latent prints proved to be fruitless. They didn’t find any useful possibles. There were tire tracks in the front yard of the Archers’ home, but they were faint because the weather was hot and dry; there wasn’t any mud to hold a good impression. Still, they painstakingly took samples of dirt and grass from the yard, hoping they would later use them to match debris caught in the undercarriage of a suspect vehicle.
    There was one odd note that long night: Roland Pitre, who identified himself as a close family friend, made three visits to the Archer home, each time demanding to see Maria, insisting that she needed his emotional support. But Maria declined to see him until, at last angered by his continual prowlings by the house, she asked to confront him to tell him to go away. The detectives asked her not to do that. In fact, the Island County investigators were beginning to find Pitre’s presence highly suspect.
    His stubborn refusal to leave was so questionable that they arrested him. He was soon charged on suspicion of first-degree murder. Detective Edwards drew up an affidavit and obtained a search warrant for Roland Pitre’s apartment, a residence approximately seven miles from the Archer home. The search warrant also listed Pitre’s van.
    Their sweep of Pitre’s apartment unearthed one bizarre item: a spiky black wig. His van