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Beej.”

13
    Hot Tub
    Erika spent twenty minutes in the bathroom with Joshua inside Seacrets at some point that night. It was near the time the bar was about to turn on the lights and motion for everyone to get the hell out. Part of what would become known later to police was that Erika was famous for making dirty promises to the men she and BJ met at bars—that is, if they wanted to continue to party with a couple after the bar closed. Some detectives from the OCPD assumed Erika had made one of these same graphically sexual promises to Joshua when they were in the restroom together for that twenty-minute span. In one instance later that same week, Erika told a man that she and BJ met at a bar and were hanging out with, “Come back to our condo and I’ll let you do me in the ass. I like it. My husband wants to watch.”
    BJ kept Geney busy while Erika was gone with Joshua. There’s no doubt that Erika asked Joshua if he and Geney “wanted to come back to our penthouse and hang out?”
    The Rainbow.
    Erika said she and BJ wanted to continue the party. It would be fun.
    A dip in the hot tub.
    Drinks.
    Drugs.
    According to Erika, Joshua mentioned something about having “some really good” marijuana back in his Atlantis room and he wanted to pick it up and bring it over to the Rainbow. On top of that, Geney and Joshua needed to pick up their bathing suits if they were all going for a romp in the hot tub.
    “Sure,” Erika said, referring to stopping by the Atlantis. “Beej loves to smoke. I don’t. I hate it.”
    So after Joshua and Erika emerged from the restroom, Erika later said, they grabbed BJ and Geney and decided to take the bus back to the Atlantis.
    “My husband really jumped at the opportunity [to smoke weed], because I don’t smoke,” Erika later explained to Detective Bernal. “He loves to smoke it, because I don’t. . . .”
    After getting off the bus, Erika, BJ, Joshua, and Geney went up to Geney and Joshua’s room at the Atlantis. After Joshua got his and Geney’s things together (his weed was in an Altoids tin canister), they walked along the beach back to the Rainbow, which was just a few city blocks away.

14
    Stranded
    According to BJ, only Erika, Geney, and Joshua got off the bus. He decided to take the bus back to the Rainbow and meet them there.
    “I’m going back to the condo,” BJ said.
    “We’ll meet you there, then,” Erika replied.
    When BJ got to the Rainbow, he realized that he couldn’t get in. Erika had the keys.
    “Shit.”
    So, BJ said later, he waited by the door for a while.
    “But it was uncomfortable.”
    Sick of sitting on the concrete floor by the door waiting for Erika, he went downstairs and passed out in the Jeep Cherokee, which, he said, was unlocked.

15
    The 130 Ways to Torture a Person
    One of the main reasons Erika was so bold—so offensively oversexual and fearless when she and BJ went out on the town to drink or steal or just cause mischief a teenager would be proud of—centered around a feeling she had that he was paying very little attention to her anymore. It wasn’t even that they didn’t have sex anymore. It was that BJ, according to Erika, was more concerned with putting his wife down and demeaning her than he was with handing out compliments.
    “I’m not a shy person,” Erika explained to Detective Scott Bernal. Her lawyer and the state’s attorney Joel Todd were also present during this same interview. “I talk to people at bars. I sit down beside someone at a bar, ask them how they’re doing . . . because I do not get that sort of attention from my husband. He’s not turned on by me. I’m not what gets him excited.”
    Erika was embarrassed by the discussion. It was hard, she claimed, to talk about such intimate things with strangers.
    “No, just tell,” her lawyer encouraged.
    Erika stopped talking, looked over at her lawyer, and grimaced, whispering, “You know . . . you know—”
    “No, it’s OK to tell them,” her lawyer