Read Online Love Her To Death by M. William Phelps - Free Book Online Page A

kids were still sleeping. He walked in.
    One of the children, sleeping in the large bed, rose up.
    Someone came up from behind. “Get out of there! No! Don’t wake the kids!”
    Keith Neff and Larry Martin backed off.
    “Look,” Martin said later, “if I pushed this issue, we don’t get any walk-through. They throw us out.”
    It was remarkable to the detectives that the kids were still asleep and had not woken up once throughout the entire ordeal.
    In the laundry room, there were a pair of each: two clothes dryers and two washers. Martin took a careful look inside both.
    He found nothing.
    Without moving anything, they quickly looked in trash cans for blood or any obvious signs of violence.
    Zilch.
    “This,” Martin said, “was certainly not the search I would have liked to conduct.”
    They wanted to go through the outside garbage cans and the turkey house out in back, but knew there was no way Roseboro was going to allow it. Heck, they were already on borrowed time; pushing the matter would only get them tossed.
    What they needed was a search warrant.
    “Legitimately,” Martin said, emphasizing the word, “it was a walk-through in every manner of speaking.”
    Nearing the end, Martin asked if they could take alook inside the pool house connected to the patio area. A nice room, with a fireplace and cozy couches, plush carpeting and fieldstone for the mantel, it was an area of the house where there had no doubt been lots of family fun. Memories, even though the addition was just months old, seemed to seep from the walls like laughter as they entered. It was hard not to picture Jan and her kids inside this room talking about life, joking around, reminiscing about a cookout or a family function, a swim meet, schoolwork, a lacrosse game, playing cards, talking about the future.
    Sad, too, that none of this would ever take place again. Three young kids—still sleeping, unaware—had gone to bed with a mother and would wake up without one.
    A tragedy, indeed.
    Roseboro followed Neff and Martin into the room. It was just the three of them now. The two detectives had finally gotten Roseboro alone.
    Martin asked Roseboro to have a seat. They wanted to speak with him, he said, if he didn’t mind. Just for a moment. Martin said they had some new information they wanted to share. It was important they gave it to him personally.
    “Mike, hey, listen,” Martin said in his gentle manner, “that injury on Jan’s head … Well, that thing is deep and wide. Do you realize how much pressure and force it must have taken … to go all the way to the skull? Do you have any idea what happened?” Martin looked at Roseboro with a seriousness neither he nor Neff had yet to project on the mortician. They wanted to let him know, delicately, that things had taken a turn into a more sobering, more serious direction. They were not simply going to write the case off as an accidental drowning because Roseboro had said so. Not with an injury as pronounced and deep as the one on the back of Jan’s head. They needed to find the answer to how the injury got there.
    “Oh, okay,” Roseboro said. It was an odd answer. And that was it.
    Neff and Martin looked at each other.
    The comment caught Neff “off guard”— “Oh, okay. “ So he piped in, “Do you have any questions for us about that, or anything else?”
    ‘No. I didn’t see the injury,” Roseboro said nonchalantly.
    ‘You have no questions, Mr. Roseboro?” Martin asked. He and Neff looked at each other again. What’s going on here? They couldn’t believe it. Both had pictured themselves in the same situation, their wives dead, the same injury on the back of the head. They’d be banging down doors to try to find out what happened. Climbing the walls. Crazy for answers.
    “Nope,” Roseboro said. He was calm. Undistracted. Unworried.
    This answer struck both men as abnormal—that is, considering the circumstances of the conversation. They had just told Jan Roseboro’s