05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 by Casey Kathryn

Author:Casey, Kathryn [Casey, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

After calling Eli the night before, Scott waited up until after midnight, hoping Sharon would call. When she didn’t, he sat on the edge of his bed, closed his eyes, and tried to visualize Jennifer. All he could see were dark clouds. In bed, he tossed, unable to sleep, feeling sweaty and anxious. At 5:30 that morning, he thought he was dreaming that someone was pounding on his apartment door. He suddenly woke up and realized it wasn’t a dream. He looked out the peephole and saw two police officers.

“Do you know a Jennifer Cave…a Colton Pitonyak?”

“Yes.”

“We’d like you to come downtown with us.”

After Jennifer moved out, a friend of Scott’s, Maci, had moved in to help with Madyson. Scott stuck his head into Madyson’s room, and quietly woke Maci, asking if she could watch the little girl. When Maci agreed, Scott went to his room to dress. Just then the telephone rang.

“Jennifer’s dead,” Denise said, when Maci picked up.

Maci ran to tell Scott. “Jennifer’s dead?” Scott repeated to the police.

“Yes,” one of them said. “We’re sorry.”

As Denise had earlier, Scott walked past the homicide sign and realized that Jennifer’s death wasn’t an accident. It was then that the horror of what had happened came into sharp focus. In the interview room, the first thing the detectives asked was where Scott had been the night Jennifer disappeared. “At home, in my apartment. Madyson, my daughter, and her babysitter, Maci, were there,” he said.

The police talked, asked questions, but Scott barely listened. “All I could think of was that the girl I loved was dead,” he says.

With a series of photos on the table, the detectives asked Scott to pick out the man he knew as Colton. It wasn’t hard. There was the disheveled drug dealer he’d met, the thug Colton Pitonyak had become, in his mug shot, his dirty black hair wild and a goatee circling his mouth.

When Maci called Laura Ingles at eight that morning to tell her Jennifer had died, Laura screamed so loud that her neighbors from surrounding apartments rushed to check on her. She drove to the police station, offering to tell them whatever she knew. All the while, she kept thinking of that last phone conversation, the night Jennifer disappeared. “I couldn’t remember if before I hung up I’d told Jennifer that I loved her,” says Ingles. “I just couldn’t remember.”

“Did she suffer?” Laura kept asking the detectives.

“We can’t tell you anything,” one said.

The story of an unidentified woman’s body found in a central Austin apartment broke at 8:45 that morning. “There were signs of obvious trauma,” the television reporter said. “And it’s being investigated as a murder, the fifteenth in Austin this year.”

A short time later, Scott finished giving his statement, and the detectives said he could leave. He’d been thinking about the message he’d left for Eli. Jennifer’s murder wasn’t Eli’s fault, Scott knew. He didn’t want to hurt his friend. So he called Eli’s phone number and left a second message: “Eli, I’m sorry for what I said.

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