04.Die.My.Love.2007 (31 page)

Afterward, a reception was held at the Boyds’ home. PTA moms supplied ham biscuits and brownies, while Paxton’s friends waited with excitement for his arrival. That afternoon they presented him with a gift, a brand new skateboard, something for Paxton to remember them by.

In Houston, Coby Kelley had a break: the name of the Houston Southwest Airlines ticket agent who’d checked Piper in the morning of her flight. He’d already heard from Hanna that that approach had been fruitless in Norfolk, but Kelley hoped he’d have better luck at Hobby Airport with a woman named Kathy Molley.

When he arrived, Kelley found Molley to be a friendly woman with curly blond hair and dark eyes.

“Would you look at this ticket and see if you remember anything?” Kelley asked.

She agreed, and he handed her the ticket.

“Yeah, I remember this,” she said. “She was a really cute woman, nicely dressed. I’m not a lesbian, but she was really attractive. And she was wearing a blond wig.”

As Molley went on, she described the encounter, saying she remembered because she thought the woman’s name, DIE, MY LOVE / 223

Tina Rountree, was “cute.” But there was something else.

“You know,” Molley said. “This woman checked a gun.”

Kelley tried not to show his excitement. “Would you take a look at the photo we have and see if you remember this woman?” he asked.

Molley sized up the photo of Piper and didn’t hesitate.

“That’s her,” she said. “That’s the woman who checked the gun.”

As Kelley listened, Molley explained in greater detail what had happened that morning. The woman, she said, was in a rush, wanting to get on the next available flight to Norfolk. When she’d checked her in, the woman said, “I have a gun in my luggage that I need to declare.”

Despite being forthcoming about having the gun, the woman hesitated when Molley said it had to be removed from the suitcase to be inspected. “I explained that I needed to see it, and she kept fumbling around in her suitcase, trying to get it out. I thought maybe she was hoping I’d forget about it,” Molley said. “I told her if she was traveling with it, I needed to see it.”

Finally, the woman Molley had just identified as Piper took the gun out of her luggage. It was in a small beige case, perhaps a foot long, encircled with a bicycle-type combination lock. At that point Molley asked her to open the case, take out the gun and check it to make sure it was unloaded.

Piper did as asked and showed Molley the gun, secured by a second cable lock that went through the trigger.

Once she was sure the gun wasn’t loaded, Molley gave Piper the required forms to fill out and called over one of the Transportation Security Administration personnel at the airport to inspect the weapon.

The TSA agent who responded that day was Allan Benestante, a tall, thin man with a furrowed brow and dark eyes hidden in shadows, who worked as a manager screening luggage.

224 / Kathryn Casey

Kelley’s luck was improving.

When Molley inquired, she discovered that Benestante was at the airport working. A few minutes later the luggage screener arrived at Molley’s station and finished the story of the woman with the gun for Kelley.

While it wasn’t unusual for people to transport guns in checked luggage, Benestante said it was unusual for women to do so. “She told me it was her father’s gun, that she was taking it to him,” he said.

The woman was white and middle-aged, Benestante said, and the gun was a chrome revolver with a short barrel, a .32

or .38 caliber, with a wood or composite grip. Without saying anything, Kelley smiled, realizing that Benestante’s description matched the ammunition expert’s assessment of the type of gun that fired the fatal bullet.

Inside Piper’s gun case, Benestante said he’d also noticed a small box of ammunition. While he inspected the gun, the TSA agent said Piper had looked nervous, fi dgeting. He’d thought little of it, however. Since 9/11, travel was stressful and many people looked frazzled. After he checked around the gun for explosives and found none, Benestante placed the declaration Piper had filled out in the gun case and closed it, then waited while she locked it. The woman then repacked the gun case inside in her luggage. As she did, Molley remembered noticing a particular pair of shoes in the suitcase.

“They were really cute,” Molley said. “And I told the woman that.”

Then Piper’s luggage, with the gun inside, was put on the conveyor belt and checked onto the belly of the airplane.

Everything had gone so well, Kelley was surprised at the next turn of events.

When he handed Benestante the photo of Piper Rountree, the security agent wasn’t sure she was the woman he’d seen with the gun. “I think that’s her, but I’m not posi-DIE, MY LOVE / 225

tive,” he said. “The hair is different and she looks thinner.”

As soon as he finished, Kelley put in a call to Virginia, telling his sergeant what he had. “Do we have enough now?”

he asked. “Can we pick her up?”

In Virginia, Hanna and his partner, Kuecker, were headed back to the Homestead Suites Hotel for another go around.

They’d called ahead, and the manager on duty the night Jerrilyn Smith had checked in was working. They were eager to talk with her.

At first, Tomiko James didn’t recognize the name of the woman they were asking about.

“Have you got a picture?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Hanna said, pulling the photo of Piper out of his file and handing it to her.

James, a tall, friendly woman with skin the color of coffee with cream, smiled. “That’s her,” she said. “That’s the lady who checked in as Jerrilyn Smith.”

“Can you describe her, how she looked that night?”

“Well, she was thin, a white female, and she had a black hat and long blond hair,” she said. “It wasn’t cold out, but she was wearing a hat, coat, a scarf, and sunglasses.”

As James recounted it, Piper had checked in at eight-fi fty that Thursday evening, first as Tina Rountree, the name the reservation was under, for Room 171, a nonsmoking room, at a cost of $65.99 a night. The woman, who appeared nervous and paced the lobby, had identifi ed herself as a leisure guest, not in Richmond on business. When she checked in, Piper had handed James a Texas driver’s license in the name of Tina Rountree for identification. James wrote up the paperwork and returned the driver’s license to her. Then Piper handed James cash to cover the bill and asked, “Can I change my name on the register?”

James wasn’t surprised; people did that for a variety of reasons, including women trying to hide their identities 226 / Kathryn Casey

while they fled abusive spouses. “Sure,” James said. “What name do you want to be listed under?”

“Jerrilyn Smith,” Piper said.

James made the change in the computer, and the woman left to go to her room.

The next morning, Friday, the maid found the room empty, and it was assumed Ms. Rountree/Smith had checked out, but that afternoon Piper returned, again paying cash and checking in as Jerrilyn Smith. Early the next morning she phoned the desk and checked out for good.

As soon as they left the Homestead Suites, Hanna called headquarters. “We’ve got a positive ID at the Homestead Suites,” he said. “The woman identified the photo of Piper Rountree as a hotel guest for Thursday and Friday nights.”

“Good,” Sergeant Russell said. “I’ll let the captain know.”

In Richmond the case seemed to be falling in place, but un-beknownst to the investigators, in Houston events were taking place that could have stopped the momentum the Jablin task force had worked so hard to build.

That night a group of good friends met at their usual haunt, Under the Volcano, a pop ular bar across the street from a bookstore called Murder by the Book, and a block from Tina’s clinic and Marty McVey’s office. It was the same bar Piper had told Charles Tooke and Dean Lowry she’d been in the Friday night before the murder, where she’d met the man who’d walked her home.

Hidden behind palm trees and thick vegetation, the Volcano was decorated like an island beach bar, in bright Carib-bean colors, the walls covered with folk masks and statues commemorating Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, the annual fiesta during which it was believed the dead dropped in on living family and friends. The name of the bar came from Malcolm Lowry’s 1947 novel, which DIE, MY LOVE / 227

told the story of the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, a British consul and chronic alcoholic.

At the bar, the gang of friends who called themselves

“Team Martini” had gathered for a bit of after-work revelry.

They were an eclectic clique, mostly middle- aged professional men who’d met years earlier at the Volcano and forged a common bond. Over the years, they’d become close friends.

On this night, the members of Team Martini in attendance noticed Piper and Tina walk into the bar. Tina paced, looking markedly agitated, while Piper approached Cheryl Crider, the pretty blond bartender.

“Do you remember me? I was in here last Friday night,”

she said.

After sizing Piper up, Cheryl said she thought she did remember seeing Piper. But had it been Friday night?

“Something’s happened, and I need to find the man I was talking to at the bar,” she said. “It’s really important.”

Cheryl turned to members of Team Martini, who were laughing and talking, and asked if they remembered Piper.

At first all of them said no. Then Kevin O’Keefe, a sandy-haired man with a degree in philosophy who made his living working on large generators, walked in the door to join the group. When Piper asked Kevin if he remembered seeing her in the bar the previous Friday eve ning, O’Keefe looked at her and said, “I think I do remember you.”

“I met this guy and we had a couple of drinks. I was having wine. I don’t remember what he was drinking,” an excited Piper said as Kevin sipped his first Paulaner Munchen beer of the eve ning. This man she’d met, Piper told O’Keefe and Crider, had offered to give her a ride home, but she’d refused. Instead, he’d walked her to her sister’s house, a few blocks away.

As he thought back, Kevin could picture Piper in the bar 228 / Kathryn Casey

the past weekend, among a sparse crowd of patrons, fi rst standing around a thick wooden post in the center of the bar, then sitting on a bar stool talking to a man. O’Keefe, dressed in his customary T-shirt and shorts, didn’t remember seeing Piper before that night, and he didn’t recognize the man she was with.

“Why is this so important?” Cheryl asked.

“I got a call from the Virginia police,” Piper said. “My ex-boyfriend I lived with four years ago was stabbed to death on Saturday morning, and they want to know where I was.”

“Four years ago,” O’Keefe said, considering that this sounded serious. “Well, where were you on Friday during the day?”

“At work at the Galveston courthouse,” Piper said.

When O’Keefe asked if someone there could verify her presence in Texas, Piper said no one could. When he asked if she had any receipts that placed her in Houston that Friday or Saturday, she said she didn’t. But if she could prove she was in Houston on Friday night at the bar, she theorized, certainly the police would realize she wasn’t in Virginia before daybreak on Saturday morning. O’Keefe felt only confusion when Piper then mused, “But what if I had a really fast airplane?”

O’Keefe, who’d had a friend murdered in the mid-seventies, thought the conversation was becoming increasingly bizarre, but it was about to become even stranger. At that point Tina walked in and put her hand on Piper’s shoulder.

“Piper, we need to talk outside, right now,” she said. “It’s about my period.”

Once the women were outside, the men on Team Martini shook their heads, amazed at the two sisters and Piper’s peculiar tale.

Minutes later Piper walked back in the bar and approached O’Keefe and Crider for a second time, asking for DIE, MY LOVE / 229

the best way to reach them, in case she needed them for an alibi.

Happy to help, they wrote their cell phone numbers on a sheet of paper and gave it to her. Piper thanked them and left. The bar patrons thought the night’s strange interlude had ended and returned to their drinks and conversation.

But half an hour later Piper Rountree walked through the Volcano’s door again, this time leading an entourage that included not only Tina but two men in business suits, one with a ledger and legal forms.

“I need to have you two give me signed statements these men can notarize and give to the police,” she said to O’Keefe and Crider. “I need to prove I was here on Friday night.”

They looked at each other, and both started shaking their heads.

“You have our phone numbers, that’s enough,” O’Keefe said. “When the police call, you give them the numbers, and we’ll talk to them.”

Piper was insistent, beginning to argue with them, when Tina nudged her.

“Piper, let’s go,” she said.

Piper looked at O’Keefe and Crider, then at her sister.

Saying nothing more, she turned and left, leading the odd procession from the bar.

“Now, that was really peculiar,” O’Keefe said to the others.

“On Friday night I was at a bar called the Volcano on Bis-sonnett,” Piper said to Coby Kelley on the telephone at eight-nineteen the next morning, Thursday, six days after the murder. Kelley was in his Houston hotel room at the time and had just finished his morning conference call to Richmond. “Two people can verify I was there,” she said, then rattled off names and phone numbers for Crider and O’Keefe. It was the first communication Kelley had received 230 / Kathryn Casey

from Piper since the morning she’d cancelled their meeting at McVey’s office, and he wasn’t able to record it. So he took notes, and then, while he was talking with her, picked up a tape recorder and repeated what she’d told him into it, while he had her on the telephone. Later he transcribed the notes onto a computer in Breck McDaniel’s office at HPD.

Piper Rountree ~ Call where she provides alibi info,
he titled the page.

In her account, Piper said she’d been at the bar from 8:30