Ann Rule The Perfect Husband

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and shot Kevin one more time.
Lori Henderson recalls, "Deidre told me they had tied him to a tree or
something and shot him a couple of times in the body and then she told
me that she picked up his head and she shot him one time in his head,
and then she had to hold a jacket to catch the shell because Kosta said
something about Kevin not being all the way dead or something and so he
shot Kevin with a big gun. She told me he had videotaped it."
After Kevin was dead, Deidre Hunt did not act as if she had done
something to be ashamed of. Her descriptions of the murder to friends
have about them the quality of a Keirn boast. She had, it seems, done
something of which she was proud.
During the days following that night in the woods off Williamson
Boulevard Deidre told at least four people about the murder, and
probably more. She told Lori Henderson. She told Mike Cox. She told
J. R. And she told Kevin's friend and Lori's boyfriend, Teja James.
She told Teja because after J. R. had turned her down and Mike Cox got
arrested, there was still the matter of Lisa Fotopoulos to be dealt
with. Kosta wanted his wife dead and, as much as she had enjoyed
killing Kevin, Deidre did not want the job of killing Lisa. She wanted
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Teja to do it.
Teja, twenty-one, had lived in Daytona off and on, and now had been
down from Brooklyn since June, long enough for him to have fallen in
with Kosta and the kids who hung out at Top Shots. Of all those kids,
he was closest to Lori, who was his girlfriend, and Kevin Ramsey, who
was his drinking pal.
Sometime during the last week of October Teja recalls being in Deidre
Hunt's apartment on Lenox. He sat on the bed with Deidre in her
bedroom. Lori was in another room.
"Do you remember what I told you and Kevin that time?" Deidre said,
referring to one of the many times she had shot her mouth off about
Kosta's various rackets.
"About the counterfeit?" Teja asked.
"Right," Deidre said. "The counterfeit. And you remember that Kevin
was going to blackmail Kosta."
"Yeah," Teja said, "I remember him talking about it."
He remembered Kevin trying to find out if Teja knew other things about
Kosta.
"Have you seen Kevin around lately?" Deidre said. She smiled.
"Come to think of it, no," Teja said. "Kevin hasn't even been in town
lately."
"No, he hasn't," Deidre said knowingly.
"I wonder where he went. His girlfriend told me he was in Orlando."
"He's not in Orlando," Deidre said. "He's in Daytona."
"Daytona? Where?"
"He's dead," Deidre said.
"Right," Teja said. "Sure he is."
"I'm not kidding," Deidre said. "He's dead. I killed him."
"Yeah, right, Deidre. Right," Teja said.
"I'll show you," Deidre said.
Teja watched as Deidre climbed off the bed and walked to her closet.
What she was telling him was ridiculous, but she didn't look as if she
were joking.
"Yeah, right," he said again, nervously. "Kevin's dead.
Sure."
Deidre came back to the bed carrying a pair of her shoes.
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"See," she said. She thrust the shoes forward with one hand and
pointed to the red crusted stains on them.
"That's his blood."
Teja could feel himself getting tense. His heart was beating faster.
He was starting to believe this shit.
"Oh, come on," Teja said. "This is a joke, right?"
"No joke," Deidre said.
"It's got to be," he said. "Tell me it's a joke."
Then Deidre called Lori into the room.
"Lori," Deidre said, "tell Teja that Kevin's dead."
Lori looked at her boyfriend.
"Well?" he said.
"He's dead," Lori said.
Teja knew Lori well enough to realize this was no joke.
He was shocked.
"But why?" he said. "How?"
Deidre and Lori sat on the bed like two girls at a pajama party and
told Teja how Deidre and Kosta had killed Kevin Ramsey and why it was
videotaped.
"Deidre told me how they went about it," Teja says now.
"Told me where the body was, how many times he was shot, what he was
shot with, what he had on, what he said, the last thing he said, and
that the only thing they regretted about it was that his last
spoken words, before they turned on the video camera, were "I'm
hungry." I was pretty pissed off about it. Kevin was my friend."
Perhaps the thing that shocked Teja most that day was the fact that his
girlfriend knew about the murder in advance. In fact, on the night of
the 20th, while Kevin was being tied to the tree, Lori was at Top Shots
with Teja, knowing what was going on.
"The whole time Lori was sitting with me at Top Shots, saying that she
was waiting to go meet Deidre at a bar, was when it happened," Teja
says.
When the girls finished telling their tale in Deidre's bedroom that
day, Teja was numb. Kevin dead? It was hard to imagine. And then
Deidre began her pitch.
"He's coming to talk to you next, you know," Deidre said.
"Who?"
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"Kosta."
"Kosta?" Teja said. The name itself had begun to sound frightening.
"What are you going to do?" Deidre asked. "He's going to ask you to
work for him."
"Or?" Teja asked.
"Or, you know, end up like Kevin," she said.
Teja Mzimmia James had arrived in Daytona Beach in June of 1989.
A tall, good-looking, light-skinned black, with a broader vocabulary [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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