Beyond Obsession Read Online Free PDF Page A

he had hurt his hand; Karin had two cats, and one of them was constantly disappearing and wasn’t all that friendly anyway, and that cat had appeared and bitten him when he was putting out the food over the weekend. That’s all there was to it. When the police asked Dennis about Karin’s relations with her mother, he said that while they had their disagreements, as did all parents and their children, they had not been serious, and there was no terrible trouble between them.
    In her separate interviews Karin told the police just about the same things, sometimes even using the same words and phrases.
    The police may have had their suspicions at this point, but that was all. They had nothing but suspicion to go on. For one thing, they weren’t even sure where Joyce Aparo had been murdered. The best guess was that she must have been killed in Glastonbury, strangled in her own bed sometime during the night; the fact that she was wearing only a nightgown when her body was discovered would point to that. But then, again, it was possible that she had been abducted, driven to Bernardston and killed there. If so, the question that loomed was why.
    What seemed certain, though, was that at least two people, and two cars, had to be directly involved, certainly if Joyce had been murdered in Glastonbury. Her car had been driven north to the Massachusetts-Vermont-New Hampshire border, where her body had been dragged to its resting place beneath the Fall River bridge, and the car dumped down the slope into the stream a mile and a half away. Unless the killer was from Bernardston itself (but, if so, how had he gotten to Connecticut?), he had somehow had to make his way back south in the middle of the night, and the only way that would have been possible was if there had been somebody else along in a second car to drive him. Karin had a solid alibi. The Markovs could attest to her presence at their home in Rowayton. Dennis seemed to have one, too; it was a long trip from Glastonbury to Bernardston and back, and unless there indeed had been someone else in another car, someone else involved in the murder, there was just no way he could have made that round trip and been at work by seven the next morning.
    Anyway, who could suspect these two teenagers, or either one of them, of committing a murder, and a terrible one at that, not a sudden killing in the momentary heat of passion, but a murder by strangulation, a murder that must have taken long, agonizing minutes, during which the victim had to have fought desperately and violently for her life? These two were the kids next door, children of the upwardly mobile middle class, wanting for little.
    Tall, slim, red-haired, freckle-faced Dennis Coleman, son of an old Glastonbury family, was the kind of boy, Connecticut State’s Attorney John Bailey said later, that you’d want your daughter to bring home. He was good-looking and personable, a smart boy, with an IQ of 137, a boy who could get by in school without cracking a book, a young man talented in music, something of a prodigy with computers, in love with the outdoors, a skier, a sailor, an expert woodsman who spent long hours carving trails and campsites in forests. He was a child of affluence, his father, Dennis senior, being head of his own prosperous computer consulting firm, where young Dennis worked part-time during the school year and on vacations until after a dispute with his father he had left and found the job at the country club. Though the junior Dennis Coleman had not gone on to college after graduating from high school the year before, had instead initially gone to work as a computer programmer for one of Hartford’s ubiquitous insurance companies, he was now planning to go on with his education. In August he was to start at Central Connecticut State University in nearby New Britain. He already had his books and his student ID card. For him, the future seemed limited only by what he would make of it.
    And