Free Cruel Death by M. William Phelps Page B

was.
    “Wow. Look at this,” Geney marveled, looking around, walking in and out of various rooms.
    Erika walked toward the refrigerator to get beers for everyone. As she did that, BJ, Joshua, and Geney sat down at the glass table just off the kitchen, broke out the marijuana Joshua had brought with him, and began chitchatting.
    Geney soon got up. “I don’t want to change down here,” she said.
    The plan had been for everyone to smoke a joint, get into their bathing suits, and then take a swirl in the hot tub.
    “Go upstairs, then,” Erika said. She pointed. The master bathroom (with the hot tub) was right at the top of the stairs, to the left, off the bedroom.
    Joshua and BJ sat and smoked. A few minutes later, Geney came back down the stairs and sat with them. As Erika later explained the scene to Detective Scott Bernal, “I’m not even paying much attention to them or sitting with them because I have no interest in smoking.”
    Erika was not a fan of marijuana; again, her thing was snorting Xanax.
    The one thing about Erika was that no matter where she went or what she was doing, all of her personal belongings were organized. She had a place for everything. One drawer was just for blue jeans; another for underwear; another for bras; another for T-shirts of a certain color; and so on. Moreover, she had always put things in the same place so she knew exactly where they were—it gave her a sense of power over her obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). She could essentially relax.
    While Geney and BJ were at the table smoking, Joshua got up for a moment and wandered around the living room. Erika began looking for her brown Hooters bag, which she always kept in a certain place inside the condo; then she noticed her purse was sitting on the “other side of the room,” where she said she would have never put it herself. Putting the two together, in Erika’s panic-stricken, drug-induced, alcohol-soaked mind, she said later that she believed at that moment that someone had taken the Hooters bag—and, worse, moved her pocketbook.
    Where is my shit? What the hell is going on here? Erika thought.
    Without telling anyone, she started looking around the first floor of the condo. As you walked in, the laundry room was right in front of you. To the left of that were two bedrooms, a bathroom attached to one. Walking down a short hallway toward the east end of the condo, off to the right was a set of stairs leading to the second floor, almost directly across from the kitchen. From there, there was that glass table with six chairs, in back of which were three bar stools against a counter/ bar opening into the kitchen. Before the balcony, which spanned the entire width of the unit, were two roomy rec areas with couches, end tables, entertainments centers, and a television.
    After a moment, Joshua sat back down at the kitchen table. The three of them were having a good old time: Joshua, Geney, and BJ. Laughing and drinking beers and just talking.
    Erika was beginning to go into full-scale panic mode, without telling anyone, she later claimed.
    She looked in a few obvious places to see if she could find her pocketbook, but it wasn’t there. Under the white cushions of one couch; under the sky blue cushions of the other couch.
    Nothing.
    So she ran upstairs.
    When she got into the bedroom, her purse was sitting on the counter by the bed. But when she looked inside, Erika noticed that her little red Coach handbag, in which she carried anything of value—including her $10,000 Canary diamond, cross, wallet with all her credit cards, cash, and her pill case—was missing.
    It wasn’t inside her purse, where she had always kept it.
    At least this was the story she told Detective Bernal. “All this stuff is missing and I don’t know where it is,” she later explained. “I don’t want to freak out, because they’re all sitting downstairs smoking, and I’m like, ‘I’m not gonna make a scene, I’m just gonna try and find my