Free Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers by Ann Rule

high-pitched scream of a creature in agony.
    “Don’t!” he cried out. “Ahhhhh…Ahhhh…Ahhh! Don’t! God! Tappan, don’t. You’re wrong, man. You’re wrong. Don’t. Please, don’t—”
    Five seconds ticked by. There was another shot, muffled. It sounded almost like a champagne cork popping.
    The silence on the tape was palpable. No more screams. No more pleading from Kyreacos. And then there were two more shots, five seconds apart.
    The tape ran on, recording emptiness. A minute. Two minutes. George Marberg looked at his watch, unconsciously timing the tape whirring without sound. None of them moved. Was it over?
    No. There were more voices on the tape, but now it was as if the investigators were listening through the dead man’s ears.
    A different male voice spoke: “We’ve already called the police. This guy is dead. He got shot right in the top of the head. You don’t think he’s still alive? Don’t touch him.”
    Sirens caterwauled through the night, growing closer and closer.
    Another voice: “They’re taking some guy to the hospital. Is an aid car coming?”
    “One of our officers?” The policeman speaking sounded shocked.
    “Yeah.”
    There was a new sound, air whooshing into the body’s throat. And then a crackling, and they realized that it was paramedic George Barnes who had tried to “bag” the victim with his own breath and was now pulling Kyreacos’s jacket open, brushing the microphone—all unaware.
    “Yeah,” Barnes’s voice said to someone. “He’s got one right in the chest.”
    A young officer’s voice: “OK, Sarge—I got a .45 over here. The fucker is cocked and ready to go.”
    Sergeant: “Leave it right where it is.”
    Steadily, accurately, the mindless tape rolled on, recording shouts, sirens, police calls coming in to the squad cars blocking the shooting site. The man was dead, but the device on his body continued to record his surroundings until the hour of blank tape ran out and the batteries faded. It had gone with him to the morgue and then stopped.
    Edmonds and Marberg were shocked at what they’d heard. Even as dozens of police officers still gathered at Virginia Mason to show support for Stan Tappan and his wife, displaying the camaraderie and concern that binds police officers, the two homicide detectives who had heard the damning tape knew that things were not at all what they seemed.
    There was no question that Tappan knew Kyreacos better than he had said. Tappan had chased the waiter, and as much as they hated to accept it, it appeared that he had deliberately shot him. It was all there on tape. It would take ballistics tests and a lot more questioning to find out what the real connection had been between the two men.
    Detective Sergeant Ivan Beeson assigned two of his day-crew—Don Strunk and Dick Reed—as the prime investigators in Stan Tappan’s shooting of Nick Kyreacos. They had been afraid that this might happen. It wasn’t a matter of a conflict of interest—they were much too professional for that—but neither had ever found the main suspect in an inexplicable murder to be an old friend. Don Strunk and Dick Reed listened to the tape and their faces went white. It was clear that Tappan didn’t know that the whole shooting had been recorded, and they couldn’t tell him so until they had taken his full statement.
    According to Stan Tappan’s first brief statement to the patrol officers, it was Kyreacos who brought the .45 to the alley. When Sergeant Beeson, Reed, and Strunk went to the hospital to talk with Tappan, he was recuperating from plastic surgery on his injured hand and assured them that he would be able to use it again, well enough to shoot a gun accurately.
    They asked him to go back over the shooting, and Stan Tappan reiterated that it was Kyreacos who had had the .45. He said he had been forced to defend himself against a convicted criminal who had a lot more firepower than he did.
    Only they knew that wasn’t true. They had