Stephen White - Cold Case

There is not much to suggest what happened inside the stone-and-log house in the next half hour or so. At some point, Gloria was directed by Brian to move from the sofa in the living room into a closet in the guest suite that was down the hall from the great room. Gloria typically used the guest-room closet to store wine for her frequent parties. Brian graciously moved a chair into the closet for Gloria to sit on. He didn't bind her hands or gag her. But he did lock the door from the outside.

Ranelle-one of the housekeepers-was the one who mentioned later that Gloria usually just left the key in the lock.

The sheriff and his deputies arrived at the Silky Road Ranch a moment ahead of Raymond Welle, whose drive from Steamboat Springs to the ranch gate took a little less than fifteen minutes. The three sheriff's vehicles that bounced up the dirt road transported a total of five officers. The Routt County sheriff had already determined that he was going to treat the situation as a possible hostage crisis.

Before the authorities had time to accomplish much planning at the scene, and long before any detailed discussions took place about how best to handle this particular hostage negotiation, should those circumstances arise, the assembled officers heard three gunshots emanate from the house. The blasts were only seconds apart. The cops all instinctively dove for cover behind their cars.

Raymond Welle reacted considerably more slowly.

Maybe thirty seconds later, while the group was still arguing about whether there had been three shots or four, they were startled again, this time by the sounds of breaking glass. Raymond sneaked a glance at the house and told the sheriff that someone had broken the small window that was above the utility sink in the laundry room.

No more than a minute after the glass broke, the windshield of one of the police department vehicles-the only one that no one was hiding behind-fractured into a starburst as another gunshot exploded. The roar of this shot echoed and bounced around off the faces of the nearby mountains like a steel ball in a pinball machine.

One of the deputies said, "My dear God, is he firing a cannon at us?"

Another one replied, "Nope. I would say that boy's firing a.45." The sheriff said, "How the hell did he get out here? Walk? Anybody see any cars or trucks that don't belong? Raymond?"

Raymond looked around.

"Nope. But there's a dirt road that goes into those woods from Copper Ridge.

His car could be in there."

"Or it could be in the garage, right?" the sheriff wondered aloud. He would later tell one of his deputies that when he first got the call from Raymond about the problem at his house he suspected that Gloria might have been having an affair and that either she or her lover had suffered a change of heart that had resulted in some impulsive actions that would surely be regretted later.

The sheriff called those situations "domestics-once removed." For the participants he usually considered them more humiliating than dangerous.

Gossip around town was that Gloria's attentions did wander occasionally, especially on those horse-buying trips she took out of town.

Raymond reached up and opened the door to his Chevy Blazer and pressed the remote switch that operated his garage doors. Immediately, the three doors swung up on the face of the garage, revealing one empty bay, one jam-packed full of junk, and one full of the rear end of Gloria's forest green Land Rover.

Ray said, "That car there? The Rover? That's Gloria's. Whoever's doing this to her, his vehicle must be in the woods."

The sheriff said, "Say you're right, Ray. Is there a side exit to the house, I mean close to the aspens over there? Some way for him to make a run for it up to a car on Copper Ridge?"

The garage doors came back down.

The chief asked, "Did you do that?"

Raymond said, "No. He must have done it. There's a switch inside the house. By the mudroom door."

"Well then. We'll have to keep an eye on the Range Rover, too. He may try to make a run for it in Gloria's car. But we'll have to be careful-if he does that he'll probably be using her as a shield. Now what about doors from the house that lead over to those woods?"

"That's the master bedroom on that end. There're big sliding doors that go out onto a deck on the side of the house just out of our sight. Your men should cover that and the garage."

On his radio the chief ordered that the dirt road from Copper Ridge to Mad Creek be blocked off. He ordered that the main gate of the Silky Road be covered. He also sent two of his deputies to set up cover on the deck by the master bedroom and the other two to drive around back to a safe location where they could watch the deck and the sliding glass doors.

"Stay out of range as you're making your way. I'll get us some assistance from town."

Before the cops were even in position around back, Raymond Welle screamed, "There he goes. Look! He's running. There! See him?" He pointed in the direction of the master bedroom. Brian Sample was loping across the wide deck.

With more deliberation in his movements than one might expect. Sample hopped the railing that led down to a neatly trimmed lawn of buffalo grass. He paused there, turned and faced the police vehicles, leveled his.45 in the general direction of the sheriff's car, and fired. The shot went high. To his men, the chief barked, "Open fire," and instantly his two remaining deputies returned fire with their scoped rifles.

Brian's left shoulder snapped back. One step later he stumbled. Two halting steps after that he fell and released his weapon. The heavy gun in his hand seemed to float in the air for a second or two before acceding to the laws of gravity and plummeting to the ground.

The sheriff's radio came alive. One of the deputies who had headed around back wanted to know what the hell was going on.

Raymond Welle was already running toward his house. * * * Gloria wasn't hard to locate. The pungent stink of spilled wine provided a great olfactory trail that led straight to the guest-room suite.

When he'd murdered Gloria Welle, Brian Sample hadn't even bothered to open the closet. He'd shot his hostage right through the door. The.45 slugs had shattered one raised panel of the pine door and two of the three bullets had shattered Gloria Welle, one in the upper abdomen and one in the neck. She was already dead when her husband, Raymond, found her slumped over the back of her chair, which had tumbled onto its side. Her clothing was stained red with her own blood and was washed burgundy with Robert Mondavi's wine. It was party wine-not Mondavi's finest.

The deputy who was right behind him said that Raymond didn't touch his wife's body, didn't even leave a footprint in the blood and wine that were consecrating together on the hardwood floor.

Brian Sample died that night in the hospital in Steamboat Springs. He had not regained consciousness.

The phone call that summoned us to D.C. came on a Friday evening in April. I was busy playing Frisbee with some pizza dough and Lauren was slicing garlic so thin it was translucent. Her hands were less sticky than mine were so she answered the phone.

A moment later, with real surprise in her tone, she said, "Hi, A. J. No, no, no.

You're not interrupting anything. Really. We're just throwing some dinner together… Yes, in our new kitchen, it's wonderful. It's good to hear from you… We're doing fine, thanks. You?"

I smiled. The only A. J. I knew was A. J. Simes, a retired FBI psychologist.

The previous year she had been instrumental in helping me identify and track down someone who was eager to kill me. Before the adventure was over she had saved my life. Lauren and I had only heard from her once since she had left Colorado and returned to her home in Virginia.