The Book of Matt Read Online Free Page B

they also pointed to a decades-old drug scandal that allegedly involved Brian Fritzen. They claimed that Brian, while a police officer, had stolen “a large amount of cocaine” from an evidence locker, “but he got off with a slap on the wrist … Instead of charging him, they sent him somewhere for treatment” and allowed him to quietly resign.

THREE
    The Little Dude
    In mid-summer 1998, as Rerucha prepared the Robinson case for trial, he had another smaller case that had yet to reach the sentencing phase: the burglary of a Kentucky Fried Chicken the previous December. Three young men had broken into the fast-food restaurant on the south side of town and had stolen twenty-five hundred dollars and — somewhat ludicrously — a few desserts.
    Among the three known burglars was a twenty-year-old “local troublemaker” with a long juvenile record, Aaron McKinney. In April 1998, Detective Rob DeBree had arrested McKinney in Pensacola, Florida, and brought him back to Laramie to face charges. McKinney had been hiding out on the Gulf Coast for several months with his pregnant seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Kristen Price, living in the home of her mother and working sporadically as a pipe fitter.
    Aaron McKinney had been on Rerucha’s watch list for years as “someone who showed clear signs of bigger problems to come.” DeBree, Ben Fritzen, and other cops had kept an eye on McKinney, too, since they knew that he and his band of friends were using and selling hard drugs. The whole bunch, plus a few of their girlfriends.
    Unbeknownst to McKinney, Laramie police had been tipped off to his whereabouts by Kristen Price’s mother, Kim Kelly, who reported that he had been physically abusive toward her daughter. Kelly told police she was “afraid of Aaron’s violent temper” and was worried for Kristen’s safety as well as the soon-to-arrive newborn’s.
    According to Kelly, while McKinney was living in her Florida home she casually mentioned that she was having a problem with her ex-husband. McKinney advised her on the spot that “he knew people who could straighten it out.”
    “All I have to do is make a call,” he said.
    Kelly was dumbfounded by McKinney’s barely masked offer to “putout a contract on my ex,” but at the time she dismissed his posturing as “a little guy talking like a big shot.” He also bragged to Price and her mother of his exploits in California the previous year. He said he had gotten in good with an organized crime family and dropped hints that he had done “jobs” for them, including murder for hire.
    “One way to get rid of a body,” he told Kelly, “is to burn it, take the teeth out, then bury the body.”
    Standing five feet, four inches tall, with a skinny build, Aaron McKinney fancied himself a thug and a “gangsta,” modeling his words and sometimes his actions after the in-your-face rhymes of his rap-star heroes. Several of his friends would later recall that he was also the brunt of frequent teasing; they called him “shrimp,” “pipsqueak,” “the little dude,” and other terms of endearment.
    But despite McKinney’s well-honed talent for exaggeration, he had not lied about living in California for a while. He was first invited there by Jay Pinney, a teenage offender whom he befriended while Pinney was in mandatory residence at the Cathedral Home for Children in Laramie. Pinney liked some of the same drugs McKinney did — weed, acid, crack, and methamphetamine — and both liked to party. McKinney also liked to shock people with tales of his friend’s childhood in Riverton, Wyoming. But it was Cal Rerucha who first told me about Pinney’s history.
    At age twelve, Pinney shot and killed a middle-aged neighbor, Delbert Dilts, with a .300 Winchester Magnum. Dilts, a maintenance manager at the town library, had gotten into a minor altercation with Pinney’s younger brother, nicknamed “Buggers,” while chasing a dog belonging to the Pinney family off his