“When customers mention being assaulted, we need to contact the police,” the co-manager replied.
“I would have followed this woman to her car to get her license plate number. I own a horse farm and I’m a multi-millionaire. I can shop for designer clothing, but the clothes you sell are good enough for me, because they’re good enough for Sam Walton.”
Burch got a good look at Countie’s face. His skin was wan and peppered with bruises and scrapes in various stages of healing. Sheila asked him several times if he was going to faint.
“My late husband was a medical doctor,” Sheila informed the employee. “And I have a medical background. I can treat his wounds.”
You have got to be kidding me, Burch thought. That guy looks like he belongs in a hospital.
Sheila told Burch that she had paid $700 that day for a professional polygraph and her “husband” had passed it with flying colors.
The manager followed Sheila to the seasonal aisle, where she planned to reconstruct the incident. Sheila pushed Kenny around, paying no mind to the shoppers around them. The man’s head was down, as if in defeat. He didn’t seem concerned in the least which direction she pushed him. At one point, Sheila touched Kenny’s shoulder. The man jumped in pain. Again, Burch offered the customer some corporate phone numbers and excused herself to get back to work.
Sheila continued shopping, grabbing a disposable camera. She pushed Kenny past hardware and into the automotive section. They passed dozens of yellow smiley faces, faces that now seemed joyless. Sheila made a sharp right around a corner. Her eyes quickly scanned the shelves. They were there, just beyond the car jacks and cans of automotive oil. There were two rows of them. One whole row of red for gasoline. A couple in blue, meant for kerosene. Next to them, the five-gallon containers in yellow. Those were for diesel fuel. They cost $11.64 apiece. She took two and piled the yellow plastic jugs on Kenny’s lap in the wheelchair. Then she pushed the broken man and the fuel containers to the checkout aisle. All alongside of them, the malevolent smiley faces peered down like some Lewis Carroll nightmare.
She rolled Kenny with the containers in his arms. Her plan for them was lodged in her own wicked mind.
Burch was paged to electronics. When the manager got there, she saw Sheila taking pictures of the security camera domes mounted in the ceilings.
“Is everything okay?” she asked as nicely as she could.
Sheila gave her a look, like an animal regarding a flea. “Yes,” she said rudely and walked away.
At 8:45 P.M., the report came over the Epping police radio for a suspicious person at Wal-Mart, and Detective Richard Cote got the call. Cops in other towns were cracking heads with St. Patrick’s Day revelers stumbling out of bars. It seemed it wouldn’t be a night patrolling Epping if the cops didn’t have to stop by Wal-Mart for something.
Burch flagged down Cote when he arrived at the store. The officer asked what the story was and the manager explained what had been going on.
“Do you have a name?” Cote asked.
“Sheila LaBarre.”
Cote’s reaction was immediate and evincive. Cote was both a football coach and the head of the department’s police union, so he wasn’t afraid of getting into a tumble. But he was smart enough to not approach “Sheila the Peeler” without at least one other officer with him. This call was going to require backup. He radioed for Sergeant Sean Gallagher to meet him at the store.
On February 26, two days after Gallagher and Cote had knocked on the farmhouse door looking for Kenny, Sheila made three phone calls to the chief ’s office within a few minutes of each other. She was in a lather about the well-being check and threatened to sue if the cops came back to her home for the same purpose. She also requested a copy of the National Crime Information Center report that listed Countie as a missing person.
“This woman has a history with the Epping Police Department,” Cote told Burch. “We need to be careful about how we handle things.”
Gallagher entered the store and met Burch and Cote at the customer service desk. He asked Burch how she wanted to proceed and she said she wanted Sheila removed from the store and told not to return.
Sheila’s eyes were drawn tight and beady when she saw the two officers approaching her. She and Kenny were in the frozen food section, and Sheila was using a disposable camera to take snapshots of the security cameras. The sergeant explained that management wanted her out of the store.
“Can I pay for my merchandise first?” The cops looked over at the Wal-Mart employees, who nodded that it would be okay.
While Gallagher talked to Sheila, Detective Cote tried to get a private word in with Kenny. The kid was wearing a goofy kind of top hat and a fur jacket that seemed too big for him. It had been only a few weeks since the well-being check at the farm, but he was taken back by how badly Kenny had deteriorated.
“Are you all right?” he asked Countie.
Sheila LaBarre, who seemed to have a wicked radar about such things, turned away from Gallagher and yelled at Countie before the wheelchair-bound man could speak.
“Don’t fucking answer that question!” she exploded. “You don’t have to answer any fucking question they ask you.”
Kenny dropped his head. He said nothing.
Sheila pushed the non-responsive Kenny toward the self-checkout kiosk. She scanned a box of crackers and some other things, then stuffed them in a blue plastic bag. She had two yellow plastic fuel cans that she didn’t scan, so the associates asked her about them. In a huff, Sheila produced a receipt for the diesel cans and the disposable camera that she had paid for earlier that evening.
Kenneth Countie tried to get out of the wheelchair, but he strained, moving gingerly. Sheila grabbed hold of him and pulled him out. The man had been hunched over in the chair and looked like he couldn’t lift himself. The store managers, seeing the injured man attempting to steady himself with the shopping cart, offered to let Sheila take the wheelchair out to the parking lot.
“No,” she said coolly. “You have harassed me enough. I’m all set.”
Gallagher took a good look at the man stumbling along next to the cart. It is him. It is Countie, he thought. But Countie looked nothing like he did on February 24, standing in the farmhouse door. His skin color was ashen. He had cuts on his face. He had cuts on his hands, and one of them appeared to be swollen.
“Are you all right?” Gallagher asked Kenny as he got into Sheila’s car. Kenny did not have a chance to respond as the woman he had fallen in love with shut the door on them. Gallagher stood there outside the passenger door, but Kenny never looked up, never looked out the window. Sheila drove out of the parking lot and the two of them went north toward the farm.
Later that night, Gallagher filled out the report for police call number 06-1468. He wrote how he told Sheila not to return to the store. “Sheila was removed from the store without incident,” the report’s narrative said. Nothing was said in reference to any concern about Kenny or how he looked.
Kenneth Countie was never seen in public again.
10
A Call in the Night
Police Sergeant Sean Gallagher couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling he got when he saw Kenneth Countie with Sheila LaBarre that night at the Wal-Mart. He told himself, Countie is an adult; it wasn’t like I could take him into protective custody. So much could account for the way Countie appeared. Bad diet. Rough sex. Humiliation. All were medications townsfolk assumed were served on that horse farm to the boys who moved there. Nevertheless, he