grandmother’s grandmother’s house. It had a wood frame and a floral pattern on horrible, scratchy corduroy.”
Cari teased Dave about his ugly couch, and it became a standing joke between them. She had impeccable taste, and he had been impressed when he saw how beautifully she’d decorated her home. When he said that he wasn’t about to spend money on new furniture, she told him he could find great deals on used stuff on Craigslist, a free online website of classified ads. She made it her mission to find him a nice couch, and she sent him links to sofas she found, but they ended up going to Goodwill where Cari spotted a loveseat in a soft shade of silver at a bargain price. Dave bought it, and they loaded it into her SUV. Back at his apartment, they rearranged his furniture to make room for Cari’s find.
While Cari shared her expertise on interior design, he advised her on cars. They had been seeing each other for about a week when she found a car she thought her son would like. Max would begin driving soon, so she bought it for him, though it wasn’t yet roadworthy. “It was an old Volkswagen,” says Dave. “Some kind of fancy sports model. She wanted to fix it up, so she brought it to the shop. We did quite a bit of work on it.”
He and Cari were having a great time together, but when Liz called to say she realized she hadn’t gotten everything she’d left at his place and was wondering about some pans she’d left behind, he offered to bring them to her. Later, he would not be able to recall the exact date but estimates he went to Liz’s home sometime between November 6 and 8. He had planned to just drop off the pans, but she had something else in mind. He was barely in the door when she brushed her body provocatively against his. “We ended up getting naked right there,” he recalls. “We had sex in the entryway. We didn’t even get past the couch.”
Liz had managed to make him forget about his new girlfriend for the duration of the sex act. But she didn’t change his mind. He continued to see Cari. He didn’t mention his encounter with Liz to Cari. It wasn’t as if he were cheating on her, because they were not exclusive. Still, he wouldn’t have sought Liz out for sex. In his mind, his relationship with Liz “was over,” but when she threw herself at him, he figured it was “one last fling.” He admits that it was fun, but that his attitude about their parting could be summed up in a few short words: “Whatever. Goodbye. Here’re your pots and pans!”
Liz saw things differently, though she tried not to seem desperate. On the afternoon of November 10, she emailed him and asked: If sometime, not saying right now, but if I felt like it, would you be comfortable as friends grabbing a drink or dinner or both sometime? Like I said, not sure when, kind of busy next few weeks, just seeing if you’d be comfortable with it.
Even as she attempted to set up a date with Dave, Liz was trying to make it appear that it would happen only if she felt like it, and that she might be too busy for him. There would come a day when a prosecutor would ask Dave if he went out for that drink with Liz, and he would testify that he was certain that he had, and that while it was during the time that he had been seeing Cari, he did not recall the exact day.
Only one person in Dave’s world was aware that something horrific was about to happen that November 2012. None of the others would realize until much, much later that the sequence of ordinary events would one day be scrutinized. He had no way of knowing he’d be asked to recollect times and dates of seemingly trivial things, or that they would hold any more significance than any other myriad occurrences in the thousands of mundane days of his life.
Dave Kroupa would wish mightily that he could step back in time and change those events, that he could relive those days but do so with a superhuman ability to recognize evil.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHEN SAM CARTER ASKED to be her friend, Cari Farver wasn’t sure what to think. She didn’t recognize him, but he seemed to know her. He