Chris & Nancy by Irvin Muchnick

Rawls that he’d overslept and missed his flight, which struck the latter as odd. Why hadn’t Chris just called his wife and spared her the inconvenience of driving to the airport for nothing?
    Yet another reason Rawls liked Chris had nothing to do with money. In 2005 , WWE fired Rawls after he was arrested for sexual exploitation of a minor. Still, Chris kept up their connection. “I live in a glass house myself, so I don’t throw stones,” he said.
    Rawls usually met Chris at the same McDonald’s off the freeway. Often Daniel was tagging along and Rawls would give him a spare wrestler’s mask or some other trinket. This time, because Chris was returning from Dr. Astin’s, he was alone. Benoit handed Rawls a check for $650 , and Rawls gave Chris two sets of tights, one for him and one to pass along to another wrestler, Chris Masters.
    Rawls and Benoit talked shop. Ray wanted to know how Chris felt about having been moved recently from WWE ’s Raw roster to ECW , the company’s least-watched brand. “As long as I can wrestle, that’s all I care about,” Chris replied.
    When Rawls mentioned that he had been working hard and was tired, Benoit perked up. He said he knew the perfect pick-me-up: a mixture of Goody’s Headache Powder, Red Bull energy drink, and “Yellow Jackets.” The latter was an ephedra-based diet pill, banned several years earlier by the Food and Drug Administration, but generic knockoffs of indeterminate pharmacology continued to be sold over the counter at places like gas station convenience stores. (One drug expert explained this category of unregulated and easily obtained borderline products as a popular and low-cost pathway to a “hillbilly high.”) No matter how tired he was, Chris said, the concoction “makes me feel like Superman.”
    â€œChris insisted that I get some Goody’s with Red Bull and Yellow Jackets right away,” Rawls recalled. “There was a BP service station across the way, and he said BP carried Yellow Jackets. He told me to follow him there in my car. But they didn’t have any. Then Chris said he was sure he’d find them at the BP closer to his house and he’d call me back when he did.”
    As Benoit sped off in his Hummer, Rawls thought, This guy is
wired
.
    * * *
    Back home, Chris talked on the phone to Kyle Burdg, a salesman at a local Hummer dealership, about selling one of their vehicles, and he ordered a call by Aqua Pro, the company that serviced the swimming pool. He talked to Chavo. He talked to Nancy, who was shopping at the local Publix supermarket for that evening’s family cookout on the grill on the back deck. When the pool guys, Patrick Sterling and Andrew Webb, arrived, they saw Chris, flipping meat on the grill, and Daniel, both in swimming trunks.
    That night, what Nancy had been fearing happened.
    Records show that at 9 : 25 p.m., the 411 information number processed a request from the Benoit home phone for the number of the Fayetteville police. The number given out was an obsolete, non-emergency number, but in any case it wasn’t called. Could Nancy not have known that, even though they had a Fayetteville postal address, they were located in an unincorporated area of the county and thus under the jurisdiction of the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office, not the city of Fayetteville Police Depart-ment? (This awareness would have been underscored if she were awake at the time of the false alarm several nights earlier when Chris forgot to enter the shutoff pass code as he went through the gate. The responding agency that night was the county sheriff, not the city police.)
    The possibility that an abortive effort to reach law enforcement might have been undertaken by Daniel, not Nancy, is tantalizing — and, if true, heartbreaking.
    At 9 : 32 , records show, there was a call from the Benoit home phone to next-door neighbor Holly’s cell, then another a