Justice Denied

CHAPTER 14

On the drive back to Seattle, LaShawn Tompkins’s murder slipped to a back burner as I concentrated on what my trip across the mountains had produced concerning Tony Cosgrove’s disappearance. If nothing else, talking to Carol Lawrence had upped my suspicion level significantly. I was convinced that she and her husband did have something to hide, even though I wasn’t sure what.

To my mind there was now a whole new urgency in my wanting to track down Thomas Dortman, the defense analyst. If, as I suspected, he had worked at Boeing during the seventies and eighties, there was a chance he had actually known Tony Cosgrove or maybe even Jack Lawrence. What I needed more than anything right then was to talk to someone who would either confirm what Carol Lawrence had told me-or blow her out of the water.

It wasn’t until I turned south on 405 that I started thinking about dinner-and about Mel. I wasn’t looking forward to going to dinner with Scott and Cherisse and having to explain why Mel wasn’t joining us. I thought briefly about calling her. I glanced at my cell phone, but there hadn’t been any calls. Then I thought about going by her place in Bellevue on the way home to Seattle. But I didn’t want to show up outside the security door at her apartment only to be told I wasn’t welcome. So I drove onto State Route 520 and straight home.

On the parking garage ramp leading down to P-2, however, I was astonished to see Mel’s 740 parked in its customary spot. I headed up to the penthouse, not the least bit sure if it would be safe to open the door without wearing a flak jacket. When I stepped inside, however, I found Mel at the far end of the living room. The window seat was covered with stacks of papers, which I immediately recognized as excerpts from Todd Hatcher’s abstracts. She was seated cross-legged on the floor in front of a yellow pad, reading glasses perched on her nose. She stood up as soon as I came into the room, walked over, and kissed me hello.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was out of line.” I kissed her back. I would have done more, but she dodged out of my arms before I could get a good grip on her. She returned to the window seat and began gathering the papers. “I should have talked to you about this a long time ago,” she added.

“Should have talked to me about what?” I asked.

“About why I’m involved with SASAC,” she replied.

I felt a funny twist in my gut. If this was something Mel didn’t want to tell me, it was also probably something I didn’t want to hear.

“Look,” I said, “I was out of line, too. Whatever it was must have happened a long time ago. It’s none of my business. You don’t owe me an explanation of any kind.”

“But I do,” she said. “What happened back then is why I’m involved in sexual assault issues today. It’s also why I’m a cop. Coffee?”

I recognized that her offer of coffee was nothing more or less than a diversionary tactic. I accepted it for the same reason. We were waltzing around something important and uncomfortable, and we needed to get past it. Mel’s face looked so troubled-so hurt-that I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her, but she wasn’t having any of that. She went back to the relative safety of the window seat and perched there, coffee cup in hand. I, on the other hand, retreated to my sturdy recliner. We both knew that whatever was coming wouldn’t be easy to discuss, and maintaining some physical distance would serve us both in good stead.

“Did you ever have something happen to you where it wasn’t your fault-I mean, you know it wasn’t your fault-but you still hold yourself responsible?” Mel asked.

Let me count the ways, I thought.

My mother died of cancer. My ex-wife died of cancer. Sue Danielson died of gunshot wounds. Anne Corley died of gunshot wounds. Only with Anne did I personally fire the weapon that killed her, and even that ended up being ruled justifiable homicide-self-defense. In all the others I was held blameless-as far as the world was concerned, but not on my own personal scorecard.

“Once or twice,” I conceded.

“Have I ever mentioned Sarah Matthews to you?”

I racked my brain and came up empty. “I don’t think so. Who’s she?”

“She was my best friend in high school-Austin High School in El Paso. Her father was a staff sergeant in the army and my dad was a major at the time. We were in the same homeroom.”

I was scrambling to pull together what little I did know about Mel Soames’s background. She had grown up as an army brat. Her dad, William Majors, was retired military who now lived somewhere in Italy with his second wife, Doris. Mel’s mother, Katy, was living in Florida with a long-term boyfriend, name unknown, whom she had so far declined to marry. I knew there had been bad blood all around during the breakup of their almost thirty-year marriage. As a result I had yet to meet any of Mel’s parental units.

“Major Majors?” I asked, trying to inject a little humor. “That must have been fun.

Mel didn’t respond in kind, and her grim expression didn’t change.

“Sarah and I were in the same homeroom for three years,” she continued. “My senior year Dad was transferred back to D.C. Sarah and I stayed in touch for a year or so-through graduation and for the first semester of our freshman year in college. She committed suicide a few days before Christmas of that year. She shot herself.”

“Where?” I asked.

“In the head,” Mel answered. “Blew her brains out.”

“No. I mean where was she when she died?”

“She was still in Texas-University of Texas at El Paso.”

I knew Mel had graduated from the University of Virginia. “So you weren’t anywhere around when it happened?” I asked.

“No,” Mel said. “Sarah was in El Paso. I was in Charlottesville.”

“So how could her committing suicide possibly be your fault?” I asked.

For an answer, Mel picked up a small book that had been sitting on the floor beside her. She got up, walked across the room, and handed it to me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Sarah’s diary,” Mel replied. “I’m sure she was afraid someone at home might find it, so she must have hidden it on my bookshelf. When we moved, it got stuck in a box of books that stayed in storage until after my parents bought the house in Manassas at the beginning of my sophomore year. Mom found it and gave it to me. It pretty much explains everything.”

I was holding the book, but I didn’t think Mel actually intended for me to read it.

“What does it say?” I asked.

Mel’s eyes filled with tears. “Her father molested her,” she said. “From the time she was little. She tried to tell her mother, but her mom didn’t believe her.”

“Did she tell you?” I asked.

Mel shook her head. “Not in so many words. I think she tried, but I was too naive to understand what she was really saying. But if I had bothered to read the book…”

“You just told me that you didn’t know about the diary until after she was already dead.”

“Right, but…”

“But what?”

“If I had been a better friend, I would have listened more. And when her father tried to put the moves on me-”

“He went after you?” I demanded.

Mel nodded. “It was at a Christmas party at a neighbor’s house. He caught up with me out in the backyard. He was drunk enough that I was able to get away, and I never told anyone about what had happened. I was too embarrassed.”

“He was what,” I asked, “in his thirties?”

“Around there,” Mel conceded.

“And you were in high school? Whatever happened has nothing to do with you,” I declared. “It was his fault, not yours.”

“It’s not so much what happened before I read the diary,” Mel interjected. “It’s what happened afterward.”

“What did happen?”

“Nothing,” Mel answered hopelessly. “Not one damned thing. I kept my mouth shut and didn’t say a single word. By then Sarah’s mother, Lois, was already sick, crippled by MS and confined to a wheelchair. She was totally dependent on the man. If he’d gone to the slammer then, I don’t know what would have become of her. Sarah was already dead. What difference did it make? Even now, I doubt the diary itself would have been enough to convict him. So I just kept quiet.”

Mel sat in the window seat. She seemed to be staring out at the water, but I doubt she was seeing any of it.

“Where are Sarah’s parents now?” I asked gently.

“Lois Matthews died about seven years ago. Sarah’s father, Richard, is remarried and lives somewhere in Mexico. When I heard he was marrying again, I wrote a letter to his second wife. I told her I was a friend of Sarah’s and that she had told me about being abused by her father as a child. I warned her to be careful-to make sure that he wasn’t allowed around young children, especially young girls. She never wrote back. I don’t know if she believed me or not. Maybe the letter never got through.”

“So you did do something,” I said.

Mel nodded. “I suppose,” she agreed. “But I didn’t do enough, not about him. What I did, instead, was get involved in the sexual assault community. By my junior year in college I was volunteering at the rape crisis center in Charlottesville once a week. That’s also when I decided to become a cop and changed my major from English to police science. I’ve been involved ever since,” she added. “So now you know. That’s how I became one of ‘those women.’”

The very idea of incest disgusts me. The fact that someone could do such a horrible thing-that a man could repeatedly violate his own child-is something I can barely comprehend. Still, I was slightly relieved. I had been afraid Mel was going to relate something horrific that had happened to her personally. When Richard Matthews had come after her, she had managed to elude him, so at least the worst of the nightmare had happened to someone else. But Mel had been victimized, too. Her hurt was collateral damage to her friend’s lifelong violation and eventual death.

For the first time I found myself wondering about some of the other women in that glittering ballroom at the Sheraton. What had propelled each of them to enter the sexual assault fray? Maybe there was something similar lurking in the lovely Anita Bowdin’s background that would account for her involvement in SASAC, something all the silk and emeralds in the world couldn’t quite erase. Maybe even the doyen of women’s studies, the daunting Professor Clark herself, had suffered some similar circumstance that had marred her very existence. Maybe all the women on the board were, in one way or another, deeply damaged.

Mel had fallen silent and seemed to be waiting for some response from me.

“I’m sorry for your friend,” I said quietly. “And I’m sorry for you, too. It’s an awful thing to have carried around on your own for all these years.”

“Thank you,” she said. “But I haven’t been that alone. When I’m with the women from SASAC, none of us is alone.”

I’ve been a cop all my adult life. I know the statistics-six out of ten girls and one out of four boys are molested prior to age eighteen. And I had certainly seen the irreversible damage a history of child abuse leaves in its wake. I had seen the deadly results of the years Anne Corley spent watching her father routinely abuse her developmentally disabled sister. But I don’t think I had ever internalized it in the same way as I did when Mel made that one quiet and very simple statement about not being alone. And it gave me a whole new perspective on “those women” at the Sheraton-the gutsy, determined, well-dressed women who had somehow moved beyond whatever had befallen them personally and who were striving to help others. It made me embarrassed to think how churlish I’d been with Mel afterward. And it made me wish I’d made a larger donation.

“Being involved in something like that changes you,” Mel said after a long pause. “It changes your whole outlook on life. That’s why I don’t dwell on it and why I don’t talk about it very often-and it’s why I couldn’t talk about it last night, not after all the stories we’d just heard. It brought it all back, and it hurt too much.

“But I really want you to understand where I’m coming from,” she continued. “Working for SASAC and for organizations like it-raising money and raising awareness-means a lot to me. It makes me feel like I’m doing something in Sarah’s honor even though it’s too little too late to help her. Maybe I’m helping prevent what happened to Sarah from happening to some other unfortunate little girl. Or maybe when it does happen she’ll realize that there are places she can turn to for help, where someone will really listen to her. The only help Sarah could see was turning a gun on herself.”

Mel needed comforting, and I did what I could. “It sounds to me like you’ve accepted what you couldn’t change and you’re changing what you can,” I told her. “That’s part of what we talk about in AA. It’s how we learn to go on. Thank you for telling me,” I added. “I know it wasn’t easy.”

Mel gave me a bleak smile. “Thank you for listening,” she said.

“So now that I’m back in your good graces, what should I do?” I asked. “Make a bigger donation?”

“No,” she said. “What you contributed is fine. Listening is better.”

“What about dinner, then?” I asked. “Are you going to join us?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I missed you last night, and there’s something I’d like to do first.”

And that’s exactly what we did. It wasn’t until much later-after we were showered, dressed, and waiting for Scott and Cherisse to show up-that we actually started talking about work. She told me how far she’d gone in making notes on the abstracts, and I told her about my semi-fruitful trip to Leavenworth.

“What’s the defense analyst’s name again?” Mel asked thoughtfully, reaching for her laptop.

“Dortman,” I said. “Thomas Dortman. He lives here in Seattle. I already Googled him.”

Mel did several quick keystrokes and then studied her screen. “And he has a new book coming out at the end of the month, The Whistle-blower’s Survivor’s Guide. Want me to order you a copy from Amazon.com?”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “From what I read in the article, Tony Cosgrove was supposed to be a whistle-blower. Or maybe he would have been, if he hadn’t disappeared when Mount Saint Helens blew up.”

“So obviously Cosgrove didn’t live long enough to benefit from the book,” Mel observed.

“No, he didn’t,” I agreed. “I sent Dortman an e-mail asking him to give me a call, but it’s the weekend. I’ll give him until Monday before I try doing anything else about finding him.”

We were still waiting for Scott and Cherisse to show up when the phone rang. Caller ID identified the call as coming from Kelly and Jeremy’s place in Ashland.

“She took off,” Jeremy blurted the moment I answered.

“Who took off?”

“Kelly.”

“Where did she go?” I asked.

“That’s the problem,” Jeremy answered, “I have no idea. She tried to grab the car keys out of my pocket. When I wouldn’t give them to her, she lost it. She screamed something about the kids and me being better off without her, then took off on foot. What am I going to do?” Jeremy added miserably. “I can’t take care of these two little kids all by myself. I wouldn’t know where to start. What’s the matter with her, Beau? What’s going on?” He sounded utterly mystified and despairing.

“Are you saying you think she’s left you for good?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” he returned. “I told you what she said, but I don’t know what it means. Do you?”

From the sound of things, it was probably a good thing Kelly wasn’t behind the wheel of a vehicle.

“Did the two of you have a quarrel of some kind after you got home?” I asked.

“How could we argue?” Jeremy said. “She wasn’t even speaking to me.”

Yes, I thought. I know how that works.

“Before you left Seattle then?” I asked. “Did something happen while you were here that upset her?”

“You saw how she was,” Jeremy answered. “She was upset the whole time we were there-upset and on edge. The thing is, what am I supposed to do now? Go looking for her? Let her go and hope she cools off? Call the cops?”

I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what to tell him.

“What’s going on?” Mel asked in the background.

“It’s Jeremy,” I explained. “Kelly cried all the way home from Seattle back to Ashland. Now Jeremy says she told him he and the kids would be better off without her and took off on foot.”

“Let me talk to him,” Mel said. I handed over the phone. She switched it to speaker mode. “How long ago did she leave?”

“A few minutes,” Jeremy answered. “I called as soon as she was out the door.”

“So she’s probably still in the neighborhood somewhere,” Mel said. “Take the kids with you, get in the car, and go find her.”

“But-”

“And when you do, take her straight to her doctor and tell him exactly what’s going on.”

“But what is going on?” Jeremy asked.

“Have you ever heard of postpartum depression?” Mel asked.

“Yes, but I always thought it was some kind of joke.”

Jeremy’s thinking on the matter wasn’t that far from my own. As far as I knew, postpartum depression was right up there with mother-in-law jokes as fodder for stand-up comedians.

“It’s no joke, Jeremy,” Mel told him. “It’s serious, and it can also turn deadly on occasion. If that’s what’s going on, Kelly needs to see her doctor right away so she can be diagnosed and treated.”

“She’s not crazy or something, is she?” Jeremy asked. His voice was subdued. And scared. The deadly seriousness of Mel’s demeanor had me scared, too.

There was a call-waiting alert on the phone, but Mel ignored it and so did I. “Kelly may be acting crazy,” Mel countered. “But having a baby is hard work. It probably left her internal chemistry totally out of whack. Since she’s not nursing…she isn’t, is she?”

“No.”

“Then having her doctor prescribe medication to counter that chemical imbalance shouldn’t be a problem, but you’ll have to find her first.”

“Should I call the cops?” Jeremy asked. “Tell them that she’s missing?”

There were plenty of reasons not to do that. Filing a police report could well give rise to questions about whether or not domestic violence was part of the equation. An official report might also bring Child Protective Services into the fray with questions asked about Kelly’s suitability for motherhood. The idea that someone might step in and try to take Kayla and Kyle away from them froze my heart.

Before I could say anything on that score, however, Mel said it for me.

“No,” she told him urgently. “In the long run that’ll only make things more complicated. Just go find her. What’s her doctor’s name?”

“Howell,” Jeremy answered. “Dr. Faye Howell here in Ashland.”

“I’ll call the doctor and let her know what’s going on,” Mel told him. “Once you find Kelly, call back here. I’ll tell you what the doctor says and where you should take her.”

While Mel busied herself with dialing information, I was summoned by the doorbell. I found Scott and Cherisse waiting outside in the hallway.

“The doorman tried calling to let you know we were on our way up,” Scott said as I let them into the apartment. “Is something the matter with your phone?”

I waved him to silence so I could listen to Mel. By then she had used her law enforcement officer persona to mow down whatever gatekeepers stood between Dr. Howell and her patients.

“All right, then,” Mel was saying. “As soon as Jeremy locates her, I’ll tell him to bring her directly to the hospital, that you’ll wait for them at the ER.”

Scott looked worriedly from Mel back to me. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“It’s Kelly,” I said. “She took off and left Jeremy and the kids behind. He’s frantic.”

“It’s postpartum depression, isn’t it,” Cherisse said.

Mel nodded. Cherisse turned back to Scott and poked him in the ribs. “See there?” she said. “I told you so.”

Scott and I exchanged long-suffering glances. That’s what’s so mystifying about women. Neither Mel Soames nor Cherisse Beaumont had ever had a baby themselves. Still, they somehow knew what was going on with Kelly, even though Kelly herself didn’t seem to.

I’ve long maintained that women are born knowing things it takes men a whole lifetime to figure out. This was simply one more case in point.