Justice Denied

CHAPTER 15

Two nights earlier, Kelly’s temper tantrum had spoiled one dinner. Now, from hundreds of miles away, her situation cast a pall on this meal as well.

We were halfway through our entrees when my phone rang. I could tell it was Jeremy calling, but it was too noisy for me to hear inside the restaurant. I excused myself and went outside to stand among the crew of waiting parking valets.

“Did you find her?” I demanded.

“Yes,” he answered, relief apparent in his voice. “She was sitting on a bench down by Lithia Creek. It was cold as hell down there. She wasn’t even wearing a sweater.”

I felt as relieved as Jeremy sounded. “She’s all right, then?” I asked.

“I guess,” he said. “I did just what Mel told me to do. I took her to see Dr. Howell. She prescribed something to help her sleep. I don’t think she’s slept in days, but she’s upstairs resting right now. Dr. Howell gave her some antidepressants. I guess it’s a good thing Kelly decided against nursing.”

“I guess so,” I agreed.

“Is Mel there?” Jeremy asked.

“She’s back inside the restaurant.”

“Tell her thank you for me,” he said. “I kept thinking it was something I had done wrong, but Dr. Howell says it’s something that happens to some women after they give birth. It can happen sooner rather than later, and this is definitely sooner. Dr. Howell said it was really smart of me to figure it out and let her know, but it wasn’t me at all. It was Mel.”

“I’ll tell her,” I said. “But remember to give yourself some of the credit, too, Jeremy. You had brains enough to ask for help, and we’re lucky it just happened to be someone smart enough to know what was going on.”

Unlike your father-in-law, I thought.

A baby wailed in the background. “Gotta go,” he said.

I went back inside. I greeted Mel’s anxious glance with a thumbs-up. “Dr. Soames’s diagnosis is correct,” I announced. “The patient is back home. With the help of a sedative, she may be sleeping peacefully for the first time in days. The doctor also prescribed some antidepressants. Jeremy says thank you, and so do I.”

After the group heard Jeremy’s good news, the remainder of the dinner was a lot more festive. We made arrangements to meet the kids and Lars for one more brunch extravaganza before their scheduled departure the next day, then Mel and I went home and fell into bed. It was amazing to realize how much better I slept with her there beside me. I awakened the next morning to the smell of brewing coffee. There was a note next to the pot. “Taking a run in Myrtle Edwards,” it said. “Back in a few.”

I had been thinking about Thomas Dortman as I fell asleep, and this seemed as good a time as any to continue my LexisNexis research on him. With my first cup of coffee in hand and waiting for the computer to boot up, I happened to think of something else. And so, out of idle curiosity, instead of typing in the defense analyst’s name, I typed in something else-“Richard Matthews, Mexico”-and waited to see what, if anything, would show up.

It didn’t take long. What popped up first was an article dated November 14, 2004, from the El Paso Herald.

Two weeks ago, Candace Matthews kissed her husband Richard Matthews good-bye as he left to go on his regular morning walk near their beachfront retirement home in Cancun, Mexico. She hasn’t seen him since. Although Mexican authorities say they have launched an investigation into Mr. Matthews’s disappearance, information on the progress of that investigation is difficult to come by.

“No one will talk to me,” Ms. Matthews said. “No one will answer my questions or tell me what’s going on. They seem to think he just decided to leave me, but Rich would never do that. I’m sure he’s dead.”

Richard and Candace Matthews were newlyweds four years ago when they purchased their dream home. It was a second marriage for both of them.

Richard had retired from a career in the U.S. military and Candace was a former Realtor when they met at a dance club in El Paso, Texas. They married two months later.

“It was love at first sight,” Candace said, choking back sobs during a telephone interview from Cancun. “And it still is. No one here seems to take this seriously. They act like he’s just wandered off somewhere and it’s no big deal.”

“The investigation is progressing,” says Sergeant Ignacio Palacios of the Cancun Metropolitan Police Department. “We are treating this as a missing persons situation, but so far there is no indication of foul play.”

That was as far as I had read when the door opened and a winded Mel bounded into the room. “On my way to the shower,” she said. “What time’s brunch? I’ll be glad when the company leaves. I feel like we’re just bouncing nonstop from one meal to the next.”

She disappeared down the hall. I turned back to the computer.

Richard Matthews came to the El Paso area with his first wife and daughter when he was posted to Fort Bliss as a noncommissioned officer with the United States Army. He stayed on after his retirement, even though his life here was dogged by tragedy. This is where his only daughter, Sarah, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound while a freshman at the UTEP. His first wife, Lois, spent the last twenty years of her life with limited mobility due to the crippling effects of MS. It wasn’t until after her death that Richard’s life seemed to take a turn for the better.

Five years ago, on a dare from a coworker, Richard Matthews signed up to take lessons at Tango-Rama, a short-lived ballroom dancing school where divorced Realtor Candace Sanders was a part-time instructor. The rest is history. After a whirlwind romance, the two married and spent their week-long honeymoon in Cancun. When they returned to El Paso they sold their respective homes and resettled in Mexico, where their joint real estate dollars went much farther than they would have in the States.

“This was our dream home and our dream life,” says Candace Matthews. “There’s no way Rich would just walk away from everything we’ve built together.”

Frustrated by a lack of official response, Ms. Matthews has posted a $5000 reward for information leading to her husband’s safe return.

It probably only looked like a lack of response, I thought. What was actually going on was no doubt a spasm of legal infighting across jurisdictional boundaries-not the least of which was the international border. That would immediately translate into investigative paralysis. Mexican authorities, wanting to underplay anything that might adversely impact the tourism industry, were probably stalling for all they were worth, just as the guys in Aruba did when that teenage girl went missing.

Down the hall the shower stopped running and I heard the hair dryer whine to life as I struggled to fend off the intense sense of foreboding that suddenly gripped me. I looked back at the computer screen and double-checked the date: November 14. Mel and I hadn’t been involved then, but I did remember Mel’s returning from a week’s worth of vacation sometime late in the fall-sometime prior to Thanksgiving. I recalled that she had come back to work in high spirits looking tanned and fit and bringing with her a gift for Barbara Galvin’s son, Timmy-a huge sombrero with his name embroidered on it. Had she been to Cancun? That I didn’t know.

I called up the next entry, dated November 18:

Unidentified human remains, discovered washed up along the base of a beachside cliff near Cancun, Mexico, are thought to be those of former El Paso resident Richard Lowell Matthews, who disappeared almost three weeks ago while on an early-morning walk. While confirming that remains have been found, Mexican authorities say that a positive identification will have to await the arrival of dental records that are expected in Cancun sometime tomorrow.

Sergeant Ignacio Palacios of the Cancun Metropolitan Police Department reported that the autopsy had revealed the presence of a gunshot wound that was most likely the cause of death. The case is being investigated as a possible homicide.

Candace Matthews, former El Paso real estate agent and wife of the missing man, expressed frustration at the lack of urgency surrounding the investigation. “They didn’t even bother calling me until after they’d already done the autopsy. How can that be? With Rich already reported missing, shouldn’t they have come to me first?”

So Richard Matthews was dead, possibly of a gunshot wound. Down the hall the hair dryer switched off and on as Mel wielded hot air and a brush to force her hair into submission. In the weeks and months Mel and I had lived together I had learned to welcome the dryer’s ungodly racket. It was an audible and daily reminder of how my life had suddenly changed for the better. It announced to me and to the world at large that another person had come into my previously solitary life. This morning, though, that hair dryer felt more like a screeching buzz saw slicing into my heart.

Surely not, I told myself. Surely it couldn’t be happening again, could it? Maybe I’m mistaken. After all, Mexico is a big place. There are lots of resorts she could have gone to that weren’t Cancun. Or maybe I’m wrong about the timing. Then again, maybe I’m not.

Once before I had fallen for a beautiful but flawed woman, one who had transformed herself into a one-woman vigilante brigade for both convicted and suspected child molesters. Smitten, I had been blind to Anne Corley’s inexplicable interest in the death of a young girl at the hands of members of a local religious cult. My inability to grasp the seriousness of the situation had led inevitably to Anne’s death-and almost to mine as well.

Now history seemed to be repeating itself. Only yesterday Mel had told me that she was still haunted by learning too late of her best friend’s incestuous relationship with her father, a relationship that had eventually resulted in Sarah Matthews’s tragic suicide. Mel had told me that she still agonized over having done nothing to avenge her friend’s death. But was that true? That friend’s pedophile father had now turned up shot to death. I had personally witnessed the fact that Mel Soames knew her way around the business end of a handgun. How could I be sure she had nothing at all to do with Richard Matthews’s death, especially since there was a chance Mel had been in the same area at the time of his murder?

You’re jumping to conclusions, I admonished myself. You’ve got no proof she was involved. Give it a rest.

The hair dryer switched off permanently. The bathroom door opened, freeing a cloud of steamy air. A heady combination of fragrances wafted down the hallway. There was shampoo, hair spray, and perfume-in short, all the individual fragrances that worked together to make Mel Mel.

Guiltily, like a kid caught reading prohibited Playboy magazines, I closed the screen containing the most recent El Paso Herald article and hurriedly typed Thomas Dortman’s name into the search field.

Mel emerged from the bathroom wearing a short silky robe, the hem of which skimmed the bottom of her equally silky panties. She came over to where I was sitting and brushed the top of my head with a kiss as she collected my empty coffee cup from the end table at my elbow. “Refill?” she asked.

“Thanks,” I mumbled.

“What are you working on?”

I could have asked her about Richard Matthews right then, but coward that I was, I didn’t. I wasn’t ready. The idea that history might be repeating itself was too appalling.

“Dortman,” I lied.

Mel stood in front of me, with my cup in one hand and the other on her hip. “Look,” she said reprovingly. “Anthony Cosgrove has been missing and/or dead since 1980. And most of the guys on my list have been gone for months if not years. This is Sunday. Other than last night at dinner, we’ve been so caught up in work that we’ve neglected Scott and Cherisse the whole time they’ve been here. We also haven’t been very diligent about keeping tabs on Lars. How about if we give ourselves the whole day off and pay attention to people instead of cases?”

Concerned that Mel’s womanly wiles might somehow allow her to see into the workings of my computer and divine what I had been doing prior to typing in Dortman’s name, I immediately capitulated.

“Great idea,” I said, slapping shut the laptop’s lid. “It’s the weekend. Let’s forget about work for a while. It’ll do us both a world of good.”

Mel disappeared into the kitchen and returned with my replenished coffee cup, which she handed over to me. As she did so her forehead knotted into a puzzled frown. “You look upset,” she said. “Is something the matter?”

“No, nothing,” I said, probably a tad too quickly. “I’ll go shower-if you’ve left me any hot water, that is.”

The last was a joke. My condo is equipped with an instant hot water heating system that can replenish itself almost as fast as someone can use it. And Mel joked right back.

“A cold shower might be good for you now and then.” She grinned.

The shower wasn’t cold, but it could just as well have been. I stood in the powerful flow that cascaded down from a ceiling-mounted showerhead while my body was pounded with spray from a collection of wall-mounted showerheads as well. Steam may have been circling upward toward the ceiling, but I felt chilled.

Surely she wasn’t involved in the death of Richard Matthews, I told myself. Surely not. It was probably a robbery gone bad, a fatal but otherwise ordinary mugging. Or maybe Matthews got involved in the drug trade to supplement his retirement income.

But there was a part of me that held otherwise-part of me that was afraid my worst nightmare was about to happen all over again.

The easiest thing and probably the best thing would have been to come straight out and ask Mel about it right then. But cops don’t ask questions unless they have a fairly good idea of what the real answers should be. Anne Corley had lied to me with utter impunity, and I was determined not to be that stupid again. So before I asked Mel any questions I needed to find out some of the answers. To do that, I’d be operating solo. Mel may have been my partner in every sense of the word, but if she had somehow stepped onto the wrong side of the thin blue line, I was the one who would have to figure it out-and do something about it.

Standing there with the punishing water pummeling my body, I was suddenly struck by an idea. There was one other person in the world who had been betrayed by Anne Corley in much the same way I had been; one other sucker who, if I told him my suspicions, would immediately grasp all possible ramifications. After all, my friend and attorney, Ralph Ames, had been Anne Corley’s friend and attorney long before he became mine, and she had suckered him, too.

Leaving the shower running full blast, I stepped out onto the bath mat, hotfooted it into the bedroom, retrieved my cell phone, and took it back into the bathroom, where I dialed Ralph’s number.

“Where are you calling from?” Ralph asked once he was on the line. “You sound like you’re standing in the middle of a torrential downpour.”

“I am,” I said. “That’s the shower.”

“Here’s an idea,” he said. “How about if you call me back after you finish your shower.”

“Please, Ralph,” I said. “There’s a problem. Listen to me.”

And he did. I explained it all while the shower continued to roar. “So what do you want me to do?” he asked when I finished. “Try to find out whether or not the remains really do belong to Richard Matthews?”

“That would be a big help,” I said. “And what, if any, progress has been made in finding out who killed him.”

“Anything else?” Ralph asked.

One of the good things about Ralph Ames is that he doesn’t require a lot of explanation. He gets things. And then he goes to work and gets things done. And since he doesn’t necessarily have to concern himself about maintaining chains of evidence and fruit of poisoned trees and all that jazz, he has avenues of investigation that aren’t necessarily open to sworn police officers.

“Mel’s full name is Melissa Katherine Majors Soames,” I replied. “I’m pretty sure she went to Mexico sometime last November. I don’t know for sure when she went or where she traveled, but I think it was sometime before Thanksgiving.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Ralph said. “Meantime, watch yourself.”

That was another thing I appreciated about Ralph. He didn’t stand around jawing or dishing out a bunch of phony platitudes. Since I was worried, he was worried, and he would simply shut up and go to work. That meant a lot.

Mel knocked on the closed bathroom door. I was so startled it’s a miracle I didn’t drop the cell phone into the toilet. “Lars is on the phone,” she said. “Do you want to take it?”

Without saying good-bye to Ralph I pressed the call-ending button. “Tell Lars I’m in the shower. I’ll call him back when I get out.”

Still disturbed by the staggering possibilities, I was disgusted to find that my right hand shook uncontrollably. In the process of shaving I nicked my neck twice and the bottom of my ear once, and I emerged from the bathroom with tiny scraps of toilet paper stanching the flow of blood to keep it from ruining my collar.

Once I was dressed I stood for a few minutes looking at my cell phone on the bathroom’s granite countertop. Part of me wanted to have it with me at all times so I’d be able to hear from Ralph the moment he learned anything. But I didn’t want to have to take a call like that-regardless of his news-in Mel’s presence. She was a cop. She’d be too curious. She’d want to know what the call was about. She’d want to know exactly what was going on.

But I had spent a lifetime living on call. It was too late to change that now. After a wavering moment of indecision I brought the phone along with me. Leaving it behind really wasn’t an option.

Out in the living room I found Mel dressed and ready to go. “Lars was calling to double-check on who was picking him up for breakfast-Scott and Cherisse or the two of us. He also wanted to know if you thought Scott and Cherisse would mind if he brought a friend along to breakfast.”

“A friend?” I asked. “What kind of friend?”

“Her name is Iris,” Mel answered. “Iris Rassmussen. According to Lars she was a good friend of Beverly’s.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me that we buried Beverly on Thursday and Lars wants to bring someone else along to brunch on Sunday?”

“I don’t think he meant it like that,” Mel returned. “I’m sure it’s nothing romantic.”

I wasn’t convinced. I thought about Lars’s protestations earlier in the week about how all the single ladies in Queen Anne Gardens were camped out at his front door and jockeying for position before Beverly was even cool to the touch. And now this?

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him that as far as I knew, Scott and Cherisse were supposed to pick him up,” Mel answered. “As for the rest of it, I said I was sure it would be fine but that you’d call him back as soon as you could.”

“It isn’t fine,” I grumbled.

“Come on,” she said. “He probably just wants to have someone along who’s his age, someone who’s on the same page he is.”

“I’ll bet Iris is on the same page, all right,” I told her. “Let’s go.”

“But I thought you were going to call him back,” Mel objected.

“Why bother?” I said. “You already told him he could bring her. He doesn’t need to hear it from me.” Even I was aware enough to see the irony of the situation. Kelly didn’t have a thing on her old man.

Mel shot me an exasperated look. “What’s the matter with you this morning? Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed, or what?”

The wrong side of the universe is more like it, I thought. “Nothing’s the matter,” I said. “What are we waiting for? We could just as well see what that randy old coot is up to.”