Justice Denied

CHAPTER 17

Because the elevator is key-controlled on weekends, I had to escort Detective Lander back down to the parking lot. On our way I noticed that Mel’s door was open and the lights and radio were both off.

Here we go again, I told myself. She’s probably gone AWOL just like she did yesterday.

I had visions of her walking back to Seattle, striding purposefully through the bike traffic on the I-90 bridge. Back upstairs, I tried calling her cell phone and was surprised when she answered.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Outside,” she said. “In the smokers’ hut.”

Last year the Washington state legislature passed its most recent rendition of the statewide no-smoking ban. The rules and regs not only prohibit smoking inside public buildings, they also forbid smokers from congregating within some arbitrary number of feet from any building entrance or exit. Knowing that some smokers, including our office manager, Barbara, will never quit no matter what, SHIT’s compassionate landlord had handled this legal bump in the road by installing a two-car-wide canvas-topped vehicle canopy just outside the prescribed boundary. He had stocked this rain-proof shelter with ashtrays, trash cans, and picnic tables. In other words, banished outdoor smokers would still freeze their butts off (in every sense of the word), but at least they wouldn’t be wet.

I hurried downstairs. With a brisk wind blowing down off the snow-covered Cascades, it was clear and sunny outside but cold as hell. Mel was huddled inside one of the collection of justin-case outerwear she keeps in her office-a hooded, fleece-lined jacket. She sat at the table with a lighter and a package of Marlboros and a huge glass ashtray in front of her. An unlabeled file folder lay next to the ashtray.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said, taking a seat across from her as the chill of the picnic bench bit into my backside.

Mel blew a column of smoke skyward and watched it drift off toward the traffic speeding past along I-90. “I don’t,” she said. “I borrowed these from Barbara.”

It seemed mean to point out that she was indeed smoking. For once in my life, I had brains enough not to say anything.

“The last time I smoked before this was the day I came home from work early and found Greg in bed with my best friend,” Mel continued. “I walked into the bedroom and there they were, both of them stark naked. I didn’t say a word to either one of them. I stripped off my work clothes, put on a pair of sweats and tennis shoes, and went jogging. Threw my cigarettes into the bedroom trash can on my way out. I knew I couldn’t jog and smoke. Never smoked again-until today.”

These were gory details from Mel’s past that I had never heard before, but knowing her, especially knowing her when she’s mad as hell, I could see it all in my mind’s eye. In another time and place I might have made a joke about it, but she was hurting way too much for me to make light of her pain. I didn’t want to make it worse than it already was.

“Why today?” I asked.

“Someone’s trying to frame me for murder,” she said. “And it must be one of my so-called friends. It’s so damned close to what happened to me before, with Greg and Gina, that it really set me off. Brought up all those bad old times; sent me looking for some of my bad old friends-one of these, for instance.” She pointed at the pack of Marlboros.

I wasn’t surprised. This is the kind of emotional setback that can send long-sober drunks bellying up to the nearest bar.

Mel stubbed what little was left of her smoldering cigarette into the ashtray. I pushed the ashtray aside and covered her icy hand with mine.

“Which so-called friend do you think is involved?” I asked.

She shrugged. “One way or another, it’s all tied in with SASAC. I came down here to work up my courage before calling Ross. I’m sure he’ll want to put me on a leave of absence before somebody in the media gets wind of this rather than after, the way he had to do with Destry.”

“Destry?” I asked. “Destry Hennessey?”

“Sure,” Mel said. “It was three years ago, just after she came back here but before I showed up. Don’t you remember?”

I did remember, but only vaguely. I wasn’t involved with a news junkie back then; current events tended to get by me. “Something about her grandmother?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mel answered. “The shorthand version of the story goes like this. The grandmother had been widowed for several years and was living alone in Salt Lake City when a sixteen-year-old punk broke into her house one night, robbed her, raped her, and left her to die. But she didn’t die-not right then. A neighbor saw the kid running out of the house and reported it. He was only two blocks away and still on foot when the cops managed to nail him with some of the grandmother’s personal goods still in his possession. When the case went to court, the kid’s defense attorney finagled a plea bargain. Juan Carlos Escobar went to a juvie facility up in Logan until he was twenty-one.”

“And Destry’s grandmother?” I asked.

“She was left with permanent internal injuries. She had been independent right up until then, but after the attack she was no longer able to live on her own. She ended up first in an assisted-living facility and later in a nursing home, where, two years later, she died. The doctors were convinced that the infection that eventually killed her came about as a result of her original injuries, but the D.A. refused to amend the charges against the punk. He was released on his twenty-first birthday.”

The more she told me of the story, the more it jogged my memory.

“And he was killed that night, right?” I asked.

Mel nodded. “On his way home to his own grandmother’s place in Salt Lake. Someone ran him down in a vehicle. It wasn’t an accident, either. They ran over him several times and left him to die in an irrigation ditch.”

“How do you know so much about this?” I asked.

“For one thing, Destry and I roomed together when we were down in Cancun. We sat up late one night on our balcony watching the moon on the water and drinking margaritas. That’s when she told me about it. What happened to her grandmother was what propelled her into SASAC, the same as what happened to Sarah did me. For another, that’s what I was doing upstairs-a LexisNexis search on the case.”

She tapped the file folder, but I didn’t reach for it or ask to see what was inside.

“What about Ross?” I asked. “You said something about what happened before?”

“Naturally Destry was a person of interest in that case. All of her relatives were as well, but on the night it happened, Destry and her husband were actually in Washington, D.C. She had been to a Homeland Security meeting and was at a dinner at the White House when Escobar died.”

“Talk about a gold-plated alibi,” I said.

Mel gave me a faint smile. “That’s what Ross Connors thought. He saw no reason to put her on administrative leave while the investigation ground on. And that’s just as well since the case has yet to be solved. But some investigative reporter from the Seattle Times raised all kinds of hell about it. Thought Destry was being given special treatment. And that’s why I’m going to go call Ross right now-to give him a heads-up.”

She started to rise, but I held her hand and stopped her. “No,” I said. “Not yet. Let’s talk about this.”

“What’s there to discuss?” she asked. “I owe him. When I needed a job that would get me out of D.C., Ross Connors was the only guy who would give my resume a second glance.”

“No, wait a minute,” I said. “You said you thought someone was trying to frame you. Assuming that’s true, there must be a reason. Has someone tried blackmailing you, for example?”

Mel looked me straight in the eye when she answered. “No,” she said vehemently. “Absolutely not.”

“So if they’re not looking for something from you, then maybe whoever’s behind this did it just for the hell of it. Because they could.”

“It doesn’t really matter why they did it,” Mel returned. “The point is, they did. And they’re getting away with it.”

“Just like whoever took out Destry’s grandmother’s killer is getting away with it,” I pointed out. “What do you think the chances are that lightning strikes twice in exactly the same spot in exactly the same way?”

Mel shrugged and didn’t answer.

“Right now,” I continued, “the people responsible for all this think they’re getting away with it. You haven’t been notified that you’re a suspect in the Matthews case, have you?”

Mel shook her head. “Of course not. How could I? I knew nothing at all about it. Until you brought it up this afternoon I didn’t even know Richard Matthews was dead.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The cops in Mexico haven’t made the connection, and as far as the killer is concerned, neither have we. As long as nothing happens to change the status quo-Ross putting you on administrative leave, for example-no one will know we’ve caught on, either. And that gives us our best chance of catching Matthews’s killer.”

Mel said nothing.

“I suggest we tackle this case the same way we would any other. First, let’s go upstairs and put Barbara’s cigarettes where they belong. Then let’s go back home and work the case. I’ll interview you the same way I would any other victim.”

“Or suspect,” Mel interjected.

“Victim,” I repeated firmly. “We’ll make a list of everybody who was on that trip with you and find out as much as we can about each of them. And we’ll also check to see exactly what the cops down in Cancun have going for them on this case.”

“What if the killer used my weapon?” Mel asked.

“You had it with you?”

“My back-up Glock,” she said. “We were flying on Anita’s private jet. There wasn’t an issue with security.”

That gave me pause. If forensics ended up linking Mel’s 9-millimeter to Richard Matthews’s death, it was going to be a hell of a lot harder to make all this go away.

“Did you have the Glock with you all the time?”

“Not when I was swimming-or jogging,” she added. “It’s hard to carry a concealed weapon when you’re wearing a bikini.”

“Amen to that!” I said.

She smiled at me then. “Let’s go inside,” she said. “I’m freezing.”

We went back upstairs only long enough to return the cigarettes and lighter to Barbara Galvin’s top desk drawer.

As we headed back to Seattle, Mel sat on the far side of the car, holding the file folder tightly against her chest. “I tried to do some checking on the Matthews case,” she said. “What little I could find was in the El Paso papers.”

“I saw that, too,” I told her.

“So how are you going to find out what the Cancun cops have without leading them straight to me?”

“You don’t know about my secret weapon,” I said. “Whatever Ralph Ames can’t find out isn’t worth knowng.”

“But Ralph’s your attorney,” Mel objected. “Whatever he found out wouldn’t be protected…”

I handed her my phone. “Look under ‘incoming calls,’” I told her. “His number should be one of the last ones that came in. Call him and tell him you’re hiring him and that he should come by the house later this evening and pick up his retainer.”

“But I can’t afford someone like him.”

“This is too serious, Mel,” I said. “You can’t not afford someone like him. We can’t afford it.”

Mel stared at the phone. “What do I tell him about what’s going on?” she wanted to know.

Mel’s state of mind was still too fragile to tell her that I had already run up the flag to Ralph. By now he probably knew more about the case than Mel and me put together.

“Say we have a situation here and that we’re sure you’ll be needing his services.”

“Isn’t that a little vague?” Mel asked.

“Believe me,” I told her, “Ralph can handle vague better than anyone I know.”

So she made the call. Concerned Ralph might inadvertently blow my cover, I was relieved when he didn’t answer and she left him a voice-mail message.

“Who all was at the retreat in Cancun?” I asked.

She rattled off a list of names. “Anita Bowdin, Professor Clark, Destry Hennessey, Rita Davenport, Abigail Rosemont, Justine Maldonado, and me. Seven of us altogether. Then there was Sarah James, Anita’s cook, and the two pilots. The cook stayed at Anita’s place. The pilots went to a hotel. Anita had her own room. The rest of us shared.”

I remembered meeting the first four women Mel mentioned. The others were names only.

“And was there any kind of disagreement among you?” I asked. “Hard feelings of any kind?”

“No. Not at all. We spent a lot of time brainstorming about the upcoming fund-raiser. That was the whole point of the retreat. We were determined to raise more money than last year, and we did-raise more money, that is. But we had fun, too. We walked on the beach. Went into town for shopping. Did the whole tourist thing. And the food was wonderful. Sarah is a marvelous cook.”

“And did any of the women know your story-about what had happened between Sarah Matthews and her father?”

“All of them did,” Mel answered. “Anyone who was on the board, and we all were, would have known about it.”

I tried to quell the sudden flare-up of anger I felt, but it didn’t go away.

“How can that be?” I demanded. “I didn’t find out about any of it until yesterday, when you finally told me. But in the meantime, you’re saying the rest of the world already knew?”

“It’s part of the board of directors’ selection process,” Mel explained. “Prospective members are encouraged to write individual essays explaining how and why they came to be involved in sexual assault prevention programs. Once the essays are written they’re circulated among existing board members.”

Maybe that was part of what had made me so uncomfortable at the SASAC banquet. Maybe the group’s ultimate aim was to help people affected by sexual assaults, but there had been that exclusionary sense about the organization-an in-crowd, private-club chumminess about the women, “those women,” an us-and-them mind-set, that had left me cold while at the same time leaving me out.

“So you have essays for all the other women on the retreat?” I asked.

“I’ve read them,” she said, “but I didn’t keep them. They’re painful stories, Beau, all of them. When I was finished reading, I ran them through the shredder.”

“Would anyone else still have them?” I asked.

“Maybe. Why?”

“Because we need to check. If the guy who attacked Destry Hennessey’s grandmother is dead and if Richard Matthews is dead, maybe some of the other responsible parties have met the same fate.”

For a moment Mel didn’t answer. Then, with no further explanation to me, she dredged her own phone out of her pocket, scrolled through some numbers, and pushed “send.”

“Hey,” she said breezily when someone answered. “Mel here.”

There was a pause. “Oh, no. The food was fine. Great. Not to worry. No complaints on that score whatsoever.”

Which told me Mel was calling Rita Davenport, her fellow SASAC board member and the lady who ran the catering company.

“So I was calling with a favor,” Mel continued. “You wouldn’t happen to have a copy of all the board member essays, would you? I’m one of those people who unload that kind of stuff as soon as I read it, but now I need to see one of them…You do? Hey, that’s great. If you could just shoot them to me in an e-mail…sure…that’s terrific. Appreciate it. Wrong? Oh, no. No, nothing’s wrong, and it’s no big deal. I just wanted to compare notes on a couple of things. Fine. Thanks.”

Mel closed her phone and heaved a sigh. “I suppose I’ll go to hell for lying,” she said, “because it is a big deal.”

Indeed it was.

Once back at Belltown Terrace, we did just what I’d said we would. Mel started a new pot of coffee. Then, armed with computers and notebooks, we began to go over what we knew and what we didn’t know.

We had barely figured out where to start when Ralph called. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Hold on,” I told him. “This is Mel’s story. You’d better hear it from her.”

I punched the phone onto speaker and handed it over to Mel. My trust in Ralph is well founded. He listened to the whole story without ever hinting that very little of what she had to say was news to him.

“What do you need from me?” he asked when she finished.

Mel sighed. “I guess I’d like you to find out whatever you can about the ongoing investigation down in Cancun.”

“And if they haven’t tumbled to your possible involvement, you’d just as soon I didn’t mention it,” Ralph concluded.

“Yes,” Mel said.

“Give me a while,” Ralph said. “But if you don’t mind, I probably should swing by in a little while so you can give me that retainer. With a situation this serious, I don’t want there to be any question at all about my being your attorney of record.”

One of the good things about working with a partner is that you gradually come to terms with a division of labor. Without our even having to discuss it, Mel opened Rita’s e-mail containing the SASAC board member essays. While she started studying those, I opened the file she had brought home from the office.

Mel had given me the broad outline of Destry Hennessey’s grandmother’s case, but the collection of articles gleaned from various newspapers laid out the story in much greater detail. I skimmed over the ones that dealt with the physical attack on Destry’s grandmother, Phyllis Elaine Hammond, and focused instead on what had happened to her attacker. Taking detailed notes, I was gradually able to gain a reasonably clear picture of the chain of events.

After serving four years for one count each of rape and robbery on seventy-nine-year-old Phyllis Elaine Hammond, Juan Carlos Escobar had been released from the North Utah Juvenile Correctional Institute in Logan on October 6, 2003. On the day of his twenty-first birthday, he had been driven to the bus terminal in Logan and handed a Greyhound ticket to Salt Lake City, where his own grandmother, Maria Andrade Escobar, had been expecting him. His bus ticket was never used, however, and he never arrived in Salt Lake, either. Several witnesses had reported seeing him in conversation with a nun near the Greyhound terminal an hour or so before his scheduled departure. Two days later, Escobar’s battered body had been discovered in an irrigation ditch on a deserted blacktop road outside Bountiful.

At the time Escobar was sentenced to serve his time in a juvenile facility, several relatives of his victim had appeared in public strenuously objecting to his having received special treatment. One or two of them had even gone so far as to vow seeking revenge.

“With that kind of history, naturally that was the first place we looked,” the lead investigator, Bountiful homicide detective Ambrose Donner, reported. “Members of Mrs. Hammond’s family were initially considered persons of interest, but at this point they’ve all been questioned and cleared of any involvement.”

Investigators continue in their efforts to locate the unidentified nun who was seen speaking to Escobar shortly before he disappeared. They’re also trying to locate the vehicle involved in the incident, reportedly a dark blue Buick Riviera with a broken front headlight and extensive front end damage.

The mention of a nun’s possible involvement was an immediate red flag, but for right then I let it go because I finally had what I needed. Flipping open my phone, I set about finding Detective Donner. He had been investigating a homicide that involved a dead sexual predator, which, it so happened, was what SHIT was doing, too. More or less.

It took a while. “Sorry to interrupt your Sunday,” I said when I finally reached the man at home and had introduced myself. I was worried he’d give me the third degree and want to know all about me-who I was and why was I horning in on his weekend, to say nothing of messing around in one of his cases.

“No big deal,” he said. “I’m watching golf. Tiger’s cleaning everybody’s clock, as per usual. What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking into one of your old cases,” I said. “Wondering whether or not you ever closed it.”

“Which one?”

“Juan Carlos Escobar.”

Donner didn’t even hesitate. “That punk? No, we never closed it. Doubt we ever will. Near as we can figure, he pissed someone off while he was in juvie and they took care of him as soon as he got out. He was sent up because he raped and robbed some helpless little old lady,” Donner added. “The victim died eventually and probably because of what Escobar did to her, but he was never charged with murder like he shoulda been.”

“And none of her relatives were involved in his subsequent death?” I asked.

“We thought so at first, but they all came out squeaky clean. We ended up settling on the gangbanger theory. What can I tell you?”

“Did you ever find the vehicle?”

Donner hesitated. “Yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact, we did. Two weeks after the fact, this guy comes home from taking his wife to Europe for their fortieth wedding anniversary. He gets off the plane and his car is missing from the airport parking lot.”

“Let me guess, a blue Buick Riviera.”

“You got it. The parking lot attendant figures the guy just forgot where he parked, so he gets a security guard to drive him around. When they find it, it’s there in the lot all right, but the date and time stamp on the ticket is a whole twenty-four hours after the guy and his wife landed in Paris. When the crime lab went over it, the interior had been wiped down pretty thoroughly, but they did find pieces of Juan Carlos still stuck to the front end and undercarriage.”

“What about the nun?” I asked. “Did you ever find her?”

“Look,” he said, hedging, “this is a small town. I’m not sure I should go into all this.”

After blithely spilling his guts about Escobar, I found Donner’s sudden reticence mystifying.

“Come on, Detective Donner,” I urged. “Did you find her or not?”

“We never found her,” he said. “But nobody ever reported her missing, either,” he hurried on. “We never found a body. Never found any remains or any blood evidence. So we didn’t have any way of knowing if we even had a second victim. The chief made the call. Said we were keeping it under wraps until we had an actual ID or a missing persons report to go on.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What are you saying?”

Donner sighed. “When the crime lab went over the Buick, they found a single thread-a long black thread. The guy who owned the car didn’t own anything black like that and neither did his wife.”

“So the nun was in the car.”

“That’s what we think, but we have no idea what happened to her afterward.”

“The thread’s still there?”

“As far as I know.”

“Did you do composites of her?”

“I think so,” Donner said. “They’re probably locked away in the cold case room. Why?”

“I’d like to get a look at them, if I could. Maybe you could fax them over to me.”

“But…” he began.

“Look,” I said. “I know you went out on a limb here by telling me this. If you like, you don’t even have to fax them to my office. If I give you my home number, we can keep this off everybody’s radar, right?”

“Right,” he said. “That would be a big help. What’s your number?”