Ties That Bind

Chapter Thirty-Two.

Amanda went to bed early and spent another night tossing and turning until exhaustion forced her into a deep, troubled sleep. In her dream, she was on a cruise ship. Amanda had no idea where the ship was sailing, but the sea seemed smooth and the sky was clear. Still, she felt a vague unease. It was as if she sensed that the weather could change at any minute.

The corridors of the ship seemed to lead nowhere and Amanda was alone and lost, searching for someone whose identity remained a mystery to her. She came to a cabin that looked familiar. When she touched the door, it moved inward in slow motion to reveal a man who was standing with his back to her. He started to turn as slowly as the door had moved. Just before she could see his face, Amanda jerked awake.

For a moment, Amanda was unsure of whether she was in bed or on the ship. Then she saw the glowing red numerals on her clock and knew that she was home. It was five o'clock. Amanda made a short, half-hearted attempt to get back to sleep but soon gave up. The dream had been very unsettling. The idea of taking something to help her sleep was getting more and more appealing, and she decided to talk to Ben Dodson about it at their session in the afternoon.

The Y was open for early risers. Amanda drove over for a workout that she hoped would clear her head. As she swam, she thought about her relationship with Mike Greene. She liked him, and she felt comfortable with him, but there was no spark.

Amanda had been away from Oregon, except for short visits, since she started college at Berkeley. When she returned to work in Frank's firm, she'd found that most of her high school friends had moved away. Many of those who remained were either married or in serious relationships and she was often the odd wheel when they got together. A few of her women friends had chosen career over marriage, but when they met for dinner or drinks, men were a frequent topic of conversation. Amanda loved her work, but her happily married friends had a closeness that she envied, and she was often depressed when she left them.

Mike had gone through a bad divorce in L.A. before moving to Portland; even so, she had a sense that he might want more out of their relationship. Amanda cared for Mike, but deep down she knew that something was missing. He was a safe haven. When she married, she didn't want to settle for safety. She wanted to be in love.

After her workout, Amanda drove downtown. There was a brief that was due in the court of appeals by next Friday, and she could get a lot of work done because the phones didn't ring in the office until the receptionist came in at eight. Amanda grabbed a scone and a latte at the coffee bar at Nordstrom, then entered the Stockman Building. She passed Daniel Ames's office on the way to her own.

Daniel's early life had been terrible. In his late teens, he had run away from an alcoholic mother and a series of abusive "fathers," living on the street until he'd joined the army out of desperation. After the army, Daniel had worked his way through college and law school, finishing high enough in his law-school class to get a job offer from Portland's largest firm.

Daniel was consulting a medical text as he waded through a stack of doctor's reports in a medical malpractice case. He looked up and grinned. Daniel was handsome, with solid shoulders and a great smile. It was almost impossible now for Amanda to remember how frantic and hopeless her friend had seemed when they'd first met in the Multnomah County jail. Daniel had been framed for the murder of one of his firm's senior partners and Kate and Amanda had saved him. Daniel had been living with Kate Ross since Kate's investigation, and Amanda's courtroom skills had cleared his name.

"I didn't think the bosses got to work this early," Daniel joked.

"I'm just here to keep an eye on the help."

"Kate's in, too. She wanted to talk to you about something."

Amanda carried the latte and the bag with the scone down the hall to the investigator's narrow, messy office.

"What have you got for me?" Amanda asked as she pushed papers away from the edge of Kate's desk and put her food on the cleared space. As Kate told her about her meeting with Billie Brewster, Amanda munched on her scone and sipped her latte.

"So, what's your conclusion?" Amanda asked when Kate was through.

"If this 'Vaughn Street Glee Club' exists, and Wendell Hayes was part of it, he could have been sent to the jail to kill Dupre."

"Why?"

Kate shrugged. "Beats me. Did Dupre have any idea why Hayes was after him?"

"No."

Amanda finished her scone and washed the last piece down with a sip of her latte.

"What are you doing next?" she asked Kate.

"I set up a meeting with Sally Grace to go over the autopsy report on Michael Israel to see if there's any evidence that he was murdered."

Amanda stood up. "Let me know what you find."

"First thing."

Amanda shook her head. "This case isn't getting any easier."

Amanda was still awkward about her visits to Ben Dodson and she'd told no one--including her father--that she was seeing a psychiatrist.

"I've been reading about you in the papers," Dodson said when Amanda was seated in his office.

"The reporters won't leave me alone," Amanda answered self-consciously.

"Have you had any trouble handling the pressure?"

Amanda nodded. "The first two times I met with Jon Dupre I was terrified."

"I don't think that's an abnormal reaction given the fact that he'd killed his previous lawyer." Dodson smiled. "I guarantee you, I'd have been pretty nervous if you asked me to evaluate him."

Amanda laughed and felt her anxiety ease a bit.

"I guess you're right."

"See, not every fear reaction is irrational."

"I didn't let my fear paralyze me," Amanda said proudly. "I was scared to death, but I forced myself to sit in the same room with Jon."

"That's good. What I want to know is whether you've had any more flashbacks--the kind of feelings that are unexpected."

"Seeing the autopsy photographs of Senator Travis and Wendell Hayes upset me, and that was unusual. I mean, you see those kinds of things all the time in my line of work."

Dodson flashed Amanda a reassuring smile.

"Anyway, the photos did get to me, and my fear of meeting with Dupre was much more intense than the normal tension I always experience when I'm in close quarters with my more dangerous clients."

"But you dealt with it."

Amanda nodded.

"When we talked during your first visit, you expressed some anxiety about continuing to work as a criminal defense attorney. How are you feeling about that?"

"Pretty good, actually." Amanda paused. "There's something funny about Dupre's case. I can't get into the facts . . ."

"Of course."

" . . . but Jon may be innocent, and that made me remember why I got into this business in the first place--to protect people who couldn't protect themselves. So, the case is making me feel better about what I do."

"That's good. What about the nightmares? How are you sleeping?"

"Not too well. I don't have nightmares every night but it happens a few times a week. And it's hard for me to fall asleep. I think I'm afraid to go to sleep because of the nightmares. I've been exhausted a lot since I took on Jon's case."

"Maybe we should consider medication."

"I don't know," she said, even though she'd planned on bringing up taking a sleeping pill. For some reason, this idea embarrassed her.

"Why don't you think about it and tell me what you want to do the next time we meet."

As Amanda rode the elevator to the lobby of Dr. Dodson's building, she thought about The Vaughn Street Glee Club. The idea of a high-level conspiracy going back decades was fascinating but far-fetched. It was a stretch to think that there was a connection between Israel's death and Dupre's case.

The elevator doors opened. Amanda paused in the lobby. Connections--conspiracies were, by definition, acts of people working in concert. Sammy Cortez had told the police that the conspiracy between Pedro Aragon and the others went way back. Was there some connection between Aragon and Hayes that started before Hayes became a lawyer? Amanda walked outside and found herself in the shadow of the Multnomah County Public Library. An idea occurred to her. She crossed the street.

The library, which took up a city block, was Georgian in style, with a ground floor fronted by cool gray limestone, and upper stories of red brick. Amanda climbed the broad granite steps that led to the public entrance and went directly to the History Department on the third floor where she found the library index; row after row of low-tech, wooden drawers stuffed with musty index cards arranged by name, which gave citations to newspaper articles in which the individual on the card was mentioned. Amanda pulled out the drawer marked animals treatment and flipped through the cards until she found several for Pedro Aragon. She listed every newspaper-story reference on her yellow, lined legal pad, then did the same for Wendell Hayes. When she was finished, Amanda made a separate list of all of the stories that mentioned both men.

Periodicals were on the second floor. Amanda decided to work from the oldest stories forward, and the oldest reference was an Oregonian article from 1971. The newspaper stories from that far back were only on microfilm. Amanda found the appropriate roll. She fitted it on a spindle attached to a gray metal scanner and turned the dial. The microfilm raced across the screen fast enough to give her a headache, so she slowed it down. Eventually she reached the Metro section for January 17, 1971. At the bottom of a column was an update of a story about the investigation into a massacre that took place in December of 1970 in North Portland, in which Pedro Aragon was a suspect. The January story concerned the discovery of three handguns in a landfill on the outskirts of Portland. They had been positively identified as weapons used in the December shootout. The handguns had been traced to the home of Milton Hayes, a wealthy Portland lawyer and gun collector, who had reported the weapons stolen in a burglary that had been committed on the evening of the shootings. Buried in the story was an explanation of how the burglars had gained entry to Hayes's house. His son, Wendell, who was home from Georgetown University for the holidays, had forgotten to set the alarm when he left the house with several of his friends to attend a Christmas party.

Amanda found the microfilm spool for December 1970 and located the story about the drug-house massacre. Dead bodies had been found scattered around the first floor of an abandoned house. Most of the victims had been shot to death, but a man in the front hall had had his throat slashed. Traces of heroin had been discovered in several rooms. The police had been able to identify several of the victims as members of a black gang with Los Angeles connections, and the others as Latinos associated with Jesus Delgado, who was suspected of working for a Mexican drug cartel. One of the dead men, Clyde Hopkins, had ties to an organized crime family in Las Vegas. Pedro Aragon, a known associate of Delgado, had been arrested the day after the murders but had been released when the police could not break his alibi.

Could Hayes and Aragon have been involved in the drug-house massacre? Amanda had a hard time picturing a West Hills preppie wiping out armed druggies in a shootout in one of Portland's worst neighborhoods, but Hayes might have been at the house buying drugs, or he could have stolen his father's guns to trade for dope.

Amanda wondered who Hayes's buddies were in December of 1970. They were probably the friends he was with on the night his father's guns were stolen. It would be interesting to get the police reports and find out the names of the boys who were with Hayes when the B-and-E occurred.

Amanda took a break from viewing microfilm and found Wendell Hayes's obituary. Hayes had graduated from Portland Catholic in June of 1970, the same year as the drug-house massacre. He had attended college and law school at Georgetown University. Amanda asked the reference librarian where she could find the yearbook for Portland Catholic. She took it to a table and started leafing through the book.

Hayes had been the senior class vice president, and the president had been Harvey Grant. As she thumbed through the yearbook, Amanda found more familiar names. Burton Rommel and William Kerrigan, Tim's father, were teammates of Hayes on the football and wrestling teams. Amanda remembered that Grant was also a graduate of the law school at Georgetown, and she was pretty certain that he'd received his undergraduate degree from the school.

Amanda checked out the backgrounds of Burton Rommel and William Kerrigan. Neither had gone to Georgetown. Rommel had a BA from Notre Dame and Kerrigan had received degrees from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Amanda returned to the microfilm projector and threaded in another spool, which contained an early reference to Pedro Aragon. She was curious to learn how someone who started out running a drug house in Portland got to be the head of a cartel in Mexico. An hour later, Amanda had learned that Aragon's rapid rise had been made possible by a series of murders, which had started in 1972 with the assassination of Jesus Delgado, Pedro's immediate superior, in the parking lot of a Portland 7-Eleven.

Amanda spent more time going through stories that mentioned Pedro Aragon and Wendell Hayes, but the majority were accounts of cases in which Hayes had represented a client with connections to Aragon. She returned the microfilm and headed back to her office. Amanda had not really believed Sammy Cortez's story about The Vaughn Street Glee Club when she walked into the library, but one piece of information in the newspaper stories had really gotten her thinking: The drug house where the massacre took place was on Vaughn Street.