Blessed are the Dead (7 page)

 

Chapter 10

I
SIT STRAIGHT
up in bed in a panic, knowing something is wrong. The glowing red numbers on my clock say 4:10
A.M
.

Then, seeing my phone in its charger on my nightstand, I realize what I've done. It has been off since Mass yesterday. My second mistake was getting home late and tumbling into bed without checking my phone for messages or watching the news.

But it's too late. Fumbling for my phone, I turn it on. Six missed calls. Shit. Listening to them, I rush to grab the newspaper outside my door. The giant headline above the fold causes me to drop my phone and sink onto my bed.

“Police Rescue Rosarito Girl, 9, from Kidnapper: 43-­year-­old Man Arrested.”

I start to hyperventilate, thinking they have found Jasmine alive. But it's another little girl. I cringe when I read the byline on the story—­May DuPont. Her story says that the little girl was walking to a convenience store in downtown Rosarito late Sunday night when the kidnapper grabbed her and forced her into his car. Two dockworkers on their way to work saw the kidnapping and called 911 with a description of the car. Fifteen minutes later, police found the car parked in a liquor-­store parking lot a few blocks away.

They surrounded the car but it was empty. A clerk ran outside the store and shouted that a man had just run out of the back door of his store. Police arrested a man a few blocks away who fit the description the clerk gave the cops—­a white man with blond hair in his forties. Jack Dean Johnson. He's a convicted kidnapper.

Inside the vehicle, police found a piece of rope, a pair of little girl's underwear, a plastic tiara, a small stuffed kitten, an open can of orange soda, and a bag of licorice. I wonder how on earth May got those details—­evidence that most cops would usually not divulge.

I read on. My hand is shaking. Police found the little girl walking down a residential road near the liquor store. Apparently, when her abductor had gone into the store, she was able to untie a rope around her ankle that kept her bound to the car's seat. The little girl simply opened the door, left the parking lot, and started walking home.

I reread the story with astonishment. May quotes the police saying they are looking at the suspect in connection with Jasmine's disappearance.

This little girl got away. Tears prick my eyes. How different my world would be if Caterina had escaped. It is bittersweet. This girl escaped, which makes me want to throw my fists up into the air in a victory shout. But too many others haven't.

I suddenly wish I knew more details about Caterina's abduction. The unspoken rule in my family is that talking about Caterina's kidnapping and murder is forbidden. As a child, I could share happy memories of Caterina, but any questions I had about what happened to her were pushed away like someone's hastily tucking a used handkerchief into their pocket.

“Let's not talk about that,” my mother would say. “We want to remember the happy times. We'll let the police worry about the ugliness. Let's always remember the good things, darling.”

I felt horrible for asking. The thin veil of happiness around my mother instantly tore when I brought up my sister. After a few times, I stopped asking. More than anything in the world, I wanted to put the joy back in my mother's face. I knew I had to forget about trying to learn what happened to Caterina if I wanted my mother to be happy again.

Until I started working as a reporter, I hadn't even considered going against my mother's wishes. The closest I have come is requesting clips on Caterina.

When I first started at the paper, I asked for all the archived newspaper clips. I'm still grateful that the news librarian never asked a single question about why I wanted information about a murdered girl with my last name. She handed me the thick folder without saying a word, but her eyes were moist and pink around the edges. I quickly shoved the file in a desk drawer as if the thick manila surface burned by fingertips. It remains there, buried, untouched, under a stack of papers.

 

Chapter 11

I
RUSH OUT
the door without showering, pulling on some dirty jeans from the floor. I know where I need to be.

The newspaper conference room is cold, and I pull my jacket tighter before I take my seat, avoiding eye contact with May, who is filing her nails. It's only eight. May doesn't usually start her shift until two, so she's obviously been called in to work. Finally, Kellogg and Evans file in.

“First of all, I want to say congratulations to May,” Evans says. “She scooped all the papers and TV stations with her story this morning. Great job.”

My face grows warm as the blood rushes to it. I hadn't even bothered to look at the
Trib
this morning. I just assumed that everyone else had the story as well.

“How did you get the scoop anyway?” I turn to May. I hold my breath. Was it that cop, Donovan?

“I can't reveal my sources.” Of course, she would say that.

“She received a good tip, and the watch commander confirmed it,” Evans says, turning to me. “Now, onto assignments. Gabriella, go to the jail and request an interview with the suspect. Of course, your main question—­if you get into interview him—­is whether he also took the other Rosarito girl.”

“Her name's Jasmine,” I say with gritted teeth. She ignores me.

Nobody will bother the family of the latest kidnapping victim, and our paper is not going to use her name because she is a minor.

“They've been through enough,” Evan says. For once, I agree with her.

Evans then turns to May, who is looking smug as hell, and tells her to cover the press conference and keep working her sources for more details about the kidnapping. Nicole is searching records for any more history on the perp.

The press conference should be mine. I look at Kellogg, urging him with my eyes to intervene, but he won't look up from the papers he's shuffling. Say something. For once in your life, stand up to her. But he has obviously checked out of this conversation. I give up.

I should be at the cop shop where the action is. Instead, they send me on a wild-­goose chase. The kidnapper's not going to talk to anyone. Why would he? Even if he wanted to talk to reporters, his lawyer would forbid it.

I get to the jail at nine—­a half hour before visiting hours begins—­but ­people are already lined up outside. I'm surprised to spot Andy Black from the
Trib
in line ahead of me. Great. The one person I don't want to see—­my competition.

The kidnapping story is big-­league, so they must have sent one of the veteran reporters to the press conference and stuck Black with the crappy jail assignment. I don't see any other reporters in line, only ­people there to visit friends and family, I guess. A few women hold small children by the hands.

I shift from foot to foot anxiously. While I'm in line, Nicole calls. According to court records, Johnson was convicted about seventeen years ago of kidnapping a woman at gunpoint and taking her to Oregon, where she escaped. He served three years in San Quentin Penitentiary.

“Holy shit, this creep's a piece of work,” she says. “He was sent back to prison once. Parole violation for—­get this—­locking a woman in a closet after she refused to have sex with him.”

I hear the sounds of rustling paper.

“Oh good Lord! You've got to be kidding,” she says. I wait, bracing myself. “Okay, listen to this, it says here that he locked the woman in the closet with a rat. Apparently, prosecutors couldn't prove Johnson knew about the rat. She was trapped with it for three days.”

“That's terrible.”

“Gets worse. When a neighbor finally rescued her, he found the woman nearly comatose, sitting in the corner, covered in blood, staring into space. Her fingernails were broken to the quick. From the marks on the door, it looked like she tried to scratch her way out. The blood was from the rat. She was clutching it in her lap. It was dead. They had to pry it out of her hands. She's institutionalized now.”

I have no words.

After a few seconds of silence, Nicole asks, “Are you ready to talk to this guy if he approves your visit?”

“Guess I better be.”

W
H
EN THE DOORS
to the jail lobby open, Black and I head straight to a small table to grab interview request forms. We then get in another line to the front desk. When I finally get to the desk, I hand the clerk my form and my California driver's license. She tells me to take a seat. I don't sit by Black, who is reading the paper. I sneak looks at him since there is nothing better to do. He's nice to look at in a prep-­school-­boy sort of way. He's got these GQ cheekbones and sensuous lips. He dresses better than most reporters, too, wearing dress shirts with the sleeves pushed up. He drives a BMW, and I once saw a bag of golf clubs in his trunk.

He catches me giving him the once-­over, so I start flipping through my empty notebook, pretending to be busy.

After about twenty minutes, the clerk calls my name. My stomach lurches with anxiety. Black glances up, surprised, since he submitted his interview request form before mine. I shrug and wink at him as I walk past. I lock my purse in one of the lobby lockers, grabbing only a pencil and notepad—­all I'm allowed to bring with me. A guard calls my name, I follow him through a doorway, then he motions me through a metal detector. Once I'm through, he points me toward another door. I open it and am suddenly face-­to-­face with Detective Donovan in a narrow corridor. At the other end, I see a bank of elevators and another guard sitting at a desk. There is no room to pass without touching. One of us has to move out of the way. It's a standoff. His eyes widen a bit.

“Miss Giovanni, fancy meeting you here.”

I match his formal tone. “Detective.”

He's got those damn sunglasses on. Inside. Again. I can't see his eyes but am mesmerized by his mouth. I force myself to look away before he notices. We are so close I can nearly feel the heat rising off his body. He smells like an intoxicating mixture of coffee and laundry soap and something else that triggers a long, slow tingle to begin at my scalp and travel down my body.

Of course, he knows why I'm there, but even so, he still seems a little surprised.

“He agreed to talk to you? I'm not so sure that's a good idea.”

That irritates me. “For you? Or for me?”

He look as if he's about to say something, then changes his mind, gently holding my shoulders and maneuvering me to the side so he can squeeze by.

I'm pressed against the wall, but still there is not enough room. His body slightly brushes against mine as he passes, sending a small shiver down my spine. Without turning, he says over his shoulder, “Watch yourself.”

Then he's gone.

My nerves are aflame from the brief contact with him, and it takes a second for me to compose myself before I head to the end of the corridor. When I'm in front of the desk, the guard looks up from his magazine and yawns.

He points to an elevator. “Second floor.”

 

Chapter 12

T
HE ELEVATOR OPENS
to a dimly lit hall with three phone-­booth-­sized cubicles. I take a step out of the elevator into the dark shadows, nervously stroking my miraculous medal on its slender chain. Spotlights shine down on the cubbies before me. Each one has a scratched window above a narrow desk, chair, and phone. On the other side of the windows, a corridor mirrors the one I'm in, except instead of a bank of elevators, there is a door leading to a hallway with bright lights.

Cameras mounted on the wall follow my every move. After a moment, a guard unlocks the door leading to the inmates' half of the room. I crane my neck to see. A man walks in wearing a baggy orange jumpsuit. He is lurching a bit, dragging one leg slightly behind him. He looks down as the guard unchains the handcuffs from the manacle at his waist. He's about six feet tall but can't weigh more than 150 pounds. I stand, waiting, and watching him. His blond hair is thin and slicked back away from his prominent forehead, and he has a pale, slight moustache. His thin lips don't adequately cover his teeth, his cheeks are sunken, and his eyeballs bulge slightly. Something about the combination of his features gives him a slight resemblance to a skull.

Then it hits me.

Holy Mary Mother of God. It's the cabbie who gave me the creeps when I was in front of Jasmine's apartment building.

Jack Dean Johnson looks up and surprises me with a somewhat boyish-­looking grin. I catch myself instinctively starting to smile back but then clamp my lips together. He walks to the middle cubicle and indicates I should sit down opposite him. He methodically begins to clean the phone on his shirt before putting it to his ear. I take my phone down from the wall and hastily wipe it with my shirt. When I lift it to my ear, I notice that my hand is shaking.

“My name's Gabriella. I'm with the
Bay Herald.
”

He just nods at me. I'm nervous. There is something about the way he looks at me that is unnerving, something off about him that I can't quite put my finger on. It's as if he's looking right through me. There's not a shred of warmth in his glassy eyes. It sends a chill through me. I start out with an innocuous question.

“Why are you limping?”

“Motorcycle accident.”

I decide to just go for it. “I heard what happened with that little girl. Did you take Jasmine Baker, too?”

Jasmine disappeared six days ago. Like Caterina, she could be held captive somewhere. I need to find out if she is still alive.

He gives me that same sort of shy smile, as if we are flirting. He's missing a few teeth. One of his dark eyes is wandering off to the side as we talk while the other remains steeled on me.

“Yeah, my lawyer will be pissed if I say anything about that.”

I look hard at him. And listen. This is what a man who kidnaps children looks and sounds like. His tone is matter-­of-­fact. His voice is in the normal range, not high-­pitched but more like one of the guys. He would fit into any blue-­collar world. He would not seem like a man who preys on children. He might not even trigger bells of alarm in most women.

But I know. He is, at the least, a kidnapper, and at the worst, the incarnation of evil. I need to figure out what to say and to word it in exactly the right way. Just like when I bummed a smoke from Richard Silva and Kelly Baker, I can convince this man I'm his friend. I dig deep into the darkness inside me to discern what he must be feeling. Jasmine's life might depend on it.

“Don't you want to tell your side of the story? Maybe you can help ­people understand what happened. Maybe it's not so bad. What the police are saying right now doesn't look too good for you. ”

“They can say whatever they want.” He calmly watches me. There is that vacant look again. I figure I have nothing to lose. I might as well get to the point.

“Is Jasmine Baker alive? Did you take her?”

His expression doesn't change. “Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. I'm the only one who knows. The cops keep dragging me out of bed to ask about her. They think I'm going to talk to them. I'm playing with them—­that's what I'm doing. I even said that. This morning I told one of them, ‘I'm going to royally fuck with you.' ”

I say nothing. You learn early on in the news business that the easiest way to get ­people to blab is to keep your own trap shut. He wants to talk. I'm going to let him. My hand trembles, so I press it into my lap.

“They'll never find any evidence against me. Right now, they are trying to connect me to every kid who has ever disappeared in the Bay Area.”

A chill shoots through me.

“Have you ever killed someone?”

He watches me with a stony stare. I wait for his eye to wander, but it doesn't. Two black orbs without light are focused on me. A few seconds pass. I don't look away. I don't even breathe. Finally, he answers.

“I've left ­people lying on the ground and not moving when I'm done with them.”

It's as if he just described a chess move. Calm, matter-­of-­fact, and calculated. My heart is jumping around in my throat, but I need to play it cool. His words have shaken me. But playing chess has taught me how to bide my time, wait for my opening.

“How come you didn't know if they were dead? Wouldn't you hear about it on the news or something?”

“Lots of ­people don't have families or anyone who cares about them. Like runaways. You may find this hard to believe, but I have my standards.”

Standards? It sounds like the opposite of having standards. What he is describing reminds me of vampire books I have read where the easiest victims are the ones nobody will miss.

He doesn't directly answer my question, but speaks in generalities. I notice that when he is thinking hard about something or remembering an incident, that is when his left eye starts to wander, looking off to the side while his other bulging eye remains focused on me.

“Were any of these . . . were any of them children?”

­“People who kill children sometimes do so to hide something they've done, so they don't get caught. That's just self-­preservation.”

“Hide something they've done? Like having sex with them?” The phrase is distasteful on my tongue. I avoid the word molestation. But I'm careful with the way I say it—­like it's no big thing.

He shrugs.

“What do you think about ­people like that—­­people who do things like that with children?” I swallow my revulsion.

“This type of sex has been happening for centuries and—­like the war on drugs—­there's nothing that can be done to stop it,” he says. “In other countries, it's legal.”

“So do you think that makes it right?” Nothing in my tone is judgmental. I need to keep this guy talking.

He doesn't answer. He looks me right in the eyes. No wandering eye now. His bulging eyes are like a black pit. There is nothing there. I have to break eye contact and glance down at my notebook. I try again. I know I have a short period before the guard returns. This is my one shot. I remember Black waiting in the lobby for his chance. I have to try again. I ask the question in a different way.

“Have you ever seriously hurt a child?”

“My lawyer would kick me in the ass if I answer that.”

I try a different tactic to keep him talking.

“Do you consider yourself a ‘bad' or a ‘good' person?”

“Good question.” He smiles at me and lifts his hand to his chin, thinking. “I don't know. That takes a lot of explaining and a lot of conversations. I'm different. I'm different because I do what I want, when I want, how I want.”

“I don't understand,” I say, pausing in my note taking. “What does that mean?”

“Listen, I've studied Buddhism for nearly two decades now. I interpret the religion as a quest to find what makes me happy. It gives me permission to do what makes me
righ­teously
happy.”

“Even if that involves hurting a child?”

“Yes,” he says without hesitation. He leans forward eagerly. “Buddhism allows me to find out about me and what makes me happy. I don't have to offer confession or give offerings to TV evangelists.”

I don't know much about Buddhism, but I know enough to realize this guy is twisting a peaceful religion into a justification for murder. This is where his crazy shines through bright and sparkly. The more engaged and excited he becomes, the more his eye begins to wander again. I try to keep him talking.

“Do you have any regrets about anything you have done in your life?” It's a calculated question. I'm looking for any sign of guilt or empathy, but I already know I'm not going to find it. I've done a little bit of research about sociopathic behavior in the past.

One of the most marked traits of a sociopath is his inability to empathize, especially in regard to the pain of their victims. Sociopaths can be charming but are truly incapable of feelings that other ­people have, especially love. It is also nearly impossible for them to consistently tell the truth. They feel “entitled” to certain things, believing their self-­serving behaviors are permissible in society even at the expense of others' “rights.”

If Johnson can find justification in a religion to murder ­people, he fits the mold in more than one way.

“What's done is done. A lot of things aren't as traumatic as ­people make them out to be.”

I fight the urge to glance at my watch. I know I'm running out of time. Black is waiting in the lobby and is going to have his turn next, I'm sure. This is probably going to be my first and last interview with him. As soon as his lawyer finds out about this interview, all bets are off. Just then, the guard opens the door to his side of the interview room. Our time is up. I'd been holding this back, waiting for the right moment to gauge his reaction.

“I saw you,” I say. “I saw you on Main Street in front of Jasmine Baker's building.”

He just looks at me and raises his eyebrow at me as he shrugs. “I know.”

What does that mean? The guard is tapping him on the shoulder now.

“Did you take Jasmine?” I blurt out. “Is she alive somewhere? If you tell me, they can still find her—­then you'd only face a kidnapping charge instead of murder. This is your last chance to tell me.”

He hangs up without answering. The guard cuffs him and leads him away. Before he goes, he looks back over his shoulder at me with a huge grin that makes me punch the elevator button again and again.