Detective Wade Jackson Mystery - 02 - Secrets to Die For (19 page)

He made himself read the rest of the article, which concluded with the announcement of a candlelight vigil for Raina Hughes that evening. Sophie’s account of Raina’s childhood affected him deeply. Raina’s grandmother had given him many of the same details when he talked to her after Raina’s death, but he had been in investigative mode then. The drug addict mother, the tumultuous custody issues, the mother’s death, Raina as a volunteer—they had been a collection of facts. Now they were the story of a young woman who had triumphed over adversity only to have her life stolen. The world was a poorer place without Raina Hughes.

Was Bruce Gorman the monster who had done this? Why did DNA analysis take four damn days?

Katie came into the kitchen, so he pushed the paper aside. “Good morning, sweetie.”

“Hey.” She opened the fridge. “What’s for breakfast?” Renee had dropped Katie off earlier on her way to a work out at the YMCA pool. His daughter seemed mostly unaffected by the last five years with an alcoholic mother. That’s what worried him most—the scars he couldn’t see.

“Toast and scrambled eggs.”

As they were finishing up, Katie said, “Are we going to work on the trike today?”

Jackson had planned to look at evidence and review his case notes, but it was Sunday. He wasn’t going to miss this opportunity to spend time with his daughter. “Sure. If we want to ride this summer, we’d better make some progress.”

The garage had become a cluttered mess of VW parts. He’d bought an old ‘75 Volkswagen bug and had cut the rear end out in one big chunk, using a Sawzall and sheer determination. A junkyard had picked up the rest of the vehicle for scrap metal. Jackson had also purchased an ‘82 Goldwing motorcycle. Now he and Katie were in the process of making a frame that would eventually connect the front end of the Goldwing with the back axle and engine of the VW.

At first, Katie had just watched and talked and kept him company. After a while she’d decided she wanted to help. Jackson couldn’t be more pleased. As a younger man, he’d envisioned himself working on cars with his son someday, as his father had done with him. Building a trike with his daughter was just as good. He wished his father were still here to see this. The old man would have gotten a kick out of the whole crazy process. Tragically, his parents had been murdered in their home when Jackson was still a patrol cop. They had caught and convicted the killer, but the lone gunman had remained silent and the department had never discovered the
why
of it.

“More welding?” Katie rubbed her hands together.

“Yep. First, we’ll weld foot pegs to the frame. Then weld the neck. You want to take a crack at it?”

“Of course.” It was the welding that had fascinated Katie and pulled her into working on the three-wheeled motorcycle. He couldn’t wait to take her out on a ride. Trikes offered all the joy of riding a motorcycle but were a hundred times safer.

Jackson helped Katie set up the parts, then handed her the welding helmet. He didn’t need to supervise; she was darn good. Her seams were smoother and stronger than his. Jackson watched with pride as his fourteen-year-old daughter laid down a perfect bead. After a few minutes, he left her to it and went back to rebuilding the carburetor on the VW engine. This was something he was good at, something he’d actually done a few times with his own hands. Everything else he’d accomplished so far on the trike, he’d learned off the Internet—and by trial and error. With this project, he felt like a blind man groping his way through a junkyard, with only occasional shouted directions from an unseen stranger.

After Katie showed him the nearly completed frame, she asked, “Can I go over to Adam’s this afternoon?”

Jackson didn’t care for Adam, but he couldn’t pinpoint why. “Are his parents going to be home?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll want to talk to them and confirm that.”

Katie rolled her eyes. “I think I’ve earned that trust by now.”

“We’ll see.”

Later, when Katie had gone off to see Adam, Jackson poured more coffee and sat down at the kitchen table with Raina’s purse and cell phone.

He started with the phone, checking recent calls, then realized he might as well take it back to his computer and log all the names into a Word document as he went along. He embraced any technology or idea that allowed him to work more efficiently.

Jackson listed incoming and outgoing calls for the three days prior to Raina’s death. Calls to her grandmother, Jamie, and Paul Phillips were most prominent, with four, seven, and three, respectively. Raina had also received two calls from someone named Chris Wallenberg. Was Chris a man or woman? More important, was Chris a drug dealer?

Jackson had been thinking about Raina’s drug use ever since he’d left the autopsy. Initially, it had caught him off guard. Nothing he’d learned about Raina had suggested a drug problem. Her mother’s death from drug abuse should have been the kind of tragic experience that kept a young woman from ever trying recreational drugs. What had Kera said?
It’s in the DNA
. Did Raina have a genetic disposition that led her to drug addiction? Jackson had seen so many families with generations of addicts that he was starting to think some people came into the world without a chance in hell of living the good life. Raina had not been dysfunctional. So her drug use couldn’t have been out of control.

Jackson used his own cell phone to call Paul, who didn’t answer, then Chris, who did.

“Hello?” The voice was definitely female.

“Chris, it’s Detective Wade Jackson. I’m investigating the death of Raina Hughes. Can you tell me how you knew her?”

A moment of silence. Jackson wished he’d been more diplomatic, but he had a lot of calls to make and not much time for small talk.

“We were in a class together at LCC. A sociology class.” Her voice was appropriately subdued.

“Who’s the teacher?”

“Mr. Arlington. Why?”

“I’m investigating. Bear with me. Why did you call Raina on Wednesday, February 13th?”

“I missed class that morning. I wanted to know if we had an assignment.” Chris was a little less subdued now.

“You called twice.”

“She didn’t pick up the first time, so I called back.”

“Did you ever spend time with Raina outside of class?”

“I sat with her in the cafeteria once, but that’s it.”

“Thanks for your time.”

Jackson spent an hour making calls and getting nowhere. As he picked up Raina’s purse again, his phone rang.

“Jackson? It’s Gunderson.”

“What have you got?”

“Raina Hughes had hydrocodone in her blood, her hair, and her nail tissue. She was a heavy Vicodin user.”

“Thanks, Gunderson. Don’t you ever take a day off?”

“Do you? You’re working right now, aren’t you?”

Jackson smiled. “You know it.”

Vicodin meant Raina likely had a prescription for pain pills. Did she have an injury that no one had mentioned? Some young people suffered from chronic pain as a result of sports injuries or car accidents. Jackson would give Raina the benefit of the doubt until he learned more. He needed to find out who had written the prescription and why had they let her take so many pills that she had signs of liver damage at the age of twenty? Did her drug use factor into her death?

Jackson closed his eyes and tried to think of absolutely nothing for a minute or two. Sometimes, he had to clear his brain and start fresh. Then the ideas started flowing again.

Nothing came to him except a twinge of gut pain.

It was Sunday, but in the world of law enforcement that didn’t matter, so Jackson called Ed Stevens at home. He needed a profile now. Despite the mountain of circumstantial evidence, he was starting to think Gorman was telling some version of the truth. If Gorman wasn’t the killer, then someone else out there was raping and beating lesbians and he needed help finding this SOB before another young woman died.

Stevens picked up right away. “Jackson, I meant to call you yesterday, but I got sucked into an all day Cub Scout thing.”

“Sorry about calling you on a Sunday, but I have a perpetrator with escalating violence. I’m afraid another woman will be killed while the wrong guy sits in jail.”

“Tell me about the case.”

“It’s a mess. I’ve got a viable suspect who admits finding and moving the body, but he swears he didn’t assault her. I just learned that my homicide victim and two other rape victims were all gay. So now I’m thinking the crimes are connected and were all committed by the same homophobic person.”

“Is the guy who found the body a lesbian hater?”

“He doesn’t seem to be.”

“The lesbian hatred helps narrow the profile, but it may not make him easier to find.”

“Who am I looking for?”

“Most likely he’s young, under thirty. He’s conservative and may be religious, but in a cafeteria way.”

“What do you mean?”

“He chooses the parts of religion that suit him and ignores the rest.”

“Is that where the gay hatred comes from?”

“Maybe. Just a sec.” Stevens had a brief muffled conversation with someone else, then returned to the phone. “Sorry. Where were we?”

“The perpetrator’s hatred for lesbians.”

“It could be very personal. A girlfriend who dumped him for another woman. A mother who came out of the closet, say, when he was in high school, and caused him great embarrassment. Or it could simply be an attitude passed down from a parent.”

“None of which will show up in a criminal record.” Jackson caught up on his notes as he talked. “What kind of priors is he likely to have?”

“Trespassing, sexual harassment. Maybe an assault-and-battery charge. This perp has little self-control and no sense of boundaries. It’s interesting that he’s attacking gay women and not men. I’m not even sure I would label that homophobia. Now that I know about the
lesbophobia
, I’ll dig around some more tomorrow and get back to you.”

“Thanks. You’ve been helpful already. I’ll let you get back to your Cub Scouts.”

Jackson turned to his computer. Armed with a more specific profile, it was time to hit CODIS again. This perp may not have started his crime spree in Eugene. Quince had already searched for rape cases with similar details and not found anything concrete, but he had not known then about the lesbian issue. Jackson worried that similar clusters of assaults on gay women might not even make it into the database. What if other detectives had failed to ask the right questions and victims had been reluctant to provide the critical information? Was there a silent epidemic of violence against gay women?

If you couldn’t identify it, how on earth could you stop it?

Jamie’s heart stopped for a beat when she saw the story on the front page of the City section. Raina was boldly displayed in full color, smiling as she climbed into her Volvo. Jamie remembered the day she’d taken the photo in front of Martha’s house. It was Raina’s birthday and she had to go to work. A hole opened in her chest, and Jamie thought she would stop breathing. She felt like crying, but no tears came. Would she ever be able to look at a picture of Raina without feeling like this?

Jamie read the first paragraph, then turned the paper over. She couldn’t read about Raina, not yet. She tried to think about something else. The full impact suddenly made her heart skip another beat. Her parents would see this story in the newspaper and know for certain that Raina was gay. If Raina was gay, they might start to think that Jamie was too.

She jumped up from the table and began to pace the cluttered kitchen.

Then what? Jamie had been over this in her mind a million times. The worst-case scenario was that they would disown her entirely, cut off all communication and money. Jamie had tried to imagine her life without her mother’s predictable comfort and her father’s wall of dependability. The idea that she could never go home again was terrifying. Would her Aunt Sue also disown her? She knew her grandparents would never speak to her again, unless she ‘repented’ and gave up the homosexual lifestyle.