Justice Denied (24 page)

Mel had been quiet for a while. Now she spoke up. “What do you mean, old stuff?” she asked.

“Before the crime lab moved into the new building, they had storage facilities here, there, and the next place, and things were a mess. No one could find anything. Once we had everything gathered in one spot, it was my job to organize it. And I did. Working with years of unprocessed rape kits was no fun. I developed a system and was starting to get it organized, but then Yolanda came along and started messing around with those old evidence kits, ones from ten or fifteen or even twenty years ago. And even though I’ve tried talking to her about it, she hasn’t stopped, and Mrs. Hennessey won’t make her stop, either, probably because Yolanda is free and I’m not.”

“Free?” I asked.

“Right,” Analise said. “Someone else, I’m not sure who, is paying her wages. Mine come out of the crime lab budget. But I’ll be a lot more expensive when this is all over. I’m on leave to
use up the rest of my vacation. After that, I’ll quit. Then I’m going to court.”

I made the connection then. Yolanda Andrade had to be the DNA profiler SASAC was paying for, the one I’d heard about on Friday night at the fund-raiser. When I glanced in Mel’s direction, she was grim-faced. And I knew why. If you’re going to launch a vigilante action, how much better to do it against people the cops didn’t know they were looking for. Those long-stored rape kits, with their unidentified DNA profiles, would be an open book. One of those could very well lead back to LaShawn Tompkins, for example, and to many others as well. Like to any number of ex-cons whose DNA profiles had been entered into the CODIS system or into our statewide DNA database simply because they’d been locked up in our prison system. Knowing we had stumbled into something important, I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.

“Did she ever get any hits on those old cases?” Mel asked. Her tone was easy, conversational, but I knew she was as on edge as I was.

“I never saw any,” Analise answered. “Getting a hit is a big deal, you see. We mark them off on a board and everything. We’re at 406 right now—406 hits, that is. And once there is one, the kit is moved to a different section in the evidence room—from cold case to pending.”

“Another part of your filing system?” Mel asked.

Analise nodded.

“Tell us about it,” Mel said.

“The filing system? It’s really nothing more or less than a shelf list, like the shelf lists kept by libraries everywhere. It’s an inventory system—a way to tell what’s missing and what isn’t.”

“Except this one isn’t about books,” I suggested.

“I added a few bells and whistles,” Analise said modestly.

“What kinds of bells and whistles?”

“The kits are filed by year and date,” she said. “A year or so ago, once I got wise to what Yolanda was doing, I started keeping track. I assigned each kit its own separate number—a sort of Dewey decimal number of rape kits. And that’s one of the things I did every single day—checked the shelves to see if any of my control numbers were missing.”

“And if they were?” Mel asked.

“I wrote down the kit number, noted when it left the shelf, when it came back on its own, or when I found it somewhere it didn’t belong.”

“You don’t still happen to have that list, do you?” Mel asked.

“Of course I do,” Analise returned. “Not here, not with me. But at home. Would you like to have a copy?”

“Yes,” Mel said. “It would be really helpful.”

“Fine, then,” Analise told us. “Once I finish here we can stop by the house. But I have to finish shelving the rest of the books.”

I had just that moment fallen in love with Analise Kim and her insatiable love of order. In fact, I had to resist the temptation to reach out and smother that incredibly wonderful record-keeping woman in an old-fashioned bear hug, but that might have been as unwelcome as an improperly aligned book spine. “We wouldn’t even consider taking you away from that,” I said.

At which point my phone rang. The withering look Analise sent in my direction made it clear cell phones were an unwelcome intrusion in
her
library. I raced for the door.

“It’s me,” Todd Hatcher said. “I was hoping to talk to you. I’ve
turned up some pretty interesting stuff today, but it’s getting late. I’m about to head home.”

“You’re still at Belltown Terrace?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I ordered a pizza for dinner. Hope you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind at all,” I said. “Hope it was good. Now, did Ross Connors happen to give you access to the SHIT squad’s LexisNexis program?”

“No,” Todd said. “He didn’t need to. I have my own. Why?”

“Because neither Mel nor I have our computers with us at the moment, and we need a whole batch of research done in a hell of a hurry.”

“When it comes to research, I’m your guy,” Todd said. Coming from someone else it might have sounded conceited. Coming from him I suspected it was absolutely true. “What do you need?” he asked.

“Every single thing you can find on both Destry Hennessey and Anita Bowdin. Two esses on Hennessey, and Bowdin is B-O-W-D-I-N. Find whatever you can and print it.”

“No problem,” Todd said. “I’ll get right on it. When do you think you’ll be here?”

“That remains to be seen,” I said. “We’ve got a few things to handle on the way.”

I
was fine while we hung around the library waiting for Analise Kim to finish her volunteer shift of shelving books. I was fine while we drove to her house to pick up a copy of her “shelf list.” But after that, on the way back to Belltown Terrace in downtown Seattle, I fell off the cliff.

Once upon a time I could do all-nighters. I used to be able to go without sleep for seemingly days on end without it bothering me, but time has a way of catching up with a guy. On the drive north from Burien, as I fought to stay awake, I was forced to con-front the fact that J. P. Beaumont is no Jack Bauer from 24. It helped my ego that, despite Mel’s relative “youth” and the nap she had grabbed earlier in the day, Mel was struggling to stay awake, too.

The only thing that helped was talking. “So what do we do?” Mel asked. She was clutching the papers Analise had given us.

What they contained was more a series of diagrams than an actual list. Each sheet represented one year and was covered with consecutively numbered boxes. I could see how numbering each of the rape kits in that fashion would have made it easy for Analise Kim to scan her shelves each day to see what, if anything, was missing. Annotations in some of the boxes, “out” or “in,” followed by dates, showed when the kit had disappeared and returned.

“As in?”

“Do we call Ross, have him send someone in to isolate all the kits that have been tampered with so they can be analyzed, or, more likely, reanalyzed?” she asked.

“Bad idea,” I said. “As soon as we do that, we tip our hand. Once Yolanda Andrade knows we’re looking into this, you can bet everyone else involved will know, too. I’m sure that’s why Ross didn’t want us talking to Destry, either.”

“It hurts me to think that Destry’s crooked,” Mel said.

“Me too,” I said. The very idea left me feeling half sick.

“And if there have been evidence-handling irregularities in the crime lab…”

She didn’t finish the sentence and she didn’t need to. I knew exactly what she meant. That kind of scandal could jeopardize convictions that were years in the past.

“Todd’s on it,” I said.

“On what?”

“He called while we were at the library. Since he was still at the house, I put him to work tracking down information on Destry Hennessey.” I paused, worried that I was venturing onto
thin ice. “I also asked him to track down whatever he could on Anita Bowdin.”

“Good idea,” Mel said, and that’s all she said.

When we got to the condo Todd greeted us like an eager puppy that’s been left on its own all day long. He had a fistful of papers to show us. He had stuff he wanted to talk about, and he was disappointed when I waved him off.

“Sorry, Todd,” I told him. “Mel and I are both working on two hours’ worth of sleep. Talking to us now would be a waste of breath and effort. You’re more than welcome to stay over. The guest room’s made up and available. Help yourself.”

And off to bed we went.

Women perform these mysterious but invisible rituals that men mostly miss. For instance, I never really understood that when Mel goes down the hall every night before we go to bed, she uses some potion or other to remove her makeup. That night, tired as she was, she went to bed without performing that little chore. And since she’s usually up before I am and down the hall in her bathroom, it’s usually a nonissue.

The next morning, though, I happened to wake up first, and I was shocked. Mel looked like a raccoon.

“Are you all right?” I asked when she finally blinked awake.

“Sleepy,” she said. “Why?”

“You look like someone blacked both your eyes.”

She uttered a strangled little sound that was halfway between a whimper and a legitimate
eek.
Then she leaped out of bed and, stark naked, raced down the hall to her bathroom. The guestroom bathroom. She came back a few minutes later wrapped in a robe, carrying her clothing, and absolutely furious—at me.

“Why didn’t you
tell
me Todd was sleeping over?” she demanded.

“You were right there when I told him he was welcome to stay,” I countered.

“Yes,” she hissed back. “But you never told me he’d
accepted!
”

In other words, the Ides of March didn’t get off to the most auspicious of starts around our place. While Mel showered in my bathroom, I went out to the kitchen to make coffee. Todd was there, eating cold leftover pizza. He didn’t say a word about Mel, and neither did I.

Todd gave me a choice of two different stacks of paper, one with reprints of articles on Destry Hennessey and the other, far larger, devoted to Anita Bowdin. I picked the Anita option and retreated to my recliner to go to work.

What I read to begin with was mostly one puff piece after another, many of them dealing with Anita’s work in founding and maintaining the SASAC. Tired of reading the same thing over and over, I skipped to what Analise Kim would have referred to as the FIFO—First In First Out—program and skipped back to the earliest one I could find, a
New York Times
feature article that profiled a group of six exceptionally brilliant female students, all of whom had enrolled in prestigious colleges at a time when most of their contemporaries were just venturing into high school.

Anita Bowdin, daughter of a university physics professor and an insurance executive, was one of the six very young women. All of them came from upper-crust, privileged backgrounds. All of them voiced concerns about whether or not they’d be able to fit in with the older students around them. All of them expressed some worry about being able to keep up with the course work. All of
them credited teachers for encouraging them to strive. I was struck by the one Anita Bowdin mentioned—Sister Helen Thomas of Sisters of the Sacred Heart School, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

So Anita Bowdin had attended a parochial school. Was that a connection? Did the fact that Anita Bowdin had attended Catholic schools as a child have something to do with the fact that a mysterious nun was somehow involved in our series of homicides?

The next media mention of Anita Bowdin came two years later, in the July 7 issue of
Ann Arbor News,
where she was mentioned in her father’s obituary.

Died unexpectedly in his home.
In the old days, when journalism was a more gentlemanly pursuit, those words constituted media shorthand and media newspeak for suicide. They were used primarily when either the deceased or his survivors had enough media pull that no one wanted to mention that the dead guy pulled his own plug.

The rest of the article was a mostly laudatory recitation of his educational and employment background. Anita’s name came at the very end, where she and her mother, Rachel Bowdin, were listed as survivors.

Those two snippets of Anita Bowdin’s history were as far as I’d managed to make it when Mel finally emerged from the bedroom. She was not only dressed—she was dressed to the nines: heels, panty hose, skirt, silk blouse, and blazer. Every
hair was in place. Her makeup was impeccable. In other words, she was clothed in the full armor of God and ready to take on all comers.

“All right,” she said coolly, ignoring me and looking Todd straight in the eye. “What have we got?”

Wordlessly he passed Mel the Destry Hennessey file. She took that and a cup of coffee and headed for the window seat. For the next several mintues the atmosphere in the room was thick with tension. It was a relief when my phone rang.

“Detective Beaumont?”

“Yes.”

“Detective Donner here, Ambrose Donner with Bountiful PD. Sorry I wasn’t able to get that composite from the Escobar case off to you yesterday like I said I would. Turns out I ran into, shall we say, a few difficulties.”

“I know how that goes,” I said, and I did. He meant that somebody with a wad of brass on his uniform had decided sending the composite wasn’t going to happen. “That’s all right,” I added. “I was tied up all day yesterday on another case.”

“I can send it now,” Donner said. He sounded pissed. “Is that fax number you gave me still good?”

“Sure,” I said. “Send away.”

“While I was at it,” Donner continued, “I read through the case file, just for the hell of it. Did I tell you about the thread?”

“The black thread?” I asked. “Yes, you mentioned it.”

“The Utah State Police Crime Lab did some analysis of it. They sent word to all convents operated by the Catholic Church in the state of Utah, asking whether or not one of their members had gone missing and also asking for samples of fabric used in the sisters’ habits. Every single convent responded. None of them
reported any of their members to be missing. There are only a few convents—eighteen, to be exact—where the nuns still wear habits. All eighteen sent fabric samples, but there wasn’t a single match. Not even close. So what I’m asking is this, Detective Beaumont. Are you looking for a Catholic nun who’s been reported missing? There’s nothing I’d like more than to clear this case and tell the guy who’s running the show here that he’s all wet.”

Working with other jurisdictions involves a lot of horse-trading. They give you something, you give them something in return. Donner deserved to get something back.

“We’re actually looking at the nun more as a possible doer than we are a missing person,” I said.

“No kidding,” Donner murmured.

“We’ve got a couple other cases here on our end where an unidentified nun has been seen in the vicinity of a homicide.”

“That would shed a whole new light on things, wouldn’t it,” Donner said. “So I’ll ship you that composite as soon as we’re off the phone. If you need anything else, just let me know.”

“What about the Escobar file?” I asked.

“I’ll copy what I can and ship that to you as well. What about Hammond?”

“Hammond?” I asked.

“Phyllis Elaine Hammond, the old lady Escobar killed. I’ve got some friends at Salt Lake PD. I might be able to get that file sent to you as well.”

“That would be great,” I said.

“On one condition. Promise me that if and when you resolve this thing, you’ll keep me in the loop.”

“Not only in the loop,” I said. “I’ll make sure you get credit where credit is due.”

I put down the phone and sat there waiting for the fax machine to come to life. “Did you call Ross yet?” Mel asked.

“I was stalling on that,” I admitted. “I’m not wild about telling him one of his favorite people, a criminalist he personally hired and mentored, is bent.”

“You’d better call him all the same,” Mel told me. “We may think confiscating those tampered rape kits is a bad idea, but Ross Connors may think differently about that.”

“Wouldn’t you like to make the call?” I offered.

“Do I look stupid or something?” Mel returned. “Not on your life. You do it.”

So I did. While the fax machine began clicking and clacking, I dialed Ross’s office and was thrilled to be told the attorney general was in a meeting.

“Any message?” his secretary asked.

“Naw,” I said. “I’ll get back to him later.”

“Coward,” Mel said when I hung up the phone.

I waited until the fax machine shot the piece of paper into the tray. Then I picked the composite up. Beneath it was a second fax, the ballistics information Ralph had managed to wheedle out of the authorities down in Cancún. I took both faxes along with me as I headed to the kitchen for a coffee refill. Mel must have emptied her mug at about the same time. I had put the composite down on the counter and was pouring my coffee when Mel joined me. She set her cup down and picked up the piece of paper. What I heard next was a sharp intake of breath.

“Damn!” Mel muttered.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I know her,” Mel said. “I’ve seen this woman before.”

“Where?” I demanded.

“On the trip to Mexico.”

“She was there?” I asked. “She’s one of the board members?”

“No,” Mel answered. “She’s one of the pilots—one of the two pilots on Anita Bowdin’s private jet.”

Life keeps reminding me that things have changed. “The pilot was a woman?” I asked, blurting out the question without even thinking.

“Both of the pilots were women,” Mel said pointedly.

My mistake!
“What’s her name?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Mel said. “We may have been introduced. If we were, I don’t remember. A pilot is a pilot. There were two of them. They were both wearing uniforms.”

Yes,
I thought,
a pilot in a uniform is almost as invisible as a nun in her habit.

There were official ways to get the information I needed—grindingly slow bureaucratic ways. The situation required speed. Later on I could go back and cross the official
t
’s and dot the
i
’s. In the meantime I opened my cell phone and dialed Ralph Ames. “Any word on the ballistics stuff I sent you?” Ralph wanted to know when he answered.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d only just that moment seen it. “Not yet,” I said, “but remember the other day, when I asked you about that flight into Cancún?”

“Sure,” Ralph said. “What about it?”

“Can you get back to whoever gave you that information and ask for a little more?”

“That depends,” Ralph replied. “What kind of information?”

“I need the tail number on the plane,” I said. “I also need to know the names of the pilots—names and addresses, too, if you can get them.”

“That might be a little more difficult,” he allowed, “but I’ll see what I can do and get right back to you.”

I closed my phone. “I don’t remember asking Ralph about the flight to Cancún,” Mel said absently.

It was, as I mentioned earlier, the Ides of March. “It was when we were talking to him about everything else,” I said. “It must have slipped your mind.”

Before anything more was said, Ross called me back. Now the conversation with him, one I had dreaded, came as a welcome diversion. I spent the next ten minutes telling him what I could about what was going on in the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab under Destry Hennessey’s dubious leadership.