Shocking True Story (5 page)

I'd found out all I could.

“Do me a favor,” I said.

“What's that?”

I could feel my emotions rise, but I kept my focus and hit J Jackson with both barrels.

“Cover her up with a sheet and if you need me to pay for it, bill me. And if you don't, I'll make sure you, your boss's boss, and his boss, are written up for abusing a person in death. Have some respect, Jackson. Would you treat your mother like this? Jeanne Morgan deserves better.”

♦

Forty-eight hours later, Valerie and I were at A small gathering in a Gig Harbor Unitarian church to celebrate Jeanne's life. It wasn't exactly a church, but a banquet room at an Embassy Suites.

“Hi, Kevin Ryan,” said a young man with a soul patch the shape and size of a guitar pick.

I gave him a quick once-over. With his black suit and white shirt, he seemed too well dressed, too young, and the wrong gender for a TC reader. He looked more graphic novel.

“Sorry,” I said, brightening a little, “have we met?”

The young man shrugged. “No. I guessed it was from you from all my Aunt Jeanne's photos on the Memory Board.” He indicated a panel of tagboard with dozens of photos affixed. They were familiar photos, too. Most of them were pictures of me with Jeanne at various events. At the mall. At the library. At a school assembly. At all places, as they say, wherever books were sold.

Val took in the photos and leaned close to my ear. “A perfect ten on the creep-meter.”

“Your aunt was a lovely woman,” I said to the young man. “I thought a lot of her.”

Soul Patch nodded. “Yeah. She was always bragging on you. I figured you were a better person than a writer.”

I figured Soul Patch was a prick.

“Thanks, I appreciate that,” I said, my face growing warm, and I was sure, quite red.

Val tugged at my sleeve. “Beating up a kid at a funeral would be at least an eleven.”

I took a deep breath. “Nice turnout.”

The kid looked around. “Thanks. I put up a Pinterest page for Jeanne. I think I got a few bites.”

The memorial service was short and sweet. I learned for the first time that Jeanne had been a flight attendant and once competed in the Iditarod dog sled race in Alaska, her home state before moving to Washington in 1982. One of the first women to do so. She had five cats. Outside of that, she didn't have much in her life but a love of all things true crime. She liked forensics, courtroom dramas, and knowing that the bad guy usually gets caught in the end.

Tears came to my eyes and Val handed me a tissue. I was sorry Jeanne was gone, of course. But I was even sorrier that I hadn't paid more attention to her story. You never know who's going to end up dead at any given time.

“She was a nice person, Val.”

“I know. A little strange though.”

“How so?”

“Five cats? Kevin, that's creepy. Your biggest fan was a cat lady.”

I didn't answer. I could forgive Jeanne for having five cats. She was, after all, my number one fan.

Monday, July 15

IT TOOK ME ABOUT TEN MINUTES to be processed by the guards at Riverstone. That was a good thing because seeing Jeanne on the slab had cost me precious time. And shook me up hard. They ran my driver's license and verified my Social Security number. A female guard behind a counter that looked like a library reference desk told me to take off my shoes, put my things in a locker and pass through the metal detector. I could keep my notebook and a pencil. No pens.

"Community Relations is coming down to get you," the guard said, motioning me through with a rubber-gloved hand.

The buzzer sounded.

"Take off your belt!"

My face went hot. I started to protest.

"Scanner is reading your buckle, sir! New equipment, more sensitive than Rick. " She motioned to Rick, a Pacific Islander with keys to a private room. He looked like he was itching to probe anyone who made fuss.

I removed my belt faster than a Chippendale and passed through without a sound.

The public relations flack at the prison was a good-looking petite woman with red hair, picture perfect teeth and a trim figure who answered to the name Muriel Constantine. Her blood-red nails had been glued and lacquered by a professional. I figured she probably made the ladies of the cell block wet with desire. Muriel apologized for keeping me waiting, but explained she had been delayed by a camera crew from
Nancy Grace
who was there to do an interview with a woman who claimed she had a sexual relationship with Satan's brother.

"I didn't know he had a brother," I said as I stuck my feet into my laced-up shoes and worked the heels inside. My socks bunched up, looking flaccid and droopy. I felt stupid as I struggled to put on my shoes to catch up with her.

"He apparently has
two
. She was involved with the younger one."

I clipped a visitor's pass to my shirt pocket and walked with Muriel through the gates that led from the reception area to a breezeway to the unit where mother and daughter were to meet me for our first interview. Coiled razor wire was a deadly slinky atop a twelve-foot fence. Muriel's heels clacked against the pavement and a couple of ladies pulling weeds looked up to watch her pass.

"Must like you," I said.

"Must like
you
," she shot back without a smile.

My mind raced to every
Chained Heat
type of prison movie I'd ever seen. I hated that I felt a little flattered and said nothing more while the red disappeared from my face.

I always liked the part of the true crime book-writing process where I came face-to-face with the person doing time. I knew that when they wrote back and said they were only "considering" talking to me that they were ready to spill their guts. Women and men in prison are lonelier than hell. They act as though they have ten thousand people visiting them, but the truth is unless they have had a TruTV or Lifetime movie produced about their story, or an ID channel episode, the list is usually quite short. As time goes by, it grows even tinier.

I followed Muriel's clacking heels to a little conference room where I was told to wait. The blind-date feeling always sets in during the minute or two it takes to retrieve the inmate from the holding cell for the interview. Outside the window, more women were weeding the flowerbeds and a few others were in small clutches of disharmony on various benches. Sometimes I wondered why these ladies had ended up where they did and why some just as tough as them were rolling back prices at a Walmart store. I felt a little queasy. I wondered if the women I was about to meet would like me. Will they trust me?
Should
they trust me?

And more importantly, was I their last shot?

Muriel clacked back into the conference room.

"Janet changed her mind. But Connie is on her way."

"Oh," I said, registering obvious disappointment. "I hope she's all right."

Muriel shrugged, stuck her pen in an empty Starbucks mug, and informed me that she'd be down the hall taking care of business.

Connie Carter and I would be alone.

Connie was in her late forties, a former NASCAR Barbie with bottle blonde hair, a penchant for swimming-pool-blue eye shadow, and tube tops at least one size too small. She had chipped teeth, puffy eyes and the kind of throaty laugh that spoke more to a two-pack-a-day habit than a terrific sense of humor. Now she was tired, worn out and dressed in jeans and a blouse. She was a woman who had literally gone back to her roots—no longer blonde, but now with brown hair was so unbelievably dark it boggled the mind that she even
thought
she could get away with a nearly platinum color.

When she entered, I stood up and extended my hand in courtesy.

"Mr. Ryan?" she asked.

Who else would be here?
I thought.

"Mrs. Carter?" I answered back, though she had a Washington State Corrections Center for Women ID tag and it didn't say "staff" so there was no room for doubt that this social hour would be between the author and the inmate. That done, I waited for her to sit and we talked about the weather, the food, the fact that her daughter had become involved with a prisoner. In fact, Janet had been Connie's roommate until the week before when she requested a transfer and ended up with another cellie.

"Her name is Angela and I don't like the looks of her. She's scary.
Really
scary."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Me, too. It's too late for me to change. Everyone tells me that I'll be a lesbian before I get out of here, but they're wrong about that. Too late for me to go that way."

Connie played with her file folder of briefs as we talked. She had carried them into the room like a shield; her proof that she was innocent of any wrongdoing. Every page within that folder verified the tragedy that had befallen her. She had been framed. She had been set up. She was the victim.

God, how I had heard that before. The woman in one of my books had put cyanide in headache capsules to kill her husband and in an effort to throw the authorities off the track, set more tainted bottles out in grocery stores. A young mother, an innocent bystander, took some tainted pills and died. The convicted tamperer told me in unblinking eyes that she had been framed.

Everyone said so
.

Another woman I wrote about had been convicted of suffocating her son repeatedly in an effort to gain the sympathy and attention of others. She too, insisted quite convincingly that she had been a victim of a witch hunt. Was there anyone in prison who was supposed to be there? Or at least owned up to the possibility that she had done something to warrant the desolate accommodations of an eight-foot cell?

Connie Carter was not to be the one to stake that claim. As we neared the end of our allotted time, I asked her if Janet was as innocent as she.

"I've agonized over that one," she said carefully. "I'm not ashamed to tell you that I've even prayed over it since I got here."

I decided to push. "Well, what do you think? Could she be guilty?"

Connie bit her lower lip. Lipstick scraped off in the parallel lines left by her front upper teeth. Either she was a damn good actress or she was having a difficult time letting her words come.

"I am beginning to wonder. I... I... I think she might have led on Danny Parker so that he would shoot Deke."

I prodded her for evidence, something to back up her story. She didn't seem to have anything. She made me promise to keep her theories to myself and I gladly agreed.

"It... it's just a feeling, really. A feeling that she's lying. Now, don't tell her I said that. We have to have trust, you know."

Considering where she was and why she was there, trust would be hard to come by. I agreed again. I thanked her and told her I'd see her again soon.

♦

I DID NOT CONSIDER MARTIN RAINES a close friend, but I certainly knew him well enough to feel confident when I made that first call to his office at the Pierce County Sheriff's Office. He was the lead investigator for the county and we had met at a symposium in Portland three or four years before. Ostensibly, I was there to talk about crime writing and the responsibility writers shared with law enforcement. I was really there to sell books and provide a little sizzle for the two-day event.

Raines cornered me the first day to tell me he had considered writing a few books of his own.

"I've seen it all," he said over a beer in the hotel lobby bar. "From the boy next door who slaughters his parents to the woman who shoved a hot poker up her husband's ass when she found out he was having a homosexual affair with the man who detailed their cars every Saturday."

I swallowed the last of a plate of deep-fried ravioli. "You really
have
seen it all," I said. Marinara dripped on the front of my shirt. I quickly moved my convention name badge to cover the stain.

Raines and I talked for two hours, and while I encouraged him to contact my agent, I doubted he could pull off a book, no matter how much firsthand knowledge he had. Outside of a parking ticket, most cops can't write. We exchanged phone numbers and actually talked once or twice a year, whenever an interesting case popped up in his jurisdiction.

Until the Carter women, there hadn't been any interesting enough to cross over from “interesting” to “book material.”

"What do you think about Connie Carter and Janet Kerr's case?" I asked over the phone after my meeting with Connie at Riverstone prison.

His recognition was swift. "Piece of work, those two. A dumb crime."

"A book?" I asked.

"Not like any you've written or I've read."

"Good," I said. "That's just what I'm looking for. I've got to come up with something different or I'll be back at the Food King passing out samples."

"Could be the one," he said.

♦

OVER THE COURSE OF THE WEEKS and months that would consume me as I researched the story and listened to the players, the words of my editor would ring in my head like some insipid ditty I could never shake.

"We want a story that's bigger than life. More bizarre than bizarre! That's what we're after. That's what will pull you out of the midlist to compete with Jan Rule."