by Ben Rehder
The cops decided to get location data for Nathaniel Tate’s cell phone, too. That’s when the picture filled in. Turned out Nathaniel had also driven to Jankowski’s neighborhood before Brent Donovan arrived, and he’d left one minute before Damon did.
He drove south, to Manchaca, a small community about ten miles from downtown Austin. He parked behind a strip center that had been built by JMJ Construction. By then, it was nearly seven in the evening. All of the little shops and businesses in the strip center were closed. Nathaniel Tate’s vehicle didn’t move for one hour and twelve minutes. Then he went to his brother’s place and stayed until three in the morning.
It was obvious what had happened, but it was still unclear who had done the killing. Legally, they were all culpable, and all of them could be charged with murder.
But first things first.
Three days after Brandi gave a statement, and one day after the cops had received the location data for the Tates’ phones, they searched the property in question behind the strip center.
They quickly located a cave entrance that had been covered with a half-sheet of plywood, which had been piled with several large rocks and pieces of loose brush. Inside, forty feet down, they discovered human remains, and dental records later confirmed that Brent Donovan had finally been found.
Joe Jankowski and Nathaniel Tate were arrested the next morning. Both were out on bond by that evening. The process goes quickly and smoothly when you have money to spend on the best lawyers. I was assuming Jankowski covered the bond for Nathaniel Tate, if for no other reason than to keep him from talking to the cops.
I felt good about the progress in the case, but I had some worries, because I knew what the defense attorneys would say to a jury…
Brent Donovan’s unfortunate death happened exactly the way Joe Jankowski described it—Donovan threw a punch at Damon Tate, who defended himself. Unfortunately, all three men made the bad decision to cover up the incident, and Nathaniel Tate volunteered to dispose of the body out of misplaced loyalty to his brother. That meant Joe Jankowski and Nathaniel Tate were guilty of crimes, indeed, but nothing nearly as serious as murder.
I could only hope the cops would keep digging until they had more. Or maybe they’d already found new evidence and were slowly building a rock-solid case.
I went to see Doris Donovan again that afternoon. I took some flowers and expressed my sympathy on the loss of her son. We had another long conversation with another glass of bourbon.
At one point, she said, “Honestly, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about this, but I’m feeling a certain amount of relief that I have an answer now. I know he isn’t alive and he hasn’t been for quite some time. All I can hope for now is that he died quickly and painlessly.”
Maybe the autopsy would deliver that solace, or maybe it wouldn’t. Or it might provide no answers at all. A body in a cave for that length of time would be in such a state that a lot of evidence could be lost.
I was glad to see that Doris wasn’t dwelling on which of the three men actually committed the murder. My money was on one of the Tate brothers. That’s why Jankowski had them around, right? To do his dirty work? And since Nathaniel disposed of the body, I figured there was a better than even chance that he did the killing. Or maybe he and Damon both did it together.
I gave Doris a hug as I left and she thanked me for bringing the truth to light. I reminded her that she had done most of that herself.
I was oddly calm as I drove through snarled traffic that stretched along Bee Caves Road and continued on MoPac.
When I got home, I noticed my neighbor Regina in front of her house, tending her flower garden. I was walking over to say hello when my phone chimed in my pocket. It was an alert from the app that monitors the GPS trackers we use. I stopped and simply stared at the screen, puzzled for a moment by what I was seeing. Damon Tate was dead. Why was I getting an alert that his truck was nearby?
I heard a vehicle passing and looked up to see a white Chevy truck rolling slowly past my house. Nathaniel Tate was behind the wheel, left elbow resting in the open window, and he gave me a grin that told me he wasn’t going to go away on his own.
37
One reason serial killers often manage to evade detection for months or years is that they choose random victims. No connection. As long as the killer doesn’t establish some sort of pattern or commit a really stupid mistake, it can be nearly impossible to track them down.
But most murders have a tangible motive. The victim is someone the killer hates. Someone who cut him off in traffic. Someone with a large insurance policy on his or her head. Someone who wouldn’t cooperate as the killer committed a burglary or a rape or a carjacking against them.
Connections. It’s how killers get caught.
If you decide to kill someone and you have a connection to the victim, well, first of all, don’t do it unless you expect to wind up in prison or strapped to a gurney.
But if you have to move forward—if, say, a loved one is at risk—you have to make a plan. How are you going to do it? Where? With what? Leave the body where it is? Try to make it look like an accident? Suicide? Try to make it look like self-defense? Jankowski had gone that route and he’d still been charged—but it might work on the jury. Never know.
The odds are against you. You aren’t as smart as you think you are. There are hundreds of ways to get tripped up. You have to be really dumb to go through with it.
Or desperate.
The day after Nathaniel Tate cruised our street in his dead brother’s truck, I tracked the movements of the truck and followed it to an indoor gun range in Oak Hill. A gun range. Not a good omen. I was tempted to go inside and see what kind of weapon Nathaniel Tate was practicing with—handgun or rifle—but I knew this particular range had security cameras inside. But I did follow him to a pool hall that night and retrieve the tracker from underneath the truck.
The next day, I checked my phone and found a nearby garage sale. They had a table piled thick with clothes. What garage sale doesn’t have clothes? I found a few things that would work, including a pair of New Balance walking shoes one size too large. Disposable clothing.
Then I let two more days pass.
I was riddled with doubt. But if I failed to act and something happened to Mia, I couldn’t live with myself. And what could the cops do? Nathaniel Tate was already awaiting two trials, but those might be a year from now. In the meantime, no law prevented him from driving down our street. I could get a protective order, but why bother? That wouldn’t stop him if he decided to act.
I had to act first.
Twenty-nine days after Jonathan had hired me to investigate Lennox Armbruster for insurance fraud, I told Mia I had a new case and that I had to conduct surveillance on a guy who worked the evening shift. I drove my Camry to a cheap hotel on Interstate 35. I’d checked it out the day before and spotted no cameras anywhere.
It was ten minutes past midnight.
I began to walk—four and a half miles to my destination. I kept to the shadows, cutting through alleys, avoiding any other humans I saw wandering the streets. It was fifty-four degrees, with no wind. I was wearing the blue jeans and dark long-sleeved shirt I’d bought at the garage sale. I had a lightweight ski mask jammed into my pocket, along with latex gloves.
Three miles to go.
I was carrying no phone. No wallet. No keys.
A compact Colt .380 was riding in a holster on my hip. Unavoidable. I’d considered other methods, but none were feasible. Too much could go wrong. This Colt was special. I’d bought it from a guy several years ago for cash via Craigslist. It was not connected to me by any paperwork or documented transaction. It would disappear permanently after I was done with it.
Two miles to go.
I was walking on a quiet street lined with warehouses and industrial complexes
. Few streetlights. I could see a small fire burning in the center of a nearby field, with a dozen figures around it, some standing, some sitting.
A man approached me in the dark. Hard to see him well, but he was big. Dark clothes. Thick, unruly hair and a beard. I could smell him, and it was not good.
He said, “Hey, man, what’s up?”
“Not interested,” I said.
“Say what?”
“Keep moving.”
“The fuck’s wrong with you?”
I turned and faced him in a boxer’s stance—left foot leading. Hands still down, but ready. My palms were tingling. I was sweaty all over. My heart was beating heavily.
“I thought you was Kenny,” the man mumbled, and he retreated back into the darkness.
I considered calling it off at this point. The man was a witness. He could place me in the area, walking, late at night. But I hadn’t gotten a good look at him, which meant he hadn’t gotten a good look at me. And what were the odds the cops would ever find him? What were the odds he would remember our encounter, or be willing to talk about it?
I kept walking.
One mile to go.
The warehouse row turned into a strip of retail establishments, but they were all closed for the night.
At half a mile, I heard a gunshot in the distance. Then another. And a third. Probably not an anomaly in this area. Hard to tell which direction the shots had come from.
I turned right onto a residential street. I saw a car without tires. A window covered with a tarp. I heard people talking loudly inside a house with an open front door.
I was getting close. Maybe a thousand yards to go. There was still time to come up with a better idea or, to put it bluntly, to chicken out. Was I really going to do this? I thought about Mia back at home, likely sleeping right now. How could I not do it? She’d done her part, taking care of Damon Tate. Now it was my turn.
I was five hundred yards from Nathaniel Tate’s house when I heard a siren. Again, probably not unusual around here. It grew louder. Then it died just as quickly and sharply as a snapped twig.
I stopped walking and waited. Was the siren related to the earlier gunshots?
Now I saw another dark form coming toward me in the darkness, roughly a hundred feet ahead. I ducked behind a truck parked along the curb. It was just one person, walking quickly.
I drew my .380, just in case. I don’t know why. Nerves, I guess. I kept my thumb on the safety.
The house behind me had a porch light burning, but a large tree in the yard kept me bathed in shadows. I was well concealed.
The person was fifty feet away. Then thirty.
Maybe I was overreacting, as I had with the man earlier who’d been looking for Kenny.
I held my breath as the person got within ten feet, still in darkness, and then, for one brief moment, light flashed across a familiar face.
Raul Ablanedo.
Wait. Wasn’t it?
It sure looked liked him, but now he was gone. Had I seen him well enough to know for sure?
I let out a long breath. My hands were trembling.
Half a minute later, red and blue lights began to bounce off the houses and trees, and then a patrol car—possibly the same one that had been sounding a siren earlier—zipped past me and continued down the street.
I slipped into bed at 2:49 and Mia didn’t budge. I knew she’d been taking something to help her sleep lately.
I wasn’t destined to sleep at all. Too much adrenaline flowing. Too many decisions to make. Too worried that an investigator would be knocking on our door at any moment, asking me to account for my whereabouts in the past several hours. What could I say? And they’d want to speak with Mia, too, to see if my alibi added up.
The minutes and hours moved painfully slowly.
Mia finally stirred at 6:14. She stretched her legs, then rolled onto her left side, now facing me.
“Hey, there,” she said. “I’m surprised you’re awake. How was your case?”
“There was no case, Mia,” I said. “I made that up.”
“What are you talking about?”
I said, “I need to tell you where I went last night, and what I saw. And then I need you to help me decide what I should do next.”
38
The knock on the door came at 1:47 in the afternoon. Two detectives—Billy Chang and Randy Wolfe. Made sense. Chang had investigated when Damon Tate had accosted me on my porch, and Wolfe had investigated and cleared me on the shooting of Nathaniel Tate outside my bedroom window.
“Mr. Ballard,” Chang said.
“Hi, guys,” I said, standing in the doorway in shorts and a T-shirt. “I was wondering when you were going to show up.”
“Why’s that?” Wolfe said.
“I heard Nathaniel Tate was killed last night. I figure you’re working your way through a long list of possible suspects.”
“Who’d you hear it from?” Wolfe asked. “The name wasn’t on the news.”
“Yeah, but they mentioned the address—Tate’s address,” I said. “And now you’re showing up here. That means it was Nathaniel Tate.”
“We need you to come down to the office and chat with us for a while,” Chang said.
I tried to appear appropriately ambivalent—like I really wanted to go, but there were too many other considerations. I said, “Look, the truth is, I’m a total dead end. I didn’t do it. So I’m going to save us all time by skipping the interview. You’ll thank me for that later.”
“Mind telling us where you were last night?” Wolfe asked.
“I have no comment on that,” I said.
“So you went somewhere, but you won’t tell us where it was?” Chang said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You stayed home?”
“No comment.”
“Who were you with?”
“No comment.”
“You and your fiancée spend the night together?”
“Mia? We usually do, because we live together.”
“No, I mean were you with her all night?”
“No comment.”
Wolfe was shaking his head, plainly irritated. Chang was glaring at me.
“We need to talk to her,” he said.
“She’s not here,” I said. “And she has no interest in answering any questions.”
“You speak for her?” Wolfe asked.
I laughed. Totally genuine.
“What’s so funny?” Wolfe asked.
“If you knew Mia, you’d know I don’t speak for her. But she knew as well as I did that you’d show up, and she told me that she wouldn’t answer any questions.”
“It’s not a big deal if you went somewhere last night or early this morning,” Wolfe said. “But we need to know where, so we can rule you out.”
“I’m ruling myself out. You can trust me. Really. Save yourself some man-hours.”
“We can get a warrant for your cell phone,” Chang said.
“Waste of time.”
“You didn’t take it with you?” Chang asked.
“No comment. Hey, I’m not trying to make your lives difficult. I just don’t want to answer any questions because I didn’t do anything to Nathaniel Tate last night or early this morning. Wasn’t me.”
“We checked his cell phone data and saw that he drove through this neighborhood four days ago,” Wolfe said.
They both looked at me.
“Yes?” I said.
“Did you see him?”
“No comment,” I said.
“Was he harassing you?”
“No comment.”
“You are only harming yourself by refusing to talk,” Chang said.
“I
tend toward self-destructive behavior on occasion,” I said. “It’s the result of some deep misgivings about my own self-worth.”
“If you had some words with him, now’s the time to tell us,” Wolfe said. “Did he threaten you?”
“No comment,” I said. “I did not kill Nathaniel Tate. I can’t make that any more clear.”
“Do you know who did?”
And, finally, we’d arrived at the most pertinent question of all. What was the answer? I mean, did I know? Had I really seen Raul Ablanedo, or was it someone who simply looked like him? It was dark out. Perceptions can be altered by nerves and adrenaline and fatigue. Let’s say it really wasn’t him, but I told Chang and Wolfe what I thought I’d seen. I might be putting an innocent man—a man with a motive—in serious legal jeopardy. That wasn’t just a rationalization, it was the truth, and I had to take that into account.
What’s more, if Raul had killed Nathaniel Tate, some people might argue he deserved our thanks, not our judgment. Should I protect him? Risk my own neck to save his? Mia and I had talked about it at great length. And we’d agreed on what I would tell the cops.
“No,” I said. “I don’t know who did it.”
I would look back in the months that followed with some measure of satisfaction that the murder of Nathaniel Tate went unsolved. Maybe the killer would get caught eventually, but I found myself hoping the detectives working the case would simply move on.
I kept remembering one thing Raul had said to me when he’d confessed his part in Brent’s scam…
I don’t know if I can ever make up for being so stupid. How would I do that? It’s too late, isn’t it?