by Marcia Clark
Principal Tyrone Watkins was young, welcoming, and awfully hip for a principal. I don’t remember ever having a principal like that. When we apologized for being late, he said, “It’s cool.” And when we told him our business concerned a former teacher, he said, “No worries.” He even said to call him Tyrone.
I told him we’d understand if there were anything he couldn’t legally share with us.
He nodded. “But then you’ll just serve me with a subpoena. So let’s see if we can avoid the hassle. Fire away.”
I really liked this guy. “You had a teacher named Tiegan Donner a few years back. Were you here then?”
He smiled. “I remember her. She was great.”
I hadn’t expected to hear that about a teacher who’d left after just one year. “Did you have any complaints about her or anything? She wasn’t here very long.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that was a loss. She said she needed to relocate for personal reasons. But I never had any complaints about her. We were all pretty surprised when she left, but . . .” He turned his palms up. “Things take place.”
“Did she say what the personal reasons were?”
He shook his head. “I assumed it was a family issue. But when I asked about that, she said her family lived in Ohio.” Tyrone frowned. “Or was it Missouri? One of those states in the middle.”
In short, Pasadena was a bust. Alex and I regrouped in the car. I pulled up Google Maps on my phone. “Want to try Mission Viejo?”
Alex looked at my phone. “It’s about an hour and a half away, but I’m game.”
I had a feeling we might be on one gigantic turd hunt. But in for a penny . . .
Mission Viejo is further south, not far from San Diego. The high school was made up of a series of red-roofed, one-story buildings that had a Spanish feel, and it was huge. I figured they must have a serious athletic program because the school sported an Olympic-size swimming pool, a well-cared-for track, and two football fields.
Our principal this time was a woman, Charlene Mayfield. She reminded me of the girls’ basketball coach at my high school: thick, short grayish-blondish hair; leathery brown skin; and a muscular body. She talked like a drill sergeant. Not hostile, just very direct, in short, staccato sentences. Charlene didn’t immediately remember Tiegan. It’d been about three years. Apparently, Tiegan had taken some time off before moving to Pasadena High.
Charlene pulled up a file on her computer, and then the light dawned. “Oh, yeah. Weird deal there.”
Had we finally gotten lucky? I leaned in. “A complaint?”
“No. Well, not by someone else. By her. She said a student was stalking her.”
Weird deal, indeed. “Were the police involved?”
Charlene gave a short, emphatic shake of the head. “She wouldn’t have it. Said she didn’t want to cause trouble for the guy. He was just a kid, and she felt sorry for him.”
Awfully kind of Tiegan. But odd. “So she left?”
Charlene gave a curt nod. “I wasn’t happy about it. If the kid’s got a problem, better to handle it now than let him get in real hot water when he’s an adult.”
“And you told her that?”
Charlene humphed. “’Course I did. But she promised she’d talk to the parents privately. Let ’em know so they could get him help.”
It’d be nice to have a chat with that guy. “Did you ever find out who he was?”
“I tried.” Charlene’s expression was mildly disgusted. “Mainly I talked to the other teachers. But no one remembered seeing a boy hanging around Tiegan’s classroom—or hanging around Tiegan, period.” Charlene sat back and folded her arms—not easy to do over her ample chest. “I didn’t believe them. Someone had to have seen something. I tried to tell them they weren’t doing the kid any favors.” Charlene blew out a breath. “Didn’t matter. They gave me diddly-squat.”
“What about the students? Did you try talking to them?”
She looked at me incredulously. “You’re kidding, right? We’ve got three thousand kids, and this boy wasn’t necessarily in any of Tiegan’s classes.” She gave me a frank look. “And do you really think a kid is going to tell me anything?”
Not for one hot second. We thanked Charlene and headed back to LA.
I leaned my seat back and watched the palm trees sway in the breeze. “What are we missing, Alex?”
“I’ll be damned if I know. So who do we talk to now?”
There were really only two choices. “Tiegan or Cassie. But I’d guess Cassie’s the weaker link.”
Alex didn’t look optimistic. “Then we hit up Cassie?”
I nodded. “And hope for the best.”
FORTY-FOUR
When Alex pulled into the parking lot at Twin Towers, I decided it’d be best if it was just Cassie and me. “I hate to do this to you, Alex, but—”
He held up a hand. “Totally get it.” Alex parked close to the entrance, then pulled out his iPad. “I told Dale I’d give him a hand with the Orozco investigation. I’ve got a line on the driver of the custody bus. He might have a cousin who’s a Southside Creeper.”
“Great.” I got out and headed for the jail, wishing that just for once, Alex weren’t so damn good at the gig.
A custody bus driver would be in a perfect position to get Ricardo put into the Southside tank. The only problem was, I knew he hadn’t done it. If Alex’s lead panned out, and the driver was connected to the Creepers, I’d have to dream up a reason why I knew it wasn’t him. I wasn’t about to get an innocent guy killed just to make the Orozcos go away. Unless he turned out to be a total scumbag who deserved it. But I doubted I’d get that lucky.
The guards said it’d be fifteen minutes or more before they could get Cassie up to the attorney room. That was fine by me. I needed time to think. Tiegan had to be Earl Lee Riser, the owner of the burner phone. But how was I going to get Cassie to confirm it? I tossed some ideas around in my head, but when they finally brought her up, I still had no inspiration. So I went straight at it.
I sat down and picked up the phone. I noticed the bandages on her wrists had been replaced with single gauze pads held on with lots of surgical tape. “I was surprised they let you out of the infirmary so soon. You must be doing pretty well.” Not true. I wasn’t surprised. She hadn’t been that badly injured, and the doctors move inmates out of the infirmary the moment they can stand up.
Cassie shrugged; she looked listless. “I guess.”
I wondered if the apathetic look was chemically induced. “Are you taking your meds?”
She made a face. “They make me sick. And tired. And I don’t feel any better. Just kind of flat and . . . slow.”
I’d heard that from clients before. I think they must give inmates elephant tranquilizers instead of antidepressants. “I can ask to adjust your meds, but after your . . . incident, I think it’ll be a while before they let you stop altogether.”
Cassie slouched in her chair and stared down at the counter. “Barbara said she’s about to start a new job, so she won’t be able to come see me very much.” Cassie wrapped her free arm around her waist, which looked even smaller than it had before. She’d never looked so forlorn.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Especially if it was true that Tiegan wouldn’t come anymore. It made me feel a little guilty about squeezing her for information. Not enough to not do it, though. “Cassie, we got the cell tower records for the calls on your phone. We know the burner phone was usually in Atwater. And Tiegan lives in Atwater. So you may as well talk to me about it. There’s no reason to pretend anymore.” It was a half bluff. I hadn’t said anything that wasn’t true. I’d just left the door open and hoped she’d walk through it.
She dropped her eyes to the bottom of the window and bit her lip. “So Tiegan . . . she—she told you?” Cassie glanced at me. I held her gaze and nodded. Cassie hunched over and dissolved into tears.
What the hell was going on? I waited for her to calm down, then spoke in a quiet voice. “Let me hea
r your side of it.” Whatever “it” was.
Cassie swiped away the tears with the back of her hand. “Tiegan told me she deleted my texts and got rid of the phone. But I really didn’t say anything . . . bad. She just didn’t like me to text her so much.”
So I was right. Tiegan was the owner of the burner phone. And all this time, she’d been telling me she had no clue who owned it. I felt like a bowling ball had landed in the pit of my stomach. Something was very wrong here. “Why not?”
Cassie sniffed hard and wiped her nose again. “In case anyone saw. She was a little paranoid about it. But I don’t blame her; it was kind of dangerous. She could lose her job.”
I put on an understanding expression and nodded. But inside, my brain was screaming. If my guess was right, I finally had the answer to so many questions—one that I’d never have seen coming in a million years. I rolled the dice again. “When did it start?”
Cassie’s chin trembled, and she bit back another wave of tears. “A month after she got assigned to be my counselor.” She looked at me, her expression anxious. “I just want you to know . . . I—I’d never done anything like that before.” Her eyes drifted away. “I never thought I was . . . like that.” Cassie tilted her head to one side and fell silent for a moment. “I thought about that a lot at first. Would I have ever done it if Tiegan hadn’t . . .” A long moment passed as Cassie stared at the bottom of the window. When she finally looked up, tears had filled her eyes again. “But I’m not sorry. I’m not. She made me happy; she cared about me, made me feel like I was someone special. She wanted me.”
As I’d guessed, Tiegan and Cassie had been . . . I couldn’t bring myself to call them lovers. Lovers are equals, two adults. Or even two teenagers. Not a woman in her late twenties and a fifteen-year-old girl. But clearly, they’d been involved.
And I’d been played. So played. I remembered how many times Tiegan told me she’d tried to get Cassie to give up the name of the guy who owned the burner phone. How she’d said she’d try to find out who Cassie’s “boyfriend” was.
My buddy Tiegan was quite the piece of work. “Is Tiegan the reason you broke up with Waylon?” Cassie nodded. “Did she tell you to?”
Cassie exhaled; her breath came through the receiver like a loud wind. “N-not really. I just knew she wouldn’t like it if I kept seeing him once we . . . ah . . . started . . .” Cassie cleared her throat and bent her head. “Started hanging out together.”
A vulnerable kid preyed upon by an adult in power. And Cassie, an adopted child, a sexually abused child, was about as vulnerable as it gets. I wished the story weren’t so familiar. “Did you feel like you had to keep seeing her, Cassie?”
Cassie’s face screwed up, tears now spilling over, as she shook her head. “I was happy. We were going to move in together. Everything was going to be so perfect.”
Move in together? I didn’t know how they thought they’d pull that off without Tiegan winding up in the back of a patrol car. “Was Tiegan onboard with that plan?”
Cassie squeezed her eyes shut and nodded. “We were going to move, go someplace where no one knew us.” A hiccup passed through her chest as she bit back sobs. “And then I screwed everything up.”
I felt like I was stumbling, blindfolded, through a maze. “How did you do that?”
Cassie wiped her face with her sleeve, the phone clutched to her ear, her free arm now wrapped so tightly around her small frame, it gripped the opposite side of the chair. “I couldn’t take it anymore! I had to get away, so I told her about . . . all of it. About Abel and my father and . . . all of it. I thought if she knew, she’d take me away, and we could live together!”
“When? When did you tell her?”
Cassie began to tremble. “That day. After school.”
A dawning awareness spread through me as the import of what she was saying sank in. “The day of the murders?”
She looked at me, her face filled with sadness. “Yes. If I hadn’t told her, she wouldn’t have . . .” Cassie dropped her head. “It’s my fault, all of it.”
FORTY-FIVE
The new scenario was solidifying in my mind, but I didn’t want to put any ideas in her head. I wanted to let Cassie tell it on her own. I’d figure out how to package it later. “What exactly did Tiegan do when you told her what’d been going on?”
Cassie stared at a point over my left shoulder. “She totally lost it.” Her voice was low and tight. “I never saw her like that. Ever. She was always so sweet, so gentle. But when I told her, she just went berserk!”
“Where were you? At school?”
She nodded. “It was late, though. I went to see her after her counseling sessions were done. There was no one around.” Cassie’s gaze shifted to the right as she relived it all. “Tiegan’s face got so red. She started pacing all around the room, calling them all kinds of names, saying they were animals and they should be put down.”
“And you’re sure no one heard all this?” I was building the case in my mind. Other witnesses to this scene would really help.
Cassie thought for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t think so. I didn’t see anyone around when I left.”
“Did Tiegan make any threats? Say that she was going to do anything?”
“At first she just said she was going to report them. But I told her she couldn’t. That they’d send me away, put me in foster care, and . . .” Her chin trembled. “And then I’d never see her again!”
“So she agreed not to do that?”
Cassie nodded slowly. “And then she said she’d . . . take care of it.”
“How was Tiegan acting at that point? Was she yelling? Screaming?”
Cassie’s face wrinkled; she seemed confused. “No, not at all. After she had that meltdown, she got real quiet. She seemed okay. She said she was glad I told her. She said it must’ve been really hard for me to keep all that inside. I told her I was glad, too, that it felt so much better to be able to talk to her about it. Then we talked about how she’d help me get out of that place. How we’d move far away, and she could work at another school and we could be together.”
“So she’d calmed down by the time you left?” Cassie nodded. “And after that, what happened?”
“I went home, did my homework, watched some television. Mom and Dad left. They were going to spend the night at a hotel to celebrate their anniversary, so I didn’t have to help with dinner.” She leaned against the wall, her expression pained, wistful. “I remember I was so happy when I went to bed that night. I was finally going to get out of there and be with Tiegan.”
I braced myself for what I was about to hear. “What happened that night?”
Cassie ran a hand through her hair; her eyes were fixed on the wall behind me, but she was focused inward. “I heard knocking on my window. It was late. I’d been asleep for a little while. I woke up and saw Tiegan standing there. It was like one of those scary movies. It’d been raining, and her hair was all wet and straggly and she looked . . . weird, like calm and crazy at the same time.”
“Did you let her in?” Cassie nodded. I pictured the crime scene. “How?”
“I took the screen off my window.”
I remembered the windows in that house were low. “Was she wearing gloves?” Cassie frowned for a moment, then she shook her head. No gloves. There was hope. “What happened next?”
“She seemed like, almost like she was in a trance. I was afraid of her. She asked me where Abel’s room was. I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ But she wouldn’t tell me. She just grabbed my arm and said, ‘Tell me!’—like, really intense.”
“And did you?”
Cassie sat up now, and I could feel her anxiety. “I was afraid not to! So, yeah. I told her. She told me to stay in my room. But I was afraid Abel would hurt her.”
“So you followed her?”
Cassie nodded. I could see her breathing getting faster. “But I stopped at the doorway.” Now her words came out in a rush. “She had a knife,
and she just whipped it across his throat and then he woke up, and blood was everywhere and . . .” Cassie put a hand over her eyes. Her voice was thin, almost strangled. “It was horrible! I couldn’t look!”
“What did you do?”
Cassie was gripping the phone so tightly I saw her forearm begin to shake. “I don’t know. I think I just stood there. Then I heard the front door open. I didn’t know what to do; I didn’t want them to see me in there, so I hid in the corner.”
“Inside Abel’s room?”
“Yeah.” Cassie’s breath was getting faster and shallower now. Her words tumbled over one another as though they were one long sentence. I had to strain to understand her. “And I told Tiegan to look out, someone’s coming. But then I heard my dad’s voice. I told her to run, get out of there! I went over to Abel’s window to pull out the screen, but she’d gone to the side of the doorway, and when Stephen reached for the light switch, she stabbed him right in the throat, and I heard him scream. I told her to stop! But she wouldn’t!” Cassie’s face was white. Her nostrils flared, her eyes were wide, and they moved back and forth as she spoke. “He fell down and she—she stabbed him over and over!” She put her hand to her chest, which was heaving now.
“And then your mother came in?”
Cassie nodded. “She stabbed her . . . just like Stephen.” Cassie covered her mouth and half sobbed, half screamed. “I told her, ‘Stop!’ But she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t listen.” She dropped her head and cried.
A part of my mind was assessing what she’d said, comparing it to the crime scene and the evidence. From what I could remember, it was matching up pretty well. “What happened after that?”
“I—I went to them. Tried to help them. I took off my pajama top and held it on my dad’s throat to try and stop the bleeding, but it was too late. Then I went to Paula . . . but I thought it was too late, that she was gone.”
I noticed she’d used her parents’ names. She’d never done that before. “What was Tiegan doing?”