The Murder of Janessa Hennley

by Victor Methos

  He watched people passing in and out of the station. He’d read that the Kodiak Basin Sheriff’s Office employed fourteen uniformed deputies and four detectives. The detectives didn’t have specialties. They were sex crimes and homicide, property and gangs, narcotics and vice all rolled into one.

  He wondered how they had time for all their cases, but their pending cases board displayed only fifteen in the entire city. Less than four per detective. At the top of the board were the names of the Hennley family with the letters “FBI” written next to them. Apparently, the case had been passed on to him without his knowledge.

  Mickey’s throat hurt, and his tongue was swelling. It created the odd sensation of having to concentrate before speaking for fear the words wouldn’t come out. He took two ibuprofen he’d purchased from a convenience store before going back inside.

  Nathan sat in the conference room right where Jason had been, waiting for his lawyer. Suzan put him there because she wanted to watch him, since the cells did not have cameras.

  “He say anything?” Mickey said, walking up to her.

  “Just asked when his lawyer was going to get here.”

  “And when is that?”

  “I called him, and he said he was coming down as soon as he got a second.”

  Mickey examined Nathan’s face. It didn’t appear like Jason’s, panicked and uncertain. Nathan was calm and collected.

  “He’s not afraid of us. He’s gotten off similar charges before.”

  “I pulled his rap. There was nothing on there.”

  “Did you run a nationwide?”

  “No. I’ll have Yazzie do that right now.”

  “I can get it done faster.” He texted his secretary. Within two minutes, he received a message with Nathan Goodall’s criminal history, including his juvenile history, his credit history, banking information, email account information and phone records attached.

  The sheriff looked at him like she had just seen him walk on water.

  “National security,” he said.

  “You think a sheriff of a town of five thousand could claim national security?”

  He grinned and flipped through the histories. Apparently, Nathan liked to travel, as he had residences set up in Utah, Colorado, and California, staying no longer than a year at each. He boasted criminal histories in all of them, including charges for sodomy and sexual exploitation of a minor. A warrant in Colorado stated that he had failed to register as a sex offender six years ago. Another in Utah for forcible sodomy.

  “I don’t think you need to worry about your registry,” Mickey said to her. “He’s already on it.”

  After presenting Nathan with an extradition petition, he told them to cancel his lawyer. He would tell them anything they wanted to know in exchange for not pursuing extradition. The forcible sodomy charge still pending in Utah came with a mandatory fifteen to life sentence.

  “I’ll think about it,” Suzan said. “Depending on what you tell me.”

  He exhaled. “I could use a drink. Do you have anything?”

  “I’ll have my receptionist get you a Coke. Now start talking.”

  He tapped his fingertips together and drew in a deep breath. “I moved around a lot. Did things I shouldn’t do and always came back here. What else is there to say?”

  “Not about you, about the video I just showed you.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “How did you get Janessa involved in this?” she said.

  “I didn’t. She asked me about it.”

  “About orgies with thirty strangers while she was passed out?”

  “She wasn’t passed out. And no, I didn’t get her involved. She wanted to be in porn. She thought that if she made some tapes and sent them in to the studios, they would pay for her to fly out to Los Angeles. I told her I would just pay for it.”

  “But she had to do some things first,” Mickey said.

  Nathan put his hands to his face. “I want immunity.”

  “Immunity from what?”

  Nathan leaned back and folded his arms. Then he set them on the table. Mickey got the impression that he couldn’t get comfortable. “I can give you some people you really want. Some bad folks.”

  “Unlike you?” Suzan said.

  He stared at the table a moment. “I want immunity and a promise that I won’t be extradited.”

  “Tell me what you have first, and I’ll think about getting the DA down here,” Suzan said.

  He looked to both of them. “There’s some men here that have certain tastes. Not just here. It goes to Anchorage and up to Homer. All over. They like younger girls. Not too young, but like teenagers. They have these parties where they get the young girls to come and then they… drug them and do what you saw on the video. Then they trade the girls with other groups.”

  “Trade?” she said. “What do you mean trade?”

  “I mean they take the girl over to another city and trade her for some other girl. Or girls, sometimes there’s more than one. And they bring that girl back for the parties. Then they’ll trade her too.”

  “Slavery,” she said, breathless. “Are you talking about slavery?”

  “That’s not what they’d call it. A lot of the girls do it voluntarily.”

  “You find vulnerable children, drug them, rape them, rip them away from their parents, and then have the balls to say it’s voluntary?”

  He held up his hands. “I didn’t say it was. Some of these guys do.” He swallowed. “Janessa was supposed to be traded with a girl from Fairbanks. Some black girl. She refused.”

  “And so one of these assholes killed her, didn’t he?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I read about how she died and that’s… that’s what I thought. But I don’t know.”

  “You sick son of a—”

  “Sheriff,” Mickey said, “how about getting that Coke?”

  Suzan held his gaze for a few seconds and then walked out of the room, shutting the door behind her.

  “Sorry about that,” Mickey said, “she gets excited. You know women.” Mickey understood that Nathan, deep down, had to resent women to do what he did. “They’re all emotion, unlike us.”

  He grinned anxiously and pulled at his fingers, his gaze darting around the room.

  “How many girls are traded in a month, Nathan?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have anything to do with that. I swear. I just let them use my house. That’s all. I didn’t even… I mean, I didn’t touch Janessa.”

  “No one’s accusing you of anything, Nathan. We just need information. Who organizes these parties?”

  “A guy named Bill Mathias. He’s an accountant. He organizes everything. He’s the one that called me about using my house.” He looked to the camera mounted on the wall. “Is that thing on?”

  “Yes.”

  He folded his arms again. “I want immunity. I can give you everything. I know all of them, I have phone numbers. Girls they’ve picked up… They told me everything.”

  “And you didn’t participate at all, huh? Just sat back and relaxed.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t do anything. I just let them use my place. They paid me a fee to do it, but that was all.”

  “If you had to guess which one of these men killed Janessa, who would you guess? Bill?”

  “No. I don’t know. Maybe. Bill’s got a real mean streak. Short fuse. I guess he could do something like this. There’s a couple of ’em that are real shady characters.”

  “We’ll be in to talk about immunity in a minute.”

  He left the interrogation room and found Suzan in the next room, her arms folded as she watched the monitor. She wasn’t blinking.

  “I know Bill Mathias. I can’t believe this. Any of it. That this happened, that these… things were going on….”

  “The world’s always been a mess, Suzan. Nowhere’s immune.”

  “My grandfather, hell, my father, they never had to deal with this.”

  “
Maybe they did, and they just never talked about it. Would you discuss it with your children?”

  She didn’t remove her gaze from the monitor.

  “You have to give him immunity,” he said.

  “What? You can’t be serious. There is no way in hell I’m giving this sick bastard immunity.”

  “You have to. He can give you a lot more than he’s worth. This probably goes across the state. I think the Bureau field office should get involved. And the U.S. Attorneys’ Office.”

  She shook her head.

  Mickey stood beside her until she looked at him. “Suzan, I’ve seen things like this before. This is much bigger than you can handle. If you really want to help those girls, you have to let the Bureau and the U.S. Attorney take over.”

  “Slavery. Slavery, Mickey. In my town.”

  “I know. But you have to get past that now.”

  She exhaled. “Call your field office.”

  28

  William “Bill” Mathias waited until the Deep Purple song on the radio was over before leaving the car and going inside to his office. His receptionist, a plump woman with a hairdo thirty years out of date, smiled and said, “Morning.”

  “Morning, Denise. Who we got this morning?”

  “Two consults, and that Jacob man wants to come in and speak to you about claiming his new boat as a business expense.”

  “Alrighty. Get ’em goin’.”

  He walked to the sink in the break room and washed his hands, then glanced out the window. Several police cruisers rolled to a stop in the parking lot. Officers ran into the building.

  “Shit.”

  He ran out of the office, Denise yelling something behind him. The corridor was empty, but he heard shoes on the stairs. He dashed to the emergency exit at the back of the building and down the stairs as fast as he could. He opened the exit and an alarm went off.

  He sprinted across the parking lot to the street and headed for a fast-food Mexican place down the road, thinking he could hide in the bathroom for a few hours.

  As he rounded the corner, another police cruiser blared its sirens. The tires squealed, the car making a sudden U-turn to catch up with him. There wasn’t time to get to the restaurant. He hurried down a side street into a residential neighborhood. Another cruiser turned the corner.

  Bill hopped a fence into someone’s backyard. He was at least fifty pounds overweight. Already his legs ached, and his heart pounded so hard it made him lose his breath.

  Across the yard and over another fence. This time he caught his leg on one of the posts and tore his pants. Once over, he kept running, out of breath, until he reached the gate leading out into the street.

  Someone shoved a pistol into his face. Hands threw him to the ground as someone screamed profanities in his ears. Cold steel cuffs clicked around his wrists. One of the officers lifted him by his arms and threw him into the backseat of the cruiser.

  29

  Mickey’s head throbbed, and the light coming through the patio doors made it worse. He went into the bathroom and sat in the dark for a while. His pulse felt slow, and, something that had come to terrify him in the past few years, his throat itched. A cold or flu could potentially kill him.

  He dressed and sat on the patio. It was cold despite the sunshine. A dog barked somewhere in the distance. He tried to read the New York Times online but couldn’t focus and kept rereading the same sentence three or four times. Eventually he put his phone down, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes.

  His phone vibrated. He picked it up and didn’t recognize the number. He didn’t realize he’d been sleeping.

  “This is Parsons.”

  “Special Agent Parsons?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Luke Torres. I’m an agent here in the Anchorage office of the Bureau.”

  “What can I do for you, Agent Torres?”

  “Bill Mathias. The call you and Sheriff Clay placed. We’re about to execute a search warrant of his home in about forty-five minutes. Thought you would want to be there.”

  He checked his watch. “Text me the address.”

  “You got it. See you soon.”

  Mickey called Suzan, and she answered on the first ring.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “I just got a call from an agent working your case. They’re going into Mathias’s house in forty-five minutes. Thought we might want to come.”

  “I’ll swing by and pick you up,” she said excitedly. “Don’t leave without me, Mickey.”

  “I won’t.”

  He sat out on the patio a good fifteen minutes before going inside. After putting on a leather jacket he’d brought on the trip with him, he sat on the porch steps.

  No missed calls the past couple of days. He thought maybe Jon Stanton would give him a ring, but he understood why he didn’t. With that kind of sensitivity, where everything stuck to your soul like glue, he wouldn’t want to think about death, either.

  The memory of Stanton brought back another: Stanton and his wife, Melissa, on a vacation with he and Ruth. They went to Lake Tahoe and rented a cabin with two rooms. On a mountain overlooking the lake, Mickey ran early in the morning when no one else was up. Trails led through the forests, and one morning he reached the peak. He sat on a rock up there and watched the blue water. Ruth had apparently followed him, and they spent the morning walking around the peak and admiring the views.

  He wished his wife were with him now. She would be adorable as a little old lady sitting on a porch with him. He saw lemonade and slow dancing and fishing trips in his old age.

  What he got instead were hospital beds and screams of pain as Ruth withered away, cancer eating her from the inside out.

  Only so much medication could be given. The patient has to bear any gap that exists between the pain and what the meds cover. But Mickey couldn’t take it. Sitting next to her hospital bed while she cried herself to sleep, he just wanted it to be over for her.

  Finally, after months of chemo, he took her to California, and they stayed in a little condo he rented on the beach. She obtained a prescription for medicinal marijuana, and that helped. The marijuana numbed her pain and actually allowed her to eat. The screams of agony subsided.

  After that experience, Mickey decided the drug war was a wasted battle. It seemed the country’s leaders always needed at least one war. Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, the first Iraq, the second Iraq, ten years in Afghanistan, the war on drugs, and—something Mickey knew was coming—the war on the border. Troops would be sent down to the Mexican border, along with all the hardware of war. They’d never call it a war, but that’s what it would be.

  He thought back to his enthusiasm when he signed on to the army for his first tour in Vietnam. A chance to stop communism in its tracks. But he didn’t see any communism. All he saw were peasants without enough money for even shoes. Children starved to death with parents that stole any food their children found. And a bunch of patriotic American kids didn’t know they’d been lied to.

  After only two weeks, he realized the mistake he’d made.

  But the nights were something he didn’t regret. Though he was wet and uncomfortable all the time, the deep black sky and the way the stars appeared so close you could pluck them out of the heavens kept him up at night. And the fighting was calmer. He feared the day.

  He heard a car horn. Suzan waited for him on the curb. He wiped his hands on his jeans and climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Hey, you doing okay?” she said.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “You look pale.”

  A small, sharp pain stirred in his stomach, reminding him of the recent surgery. “I’ll be fine. Just a little tired, is all.”

  “If you need some time—”

  “No, really, I’m fine. I want to be there.”

  It wasn’t more than a twenty-minute drive. As they got off the main road, they turned up a dirt path past some homes that looked like they could have come from any Southern plantation.
<
br />   Mathias’s house was yellow with white trim, the lawn freshly mowed and the windows spotless. Mickey thought of a house trying to fit in with all the others, not wanting to appear out of place in any way.

  The Bureau had either brought or flown in their own forensics unit, and a black van was parked in the driveway. Two men suited up in what appeared to be biohazard suits.

  “What does that mean?” Suzan said.

  He glanced to her and then back to the van. “It means they’ve found remains.”

  30

  Mickey was the first to step out of the Tahoe, but he kept his gaze on Suzan. Though she seemed composed and calm, he was worried she would see things she could never get out of her mind. He walked ahead, hoping to prevent that from happening. An intern from the Bureau guarded the door. Mickey flashed the tin, and he let them through.

  The home was what Mickey expected from a middle-class accountant, with one exception: no family photos. Instead of pictures, the mantle over the fireplace exhibited various recognitions and awards. Mickey scanned the front room until a man in a black suit stepped out of the kitchen. He thrust out his hand.

  “Luke Torres. Glad you could make it, Agent Parsons.”

  “Just Mickey is fine.”

  “I have to tell you, Mickey, that I have a little bit of an ulterior motive in getting you out here. I wanted to meet you. Your text on Fourth Amendment issues relating to investigations was required reading when I went through the academy. Best book I’ve ever read on the Fourth Amendment.”

  “It was me and Bob Reir, and Bob did most of the heavy lifting. But I appreciate it.”

  “You’re welcome.” He glanced to Suzan. “And you are?”

  “Suzan Clay. I’m the sheriff for Kodiak Basin.”

  “Oh, right. We’ve spoken on the phone a couple times. I can’t believe we’ve never met.”

  “Well, never had something like this before.”

  “Ain’t that the truth. Come on, I’ll show you what we got.”

  He led them through the kitchen, where a forensics tech was scouring the drain in the sink. Mickey followed Torres down a set of stairs leading to the basement, Suzan behind them.