“I know you’re right. It’s just difficult to pull my mind away from Thor. He’s the sort of guy who can hold on to it, you know?”
“I certainly haven’t forgotten him. But I think I’ve got something that’ll re-focus you.”
“Yeah?”
He had a piece of paper in his hand, an excited gleam in his eyes.
“Remember the problem we had believing that someone connected to Andy Doran could be coming after Jefferson?”
I nodded. “The time lag. It seemed like a stretch.”
“About ten minutes before you showed up, that problem was blown away, LP.”
He slid the paper onto my desk, and I saw it was a printout from an Internet newspaper site.
“Andy Doran escaped from prison the end of September. He was back on the streets over two weeks before Jefferson was killed.”
I picked up the printout and looked from it back to Joe. He had a tight smile on his face.
“Well? Think you’ll be able to forget about Thor for a bit now?”
Without answering, I dropped my eyes and read through the article. Doran had been one of three inmates from a cleanup detail who’d broken out of prison by hiding in a garbage truck. The other two had been arrested within twenty-four hours. Doran had vanished.
“Are you sure he’s still out? Most of these guys are caught so fast . . .”
“He’s still out. There’s a page devoted to him on the U.S. marshals’ Web site.”
I read the article a second time, then set it aside and stared at Joe. “He’s the guy. Doran’s the guy.”
“I’m leaning that way myself.”
“When he had that bag over my head, he told me that Jefferson’s son called his dad for help, and he paid the price for five years. It says in this article that he’d been in prison for five years on a twenty-year sentence.”
“It’s a possibility,” Joe said. “Maybe a strong one. But we’ve got to dig deeper before we throw this one at Targent. A single remark about five years of paying a price is not going to convince the cops.”
I looked back down at the article. “It said he was convicted of manslaughter.”
“I saw that, and I don’t understand it. We’re going to need to go get the case file, see how all of this unfolded.”
“Case file will be out in Geneva.”
“Right. Which is why I suggest we leave now.”
I called Karen while we drove, asked her if she’d received any more phone calls, any more threats. She hadn’t, but it was clear she was still shaken from the first, speaking in a tight voice, her words coming too quickly, her tone too uneven.
“You okay?” I said. “You get any sleep?”
She gave a bitter laugh. “No, Lincoln. I didn’t feel sleep was much of a possibility last night. The police came out and spent a long time here. That was good. I was . . . It was a tough night. I was a little unsteady.”
“Maybe you should go somewhere today. Get out of that house, stop being alone, spend some time around people.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“All right. Listen, Joe and I are working on this, okay? We’ve got some ideas, maybe a decent lead. We’re going to make progress today, Karen. I’m sure of it.”
“Anything you want to tell me about?”
“Give me the day. Let us have the day to work on it, and I’ll come by the house tonight, tell you what we’ve done and what we’re considering.”
“I’d appreciate that, Lincoln. I do appreciate it.”
I hung up and relayed the conversation to Joe.
“I’d be damn careful deciding what to tell her, and when to tell it,” he said. “There are a million types of grudges, and reasons for them. But if this guy really is Doran, and he really was innocent?”
“It’ll make Jefferson look like one dirty son of a bitch.”
He nodded. “You got it.”
“I don’t have trouble buying that idea.”
“No. But Karen will. And having it come from you . . .”
“Let’s worry about that when we get to it. All I care about now is finding out what happened to this guy.”
Making the drive felt good. Joe was in the car with me, where he belonged, and we were making progress on a case that mattered. It was in that moment of satisfaction that I thought of the question I’d asked him yesterday, the one he’d chosen not to answer.
“I appreciate you coming out with me on this one, Joe. Don’t know if I made that clear enough.”
“It’s nothing.”
“When I came by your house yesterday, though . . . I asked when you were planning on coming back.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You didn’t answer.”
He was quiet. I kept my eyes on the road and waited.
“I joined the police right out of school,” he said. “It was the only thing I ever wanted to do, the only thing I ever considered doing. So I joined up, and I did my thirty. Ruth died and I took a week off and went right back to work, and then it was all I had. She and I had made all these plans, right? Plans for retirement, the way we’d spend it together. But then she was gone, and what was I going to do, see Europe by myself? Build a greenhouse and plant tropical flowers? Come on. All that was gone, and so I retired and started the PI gig with you. Didn’t pause for so much as a summer. Just went right back into the work. It was without the badge and without the bureaucracy, but it was the same work.”
He paused for a minute, and I wanted to look at him but was afraid to, somehow, as if movement would disrupt him, stop him from continuing.
“When I got shot this summer, it forced me to step away from it,” he said. “That was the first time I’d done that, LP. The first time since I was a kid that I wasn’t living and breathing an investigation.”
“And that was good?”
“Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. It was different, at least. It was something different, after three decades of it all being largely the same. And it made me wonder . . . I don’t know.”
“What?”
“I guess it made me wonder if there’s something else I want to do before I’m gone, you know? Something else I need to do, or should do. I’m running out of time—”
“You’re not running out of time.”
“You say that because you’re young. I’m not at death’s door or anything, LP, I know that, but I’m also not young. I’m old, and getting older. And all I’ve ever done is this sort of work.”
I looked over at him for the first time since he’d started to talk. “Are you happy being away from it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t look happy. You looked . . . kind of empty, Joe. I understand what you’re saying about how long you’ve been in this game, but all you were doing until I dragged you back out of the house was sitting in your chair in the living room. Is that better for you?”
He shook his head. “No, it’s not. I have no intention of spending the rest of my life sitting in that chair, feeling like a damned old man. There’s a part of me that believes it’s time for a change, though. I was in the chair only because I don’t know what the change should be, or even if it should be.”
I sat and watched the highway open up ahead of us, didn’t say a word.
“I know you feel like I left you adrift these last couple of months,” Joe said, “but if you were smart enough to consider it, you’d realize there’s an unspoken compliment there. I don’t have to worry about you. Don’t have to call the office nine times a day to make sure nothing’s going wrong. Nothing will be going wrong, because you’re good. You’re damn good, probably already better than I am in some ways. You’ve got an instinct for this sort of work that’s as good as anybody’s I’ve ever seen, and now you’ve matured to the point where you can build off the instinct with a cool head. You’re not the cowboy you used to be, not so much of one, at least.”
“I still need you, Joe. I can’t run this thing by myself.”
“That’s not tr
ue.” He shook his head. “You can run it by yourself, and you know that. You can handle any case that comes our way, handle it well. You did it alone for the last few months, and did it easily.”
“You know I’ll support you with whatever it is you want to do,” I said. “I don’t want to work alone, but I will support you if you decide to leave.”
“I know. And when that decision is made, it’ll be made in consultation with you, LP. You’re my partner whether I’m in that office or not.”
21
Eight months out of high school, Andy Doran was arrested for the first time. He was in Cleveland then, a John Marshall High School graduate who got picked up for breaking into a house in Shaker Heights and making off with a few televisions and some speakers. Made it about three miles before he was pulled over for speeding by a cop who grew curious about the odd collection of used electronics equipment in Doran’s backseat.
Doran managed to walk away with nothing more than probation for that first offense, and he kicked around the city for another two years before joining the Army. There he lasted four years, earning a few commendations for his physical skills and marksmanship while completing advanced infantry training, airborne training, and some specialized urban combat training. The commendations didn’t mean his military career was off to a problem-free start, though—his personnel file grew thick with disciplinary actions before he was arrested for the second time. An MP investigation revealed that Doran, in connection with a couple of civilian buddies near Fort Bragg, had been selling stolen military equipment through local gun dealers and the Internet—military equipment that included night vision goggles, guns, and grenades. A dishonorable discharge was the prelude to a two-year prison stay for that one.
He made his way, as ne’er-do-wells usually do, back home. Six months after he moved into his mother’s house, she died, leaving her son a meager inheritance and a larger mortgage. Doran promptly defaulted on the loan and moved out of the house to places unknown. Eighteen months later, he turned up in Geneva-on-the-Lake, where he was arrested for assault and battery after a bar fight. Doran walked away from the fight with some minor bruises and lacerations—all to his hands, which he’d used quite effectively on the other man’s face. For this offense, he served another six months in jail. The fight apparently stemmed from a territorial debate involving a redheaded waitress. While Doran won the brawl, he did not win the waitress, because he was single when he got out of jail, a problem he quickly sought to rectify upon meeting twenty-year-old Monica Heath.
By then Doran was driving a truck, albeit without a commercial driver’s license, engaged in furniture deliveries and whatever other local hauling he could land. One of those jobs was driving the catering van for Heath’s company. A short relationship flourished, apparently based upon a shared love of outdoor intercourse and marijuana. The couple remained together for about three months before Heath’s friends convinced her that Doran was trouble and she could do better. They made out in the van one last time, split a joint, and parted on what appeared to be amicable terms.
Seven weeks later, Heath was dead with her skirt pushed up over her hips, her underwear missing. She’d been strangled with the towel that she’d used to wipe down the tables. The towel was a problem—no fingerprints, no grip marks. The police interviewed Doran after the body was discovered, then returned the next day, this time with a search warrant for his trailer and orange Camaro, motivated by an eyewitness who could place Doran at the scene. Doran was high when they came for him, with a water bong sitting in his sink, but not so far gone that he failed to put up a fight when officers found a black garbage bag tucked beneath a stack of cinder blocks near one end of the trailer—with Monica Heath’s underwear inside. Doran stumbled out of the trailer spewing profanities and trying to fight the cop who’d made the find, screaming about being framed as he swung uncoordinated punches at the man’s head before being subdued.
The underwear was taken to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, where lab tests returned Heath’s DNA, but not Doran’s, or anyone else’s. Still, the black Victoria’s Secret thong made things grim for Doran, particularly when combined with his criminal history and the testimony of Heath’s friends, a half dozen of whom reported that Monica had frequently stated that sex with Doran—while good—was also rough, that he was aggressive and wild and, yes, prone to the occasional hair pull or maybe even a little choking. None of them was firm in the memory of a choking reference, but two of the girls thought that, yeah, maybe, just maybe, Monica had mentioned it in the past.
Powerful evidence, made only more powerful by the addition of an eyewitness account placing Doran’s Camaro at the scene and a man matching his description involved with Heath on the winery’s deck.
That eyewitness, a Matthew Jefferson, of Pepper Pike, came forward in something of an unconventional manner. Jefferson had discovered the body and called the police. He had not, however, been able to pass along any details of the man on the deck—at least not at first. It was the following day when young Jefferson reappeared with an amended account of the night and his father at his side. In this meeting, the law student claimed that he’d been frightened by the police, who had apparently been aggressive in their questioning, and that he’d neglected to mention that he’d seen a car in the parking lot on his walk up to the winery. The car, he explained, was an older Camaro that had looked orange in the moonlight. Also, he’d had a better look at the man on the deck than he’d shared, a good enough look to tell him that the man was about six feet tall, with bristle-short hair and a tattoo of some sort along his left forearm.
Doran insisted he had an alibi: He’d spent the night with a man named Donny Ward, drinking whiskey and target shooting with a .22. When the police went to interview Ward, though, he claimed to have no idea what Doran was talking about. Said he hadn’t seen Doran since an encounter at a bar a few nights earlier.
Within days of Heath’s murder, Doran found himself facing an eyewitness account, hard evidence found at his home, and a useless alibi. He was broke, of course, and couldn’t afford a private attorney. His public defender, a man who had worked on exactly zero murder cases, managed to get a plea offer that reduced the charge to manslaughter, occurring during autoerotic activity, consensual activity, mind you. Two days before his trial was to begin, Andy Doran was offered a plea agreement for a twenty-year prison sentence, which meant he could be out in ten if he didn’t cause any trouble. Facing a life sentence if he was convicted, possibly even the death penalty if things really went bad, Doran accepted the plea.
Five years passed, and Doran stayed in prison. He behaved well in custody, gave the jailers no trouble, kept his mouth shut. Behaved well enough, in fact, that he was trusted with some sweet prison jobs, simple, yawn-while-you-work tasks like cleaning up after meals, mopping the floors, and taking out trash.
It was a tough fiscal year, state and federal budget crunches being felt in almost every agency, including the correctional facilities. Jobs were lost, and employees who left of their own volition were not quickly replaced. Reduced manpower was a challenge in every jail, and with that challenge Doran and the rest of his cleanup crew were given a new responsibility: running the trash compacter, a task previously supervised by a corrections officer. All trash leaving the jail was compacted both for efficiency and to ensure that any inmate hoping to escape in a garbage bag would be properly flattened before finding his way to the truck.
One day in late September, not all of the trash was compacted. Andy Doran and two others hid in a heap of refuse, were loaded into the back of a garbage truck, and were driven out of the gates and back into freedom. Within forty-eight hours, the other two were arrested at a truck stop on I-70, where they were attempting to purchase hot dogs and Red Bull energy drinks even while their pictures were being displayed on the television set just over their heads. Andy Doran wasn’t with them when the cops came, though, and, according to his fellow escapees, the last time anyone saw him he was walking through
a muddy wheat field, heading north.
All of this, Joe and I learned through several hours spent in the Ashtabula County Courthouse reading hundreds of pages of depositions and transcripts in Doran’s case. While I went through the case file, Joe made a trip to the library and came back with a dozen more articles relating to Doran’s escape from prison and the subsequent—and unsuccessful—manhunt.
“Can we really believe,” Joe said, “that when this guy broke out of jail the first thing on his mind was settling a score?”
“Why not? If he’d done five years for a crime he didn’t commit—”
“He might have murdered that girl. Can’t be sure he didn’t, not yet, at least.”
“Right. But playing out the thread here, we’ll say that he didn’t, and that for some reason unknown to us he held Jefferson responsible. Five years is a long time to spend in prison for something you didn’t do. A long time to build a grudge. Ever read The Count of Monte Cristo? Besides, the guy’s a fugitive now. Where’s he going to run? And on what cash? He needed money, and Jefferson had it.”
Joe wore a deep frown as he continued flipping through documents, but he was also nodding. “Jefferson never went to the cops. He tried to hire Thor to kill whoever was threatening him. Doesn’t exactly smack of legitimacy, you know? So maybe we’re right. Maybe the reason he had to try to handle it with someone like Thor was because he knew Doran had him—and his son—by the balls.”
“His son’s testimony was absurd. Showing up with his father to change stories a day after he found the body?”
“It is weak, which is why it wouldn’t have convicted Doran. The girl’s underwear—”
“Which could have been planted easily enough.”
“Yes, but it was still more convincing evidence than anything Jefferson’s son said. Although he did point them in Doran’s direction, I suppose. He got it all moving.”
“That time reference . . . it’s too clear. Paying the price for five years, he said—and then he comes after Jefferson and the son as soon as he gets out of prison. It’s also the exact same time Jefferson and the son developed their rift. I bet Jefferson pulled the son out of the fire and then cut him off. He wouldn’t want his image tarnished by a son who was a murderer, but he also wouldn’t want the kid around. Out of sight, out of mind.”
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