by J. A. Jance
“How’s Jaime doing?” Butch asked.
“He’s on bereavement leave as of this morning,” Joanna answered. “Naturally he’s devastated.”
“Why wouldn’t he be?” Butch replied. “When someone dies, the people who are left behind assume that they’re somehow the root cause-that the tragedy happened because of something they did or didn’t do at some critical juncture.”
Joanna nodded. “You’ve got that right,” she said. “On our way uptown Jaime told me about a family Easter-egg hunt when he and Marcella were little. He was three years older than she was. She was running. She tripped and spilled her basket. Jaime tried to find all the missing eggs and put them back. He traded some of his own good eggs for some of her broken ones.”
Butch looked puzzled. “What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?”
“I think that was probably the first time Jaime tried to smooth things over for his little sister, but I think he’s been doing the same thing all his life.”
“Except this one can’t be smoothed,” he said.
Just then Carol Sunderson bustled in through the back door with a bright-eyed Dennis parked on her hip and with the three boisterous dogs trailing behind. None of them seemed any worse for wear for having spent the night away from home. For the next several minutes the kitchen was a chaotic circus of dogs and boy as Dennis did his best to relate everything that had gone on the evening before. Eventually, though, Dennis trotted off, taking the dogs with him. In the sudden quiet, Butch turned to Joanna.
“How about some breakfast?” he asked.
“Toast, maybe,” Joanna said. “I’m not very hungry.”
While Butch set about fixing it, Joanna leaned back, rested her head against the wall behind her, and closed her eyes.
“So what’s the plan?” Butch asked.
Joanna looked at her watch. “It’s supposed to be a light day,” she said. “The daily briefing first and then the Board of Supervisors meeting. After that, you and I are supposed to have our farewell lunch with my mother and George, followed by a haircut and a wedding rehearsal.”
The plate Butch set in front of Joanna contained a piece of buttered toast along with a hunk of leftover steak. “Have some protein,” he advised. “Even the Energizer Bunny needs to refuel sometime. Oh, and about that lunch,” he added.
George and Eleanor Winfield were about to embark on their second snowbird season, driving back to George’s Minnesota cabin in their motor home. They had delayed their spring departure in order to attend Frank Montoya’s wedding. Now they were due to leave on Sunday morning. Hence the scheduled get-together today.
“What about it?” Joanna asked.
“I may not make it,” Butch said. “My editor sent me an e-mail early this morning. They want to have a telephone conference later on today so we can get the next book tour organized. If the call is over in time, I’ll come. If not…”
“That sounds a little lame,” Joanna said.
Butch grinned. “I know,” he said. “But it’s a good excuse. Besides, she’s your mother.”
Based on Jaime Carbajal’s phone call, Mel and I had stayed up until the wee hours tracking down information on Paco Castro-no relation to Fidel and Raul, by the way. It didn’t seem likely that a tip from a grieving relative would lead us straight to a killer. That hardly ever happens. But what our research did do was show us that Paco Castro had an extensive rap sheet dating back to juvenile days. If he was representative of the caliber of Marco and Marcella Andrade’s friends, they had run with a pretty tough crowd.
The next morning, Mel and I filled our traveler’s cups with java, got in our two separate vehicles, and headed across the water to our office in Bellevue’s Eastgate neighborhood. It’s a fifteen-mile commute that, under good traffic conditions, can take as little as twenty minutes. As I’ve mentioned before, during rush hour in Seattle, there are no good traffic conditions. That day the drive took over an hour door-to-door in wall-to-wall rain. Once inside the building, we settled into our tiny but nonetheless private offices. My job that morning was to go nosing around in the world of a now-deceased two-bit thug named Marco Andrade.
From the multiple offenses listed on Marco Andrade’s rap sheet, everything from aggravated assault to attempted murder, I was mystified as to why he would have been transferred from a maximum security facility near Lancaster in southern California to a medium-security lockup called Wild Horse Mesa Prison near Redding. While doing time in Lancaster, Marco had been tagged with numerous infractions, including fighting and being nonco-operative. If it had been up to me, I would have left him where he was instead of transferring him to something less severe.
Anyone who has ever tried to outwit a recalcitrant two-year-old will be happy to tell you, chapter and verse, why it’s never a good idea to reward bad behavior.
Once again, however, I was grateful to be working for Ross Connors. When I’m initiating contact with folks in other jurisdictions, it always gives me a big leg up on the credibility ladder when I’m able to drop the name of Washington State Attorney General into the mix. If I need to go to the top, using his name makes it possible for me to take the express elevator, so to speak. It was a lot tougher back in the old days when I was a grunt working for Seattle PD.
In this instance, the top turned out to be a guy named Donald Willison, the warden of Wild Horse Mesa Prison. When his secretary put me through to him at ten past nine, Willison sounded surly and argumentative, but then again, if I had to spend every day and hour of my working life locked up inside an institution right along with a bunch of convicted criminals, maybe I’d be surly, too.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “And what do you want?”
I told him who I was and that I was calling about Marco Andrade.
Willison sighed. “Oh, crap,” he said. “Him again? You and everybody else. I knew that mope was going to be trouble the minute they dropped him off in my sally port. And once I got a look at his paperwork, I was even more convinced. I could see right off that he was going to be a problem and had no business being here. Sure enough. As soon as he got in a pissing match with one of my guards, I started trying to send him back where he came from, but reversing transfers is a lot like trying to push a rope uphill.”
That’s the way it works in bureaucracies. It may be possible to undo whatever’s been done, but you can count on it taking lots of time and extraordinary amounts of effort.
“And now that he’s dead,” Willison continued, “things will probably get worse. I expect that a whole army of grieving relatives will come crawling out of the woodwork in time to file a bunch of wrongful death lawsuits against me and the state of California. As a matter of fact, I’ve already heard from one. He called on the pretext of working a missing persons case on Andrade’s wife, but I checked the paperwork. Surprise. That so-called detective also happens to be Andrade’s brother-in-law. He said nobody had told his family that Marco was dead. God knows we tried. But it turns out Marco’s wife-this detective’s sister-seems to have gone to ground. If he can’t find her, why the hell does he think we should be able to?”
“What happened to Marco?” I asked.
“I already told you. He’s dead.”
“I mean, what happened to his body?”
Willison sighed. “We buried him.”
“On site?”
“Not exactly,” Willison said. “We’ve got a little plot just outside the gate that’s dedicated as a cemetery. When guys die in prison, it often happens that no one’s willing to step up and take responsibility for the body or for final arrangements. We do it here, but we bury them outside the fence, not inside. I’m of the opinion that a life sentence shouldn’t turn into more than that.” He paused and then added, “But you still haven’t explained why the Washington State Attorney General is interested in one of my dead inmates.”
“We’ve been investigating a series of homicides up here in Washington. In the course of the last year and a half, we’
ve had six women with known or suspected connections to prostitution who have been murdered and dumped. As of yesterday, Marco Andrade’s wife, Marcella, was positively identified as one of our six.”
“And you’re wondering if what happened to Marco had anything to do with what happened to his wife.”
“Exactly,” I told him.
“Hang on just a minute,” Willison said. “Let me get his file. I had it pulled after I heard from the alleged brother-in-law so I’d be able to know what I’m talking about.”
I heard paper rustling somewhere in the background. I found it reassuring to know that paper files still exist somewhere in the world. I’ve met a few wardens in my time, and they’re not often likable, but behind Willison’s gruff delivery I glimpsed a guy who sounded a lot like me-like someone determined to do a tough job to the best of his ability and someone who doesn’t need everything in life boiled down into bare-bones computerese.
“Here it is,” he said at last. “Name is Marco Javier Andrade. Age thirty-four. Died as a result of homicidal violence at four forty-six P.M. on October 31 of last year. He was doing five to ten for drug dealing and for attempted homicide. What else do you want to know?”
It interested me to hear that Marco Andrade had been murdered within two weeks of the time his wife had disappeared from her new home in Federal Way. That seemed like more than a mere coincidence.
“Halloween,” I said. “Not my idea of trick or treat. Do you know who killed him or why?”
“There’s an ongoing investigation into that incident,” Willison said.
That’s CYA-speak for “I don’t know squat.” I waited long enough. Finally Willison continued just to fill up the dead air.
“Andrade’s throat was slit with what started out as a toothbrush with a handle that got turned into a deadly weapon. Twelve guys went into the showers; eleven came out. He bled out right there on the shower floor.”
“What about surveillance cameras?”
Willison paused again. “Funny you should ask,” he said with some reluctance. “It turns out we just happened to be having a facility-wide problem with our surveillance equipment at that very same time. We have no tape of what happened in that shower and no way of knowing who was responsible.”
How convenient, I thought, but I could hear what he left unsaid. Willison didn’t know who had murdered Marco Andrade, and he also didn’t know who had sabotaged his surveillance equipment. It seemed to me, and most likely to Warden Willison as well, that Marco Andrade had attracted the unwelcome attention of someone with a lot of deadly horsepower.
“I suppose your investigators have talked to all the inmates who were in the shower at the time.”
“My investigators haven’t talked to anyone!” Willison retorted. Outrage was clearly audible in his voice. “Because of the surveillance camera screw-up, I was ordered to hand the investigation over to someone else-to the local guys, in this case-in order to avoid ‘any further appearance of impropriety.’”
In other words, Willison had been disciplined for both the death of his inmate and the breach of the prison security cameras. That gave me an even better idea of why the warden wasn’t happy to be discussing Marco Andrade.
“And none of the guys in the showers have come forward to volunteer any information?” I asked.
Willison hooted aloud at that one, but I don’t think he thought it the least bit funny. “You could say that,” he said. “And why would they? If there was even the slightest suspicion one of them had turned snitch, he’d probably be next on the hit list.”
“What about the surveillance cameras? Did you ever find out what happened to them?”
“I’ve been told that someone from outside hacked into our supposedly ‘super-secure’ system and that the breach has been handled, that it’s a done deal,” Willison said. “Super-secure, my ass! Just for the record, I’m not at all sure this whole thing, Marco’s death included, wasn’t an inside job, but that’s strictly between you and me. And just because I’ve been told something is a done deal doesn’t mean it is a done deal.”
In other words, Donald Willison does not play well with others, I thought. And he’s still following up on this even though he’s been told not to.
“Who’s handling the homicide investigation then?” I asked.
“Shasta County Sheriff’s Department,” he said. “A homicide detective named Gerald Lowell. He seems to be a pretty squared-away, conscientious guy, but I don’t think he’s made a whole lot of progress. For one thing, he’s on the outside and his potential eyewitnesses aren’t. Not only that, Lowell is having to work against the grain inside his own department.”
“Which is?”
“If one punk knocks off another one inside, it’s considered good riddance. They’re doing society a favor and saving the taxpayers’ money. Who cares? Nobody gives a rat’s ass!”
But I could tell by the way Donald Willison said it that he did give a rat’s ass. He was mightily offended that one of his inmates had been murdered on his watch. That was a major blow to his own job record. Willison was further offended because the powers that be were tying his hands when it came to finding out who, why, and how.
“Who do you think did it?” I asked.
“I know who did it,” he echoed. “The killer is either one of my inmates or one of my guards. There’s no way to tell which, and I’m mad as hell about that. This is a medium-security facility. We’re not supposed to be harboring killers. We’re supposed to focus on rehab and on getting people ready to go back outside and live in the real world. Now I’m faced with the possibility that one of those eleven guys, two of whom are supposed to be released in the next several weeks, is a cold-blooded killer. For the time being, I’ve put a moratorium on releases for all of them, but I won’t be able to keep them here forever. I need to know which one did it before I’m forced to let him back on the streets.”
I noticed it was easier for him to focus his anger on the inmates than it was to consider the idea that one of his guards might have switched sides.
“How long was Marco Andrade at Wild Horse Mesa?” I asked.
“He arrived here on October first,” Willison said. “Like I told you before, I knew the guy was trouble as soon as I saw his paperwork, even before he took a swing at one of my guards.”
“And the guard in question?” I asked.
The question was a natural follow-up, and Willison answered it without hesitation. “He wasn’t here. He was on medical leave from October 6 to November 15.”
It wasn’t difficult to look at all the machinations and see the same thing Warden Willison was seeing. Whoever was behind this had worked in the background, pulling strings and manipulating the system so that Andrade could be shipped from a facility where he wasn’t touchable to one where he was. In this case he was better off when he was doing hard time than when he was pressing the easy button. Maybe not better off, really, but safer.
“Were any of Andrade’s known associates in that set of showers at the time?”
“No,” Willison answered. “Not as far as I’ve been able to ascertain. What I do know is that this was a hit-as much as anything the Mafia does-and every bit as deadly.”
I heard the frustration in his voice, and I didn’t blame him for being pissed.
“I’ll talk to Detective Lowell then,” I said. “I assume he has all Andrade’s personal effects?”
“Yes. He’s got everything. By the way, what’s your name again?”
“Beaumont,” I said. “With the Washington State Attorney General’s Special Homicide Investigation Team.”
“Lowell can’t very well talk to me about what’s going on,” Willison said. “But he might talk to you. If someone who works here is a crook, I want to know about it. Understand?”
I understood completely.
“You bet,” I said. “If he comes up with a name, I’ll be happy to pass it along.”
By the time the morning briefing started, everyone had alrea
dy heard about the situation with Jaime’s sister, so it was a subdued group of officers who gathered in the conference room as Joanna brought them up-to-date. With Jaime out on bereavement leave, Joanna was gratified to see how eagerly her remaining officers were to pick up the slack. Ernie Carpenter volunteered to take charge of the DPS photo enhancement project while Debra Howell agreed to take the lead on the situation with Caring Friends.
The briefing was almost over and people were preparing to leave when they heard the sound of raised voices on the other side of the closed door. Hearing the disturbance, Ernie reached over and opened the door. From Joanna’s place at the head of the table she saw a mountain of a man standing in front of Kristin’s desk in the small lobby outside Joanna’s private office.
“I don’t care what she’s doing!” he exclaimed. “I need to see Sheriff Brady now! Understand?”
With that, he slammed his fist into Kristin’s desktop. There was enough force behind the blow that Kristin’s crystal paperweight went skittering off the desk and onto the carpeted floor. Fortunately it didn’t break. Every officer in the conference room was ready to leap to Kristin’s defense, but Joanna beat them to it.
“Excuse me,” she said calmly, walking up behind the man. “What seems to be the problem?”
The man-mountain spun around, whirling to face her. He was six-six if he was an inch, portly and slightly balding. He could have been in his late sixties or early seventies. He was also mad as hell.
“Problem?” he repeated. “You’re damned right there’s a problem. You people want to dig up my mother, and it’s not gonna happen. Understand?”
“That would make you Mr. Fletcher?” Joanna asked. Walking toward him, Joanna paused long enough to retrieve the fallen paperweight and return it to Kristin’s desk. In the meantime her officers emerged from the conference room one by one and edged into the room. Their very presence made it plain that they were all ready and willing to provide backup in case things got out of hand.