by J. A. Jance
“Thanks for your help,” Joanna said, getting to her feet. “We’ll take it from here.”
“Will this be enough to put her in jail?” Norm asked hopefully.
“I’m not so sure about jail,” Joanna said. “That’s best left up to a judge and jury, but if it’s as bad as you say, it should be enough to shut her down.”
“I hope so,” Norm said plaintively.
So do I, Joanna thought.
I seem to remember that sometime in the not-too-distant past I hated computers. And there are times when I admire people like Warden Willison and Harry I. Ball, who prefer keeping records on paper; but from a law enforcement standpoint, computers are amazing. Databases are amazing. Search engines are amazing. Back at the sheriff’s department, we went to the Records Department, where a clerk put in three separate fields in the Department of Licensing database-Hummer, yellow, and Miguel. Within seconds, out popped a name-Miguel Escalante Rios, with what turned out to be a waterfront address in Gig Harbor just up Highway 16 from Tacoma.
When we went looking for Mr. Rios’s rap sheet, what we found was interesting. He had several convictions in his early twenties-grand theft auto, several drug-related offenses, and pimping, but those convictions were all nearly thirty years old. The most recent incident was a domestic-violence arrest three years ago, one in which charges were dropped when the wronged wife refused to take him to court. The mug shot from that arrest showed a handsome enough Hispanic man somewhere in his fifties. Only in profile could you see the vicious scar that ran down one side of his face where he was missing a good part of his right ear.
“So what’s your guess?” Mel asked me, once we’d both had a chance to read through it. “Does it seem likely to you that this guy, just like Mama Rose, decided to straighten up and fly right?”
“No,” I said. “I’m of the opinion that he just stopped getting caught.”
The Records clerk, who had two sons of her own, happened to have an old GameBoy in the bottom drawer of her desk. She kept it around to use on those occasions when her kids dropped by to see her at work and she needed to keep them occupied. When we headed off to join Lupe Rivera, Detective Caldwell, and the translator in the interview room, Alfonso and Tomas were seated side by side in a worn armchair with their faces glued to the tiny screen.
Mel knocked on the door of the interview room, and Lucy Caldwell came out. “I hope you’ve got something for me,” she said. “Either she knows nothing and she can’t tell, or she knows plenty and she won’t tell. Either way, I’m not making any progress.”
“Let’s try a reality check,” I said. “How about we drop Mr. Rios’s photo in front of her and see what happens?”
Lupe Rivera’s reaction to seeing Miguel Rios’s face was every bit as jarring as her sons’ response to hearing the man’s name. Her skin turned ashen; her jaw dropped. After a moment, she shook her head. “I’ve never seen him before,” she said.
Not true!
“Look,” I told her. “Up till now, you haven’t been in any trouble. But if you start lying to us, you will be. You may not realize this, but if you don’t tell the truth, we can put you in jail. Besides, we know you have seen this man before, just this morning, as a matter of fact. Alfonso says he came by the house today, looking for your husband. What did he want?”
As the translator delivered my words, Lupe buried her face in her hands and began to weep.
“Tell us,” Mel urged. “We need to know what’s going on. That’s the only way we can help you.”
Gradually, over the next hour or so, the story came out. Tomas had come to the country illegally and had arranged a green-card marriage. He had divorced the woman once he had his permanent residency, then had gone back down to Mexico and married his childhood sweetheart. Sometimes he came home and sometimes he sent money. Still not a citizen and wanting to have his family with him, he had made arrangements to smuggle Lupe and the boys into the country.
“And that’s where Rios came in?” I asked.
Lupe nodded. “Not Miguel himself but people who work for him.”
“Do these people have a name?”
“Tomas used the same people who brought him across the border years ago. Now it’s more expensive. He had to save his money for a long time. Bringing us here cost him twenty thousand dollars in cash. We came across the border at a place called Agua Pri-eta and then rode north in a big Suburban with blacked-out windows. They dropped us off somewhere down around Tacoma. Tomas met us there and brought us here.”
“When was this?” Lucy asked.
“Two years ago.”
“And were you and your boys the only passengers on the trip north?”
“No. There were two men and some young girls-three of them-teenagers. They weren’t much older than my boys, but they were traveling alone. They didn’t have any money for food, so we shared what we could with them. On the second night, the driver asked one of the girls to have sex with him. She told him no. Later on I heard the driver and the two men joking about it. ‘That’s all right,’ the driver said. ‘She can tell me no now, but I’ll have her later. After they get cleaned up, they’ll smell a lot better.’”
I glanced at Mel and saw the tension in the muscles of her cheeks. She takes a very dim view of men who prey on young girls.
“In other words, the girls would be working off the price of their fares,” she said. “As prostitutes.”
Lupe nodded. “Si,” she said in a very small voice.
“Did the girls have any idea about what was in store for them?”
“No,” Lupe said. “I don’t think so.”
“What did Miguel want when he came here this morning?”
“I know Tomas did things for Miguel sometimes, things he wouldn’t talk about. This morning Miguel was very angry. He wanted to talk to Tomas, but my husband was already gone. Miguel said that I should give Tomas a message-that there were worse things than being dead.”
“What do you think he meant by that?”
“I don’t know.”
“What happened then?”
“I called Tomas’s boss at work, hoping to talk to him and let him know Miguel was looking for him, but my husband wasn’t there. He hadn’t shown up. And then I started thinking about what if Tomas was in some kind of trouble? What if he ran away and left us? That’s when I went through his drawers and things. If he was supposed to keep his mouth shut, I thought maybe I might find something that would let me know what was wrong.”
“And that’s when you found the photo?” Mel asked.
Lupe nodded.
“The photo of the boy you thought might be your husband’s child by another woman?”
Lupe didn’t answer for a very long time. “If I tell you the truth now and if it’s different from what I told you before, will you still put me in jail?”
“That depends,” I said.
“The picture wasn’t in Tomas’s drawer,” Lupe said. “It was in his Bible. Like he had been praying over it. And I thought…”
Tears spilled out of her eyes. She couldn’t go on.
“You thought what?” I asked.
“I thought he was a…” She struggled for a moment before continuing. “A boy someone had used just like those men used those poor girls. And I thought Tomas knew about it and he couldn’t stand it-that he was afraid the same thing could happen to Alfonso and Little Tomas. So when that other man told me the boy was his nephew and he was fine, I was very happy. But now that I know the boy’s mother is dead, I’m afraid-afraid Tomas has done something awful. So afraid.”
With good reason, I thought as she collapsed in tears once more. With very good reason.
Butch caught Joanna’s eye as she returned to the table. “Is everything all right?” he asked.
She nodded. “Everything’s fine,” she said, even though everything wasn’t fine. She found herself wondering how many times her own father and countless others like him had come home from work and told their families that ev
erything was A-OK. She suspected it wasn’t just a law enforcement subterfuge. Maybe it was a grown-up subterfuge. Maybe it was the kind of little white lie adults always tell the people they love.
Dennis was asleep within minutes of being belted into his car seat. On the way home, though, Joanna couldn’t keep all the ugliness locked inside her, and so she told Butch all about the situation at Caring Friends because it was far too heavy a burden to bear alone. When they got home, Butch carried Dennis into his room and put him to bed while Joanna went into the office and inserted the memory card into her home computer.
Norm Higgins was right. The photos were appalling and as graphic as any autopsy photos Joanna had ever seen. Derek Higgins had used a ruler to document the seeping wounds on Faye Carter’s back and buttocks. One of them was a full three and a half inches wide. Derek had also scanned a copy of the death certificate into the file. Joanna recognized the doctor’s name. Dr. Clay Forrest was the same physician who had pronounced Inez Fletcher’s death as due to natural causes. Sepsis. Again.
Scrolling through the photos, Joanna came face-to-face with the idea that now Inez Fletcher’s remains would most likely need to be exhumed. The evidence in front of her was telling, but it wouldn’t satisfy the requirements of a court of law. Derek’s sworn statement wouldn’t hold up to the demands of maintaining a chain of evidence. Only an official autopsy would do that.
A while later Butch came into her office and stood behind her, staring at the computer screen over her shoulder. Finally he heaved a sigh and walked away. By the time Joanna followed him into the bedroom, he was already in bed.
“I don’t know how you do it,” he said gruffly.
“Somebody has to,” she said.
She undressed and then had to bound over Lady’s prone sleeping body to make it into bed.
Butch reached over and wrapped his arms around her. “You’ll probably have nightmares,” he said. “I’ll probably have nightmares.”
It turned out Butch was wrong about Joanna having nightmares. She didn’t. In actual fact, she put her head on her pillow, closed her eyes, drifted off immediately, and slept like a baby.
Lupe Rivera was still in the interview room when Mel and I went out into the lobby and placed a call to Ross Connors. Once he heard the background he was adamant. “Find ’em a hotel room,” he said, “someplace with a restaurant. Put it on your company Amex. With this Rios character out gunning for them, you sure as hell can’t take them home.”
So that’s what we did. It turned out that the same Best Western where Jaime Carbajal was staying was the only place that filled the bill as far as sleeping and eating were concerned. But it occurred to me that maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. At least Jaime would know what to do if things got rough.
By the time we took them to the hotel, there weren’t any stores left open. “We’ll come over tomorrow morning,” Mel told Lupe. “We’ll help you pack up clothing and so forth.”
Or buy new, I thought. I found myself wondering how many times Lupe and her sons had actually worn clothing that wasn’t secondhand.
Mel and I had driven over in separate cars, and we went back the same way. “See you at home,” she said with a wave, and then set off out of the parking lot at something just under warp speed.
I took things a little slower, remembering the stenciled sign on Mason Waters’s maroon Kenworth. DRIVE SAFE. ARRIVE ALIVE.
I was making my solitary way past North Bend when I remembered Ken Leggett, the heavy-equipment operator who had found Marcella Andrade’s body months after her death. North Bend, Cle Elum, and Ellensburg are all little beads of towns strung on the necklace of I-90. Before today, we’d had only North Bend and Ellensburg. Now we had Cle Elum as well. On a whim, I turned off the freeway and made my way back to Ken Leggett’s place with the Lady in the Dash telling me over and over in the firmest possible voice that I was “off route” and to “make a U-turn where possible.”
No one answered the door at Ken Leggett’s place, but that wasn’t surprising. It was 10:00 P.M. on a Friday night. Without much worry about being wrong, I made my way to the Beaver Bar, and there he was-sloshed as can be and slouched in a corner booth.
As I came through the door, the bartender recognized me. “Don’t worry,” he said, nodding in Ken’s direction. “I already cut him off. He’s drinking straight coffee.”
When I sat down opposite him, Ken gave me a bleary-eyed stare. “Who the hell are you?” he wanted to know. “And who said you can sit here? This booth is taken.”
“I’m a cop, remember?” I said. “I’m the one who came to talk to you about that body you found in the woods.”
He stiffened. “I don’t wanna talk about it,” he said.
“I don’t blame you a bit,” I said. “So let’s talk about something else.”
“What?”
“Who do you work for again?”
“Bowdin Timber. Why? What’s it to you?”
My heart quickened as I heard the name. It was the same company that employed Tomas Rivera.
“Did you ever run into a guy by the name of Tomas Rivera?”
Ken squinted at me over the top of his coffee mug. “Sure,” he said. “I know Tommy. I’ve known him for years. On the crew we all call him Tomba, Tomba, Tomba. Don’t know why.”
“Did you happen to see him today?” I asked.
“Do I look like somebody’s attendance officer?” he said. “Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“I could have sworn I saw his red pickup parked outside my equipment shed as I was leaving, but I remember his crew chief complaining that he never showed up for work today.”
If I could find Tomas’s vehicle, maybe I could start to get a line on where he had gone.
“By your shed,” I said eagerly. “Where’s that? Can you tell me how to get there?”
“Hell, no,” Ken said. “You’d be lost for years. Some elk hunter would find you dead in your car next winter. But I can show you.”
He heaved himself out of the booth. “Come on,” he said.
Ken staggered outside. There was no way I was letting him drive, but when I showed him my Mercedes, he hooted with laughter. “That thing’ll high-center and we’ll end up needing a tow.”
In the end, we took his four-wheel-drive Toyota Tundra. I drove. He directed me down I-90 and off into the woods on roads that made no sense and where I began to believe he was right-that once we got in, we’d never get out. But eventually we rounded a corner and there, in front of us, was a massive metal shed with two sets of huge garage doors. And parked off to one side was a red Toyota pickup truck.
I suddenly felt nervous and wished I were wearing my Kevlar vest. I was there alone, except for Ken, but he was drunk and I knew he wouldn’t be any help if push came to shove. I was going to tell him to stay put and let me go scout around. Before I had a chance, he swung open the door and half tumbled/half stumbled to the ground. Then he righted himself and started toward the shed, swearing under his breath.
I yelled at him to stop, but he ignored me. Instead, he set off in a staggering broken-field trot, lumbering toward the shed. I got out of the Tundra, too. Once I was on the ground, I heard what he had heard. Coming from inside the shed was the low-throated rumble of some kind of heavy equipment.
By the time I caught up with Ken, he had fumbled a set of keys out of his pocket and was opening a door that was set into the side wall of the shed. He reached inside and switched on a light. Then, after hitting a button that opened the garage doors, he came rolling back out of the shed coughing as a thick cloud of diesel smoke and carbon monoxide billowed behind him and rose skyward in a cloud through the open garage doors.
We waited for a few moments for the air to clear. When Leggett went back inside to turn off the bulldozer, I followed behind. A man sat slumped at the wheel. I knew from the way he was sitting that Tomas Rivera was gone.
I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. Amazed t
o see I had a signal, I called Mel.
“You’d better turn around at the next exit,” I told her. “We have a problem.”
CHAPTER 16
As Best Man, Joanna was due at the church for wedding photos at nine. By seven-thirty she knew she was having a bad hair day. After wetting her hair down completely and starting over, she managed to make the grade.
After the fuss Dennis had made during the rehearsal, she and Butch decided to run up the flag to see if Carol could keep him with her rather than having him mess up the ceremony. Jenny wouldn’t be there, either, which meant it would just be Joanna and Butch. If kids did something to wreck the festivities, they would be someone else’s kids and someone else’s problem.
While getting dressed, Joanna had also decided that she would do nothing about the funeral-home photos until after the wedding. Most of the people who weren’t on duty would be at the church.
People need to have a chance to enjoy themselves, she told herself as she sprayed her unruly hair into submission. Besides, since the victims in question had been dead for months, there was no point in putting in a lot of costly overtime to jump-start the investigations.
Butch whistled appreciatively when she finally emerged from the bedroom. “Most of the best men I’ve met aren’t nearly this good-looking,” he said.
They dropped Dennis off at Carol’s place on the way. Once at the church, Joanna started inside for the formal wedding photo ordeal while Butch told her he would wait in the car until closer to the ceremony.
“You’re just going to sit here?” she asked. “You didn’t even bring along something to read.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “I don’t need anything to read. You’d be surprised how little time I have to just sit and think.”
She made it through the photo session in good shape. The dove-gray silk ensemble her mother had found was a perfect complement for the tuxes worn by Frank and the ring bearer.
True to Father Rowan’s words, the ceremony went off without a hitch. Well, mostly without a hitch. As the ring bearer, Joanna, and Frank filed into their places at the front of the church, Frank looked nervous and more than a little pale. Joanna worried that if Frank keeled over, she’d have a hard time holding him up. But then LuAnn Marcowitz, the bride, came walking down the aisle accompanied by both her son and daughter. The radiant smile she turned on Frank seemed to bolster him. He straightened his shoulders and a bit of color seeped back into his pallid cheeks.