by J. A. Jance
“Todd’s on it,” I said.
“On what?”
“He called while we were at the library. Since he was still at the house, I put him to work tracking down information on Destry Hennessey.” I paused, worried that I was venturing onto thin ice. “I also asked him to track down whatever he could on Anita Bowdin.”
“Good idea,” Mel said, and that’s all she said.
When we got to the condo Todd greeted us like an eager puppy that’s been left on its own all day long. He had a fistful of papers to show us. He had stuff he wanted to talk about, and he was disappointed when I waved him off.
“Sorry, Todd,” I told him. “Mel and I are both working on two hours’ worth of sleep. Talking to us now would be a waste of breath and effort. You’re more than welcome to stay over. The guest room’s made up and available. Help yourself.”
And off to bed we went.
Women perform these mysterious but invisible rituals that men mostly miss. For instance, I never really understood that when Mel goes down the hall every night before we go to bed, she uses some potion or other to remove her makeup. That night, tired as she was, she went to bed without performing that little chore. And since she’s usually up before I am and down the hall in her bathroom, it’s usually a nonissue.
The next morning, though, I happened to wake up first, and I was shocked. Mel looked like a raccoon.
“Are you all right?” I asked when she finally blinked awake.
“Sleepy,” she said. “Why?”
“You look like someone blacked both your eyes.”
She uttered a strangled little sound that was halfway between a whimper and a legitimate eek. Then she leaped out of bed and, stark naked, raced down the hall to her bathroom. The guestroom bathroom. She came back a few minutes later wrapped in a robe, carrying her clothing, and absolutely furious-at me.
“Why didn’t you tell me Todd was sleeping over?” she demanded.
“You were right there when I told him he was welcome to stay,” I countered.
“Yes,” she hissed back. “But you never told me he’d accepted!”
In other words, the Ides of March didn’t get off to the most auspicious of starts around our place. While Mel showered in my bathroom, I went out to the kitchen to make coffee. Todd was there, eating cold leftover pizza. He didn’t say a word about Mel, and neither did I.
Todd gave me a choice of two different stacks of paper, one with reprints of articles on Destry Hennessey and the other, far larger, devoted to Anita Bowdin. I picked the Anita option and retreated to my recliner to go to work.
What I read to begin with was mostly one puff piece after another, many of them dealing with Anita’s work in founding and maintaining the SASAC. Tired of reading the same thing over and over, I skipped to what Analise Kim would have referred to as the FIFO-First In First Out-program and skipped back to the earliest one I could find, a New York Times feature article that profiled a group of six exceptionally brilliant female students, all of whom had enrolled in prestigious colleges at a time when most of their contemporaries were just venturing into high school.
Anita Bowdin, daughter of a university physics professor and an insurance executive, was one of the six very young women. All of them came from upper-crust, privileged backgrounds. All of them voiced concerns about whether or not they’d be able to fit in with the older students around them. All of them expressed some worry about being able to keep up with the course work. All of them credited teachers for encouraging them to strive. I was struck by the one Anita Bowdin mentioned-Sister Helen Thomas of Sisters of the Sacred Heart School, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
So Anita Bowdin had attended a parochial school. Was that a connection? Did the fact that Anita Bowdin had attended Catholic schools as a child have something to do with the fact that a mysterious nun was somehow involved in our series of homicides?
The next media mention of Anita Bowdin came two years later, in the July 7 issue of Ann Arbor News, where she was mentioned in her father’s obituary.
Private funeral services will be held today at 2:00 p.m. at St. Claire Catholic Church for noted University of Michigan physics professor Armand P. Bowdin, who died unexpectedly in his home late last week.
Died unexpectedly in his home. In the old days, when journalism was a more gentlemanly pursuit, those words constituted media shorthand and media newspeak for suicide. They were used primarily when either the deceased or his survivors had enough media pull that no one wanted to mention that the dead guy pulled his own plug.
The rest of the article was a mostly laudatory recitation of his educational and employment background. Anita’s name came at the very end, where she and her mother, Rachel Bowdin, were listed as survivors.
Those two snippets of Anita Bowdin’s history were as far as I’d managed to make it when Mel finally emerged from the bedroom. She was not only dressed-she was dressed to the nines: heels, panty hose, skirt, silk blouse, and blazer. Every hair was in place. Her makeup was impeccable. In other words, she was clothed in the full armor of God and ready to take on all comers.
“All right,” she said coolly, ignoring me and looking Todd straight in the eye. “What have we got?”
Wordlessly he passed Mel the Destry Hennessey file. She took that and a cup of coffee and headed for the window seat. For the next several mintues the atmosphere in the room was thick with tension. It was a relief when my phone rang.
“Detective Beaumont?”
“Yes.”
“Detective Donner here, Ambrose Donner with Bountiful PD. Sorry I wasn’t able to get that composite from the Escobar case off to you yesterday like I said I would. Turns out I ran into, shall we say, a few difficulties.”
“I know how that goes,” I said, and I did. He meant that somebody with a wad of brass on his uniform had decided sending the composite wasn’t going to happen. “That’s all right,” I added. “I was tied up all day yesterday on another case.”
“I can send it now,” Donner said. He sounded pissed. “Is that fax number you gave me still good?”
“Sure,” I said. “Send away.”
“While I was at it,” Donner continued, “I read through the case file, just for the hell of it. Did I tell you about the thread?”
“The black thread?” I asked. “Yes, you mentioned it.”
“The Utah State Police Crime Lab did some analysis of it. They sent word to all convents operated by the Catholic Church in the state of Utah, asking whether or not one of their members had gone missing and also asking for samples of fabric used in the sisters’ habits. Every single convent responded. None of them reported any of their members to be missing. There are only a few convents-eighteen, to be exact-where the nuns still wear habits. All eighteen sent fabric samples, but there wasn’t a single match. Not even close. So what I’m asking is this, Detective Beaumont. Are you looking for a Catholic nun who’s been reported missing? There’s nothing I’d like more than to clear this case and tell the guy who’s running the show here that he’s all wet.”
Working with other jurisdictions involves a lot of horse-trading. They give you something, you give them something in return. Donner deserved to get something back.
“We’re actually looking at the nun more as a possible doer than we are a missing person,” I said.
“No kidding,” Donner murmured.
“We’ve got a couple other cases here on our end where an unidentified nun has been seen in the vicinity of a homicide.”
“That would shed a whole new light on things, wouldn’t it,” Donner said. “So I’ll ship you that composite as soon as we’re off the phone. If you need anything else, just let me know.”
“What about the Escobar file?” I asked.
“I’ll copy what I can and ship that to you as well. What about Hammond?”
“Hammond?” I asked.
“Phyllis Elaine Hammond, the old lady Escobar killed. I’ve got some friends at Salt Lake PD. I might be able to get that file sen
t to you as well.”
“That would be great,” I said.
“On one condition. Promise me that if and when you resolve this thing, you’ll keep me in the loop.”
“Not only in the loop,” I said. “I’ll make sure you get credit where credit is due.”
I put down the phone and sat there waiting for the fax machine to come to life. “Did you call Ross yet?” Mel asked.
“I was stalling on that,” I admitted. “I’m not wild about telling him one of his favorite people, a criminalist he personally hired and mentored, is bent.”
“You’d better call him all the same,” Mel told me. “We may think confiscating those tampered rape kits is a bad idea, but Ross Connors may think differently about that.”
“Wouldn’t you like to make the call?” I offered.
“Do I look stupid or something?” Mel returned. “Not on your life. You do it.”
So I did. While the fax machine began clicking and clacking, I dialed Ross’s office and was thrilled to be told the attorney general was in a meeting.
“Any message?” his secretary asked.
“Naw,” I said. “I’ll get back to him later.”
“Coward,” Mel said when I hung up the phone.
I waited until the fax machine shot the piece of paper into the tray. Then I picked the composite up. Beneath it was a second fax, the ballistics information Ralph had managed to wheedle out of the authorities down in Cancun. I took both faxes along with me as I headed to the kitchen for a coffee refill. Mel must have emptied her mug at about the same time. I had put the composite down on the counter and was pouring my coffee when Mel joined me. She set her cup down and picked up the piece of paper. What I heard next was a sharp intake of breath.
“Damn!” Mel muttered.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I know her,” Mel said. “I’ve seen this woman before.”
“Where?” I demanded.
“On the trip to Mexico.”
“She was there?” I asked. “She’s one of the board members?”
“No,” Mel answered. “She’s one of the pilots-one of the two pilots on Anita Bowdin’s private jet.”
Life keeps reminding me that things have changed. “The pilot was a woman?” I asked, blurting out the question without even thinking.
“Both of the pilots were women,” Mel said pointedly.
My mistake! “What’s her name?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” Mel said. “We may have been introduced. If we were, I don’t remember. A pilot is a pilot. There were two of them. They were both wearing uniforms.”
Yes, I thought, a pilot in a uniform is almost as invisible as a nun in her habit.
There were official ways to get the information I needed-grindingly slow bureaucratic ways. The situation required speed. Later on I could go back and cross the official t’s and dot the i’s. In the meantime I opened my cell phone and dialed Ralph Ames. “Any word on the ballistics stuff I sent you?” Ralph wanted to know when he answered.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d only just that moment seen it. “Not yet,” I said, “but remember the other day, when I asked you about that flight into Cancun?”
“Sure,” Ralph said. “What about it?”
“Can you get back to whoever gave you that information and ask for a little more?”
“That depends,” Ralph replied. “What kind of information?”
“I need the tail number on the plane,” I said. “I also need to know the names of the pilots-names and addresses, too, if you can get them.”
“That might be a little more difficult,” he allowed, “but I’ll see what I can do and get right back to you.”
I closed my phone. “I don’t remember asking Ralph about the flight to Cancun,” Mel said absently.
It was, as I mentioned earlier, the Ides of March. “It was when we were talking to him about everything else,” I said. “It must have slipped your mind.”
Before anything more was said, Ross called me back. Now the conversation with him, one I had dreaded, came as a welcome diversion. I spent the next ten minutes telling him what I could about what was going on in the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab under Destry Hennessey’s dubious leadership.
When I finished, he let out a long sigh. “Damn,” he said. “But you and Mel are right. Doing anything to try to secure those rape kits right now is going to set off alarms for whoever’s involved. We’re just going to have to leave them for the time being. And maybe when some of the dust settles, we’ll be able to talk Mrs. Kim into coming back and helping us sort it all out.”
“If it gets rid of whoever’s been responsible for moving her stapler, I’m sure she’ll be happy to.”
“Her stapler?” Ross asked.
But call-waiting was calling. “Sorry, Ross,” I said. “Gotta go.”
Ralph Ames was on the other line. “Here are the names of the pilots,” he said. “Diane Massingale and Trudy Rayburn. The plane’s a Hawker 800XP. Tail number is N861AB-that’s November eight six one Alpha Bravo.”
“Excellent, Ralph,” I told him. “What about addresses on the pilots?”
“Didn’t get those,” he said. “The FBO in Cancun might have some information on that.”
“FBO?” I repeated. “What’s that?” It sounded as though we had landed back in Analise Kim’s world of LIFO/FIFO.
“FBO stands for Fixed Base Operator,” Ralph explained. “They handle ground operations for general aviation-fuel, catering, landing facilities, ground transportation, car rentals, all those kinds of things. The FBO in Cancun is called ASUR. Again, that’s A-S-U-R. Got it? If the pilots purchased fuel there, they probably have a record of the credit card transaction. They would also know if there was a rental car involved and maybe even what hotel was used.”
“So FBOs are all over?”
“Sure,” Ralph said. “There are only about three hundred airports in this country that handle commercial jet traffic, but there must be at least five thousand that serve the private, corporate, and charter-jet end of the business. Every one of them has at least one FBO. Some of them have several.”
“And they keep a record of planes that land and take off under their auspices?”
“Especially if landing fees or fuel purchases were involved,” Ralph said. “Why? What does any of this have to do with the price of peanuts?”
“I’ll tell you later, Ralph. Right now I’ve got to go.”
I closed the phone and turned to Todd Hatcher. “Do you happen to have your spreadsheet handy?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Why?”
“You know what an FBO is?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” he returned.
So I explained it as well as I could, bearing in mind that I had only heard the term for the first time a few minutes earlier. “I want you to go to each of the crime scenes we know about, the ones you’ve been putting in. Then I want you to locate all the FBOs in the area and find out if a plane with the tail number November eight six one Alpha Bravo was anywhere in that vicinity at the time of any of our mysterious deaths. Ditto the case in Salt Lake City,” I added.
“The one I read about in the Destry Hennessey stuff?” Todd asked. “The Escobar murder?”
“That’s the one.”
“What do I say if they ask me who I am or what right I have to ask for any information?”
“Tell them you’re a cop,” I told him. “You work for the Special Homicide Investigation Team, an arm of the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. And if they give you any trouble, tell them to call Ross’s office and check. Tell them to call collect.”
While I had been talking to Todd, Mel had located a phone book. “Here,” she said. “T. Rayburn. She lives in Kent.”
“Don’t pilots all have licenses?” I asked.
“I’m sure,” she said. “They’re handled by the Federal Aviation Administration. Want me to see what kind of information we can come
up with? If nothing else, it would be helpful to know which is which.”
Suddenly my Belltown Terrace apartment was a beehive of activity as our mini “task force” swung into action. With Todd using the landline to track FBOs, Mel got on her cell phone to start working her way through the powers that be at the FAA. Meanwhile, I poked away at my cell phone to dial my own favorite weapons analyst, a self-described “gun guy” down at the crime lab, one Larry Crumb.
Larry and I go back a long way. We used to be pals-drinking buddies. And for a while, back when we were both still married, we were on each other’s Christmas card list. Every year, Larry’s card was a photo featuring Larry posing with some outrageous weapon or other.
“Hey, bro,” Larry said, when I identified myself. “How’s it hanging?”
Typical drinking-buddy BS. And typical drinking-buddy conversation-never say anything real.
“I’m working on a case,” I told him.
“This is not news,” he replied.
“The problem is, it crosses a few international lines,” I explained. “Like between the U.S. and Mexico. I have the ballistics workup that was sent from the crime scene, and I’m trying to figure out a way to run it through NIBIN.”
“No can do,” Larry returned. “NIBIN would be the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network. Nobody’s calling it the International Whatever, if you get my meaning.”
“I understand that,” I said. “And I don’t want to rattle cages, but I think the case from Mexico leads directly back to at least one case and maybe several more here in the States. If you could just walk this past-”
“Look, Beau,” he said. “You don’t hang around the crime lab much these days, but I can tell you, it’s hell. When Destry Hennessey comes riding through here on her broom, we all run for cover. If she finds out I’m doing an unauthorized analysis on her equipment and on her watch, she’ll have my balls-and my job.”
In other words, Analise Kim wasn’t the only pissed-off employee at the Washington State Crime Lab. There were other avenues I could have used, but those would have taken more time. And lots more documentation. The material I had in hand through Ralph’s unofficial efforts would have to be reobtained, this time going through channels and across desks, something that would take time-a commodity we didn’t have. So I punted.