Justice Denied jpb-18

by J. A. Jance

  “That doesn’t change the fact that his picture is here,” Mel said determinedly.

  And off we went on the trail of Anita Bowdin’s mother Rachel. It took time for us to bring her to ground. Widowed for a second time, Rachel A. Trasker lived in a retirement compound near Tampa, Florida.

  “This is about my daughter?” Rachel asked warily once we finally had her on the phone. “If you’re a reporter…”

  Clearly we weren’t the first people to make the connection between Mrs. Trasker and her errant daughter.

  “I’m definitely not a reporter,” Mel corrected. “I’m an investigator for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. We’re calling about your husband-your first husband.”

  Mel’s remark was followed by a long period of dead silence. “What about him?” Rachel asked finally.

  “Did he commit suicide?”

  “Why do you ask?” Rachel wanted to know.

  “Did he?” Mel insisted.

  There was another long pause. “What if she comes after me?” Rachel asked finally.

  “What if Anita comes after you?” Mel clarified.

  “She always said she would. If I ever told anyone, she said she’d get rid of me, too. I happen to believe her.”

  “Your daughter is an accused serial murderer. She’s jail awaiting trial on twelve cases of homicide. She isn’t getting out anytime soon.”

  “Armand never did any of the things Anita said,” Rachel declared after a time. “He wouldn’t. He was a nice man. She tried to tell me that he did things to her, messed with her, touched her. It was just too crazy. I never believed a word of it. But she told me she gave him a choice, either take the pills or she’d go to the police. She told me she sat right there and watched him do it. How could her father and I have raised such a monster?”

  Unfortunately, the answer to that question was all too apparent-to everyone but Anita Bowdin’s mother. And now we knew why Armand’s picture was the very first entry on Anita’s scorecard.

  Meanwhile the case kept grinding on in other people’s hands. In the end, Yolanda Andrade turned out to be the weakest link. She had come to the crime lab with a phonied-up resume after being fired from working at CODIS, the national DNA database. With her expertise it had been simple enough for her to make inroads into Washington State’s far less secure DNA database-the shortcomings of which Ross Connors is even now working to fix.

  I think it was shocking for the whole law enforcement to realize that this invaluable crime-fighting tool, DNA profiling, had been perverted into a targeting device for murder. But once Yolanda confessed to her part in the scheme and agreed to testify against the others, other guilty pleas started falling into place. Eventually Destry and Anita will either cop pleas as well or else stand trial. When that will happen is anyone’s guess.

  As the investigators closest to the case, Mel and I were put in charge of victim and family notifications. Every single case was one of justice denied. Talking to those folks was grueling, emotional work-some of the hardest police work I’ve ever done. With the notable exceptions of Richard Matthews and LaShawn Tompkins, all the victims were either convicted sexual predators or else convicted felons. That made them a less than sympathetic lot, but the same wasn’t true of their survivors. For the parents or grandparents or siblings or wives or girlfriends of all these bad boys, the murdered victim was still their very own bad boy. Regardless of what crimes he may have committed as an adult, he had been little once-little, innocent, and loved.

  Of all of those family notifications, the hardest for me was the one with Etta Mae Tompkins. In the intervening months she had become far frailer. She sat quietly in her corner chair and listened to what I had to say. When I finished, she nodded.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “My Shawny’s in heaven now. I pray to Jesus every night that he’ll come soon and take me, too. With LaShawn gone, I’ve got nothing else to live for.”

  I felt honor-bound to go back to King Street Mission to tell Pastor Mark I had been wrong and he was off the hook as far as LaShawn Tompkins’s murder was concerned. When I got there, though, the building was gone-demolished. What I found instead was a hole in the ground with a construction crane parked in the middle of it. I never found Pastor Mark again, and I never found Sister Elaine Manning, either.

  Then there was the matter of dealing with the victims of all those long-ago, never-solved rapes. As the rape kits were tested, or rather, as they were retested, results led back to one or another of Mel’s dead sexual offenders. And one by one we located the rape victims involved to let them know that their cases were now considered solved and closed, even though they would never have the benefit of a trial to help put the attacks behind them.

  For a long time I wondered if LaShawn Tompkins’s case would ever surface. One of the last profiles developed was that of a fourteen-year-old rape victim, Jonelle Lenora DeVry, who claimed she had been attacked and raped on her way home from school by an unidentified gangbanger.

  It took us a while to track down Jonelle DeVry Jackson, but we finally did. That was how, two months later, Mel and I came to be sitting across from a young black woman in the neat living room of a small house on the outskirts of Ellensburg, Washington, where Jonelle now works in the admissions office for Central Washington University.

  “We wanted you to know the case is finally resolved,” Mel said tentatively. “That we’ve finally learned the identity of the boy who raped you.”

  Jonelle studied Mel for a long hard minute. “Is this going to come out in the newspapers?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Not at all. You were a juvenile at the time. There’s no reason to reveal your name now.”

  “Good,” Jonelle said with a relieved sigh. “I always knew who raped me,” she added. “And it wasn’t rape, either. LaShawn Tompkins was five years older than me, but I loved him to distraction, and I thought he loved me, too. I told my parents it was somebody else because I knew my daddy would have killed LaShawn if he’d known. And then, about the same time, LaShawn got caught up in that other case…”

  “The one he went to prison for?” Mel asked.

  Jonelle nodded. “Yes,” she answered. “But once he went to jail for that, I knew not telling had been the right thing to do. And it still is. DeShawn has no idea who his father was. I want to keep it that way.”

  That stopped me. “DeShawn?” I repeated. “You had LaShawn’s baby and kept him? You named him after LaShawn, but you raised him without ever telling him who his father is?”

  “My parents raised him,” Jonelle corrected. “They raised both of us. They helped me get through school, the same way I’m helping DeShawn right now. It hasn’t been easy, but he’s a smart boy. He earned a full scholarship to Gonzaga. He’s studying premed. With all that, what was the point of telling him his father was in prison? And by the time LaShawn was released…” She paused and shrugged. “There wasn’t any point then, either.”

  “You knew LaShawn was raised by his grandmother?”

  “I knew Etta Mae,” Jonelle replied. “Our old house is gone now. They tore it down and built an apartment building there, but we lived on Church Street, too. Etta Mae and my mother were good friends.”

  “You knew LaShawn turned his life around while he was in prison?”

  “I guess,” Jonelle said.

  “And Etta Mae stood by him the whole time, believing in him, loving him.”

  A single tear slid out of the corner of Jonelle DeVry’s eye and trickled down her cheek. “She would do,” she said. “That’s Etta Mae.”

  “She’s an old lady now,” I continued. “She’s old and frail, and she’s lost LaShawn, the boy she raised from a baby.” I left the sentence hanging in the air and waited.

  “And you’re thinking I should tell her?” Jonelle retorted angrily. “You think I should drag my DeShawn over there to Seattle and tell him here’s your other grandmother-your great-grandmother-and sorry I didn’t tell you because your real fa
ther was locked up in prison and now he’s been murdered and have a nice day?”

  “I’m not telling you what you should or shouldn’t do,” I said. “But it sounds like you’ve raised a good kid, and I think knowing DeShawn exists would give a dying old woman a precious gift beyond her wildest imaginings.”

  Jonelle studied me for a very long time. “I’ll think about it,” she said finally. “But I’m not making any promises.”

  A week or so after that, I was due to go to court for a hearing in the Thomas Dortman matter. In the corridor outside the courtroom I ran into DeAnn Cosgrove. The ponytail was gone. Her hair was cut short and her makeup was deftly applied. She was wearing heels and a skirt and blazer. There was only the vaguest resemblance to the overwhelmed young woman I had seen juggling her three children in that messy living room or standing angry and silent next to her husband’s hospital bed.

  “DeAnn,” I said, taking her hand. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

  She smiled. “I’m working,” she said. “At Microsoft, so it’s practically just up the street.” She paused and then added, “Did you know Donnie’s moved out?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I kept trying to pretend he didn’t have a problem,” she said. “But that day in the hospital you knew, didn’t you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess I did.”

  “Finally I just couldn’t pretend any longer. If he was so drunk that he’d just leave people to die, I had to give him a choice. Us or booze.”

  “I see,” I said, knowing without having to be told which choice he had made.

  “But don’t worry about the kids and me, Mr. Beaumont,” DeAnn continued brightly. “I have a roommate now, to help with the kids and expenses. And once Jack’s and my mother’s estate is settled, we’ll be fine.”

  She started to walk away then, into the courtroom, when I remembered something else.

  “There was one other person your mother was in touch with that weekend, someone down in Portland. Do you remember any friends she might have had down there, someone she might have turned to in a crisis?”

  DeAnn shook her head. “Not that I remember.”

  And so, because I was curious, I called Barbara Galvin and had her dredge Kevin Stock’s name out of the file. But when I called DeAnn that evening and asked her about him, he still didn’t ring any bells.

  A few days later, Mel and I drove to Vancouver, Washington, to meet with the family members of one of the last men to die at Anita Bowdin’s behest-a man who had been placed in a vehicle with the engine running and asphyxiated in his own two-car garage. We finished meeting with the family earlier than we had expected. Mel was anxious to head back north. But Vancouver, Washington, is right across the river from Portland.

  “If you don’t mind,” I said, “there’s one more stop I’d like to make.”

  “Where?” Mel asked.

  “In Portland.” And I gave her Kevin Stock’s address, which I had looked up before we ever left Seattle.

  “You just happen to have his address with you?” Mel asked.

  “It’s a coincidence,” I told her.

  Kevin Stock lived in a small condo overlooking the Willamette River near downtown Portland. I saw the family resemblance as soon as he answered the door. Kevin Stock may have aged twenty years, but he was still Tony Cosgrove. His daughter looked just like him.

  “Anthony Cosgrove?” I asked.

  “No,” he stammered. “You have me mixed up with someone else.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, handing him my card. “We need to talk.”

  Just then a second man appeared in the doorway behind him. “What is it, Kev?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Tony shook his head and sighed. “All right,” he relented. “I guess we do need to talk.”

  It took the better part of an hour. Sometimes it’s hard to realize how much things have changed since the early eighties. Then, on the other hand, many things have remained the same. Tony Cosgrove had fallen in love with another man. He was also a devout Catholic who didn’t believe in divorce or suicide. So he had chosen to disappear.

  “I loved Carol,” he said, “And I told her if she ever needed me, to call. I always made sure she had my number, just in case. But she only called me once,” he added accusingly. “To tell me about you. She was afraid you were going to upset things. And you did, and you’re still upsetting things. Why are you here? What do you want?”

  “I want you to think about your daughter,” I said. “And your grandchildren.”

  “I think about DeAnn every single day,” he returned. “But at this point, she’s far better off without me.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said. “Her mother’s dead. Her husband’s moved out. She’s on her own with three preschoolers. And no matter what happened, Tony, she never once believed you were dead. She’s been waiting all this time for you to come home.”

  “I can’t,” Tony said hopelessly. “Think about the insurance. If I turn up alive, she’ll have to pay it back.”

  “Between having the money and having her father?” I asked. “For the DeAnn Cosgrove I know, there’s no question how she’d choose.”

  EPILOGUE

  While we were knee-deep in investigative alligators, though, neither Mel nor I lost sight of her one-word answer: “Okay.”

  By now I’d had extensive experience with weddings. As the groom, I had survived the full-court-press June aisle-walker that had been my wedding with Karen and the three-day rush to judgment with Anne Corley. I had been the father of the bride for Kelly and the father of the groom for Scott. When it came to how Mel wanted to do this, I left the arrangements entirely in her capable hands. The resulting ceremony turned out to be a happy medium of all of the above.

  We got married in Vegas at Treasure Island. Scott was the best man. Kelly, having recovered her equilibrium, was the matron of honor. Kayla was the flower girl and ring bearer both. Mel doesn’t do sexism even for weddings. In addition to the kids, the only other guests were Lars-and, Lars being Lars, the joke-wielding Iris Rassmussen. Ralph Ames convinced me to charter a jet and fly everybody in, and that’s what I did.

  The wedding was in late afternoon. Mel wore an ivory silk suit and was absolutely stunning. I wore my tux. After all, I had already paid for the damned thing and it seemed reasonable to get a few wearings out of it. I had fairly low expectations about the kind of wedding ceremony we’d have at a Vegas hotel, but I shouldn’t have worried. Vegas is full of showmen, and the hired reverend delivered his memorized lines with a kind of heartfelt sincerity that left everyone in attendance in tears-well, almost.

  The wedding supper was next door in a small private room at Morton’s. Then, while everyone else went out to party, Mel and I returned to our bridal suite, where someone had strewn our bed with rose petals, for Pete’s sake!

  I was lying in bed when Mel emerged from the bathroom, having removed her makeup. She flopped onto her side of the bed.

  “Ouch!” she exclaimed, sitting up and rubbing her head. “What the hell’s wrong with the pillow?”

  I love being married to a plainspoken woman.

  Reaching under the pillow, she removed the small gift-wrapped box I had hidden there. “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Open it and find out,” I said.

  Inside was a model car, and not just any model car, either-an arctic silver Porsche Cayman.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “It’s a wedding present,” I told her. “Some people register at Macy’s. When I get married, I prefer to give and receive Porsches. So that’s your present. A Cayman. It’s on order. We’re scheduled to take European delivery in Stuttgart in early September. I already cleared it with Harry so we can both have the time off.”

  Mel looked both astonished and bemused. “You’re really giving me a Porsche for a wedding present?”

  “Yes, I am,” I told her. “Your BMW was starting to look a l
ittle worn around the edges.”

  “And I get to drive it on the autobahn?”

  “Yes,” I said, shaking my head. “God help us all, you do.”

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