“How was she stalked? This is all news to me.”
I knew I was in trouble here. I was telling her things she didn’t know, so the first thing she was going to do after I left was call Mattson about it. Then Mattson would learn that I was still actively pursuing the case, and Regina would in turn learn that my reporter’s interest in Tina and her death was compromised by my having known her briefly but intimately. This meant that this was the one and only time I would get to talk to Tina’s mother. She would be turned against me in the same way Lisa Hill had been.
“I don’t know exactly how she was stalked,” I said. “That is only what the police said. I talked to her friend Lisa and she said Tina apparently met a man in a bar but that it felt like he was there waiting for her or something. That it wasn’t a random encounter.”
“I told her to stay out of the bars,” Regina said. “But she couldn’t keep away—even after the arrests and rehab.”
It was an incongruous response. I was talking about her daughter being stalked and she fixated on her daughter’s drug and alcohol issues.
“I am not saying one thing had anything to do with the other,” I said. “I don’t think the police know yet either. But I know she had arrests and had been to rehab. Is that what you mean about her going to bars?”
“She was always going out, meeting strangers … ,” Regina said. “All the way back to high school. Her father told her it could end this way—he warned her—but she didn’t listen. She didn’t seem to care. She was boy crazy from the start.”
Regina seemed to stare off into the distance when she spoke. Boy crazy seemed like an innocent term but, clearly, she was seeing a memory of her daughter as a young woman. An unpleasant memory in which there was upset and rancor.
“Was Tina ever married?” I asked.
“No, never,” Regina said. “She said she never wanted to be tied down by one man. My husband used to joke that she saved him a bundle by never getting married. But she was our only child and I always wished I had gotten to plan her wedding. It never happened. She was always looking for something she felt no man she met could provide… . What that was, I never knew.”
I remembered the post I had seen on Tina’s social media.
“I saw on her Instagram that she said she found her sister,” I said. “A half sister. But she’s not your daughter?”
Regina’s face changed and I knew I had hit on something bad in her life.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Regina said.
“I’m sorry, did I say something wrong?” I asked. “What happened?”
“All these people, they are so interested in that stuff. Where they come from. Are they Swedish, are they Indian. They don’t know what they’re playing with. It’s like that privacy thing you mentioned. Some secrets are meant to stay secret.”
“The half sister was a secret?”
“Tina sent her DNA in and then next thing she does is tell us she’s got a half sister out in Naperville. She … I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“You can tell me off the record. It will never go into a story but if it helps me understand your daughter and what she was interested in, it could be important. Do you know why she sent her DNA in for analysis? Was she look—”
“Who knows? That’s what people do, right? It’s quick. It’s cheap. She had friends that were doing it, finding their heritage.”
I had not submitted my DNA to any of the genetic-analytics sites but I knew people who had and therefore knew generally how it worked. Your DNA went through a genetic data bank that returned matches to other customers of the site, along with the percentage of shared DNA. Higher percentages meant a closer relationship—from distant cousins to direct siblings.
“She found her half sister. I saw the photo of them. Naperville—that’s near Chicago, right?”
I needed to keep her talking about something she didn’t want to talk about. Easy questions got easy answers and kept the words coming.
“Yes,” Regina said. “I grew up there. Went to high school there.”
She paused and looked at me and I realized she needed me to tell the story. It was always amazing to me when people opened up. I was a stranger but they knew I was a reporter, a recorder of history. I had found many times when reporting tragedies that those left behind wanted to reach out through their grief to talk and set down some sort of record of the lost loved one. Women more than men. They had a sense of duty to the lost one. Sometimes they needed only a little prodding.
“You had a baby,” I said.
She nodded.
“And Tina didn’t know,” I said.
“Nobody knew,” she said. “It was a girl. I gave her up. I was too young. And then later I met my husband and we started a family. Tina. And then she grew up and sent her DNA in to one of those places. And she had done it, too. The girl. She knew she was adopted and was looking for connections. They connected through the DNA site and that’s what destroyed our family.”
“Tina’s father didn’t know …”
“I didn’t tell him at first and then it was too late. It was supposed to be my secret. But then the world changes and your own DNA can unlock everything and secrets aren’t secrets anymore.”
I once had an editor named Foley who said that sometimes the best question is the one not asked. I waited. I didn’t feel I had to ask the next question.
“My husband left,” Regina said. “It wasn’t that I’d had the baby. It was that I didn’t tell him. He said our marriage was built on a lie. That was four months ago. Christina didn’t know. Her father and I agreed not to put that guilt on her. She would have blamed herself.”
Regina had been holding a clot of tissues in her hands and now used them to dry her eyes and wipe her nose.
“Tina went back to Chicago to meet her half sister,” I said, hoping to spark more revelations from the broken woman.
“Tina was such a sweet girl,” Regina said. “She wanted to reunite us. She thought it was a good thing. She didn’t know what was going on with her father and me. But I told her no, I couldn’t see the girl. Not now. And she was very upset with me.”
She shook her head and continued.
“Funny how life is,” she said. “Everything’s good, everything’s fine. You think your secrets are safe. Then something comes along and it all just goes away. Everything changes.”
It would only be a detail in the story but I asked what genetics site Christina had submitted her DNA to.
“It was GT23,” Regina said. “I remember because it only cost twenty-three dollars. So much grief for just twenty-three dollars.”
I knew about GT23. It was one of the more recent entries into the DNA testing-and-analytics business. The upstart company was attempting to take control of the billion-dollar industry by dramatically undercutting the pricing of the competition. It had an advertising campaign based on the promise of DNA analytics accessible to the masses. Its slogan was DNA You Can Afford! The 23 in its name stood for the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes in a human cell as well as the price of its basic kit: a full DNA and heredity report for twenty-three dollars.
Regina started to cry full-on then. Her knot of tissues was falling apart. I told her I would get her more and got up. I started looking for a restroom.
Something told me that while the emergence of the half sister in Tina’s life was important, this was not the angle of the story that led to the cyberstalking. This was just one spoke in the wheel of Tina’s life, although it was one that brought about profound changes to those close to her. But the stalking had to have come from another angle and I was guessing that was her lifestyle.
I found a restroom, pulled open a steel container holding a cardboard box of tissues, and took the whole thing back out to the lobby alcove.
Regina was gone.
I looked around and she was nowhere to be seen. I checked the couch where she had been sitting. No purse, no wad of tissue.
“Sorry, I had to go to the bath
room.”
I turned around and it was her. She returned to the couch. She looked like she had washed her face. I put the box of tissues down next to her and returned to the chair I had been sitting in to her left.
“I’m sorry to make you go through all of this,” I said. “I didn’t know when I asked the question that it would bring up this difficult stuff.”
“No, it’s okay,” Regina said. “It’s kind of therapeutic in a way. To talk about it, get it out. You know?”
“Maybe. I think so.”
I wanted to move in a different direction now.
“So,” I asked. “Did Tina ever talk to you about any of the men she dated?”
“No, she knew my feelings about that and her lifestyle,” Regina said. “Also, what could I say? I met my husband at a blues club in South Side Chicago. I was only twenty years old.”
“Do you know if she did any online dating, that sort of thing?”
“I would guess that she did but I don’t know about it. The police asked me the same thing and I said that Tina didn’t tell me about the specifics of her life here. I knew about the arrests and the rehab—because she needed money. But that was all. The one thing I always told her was that I wished she’d come back home and be close. I told her that every time we talked.”
I nodded. I wrote the lines down.
“And now it’s too late,” she added.
She started to cry again and I wrote that last line down as well.
I should have ended the interview there and not pushed the woman further. But I knew that once she interacted with Mattson again he would tell her to steer clear of me. It was now or never and I had to roll with it.
“Have you been to her apartment?” I asked.
“Not yet,” she said. “The police said it’s still sealed because it was the crime scene.”
I was hoping to get a look inside Tina’s home myself.
“Did they say when you could go in and get her things?”
“Not yet. I’ll have to come back for that. After the funeral, maybe.”
“Where exactly was her place?”
“Do you know where the Tower Records used to be?”
“Yes, across from the bookstore.”
“She lived right above it. Sunset Place Apartments.”
Regina pulled fresh tissues out of the box and dabbed at her eyes.
“Cute place,” she said.
I nodded.
“She was beautiful and kind,” Regina said. “Why did someone have to kill her?”
She buried her face and her sobs in the tissues. I just watched her. She had asked a question only a mother could ask and only the killer could answer. But it was a good line and I memorized it to write down later. For the moment I just nodded sympathetically.
6
I got back to the office by lunchtime and everyone was in their cubicles eating sandwiches from Art’s Deli. Most days we ordered in food but no one had thought to text me for my order. That was okay because at the moment I didn’t need food. I was fueled by the momentum of the story. I was in that early stage where I knew I had something but wasn’t sure what it was or what the next step should be. I started by opening up a Word file on my laptop and typing up my handwritten notes from the interview with Regina Portrero. I was halfway through the process when I realized my problem. The next step was to go back to Lisa Hill to ask more questions about Tina and her stalker, but Lisa Hill thought I was not only a scumbag but a suspect in her friend’s murder.
I put transcribing my notes aside and checked my phone to see if Hill had gotten around to blocking me on Instagram. She had not, but my guess was that this was just an oversight and she would do so as soon as she checked her followers and was reminded of my previous deception.
I spent the next half hour composing a private message to her that I hoped would give me a second chance.
Lisa, I apologize. I should’ve been up-front with you. But the cops are wrong about me and they know it. They just don’t want you talking to a reporter. It would be embarrassing if I got to the real suspect ahead of them. I liked Tina a lot. I wished she had wanted to meet again. But that’s it, nothing else. I am going to find out who stalked her and may have hurt her. I need your help. Please call me again so I can explain further and tell you what I know that the cops don’t. Thank you.
I put my phone number on the end of the message and sent it, hoping for the best but knowing it was a long shot, and that I couldn’t just wait for Lisa Hill to change her mind about me. I next checked the causes-of-death website where I had posted my request for information on atlanto-occipital dislocation. And this was where my luck and the story changed dramatically. There were already five messages waiting for me.
The first message had been posted at 7 a.m. L.A. time but 10 a.m. Florida time, where the posting had come from the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office. A pathologist named Frank Garcia cited an AOD case from the previous year that had been ruled a homicide.
Have an open homicide. Female, 32, came in last year as single-car traffic fatal with COD orthopedic decapitation (AOD) but TA investigator said impact not enough. Scene was staged. TA injuries postmortem. Victim name: Mallory Yates. I/O Ray Gonzalez FLPD.
I could decipher most of the shorthand. COD was cause of death and TA meant traffic accident, while I/O meant investigating officer. And I thought FLPD meant Florida Police Department until I googled it and came up with Fort Lauderdale Police Department, which was located within Broward County. I copied the message and transferred it to the story file I had created on my computer.
The next message was from Dallas and it was similar to the first in that the victim was a woman of similar age—thirty-four-year-old Jamie Flynn—who had died in what appeared to be a single-car accident with AOD listed as cause of death. This was not classified as a homicide but as a suspicious death because all of Flynn’s toxicity reports came back clean, so there was no clear explanation as to why she drove off a road and down an embankment into a tree. Flynn’s death had occurred ten months earlier and the case was still open because of the suspicious circumstances.
The third message was a follow-up from Frank Garcia at the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Checked with Gonzalez at FLPD. Case still open, no suspects, no leads at this time.
The fourth post on the message board was about another case, which had occurred three months before. This one came from Brian Schmidt, who was an investigator with the Santa Barbara County Coroner’s Office.
Charlotte Taggart, 22 yoa, fell from cliff at Hendry’s Beach, found DOA next morning. AOD and other injuries, accidental. BAT .09 and fall occurred 03:00 in full darkness.
I knew that BAT meant blood-alcohol toxicity and that the limit for driving in California was .08, indicating Taggart was at least slightly inebriated when she walked to the edge of a cliff in darkness and fell to her death.
The fifth message was posted most recently. It was the shortest message but it froze me.
Who is this?
It had been posted only twenty minutes earlier by Dr. Adhira Larkspar, who I knew was the chief medical examiner of Los Angeles County. It meant I was in danger of discovery. When no one volunteered to identify themselves to their boss, Larkspar might check to see if her office did indeed have a recent AOD case, and this inquiry would undoubtedly lead her to Mattson and Sakai, who would undoubtedly conclude that I had been the one to initially post on the message board.
I tried to push thoughts of another visit from the detectives aside and to focus on the information I had in front of me. Three cases of AOD in the last year and a half, with Tina Portrero making a fourth. The victims were women ranging in age from twenty-two to forty-four. So far, two of the cases had been ruled homicides, one was suspicious, and one—the most recent before Portrero—was classified as an accident.
I did not know enough about human physiology to be sure whether the fact that all four cases involved females was significant. S
ince men are generally larger and more muscled than women, it was possible that AOD happened more to women because their bodies were more fragile.
Or it could be that they are stalked and become the targets of predators more often than men.
I knew that I had to add more to the profiles of these four women if I were to make any informed judgment based on the information I had. I decided to work backward and start with the most recent case first. Using basic search engines I found very little on Charlotte Taggart other than a paid obituary that had run in the East Bay Times and an accompanying online memorial book where friends and family could sign their names and make comments about the deceased loved one.
The obituary said Charlotte Taggart grew up in Berkeley, California, and attended UC–Santa Barbara. She was in her senior year when she passed. She was interred at Sunset View Cemetery in Berkeley. She was survived by both parents, two younger brothers, and many close and distant relatives she had discovered in the past year.
The end of the last line drew my focus. Charlotte Taggart had discovered new relatives in the last year of her life. That said to me that she most likely discovered these people through a heritage-analysis company. My guess was she had submitted her DNA just as Christina Portrero had done.
This connection didn’t necessarily mean anything—millions of people did what these two young women had. It was not uncommon at all and at this stage it appeared to be a coincidence.
I scanned the comments in the online memorial book and found it to be full of heartfelt but routine messages of love and loss, many written directly to Charlotte as though she would be reading them from the great hereafter.
After entering what I knew about Charlotte Taggart’s life and death into the story file, I moved on to the Dallas case, where Jamie Flynn’s death was labeled suspicious because there was no explanation for her driving down an embankment into a tree.
Fair Warning - Jack McEvoy Series 03 (2020) Page 5