by J. A. Jance
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For CSJ and Michael S. Bowl on!
|PROLOGUE|
BUTTE, MONTANA
— October 1981 —
An icy wind blew in from the west, and Broomy McCluskey, age fifteen, huddled in the moon-cast shadow on the far side of the shed, shivering—whether from the chill or anticipation—and waiting for the light in the kitchen to come on, signaling that his mother was about to send her mutt, Rocco, out to do his business. Broomy flexed the fingers of his right hand, feeling the unfamiliar weight of the brass knuckles and wondered if, when the time came, he would have nerve enough to go through with it.
Another blast of cold air ripped through the night. The first snow of the winter was supposed to fall by morning, and a good snowstorm was exactly what Broomy needed. Still, he shivered again, wishing he’d brought his jacket along. Had he done so, however, one or more of his drinking buddies might have noticed he wasn’t just going outside to take a leak. It wasn’t a huge worry, though. As far as he could tell, by the time he left, everyone was far too soused to notice much of anything.
The party was supposed to be nothing more than a last-minute kegger, held at Tony’s house because his parents were out of town for a week. Broomy, having raided one of his dad’s secret stashes of booze, had crashed the party, ensuring his welcome by adding a couple of fifths of tequila to the mix. He might have been the youngest guest at this underage gathering, but the tequila he brought along made him a very welcome one. He had pretended to swill down shots right along with everybody else, but by the time his buddies started passing out, Broomy was still stone-cold sober.
After making his excuses, he left the party by way of the back door and went straight to Tony’s aging GMC pickup. He chose that vehicle for two reasons: Everyone knew that Tony always left his keys in the ignition and the brass knuckles he had inherited from his cousin in the glove box. Broomy had no problem maneuvering the vehicle out of the driveway. He might have been too young to have a license, but he had his learner’s permit, and his dad had been teaching him how to drive a stick shift. His big worry now was that a cop might spot him coming or going, so Broomy made sure he didn’t exceed the speed limit or do anything at all that might attract unwelcome notice.
At last the kitchen light came on. The back door opened, and Rocco sprinted down the steps and into the yard. As the door slammed shut behind him, Rocco stopped for a moment and stood still, sniffing the air. That’s when Broomy let out a low whistle. He didn’t care for his mother much, but he did like her dog. Without so much as a bark, Rocco galloped straight to the shed and stood there with his tail wagging while Broomy pulled a hunk of jerky out of his pocket. Rather than giving it to the dog immediately, Broomy opened the door to the shed and tossed the jerky inside. When Rocco leaped in to retrieve it, Broomy shut the door behind him.
Then he waited again. Minutes later, Ida Mae McCluskey, now wearing her long flannel nightgown, appeared on the back porch. “Rocco,” she called. “Where the hell are you? It’s cold out here.”
Broomy knew from experience that the dog hated being locked in the shed. Rocco was scratching on the door and whining, and when the door didn’t open, he started to bark, just as Broomy hoped he would. Stepping back into the shadows, Broomy peered around the corner and watched Ida Mae make her moonlit way across the yard, still calling for the dog, who was barking frantically by this time, hoping to be let out.
Tense with anticipation, Broomy stood still and held his breath, remembering what Tony had told him about the brass knuckles. “If you hit someone with these hard enough, right at the base of the skull, they’ll be dead as a doornail, and there won’t be no blood neither.” That’s what Broomy was counting on—no blood.
As his mother approached the door, Broomy sneaked around the far side of the shed so he’d be able to surprise her from behind.
“How the hell did you get yourself stuck in there, you stupid dog?” Ida Mae muttered as she reached to wrench open the door. “Come on, now. I’m freezing my ass off.”
Those were Ida Mae’s last words. Before her hand touched the knob, Broomy aimed a powerful punch at the base of her skull. He heard a sharp crack as the brass knuckles connected with skin and bone. His mother crumpled to the ground and lay there moaning. There wasn’t a moment to lose. Afraid she might start making noises or calling for help, Broomy bent down and picked her up. It wasn’t hard. Two years of weight lifting with the JV wrestling squad paid off in that moment. At this point Broomy could regularly bench-press a hundred fifty pounds, and his mother didn’t weigh nearly that much.
He slung her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and hurried back toward the truck he’d left parked on the side of German Gulch Road, just beyond their drive. Halfway to the truck, Broomy felt a warm gush of moisture as urine flowed down over the front of his shirt and pants. That’s when he knew she was gone. Probably the very act of slinging her over his shoulder had been enough to finish her off. Now that his mother was dead, Broomy assumed he would have felt something, but he didn’t. He was mostly annoyed that he was so wet, because it really was cold as hell.
Back at the truck, he hoisted her over the tailgate and dropped her into the bed of the pickup. Then he headed for what he hoped would be Ida Mae’s final resting place. All around Butte there were low spots where brackish, mineral-laced mine-water runoff spilled into the earth and formed shallow ponds. Anaconda, doing its best to keep kids and wildlife from coming into contact with the contaminated water, had built chain-link fences and padlocked gates around most of the ponds, not that the gates were impervious. As kids, Broomy and his pals would use a bolt cutter to slice through the chains so they could come and go at will. When they were done wading, they’d wire the chain back together in a fashion that made it appear to the casual observer that the padlock and chain were still intact. Earlier that night, before Tony had come to pick him up, Broomy had smuggled his dad’s bolt cutter and a roll of baling wire out of the shed and hidden them away in some brush near the end of the drive. With his mother loaded into the pickup, Broomy retrieved both those items and headed out.
The pond he had in mind was less than two miles from the house and down half a mile of rocky dirt road. At the gate he made short work of the chain. Once the gate was open, he went to retrieve his mother’s body from the bed of the pickup. Before lifting her out, he took hold of her cold left hand, wrenched off her wedding ring, and stuffed it in his pants pocket. Then he picked Ida Mae up and carried her to the edge of the pond, where he heaved her into the water. He couldn’t throw her very far, and the pond wasn’t especially deep—only a couple of feet—but it was deep enough. Standing in the moonlight, Harvey “Broomy” McCluskey caught one last glimpse of his mother’s pallid face as her still body slipped beneath the surface of the water.
“Go to hell, you bitch,” he muttered under his breath. “Go to hell, and good riddance.”
|CHAPTER 1|
MONROE, WASHINGTON
— May 2017 —
Mateo Vega lay on his narrow, metal-framed cot with his hands behind his head and stared up at the blank ceiling. He knew every hairline crack and blemish in the dingy paint. He knew which of the three hundred–plus CMUs, the concrete masonry units, that made up the three solid walls of his eight-by-ten cage had fa
int remnants of graffiti scratched indelibly into their rough surfaces by hopeless souls marking time. He’d been in this cell for eight of the past sixteen years, but tomorrow, finally, he’d be out.
“So tomorrow’s the big day, then?” Pop said from his cot on the far side of the cell. Pop’s given name was Henry Mansfield Johnson, but no one called him that. He was a wiry black man, a gay one as well, who had murdered his former partner and the partner’s new lover sometime back in the eighties. Pop was the first to admit that his double homicide had been a cold-blooded crime, with plenty of premeditation thrown into the bargain. Somewhere along the way during his lengthy incarceration, he’d had his come-to-Jesus moment. Based on what he’d read in a now well-thumbed Bible, his sins were forgiven and his soul was saved. That was fine as far as the spiritual world was concerned. In the real world, however, nothing had changed, and Pop was determined to serve out his two life sentences with as much humility and grace as he could muster.
Mateo and Pop had been cellmates for five years now and friends for most of that, primarily because they both were outsiders. They kept their noses clean and steered clear of trouble. Neither of them was a lifetime criminal with a long, diverse rap sheet that started with juvenile offenses and escalated from there. They were in prison for similar crimes—the murder of a previous lover. There was one major difference between them, however: Pop accepted full responsibility for what he had done. Mateo did not. At his public defender’s urging, he had entered a guilty plea to second-degree murder, but ever since he’d steadfastly maintained his innocence.
His final parole hearing, his tenth, had taken place six weeks earlier. They’d approved his request, but it had taken from then until now for the Department of Corrections to finally get its act together and issue his discharge papers. Evidently it took that long to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s.
“According to what I’ve been told,” Mateo responded finally, “I’m supposed to be on my way by eleven tomorrow morning.”
That was how their leisurely conversations went. With nothing but time between them, the reply to a question might come five to ten minutes after it had been asked.
“What’s the first thing you’re gonna do?”
“Find a taco truck,” Mateo answered, “preferably one where they make their tacos with shredded beef as opposed to mystery meat.”
Food in the Monroe Correctional Facility was, generally speaking, bad news, but what was purported to be Mexican food scraped the very bottom of the barrel.
Pop laughed. “If it was me, I’d head straight for the Central District and hook me up with some of Ezell’s Famous Chicken—if they’s still in business, that is,” he added. Another long pause followed. “Then what?” Pop asked.
For someone like Pop, doing life without parole, the idea of getting out of prison was an impossible dream, and hearing about someone else’s upcoming release was like listening to a fairy tale. Knowing that was the case, Mateo was glad to humor him.
“Find a place to live.”
“How you gonna pay for it?”
“Work.”
“Doing what?”
Mateo shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be a day laborer for now. I bet there are still groups of guys hanging out by Home Depot and Lowe’s looking for work.”
“I hear they’s almost unionized these days,” Pop told him. “Some guy organizes it all, and then he takes a cut of what everyone makes.”
“Figures,” Mateo muttered under his breath.
“Knowin’ you,” Pop said encouragingly, “I think you’ll be jus’ fine.”
“What I’m really going to do,” Mateo added determinedly after another long pause, “is find the son of a bitch who really killed Emily Tarrant.”
“You bet,” Pop agreed with a grin, “you and O.J. How do you think that’s gonna turn out for you?”
Mateo didn’t answer. The conversation ended then, and another long silence fell between them, as much silence as there ever was in the perpetual din of the cellblock. And in that silence, Mateo lay there thinking.
No matter how many years crept by, Mateo remembered the conversation with his public defender almost verbatim. It had occurred in an interview room deep in the bowels of Seattle’s King County Jail. All the interview rooms looked exactly alike, as did all the corridors leading to and from Mateo’s cell. During the interview his hands had been attached to the table with a pair of cuffs. His suit-clad public defender’s hands had been free to wave in the air when he wasn’t prying dirt from under seemingly pristine nails.
“It’s a good deal,” Arthur Harris had assured him. “Emily Tarrant died of manual strangulation. She was sexually assaulted before her body was thrown into a blackberry bush just up the bluff from the beach. The state is willing to let you plead guilty to second-degree murder. With a sentence of sixteen years to life, you’ll most likely be out in eight. By then you’ll only be in your early thirties. You’ll still have your whole life ahead of you.”
At the time Arthur Harris must have been somewhere in his sixties, and no doubt those words came easily to him. For Mateo, age twenty-two, eight years in prison could just as well have been forever.
“How can I plead guilty to something I didn’t do?” Mateo had objected.
“They have your DNA,” Arthur replied.
“They have somebody else’s DNA, too,” Mateo countered. “Emily and I went to a beach in Edmonds. She was drinking and flirting with everybody in sight. Later on I caught her down by the water making out with one of the guys she’d been hanging with. I punched the guy in the nose, and then I dragged her kicking and screaming back through the party to my car. I thought we were headed home, but when I stopped at the first stop sign, she jumped out and took off running. That’s where she was the last time I saw her, hotfooting it down the road. I said the hell with her, drove home, and got into bed. In other words, the last time I saw her, she was still alive. I got home, I went to sleep by myself. The next day, when she didn’t come home, I reported her missing.”
“Which amounts to your having no alibi, since you claim you lost your phone at the party,” the lawyer suggested.
“I did lose my phone at the party,” Mateo insisted. “It must have fallen out in the sand, or maybe someone stole it. But what about the lie-detector test I took? I passed it fair and square, didn’t I?”
Harris remained unmoved. “Lie-detector results aren’t admissible in court. DNA is, and with that conveniently misplaced phone, the cops can’t trace your movements. Being home by yourself means you have zero alibi. And there was bruising on your hands.”
“Of course there was,” Mateo agreed. “Like I already told you, I punched a guy in the nose.”
“Be that as it may,” Arthur intoned, “in my opinion, if you go to trial on a charge of first-degree homicide, you’re really rolling the dice. With sexual assault thrown into the mix, there’s a good chance you could end up getting life without parole.”
“Like I said, Emily and I had consensual sex before the party, but when I left, she was mad as hell and still very much alive.”
“Physical evidence suggests that what happened to Emily Tarrant was not consensual,” Harris countered, “but it’s your call. The plea deal is on the table—take it or leave it. If we go to court, though, I think there’s a good chance you’ll end up with a whole lot more than sixteen years.”
If Mateo had asked, his folks probably would have helped, but he was used to being on his own. He had made his way through school on scholarships and by working nights at Pizza Hut. During his junior and senior years, he’d had to resort to student loans. He was pretty sure the interest on those was going to keep on growing even if he ended up going to prison. Not wanting to add in a mountain of legal fees, he’d settled for a public defender. Unfortunately, he realized much later, you get what you pay for.
In the stark silence of the interview room, Mateo did the math. Serving eight years of a sixteen-year sentence would be b
etter than risking a life sentence by going to court. After all, Mateo’s paternal grandfather had been ninety-three when he died. Even so, Mateo still wouldn’t go for it. When he came before the judge to enter his plea, he looked the man in the eye and pronounced the words “Not guilty.”
For the next ten months, Mateo languished in a cell in the King County Jail awaiting trial. The longer he waited, the more hopeless things seemed. Would a jury ever overlook the DNA evidence and return a verdict of not guilty? More and more, the answer to that seemed to be, “Not likely.” Finally, two weeks before his scheduled trial date, Mateo cratered and called Harris at his office.
“I’ll take the deal,” Mateo told him.
Two weeks later, in a King County courtroom, Mateo Vega had stood up and pled guilty to second-degree murder in the death of Emily Tarrant. The sexual-assault charge had somehow disappeared from the mix. He was sentenced to sixteen years to life, with a year credited for time served in the King County Jail while awaiting trial. After that he was shipped off to the Monroe Correctional Facility, where, one by one, the years inched past. By the time his first parole hearing came along in 2009, he had a new public defender—a woman this time, Alisha Goodson.
“All you have to do is accept responsibility and say you’re sorry,” she explained to him. “Your record here is squeaky clean. If you express remorse, they’ll let you out first time at bat.”
Mateo took some of her advice but not all of it. “I’m sorry Emily Tarrant is dead,” he told the parole board when it came his turn to speak, “but I didn’t do it.”
Emily’s mother, Abigail, was right there in the hearing room, watching and listening to every word. She stiffened visibly when Mateo spoke. When it was her turn, she told the board she was still devastated and that her life had been forever changed by the death of her daughter at such a tender age. Mateo had caught Emily cheating on him only that one time at the party, although he had no doubt there’d been plenty of others he didn’t know about. But according to Mrs. Tarrant, her beloved Emily was as pure as the driven snow. And that’s when Mateo’s dream of being paroled after eight years went out the window.