Unfinished Business

by J. A. Jance

  The same thing happened year after year, and year after year, as Mateo refused to accept responsibility and parole was denied—one hearing after another. Finally, in year sixteen, for Mateo’s final parole-board hearing, Mrs. Tarrant didn’t show up. Although no one mentioned it, Mateo guessed that she must have passed away between hearings. That was when they finally agreed to let him go—without even bothering to ask the responsibility question.

  A little over a month later, Mateo awakened early on the morning he was due to be a free man. Still in handcuffs, he was escorted to the property division, where an attendant gifted him with an ill-fitting set of cast-off clothing. Had the clothing he’d surrendered years earlier still existed, it wouldn’t have fit the thirty-eight-year-old man he was now. Next a clerk returned his property—his 1994 class ring from Yakima High School and a faded wallet that contained sixty-three bucks in cash, along with an out-of-date driver’s license, an expired Visa card, a no-longer-valid proof of insurance, and a scrap of paper listing the phone numbers for several of his family members. After that he was given a check that contained the outstanding amount from his commissary account and what remained of his accrued wages—an average of five bucks a day—earned from working first in the laundry and later in the library. Most of the inmates sent all their earnings directly to their commissary account, but Mateo had banked close to half of his, and the check amounted to almost sixteen hundred dollars.

  At that point he expected to be escorted straight to the sally port. Instead, much to his surprise, he was taken to the warden’s office.

  Mateo had been there once before. Years earlier he’d happened to be in the prison library when the computer system crashed. The librarian, Mrs. Ancell, was mid-meltdown and on the phone to some long-distance tech support when Mateo asked if he could help. He had just graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in computer science and had started working his first job with a company called Video Games International when he ended up in prison.

  Mrs. Ancell, totally unable to understand a word of what the remotely located tech guy was saying, had handed the phone over to Mateo. The technician’s mangled English-language skills had made it challenging for Mateo to understand him as well, but he grasped enough that he’d been able to create a workaround and reboot the system. Out of gratitude Mrs. Ancell had sung his praises to the warden and lobbied for him to be given a certificate of appreciation, which had been handed over in person by the warden himself. Up until then Mateo had worked mostly in the prison’s laundry facility or handled mess-hall duties. From then on he was assigned to work in the library. Yes, prison might have been the wrong place to be, and a prison library was probably even wronger—if there was such a word. But in that moment, it was both the right place and the right time, because over the years working in the library had proved to be a huge benefit.

  From that moment on, Mrs. Ancell had taken a personal interest in Mateo. She located textbooks and articles that had enabled him to advance his studies in computer science. His disciplined self-improvement program might not have earned any additional degrees, but it had allowed him to accumulate a good deal of practical knowledge and to keep up to date with what was going on in the fast-moving tech world. Then, in those final weeks leading up to his release, Mrs. Ancell had allowed him to go online in search of possible rooms to rent. He found one south of Seattle in Renton, where, with the remainder of the money in his prison account plus his accumulated wages, he’d have enough to cover the first and last month’s rent. Anything extra, along with the sixty-three bucks found in his wallet, meant he’d be able to buy some food prior to receiving his first paycheck.

  Seated in the bare-bones waiting room outside the warden’s private office, Mateo began to fret and wonder as the time ticked closer to the prison van’s scheduled departure. What was the holdup? Had some kind of glitch developed that would mean he wasn’t being released after all? Finally the door opened, and Warden Pierce beckoned him inside.

  “Come in,” he said with a welcoming smile and an outstretched hand. “I understand you’re leaving us today.”

  A handshake was way more than Mateo had expected.

  “I believe so,” he said.

  Warden Pierce motioned him into a chair. “I’m sure Mrs. Ancell is going to miss you,” he said. “From what I hear, you’ve been a great help to her.”

  “She’s a good lady,” Mateo replied. Saying more than that seemed unwise.

  “I asked you to drop by because I have something for you,” Warden Pierce said. He opened a desk drawer, removed an envelope, and reached across the desk to hand it to Mateo. Looking down at the envelope, Mateo recognized his mother’s stilted handwriting, but the letter wasn’t addressed to him. It was addressed to Warden Pierce and bore a postmark that was only a week old. The words “PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL” were prominently displayed just beneath the stamp.

  “It’s open,” the warden said with a smile. “You’re welcome to look inside.”

  So Mateo did. He found a piece of lined paper that had most likely been torn out of a grandchild’s spiral notebook. The words written there were brief and to the point.

  Mateo Vega is my son. Since I no longer live in my own home, I’m unable to offer him a place to stay upon his release. Would you please pass this along to him so he’ll have some funds available to find a place to live and food to eat?

  Sincerely,

  Olivia Vega

  Mateo unfolded what he recognized to be a postal money order and was astonished to see that it was written to him in the amount of one thousand dollars. He studied it for a long moment and had to swallow the lump in his throat before he could speak again.

  “My mother isn’t rich,” he said gruffly. “How could she afford to send this to me, and why would she?”

  “I suppose the answer to both questions would be that she loves you very much,” Warden Pierce suggested.

  Mateo looked up at the man. Inmates generally regarded Pierce as a thin-skinned hard-ass, someone worthy of fear and loathing. Yet as the two men sat there together, with Warden Pierce gazing kindly at Mateo across an expanse of wooden desk, Mateo came to the blinding conclusion that there was an essential kindness to the warden that no one had ever noticed or mentioned.

  Pierce glanced down at the top of several pieces of paper in a file folder that lay open on his desk. “It says here that you want to be dropped off in Seattle, but wouldn’t you be better off back home in Yakima? The cost of living there would be far less, and maybe you could start out by staying with one of your relatives.”

  In a family of eight kids, Mateo had been the baby, born when both of his parents, Joaquin and Olivia, were in their forties. While the older kids had been growing up, the family had lived in straitened circumstances, and there had been no question about the older kids being able to go on to college. His sisters had all married straight out of high school, and after graduating from Yakima High, Mateo’s three brothers had gone to work in the orchards like their father. By the time Mateo came along, his father had been promoted several times over, eventually landing as the foreman of an orchard operation where he’d once been a mere laborer, a situation that offered him employer-provided housing. In addition, Mateo’s mother had gotten a job working in the high school cafeteria. With his parents having a much-improved income situation and far fewer mouths to feed, Mateo’s childhood circumstances were far different from those of his brothers and sisters.

  Joaquin, determined that Mateo do something besides follow in the footsteps of his older siblings, had encouraged him to focus on his studies. As a result Mateo had earned top grades and ended up with a sizable academic scholarship to the University of Washington.

  Naturally his brothers and sisters had resented everything about this and weren’t shy about letting Mateo know exactly how they felt. They ragged on him about being lazy and thinking he was too good to work in the orchards the way everybody else had. They called him a crybaby and a spoiled brat
, among other things, and when he went off to Seattle to enroll in the U Dub, they’d been united in saying so long and don’t come back anytime soon.

  During the years Mateo had been locked up, his mother had developed diabetes and could no longer work. Then, when his father was killed on the job by a freak lightning strike, not only did Olivia lose her husband and her primary means of support, she no longer had a place to call home. She now lived with her oldest granddaughter, helping look after five of her great-grandchildren in order to earn her keep.

  At the time of Joaquin’s death, Mateo had applied for and been granted a temporary release to attend his father’s funeral. Of course, he would have had to go to the service in handcuffs accompanied by a guard, but he’d been looking forward to attending. Then, the day before the funeral, a letter arrived from his oldest brother, Eddie, saying that his presence at the funeral would be a disruption, adding that it would be best for all concerned if Mateo simply stayed away.

  So when Warden Pierce suggested that perhaps Mateo would be better off going home to Yakima, a whole turmoil of thoughts and emotions raced through Mateo’s mind and heart. “No,” he said at last. “I can’t go back home to Yakima. It just wouldn’t work.”

  “All right, then,” Warden Pierce said. “Suit yourself.” He stood up. “On your way, Mateo. Take care of yourself. With any kind of luck, I hope I won’t see you back here ever again.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mateo replied. “I hope so, too.”

  In the prison yard, Mateo was loaded into a van and driven to Seattle as part of a van network known as “the Chain” that shuttled prisoners back and forth between jails, courthouses, and prisons inside the state of Washington. The van dropped him off on the sidewalk outside the sally port’s entrance to the King County Jail. He found a taco truck, Jorge’s Tacos, parked on Yesler next to City Hall Park, and gorged himself on three tacos and a luscious homemade tamale. Then he set out for Renton on foot.

  It was May. The air was cool and clean. After being locked up for so long, he enjoyed walking. His future landlord wouldn’t be off work until after five, and there was no sense in arriving early. As Mateo headed south from downtown, he was shocked to see the homeless encampments along the way—the derelict but clearly occupied campers parked here and there along the street, the tents erected under overpasses, and panhandlers begging at almost every street corner. Seattle hadn’t looked like this before, or if it had, Mateo didn’t remember it.

  At one point he spied a check-cashing store. Once inside, he turned his mother’s money order and the check the property clerk had issued him into actual cash. As the clerk counted out the bills into his waiting hand, Mateo couldn’t help but wonder how his mother had come by that much money. He was pretty sure it was something his brothers and sisters knew nothing about.

  He put enough money to cover his first and last months’ rent in his wallet. Then, outside the store, he located a bench and sat down long enough to stow the rest under the insole of his ill-fitting shoes.

  It was close to six, and his feet were killing him by the time he finally arrived at the address he’d been given—a ramshackle house at the end of Northwest Sixth Street. The place was a wreck, with a collection of half-dismantled cars parked in the driveway and a sagging porch propped up on one corner by a strategically placed stack of concrete blocks. The other houses on that same stretch were well maintained with manicured, fenced-in yards. This one was clearly a teardown awaiting a change in the real-estate market, when investing in new construction in the neighborhood would once more be profitable.

  Mateo was seated on the front porch examining the oozing blisters on his heels when Randy Wasson, his soon-to-be landlord, arrived at five forty-five, driving up in a rattletrap Ford pickup that might have seen better days, but unlike the rusted hulks clogging the driveway, it still ran. Mateo would learn later that the man worked as a mechanic at a nearby Jiffy Lube. Unfortunately, Randy’s interest in automobile mechanics didn’t extend to his own fleet of derelict vehicles.

  “You must be Mateo,” Randy said, sauntering up the cracked and weedy front walkway.

  Mateo slipped his ill-fitting shoes back on and winced as he stood up to greet the man. Randy looked back toward the street. “No car?” he asked.

  Mateo had owned his own car a long time ago, but once he went to jail, his dad had taken it home to Yakima, where it had been passed down to one of his many nephews—who, according to his mother, had wrecked it in short order.

  “Nope,” he answered. “I’m on foot.”

  “So how’d you get here? Bus? Uber?” Randy asked.

  “I walked,” Mateo replied.

  “From downtown Seattle?”

  Mateo nodded.

  “So no furniture, then?” Randy asked.

  “Not so far.”

  “All right,” Randy told him. “There’s a bed in each of the bedrooms, but not much else. I can spare you some sheets, a pillow, and a couple of blankets. I live in the basement. There are three bedrooms upstairs. The next roomer is due to show up tomorrow, so you get first choice. The three of you share the kitchen, living room, and bathroom. Everybody takes care of his own food and cleans up his own mess. Does that work for you?”

  “Sounds fair,” Mateo agreed.

  “Not much luggage, I see,” Randy ventured.

  Mateo had been up front with Randy, letting him know that he was being let out of prison on parole. There was no point in lying about it and having it turn into a big screwup later.

  “Nope,” Mateo said. “What you see is what you get.”

  “You’re in luck,” Randy said. “There’s a St. Vincent de Paul store right here in the neighborhood, through those trees and just over an eight-foot sound-barrier fence.” He nodded toward a grove of second-growth trees that separated the weedy backyard at the end of the cul-de-sac from the commercial businesses on Rainier Avenue South. “You can probably pick up some duds there on the cheap and maybe some furniture, too. If you find something, I’ll be glad to haul it home in my truck. Come on. Let me show you around.”

  Given his choice of either an east-facing room or a west-facing room, Mateo settled for east. It was still cool in May, but he was pretty sure the house didn’t have air-conditioning and probably not much insulation either. With summer coming on, he’d be better off dealing with morning sun than afternoon heat.

  * * *

  The next day Mateo took Randy’s advice and made his way to the massive thrift store that was almost next door. His older brothers and sisters had been forced to wear secondhand clothing while they were growing up—that was something else they had against him—but this was Mateo’s first venture inside one of those establishments. And he was surprised by what he found there. In the furniture section, he located a small dresser and an easy chair, along with a nightstand and lamp, all for a total outlay of eighty-eight dollars. He paid for those and had them set aside to be picked up later with Randy’s truck. In housewares he gathered up a couple of pots and pans, some plates and bowls, some silverware, and two glasses. In the clothing department, he found three pairs of pants, several shirts, and two pairs of shoes—including a pair of almost new work boots—that actually fit him. The total for all that was just over a hundred bucks.

  Pleased with his purchases and clothing in hand, he was on his way out of the store when he spotted a HELP WANTED sign in the front window. It turned out they were looking for someone to work the loading dock, accepting donations. Mateo didn’t think twice about filling out an application. A job that was within easy walking distance was far preferable to dragging his ass all over town looking for casual-laborer work at the nearest Home Depot. Two days later he was hired.

  Three days out of the slammer, Mateo Vega had a place to live and a job. Yes, it wasn’t the kind of job he’d dreamed of back when he was going for his degree in computer science, but Mateo wasn’t proud, and he wasn’t picky either. Working on a loading dock was a hell of a lot better than having no job at all. Onc
e he had a bus pass and could find a nearby public library, he’d get on one of the library computers and start sending out résumés. There had to be better jobs out there somewhere, and he planned to find one. Once he did, he’d devote himself to doing exactly what he’d told Pop he intended to do—find the guy responsible for killing Emily Tarrant.

  |CHAPTER 2|

  COTTONWOOD, ARIZONA

  — April 2018 —

  Ali Reynolds sat at her desk in High Noon Enterprises’ corporate office and tried to keep from nodding off over her computer keyboard. It was just after the first of the month. She might have held the title of CFO in the cybersecurity company she and her husband, B. Simpson, owned, but she really functioned as a glorified bookkeeper most of the time. While B. was busy doing the globetrotting glad-handing necessary to maintain good relations with established customers and bring in new ones, Ali generally stayed put in Arizona, keeping the lights on and the bills paid.

  B. had flown out of Phoenix on Sunday afternoon to get to Helsinki in time for a Monday-afternoon meeting, which, she realized, glancing at her watch, was probably over by now. After B. left, Ali had planned on going to bed early in preparation for tackling two equally complex tasks today—paying the monthly bills on the one hand and sending out the monthly billings on the other. Yes, both of those operations were computerized, but they nevertheless required human oversight—preferably alert human oversight. Right that moment Ali was definitely not at her best.

  Her plan for an early bedtime had been derailed by news from her son, Chris, saying that her daughter-in-law, Athena, had just gone into labor a week earlier than expected. Rather than hitting the sack at a decent hour, she had followed her son and daughter-in-law to the hospital in Prescott, where she had taken charge of their twins, Colin and Colleen. She had hung out in the waiting room with them while Chris and Athena were otherwise occupied. Ali’s new grandson, Logan James Reynolds, had finally made his reluctant entrance into the world via an unplanned cesarean at 3:10 in the morning. With Chris planning to stay on at the hospital, Ali took the older kids back home to Sedona with her. After she got the two of them situated in the guest room, it had been close to 5:30 before Ali was able to hit the sack. Her grandkids, left in the care of Ali’s majordomo, Alonzo Rivera, were still fast asleep when she dragged herself out of bed. Not on spring break, Ali staggered off to work a little past 9:00.