by J. A. Jance
|CHAPTER 57|
BELLINGHAM, WASHINGTON
No one was more surprised than I was when I told Ali Reynolds I’d look into the Mateo Vega situation. Initially, before we connected, I thought she was most likely just another empty-headed do-gooder messing around with something that was none of her business. But when it became clear that she was truly concerned about what had happened to Mateo Vega and that she’d done her homework, that changed. When I mentioned the JDLR shorthand, I didn’t mean to say it aloud. It just popped out of my mouth, but the fact that she instantly understood that that bit of copspeak meant “just doesn’t look right” sucked me in.
But there were other reasons I said yes. The first TLC case I ever worked was one that had ties to both Arizona and Washington State. A guy named John Lassiter had languished in an Arizona prison for decades over a crime he didn’t commit, put there by a gang of corrupt law-enforcement officers and prosecutors. What right-thinking good cop wouldn’t jump at the chance to take down some bad ones? And once TLC’s investigation into Lassiter’s situation helped find the answers to a long-unsolved Seattle-area homicide, I became a true believer—in like Flynn, as the saying goes.
Based on what Ali Reynolds had told me, Mateo Vega’s situation seemed to be vaguely similar to Big Bad John’s. I was impressed that she’d gone to the trouble of obtaining the guy’s parole-hearing statements, and the fact that they never varied over the years carried a lot of weight with me, just as it did with her. But unfortunately, out in the real world, there are plenty of prosecutors who prefer encouraging suspects to accept plea deals over having to undertake thorough investigations. In other words, from what I was hearing, enough “there” was there to make me want to know more.
I may be retired, but Mel, my wife, as the somewhat newly appointed chief of police in Bellingham, Washington, is definitely not in that same boat. When I opened my computer earlier that morning, a reminder had appeared on my calendar saying Mel and I were due to attend a soiree of some kind that evening. The party would be chock-full of local dignitaries. They and all their significant others were expected to get cleaned up, put on their best bib and tucker, and show up on time.
As the spouse of a local police chief, I do my best to perform my husbandly duties when called upon to do so. However, tonight’s gathering was one of those recurring events that happen every year, and I’d had the misfortune of attending the previous one.
I’m one of those guys who’s given up drinking on a permanent basis. Having to stand around for a couple of hours making idle conversation with a bunch of strangers isn’t my idea of a good time. At such events I usually walk around with a glass of ginger ale in hand so I’m not required to explain why I’m not drinking. There are lots of reasons for that, by the way, but most party guests don’t want to hear about them.
After a minimal amount of thought, I decided to use Mateo Vega’s case as my get-out-of-jail-free card for the evening. I called Mel’s office. For a change I got through to her without having to wait on hold.
“What’s up?”
“A guy from TLC just called,” I told her. “I’ve got a case and need to head down to Seattle ASAP.”
“Do you really have a case, or are you just trying to weasel out of having to go to the shindig tonight?” she asked.
“Would I try to pull a dumb stunt like that?” I asked, playing a card I knew in advance wouldn’t work.
She laughed. “Case or not, you’re excused, but on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You have to make an effort to see the kids before you come back home.”
These days my “kid” situation is a little complicated. First on the list would be my son and daughter-in-law, Scott and Cherisse, and their son, JonJon. They named the poor kid Jonas in my honor. Thankfully, they started calling him JonJon almost from day one.
Next up on the “kid” roster is my relatively new daughter, Naomi, and Athena, the granddaughter who lives in Texas. Although Naomi is now in her thirties, she’s been a part of my life for only a matter of months. She came about as the unintended consequence of a drunken one-night stand back in the eighties. I believe I already mentioned there are reasons I gave up drinking, and having occasional one-night stands is very close to the top of that list.
The next part of Naomi’s story is tragically all too familiar for too many families. She was a smart kid who fell in with a bad crowd in high school. Naomi ran away from home and ended up in Seattle, where she took up with a fellow druggie who turned up dead months before Athena was born—murdered, surprisingly enough, by something that had nothing to do with either narcotics or drug trafficking.
Distraught and homeless, Naomi abandoned her newborn baby at a local hospital, and Athena’s other grandpa, hoping to keep the baby out of foster care, showed up on my doorstep asking for help in his quest to be appointed Athena’s legal guardian. That’s what brought me into the picture.
You’ll be happy to know that at this point Naomi is in a good place. She has successfully completed a residential drug-treatment program. For now she has decided to leave Athena in her father’s—her other father’s—care while she goes back to school to work on an associate’s degree.
There’s also my other daughter, Kelly, who lives in southern Oregon. Kelly got knocked up in high school and took off with her musician boyfriend. Where are they now? Happily married with two kids. But since they live the better part of two states south of us, adding them to this trip’s agenda wasn’t necessary.
“I’ll do my best to see both Scott and Naomi,” I promised Mel, “as long as they’re not too busy.”
“Okay, then,” she said, giving me her blessing. “Have fun, but you owe me one.”
“I certainly do,” I told her.
Before heading out the door, I did a quick Internet search on the Emily Anne Tarrant homicide and learned that although the beach in question appeared to be located in Edmonds, for some reason the case had been investigated by the King County Sheriff’s Department. The lead investigator on the case had been a guy named Henry Norton. Wonder of wonders, Hank Norton happened to be someone I knew personally back in the day, and not in a good way. Even while I was still at Seattle PD, he’d had a reputation in local law-enforcement circles for cutting corners and pushing envelopes. And while Mel and I worked at the Washington State Special Homicide Investigation Team, or SHIT—yes, I realize those initials add up to a very unfortunate acronym, but it’s a name we all wore with pride, and without it I might never have met my wife—we’d run up against several of Detective Norton’s sloppily handled cases.
With only the barest outline of Emily Tarrant’s case in mind, I headed down I-5, knowing exactly where I had to go to flesh out the story.
For the record, evidence boxes take up lots of room. When a case is deemed closed, the evidence involved doesn’t disappear in a puff of smoke. It has to be kept and maintained in an orderly fashion. As downtown Seattle real estate has become more and more expensive, local cop shops including King County have gone looking for warehouse space in less pricey parts of the city—in this case a nondescript warehouse just south of CenturyLink Field.
When I arrived, I used my private-investigator ID to gain admittance to the building. The guy behind the counter, a kid who looked to be barely out of junior high, took my information, copied my ID, made a note of the case I was interested in, and then sat me down in a cubicle to wait. Much to my surprise, he was back with the banker’s box in question in very short order.
Since the Tarrant case was closed, there was no prohibition against my examining or photographing any of the evidence I found there. Even so, every move I made was under the watchful eye of a surveillance camera. After dusting off the top of the box and peeling away the red tape that had held it shut, I went through everything inside, copying material as needed with the scanning app on my iPhone, but the truth of the matter is, there wasn’t much there.
Emily Tarrant’s autopsy l
isted manual strangulation as the cause of death. There were lots of postmortem scratches and contusions on the body due to its having been tossed into a blackberry patch shortly after death. The autopsy reported that a rape kit had been performed. DNA evidence had been obtained from that as well as from Emily’s clothing. Those samples had been submitted to the Washington State Crime Lab for processing.
As for the murder book itself? For a homicide case, it was very sparse indeed. Other attendees at the beach party had been interviewed without much enthusiasm or with any apparent follow-up. They all agreed that both Mateo and Emily had been at the party. The couple had arrived together and left together. As they were leaving, they were reportedly involved in a heated argument, although no one seemed to know the exact cause of the disagreement.
It was clear to me that Mateo had been the focus of Hank Norton’s investigation from the very beginning. No other suspects were ever identified or brought in for questioning. Part of the problem owed to the fact that once Mateo left the party, there was no one who could verify his movements between then and the following afternoon when he reported his girlfriend missing. From that moment on, as far as the lead investigator was concerned, Mateo was the prime suspect.
I could have requested to watch the videos of Hank Norton’s interviews with Mr. Vega right away, but I didn’t bother. I’d seen him in action before, and at the moment I didn’t need to sit through hours of watching him bullying a suspect to convince myself he was a bad cop.
The Emily Anne Tarrant case was declared officially closed some fifteen months later when Mateo Vega appeared in a King County courtroom and pled guilty to second-degree homicide. Had the investigator involved been anyone other than Hank Norton, I might have let it go at that. As it was, I was obliged to dig deeper.
DNA profiling is both expensive and time-consuming, although it’s a hell of a lot faster these days than it used to be. Statewide, the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab is the entity that does DNA processing for all Washington-based jurisdictions—it tests the evidence, obtains the DNA samples, creates the profiles, and submits them to CODIS. I worked more closely with the crime lab during my time with SHIT than I did while working for Seattle PD, and the special homicide stint of my policing career was a lot more recent. As a result, when I got to the crime lab and asked who was on duty in the DNA section, I was delighted to learn that Gretchen Walther was holding down the fort. She’s someone I know.
Several minutes later she came down to reception. After an effusive greeting, she escorted me upstairs. By the way, no one gets a free pass into the crime lab. Either you have an escort with you or you don’t go. On the way to the lab, I told Gretchen what I was looking for—profiles obtained from the Emily Anne Tarrant homicide. Once back at her computer station, she quickly typed the information I had provided into her computer. When the first results came back, she studied them for a long time, frowning.
“That’s odd,” she muttered at last.
“What’s odd?”
“These profiles were obtained within a month of the day the homicide occurred. As far as I can tell, the results were forwarded to the King County prosecutor’s office, but there’s nothing here to indicate that either of those original profiles was ever entered into CODIS.”
That was a serious admission, and Gretchen probably shouldn’t have said it aloud, but the cat was out of the bag.
“Can you enter them now?” I asked.
Another period of frowning silence was accompanied by warp-speed keyboarding while I stood there waiting, shifting from one foot to the other and forcing myself to remain absolutely quiet.
“Okay,” she said finally, “the one from the rape kit was rejected because it leads back to Juan Mateo Vega and is a duplicate of one submitted by the Monroe Correctional Facility upon his arrival there some fifteen months after the initial profile was obtained.”
“That means the one from the crime scene never arrived?” I asked.
“Correct,” Gretchen replied. “Now I’ll run the profiles taken from the victim’s clothing.”
After more swift keyboarding, Gretchen finished typing and pressed Send. Very little time passed—not more than thirty seconds—before a whole new set of material appeared on her screen. This one included a mug shot of a man whose face was covered with tattoos. Moments later Gretchen printed it out.
“There you go,” she said, handing the page to me. “Meet Mr. Josiah Young. He’s currently serving three consecutive life terms at the Monroe Correctional Facility for three counts of forcible rape and murder.”
And that’s when I knew for sure that Ali Reynolds was right. Mateo Vega had just spent sixteen years of his life locked up for a crime he didn’t commit.
Feeling invigorated and excited, I left the crime lab. By then it was after six. My intention was to go straight to our condo at Belltown Terrace and start boning up on the life and times of one Josiah Alvin Young, but once in the car I realized I had totally missed lunch, and I was starving.
Driving north toward downtown, I did the only thing any self-respecting cop of my generation would do—I pulled in to the drive-thru at Krispy Kreme and ordered a dozen doughnuts, enough to cover both dinner and breakfast, with maybe some left over for lunch.
As I drove away from the window with the sweet-smelling box sitting on the front seat beside me, I couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit sorry for Mel. Whatever version of rubber chicken she was having for dinner tonight couldn’t possibly measure up to those doughnuts.
|CHAPTER 58|
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
Upstairs in our Belltown Terrace penthouse, I made coffee—coffee has never kept me awake—and downed three of the doughnuts—plain-glazed and scrumptious. Then I turned on the gas-log fireplace in the study and settled in with my computer. When Gretchen mentioned the name Josiah Young, I had recognized it as one of the interviewees from Emily’s murder box. He’d been one of the individuals at the beach party and someone Hank Norton had interviewed in the course of his lightweight investigation.
With the information obtained from Gretchen in hand, I now knew that Young had been nineteen years old at the time of the murder and living with his parents in Boise, Idaho. He’d been in Seattle that weekend, visiting his stepbrother, Andrew Little, one of Mateo’s best friends from the U Dub. Since Josiah had been at the party, I had reason to believe he was the guy Emily Tarrant had been making out with when Mateo caught up with them down on the beach. In other words, Hank Norton hadn’t noticed the killer hiding in plain sight because he’d been totally focused on the boyfriend.
At the time of the homicide, Josiah was a kid barely out of high school and with no prior history of juvenile offenses. Six years later, by age twenty-five, he was serving life in prison, convicted of three separate rape/murders. His preferred hunting grounds were out of town—two in Spokane and one in Pullman. His victims, all coeds, were invariably petite blondes. From the photos provided, those three girls might well have been Emily Tarrant’s sisters. In addition, Young was the prime suspect in the rape/murder of a University of Idaho student in Moscow, Idaho. Once Washington nailed him with three consecutive life without parole sentences, prosecutors in Idaho decided to let their case slide. They didn’t see any need to go to the time, trouble, and expense of putting him on trial.
Emily might have been Josiah Young’s introduction to bloodlust, but Mateo Vega had been the one who paid the price.
When I finished my dive into Josiah’s ugly history, it was time to figure out what to do about it. In the past, as a sworn law-enforcement officer, I wouldn’t have had to wonder. I’d have taken my findings up the chain of command—but as an independent operative for The Last Chance, I was part of no chain of command. I had uncovered a whole lot of damning evidence, but as a member of TLC’s loose-knit community of volunteers, I couldn’t do a whole hell of a lot with it. Fortunately, I knew people who could.
The Lassiter case in Arizona had introduced me to an organization called Jus
tice for All. Think of JFA as a stealth version of the Innocence Project, small but effective, as in “speak softly and carry a big stick.” My only question was this: Would anyone there be interested in Mateo Vega?
There are any number of reasons that outfits like TLC keep us old geezers on their rosters. We’re handy as hell because, as I mentioned earlier, not only do we have decades of experience, we come complete with long-standing networks of connections. In this instance, after a single call to Brandon Walker down in Tucson, I was referred to JFA’s local Seattle-area contact, Chloe Bannerman in Redmond, Washington.
I called her at home just after eight, and her initial response to me was every bit as frosty as mine had been to Gordy Maxwell earlier in the day: “Who the hell are you?” and “How did you get this number?” Dropping Brandon Walker’s name into the conversation and saying this was all about JFA quickly smoothed Chloe’s ruffled feathers.
“All right, then,” she said. “What do you need?”
So I told her, and not in twenty-five words or less. By the time I finished, she was on her game. She wanted all pertinent details, names, and phone numbers, and I could hear her making detailed notes as we went along. When our conversation was coming to a close, she asked if I had discussed the matter with anyone other than her.
“Nope,” I said. “I asked Brandon for a local JFA contact, but I didn’t mention any of the details to him.”
“I see here that you didn’t include any direct contact information for Mr. Vega.”
“That’s because I don’t have it,” I told her. “My involvement came strictly from that earlier conversation with Ali Reynolds.”
“In that case,” Chloe said, “I’ll start with her, but would you do me a favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Call her and let her know I’ll be in touch. After that I’d appreciate it if you’d keep a low profile. If JFA ends up taking any kind of action on this, I’d like to be in charge of controlling the media narrative.”