The address led Yardley to an apartment complex in downtown Las Vegas. Three buildings with dead grass in between them and a swimming pool that looked like it had been emptied long ago, mounds of dirt and sand layered on the bottom.
The apartment number listed was on the second floor. The hallways, stained with graffiti, smelled of urine and mold. Many of the doors were cracked and broken, and the two windows on either side of the hall were smeared with substances she didn’t even want to guess at.
Apartment 6. Yardley waited a moment. She was about to knock when she stopped. Instead, she pulled from her purse the .38 revolver she kept in a gun safe in her closet. Not once had she had to pull it out of the safe before, with the exception of having it cleaned a few years ago.
She closed her eyes, opened them, and then turned the knob and jammed her shoulder into the flimsy door. The wood was weakened with age and cheap to begin with. It cracked near the doorknob and swung open.
The apartment appeared as a mess of bodies, sleeping bags, fast-food wrappers, and old pizza boxes. Several stained mattresses filled the living room. Two people sat against the wall, a boy and a girl, probably no more than seventeen. A pipe was pressed between the boy’s lips, and Yardley smelled the unmistakable scent of burning methamphetamine: a cross between melted plastic and burning hair.
“Where’s Tara Yardley?”
The girl said, “Who are you, her mom?”
She said mom as though it were an insult. Yardley moved past them and down a hall. Two bedrooms and a bathroom. She opened the first bedroom door, and the shock of it took her breath away.
Tara sat on the floor, Kevin asleep next to her. Two other young men were asleep on the bed. Tara’s eyes went wide, and she jumped up and ran to her mother and threw her arms around her.
One of the young men stirred and said, “Hey, what—”
Yardley lifted her gun. The man held up his hands.
“Whoa, easy, lady,” he said.
With one arm wrapped around her daughter, Yardley backed out of the bedroom, and they left the apartment.
On the drive home, Yardley let her daughter cry. They didn’t speak until the shine from the tears on her cheeks had faded. Tara was looking out her window when she said, “We were going to run away and live with his uncle in Los Angeles. He said he had some friends that had an apartment we could stay at for now. They were nice at first, and then they started telling us that we needed money to make it and the easiest way was . . . was for me to have sex with men for money. That they had other girls do it, and they were making a thousand dollars a week. I thought Kevin would hit them and scream his head off.” She sobbed quietly. “But he said I should do it. He said it was a good idea and it was just sex and it didn’t mean anything, and when I told him no, he got furious at me and said I couldn’t leave.”
She was crying again.
When she stopped, she looked at her mother and said, “You’re not yelling. You’re not mad at me?”
Yardley shook her head and softly said, “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I realized what losing you would feel like. I’m too relieved right now to be angry.”
Tara turned her head toward the window and watched the passing casinos and shops. “I’m so stupid,” she said. “I thought he was in love with me, but he didn’t give a shit about me.”
“You are not stupid. Look at me . . . you are not stupid. There’s certain types of men, Tara, that look for the best in people and use it against them. Compassion, forgiveness, a willingness to help, pity, love—that’s what they look for, and they use them against you. But those traits are not weaknesses. They’re strengths, and don’t ever let anyone convince you otherwise.”
She shook her head. “Kevin’s an idiot. He can barely read. All my intelligence, and someone like him completely fooled me.”
“You see the best in people. You can’t blame yourself for that.”
She wiped the last of her tears away. “Then you can’t either.”
Yardley looked at Tara, and then she took her daughter’s hand and held it as they drove.
38
Yardley called Lieu at work and said she was taking some time off, and she decided she was too angry with Wesley to let him know as well. Tara had eaten breakfast and then gone right to bed. Yardley lay with her awhile, then called a friend at the LVPD who was with the Missing Persons Division. She told him about the apartment and what Kevin had done, and the detective promised her he would be looking into it today.
Yardley made coffee in the kitchen, rehashing over and over the moment she’d opened the door and seen her daughter sitting among filth and squalor and three men that weren’t letting her leave. The shock of it tasted putrid in her mouth.
Words hadn’t even formed in her head when the horror had hit her. Opening the door, that fraction of a second to take the image in, had been enough. Enough to mentally destroy her if she had let it. The mind worked so quickly at times and so slowly at others.
The door.
Yardley stopped pouring the coffee and stared at the cup of dark fluid. The shock had been when she’d opened the door. It had been so painful because it was so sudden. A flash of terror absorbed in an instant. Activating the most primitive part of the human brain, the part that told an animal to run or fight or freeze.
Her heart pounding, she texted Baldwin:
I need you to do something for me. Right now, right away.
Shoot.
Go talk to Isaac Olsen. At the school if you have to. Ask him if his parents’ bedroom door was broken the day before they were killed. If it wouldn’t close all the way.
Because of the broken hinge photos you sent me?
Yes. Right away. Please.
Okay, you got it. Anything else?
Yes, Tara’s home.
That’s fantastic! I knew she’d be okay. Where was she?
Another time. Let me know about Isaac right away, Cason.
I will.
The next couple of hours were spent in anxious pacing. Tara slept the entire time, and Yardley pictured her leaning against that filthy wall in the apartment all night, unable to sleep, her eyes darting toward any sound in the dark.
The text came around ten in the morning.
Isaac says the door was broken. That he was hanging on it and broke it and it wouldn’t close, so his dad was going to fix it that weekend.
Yardley could barely breathe. She called a neighbor, a pleasant retiree named Martha, and asked if she would come over and stay with Tara until Wesley got home.
Yardley threw on jeans and a blouse and rushed out of the house as Martha walked up the porch steps.
Baldwin sat in a chair across from her as Ortiz chatted with a secretary outside of Yardley’s office. Baldwin had a rubber ball, something people with office jobs squeezed to strengthen their forearms and attempt to impede carpal tunnel syndrome. Yardley ran various searches on several different databases at once.
“It’s unlikely,” Baldwin said. “The female is nearly always the target in these types of attacks.”
She shook her head. “There was no sexual assault. We assumed he was killing the husbands first to make the wives suffer while they watched them die, but I think it was a practical decision. The husbands were stronger. He was taking out the bigger threat first and gagged the wives so they wouldn’t wake the children. The children are the targets. The rage is directed at them, and the violation is that moment they open the door and see their parents. It’s important for him that they open the door to see the carnage in a single moment. It amplifies the pain. It wouldn’t be the same if they walked down the hall and saw it from afar. They would have some time to process it, for the brain to dissociate to protect itself. It wouldn’t inflict maximum trauma. The children are the link. That’s how he’s choosing them. The parents are just a tool to inflict the pain on them.”
The database searches revealed little about the Deans’, Olsens’, or Mileses’ children,
so she went into the federal juvenile-records database. It was the most protected database in the entire court system, and only a select few agencies had access.
She searched for Isaac Olsen first, inputting the birth date from the case file. It took only a few seconds to bring up his court case history.
Suddenly her stomach felt like she’d swallowed molten steel. She had antacids in a drawer, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the screen long enough to reach for them.
“It’s adoption,” she whispered to herself.
She couldn’t sit. She rose and began pacing her office, biting her thumbnail.
“What?”
“Isaac Olsen was adopted.”
“I would’ve seen that.”
“It’s a sealed adoption.”
Sealed adoptions were heavily guarded, as most of the time they meant the adoptive parents didn’t wish the children to know they were adopted, so the courts closed the files and didn’t make them accessible to the public or even most law enforcement agencies. Before the widespread use of computers, they would destroy the physical files, but now records remained, buried, in the database.
She sat down again and searched for Emma and Eric Dean. Emma was the biological child of Sophia and Adrian Dean, but Eric was adopted. A sealed adoption. She searched for the five Miles children. Two were adopted, both sealed adoptions.
She leaned back in her chair as Baldwin came up behind her and read the computer screen over her shoulder.
“He’s choosing them by whether they have adopted children,” he said more to himself than to her.
“How, though?” Yardley asked. “Even local law enforcement doesn’t have access to this database. He’d have to be FBI.”
Baldwin shook his head. “No way. Not one of my guys. I can check, but there’s no way. It’d be easy to spot someone logging in and accessing the database. It records any log-ins. What about someone from your office? An in-house investigator?”
“We only have two. One of them is female, and the other was sent to Florida for a case last week. He couldn’t have attacked Jay Miles. And it’s the same with the prosecutors: the log-ins are recorded. Too easy to check. Who else has access to this database?”
“The courts, so it could be a court employee. We’ll have to run a check, obviously. Judges aren’t exactly going to like getting interviewed in a homicide investigation, you know, so just be prepared.”
“What about Greg?”
He shook his head. “He wouldn’t have access. Besides, he was in Salt Lake City consulting on a case the night the Olsens were killed. I checked with the ASAC down there, and they had lunch together.”
“Austin Ketner wouldn’t have access either.”
He glanced to her and then back at the screen. “No, I guess not.”
“Anyone else?”
He shrugged. “Probably the adoption agencies, Guardian ad Litem’s Office . . .”
All thought ceased in a flash of pain and realization. It was as if the words had pressed a button and a deep well in her stomach had sucked her down into herself. Yardley put her hands on the desk in case she fainted. When she lifted them, she rose and grabbed her purse.
“I have to go,” she said as she hurried out the door.
39
“You can watch the videos in my office,” Warden Gledhill said.
Yardley sat down at the warden’s desk. “I appreciate it, Sofie, thank you.”
“You’re welcome. But like I told you before, he’s only had a bunch of academics visiting him. An occasional reporter. No one interesting. We didn’t let any of the crazies in.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing. Just need to make sure. How far do the videos go back?”
“It used to be tapes, and they’d reuse them, but since we went digital, we keep all of them. That was . . . I wanna say seven years ago? So that’s as far back as you get.”
“That’ll be fine, thank you again.”
“Mm-hmm. Let me know if you need anything. I’m going to lunch. I’ll bring you back a sandwich.”
Yardley began with the first visitor Cal had had seven years ago. A journalist with the Las Vegas Sun. The video camera in the visitation rooms for death row inmates hung in the corner. She could see Cal’s hands, though not his face, but could see the upper half of the visitor’s body clearly. The journalist was tall, black, and female. She skipped her and went to the next one, a professor of criminology at the University of Michigan. Another woman. Yardley skipped her, too.
She skipped eighteen male visitors after researching their identities. Only on the nineteenth did she stop. The visitation log said it was a man named Roger Kohi, a sociologist with the University of Nebraska. The visitor had blond hair sticking out from a baseball cap and wore glasses. He either had a thick beard or wore a fake one, but there was no mistaking it. She simply knew the face too well to be fooled.
Roger Kohi was Wesley Paul.
Yardley went through the rest of the videos. Roger Kohi had visited Cal thirteen times in the span of seven years.
The email sent to Cal with a photo of Aubrey Olsen attached had been a ruse to make her and Baldwin think Cal and the copycat had never met or corresponded before and to shift suspicion onto Austin Ketner. At least until the next murders.
The videos had no accompanying audio because of a Nevada Supreme Court case from the nineties where a jail had been found to be recording attorney-client conversations for information on new crimes. Yardley wished like hell she could hear what they were saying.
She had to be absolutely sure, one way or the other.
Yardley asked the warden’s secretary to burn copies of the videos onto discs, then send her an email detailing the date and time and what actions she’d taken, so that she could establish chain of custody later if need be.
Wesley had kept his condominium when he’d moved in with her and Tara. Yardley had always assumed it was a way for him to keep his independence. He was forty-four and had never been married. According to him, never even been in a serious relationship, so moving in with someone, Yardley guessed, terrified him. She hadn’t given a second thought to him wanting to keep the condo. Particularly since it was already paid off.
The condominium complex had the air of someplace exclusive. A gated community with an actual guard at the gate instead of an automatic arm. The guard asked who she was there to see, and she told him she was Wesley Paul’s fiancée. He had her sign a visitor sheet and let her through.
The complex housed several buildings. The condo took up the top floor of a three-story building near the back, by the community swimming pool. Yardley stopped at the management office. Two women sat facing each other with large glass desks in front of them and paintings on the walls instead of posters.
Yardley smiled at the woman to the right of her. “I’m Jessica Yardley. I’m the fiancée of one of your tenants, Wesley Paul. I need to get into his condo and get a few things for the wedding coming up.”
“Oh, okay. Is he with you?”
She kept her smile. “No, if he was with me, I wouldn’t need to ask you to open the door, hon.”
The woman raised her eyebrows. “Well, I’m sorry. I can’t just let you in there. I don’t know you from Eve, and if something goes missing, we would be liable.”
She nodded and showed her badge. “I understand. But I’m also a US attorney, and this is part of an investigation.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t let you in without his permission.”
Yardley took out her phone and dialed a number. Baldwin answered on the second ring.
“Where are you?” he said.
“I need you to do something for me, please.”
A hesitation, and it didn’t seem like the words would come, or maybe she didn’t want them to. She didn’t speak until Baldwin said, “Jess?”
“Please draft a warrant to search the condominium of Wesley Paul. I’ll give you the details to state.”
40
While Yardley waited for the w
arrant, she went out to the pool and watched some children playing. They played Marco Polo and then raced in the pool, one child upset that he had been cheated from victory because he didn’t have goggles like the others.
A chill hit her when she realized that on the night the Miles family had been attacked, Wesley had been out until the sun was nearly up, allegedly searching for Tara.
She tried to read on her phone, tried to listen to music, to catch up on a few other cases, but nothing would distract her from the heaviness crushing her chest. She thought that this must be what the stirrings of a heart attack felt like.
An email notification dinged her phone. The e-warrant had been approved and filed.
Yardley showed it to the receptionist in the management office. The woman had apparently never seen a warrant and said, “Let me call our boss.”
Yardley felt a simmering anger. It bubbled to the surface, though the only outward sign was her jaw muscles grinding her teeth together.
“I’ve wasted enough time. If you don’t let me into that condo immediately, I’m calling the FBI agent I spoke with to come down here and arrest you both for obstruction of justice, and I’ll have him kick that damn door down.”
The woman’s face paled. She attempted to say something, but no words came. The other woman rose and said, “Lemme just grab the keys.”
Wesley’s condo looked small. One bedroom, one bathroom, kitchen, home office, and living room. Only one closet in the bedroom and no pantry or linen closet. Yardley shut the front door behind her while the woman said something about signing a release.
The white carpets and simple furniture had an elegance to them, a simplicity appealing to the eye. No paintings, no photographs, no decorations at all. One television and DVD player and a bookcase filled to the brim with books. On the top shelf were about two dozen books on serial murder, abnormal psychology, and forensic investigation, along with biographies of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Hitler, Stalin, and Eddie Cal.
The bedroom had a Japanese-style bed low to the ground with a thin mattress. A painting hung above the bed, and when she saw it, she knew she needed to sit because her legs might give out. It was one of Eddie Cal’s paintings. One she had seen before. A black figure with a white face inside what looked like a box but what Yardley thought now was probably a grave.
A Killer's Wife (Desert Plains) Page 15
