Justice Denied

by J. A. Jance

  “You’re saying he would be upset by my being here? Why’s that? We’re just doing a routine follow-up on your missing first husband. I can’t see why Mr. Lawrence finds that so disturbing—unless he has something to hide, that is.”

  “Jack’s a very private man,” Carol insisted. “He doesn’t like people nosing around in our private lives. We want to be left alone. Just go away.”

  “The way he’s acting is enough to make me think maybe the two of you were an item long before Tony went fishing up on Spirit Lake.”

  “So what if Jack and I were an ‘item’ back then, as you call it?” Carol demanded hotly. “We’ve been married for twenty-five years now. That should count for something. You don’t have any idea what my life was like then, and you have no right to judge me now. Neither does my daughter. My husband is a very private man. The idea that DeAnn brought this up—”

  “She didn’t,” I interjected. “DeAnn had nothing to do with it. The attorney general’s office is doing routine follow-ups on missing persons cases from all over the state. That’s how your former husband’s name came up. Period.”

  “Oh,” Carol said, sounding somewhat subdued. “We thought…”

  I took a business card from my pocket and passed it through the door. I didn’t expect her to take it, but she did.

  “I don’t care what you thought,” I told her curtly. “We are conducting an active investigation at this time. Please let your husband know that I am going to need to talk to both of you sooner or later. You can make it easy or you can make it hard.”

  She studied the card, then unlatched the chain. “All right.” She sounded resigned. “Come on in. Like I said, Jack isn’t home right now. You probably passed each other somewhere between here and Seattle. What do you want to know?”

  For the next hour or so we went over the same ground I had covered with DeAnn days earlier. I asked many of the same questions and heard the same answers, but with one telling difference. I had left DeAnn Cosgrove’s home convinced she was telling the truth, or at least the truth as she knew it.

  When my interview with Carol was over I left the Lawrences’ sprawling log house living room with the distinct impression Carol had been lying through her teeth. I didn’t know why, not for sure, but I had my suspicions. All I had to do now was to learn enough about the case to catch her in one of those lies.

  Like Donnie Cosgrove, I was beginning to believe that Mount Saint Helens had nothing at all to do with his first father-in-law’s disappearance.

  “Have Jack give me a call,” I told Carol the last thing before I stepped off her front porch to return to my car. “You have my number.”

  “Okay,” she said, “I’ll tell him.”

  We both knew he wouldn’t call. Most likely Jack Lawrence would play hard to get. That didn’t bother me, though. Tony Cosgrove had been gone for a quarter of a century. I had all the time in the world.

  Without Mel there to ride herd on me I had missed breakfast, so I stopped off at the Brewery Pub in Leavenworth to grab some lunch before heading back to Seattle. As I waited for my hamburger, I was thinking about DeAnn Cosgrove and her mother. DeAnn evidently still disapproved of her mother’s moving on twenty-five years after it had happened. That certainly boded ill for me and Kelly.

  The waitress was delivering my hamburger when Kendall Jackson called.

  “Just left Elaine Manning,” he told me. “Thanks for that, by the way. What she had to say was interesting, and we’ll follow up on some of the leads she suggested, but I’m not holding my breath. Without something more solid than her suspicion…”

  “That’s pretty much where I am on that, too,” I told him. “What about the nun? Any luck tracking her?”

  “All bad,” Jackson returned. “But I seem to remember that your boss has way more high-level connections inside the Catholic Church than I do. Here’s an idea. How about if you see what you can do to find that missing nun?”

  I was still pissed that he hadn’t mentioned the existence of a possible eyewitness without my having to find it out on my own, but there was no sense arguing over it, especially not when I still needed Detective Jackson in my corner on occasion.

  “Thanks for the suggestion,” I told him. “I’ll give it a whirl.”

  Ross Connors is a lifelong Catholic, and one of his best friends from O’Dea High School is now a special assistant to the bishop at the Seattle Archdiocese. So I called Ross. It was March and nippy, but it was also that rarest of rare northwest commodities—a sunny Saturday. I had no doubt Ross was out on a golf course somewhere.

  I left him a message to call me back. Then I put my phone away and tucked in.

  CHAPTER 14

  On the drive back to Seattle, LaShawn Tompkins’s murder slipped to a back burner as I concentrated on what my trip across the mountains had produced concerning Tony Cosgrove’s disappearance. If nothing else, talking to Carol Lawrence had upped my suspicion level significantly. I was convinced that she and her husband did have something to hide, even though I wasn’t sure what.

  To my mind there was now a whole new urgency in my wanting to track down Thomas Dortman, the defense analyst. If, as I suspected, he had worked at Boeing during the seventies and eighties, there was a chance he had actually known Tony Cosgrove or maybe even Jack Lawrence. What I needed more than anything right then was to talk to someone who would either confirm what Carol Lawrence had told me—or blow her out of the water.

  It wasn’t until I turned south on 405 that I started thinking about dinner—and about Mel. I wasn’t looking forward to going to dinner with Scott and Cherisse and having to explain why Mel wasn’t joining us. I thought briefly about calling her. I glanced at my cell phone, but there hadn’t been any calls. Then I thought about going by her place in Bellevue on the way home to Seattle. But I didn’t want to show up outside the security door at her apartment only to be told I wasn’t welcome. So I drove onto State Route 520 and straight home.

  On the parking garage ramp leading down to P-2, however, I was astonished to see Mel’s 740 parked in its customary spot. I headed up to the penthouse, not the least bit sure if it would be safe to open the door without wearing a flak jacket. When I stepped inside, however, I found Mel at the far end of the living room. The window seat was covered with stacks of papers, which I immediately recognized as excerpts from Todd Hatcher’s abstracts. She was seated cross-legged on the floor in front of a yellow pad, reading glasses perched on her nose. She stood up as soon as I came into the room, walked over, and kissed me hello.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was out of line.” I kissed her back. I would have done more, but she dodged out of my arms before I could get a good grip on her. She returned to the window seat and began gathering the papers. “I should have talked to you about this a long time ago,” she added.

  “Should have talked to me about what?” I asked.

  “About why I’m involved with SASAC,” she replied.

  I felt a funny twist in my gut. If this was something Mel didn’t want to tell me, it was also probably something I didn’t want to hear.

  “Look,” I said, “I was out of line, too. Whatever it was must have happened a long time ago. It’s none of my business. You don’t owe me an explanation of any kind.”

  “But I do,” she said. “What happened back then is why I’m involved in sexual assault issues today. It’s also why I’m a cop. Coffee?”

  I recognized that her offer of coffee was nothing more or less than a diversionary tactic. I accepted it for the same reason. We were waltzing around something important and uncomfortable, and we needed to get past it. Mel’s face looked so troubled—so hurt—that I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her, but she wasn’t having any of that. She went back to the relative safety of the window seat and perched there, coffee cup in hand. I, on the other hand, retreated to my sturdy recliner. We both knew that whatever was coming wouldn’t be easy to discuss, and maintaining some physical distance would serve us both in good st
ead.

  “Did you ever have something happen to you where it wasn’t your fault—I mean, you know it wasn’t your fault—but you still hold yourself responsible?” Mel asked.

  Let me count the ways, I thought.

  My mother died of cancer. My ex-wife died of cancer. Sue Danielson died of gunshot wounds. Anne Corley died of gunshot wounds. Only with Anne did I personally fire the weapon that killed her, and even that ended up being ruled justifiable homicide—self-defense. In all the others I was held blameless—as far as the world was concerned, but not on my own personal scorecard.

  “Once or twice,” I conceded.

  “Have I ever mentioned Sarah Matthews to you?”

  I racked my brain and came up empty. “I don’t think so. Who’s she?”

  “She was my best friend in high school—Austin High School in El Paso. Her father was a staff sergeant in the army and my dad was a major at the time. We were in the same homeroom.”

  I was scrambling to pull together what little I did know about Mel Soames’s background. She had grown up as an army brat. Her dad, William Majors, was retired military who now lived somewhere in Italy with his second wife, Doris. Mel’s mother, Katy, was living in Florida with a long-term boyfriend, name unknown, whom she had so far declined to marry. I knew there had been bad blood all around during the breakup of their almost thirty-year marriage. As a result I had yet to meet any of Mel’s parental units.

  “Major Majors?” I asked, trying to inject a little humor. “That must have been fun.

  Mel didn’t respond in kind, and her grim expression didn’t change.

  “Sarah and I were in the same homeroom for three years,” she continued. “My senior year Dad was transferred back to D.C. Sarah and I stayed in touch for a year or so—through graduation and for the first semester of our freshman year in college. She committed suicide a few days before Christmas of that year. She shot herself.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “In the head,” Mel answered. “Blew her brains out.”

  “No. I mean where was she when she died?”

  “She was still in Texas—University of Texas at El Paso.”

  I knew Mel had graduated from the University of Virginia. “So you weren’t anywhere around when it happened?” I asked.

  “No,” Mel said. “Sarah was in El Paso. I was in Charlottesville.”

  “So how could her committing suicide possibly be your fault?” I asked.

  For an answer, Mel picked up a small book that had been sitting on the floor beside her. She got up, walked across the room, and handed it to me.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Sarah’s diary,” Mel replied. “I’m sure she was afraid someone at home might find it, so she must have hidden it on my bookshelf. When we moved, it got stuck in a box of books that stayed in storage until after my parents bought the house in Manassas at the beginning of my sophomore year. Mom found it and gave it to me. It pretty much explains everything.”

  I was holding the book, but I didn’t think Mel actually intended for me to read it.

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  Mel’s eyes filled with tears. “Her father molested her,” she said. “From the time she was little. She tried to tell her mother, but her mom didn’t believe her.”

  “Did she tell you?” I asked.

  Mel shook her head. “Not in so many words. I think she tried, but I was too naive to understand what she was really saying. But if I had bothered to read the book…”

  “You just told me that you didn’t know about the diary until after she was already dead.”

  “Right, but…”

  “But what?”

  “If I had been a better friend, I would have listened more. And when her father tried to put the moves on me—”

  “He went after you?” I demanded.

  Mel nodded. “It was at a Christmas party at a neighbor’s house. He caught up with me out in the backyard. He was drunk enough that I was able to get away, and I never told anyone about what had happened. I was too embarrassed.”

  “He was what,” I asked, “in his thirties?”

  “Around there,” Mel conceded.

  “And you were in high school? Whatever happened has nothing to do with you,” I declared. “It was his fault, not yours.”

  “It’s not so much what happened before I read the diary,” Mel interjected. “It’s what happened afterward.”

  “What did happen?”

  “Nothing,” Mel answered hopelessly. “Not one damned thing. I kept my mouth shut and didn’t say a single word. By then Sarah’s mother, Lois, was already sick, crippled by MS and confined to a wheelchair. She was totally dependent on the man. If he’d gone to the slammer then, I don’t know what would have become of her. Sarah was already dead. What difference did it make? Even now, I doubt the diary itself would have been enough to convict him. So I just kept quiet.”

  Mel sat in the window seat. She seemed to be staring out at the water, but I doubt she was seeing any of it.

  “Where are Sarah’s parents now?” I asked gently.

  “Lois Matthews died about seven years ago. Sarah’s father, Richard, is remarried and lives somewhere in Mexico. When I heard he was marrying again, I wrote a letter to his second wife. I told her I was a friend of Sarah’s and that she had told me about being abused by her father as a child. I warned her to be careful—to make sure that he wasn’t allowed around young children, especially young girls. She never wrote back. I don’t know if she believed me or not. Maybe the letter never got through.”

  “So you did do something,” I said.

  Mel nodded. “I suppose,” she agreed. “But I didn’t do enough, not about him. What I did, instead, was get involved in the sexual assault community. By my junior year in college I was volunteering at the rape crisis center in Charlottesville once a week. That’s also when I decided to become a cop and changed my major from English to police science. I’ve been involved ever since,” she added. “So now you know. That’s how I became one of ‘those women.’”

  The very idea of incest disgusts me. The fact that someone could do such a horrible thing—that a man could repeatedly violate his own child—is something I can barely comprehend. Still, I was slightly relieved. I had been afraid Mel was going to relate something horrific that had happened to her personally. When Richard Matthews had come after her, she had managed to elude him, so at least the worst of the nightmare had happened to someone else. But Mel had been victimized, too. Her hurt was collateral damage to her friend’s lifelong violation and eventual death.

  For the first time I found myself wondering about some of the other women in that glittering ballroom at the Sheraton. What had propelled each of them to enter the sexual assault fray? Maybe there was something similar lurking in the lovely Anita Bowdin’s background that would account for her involvement in SASAC, something all the silk and emeralds in the world couldn’t quite erase. Maybe even the doyen of women’s studies, the daunting Professor Clark herself, had suffered some similar circumstance that had marred her very existence. Maybe all the women on the board were, in one way or another, deeply damaged.

  Mel had fallen silent and seemed to be waiting for some response from me.

  “I’m sorry for your friend,” I said quietly. “And I’m sorry for you, too. It’s an awful thing to have carried around on your own for all these years.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “But I haven’t been that alone. When I’m with the women from SASAC, none of us is alone.”

  I’ve been a cop all my adult life. I know the statistics—six out of ten girls and one out of four boys are molested prior to age eighteen. And I had certainly seen the irreversible damage a history of child abuse leaves in its wake. I had seen the deadly results of the years Anne Corley spent watching her father routinely abuse her developmentally disabled sister. But I don’t think I had ever internalized it in the same way as I did when Mel made that one quiet and very simple sta
tement about not being alone. And it gave me a whole new perspective on “those women” at the Sheraton—the gutsy, determined, well-dressed women who had somehow moved beyond whatever had befallen them personally and who were striving to help others. It made me embarrassed to think how churlish I’d been with Mel afterward. And it made me wish I’d made a larger donation.

  “Being involved in something like that changes you,” Mel said after a long pause. “It changes your whole outlook on life. That’s why I don’t dwell on it and why I don’t talk about it very often—and it’s why I couldn’t talk about it last night, not after all the stories we’d just heard. It brought it all back, and it hurt too much.

  “But I really want you to understand where I’m coming from,” she continued. “Working for SASAC and for organizations like it—raising money and raising awareness—means a lot to me. It makes me feel like I’m doing something in Sarah’s honor even though it’s too little too late to help her. Maybe I’m helping prevent what happened to Sarah from happening to some other unfortunate little girl. Or maybe when it does happen she’ll realize that there are places she can turn to for help, where someone will really listen to her. The only help Sarah could see was turning a gun on herself.”

  Mel needed comforting, and I did what I could. “It sounds to me like you’ve accepted what you couldn’t change and you’re changing what you can,” I told her. “That’s part of what we talk about in AA. It’s how we learn to go on. Thank you for telling me,” I added. “I know it wasn’t easy.”

  Mel gave me a bleak smile. “Thank you for listening,” she said.

  “So now that I’m back in your good graces, what should I do?” I asked. “Make a bigger donation?”

  “No,” she said. “What you contributed is fine. Listening is better.”

  “What about dinner, then?” I asked. “Are you going to join us?”