Justice Denied

by J. A. Jance

  Darrell Cross remained pleasant and cordial enough, right until Tim Lander showed up. He arrived with his legally executed search warrant in hand about the same time Darrell Cross’s warrant appeared. That was when some old-fashioned TSA rigidity and noncooperation arrived on the scene as well.

  Before the situation devolved into open warfare, Mel was able to finesse things enough that we were finally able to open Thomas Dortman’s assorted luggage. The lid of one carry-on was stuffed with packets of hundred-dollar bills.

  “Looks like he stopped by his bank this morning and closed out his accounts,” I said.

  Mel nodded. “That’s probably why he hung around until Monday,” she said.

  In the end Detective Lander settled for walking away with Dortman’s 9-millimeter Beretta while Darrell Cross took control of everything else.

  As far as Dortman’s Lincoln was concerned, however, Lander held the trump card. The LS was specifically listed on his search warrant. It wasn’t mentioned on Cross’s. So after we left the TSA office, Lander, Mel, and I spent the next half hour walking through Sea-Tac’s massive parking structure searching for the vehicle. Because local spring breaks were already in process, the garage was packed to the gills. My idea was to start on the top floors and work our way down. It was a logical-enough choice but a bad one. It turned out Dortman had used valet parking. And why not? It didn’t matter how much it cost. Dortman wasn’t planning on coming back, so he wasn’t ever going to pay the bill, either.

  In the long run, that was a benefit. Once we located the vehicle and showed the parking attendant the search warrant, he produced the keys. Lander opened the driver’s door, bent down, and peered at the floor. Then he stepped back. “Take a look,” he said.

  Mel took a look herself. “Looks like dried blood to me,” she said.

  “That’s what I thought,” Lander replied.

  He had summoned a tow truck. He and the attendant were arguing over payment of the parking fee when my phone rang.

  “You never called me back,” Ralph Ames said accusingly.

  Ralph isn’t someone who gets his nose out of joint easily, but this time he did sound miffed.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Mel and I have been caught up in a situation that’s just now settling down.”

  “So did you tell her—about the nun thing?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t have a chance. Why don’t you?”

  The look on Mel’s face was thoughtful as she finished the call and handed me back my phone. “Two unidentified nuns,” she said. “That pretty well spells it out. Richard Matthews’s murder and Juan Carlos Escobar’s have to be related.”

  “Not two unidentified nuns,” I told her. “Three.”

  “Three,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

  “LaShawn Tompkins. Shortly before he was gunned down at his mother’s front door an unidentified nun was seen lurking in the neighborhood. She was seen, but no one’s been able to find any trace of her. Initially I thought she was an eyewitness, but maybe now…”

  “A nun who goes around shooting people or running them down?” Mel asked. “That’s ridiculous.”

  But I’m older than Mel Soames, and maybe I’m more cynical. Not only that, I’ve met enough religious nutcases that the idea of an unhinged nun didn’t sound at all beyond the realm of possibility.

  “It makes no sense,” Mel insisted.

  “It’s still a possibility,” I told her. “And even if it’s a long shot, with both you and Destry Hennessey involved, we’d better give Ross Connors a heads-up on this, too.”

  She nodded. When Ross didn’t answer his cell I called his office, only to be told he was locked up in a series of meetings. When those ended, he was scheduled to speak at a dinner meeting in Tacoma. I had to summon a full dose of blarney before I was able to wheedle the location of said meeting out of his secretary, but with Mel’s Sea-Tac performance as inspiration, I hung in there until I finally had the name of the restaurant—Stanley Seaforts.

  It’s actually Stanley & Seaforts, but I didn’t correct her. By then Mel and I were running on empty on both food and sleep. We had planned to go back to Belltown Terrace and call it a day. Instead we left the airport, hit I-5, and headed south smack in the middle of rush-hour traffic.

  “Can’t we stop somewhere and get a sandwich?” Mel complained. She was hungry enough to be downright whiny.

  “Wait,” I told her. “You’ll thank me later.”

  “I doubt that,” Mel said. Sulking, she folded her arms across her chest, settled into the far corner of the passenger seat, and soon nodded off, leaving me alone to do both the driving and the thinking.

  The problem with tying the three cases together was that, an unidentified nun aside, they were still very different. Juan Carlos Escobar had been guilty and punished some, if not enough to satisfy some of his victim’s survivors. Richard Matthews had been guilty and punished not at all—unless the bullet in his chest was some kind of latter-day payback for molesting his daughter. Fair enough. But LaShawn Tompkins hadn’t been guilty at all, although now he was just as dead as the other two. There again, like it or not, another unidentified nun had been seen in the vicinity of the crime. And what about the black cloth they had found in the door of the vehicle they had dredged out of the water up by Chuckanut Drive? Surely these weren’t all connected. That couldn’t be.

  By the time we finally exited the freeway and made our way up the hill to the restaurant, the rain had stopped and an afternoon sun break had burned through the gloom. Inside, they had started serving dinner and the early dining crowd was lining up for the cheap eats. I guided Mel into the bar, hoping that from there we’d be able to spot Ross on his way into the restaurant. As we mowed our way through two orders of crab cakes, a side of pea salad, and several cups of coffee, Mel was almost civilized again. She was also puzzling over the same question that was bothering me.

  “Okay,” she said. “Matthews clearly got away with something. To a lesser degree, so did Escobar, since the punishment didn’t exactly suit the crime. It makes sense that we’re dealing with a vigilante action of some kind. Other than the involvement of a nun, the only other connection between those two cases is that Destry and I are both involved in SASAC.”

  I had already come to that same conclusion, and I was glad to hear Mel arrive there on her own. Under the circumstances it seemed wise to nod and say nothing more.

  “But LaShawn Tompkins was exonerated,” Mel continued.

  “Of that particular crime,” I said. “What if there’s another crime we don’t know about? What if he got away with that one?”

  “The problem with that is, if we don’t know about it, how would anyone else?”

  Just then a chauffeur-driven limo stopped at the front entrance. Ross Connors emerged and entered the lobby. Three stylishly dressed, power-suited women greeted him there and were about to lead him off toward a meeting room when I managed to snag him away from them.

  The ladies weren’t pleased to let him go, but he excused himself. On his way to join us he ordered a single-malt from the bar.

  “I saw that you called,” he said. “What’s up?”

  We told him what was going on. All of it, from Donnie Cosgrove and Thomas Dortman right through to our unexpected but possible linking of those three very disparate cases. When we got to the part about LaShawn Tompkins, he stood up abruptly, walked over to the bar, and ordered another drink. By the time he returned to the table he seemed to have made up his mind about something.

  By then one of the ladies had returned to retrieve Ross and was standing impatiently at his shoulder. Taking the paper cocktail napkin from under his drink, he jotted a name onto it and then dropped it on the table in front of me. Two words were written there: Analise Kim.

  “She works at the Crime Lab in south Seattle,” Connors said. “We may have an evidence-handling problem there. Go talk to her.”

  “Mel and I were actually talking about going on down to Olympi
a to see Destry—”

  “No,” Connors barked, cutting me off. “Not at this time.” With that he turned and gave his hostess a bland smile and allowed himself to be led away.

  “Whoa,” Mel observed. “Who pushed his button?”

  “We did, evidently.”

  Mel picked up the napkin. “Who’s this?”

  “I’m not sure. I think she’s an evidence clerk.”

  “I guess we’d better go see her.”

  Which we did. Once again, I drove while Mel ran the phone. We were headed for the crime lab, but fortunately she called ahead and learned that Analise Kim was currently off on leave. Nobody said what kind of leave, but the answer Mel was given raised enough red flags that she didn’t hang up until she had Analise’s home phone number and address. When Mel phoned there, she spoke to a Mr. Kim, who told us that his wife volunteered at the Burien Public Library Branch on Monday evenings. So we went there instead.

  Walking into the library, we went straight to the lady stationed at the reference desk. It was just past seven o’clock.

  “I’m looking for Mrs. Kim,” I said.

  The woman smiled and nodded in the direction of one of the book stacks. “She’s over there,” the woman said. “The woman with the cart who’s shelving books.”

  Partway across the room a small woman with iron-gray hair and decidedly Asian features was pushing a heavily laden wooden book cart that was nearly as tall as she was. As we approached her she pulled a Rubbermaid footstool from the bottom shelf of the cart and climbed up to return a book to a spot that was far beyond her normal reach. She was still on the stool and at my eye level when we reached her.

  “Mrs. Kim?” I asked, pulling out my ID. “I’m J. P. Beaumont with the Special Homicide Investigation Team. This is my partner, Mel Soames. Ross Connors suggested we get in touch with you.”

  “That didn’t take long.” She climbed off her perch, returned the stool to her cart, and shelved the next several books without needing the stool’s extra elevation. Not only did she shelve returning books, Analise straightened the spines of all the other books as she went along. Clearly the woman was a perfectionist.

  “Didn’t take long?” I asked. “Sorry, I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I’ve been complaining about this for months, but as soon as I send an attorney around, well, that gets a reaction, doesn’t it.”

  “Complaining about…?” Mel said.

  Analise Kim moved to the next section of shelves, retrieved the stool, and once again clambered up high enough to reach the topmost shelf. She returned two books and then sorted and reshelved several that must have been put away in the wrong order.

  “About the hostile work environment at the crime lab,” she said in answer to Mel’s unfinished question.

  “Mrs. Kim,” Mel said, “we seem to be coming in in the middle of something. If you wouldn’t mind bringing us up to speed…”

  “I like order,” Analise declared. “I like order at work, at home, and here. That’s why I come here once a week to do what I’m doing now—putting books away. I like to know that every book is where it belongs. If I don’t put a book away properly, then the next person who needs it won’t be able to find it. If books are just put away anywhere, what you have is chaos.”

  I couldn’t tell if Analise Kim was giving us a glimpse into her basic philosophy of life or if this was something else.

  “Some people aren’t interested in keeping things in order,” she continued. “Or in doing them in a timely fashion.” Pausing to straighten the spines of books that were less than properly aligned, she muttered, “LIFO,” almost under her breath. “That’s the way we used to do it, before…”

  I glanced at Mel, who seemed to be as mystified about all this as I was. “Excuse me?” she said.

  “LIFO,” Analise said impatiently, as though we were dim beyond bearing. “As in Last In First Out, as opposed to FIFO—First In First Out. LIFO is how we do things here, too. When I come in, the returned books are stacked right there under the counter. The last ones to come in go back on the shelves first. And when I get to the last stack, the one in the back, I know I’m catching up. I like that. It makes me feel as though I’m accomplishing something. Not only that, the last books that come in are often the newest and the most popular—the ones with the biggest demand—so it’s important to get them back out first thing.”

  That pretty well clarified one thing. We really were talking about Analise Kim’s philosophy of life, but we also needed to get her back on track.

  “To go back to what you said before. I’m assuming LIFO is how you used to do things at the crime lab, but now something has changed and you don’t do things that way anymore. Is that correct?”

  “What changed is she came along,” Analise declared. The vehemence she put behind that single “she” said volumes.

  “By ‘she,’ you mean Destry Hennessey?” Mel asked.

  “Oh, no. Not her,” Analise said quickly. “But since she’s in charge, she’s the one who could have fixed it—the one who should have put a stop to it.”

  “Who then?” I insisted.

  “Yolanda Andrade,” Analise replied.

  “One of your coworkers?”

  “Not exactly. I’m just a clerk. Yolanda’s an actual DNA analyst. So even though she’s much newer, she thinks she’s better than I am and she wants everyone to do things her way. When I told her that was wrong, that’s when it started.”

  “What started?” I asked.

  “Yolanda likes to mess with me. She puts evidence kits back in the wrong place, just because she knows it drives me crazy. When I come to work she’ll have moved things around on my desk—my stapler; my tape holder; my pencils. She’ll put them in different places on my desk or in different drawers. Sometimes, when I put my lunch in the refrigerator in the morning, I’ll come back at noon and it’ll be on a different shelf. Or in the garbage.”

  Watching Analise’s fierce dealings with unaligned library books, I could see how this kind of harassment would drive her absolutely nuts. She was someone who required order as much as she did air to breathe.

  But Ross had mentioned something about evidence-handling irregularities.

  “About the LIFO thing…” I suggested.

  “Yolanda is supposed to develop profiles on the most recent cases,” Analise returned. “That’s the whole reason they hired her, so the newest cases could be run through those new violent offender DNA databases. But she keeps rummaging around in the old stuff. I know, because she takes kits out of cold storage and then she doesn’t return them to where they’re supposed to go.”

  Mel had been quiet for a while. Now she spoke up. “What do you mean, old stuff?” she asked.

  “Before the crime lab moved into the new building, they had storage facilities here, there, and the next place, and things were a mess. No one could find anything. Once we had everything gathered in one spot, it was my job to organize it. And I did. Working with years of unprocessed rape kits was no fun. I developed a system and was starting to get it organized, but then Yolanda came along and started messing around with those old evidence kits, ones from ten or fifteen or even twenty years ago. And even though I’ve tried talking to her about it, she hasn’t stopped, and Mrs. Hennessey won’t make her stop, either, probably because Yolanda is free and I’m not.”

  “Free?” I asked.

  “Right,” Analise said. “Someone else, I’m not sure who, is paying her wages. Mine come out of the crime lab budget. But I’ll be a lot more expensive when this is all over. I’m on leave to use up the rest of my vacation. After that, I’ll quit. Then I’m going to court.”

  I made the connection then. Yolanda Andrade had to be the DNA profiler SASAC was paying for, the one I’d heard about on Friday night at the fund-raiser. When I glanced in Mel’s direction, she was grim-faced. And I knew why. If you’re going to launch a vigilante action, how much better to do it against people the cops didn’t know they were lookin
g for. Those long-stored rape kits, with their unidentified DNA profiles, would be an open book. One of those could very well lead back to LaShawn Tompkins, for example, and to many others as well. Like to any number of ex-cons whose DNA profiles had been entered into the CODIS system or into our statewide DNA database simply because they’d been locked up in our prison system. Knowing we had stumbled into something important, I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.

  “Did she ever get any hits on those old cases?” Mel asked. Her tone was easy, conversational, but I knew she was as on edge as I was.

  “I never saw any,” Analise answered. “Getting a hit is a big deal, you see. We mark them off on a board and everything. We’re at 406 right now—406 hits, that is. And once there is one, the kit is moved to a different section in the evidence room—from cold case to pending.”

  “Another part of your filing system?” Mel asked.

  Analise nodded.

  “Tell us about it,” Mel said.

  “The filing system? It’s really nothing more or less than a shelf list, like the shelf lists kept by libraries everywhere. It’s an inventory system—a way to tell what’s missing and what isn’t.”

  “Except this one isn’t about books,” I suggested.

  “I added a few bells and whistles,” Analise said modestly.

  “What kinds of bells and whistles?”

  “The kits are filed by year and date,” she said. “A year or so ago, once I got wise to what Yolanda was doing, I started keeping track. I assigned each kit its own separate number—a sort of Dewey decimal number of rape kits. And that’s one of the things I did every single day—checked the shelves to see if any of my control numbers were missing.”

  “And if they were?” Mel asked.

  “I wrote down the kit number, noted when it left the shelf, when it came back on its own, or when I found it somewhere it didn’t belong.”

  “You don’t still happen to have that list, do you?” Mel asked.

  “Of course I do,” Analise returned. “Not here, not with me. But at home. Would you like to have a copy?”

  “Yes,” Mel said. “It would be really helpful.”