Justice Denied

by J. A. Jance

  Anita Bowdin did as she was told without further protest. By then I think she knew we knew and there was no need for any further discussion.

  Halfway between the sunporch and the front door we met up with Dory. She was carrying a silver tray laden with a complete coffee service along with an ice bucket, glasses, and a selection of sodas.

  “Call Calvin,” Anita snapped at the maid as we went past. “He’s at the office. Tell him I need him.”

  We walked on. Behind us we heard the tray crash to the floor, glasses and cups shattering as they fell.

  CHAPTER 26

  Mel Soames and I had both worked high-profile cases before, but nothing could have prepared us for the storm of controversy we’d fallen into this time. It’s one thing for a derelict pig farmer to be murdering folks society is ready to label throwaway prostitutes. Cops who bring down a guy like that are heroes while, through some warped logic, society views those kinds of victims as somehow complicit in their own deaths—as in, they were asking for it. As for the killer? He’s a nutcase, to be sure, but he was also doing some of society’s dirty work, so let’s put him away somewhere and move on.

  Anita Bowdin and her gang of female vigilantes turned that whole scenario on its ear. She and Destry Hennessey were and are well known and ostensibly respectable women in Washington State, with plenty of people who, without knowing any of the story, were ready to back them to the hilt. As far as those folks were concerned, the two of them could do no wrong, whereas Mel and I were nothing but a pair of malcontents who should never have brought any of this up. Ditto Todd Hatcher, who, I learned much later, did indeed turn his fifteen minutes of fame into a whopping two-book publishing contract.

  What really ended up pulling all the various threads together, however, was a young IT wizard, also a friend of Todd Hatcher, who, search warrant in hand, went on a mission through Anita Bowdin’s computer’s hard drives. The information he uncovered there was nothing short of a gold mine.

  Destry Hennessey’s initial position—that she had been duped the same way Mel had—went bye-bye when we uncovered and decoded a secret recording Anita had made of a telephone conversation between her and Destry. In it the two women not only discussed exactly when Juan Carlos Escobar was due to be released from jail but also how serendipitous it was that both Destry and her husband would be in Washington, D.C., at the time. Ambrose Donner of Bountiful, Utah, was especially pleased to hear about that one.

  Anita was someone who liked to keep score. Several weeks into the now-public investigation, Mel and I found ourselves scrolling through one of Anita’s files that the IT guy had lifted from her computer. It was a chilling rogue’s gallery of the people she had successfully targeted and had taken out. With the exception of Richard Matthews, who had never been arrested, the record for each man came complete with mug shot, copies of fingerprints, and rap sheets. No doubt all that official information had been obtained with the help of Destry Hennessey. And side by side with each mug shot was a second photo of the same face, often a postmortem one, taken by a grainy cell phone camera and annotated with a caption that listed the date of death.

  As we worked our way through the list by Analise Kim’s preferred LIFO fashion, the names we saw were far more familiar to Mel than they were to me. After all, these were “her guys”—violent sexual predators—who were dead now for crimes they had committed but for which they had never been either officially tried or convicted. It was only when we scrolled down to the last one—the earliest one—that we found another record missing its mug shot.

  “What’s he doing here?” Mel demanded.

  I had gone to refill our coffee cups. When I returned I was looking at the head-shot photo of a pleasant-faced balding man in a jacket and tie. The caption beneath it read: “Professor Armand P. Bowdin.”

  “I thought he committed suicide,” Mel added.

  “So did I.”

  We went back through the now dog-eared collection of papers Todd Hatcher had amassed for us the day we started closing in on the truth. Searching through them all, we came up with nothing more than “died unexpectedly in his home.” A call to the Ann Arbor Police Department didn’t add much to what we’d already surmised. Armand P. Bowdin had committed suicide by taking an overdose of prescription medications.

  “That doesn’t change the fact that his picture is here,” Mel said determinedly.

  And off we went on the trail of Anita Bowdin’s mother Rachel. It took time for us to bring her to ground. Widowed for a second time, Rachel A. Trasker lived in a retirement compound near Tampa, Florida.

  “This is about my daughter?” Rachel asked warily once we finally had her on the phone. “If you’re a reporter…”

  Clearly we weren’t the first people to make the connection between Mrs. Trasker and her errant daughter.

  “I’m definitely not a reporter,” Mel corrected. “I’m an investigator for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. We’re calling about your husband—your first husband.”

  Mel’s remark was followed by a long period of dead silence. “What about him?” Rachel asked finally.

  “Did he commit suicide?”

  “Why do you ask?” Rachel wanted to know.

  “Did he?” Mel insisted.

  There was another long pause. “What if she comes after me?” Rachel asked finally.

  “What if Anita comes after you?” Mel clarified.

  “She always said she would. If I ever told anyone, she said she’d get rid of me, too. I happen to believe her.”

  “Your daughter is an accused serial murderer. She’s jail awaiting trial on twelve cases of homicide. She isn’t getting out anytime soon.”

  “Armand never did any of the things Anita said,” Rachel declared after a time. “He wouldn’t. He was a nice man. She tried to tell me that he did things to her, messed with her, touched her. It was just too crazy. I never believed a word of it. But she told me she gave him a choice, either take the pills or she’d go to the police. She told me she sat right there and watched him do it. How could her father and I have raised such a monster?”

  Unfortunately, the answer to that question was all too apparent—to everyone but Anita Bowdin’s mother. And now we knew why Armand’s picture was the very first entry on Anita’s scorecard.

  Meanwhile the case kept grinding on in other people’s hands. In the end, Yolanda Andrade turned out to be the weakest link. She had come to the crime lab with a phonied-up résumé after being fired from working at CODIS, the national DNA database. With her expertise it had been simple enough for her to make inroads into Washington State’s far less secure DNA database—the shortcomings of which Ross Connors is even now working to fix.

  I think it was shocking for the whole law enforcement to realize that this invaluable crime-fighting tool, DNA profiling, had been perverted into a targeting device for murder. But once Yolanda confessed to her part in the scheme and agreed to testify against the others, other guilty pleas started falling into place. Eventually Destry and Anita will either cop pleas as well or else stand trial. When that will happen is anyone’s guess.

  As the investigators closest to the case, Mel and I were put in charge of victim and family notifications. Every single case was one of justice denied. Talking to those folks was grueling, emotional work—some of the hardest police work I’ve ever done. With the notable exceptions of Richard Matthews and LaShawn Tompkins, all the victims were either convicted sexual predators or else convicted felons. That made them a less than sympathetic lot, but the same wasn’t true of their survivors. For the parents or grandparents or siblings or wives or girlfriends of all these bad boys, the murdered victim was still their very own bad boy. Regardless of what crimes he may have committed as an adult, he had been little once—little, innocent, and loved.

  Of all of those family notifications, the hardest for me was the one with Etta Mae Tompkins. In the intervening months she had become far frailer. She sat quietly in her corner chair and list
ened to what I had to say. When I finished, she nodded.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “My Shawny’s in heaven now. I pray to Jesus every night that he’ll come soon and take me, too. With LaShawn gone, I’ve got nothing else to live for.”

  I felt honor-bound to go back to King Street Mission to tell Pastor Mark I had been wrong and he was off the hook as far as LaShawn Tompkins’s murder was concerned. When I got there, though, the building was gone—demolished. What I found instead was a hole in the ground with a construction crane parked in the middle of it. I never found Pastor Mark again, and I never found Sister Elaine Manning, either.

  Then there was the matter of dealing with the victims of all those long-ago, never-solved rapes. As the rape kits were tested, or rather, as they were retested, results led back to one or another of Mel’s dead sexual offenders. And one by one we located the rape victims involved to let them know that their cases were now considered solved and closed, even though they would never have the benefit of a trial to help put the attacks behind them.

  For a long time I wondered if LaShawn Tompkins’s case would ever surface. One of the last profiles developed was that of a fourteen-year-old rape victim, Jonelle Lenora DeVry, who claimed she had been attacked and raped on her way home from school by an unidentified gangbanger.

  It took us a while to track down Jonelle DeVry Jackson, but we finally did. That was how, two months later, Mel and I came to be sitting across from a young black woman in the neat living room of a small house on the outskirts of Ellensburg, Washington, where Jonelle now works in the admissions office for Central Washington University.

  “We wanted you to know the case is finally resolved,” Mel said tentatively. “That we’ve finally learned the identity of the boy who raped you.”

  Jonelle studied Mel for a long hard minute. “Is this going to come out in the newspapers?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Not at all. You were a juvenile at the time. There’s no reason to reveal your name now.”

  “Good,” Jonelle said with a relieved sigh. “I always knew who raped me,” she added. “And it wasn’t rape, either. LaShawn Tompkins was five years older than me, but I loved him to distraction, and I thought he loved me, too. I told my parents it was somebody else because I knew my daddy would have killed LaShawn if he’d known. And then, about the same time, LaShawn got caught up in that other case…”

  “The one he went to prison for?” Mel asked.

  Jonelle nodded. “Yes,” she answered. “But once he went to jail for that, I knew not telling had been the right thing to do. And it still is. DeShawn has no idea who his father was. I want to keep it that way.”

  That stopped me. “DeShawn?” I repeated. “You had LaShawn’s baby and kept him? You named him after LaShawn, but you raised him without ever telling him who his father is?”

  “My parents raised him,” Jonelle corrected. “They raised both of us. They helped me get through school, the same way I’m helping DeShawn right now. It hasn’t been easy, but he’s a smart boy. He earned a full scholarship to Gonzaga. He’s studying premed. With all that, what was the point of telling him his father was in prison? And by the time LaShawn was released…” She paused and shrugged. “There wasn’t any point then, either.”

  “You knew LaShawn was raised by his grandmother?”

  “I knew Etta Mae,” Jonelle replied. “Our old house is gone now. They tore it down and built an apartment building there, but we lived on Church Street, too. Etta Mae and my mother were good friends.”

  “You knew LaShawn turned his life around while he was in prison?”

  “I guess,” Jonelle said.

  “And Etta Mae stood by him the whole time, believing in him, loving him.”

  A single tear slid out of the corner of Jonelle DeVry’s eye and trickled down her cheek. “She would do,” she said. “That’s Etta Mae.”

  “She’s an old lady now,” I continued. “She’s old and frail, and she’s lost LaShawn, the boy she raised from a baby.” I left the sentence hanging in the air and waited.

  “And you’re thinking I should tell her?” Jonelle retorted angrily. “You think I should drag my DeShawn over there to Seattle and tell him here’s your other grandmother—your great-grandmother—and sorry I didn’t tell you because your real father was locked up in prison and now he’s been murdered and have a nice day?”

  “I’m not telling you what you should or shouldn’t do,” I said. “But it sounds like you’ve raised a good kid, and I think knowing DeShawn exists would give a dying old woman a precious gift beyond her wildest imaginings.”

  Jonelle studied me for a very long time. “I’ll think about it,” she said finally. “But I’m not making any promises.”

  A week or so after that, I was due to go to court for a hearing in the Thomas Dortman matter. In the corridor outside the courtroom I ran into DeAnn Cosgrove. The ponytail was gone. Her hair was cut short and her makeup was deftly applied. She was wearing heels and a skirt and blazer. There was only the vaguest resemblance to the overwhelmed young woman I had seen juggling her three children in that messy living room or standing angry and silent next to her husband’s hospital bed.

  “DeAnn,” I said, taking her hand. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

  She smiled. “I’m working,” she said. “At Microsoft, so it’s practically just up the street.” She paused and then added, “Did you know Donnie’s moved out?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I kept trying to pretend he didn’t have a problem,” she said. “But that day in the hospital you knew, didn’t you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess I did.”

  “Finally I just couldn’t pretend any longer. If he was so drunk that he’d just leave people to die, I had to give him a choice. Us or booze.”

  “I see,” I said, knowing without having to be told which choice he had made.

  “But don’t worry about the kids and me, Mr. Beaumont,” DeAnn continued brightly. “I have a roommate now, to help with the kids and expenses. And once Jack’s and my mother’s estate is settled, we’ll be fine.”

  She started to walk away then, into the courtroom, when I remembered something else.

  “There was one other person your mother was in touch with that weekend, someone down in Portland. Do you remember any friends she might have had down there, someone she might have turned to in a crisis?”

  DeAnn shook her head. “Not that I remember.”

  And so, because I was curious, I called Barbara Galvin and had her dredge Kevin Stock’s name out of the file. But when I called DeAnn that evening and asked her about him, he still didn’t ring any bells.

  A few days later, Mel and I drove to Vancouver, Washington, to meet with the family members of one of the last men to die at Anita Bowdin’s behest—a man who had been placed in a vehicle with the engine running and asphyxiated in his own two-car garage. We finished meeting with the family earlier than we had expected. Mel was anxious to head back north. But Vancouver, Washington, is right across the river from Portland.

  “If you don’t mind,” I said, “there’s one more stop I’d like to make.”

  “Where?” Mel asked.

  “In Portland.” And I gave her Kevin Stock’s address, which I had looked up before we ever left Seattle.

  “You just happen to have his address with you?” Mel asked.

  “It’s a coincidence,” I told her.

  Kevin Stock lived in a small condo overlooking the Willamette River near downtown Portland. I saw the family resemblance as soon as he answered the door. Kevin Stock may have aged twenty years, but he was still Tony Cosgrove. His daughter looked just like him.

  “Anthony Cosgrove?” I asked.

  “No,” he stammered. “You have me mixed up with someone else.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, handing him my card. “We need to talk.”

  Just then a second man appeared in the doorway behind him. �
�What is it, Kev?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Tony shook his head and sighed. “All right,” he relented. “I guess we do need to talk.”

  It took the better part of an hour. Sometimes it’s hard to realize how much things have changed since the early eighties. Then, on the other hand, many things have remained the same. Tony Cosgrove had fallen in love with another man. He was also a devout Catholic who didn’t believe in divorce or suicide. So he had chosen to disappear.

  “I loved Carol,” he said, “And I told her if she ever needed me, to call. I always made sure she had my number, just in case. But she only called me once,” he added accusingly. “To tell me about you. She was afraid you were going to upset things. And you did, and you’re still upsetting things. Why are you here? What do you want?”

  “I want you to think about your daughter,” I said. “And your grandchildren.”

  “I think about DeAnn every single day,” he returned. “But at this point, she’s far better off without me.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said. “Her mother’s dead. Her husband’s moved out. She’s on her own with three preschoolers. And no matter what happened, Tony, she never once believed you were dead. She’s been waiting all this time for you to come home.”

  “I can’t,” Tony said hopelessly. “Think about the insurance. If I turn up alive, she’ll have to pay it back.”

  “Between having the money and having her father?” I asked. “For the DeAnn Cosgrove I know, there’s no question how she’d choose.”

  EPILOGUE

  While we were knee-deep in investigative alligators, though, neither Mel nor I lost sight of her one-word answer: “Okay.”

  By now I’d had extensive experience with weddings. As the groom, I had survived the full-court-press June aisle-walker that had been my wedding with Karen and the three-day rush to judgment with Anne Corley. I had been the father of the bride for Kelly and the father of the groom for Scott. When it came to how Mel wanted to do this, I left the arrangements entirely in her capable hands. The resulting ceremony turned out to be a happy medium of all of the above.