Three days before Tami and Miko disappear in the late fall of 1988, Joey Franklin rapes Satoshi Hamamoto.
That night, Satoshi tells her sister, Mariko, about the rape.
Did Mariko then confide Satoshi's secret to Tami Franklin? It would have been an awkward disclosure, since the accused was Tami's sibling. But I can't rule it out.
Two days later, Miko accompanies Satoshi on a visit to Raymond Welle's Steamboat Springs ranch.
That night-only a few hours later-Miko and Tami disappear on their way to the hot springs at Strawberry Park.
Months later, the girls' bodies are discovered near Tami's wrecked snowmobile.
The discovery takes place not anywhere close to Strawberry Park, but rather farther up the same scenic Elk River Valley that is home to the ranches of both the Welles and the Franklins.
No matter how I looked at it, Raymond Welle was right in the middle of everything and everybody. He had treated Mariko in psychotherapy. He was, or had just concluded, treating Joey Franklin, which meant he'd had professional contact with at least one of Joey's parents. Probably both of Joeys parents. At Mariko's urging, he had just completed an emergency session with Satoshi. In fact, Welle seemed to have an established relationship with everyone involved in the conundrum with the possible exception of Tami Franklin.
What else was going on in Steamboat during that three-day period in the late autumn of 1988?
In 1988, Phil Barrett was sheriff of Routt County.
Gloria Welle was raising her horses.
Raymond Welle was running a successful small town psychology practice and toying with starting a radio show. Maybe he was already dreaming of running for Congress.
And something else. What? I didn't know. But something else must have been going on, too.
And now, years later? Satoshi Hamamoto feared that someone might try to silence her. Why?
I could think of only one answer. Someone wanted to keep her from accusing Joey Franklin of a very old rape. Was that enough of a motive?
To me, it didn't seem sufficient.
If Satoshi ever went public with her accusation, which seemed unlikely, Joey could just deny the story. If the national media picked up the allegation, Joey might suffer some temporary damage to his reputation, but he would survive it.
Professional athletes are routinely accused of criminal activities and their careers seem to proceed unhindered by the charges. In fact, their careers often proceed unhindered by a subsequent conviction.
If the threat of disclosure of the rape wasn't the motivation for the danger Satoshi was in, then what was it? The timeline I'd just typed suggested that there had to be a link to whatever originally motivated the murders of Tami and Miko. Something that tied Satoshi to Tami's and Miko's deaths. Perhaps something that Satoshi wasn't even aware of.
What was it?
I didn't know. But I knew whom I wanted to ask.
I called Sam and asked if his guest was awake and available. While he and I were negotiating a safe place to rendezvous in town, the fax machine started spitting out a two-page memo to Lauren from. Mary Wright in Washington.
The gist of the memo was that Mary was asking Lauren for advice about two things. First, she wanted a review of Colorado statutes and procedures relating to search warrants. And second, she wanted to know the circumstances under which a Colorado governor could usurp the power of a local district attorney and appoint a special prosecutor for a criminal investigation.
I momentarily stopped breathing when I read that the suspect property for the search warrant was Raymond Welle's home, the Silky Road Ranch. Mary informed Lauren that inquiries were being made of Representative Welle to determine whether he would voluntarily grant Locard investigators access to his property.
Should he refuse, Wright seemed prepared to recommend approaching the local district attorney in Routt County to petition a judge to obtain a search warrant. Should the DA refuse to proceed, Mary Wright was devising a strategy for an end around.
It was obvious to me that Mary Wright thought she had grounds for probable cause. Given her reputation, I didn't doubt that she was right.
I wondered what Flynn and Russ had discovered that pointed them toward the Silky Road.
Lauren was asleep. I left her a note that I was going to town to meet with Sam and Satoshi, and headed to Sherry Purdy's flower shop. I spent the time driving across the Boulder Valley trying to imagine what life was like right now in Raymond Welle's camp.
He was in the midst of a senatorial campaign that had necessitated his choosing not to run for reelection to his relatively secure seat in the House of Representatives. The Washington Post was investigating him for campaign-finance irregularities dating back ten years or more. With the bloody disappearance of the Post reporter who had broken the campaign-finance story, the rest of the national media had sharpened their focus on the accusations that had initially been front-page news only in the Washington Post and in the Denver papers.
In addition, Locard had shown up in Raymond Welle's universe and started actively investigating the possibility that he'd had a role in the murder of two young girls a dozen years before. Satoshi Hamamoto, who Welle knew had accused one of Welle's ex-patients of rape, had become a loose cannon. And now Locard's investigation had apparently proceeded to a point where the Locard forensic team felt that it was reasonable to consider asking the local prosecutor in Routt County to petition a judge for permission to search Welle's ranch for physical evidence that might be related to the murders of Tami and Mariko.
Indeed, Mary Wright felt strongly enough about the evidence she had before her to inquire about procedures that would bypass the local prosecutor should he or she turn out to be reluctant to ask a judge for a search warrant.
Raymond Welle was not having a very good month. Given the circumstances, I assumed he had little choice but to agree to a voluntary search of his property.
Should he deny Locard permission to search, they were inclined to present whatever new evidence they had accumulated to the local prosecutor and to a local judge. That maneuver would greatly increase the risk of leaks to the media. And that was something that Welle could ill afford.
Sam hadn't turned on any lights, and the interior of his wife's flower shop was streaked with shadows from the streetlights along Pearl. The sweetness of the perfume from the blossoms felt especially cloying in the dark. I followed Sam past a wall of coolers to a crowded back room where Sherry did the paperwork associated with her business. Satoshi was there waiting for us.
She stood and embraced me, kissing me quickly on one cheek. I found myself surprised by the intimacy of the greeting. She smiled warmly at Sam-she had obviously developed a quick affection for him.
Sam wasted no time. He asked me, "What's up?"
I looked at Satoshi as I answered.
"I just learned that Raymond Welle was treating Joey Franklin in psychotherapy when he raped you, Satoshi."
She lowered her chin and exhaled in a rush through her nose. It was as though I had hit her in the gut. It took her half a minute to process the information and to regain her composure.
"For what?" she asked.
"Why was Dr. Welle seeing him?" I'd expected her to be full of venom. I found the question curious.
"His assault on you apparently wasn't the first time he'd… taken advantage of young girls."
"So Dr. Welle knew about Joey. And he knew… what Joey was… capable of doing."
"Possibly, yes." Sam asked how I knew, and I explained about my call to Ellen Left, Tami's old English teacher, and about her story regarding Joey and his trouble at school.
Satoshi's expression was tight as I spoke, but her eyes were unfocused. I guessed that her agile mind was navigating the waters I'd stirred up.
"It's not enough," she said.
"It still isn't adequate to explain why someone would threaten me. I can't prove what Joey did to me. If he denies it, and especially if Dr. Welle denies knowing about it, my accu
sation would be meaningless." Without even having heard Joeys denial that he even remembered Satoshi, and without even considering the fact that confidentiality would prevent Welle from commenting on the case, Satoshi had reached the same conclusion that I had.
I said, "I agree. It leaves me thinking that you must know something else, Satoshi. Perhaps something that felt inconsequential at the time. But something that's crucial to someone today. Something that puts someone at enough risk that they are willing to try to scare you into silence."
She raised her eyebrows and they disappeared beneath her thin bangs.
"What?" she asked.
Sam nodded his big head twice and shifted on his chair. He said, "Let's see if we can figure that out." He leaned close to Satoshi and his voice softened.
"What I'd like to do now, tonight-what we're going to do now-is we're going to talk about those few days back then and see if we can help you remember some things that you might have forgotten. Or maybe see if there're some things that you remember that have never seemed particularly important until now. How does that sound? You ready to get started? I'm going to be asking you a lot of questions.
I'll probably be a little redundant. And I'm going to ask for a lot of detail."
"I'm ready."
He turned and faced me.
"Alan, go get us all some coffee. I'm afraid we could be here for a while. I'm sure something's open on Pearl. Get me a Danish or something, too. I really like bear claws." Satoshi said, "I'll have tea. A plain bagel maybe, if you don't mind." Sam said, "She'd prefer tea. Get her some tea."
I stepped out of the room and ventured out onto Pearl Street. The night was warm, and the sidewalk was pocked with raindrops that had fallen since we'd been inside. I guessed it had been a thunderstorm cell about the size of a city block. The air was heavy. For an hour or so Boulder would pretend that it had humidity.
I hesitated outside Peaberry's but decided to buy our provisions across the street at the Trident. Something about the place always took me back to the Boulder I'd fallen in love with in the seventies. The Trident was careless and cluttered and autocratic and democratic all at once. The coffee was reliably good. The pastry case was usually overflowing.
Sam got his cherished bear claw. Actually, I bought him two. They were out of plain bagels. Satoshi was going to have to settle for poppy. I went back and forth over the selection of teas. After a mental toss of the coin I chose Darjeeling.
She accepted the pebbled bagel and the cup of tea with grace.
I thought it resembled a pas de deux between an elephant and a doe. Over the years, Sam had often surprised me with his physical agility. In fact, a time or two, when I'd seen him dance with his wife, Sherry, he had struck me as peculiarly light on his big feet. But I'd rarely seen him dart and probe with the sensitivity and delicate touch that he demonstrated as he interviewed Satoshi about the ancient rape and the tragic days that followed.
The most glaring difference between a psychologist-interviewer and a cop-interviewer is that the cop treasures the facts more than the psychologist does. Facts for me, as a psychologist, are the smooth rocks I step on as I follow my patient across a riverbed. They are the treads I use to ascend a staircase behind her as she climbs toward a destination I cannot imagine. I try never to succumb to the trap of allowing the facts to masquerade for truth, for truth is a commodity that sometimes bears little resemblance to my patients' recall of the facts. But for a cop, like Sam, the facts are everything. They are the gilded riches in the hold of the sunken galleon. When Sam is in full cop mode, the facts are what he's diving for.
As he proceeded with Satoshi-guiding, prodding, probing-I spotted at least a dozen instances where I would have followed different paths from the one that Sam chose to pursue. A spark of anger that flared in the corners of Satoshi s mouth would have warranted a diversion to explore the source of the detonation.
The fingernails that she dug into the flesh of her thigh would have earned a soft "What is that about?" But Sam wasn't interested in reading the signs that were flashing about eruptions in Satoshi's underlying affect; his eyes were focused on the hard details of the ancient wreckage.
In the end-and the end didn't come until the clock in Sherry's office read 2:18-I was pretty certain Sam had learned a story different from the one that I would have learned.
The story of the rape itself didn't change much in the retelling.
Sam insisted on hearing much more than I would have about the setting where the rape occurred. He pestered Satoshi for detail after detail about possible witnesses who might have been nearby. Where were the closest houses? What was Joey wearing that afternoon? Did he remove any of his clothing? What color was it? Sam wanted to know exactly what she did after she returned home. When had she showered? What had she done with her own clothing? At one point he asked if she knew whether Joey had ejaculated during the assault. Satoshi tightened her lips and nodded in response before she turned away from him and faced me. I felt a plea in her eyes, as though she wished that I would rescue her from his onslaught of queries. I wanted to.
I didn't.
A moment later she turned back to Sam and said, "When it dripped down my thigh, I didn't know what it was. There was blood, too. Mariko explained to me what it was."
I couldn't imagine that those prurient facts or the innumerable mundane ones were actually important to Sam. His purpose, I guessed, was to try to goad Satoshi's memory to do some yoga. He wanted her to begin to stretch her mental muscles and find recollections that had disappeared under the weight of the dual pressures of time and suppression. Sam needed Satoshi to be limber for what was to come.
What was to come? At Sam's insistence, Satoshi recalled the details of the conversation she'd had with her sister, Mariko. Satoshi's memory of this event was quite vivid, as though it were a relic she had refused to bury along with her sister. She recalled that telling Mariko what Joey had done to her took only about as long as the rape had taken-a matter of only a few minutes.
Satoshi guessed three or four. In Sam's hands, though, the retelling of the conversation took most of an hour. What had Mariko wanted to do after she learned about the rape? Was she going to tell someone else? Would she break a confidence and tell their parents what she had learned? Did she want to go and confront Joey and cut off his nuts? What?
Satoshi's patience with Sam was admirable. She answered the questions, one after another, the best she could. Some she couldn't respond to because she couldn't find the memories; others she remembered like that morning's breakfast.
Sam permitted a few tangents. One was especially poignant to me. Satoshi wanted to talk about the friendship between Tami and Miko.
Her words were halting. She wasn't comfortable with the territory.
"She was Mariko's first American girlfriend. Tami was. Before coming to Colorado, our family had been in Switzerland for, I think, two years. And before that, of course, we were in Japan. Tami was something new for her. For both of us. I remember feeling jealous. Tami would lie for Mariko and they would go off on their own after school. At night, at home, they would whisper secrets on the telephone for hours and hours. I felt as though I was no longer the sister. Tami was more important to Mariko than I was-that's how it felt to me. For a long time, I tried to follow along. To be with them. To ski with them. To hang out with them in town.
"I wanted a friend like Tami. That was part of it. But I also wanted my sister back."
Sam stayed in her footsteps, always behind her, always filling her shadows with his mass. Occasionally he asked for a clarification. When she stopped speaking at the end of a long response to another in a series of questions about what she had told Mariko the night of the rape, Sam said, "Good, good. That's great." I mistakenly assumed he had concluded his questioning.
But he soon continued. He rubbed his hands together and rested his elbows on his knees.
"Let's do it again," he said.
"This time, though, we'll do it from some new angles."
The new questions came in sets, like ocean waves. Where were you sitting when you told Mariko about the rape? Where was she sitting? Or-maybe-she was standing? How did you bring it up? What were your first words? Did she believe you? What did she say?
Satoshi found answers for almost all of Sam's questions, surprising herself with the wealth of information that she could remember. Sam tried to stay impassive, but his eyes betrayed his enthusiasm. His subject, he knew, was warming up to her task. I was stifling yawns. I would have gone back out for more coffee but I didn't want to miss what might come next.
Sam said, "Okay, okay. Now we move on to the day that Mariko took you to see Dr. Welle. Do you remember that day?"
"Yes."
"What was the weather?"
For the first time Satoshi's voice betrayed some irritation.
"What? Why does that matter?"
"It does. Humor me."
She thought for a moment.
"It was a beautiful day. A storm was coming. The day had been warm and the sky was high. No clouds. Not even a thread. You know what it's like in the Rockies just before a big blizzard comes? It was one of those days. A September day in November." "I love those days before a storm," said Sam.
"One time-must've been Thanksgiving a couple of years ago-I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt when I was going into Ideal to get some groceries. I come out with maybe fifty dollars' worth of stuff and the air's suddenly freezing cold and the wind's howling and there's half an inch of snow on my windshield.
Don't know why, but I love those days when that happens. Its like weather chaos."
I loved those days, too. But I kept quiet.
Sam had an annoying little buzzer on his wristwatch that beeped on the hour. It tolled at two A.M." causing me to check my watch. Satoshi had just said, "You know what? There was a car there when we left Dr. Welle's house. It was down near the stable. We drove by it on our way out. I remember because Mariko mentioned it. She said she liked it-the car." Neither Sam nor I had reacted to her words as though they were particularly meaningful.
Cold Case Page 26
