The Murder of Janessa Hennley

by Victor Methos

  “She sounds like a smart woman.”

  She pushed food out of the cartons and onto her plate. “She was a schoolteacher. She easily could’ve gone on to get her doctorate. But she said at that time it was difficult for a woman to get into any doctorate programs. Especially in mathematics, which was her specialty.”

  “And your father was a cop?”

  “Yeah, nothing fancy. He barely graduated high school. But boy, he loved my mother. I think a lot of men are intimidated by smart women, but he loved that she was so much smarter than he was.” She took a bite of rice. “What about your parents?”

  “My mother passed away when I was young. I was raised by my father.”

  “How’d she pass?”

  He hesitated. “Cancer. Same as my wife thirty-five years later.”

  A silence before she said, “I’m sorry, Mickey. What was your wife like?”

  “She was one of those people that just loved life. No matter where she went, she made the place better. She’d stay with relatives and start a garden for them. Or we’d go on vacation, and she’d see that the town didn’t have a dog park so she’d spend an afternoon petitioning the city council to designate one.” He grinned. “After a few drinks once, she got up on stage with a belly dancer because she said she wasn’t doing the moves right. In front of fifty strangers she started belly dancing, something she hadn’t done for years.”

  “She sounds great.”

  “She was.”

  The sheriff popped open a can of Coke and slid it over to Mickey. “You miss her a lot, don’t you?”

  “Not a day goes by I don’t think about her.” He took a long drink and it burned. “But life goes on.”

  They ate in silence for a moment.

  “Can I ask you something personal?” she said. Mickey was used to this question.

  “About my health issues.”

  “About your health issues.”

  “I don’t see myself as dying of AIDS, I’m living with it. And with modern medication I expect to see my grandchildren.”

  “How did it happen?”

  He sipped at his soup. It hurt his stomach, so he picked at some rice instead. “When Ruth died, I slipped into a very dark place. I was alone in Washington, and there was only so much time my daughter could take away from school. So I regressed into myself. I started drinking a lot, not leaving the house for weeks at a time. I took a leave of absence from the Bureau, and one day I saw my badge lying out on a counter. My first thought was, ‘Whose badge is that?’ And the loneliness was crushing. I thought it would make me stronger, but it just made me more desperate. So I didn’t want to be alone anymore.”

  She put her hands on her lap and leaned back. “What happened?”

  “I would pick up women at bars and strip clubs, wherever. It wasn’t even the sex, really. I didn’t care about that. It was just having someone there through the night. I didn’t realize that at the time.” He inhaled and exhaled loudly through his nose. “As you can guess, I wasn’t exactly practicing safe sex. I think in some ways, I wanted to die. Or at least didn’t care if I did.”

  She was silent a long time, moving the food around on the plate. “How long do the doctors… I mean…”

  “It’s all guesswork. I think I got a good ten or fifteen left in me.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, so am I.”

  Another long silence as they ate.

  “So, this man we’re after,” she said, changing the subject, “you’ve dealt with people like him before?”

  “Cannibals?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s not terribly common among sadists like this, but it is there. Usually there’s a sexual component. It’s extraordinarily rare to have the cannibalism without rape.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. Some sort of mental illness. Or maybe he’s impotent and tried to perform and couldn’t. Maybe he has some sort of injury that prevents it.”

  She exhaled. “Lord have mercy. That poor girl.”

  He drank down some more soda and pushed his plate away. He wished he hadn’t eaten anything. “There’s going to be more. He crossed a line and saw how easy it was.”

  “No, he won’t be doing anymore. I’m putting everything else on hold. Every cop in this county is working on this case. And when we find him, I hope he tries to fight.”

  24

  Mickey felt better the next day. His stomach still burned, but it wasn’t a gnawing pain that distracted him from everything else. He could manage it.

  He chose not to shower because he didn’t want to get the bandages wet. Instead, he brushed his teeth and went into the kitchen. Suzan was reading the paper on her laptop and eating breakfast cereal.

  “You want some Captain Crunch?”

  “No, but some oatmeal would be divine right now.”

  “Second cupboard to the right.”

  He mixed the oatmeal with milk and a spoonful of peanut butter and stood by the microwave as it heated. Suzan was reading an article on police corruption in the LAPD.

  He sat and stirred his food before saying, “I’m guessing you don’t have a lot of that here.”

  “Corruption? No. I don’t think so. I mean we have some drug pushers that are always in and out of the system, but they would never try bribing a cop. And to be honest, once you become a citizen of Alaska, the taxes are low, and every citizen gets a dividend of the oil revenue. As long as you’ve got a full-time job and health insurance, it’s not that hard to get by up here. You could even live off the land if you needed to.”

  Mickey tasted the oatmeal. His stomach growled, and he salivated like an animal. After almost two days with little food, the peanut butter tasted better than anything he’d ever eaten. “I’d like to go out today.”

  “Where?”

  “Jason, the mechanic. I want to bring him in for a formal.”

  “You think it’s him?”

  He heard her words, but knew they weren’t what she meant to say. Her tone suggested something else, that she’d known him a long time and didn’t want to accuse him of anything. “I think it’s the only way to get the truth out of him. Put him under some pressure.”

  “You sure you’re up to that? Applying pressure?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  The gray clouds faded away, replaced with warm sunshine and cool breeze. The summers here, Suzan informed him, never got this hot. This was the first year she actually felt comfortable wearing shorts. She remembered a couple of summers where it even snowed a handful of days in July.

  Mickey enjoyed the fresh air, and for the moment, it took his mind off the pain in his stomach, which was diminishing every hour. Though he didn’t like how powerful it was, he took a Percocet to numb himself and ensure that Jason didn’t see him weakened.

  As they drove, he sat in the passenger seat and flipped through Jason Delasorto’s criminal history. He had seven total arrests with five convictions. None of them were sex offenses, but that wasn’t necessarily an indicator of a sadist. Jason’s charges were pot and minor in possession of alcohol tickets.

  “What do you know about Jason’s background?” he asked.

  “Rough going at first. His dad was an extremely abusive alcoholic. I actually remember my dad talking about it, because his mom would never testify against him and the DA kept having to drop the charges.”

  “Any allegations of sexual deviance? Molestations or flashings?”

  “No, never.”

  “Was there mental illness in their family?”

  “I don’t think so. Other than the alcoholism.”

  They pulled into the mechanic shop, where Jason was working on a Mustang. He saw them and stopped what he was doing.

  “Jason,” the sheriff said, “we’d like to talk to you for a bit.”

  “’Bout what?”

  “Well, we’d like for you to come down to the station.”

  “Why?”

&nb
sp; Mickey noted the glance behind him into the shop; Jason was contemplating a run. Just in case, Mickey stepped behind him. Jason grew agitated, wiping his hands vigorously on his pants though little grease stained them.

  “Calm down, Jason,” Mickey said. “We just want to talk. Sometimes people know more than they think they do, and we just want to be somewhere comfortable for us. Somewhere we can take notes in private.”

  He licked his lower lip. “I didn’t do nothin’ to her, man.”

  “No one’s saying you did.”

  “Then why can’t we talk here?”

  Suzan reached for the sidearm in her holster. “Jason, you’re coming with us. That’s all there is to it.”

  He looked between them a couple of times. “All right. All right.”

  25

  The color monitor in the room next to the interrogation room, which was also the conference room, flickered a few times before clearing. Mickey, Suzan, and one of her detectives, Taylor Yazzie, stood in front of the monitor and watched Jason Delasortos fidget in the next room.

  “He’s nervous,” Yazzie said, “no doubt about it.”

  “You’d be nervous too, in a police station after one of your ex-girlfriends was murdered,” Suzan said.

  “Do you have the knives back from the lab?” Mickey asked.

  “I did get confirmation that the switchblade had been rusting out there at least a few years. It had nothing to do with our case. Still waiting on the other knife.”

  “Do you have a photo of the knife?”

  “Just the photo I took on my cell phone when I found it.”

  “Can you print that photo off for me?”

  “Sure.”

  Mickey entered the interrogation room and placed the photo down on the table between him and Jason. He shut the door behind him and sat down, looking Jason in the eyes.

  He was there at least half a minute before Jason said, “So, you gonna ask me some questions or what?”

  Mickey didn’t blink. He didn’t say anything or even move. He kept his gaze locked on Jason’s.

  “This is bullshit, man.” Another long while passed. “Hey man, I’m just gonna go if this is all you’re gonna do.” He leaned back in the seat and blew air through his teeth. “Bullshit, man.”

  Mickey sat across from him another hour. He never spoke a word, and the only movement was the occasional glimpse to the photo. Jason tapped his foot and rubbed his hands together the entire time. He started pulling on his fingers and popping them, and then finally started swearing under his breath. Just when Jason was on the verge of losing it, Mickey spoke.

  “You hid something from me about Janessa the other day,” Mickey said. “What was it?”

  “Nothing, man.”

  Mickey went silent again. After about ten minutes, Jason stood up to leave but found the door locked. He yelled into the camera and called for the sheriff. Mickey didn’t move.

  After a solid twenty minutes, and after Jason had kicked the door twice, Mickey said, “What are you hiding?”

  He sat back down at the table and ran his hand through his hair. “Fuck,” he shouted.

  “What is it, Jason?”

  “She was into trains, man.”

  “Trains with who?”

  “Whoever, man. She was wild. She’d go to a party and fuck five dudes if she was drunk enough. She said she wanted to be in porn.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I was at one of ’em parties.”

  “And you had sex with her there?”

  “I ain’t sayin’ that, man. She was sixteen. I’m just saying that’s what she did.”

  Mickey leaned back in his seat. “When was the last time she did something like that?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t keep up with her, you know? Last time I saw her was at that prick Nathan’s house. Last month. He got her really high, and she gangbanged all the dudes at the party. Like twenty of ’em. But she didn’t want to.”

  “And you just happened to be standing around while twenty guys raped your ex-girlfriend?”

  “What was I supposed to do, man? She dumped me; I didn’t have no control over her. I tried to take her home, and Nathan threw me out, man.” He paused and looked away. “Fucker bought her a watch later to make up for it.”

  “What else, Jason?”

  He hesitated a moment and glanced down at the table. “I taped it.”

  “Taped what?”

  “The train. I taped like thirty seconds of it.”

  “So you could jerk off to it later?”

  “Nah, man. I ain’t like that, I’m telling you. I taped it on my phone to give to the cops. But the next day I called Janessa and told her, and she said to erase that shit. That she wanted to do it and to leave it alone. But I know she didn’t wanna do it. Not that many guys. She could get AIDS and shit, you know?”

  Mickey didn’t respond for a moment. “Do you still have that recording?”

  “Yeah, man. I got it right here. I thought she might change her mind. But she didn’t get a chance to.”

  26

  Mickey, Suzan and Detective Yazzie sat in the conference room. One of the techs, a part-time computer repairman who also handled the IT for the Sheriff’s Department, had transferred the video from Jason’s phone to a DVD. He set up a laptop to play the disc.

  “Okay, it’s ready,” he said. “What’s on this any… Holy shit.”

  “Please leave, Randy,” the sheriff said.

  “Um, yeah. All right.”

  The shaky, poor-quality video was clearly taken on a cell phone. Over a massive bed, where the headboard should have been, was what looked like an Italian Renaissance painting. Three nude women, plump and smiling coyly at the painter.

  Like the women in the painting, Janessa Hennley lay nude on the bed. She was incoherent and groaning, and several men were raping her. Groups of them stood around the bed, nude and waiting their turn.

  Mickey had to look away. His own daughter wasn’t that much older.

  “Lord have mercy,” Suzan mumbled.

  “That’s not twenty guys like Jason said,” Yazzie murmured. “There’s at least thirty men on this video.”

  “Do you recognize any of them?” Mickey said.

  Yazzie pointed. “Yeah, that guy there, the big one with the tattoo, his name’s Roger something. He works at the gym downtown as a personal trainer. That guy there, the bald one, he’s Carl Tomsell. He owns that used-car lot you see coming in from the airport. Couple other guys, too. I don’t think it’ll be too hard to find all of them.”

  The sheriff turned the video off. “I want all of them in my cells tonight. You hear me, Taylor? Not tomorrow, tonight. You take who you have to and pick these rapist sonsabitches up.”

  He nodded without saying anything and left the room.

  “This isn’t going to be good,” Mickey said. “You don’t have a victim. Just Jason with his camera.”

  “So?”

  “Juries like a tearful victim telling their story. Without it, all these guys are going to say it was consensual, and even our witness is going to back that up.”

  “The video—”

  “Shows her having sex. She’s not screaming or fighting them off. The most you’ll be able to charge is sexual assault in the third degree. It’s a felony, but barely. Most of these guys won’t even go to prison. And that’s if you can land convictions by convincing a jury this wasn’t consensual.”

  “But it’s a registerable offense. I’ll have these bastards pegged as sex offenders for a good ten.”

  “If your DA’s like every other, they’ll settle with misdemeanors, non-registerable.”

  She thought a moment. “What the hell do we do?”

  “What we want is for them to give us everything they know about who was there and what happened. They won’t do that knowing they’re just going to get slapped with misdemeanors. What we need is someone to say that she was prostituting herself. Exchanging sex for something of value. The
n it becomes exploitation of a prostitute. We can charge that in federal court and threaten them with ten years in a federal penitentiary, minimum.”

  “Should we talk to Jason again?”

  “No, I think we need to go to the source.”

  Nathan Goodall answered the door in a bathrobe with his initials on the breast. He looked from the sheriff to Mickey. “Can I help you with something, Sheriff?”

  “Sit down,” she said, brushing past him. “I have something to show you.”

  Suzan flipped open her iPad. The two men followed her. She began the video and turned it to Nathan. His mouth fell open.

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “No, you don’t,” Suzan said. “What you want is to cooperate and tell me everything, and I mean everything, Nathan, so that I don’t arrest you and send this video to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Not the DA, Nathan. The Feds. We’re talking federal penitentiary.”

  “For what? I’m not even having sex with her there.”

  “Exploitation of a prostitute.”

  “What? She wasn’t a prostitute.”

  “Jason told us you bought her a watch. I’m sending someone to Janessa’s house to find that watch, and then I’m going to trace where it came from. Knowing you, it’s probably something fancy. Something where the store will have a video camera. And guess what? That watch is payment. Sex for payment, Nathan.”

  “That’s absolutely ridiculous. And you guys can talk to my lawyer.”

  “Fine. But we’ll talk to him down at the station.” She pulled out her handcuffs and slapped them on his wrists, pulling his arms behind his back. “You have the right to remain silent.”

  27

  Mickey took his medication and then topped it with another Percocet. He sat outside the Sheriff’s Office, really just a small town police station with two cells that likely never saw more than drunks and potheads. The sun was at its zenith, but the temperature never rose above seventy-five.