Downfall

by J. A. Jance

  Stunned, Drexel Nelson left off any attempt to voice further protests. He sat in stricken silence, watching as Joanna held open the door so Robin could carry the drawer outside.

  “Where are we taking all this?” Robin asked.

  “Straight back to the department,” Joanna answered, her voice brimming with excitement. “If there are more boys involved in all this than Travis, we need to know who they are. Every piece of paper in that drawer needs to be analyzed, swabbed for DNA, copied, and maybe even dusted for prints. I’m willing to bet that we’ll find our killer somewhere in that pile of correspondence—our killer and our motive. And if there is a connection between the two victims? I’m guessing that’s where we’ll find Desirée Wilburton, too.”

  “There’s a lot of material here,” Robin said. “And yes, it needs to go first to your department, where it can be properly logged into evidence. After that, though, how about if I take it to the FBI’s lab in Tucson. Your department has a limited number of CSIs, and they’re already overwhelmed. This would speed up the process immeasurably. I came here to help. Let me.”

  “Your lab can do it all, including DNA profiling?”

  “Including,” Robin answered.

  “Let’s do it, then,” Joanna said. “The sooner the better.”

  CHAPTER 24

  AN HOUR LATER, SHERIFF BRADY AND AGENT WATKINS WERE SITTING side by side on stools in the CSI lab at the Cochise County Justice Center. They watched as Casey Ledford—wearing latex gloves and using tweezers—carefully removed each individual piece of paper from the stack and held it up to be copied by a scanner before numbering the image and logging the paper itself into evidence. Once that was done, she used PowerPoint to display the scanned item on a nearby screen.

  Item number one was a barely legible note, scrawled in pencil and written in awkward cursive on rough-edged paper torn from a student notebook. Reading the words broke Joanna’s heart.

  Please, please, please dont’ do this. Its my baby too. I want to marry you. I want to be the baby’s father. You know he doesn’t love you, and I do. Please. I know you said your answer was final, but lets talk about this again.

  Love you,

  Trav

  “Trav would be Deputy Stock’s son?” Casey asked.

  Joanna nodded. “One and the same.”

  “Do Jeremy and Allison know about any of this?”

  “I doubt it,” Joanna said. “Not yet, but it’s almost word for word what our CI told us—that Travis thought the baby was his and had begged Susan Nelson to marry him. She apparently told him to get lost. And now, since Travis’s alibi for Saturday afternoon and evening has just evaporated, we’ve moved him to first place on our prime suspect list.”

  “If Travis thought the child was his, Susan Nelson must have been teaching him lessons that weren’t exactly speech or debate related,” Casey said.

  “No kidding,” Joanna agreed. “DNA obtained from a pencil taken from Travis’s school locker suggests that he’s the father, but we’ll need a properly obtained DNA sample from him to verify that information. In the meantime, I expect we’re going to find the identities of any number of Susan’s other sexploitation victims among the papers hidden in this drawer.”

  “You’re saying there are more victims besides Travis?”

  Joanna nodded. “Evidently.”

  “What can you say to the parents of kids who’ve been victimized that way?” Casey asked. “How on earth do you go about delivering that kind of awful news to anyone, let alone someone you know like Jeremy and Allison? And for them, it’ll be a double whammy—not only is their son a victim of sexual assault, now he’s a homicide suspect, too. Hearing about this is going to break their hearts.”

  “I know,” Joanna said. “As of right now I have no idea of what I’m going to say to them.”

  Casey retrieved the next item—a second note. This one, written in the same hand and on a similar piece of paper, was only a few lines long:

  Really? Are you kidding? Thats wonderful. When is it due?

  Trav

  Casey shook her head. “This just gets better and better, doesn’t it.”

  Item number three turned out to be a plain white envelope with nothing on it—no name; no return address. The top had been slit open, so the flap was still sealed.

  “We’ll be able to get DNA from that flap with no problem,” Casey observed as she carefully removed the piece of paper from the envelope and held it up to the camera. As she did so, item number four gradually came into focus on the wall-mounted screen on which Joanna and Robin had been viewing greatly enlarged images of each document.

  “Oh my God!” Joanna exclaimed as the signature at the bottom gradually resolved itself into readable script—Kev.

  “Who’s Kev?” Casey asked.

  “That’s likely to be Kevin Thomas, the kid who’s supposed to be our CI in all of this. The one who claimed he and Travis Stock were best buddies.”

  “Scroll back up to the top,” Joanna directed. “We need to be able to read the whole thing.” And doing that was enough to take her breath away:

  I can’t believe you’d just drop me like that and send me down the road like I’m some kind of worn out toy. Is that all I am to you? Is that all I was? And you still expect me to show up at Debate Club and act like nothing happened—like everything is just great?

  I thought you loved me, but you don’t. If I told people what you did to me, you’d lose your job. You might even go to JAIL!!

  I know you won’t take me back, but now I’m starting to wonder. Am I the only one or are there others? I feel so stupid. If my mother ever figures out what happened, I know she’ll kill me, so I probably won’t tell, even though I should.

  What I don’t understand is how you can look yourself in the face? How can you stand up in front of your classes and pretend to be such a great teacher and act like you care about all of us when you don’t? Not at all. How can you go to that church of yours and sit there with all the other good people pretending you’re good, too? You’re not. You are evil. You deserve to die, and when you do, I hope you rot in hell.

  Kev

  “Holy moly!” Robin breathed. “This is a game changer. This guy threatened her, plain and simple. It says so right there in black and white. The whole time Kevin was pointing us in the direction of Travis Stock, he was really trying to make sure we weren’t looking too closely at him.”

  “Does that mean we now have dueling prime suspects?” Casey asked.

  “Maybe even more,” Joanna said. “How many pieces of paper do you have in that stack of love notes?”

  Casey shuffled through the documents. “Thirty or forty individual pieces of paper with what looks to be ten or fifteen distinctly different sets of handwriting. I’m guessing some of them are current students. Others may have already graduated.”

  “We’ll need to identify and interview all of them,” Joanna said. “Can we lift DNA from any of the notes?”

  “Getting DNA from licked and sealed envelopes is easy,” Casey answered. “Lifting DNA just by swabbing the surface of a piece of paper is a little more problematic than saliva on glue. Agent Watkins said we can make use of the FBI lab in Tucson. I suggest that she take the notes and letters themselves to the lab and let their people go to work on them. In the meantime, we’ll send the envelopes directly to the state patrol crime lab.”

  “How many envelopes?” Joanna asked.

  Casey sorted through the pile. “Six,” she answered. “Most of them are just like the first one—still sealed because they’ve been slit open with a knife or letter opener.”

  “Would you like me to drop the envelopes off at the state crime lab when I take everything else to ours?” Robin asked.

  “Sounds like a plan,” Joanna said.

  Her phone rang with the ME’s number showing in caller ID. Not wanting to slow down Casey’s analysis of the material from the linen drawer, Joanna excused herself and went out in the hallway to take the ca
ll.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “You were right,” Kendra Baldwin replied. “Hal Hopkins was suffering from arsenic poisoning. After what you said this morning, I ran a whole battery of tests, ones I might not necessarily have used on someone who died of blunt-force trauma. I’d say he’d been given low doses over some period of time. The amount administered wasn’t enough to kill him outright, at least not yet, but it was getting there.”

  “During the interview, I seem to remember that his wife mentioned his being in ill health for some time—enough to require several recent hospitalizations.”

  “With flulike symptoms by any chance?” Kendra asked. “Low doses of arsenic will do that. Did she say where he was hospitalized? I can put through an official request for his medical records.”

  “I’d try the hospital in Willcox first,” Joanna suggested.

  “Will do.”

  “But this throws a whole new light on the subject,” Joanna said. “It explains why Hal’s nongrieving widow is so eager to confess to whacking the poor guy over the head with a golf club. She probably thought with blunt-force trauma, when you did the autopsy, you’d look at that and nothing else.”

  “Too bad for her, then,” Kendra replied. “I suppose she thinks being charged with manslaughter or second-degree murder is preferable to being charged with murder in the first degree. The potential outcomes behind doors number one or two are better than the ones behind door number three.”

  “Does Detective Howell know any of this?” Joanna asked after a pause.

  “Not yet,” Kendra said. “At least not from me. You’re the first person I called.”

  “I’ll contact Deb now,” Joanna said. “She’s over in Sun Sites executing a search warrant. She needs to know that she should be looking for anything remotely related to arsenic. Before we’re done, I’m hoping we’ll be able to nail Kay Hopkins’s feet to the ground.”

  Joanna ended the call and went back into the lab. While Casey continued to sort through papers, she reported what the ME had said.

  “How much longer is this going to take?” she asked.

  “We’re only halfway,” Casey answered.

  “Okay, then,” Joanna said. “You finish that so Agent Watkins can head for Tucson. In the meantime, I’m heading for Sierra Vista.”

  “To talk to Travis’s parents?” Robin asked.

  Joanna nodded. “To them first, and then I intend to have another chat with Kevin Thomas.”

  “You’re talking to the Stocks on your own?” Robin asked. “I thought you wanted me along so you’d have someone from outside your department along with you.”

  “I do want an outsider,” Joanna said. “Fortunately, with you fully occupied transporting evidence to Tucson, I have someone else in mind—Detective Ian Waters from the Sierra Vista PD. After I talk to Deb Howell, that’s my next call—to Chief Montoya. I want to let him know what’s up. When all this hits the fan and people know about not only Susan Nelson’s pattern of abuse but the extent of it as well, it’s going to come as huge news in Sierra Vista. It’ll blow the lid off SVSSE, and Frank needs to know in advance exactly what’s coming.”

  CHAPTER 25

  WHEN JOANNA DIALED DEB’S NUMBER, THE CALL WENT TO VOICE mail. After leaving a complex message about the possibility of arsenic being involved in the Hopkins homicide, Joanna dialed Frank’s number. “What’s happening?” he asked when he came on the line. “Any news?”

  “Yes, lots,” Joanna answered, “and most of it bad. I need a favor. Do you know where Detective Waters is right now?”

  “The last I heard he was on his way to SVSSE to let Mr. McVey know that there’s another round of interviews coming. As soon as Ernie and Jaime finish talking to Travis Stock’s friends at Buena High, that’s where all three detectives are headed. What kind of favor?”

  “I’m headed your way now, too,” Joanna said, “and so’s a whole crap storm. I want to have a word in private with you and Detective Waters before that happens.”

  “This sounds serious.”

  “It is serious,” Joanna said. “Susan Nelson was evidently carrying on with a number of her students over an extended period of time, most likely over the course of several years. We have reason to believe that Deputy Stock’s son was one of the boys involved.”

  “Travis?” Frank asked. “That’s appalling. He’s always seemed like such a straight-arrow kid. And when you say, ‘carrying on,’ does that mean she was having sex with them?”

  “A definite yes to the sex question along with the added complication of having made at least one baby in the process,” Joanna replied. “As I’m sure you saw in the reports, Dr. Baldwin’s autopsy revealed that Susan Nelson was pregnant at the time of her death. Given the whole vasectomy/condom controversy from the other night, I’m relatively certain that one of her students, rather than her husband, was the father. We’re attempting to ascertain which one.”

  “Any probable candidates so far?” Frank asked.

  “Travis Stock seems to be under the impression that he’s the father of the child, which may or may not be true. We’ll need properly collected DNA from him to confirm that. In the meantime, I need to drop this whole batch of bad news into Jeremy and Allison’s laps.”

  “Not an easy thing to do,” Frank said.

  “No, it’s not,” Joanna agreed. “I was hoping Detective Waters could go along with me on that interview. Given the fact that Deputy Stock has been with my department for years, I thought it might be easier on him and on Allison, too, if we do this in front of a relative stranger rather than in front of people he’s worked alongside for years. At least I believe that’s how I’d feel if our situations were reversed and I was in their shoes.”

  “You don’t think either Jeremy or Allison has any idea about what’s been going on at school?” Frank asked.

  Joanna sighed. “Maybe,” she said, “but I doubt it.”

  “Well, then,” Frank said, “bringing in an outsider to deliver the bad news is probably a good call. I’ll get on the horn with Ian as soon as we hang up. But, realistically, how many boys are we talking about here?”

  “We found a hidden cache of correspondence,” Joanna replied, “mostly handwritten notes. Casey came up with at least ten different handwriting styles on them, so the paper trail would indicate the involvement of at least ten to fifteen different kids. There may be more than that, however. We all need to be prepared for that possibility.”

  “So there will be other parents who’ll need to be notified and interviewed as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which means we’ll need to think about ongoing counseling for the affected victims,” Frank concluded. “That’s going to create time and budget complications for both of our departments.”

  “Right,” Joanna agreed. “In addition, once we’ve established who the victims are, we’ll probably need help from your department to conduct whatever additional interviews are deemed necessary.”

  “Let me know what you need and you’ll have it,” Frank declared. “In the meantime, tell me about the notes you found.”

  “They’re love notes, evidently, jotted on lined paper mostly torn from student notebooks. The notes are signed with first names only. It seems reasonable to assume that the one named Trav would be Travis Stock. Figuring out who the other victims are will be a bit more difficult. It seems unlikely that any of the kids Susan Nelson targeted will come forward on their own.”

  “I doubt that, too,” Frank said. “If the victims were girls and the abuser turned out to be a male teacher or coach, the public would come down squarely on the side of the girls. With boys, it’s a whole different ball game.”

  Alone in the Yukon, Joanna found herself nodding in agreement. “That was my first instinct as well. There’s always a sense that girls are considered victims from the get-go, while boys are often regarded as co-instigators.”

  “How’s it possible that she could get away with pulling stunts lik
e this for so long?” Frank asked. “How come nobody caught on?”

  “I believe Susan Nelson was a born manipulator,” Joanna answered. “She seems to have convinced each and every one of those poor kids that he was her one and only—the true love of her life—right up until it came time for her to dump him. By then I would guess they were all too ashamed or embarrassed to come forward, leaving her free to move along and target someone else.”

  “Do you think one of those lovesick boys—Travis, for example—is responsible for your two murders?” Frank asked.

  “That’s certainly a possibility,” Joanna answered. “The school surveillance tape made it appear as though Susan was being abducted at gunpoint. Or maybe knifepoint, but it turns out no weapon was used in the course of the attacks. No gunshot wounds or stab wounds were found on either body.”

  “If the killer turns out to be one of her juvenile victims,” Frank suggested, “he might not have had ready access to a weapon, which would explain why no weapon was used.”

  There was a short silence on the phone. “What about the other people at the school,” Frank asked, “the teachers and administrators? Do you think they knew about what was going on and simply turned a blind eye?”

  “What do you think?” Joanna responded. “It’s a small school. I suspect that, among the boys especially, what was happening may have been rumored about or, even worse, common knowledge. As far as the faculty is concerned, I’d be surprised to think that no one had any suspicions at all. For one thing, we already know Susan had a fling with a previous principal—one who was fired. Speaking of girls as victims and boys as co-instigators, here’s an interesting question: Why did the principal get fired and Susan didn’t?”

  “That’s easy,” Frank replied. “It happens all the time. I believe it’s called a double standard.”

  “But the real question—the one the boys’ families should be asking—is this,” Joanna added. “Did any members of the SVSSE faculty know or even suspect that this was going on right under their noses? If so, why didn’t someone report it?”