by J. A. Jance
“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 Olympia 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 ne
west 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 looking 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.”
“Fine, then,” Analise told us. “Once I finish here we can stop by the house. But I have to finish shelving the rest of the books.”
I had just that moment fallen in love with Analise Kim and her insatiable love of order. In fact, I had to resist the temptation to reach out and smother that incredibly wonderful record-keeping woman in an old-fashioned bear hug, but that might have been as unwelcome as an improperly aligned book spine. “We wouldn’t even consider taking you away from that,” I said.
At which point my phone rang. The withering look Analise sent in my direction made it clear cell phones were an unwelcome intrusion in her library. I raced for the door.
“It’s me,” Todd Hatcher said. “I was hoping to talk to you. I’ve turned up some pretty interesting stuff today, but it’s getting late. I’m about to head home.”
“You’re still at Belltown Terrace?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I ordered a pizza for dinner. Hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind at all,” I said. “Hope it was good. Now, did Ross Connors happen to give you access to the SHIT squad’s LexisNexis program?”
“No,” Todd said. “He didn’t need to. I have my own. Why?”
“Because neither Mel nor I have our computers with us at the moment, and we need a whole batch of research done in a hell of a hurry.”
“When it comes to research, I’m your guy,” Todd said. Coming from someone else it might have sounded conceited. Coming from him I suspected it was absolutely true. “What do you need?” he asked.
“Every single thing you can find on both Destry Hennessey and Anita Bowdin. Two esses on Hennessey, and Bowdin is B-O-W-D-I-N. Find whatever you can and print it.”
“No problem,” Todd said. “I’ll get right on it. When do you think you’ll be here?”
“That remains to be seen,” I said. “We’ve got a few things to handle on the way.”
CHAPTER 23
I was fine while we hung around the library waiting for Analise Kim to finish her volunteer shift of shelving books. I was fine while we drove to her house to pick up a copy of her “shelf list.” B
ut after that, on the way back to Belltown Terrace in downtown Seattle, I fell off the cliff.
Once upon a time I could do all-nighters. I used to be able to go without sleep for seemingly days on end without it bothering me, but time has a way of catching up with a guy. On the drive north from Burien, as I fought to stay awake, I was forced to con-front the fact that J. P. Beaumont is no Jack Bauer from 24. It helped my ego that, despite Mel’s relative “youth” and the nap she had grabbed earlier in the day, Mel was struggling to stay awake, too.
The only thing that helped was talking. “So what do we do?” Mel asked. She was clutching the papers Analise had given us.
What they contained was more a series of diagrams than an actual list. Each sheet represented one year and was covered with consecutively numbered boxes. I could see how numbering each of the rape kits in that fashion would have made it easy for Analise Kim to scan her shelves each day to see what, if anything, was missing. Annotations in some of the boxes, “out” or “in,” followed by dates, showed when the kit had disappeared and returned.
“As in?”
“Do we call Ross, have him send someone in to isolate all the kits that have been tampered with so they can be analyzed, or, more likely, reanalyzed?” she asked.
“Bad idea,” I said. “As soon as we do that, we tip our hand. Once Yolanda Andrade knows we’re looking into this, you can bet everyone else involved will know, too. I’m sure that’s why Ross didn’t want us talking to Destry, either.”
“It hurts me to think that Destry’s crooked,” Mel said.
“Me too,” I said. The very idea left me feeling half sick.
“And if there have been evidence-handling irregularities in the crime lab…”
She didn’t finish the sentence and she didn’t need to. I knew exactly what she meant. That kind of scandal could jeopardize convictions that were years in the past.
