Judgment Calls (30 page)

The request was reasonable under the circumstances. I nodded.

“OK. We found four unsolved homicides through the Northwest Regional Cold Case Database. One in Idaho, one in Montana, and two in Washington. All of them women, all either prostitutes or promiscuous. So far, the details match the Long Hauler letter to a T. We’re dealing with a grade-A psycho.”

“What kind of details, public information or concealed?” I asked. In any murder investigation, law enforcement always held back certain details. It kept the bad guy from knowing what investigators had, and it could help down the road if a wanna-be confessor tried to jump into the mix.

“Stuff no one else could know. Position of the bodies, personal items that were taken, whether specific items of clothes were on or off. I told you, the guy’s for real.”

“Just on the four new cases? What about Zimmerman and Martin?” I asked. It sounded funny to label Kendra by her last name, but O’Donnell was sharing information. It was better not to remind him of my personal attachment to the victim.

“Them too. On your case, he gave us the exact intersection they pulled Martin from, everything they did to her, that they threw the purse in the trash. The paper didn’t have those details.”

“No, but it all came out in trial,” I said. I was playing it cool, removing the lid from my latte and blowing in the cup, like we were talking about running times or stock performances.

“Are you saying you saw a suspicious serial-killer type sitting in on your trial?”

He was right. I would have noticed if someone had been watching. “Any possibility that Derringer did it all and then wrote to the paper as the Long Hauler when he got caught on the Martin rape?” Clearly Derringer was benefiting from these letters, and given what he did to Kendra, he certainly had it in him to rape and kill other women.

But O’Donnell was already shaking his head. “Doesn’t look like it. No way he could’ve sent them himself. The jail reads all outgoing prisoner mail. There’s always the possibility that he could sneak a letter to a visitor or something, but it doesn’t look like he could be the guy. We’ve already got him solid in Oregon during two of the out-of-state murders. He had a parole meeting with Renshaw during one of them and was doing time on the Clackamas County attempted sod for another.”

It looked like we had a serial killer on our hands. “Any other cases in the Cold Case Database that match?” I asked. The computerized data bank was a partnership among law enforcement agencies in the Pacific Northwest and included details of all unsolved homicides.

“Nope, nothing obvious,” he said. “Our guy’s MO seems to be street girls, strangled and dumped outside so it takes awhile to find them. Looks like he copped to all of them in his letter.”

Duncan hung up the phone. “Governor’s office,” he said, by way of explanation. “They’re all over me. Jackson’s under pressure to pardon Taylor and is looking for something to hang his hat on. Fucking pussy. He won’t admit it’s because of the death penalty. Doesn’t want to lose eastern Oregon.”

Bud Jackson was a Portland liberal who managed to win a statewide race only by sending his wife, the daughter of a prominent local ranching family, on the campaign trail throughout conservative rural Oregon.

“If he can say Taylor might be innocent, he could do the pardon and save face.” Duncan stopped, seeming to register my presence for the first time since I sat down. “This OK with you, Tim?” he asked, tilting his head toward me.

“Yeah, I’m going to need some help with the Martin family. I was just giving Sam what we got out of the letters.”

“Well, it’s nice to see you two sharing the sandbox again. So where are we this morning?” he asked, folding his arms in front of him. “I see we weren’t able to keep the Gorge search quiet.”

“No, sir, we weren’t,” O’Donnell said, laughing at the obvious understatement.

“They find anything?” Griffith asked.

“Yes, miraculously.” Tim turned toward me. “To get you up to speed, Kincaid, the Long Hauler said he threw Zimmerman’s purse from his car past a bend in the road up the Gorge, about a quarter mile from the freeway, so we sent the Explorers out there yesterday to dig around along the road out there.” He turned back toward Griffith. “They spent all day searching yesterday, but no luck. The bureau was about to call everybody in, but they wanted to make sure they didn’t screw it up. Don’t want to pull a Washington, DC have some old guy’s dog dig it up next year from right under their noses. Anyway, the detective supervising the search pulls out a park map and talks to every Explorer to make sure he marks off where they’ve searched. Turns out there’s a monster patch of blackberry bushes no one wanted to touch. About a quarter of a football field, four feet high. Now most people would’ve let it slide, thinking no way a purse can get in there.”

I nodded. Blackberry bushes are dense and woody. You can’t get through them without a hatchet. I knew from the countless golf balls I’d lost to them that a purse thrown on a blackberry bush would bounce off.

“But this guy is ex-military, total sphincter boy. He checked with the parks department and found out they started letting those bushes grow two years ago, meaning they weren’t there when Zimmerman was killed. So he gets everybody clearing out blackberry bushes all night. They found it early this morning,” he said, sounding more excited. “They actually found Jamie Zimmerman’s purse, and it’s pretty much where the guy said it would be. Still has a bunch of stuff in it. Cigarettes, makeup, and, most critically, a fake ID issued to one Jamie Zimmerman. A detective told me he got chills when he found it. Her real ID was in the pocket of her jeans along with a condom and a lipstick, and we figured that was all she carried. We never even knew to look for a purse.”

“So we’ve got him tied to everything now,” Duncan said. “Jesus, five dead women, Sam’s vie, God knows how many others. Do the police have any leads on this guy?”

“No. Whoever he is, his luck is unbelievable. Crime lab says there’s no DNA on either letter. The Cold Case Databank entries for all four of the other cases indicated there was too much deterioration for testable DNA samples, just like with Zimmerman. I had IA call the hometown police agencies to verify the computer information, and I heard from them right before I came down. Nothing.”

“Were there any other strangling cases in the database without DNA evidence?” I asked.

O’Donnell paused. “No, just the ones from the letter.”

“What’s the FBI doing?” Duncan asked.

“They’re interested but haven’t taken over yet. They’ve got a profiler studying the cases. Can’t give me a time line on when they might have something.”

Duncan gave a dismissive wave. “Useless anyway. Let me take a wild guess. Guy in his mid-twenties to forties, loner, no meaningful relationships with women, with a job or lifestyle that takes him through the Pacific Northwest. Likes to type letters and call himself the Long Hauler. Yeah, real science.”

He looked down at his desk and picked up a file.

“Alright, folks, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re dumping the case against Derringer.” Duncan put up a hand to silence me before any words came out of my open mouth. “No, Sam, we’re dumping it. Your evidence has gone to shit. You’ve got nothing but the vic’s ID. Now, I know you’ve got a personal interest in the girl, and it’s admirable. It really is. But the girl was coming out of a heroin OD. Plus you’ve got a nearly identical crime committed by a different person same type of victim, same location, both with missing purses. Oh, and don’t forget that the different person is confessing to both crimes. You don’t have enough to prove your case beyond a reasonable doubt. Hell, Sam, you don’t even have probable cause.”

“Duncan, the man’s a convicted sex offender with shaved pubic hair. That, combined with the confession “

He interrupted me. “You know damn well the jury can’t hear about the sex offense. Plus we had that defense attorney in here a couple days ago about that, because the shaving was bothering me too. I can see why you butt heads with her,” he said, smiling. “What’s her name again?”

“Lisa Lopez,” I said.

“Right, Lopez. Real firecracker, that one. But she made a good point. She says Derringer shaved his privates because he was due for a second pethismograph the Monday after the assault. I guess the wires pulled at him on the first one.” Duncan and Tim both made faces like even the thought was painful. Wusses. They should try a bikini wax. “We confirmed it with the PO what’s his name “

“Renshaw,” O’Donnell reminded him.

Griffith nodded. “Renshaw checked his calendar. Derringer was due in on Monday, just like Lopez said. She couldn’t find a way to bring it out at trial without letting the jury know her guy was a pervert, so she had to leave it out. Anyway, all you’ve got left is the ID, Sam, and it’s not enough.”

But I had more than that. I had solid reliable Jan. I told them about my visit to Meier & Frank. Surely it would be enough. It meant that the fingerprint was back. The print had always been the best evidence. So why weren’t they excited?

“No dice, Sam,” O’Donnell said, shaking his head. “I saw your note in the file that the mom thought she got it from Meier & Frank. Just to be safe, I called Staffpower, the temp agency that Derringer worked for?”

I nodded.

“They faxed this over,” O’Donnell said, handing me a piece of paper from his file. “Turns out most stores do inventory before the holiday shopping frenzy, and a lot of them use Staffpower. Derringer did inventory at Meier & Frank last October also.”

The paper he’d handed me was a list of all of the jobs Derringer took through Staffpower last year. In the two months before Thanksgiving, he must’ve worked inventory for half the stores in the mall.

“You could’ve saved yourself some time if you’d talked to me before you went running around Meier & Frank on your own after you got taken off the case,” Tim said.

“I didn’t ‘run around,” ” I said, making air quotes with my hands. I was seething. And I hate air quotes. “It’s on my way home and “

Griffith put a hand up to silence us. “Sandbox. Remember, kids?” Tim and I stopped. Duncan was right. It didn’t matter anymore.

“Sam, you’ll explain the situation to the family?” Griffith asked.

I nodded. Yes, I would have to. I couldn’t pretend any longer that the case was winnable. It rested entirely on Ken-dra’s ID. Eyewitness ID is always questionable, but I had a child victim who had suffered a horrific assault and was under the influence of heroin. And if I couldn’t maintain that the case was winnable, I couldn’t argue with the decision to dismiss it. I hated the thought of breaking the news to Ken-dra, but I couldn’t stomach the idea of anyone else doing it either.

“What do you want to do with Taylor and Landry?” O’Donnell asked.

“That one’s trickier,” Duncan said, pressing the pads of his fingertips together to make something resembling a filleted crab, an annoying male gesture that seemed popular in the power corridor. “Juries heard the evidence and found Taylor and Landry guilty. Even now, the evidence we’ve got on them isn’t so bad, a lot better than we’ve got on Derringer. There’s no way around the phone number and earrings that Landry planted on Taylor. But now we’ve also got ironclad proof that the Long Hauler is involved.”

“We’ve basically got proof beyond a reasonable doubt of two separate theories,” I said.

“Right,” Griffith said, “unless we buy Landry’s explanation for how she knew so much. So if we say she didn’t do it, we’re basically admitting that a cop helped her with the set-up on Taylor and then lied about it on the stand. I want to be careful here.”

He turned to Tim. “Call the FBI. See if they’ll make a polygrapher available to us. Then see if Landry and Taylor will agree to polys. You’ll have to discuss the questions with the FBI examiner, but what I really want to know is whether they did the Zimmerman girl, and whether they know the Long Hauler.”

The results of a polygraph examination aren’t admissible in court, but the examinations are used by law enforcement all the time. Sometimes you hook a suspect up to one so he’ll confess after he fails it. The failed poly doesn’t come into evidence, but the confession does. Polygraphs also help clear someone you already want to cut loose, based on your instincts: the missing kid’s parents, the dead woman’s husband, the suspects who become suspects merely because of their status. If you don’t have any other reason to suspect them, a passed poly lets you stop looking at them and move on to less obvious theories. Griffith would feel more confident about exonerating Landry and Taylor if they passed polygraphs first.

“Isn’t there also the possibility that someone connected to Landry or Taylor wrote the Long Hauler letters?” I asked. It couldn’t be Landry or Taylor themselves. As O’Donnell had pointed out, outgoing prisoner mail is strictly monitored.

“I thought that was a possibility with the first letter,” Tim said, “but I can’t see it with this new one. First of all, I don’t think Landry knew about Zimmerman’s purse, or she would have mentioned it when she was trying to set Taylor up for the fall. More importantly, whoever wrote the Long Hauler letter had to know not just about the Zimmerman murder but the four other murders, plus your case. No way some friend of theirs could cook this up. But, like Duncan said, we should make sure with the poly that Taylor and Landry aren’t somehow wrapped up with the Long Hauler.”

“So there’s the plan, team,” Duncan said. The filleted crab fingers were gone and the capped smile was back. “Sam, you take care of the dismissal on Derringer. Any calls from the press, you give ‘em some bullshit about new evidence produced by the defense. Don’t tie it to the Long Hauler, or we’ll get even more pressure to cut Landry and Taylor loose. And talk to the victim today. The family needs to be on board for this. Let them know we’re going after this guy and her case won’t be forgotten. Tim, get me those polys. I need to get back to Governor Jackson.”

So that was it. The case was gone, and I was the one who had to dismiss it and deliver the news to Kendra.

Part of me wanted to call her immediately. Get it over with. Rip the bandage off. But she was in school, so I worked my hardest to keep my mind occupied, trying not to think about how much the case’s dismissal would hurt her.