One to the Wolves, On the Trail of a Killer (12 page)

Reading that letter and visualizing Kippy’s poor mother, I was violently sick to my
stomach.

Soon after that, I experienced that same reaction when Paul Apodaca suddenly hit the
headlines:

Albuquerque Journal, October 5, 1995

MAN RAPES STEPSISTER TO GET INTO PRISON

An Albuquerque man told the judge he raped his 14-year-old stepsister so he could
go to prison to protect a younger brother imprisoned on a murder conviction.  Judge
Richard Knowles obliged with a 20-year sentence for Paul Raymond Apodaca, but recommended
to the Department of Corrections that Apodaca not be housed in the same prison as
his brother.”

By now Pat had interviewed the first two officers at Kait’s scene. Their statements
conflicted so radically that they might have been at two different crime scenes. Each
blamed the other for not taking information from Apodaca. Cop Number One said he assigned
that job to Cop Number Two, because, “I had to make a choice — I had to stay with
the injured person.” Cop Number Two was adamant that Cop Number One had specifically
told her
not
to take information from Apodaca, because he already had done so. Cop Number Two
told Pat that, as soon as she suspected murder, she called her supervisor. Yet the
supervisor recalled no call from Cop Number Two and said the person who called her
was Cop Number One.

Pat went down to the detention center to get Apodaca’s version of the story.

“The first thing he asked was, ‘How did you find me?’” she told us. “He apparently
thought the police reports had made him untraceable.”

When she questioned him about his presence at the scene, he explained he was in the
neighborhood to buy drugs from a friend named Lee. He described how he and Cop Number
One had gone together to look into Kait’s car, but denied ever seeing Cop Number Two,
although Cop Number Two had told Pat that she was with the two men when they went
to Kait’s car and had described Apodaca’s excitement at the sight of so much blood.

Apodaca went on to say he had given Cop Number One his name and then driven off in
his car — a VW bug — and gone around the corner to his drug dealer’s house. According
to Apodaca, he remained with Lee for about half an hour, and when he left he noticed
an ambulance at the scene.

Pat recognized Lee’s name from a public records report of Apodaca’s 1990 arrest for
shooting a prostitute from his VW bug. At the time of that incident, Apodaca had presented
Lee’s MVD identification card, apparently assuming that Lee would be immune to arrest.

Pat went to Lee’s home, and his mother answered the door and said Lee was sleeping.
When Pat identified herself as a private investigator who was working on the Arquette
case, the woman responded, “You mean the girl who was shot by those Vietnamese guys?”
Lee’s mother confirmed that Paul Apodaca was a close friend of Lee’s and promised
to give Lee Pat’s card.

She also proudly volunteered the fact that her other son was an APD narcotics officer.

Highlights of 1996:

Jim Ellis retired.

Michael Bush and his wife became parents of a little boy.

Pat Caristo became the grandmother of a little girl.

Don began doing volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity.

Kerry wrote her first book and won the Colorado Young Readers Award.

Both Robin and Brett got married.

Donnie won $11,000 playing a slot machine on an Indian reservation.

As for me — I dreamed.

What I dreamed about was Kait’s diary.

During daylight hours I obsessed about that diary. With Lawrence now out of the picture,
I would never know if Kait’s journal actually existed. Despite the fact that the man
was a sadistic con artist, his information about Kait’s personal life had been disturbingly
accurate. He had known that, at age sixteen, she had posted an ad in a singles magazine
and misrepresented her age by three years. That was not a specific you pulled out
of a hat. If Lawrence himself was a fraud, then he had to have obtained information
from somebody who knew Kait.

Either that, or his conspirator had access to her diary.

One night before falling asleep, I said to Kait, “I’m going to sleep with my mind
propped open. I want you to try to get into it and tell me what’s in that diary. If
there isn’t any diary, then tell me what you would have written in a diary if you’d
kept one.”

That night I had a vivid dream in which Kait appeared, shaken and teary-eyed, and
announced that she had been raped. Then, suddenly I was reading an account of that
rape in a journal. The entry was worded in third person, as if the author was trying
to distance herself from the violence, and it ended with the sentence, “Then Katie
sat down and read a magazine.” At the bottom of the page there was a little stick-on
heart like the ones our grandchildren liked to paste on envelopes. In the dream I
reached out and touched the heart, and it came off in my hand. I turned it over, and
on the back there was the name “Roxanne.”

I woke up with a start and lay, staring into the darkness, trying to discern the meaning
of this extraordinary message— if, indeed, it was a message. We had no reason to believe
that Kait had been sexually assaulted, and I wasn’t aware of any friend of hers named
Roxanne. Kait had been an avid reader when it came to novels, but the only place she
read magazines was under the hair dryer.

Kait’s purse had been returned to us by the hospital and contained a date book with
a page in the back for phone numbers. I kept that book in the bottom drawer of my
dresser. Now, I got out of bed and groped in the drawer for the book, which I carried
into the bathroom so I could turn on the light and read without waking Don. The calendar
revealed that, on the week of her death, Kait had had not one, but two, appointments
with her hairdresser, one for a haircut and the other for
“pictures with Roxanne.”

I flipped to the back of the book and found the number for the beauty parlor. In the
morning I dialed it and asked to speak to “Roxanne.” The receptionist told me that
nobody named Roxanne was employed there. Then a voice in the background called out,
“There was a Roxanne who used to work here. I think she quit to start her own shop.”
I asked what Roxanne’s last name was, but nobody could remember.

I phoned Pat and told her about the heart dream.

“I think Kait wants us to talk to her hairdresser,” I said.

Pat was kind enough not to scoff, but she wasn’t exactly jumping up and down with
excitement.

“You don’t know where Roxanne works or what her last name is?”

“No,” I said. “But I do think we need to find her.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Pat said without much enthusiasm.

Several days later, she called me, sounding stunned.

“I found Roxanne,” she said. “You’re not going to believe this! Roxanne has a
heart tattoo
on her upper arm!”

Roxanne told Pat that she had been more than Kait’s hairdresser, the two had been
personal friends. Kait had babysat for Roxanne’s children, and Roxanne had used Kait
for a hair model, which accounted for the notation
“pictures with Roxanne.”
And, not only had Roxanne cut Kait’s hair, she also had cut Dung’s hair.

“I asked her if she had a problem understanding Dung’s English, since that’s the reason
the police gave for not being able to properly question him,” Pat said. “Roxanne said
she understood him fine, except on the night Kait was shot. She said he phoned her
a little before midnight, babbling, ‘Kait’s dead! They shot Kait!’ He was so hysterical
that she had to keep asking him to repeat himself.”

“He called her
before midnight?
” I exclaimed. “But he wasn’t told about the shooting until three the next morning!
Is she certain about the time?”

“Her husband’s confirmed it. They’d just watched the evening news and were getting
ready for bed. If that’s true, it means Dung knew about the shooting three hours before
police informed him. And it sounds like he knows who did it. He didn’t say, ‘Kait’s
been shot,’ he said, ‘They shot Kait!’

“Roxanne also knew about the car wreck scam,” Pat continued. “She said Kait was very
upset about Dung’s activities and wanted out of the relationship. Kait also told her
that Dung’s group was stealing cars and changing the engine numbers, which would certainly
be a reason for them to frequent that body shop. Roxanne said she tried to give that
information to Detective Gallegos, but he told her she wasn’t telling him anything
he didn’t already know.”

“Is Roxanne willing to sign an affidavit?”

“She’s eager to do that. She’s always wondered why the police wouldn’t take a statement
from her. Oh, and one other thing — I just had a call from a woman named Linda, whose
son, Nathan Romero, was murdered in Albuquerque in 1993. Linda thinks his case may
link to Kait’s.”

She gave me Linda’s number, and I immediately dialed it.

“Nathan was chased down by three cars, stabbed, and left to die in the street,” Linda
told me. “He was found with a Vietnamese medallion clutched in his hand, apparently
snatched from his killer during the struggle. APD didn’t bother to place that medallion
into evidence. It was turned over to me along with Nathan’s personal effects.”

Friends who had been with Nathan had identified his killers, but the police had refused
to arrest them.

“That Asian gang harassed me for years,” Linda said. “The men were so cocky they’d
park in front of my house and sit there grinning. They’d laugh at Nathan’s friends
and ask them if they wanted to be killed next. Even when two gang members came forward
as witnesses, APD didn’t make arrests. During one phone conversation, a police captain
got so furious with me that he bellowed at the top of his lungs, ‘We know who killed
your son just like we know who killed Kait Arquette! This is police business — butt
out!’ When I asked him why he was connecting those two cases, he yelled at me to keep
my mouth shut and forget I ever heard that.”

Linda refused to be intimidated and informed her private investigator, who contacted
the mayor and warned him that the City could expect a massive law suit if the police
didn’t do their job.

“Then things started to happen,” Linda told me. “The case detective, Steve Gallegos
— wasn’t he your case detective too? — got transferred out of the department, and
Nathan’s killers were arrested. Not that it did much good, because they plea bargained.”

When I asked Linda the name of the APD captain who had linked our children’s cases,
it turned out to be the same captain who had stated on “Good Morning, America” in
regard to Kait’s case, “The Vietnamese angle was extensively looked into. We could
find no tie to the homicide with any Vietnamese gang.”

Meanwhile, our family was experiencing happy times also, for in the course of two
months we had acquired a daughter-in-law and a second son-in-law. Brett and his girlfriend
Cindy eloped to Las Vegas, while Robin was married to Anatole in a small but joyous
ceremony in a garden in Florida. We were worried about the weather because it had
been raining off and on all day, but when the bride stepped under the arbor, radiant
with happiness and more beautiful than we ever had seen her, the sun broke through
the clouds and the sky was split by a rainbow. Kerry, who was matron-of-honor, stood
slightly apart from her sister to acknowledge the space where Kait would have stood
if she had been there. When I looked at that space I was almost able to convince myself
that — for just an instant — it was occupied by the misty form of a girl in a peach
color dress the same shade as Kerry’s. Then the image was gone, and I accepted it
as a trick of the light and an overactive imagination.

That evening, after the newlyweds left on their honeymoon, the rest of us reminisced
about happy times and sad ones. Kait was very much on our minds.

“Since the cops don’t want your information, why don’t we put it on the Internet?”
Brett suggested. “Maybe somebody out there will read and react to it.”

Brett, who was a computer guru, designed the website, which included a message board
and e-mail envelope for informants.
8

He posted the page, and surfers found it. Steve Schiff, United States Congressman
from New Mexico, called to suggest that we request an Internal Affairs investigation.
I told him we had little confidence in the APD Internal Affairs Unit, since a former
supervisor — an alleged field officer at Kait’s scene — had been charged with burglarizing
a liquor store.

“Good point,” Schiff acknowledged. “Let’s try to go over their heads then.” He wrote
a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno, requesting that the Justice Department look
into a possible police cover-up. The Civil Rights Division responded that the federal
five-year statute of limitations prohibited their doing that.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for you,” Congressman Schiff told us. “I do have one
suggestion. Under New Mexico law, the State Attorney General can prosecute a case
where the local district attorney declines. As the DA has not charged the individual
you suspect, I recommend you contact the AG’s office.”

It was a well-meant suggestion from a good and caring man, who didn’t realize that
the Attorney General wouldn’t meet with us. And even if Congressman Schiff could convince
him to do so, whom would we accuse of Kait’s murder? Dung Nguyen? An Quoc Le? Bao
Tran? Paul Apodaca?  A hired hit man who might or might not have been Miguel Garcia?
As private citizens, neither we nor Pat had the authority to force witnesses and suspects
to talk to us. Only the police could do that.

The traffic at Kait’s website continued to accelerate, and many of those visitors
contacted us by e-mail. Among them were a forensic expert from Illinois and a crime
scene technician from Michigan, both of whom offered to review Kait’s scene information.
They asked us to send them copies of the scene reports, autopsy report, and a full
set of crime scene photos.

We were able to provide them with everything except the pictures and set out to get
those by submitting an Inspection of Public Records Act request. The APD photo lab
told us that nine rolls of pictures had been taken but only a couple of shots on each
roll had turned out. We ordered two sets of the twenty-two photos. The charge for
those snapshot size prints was $176.

I was not prepared for the impact those photos would have on me. Although Kait was
not in the pictures, her blood was sloshed on the seat and floorboards of the car.
There was a large pool of body liquids on the curb next to the passenger’s door, and
a small black object that looked like a shoe lay on the ground outside the closed
door on the driver’s side.

I opened the packet while standing at the mailbox and trudged up the driveway to the
house, clutching the photos to my chest. Since Don was not home, and I had to reach
out to somebody, I e-mailed the technician in Michigan.

He responded instantly: “Lois, Lois, Lois, it’s a grim business, this. It’s not for
anyone who ever loved the victim. We hope the pictures tell a story, but it’s probably
not a story you should have to read or can read. It’s told in the language of blood
and broken glass and bullet holes. Put those pictures away for now. I’ll let you know
my reaction when I receive my set.”