The Murder of Janessa Hennley (11 page)

28

William “Bill” Mathias waited until the Deep Purple song on the radio was over before leaving the car and going inside to his office. His receptionist, a plump woman with a hairdo thirty years out of date, smiled and said, “Morning.”

“Morning
, Denise. Who we got this morning?”

“
Two consults, and that Jacob man wants to come in and speak to you about claiming his new boat as a business expense.”

“Alrighty. Get ’em goin’.”

He walked to the sink in the break room and washed his hands, then glanced out the window. Several police cruisers rolled to a stop in the parking lot. Officers ran into the building.

“Shit.”

He ran out of the office, Denise yelling something behind him. The corridor was empty, but he heard shoes on the stairs. He dashed to the emergency exit at the back of the building and down the stairs as fast as he could. He opened the exit and an alarm went off.

He
sprinted across the parking lot to the street and headed for a fast-food Mexican place down the road, thinking he could hide in the bathroom for a few hours.

As he rounded the corner
, another police cruiser blared its sirens. The tires squealed, the car making a sudden U-turn to catch up with him. There wasn’t time to get to the restaurant. He hurried down a side street into a residential neighborhood. Another cruiser turned the corner.

Bill hopped a fence into someone’s backy
ard. He was at least fifty pounds overweight. Already his legs ached, and his heart pounded so hard it made him lose his breath.

A
cross the yard and over another fence. This time he caught his leg on one of the posts and tore his pants. Once over, he kept running, out of breath, until he reached the gate leading out into the street.

Someone
shoved a pistol into his face. Hands threw him to the ground as someone screamed profanities in his ears. Cold steel cuffs clicked around his wrists. One of the officers lifted him by his arms and threw him into the backseat of the cruiser.

29

Mickey’s head throbbed, and the light coming through the patio doors made it worse. He went into the bathroom and sat in the dark for a while. His pulse felt slow, and, something that had come to terrify him in the past few years, his throat itched. A cold or flu could potentially kill him.

He
dressed and sat on the patio. It was cold despite the sunshine. A dog barked somewhere in the distance. He tried to read the
New York Times
online but couldn’t focus and kept rereading the same sentence three or four times. Eventually he put his phone down, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes.

His phone
vibrated. He picked it up and didn’t recognize the number. He didn’t realize he’d been sleeping.

“This is Parsons.”

“Special Agent Parsons?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Luke Torres. I’m an agent here in the Anchorage office of the Bureau.”

“What can I do for you
, Agent Torres?”

“Bill Mathias. The call you and Sheriff Clay placed. We’re about to execute a search warrant of his home in ab
out forty-five minutes. Thought you would want to be there.”

He
checked his watch. “Text me the address.”

“You got it. See you
soon.”

Mickey called Suzan
, and she answered on the first ring.

“Hey,” she said.

“I just got a call from an agent working your case. They’re going into Mathias’s house in forty-five minutes. Thought we might want to come.”

“I’ll swing by and pick you up,” she said excitedly. “Don’t leave without me, Mickey.”

“I won’t.”

He sat out on the patio a good fifteen minutes before going inside.
After putting on a leather jacket he’d brought on the trip with him, he sat on the porch steps.

No missed calls the past couple of days. He thought maybe Jon Stanton would give him a ring, but he understood why he didn’t.
With that kind of sensitivity, where everything stuck to your soul like glue, he wouldn’t want to think about death, either.

The memory of Stanton brought back another: Stanton and his wife
, Melissa, on a vacation with he and Ruth. They went to Lake Tahoe and rented a cabin with two rooms. On a mountain overlooking the lake, Mickey ran early in the morning when no one else was up. Trails led through the forests, and one morning he reached the peak. He sat on a rock up there and watched the blue water. Ruth had apparently followed him, and they spent the morning walking around the peak and admiring the views.

He wis
hed his wife were with him now. She would be adorable as a little old lady sitting on a porch with him. He saw lemonade and slow dancing and fishing trips in his old age.

What he got instead were hospital beds and
screams of pain as Ruth withered away, cancer eating her from the inside out.

Only so much medication could b
e given. The patient has to bear any gap that exists between the pain and what the meds cover. But Mickey couldn’t take it. Sitting next to her hospital bed while she cried herself to sleep, he just wanted it to be over for her.

Finally,
after months of chemo, he took her to California, and they stayed in a little condo he rented on the beach. She obtained a prescription for medicinal marijuana, and that helped. The marijuana numbed her pain and actually allowed her to eat. The screams of agony subsided.

After that experience
, Mickey decided the drug war was a wasted battle. It seemed the country’s leaders always needed at least one war. Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, the first Iraq, the second Iraq, ten years in Afghanistan, the war on drugs, and—something Mickey knew was coming—the war on the border. Troops would be sent down to the Mexican border, along with all the hardware of war. They’d never call it a war, but that’s what it would be.

He thoug
ht back to his enthusiasm when he signed on to the army for his first tour in Vietnam. A chance to stop communism in its tracks. But he didn’t see any communism. All he saw were peasants without enough money for even shoes. Children starved to death with parents that stole any food their children found. And a bunch of patriotic American kids didn’t know they’d been lied to.

After only two week
s, he realized the mistake he’d made.

But
the nights were something he didn’t regret. Though he was wet and uncomfortable all the time, the deep black sky and the way the stars appeared so close you could pluck them out of the heavens kept him up at night. And the fighting was calmer. He feared the day.

He heard a car horn
. Suzan waited for him on the curb. He wiped his hands on his jeans and climbed into the passenger seat.

“Hey, you doing okay?” she said.

“Yeah. Why?”

“You look pale.”

A small, sharp pain stirred in his stomach, reminding him of the recent surgery. “I’ll be fine. Just a little tired, is all.”

“If you need some time—”

“No, really, I’m fine. I want to be there.”

I
t wasn’t more than a twenty-minute drive. As they got off the main road, they turned up a dirt path past some homes that looked like they could have come from any Southern plantation.

Mathias’s house was yellow with white trim
, the lawn freshly mowed and the windows spotless. Mickey thought of a house trying to fit in with all the others, not wanting to appear out of place in any way.

The Bureau had either brought or flown in their own forensics unit
, and a black van was parked in the driveway. Two men suited up in what appeared to be biohazard suits.

“What does that mean?” Suzan said.

He glanced to her and then back to the van. “It means they’ve found remains.”

30

Mickey was the first to step out of the Tahoe
, but he kept his gaze on Suzan. Though she seemed composed and calm, he was worried she would see things she could never get out of her mind. He walked ahead, hoping to prevent that from happening. An intern from the Bureau guarded the door. Mickey flashed the tin, and he let them through.

The home was
what Mickey expected from a middle-class accountant, with one exception: no family photos. Instead of pictures, the mantle over the fireplace exhibited various recognitions and awards. Mickey scanned the front room until a man in a black suit stepped out of the kitchen. He thrust out his hand.

“Luke Torres
. Glad you could make it, Agent Parsons.”

“Just Mickey is fine.”

“I have to tell you, Mickey, that I have a little bit of an ulterior motive in getting you out here. I wanted to meet you. Your text on Fourth Amendment issues relating to investigations was required reading when I went through the academy. Best book I’ve ever read on the Fourth Amendment.”

“
It was me and Bob Reir, and Bob did most of the heavy lifting. But I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome.” He glanced to Suzan. “And you are?”

“Suzan Clay. I’m the sheriff for Kodiak Basin.”

“Oh
, right. We’ve spoken on the phone a couple times. I can’t believe we’ve never met.”

“Well, never had something like this before.”

“Ain’t that the truth. Come on, I’ll show you what we got.”

He led them through the kitchen
, where a forensics tech was scouring the drain in the sink. Mickey followed Torres down a set of stairs leading to the basement, Suzan behind them.

The
narrow stairs gave Mickey a claustrophobic tightness in his chest. Suzan didn’t seem to notice.

The basement was unfinished, the floors bare cement and the walls wood and insulation.
Behind a table in the corner was a large hole in the wall.

“Found her right there. The hole had been patched over
, and when we brought out a K-9 unit to have a sniff, he hit right in that spot.”

A tag
with the words JANE DOE written in marker was attached to a black bag that resembled a thick trash bag.

“Bobby, you mind?” Torres
said.

One of the techs working on the hole unzipped the bag. Inside were the putrid remains of what was clearly a young teenager. She still
wore shorts and a red tank top. Most of her flesh had rotted away, and the stench was overpowering. Dead human bodies had a unique smell that nothing in the animal kingdom resembled.

“Found her encased in cement in the wall. The cement had cracked th
rough and let in oxygen. It must’ve stunk up the whole house. I don’t know why he didn’t try to move it or something.”

“
Other victims?” Mickey asked.

“Nope. But we’ve just started tearing the house up. Maybe we’ll find something
, but the K-9 didn’t hit anywhere but here.”

“
Did you find anything else?”

“Oh yeah. Come upstairs.”

He followed him up the stairs and quickly glanced at Suzan. She said nothing as they ascended. Torres led them to the master bedroom. A tech was standing in front of the television, latex gloves on his hands as he flipped through some DVDs.

“Turn it on
,” Torres said. Mickey picked up an emotion in his voice that sounded almost like glee.

The image came to life on the screen. A
girl of perhaps fifteen or sixteen was nude and tied up in a bed. Mickey recognized the bed as the one he stood in front of right now. A man’s voice spoke over the video.

“
You’re gonna love this, you little bitch. I have a fun night planned. You like masks, huh? You like masks?”

The man placed a
mask over the camera, darkening it. Only a muffled groan escaped the girl’s gagged mouth. The image switched to a stationary one a few feet from the bed. The next shot showed his nude body and him raping the young girl.

Mickey looked over to Suzan. Her eyes were glistening
, and she wasn’t blinking.

“Turn it off,
please,” Mickey said.

“Huh? Oh, sure.” Torres
nodded, and the tech flipped it off. “There’s at least twenty of these videos. Some of them have more guys in them. As many as a few dozen in one we saw. We haven’t even gone through the entire collection yet.”

“Where is he?” Suzan said
through clenched teeth.

“Mathias? He’s being driven down
to the Bureau in Anchorage for interrogation.”

Mickey waited a beat and said, “Come on, let’s get outta here.”

As they descended the stairs back to the main floor, Suzan turned to him. “They better keep him the hell away from me. ’Cause if I see him, I’m putting a bullet in his head.”