Chapter 17

Bellingham, Washington

Saturday, February 29, 2020

I stayed up until the wee hours Friday night and Saturday morning reading Yolanda Aguirre’s interview files. I went to bed

only when my eyes were too tired to read any more. When Sarah nosed me awake Saturday, she was probably surprised when I walked

straight past the coffee machine twice, coming and going, without even pausing. Once she was back inside, I fell into bed

and slept until several hours later when Mel shook me awake.

“Time to rise and shine,” she told me. “Alice is almost ready to work on our room, and she can’t do that when you’re still

sleeping.”

I quickly pulled on some clothing. When I exited the bedroom, I found Alice Patterson waiting in the hallway right outside.

She was standing there looking annoyed with one hand resting on her hip while the other held her trusty Dyson at the ready.

“It’s about time,” I heard her mutter under her breath as I walked past.

“Sorry,” I murmured, but I doubt my apology was accepted. Alice is your basic worker-bee with little or no patience for people

who are slugabeds.

I made my coffee and headed into the living room where Mel was perusing something on her iPad.

“I held her off as long as I could,” she explained. “The problem is, Alice usually starts with our bedroom, and she doesn’t

like having to change her routine. How late were you up?”

“I’m not sure,” I answered. “I got caught up in reading those overdose family interviews and time got away from me.”

“Find anything?” she asked.

“I certainly did,” I told her and spent the next fifteen minutes and my first cup of coffee bringing her up to speed. It wasn’t

until I was ready for cup number two when I noticed the two of us were alone—no Kyle and no Sarah, either.

“Where is everybody?” I asked.

“Sarah’s still leery of the vacuum cleaner,” Mel explained, “so Kyle took her for a walk. I figure an extra walk or two is

good for both of them.”

“Speaking of Kyle, how did his room inspection go?”

“He passed with flying colors.”

Intent on staying out of Alice’s way, I settled down in the living room. Worn out by reading files, I decided to try following

up on the Jake Spaulding case. Gretchen had given me the direct number to Detective Ron Wang, the original Liberty Lake detective

working the case. When I dialed it, however, the person who picked up wasn’t Detective Wang.

The woman who answered identified herself as Detective Byrd, “That’s Byrd with a y rather than an i ,” she informed me.

“My name is J. P. Beaumont,” I told her. “I’m a private investigator looking into a series of fatal fentanyl overdoses. My

understanding is that Detective Wang is working one of those, a case that may be related to one I’m working. Could I speak

to him, please?”

“Ron pulled the plug a couple of months back,” Detective Byrd said. “He and his wife bought some horse property somewhere

over near SeeQuiUm.”

Ouch. The state of Washington is divided into two distinct parts, separated by the Cascade Mountain Range. The Westside, dominated

by the Seattle metropolitan area, generally leans to the left. The Eastside leans right, and what each side doesn’t know about

the other could fill volumes. For instance, until that phone call to Detective Byrd, I’d never knowingly had any dealings

with someone from Liberty Lake, and, other than knowing it’s somewhere in eastern Washington, I couldn’t tell you right off

the bat exactly where it’s located.

Clearly, Detective Byrd was equally ignorant about this side of the mountains. The town of Sequim is located in Clallam County

on the Olympic Peninsula. The problem is, only western Washington outsiders pronounce it SeeQuiUm. It’s supposed to be pronounced

like swim with a K added into the mix—in other words, skwim , like squish .

So I thought about who I was and what I needed. Then I thought about what sounded like a much younger woman on the other end

of the line and wondered how much interest she’d have in helping me with a case she likely knew nothing about. I suspected

that wouldn’t result in a positive outcome for either one of us.

“You wouldn’t happen to know how I could get in touch with him, would you?” I asked.

Detective Byrd held the phone away from her mouth. “Hey, does anybody here have Ronnie’s cell number?”

“Who’s asking?”

“A private eye from Seattle who’s looking into one of Ron’s old cases.”

In Seattle, there wouldn’t be a chance in hell that someone would actually pass along that kind of information over the phone,

but Liberty Lake must still have had something of a small-town vibe to it.

“Sure,” I heard someone else say in the background. “I’ve got his number right here.”

When Detective Byrd repeated it for me, I fed it into my phone. “Thanks,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

A moment later, when I dialed the number, my phone helpfully told me that I was calling Liberty Lake, Washington, even though

I knew good and well I wasn’t.

“Hello,” a wary male voice answered.

“Ronald Wang?”

“Who’s asking?”

“My name’s J. P. Beaumont, formerly with the attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team.”

“S.H.I.T. you mean?” he asked.

Somehow that was the only name for that agency that ever resonated with anyone. Special Homicide Investigation Team never

rang any bells. S.H.I.T. did back then and obviously still does.

“Exactly,” I replied. “S.H.I.T., but now I’m a private investigator and looking into a fentanyl overdose case that might or

might not be related to the unsolved death of Jake Spaulding.”

That’s all I said, and then I waited. I know from personal experience how much homicide cops hate to walk away from the job, leaving an unresolved case on the table. No matter how much time passes, those cases stay with us for the remainder of our lives. Luckily for me, Ron Wang was true to type.

“That son of a bitch?” he said after a long moment. “Whoever booted Jake Spaulding off the planet did everybody else a huge

favor, but what do you want to know?”

Biased maybe? If this was the guy in charge of investigating Jake Spaulding’s death, maybe it wasn’t so surprising that the

case remained unresolved.

“What can you tell me about him?” I asked.

“His folks have lived in the Liberty Lake area all their lives, and believe me, Darlene and Tom Spaulding are terrific people—churchgoing,

salt-of-the-earth people. They’re the backbone of the local high school sports booster club. They volunteer for the local

Meals on Wheels. No way did that poor couple deserve to be saddled with a worthless son like Jake.”

“So what happened?”

“He was a top-drawer football player and passable at baseball, but he was one of those kids who peaked early. After his senior

year in high school, it was all downhill from there. All through school he was reported to be a bully who liked to pick fights,

but because he was a standout at sports, everybody gave him a pass. He picked up his first DUI at age eighteen, the summer

after he graduated. He had a full-ride athletic scholarship to WSU, but he fell in with the wrong crowd and flunked out by

the end of his freshman year. After that, he moved to Seattle and started working construction. He married and had a couple

of kids. According to his wife’s family, his wife, Lisa, was a sweetheart who thought she could somehow fix him.”

“I’m guessing that didn’t happen.”

“Hardly,” Ron replied. “His drinking got worse over time, and so did the violence. He beat the crap out of her on a regular basis, but she never pressed charges.”

“Big surprise there.”

“In 2010, they were living in Seattle when he damn near killed her. Kicked her in the small of the back so hard that it left

her a paraplegic. While she was hospitalized for that, she suffered a stroke and still has difficulty speaking. That time

there was no question about charges being filed. When he was arrested, Lisa was still in the hospital hovering between life

and death. Originally he was charged with attempted homicide. Since she didn’t die, he ended up with a plea deal—ninety-three

months flat time for assault in the first degree.”

“Flat time means he served out his whole sentence?”

“Yup,” Ron said, “every single day of it.”

“And once he was out of the slammer, he went straight back to his parents’ place in Liberty Lake?” I asked.

“You bet he did, because that’s the kind of folks Tom and Darlene Spaulding are. They believe in the power of forgiveness.

When their son got out of prison and had nowhere else to go, they let him come home. A week later he was dead.”

“One week?”

“One week to the day. As far as I’m concerned, that’s more freedom than he deserved,” Ron declared. “Beth and I caught the

case, but I was lead.”

“Beth?” I asked.

“That’s my former partner, Detective Byrd. Her name’s Elizabeth, but she goes by Beth. I think most people in town were of the opinion that Jake Spaulding finally got exactly what he deserved, but we worked it like we would have any other case. The fact that he had overdosed on vaporized fentanyl was odd. According to everyone we talked to, booze was his drug of choice, but maybe that changed while he was locked up. The Washington State Corrections System isn’t exactly a drug-free zone.”

I certainly know that to be true.

“The night he died, he’d been drinking at a joint called the Hitching Post, just off the freeway on the far east side of town.

It’s probably the scuzziest bar around, and there’s known to be a good deal of drug activity in that area. When the daytime

bartender came to open up at six a.m. the next morning, he found Spaulding dead in his car in the parking lot. He was sitting in the driver’s seat of his vehicle

with his window wide open. By the way, the vehicle involved, an old Crown Vic, belonged to Tom Spaulding, his dad. Jake hadn’t

been out of prison long enough to have wheels of his own.

“When Beth and I arrived on the scene we saw no sign of any violence, and our first thought was that maybe Spaulding had died

of natural causes. We were able to locate and interview most of the people who had been at the Hitching Post the night before—both

the bartender on duty as well as the customers. No one reported seeing or hearing anything out of the ordinary—no fights,

no arguments, nothing like that.”

“Any video surveillance?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? We noticed there were cameras located inside the building and outside as well, but when I asked the bartender

about viewing the footage, the guy laughed his head off. He said he’d worked there for more than five years, and that the

surveillance system had been broken the whole time.”

“Too bad,” I said.

“When we went to Tom and Darlene and asked if they knew of anyone who may have wanted to kill their son, they told us to watch the video of Jake’s sentencing hearing, so we did. Lisa was there, but since she couldn’t speak on her own back then and still can’t, as far as I know, her older brother, Dave, spoke on her behalf. He was so angry it looked like the man was going to explode. He said the plea deal was a pile of crap. Considering the extent of Lisa’s injuries, I happen to agree with him on that score—the plea deal was a joke. Dave also said, and I quote, ‘If you ever get out of prison, you’d better watch your back, buddy, because I’m coming for you.’”

“Which turned him into suspect number one?” I asked.

“It certainly did. The problem is, Dave was fishing in Alaska when Jake died. He voluntarily gave us unlimited access to his

electronic devices. He also agreed to a polygraph test, which he passed with flying colors. Dave had no involvement whatsoever

in Jake’s death, and we were able to clear him almost immediately.

“Once that female DNA profile turned up, we asked Lisa’s female friends and relations to submit DNA samples. They all complied

with no questions asked. Since most of them live in the Seattle area, it was easy to verify their alibis, and we cleared them

as well. We wondered if maybe the female involved could have been Jake’s dealer, but we were unable to identify any potential

suspects.

“That’s about the time the Spokane County Medical Examiner’s report came in pegging Spaulding’s death as undetermined, so

naturally that case didn’t get the same kind of attention as the next case, which happened only a few weeks later and turned

out to be an actual homicide from the get-go. By the time I retired, the Spaulding case had gone cold. Beth and the new guy

may have done some work on it after I left, but I doubt it.”

“New guy?” I asked.

“The department generally has only two investigators on staff, and they handle everything, from soup to nuts. A couple of guys were under consideration for the job when I left, but I’m not sure who they promoted to take my place.”

“One more question,” I said. “Was any money found on the body?”

Ron hesitated. “Why do you want to know?” he asked at last.

“Well,” I insisted, “was there?”

“As a matter of fact there was,” Ron replied. “We discovered a couple of twenties and a five or two in his wallet, but there

were also two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. His folks were really mystified about those. Jake was fresh out of prison and

wasn’t working. As far as they knew, he was dead broke, so where did the money come from?”

Bingo! Two one-hundred-dollar bills! With that I knew for sure that there was a connection here. The presence of those two

pieces of currency meant that although the woman matching our DNA profile might not be responsible for all three deaths, she

was sure as hell connected to all three victims.

After that I spent the next twenty minutes bringing Ron Wang up to speed as far as what I was working on and giving him an

overview of everything I had learned so far about both Raymond with the redacted last name and Darius Jackson.

“Sounds like you’ve got a serial killer on your hands,” Ron observed when I finished, “and possibly a female one at that.

Considering the three victims’ criminal histories, maybe she’s some kind of domestic violence vigilante.”

That’s why every case needs new eyes and new perspectives. I felt as though I’d been whacked upside the head. A domestic violence vigilante? Of course! That made perfect sense. I had been so busy looking at the details of each case that I had failed to look at the big picture. My mother would have said that I wasn’t seeing the forest for the trees.

Domestic violence was a common denominator in all three cases. Each of the victims had a long history of DV-related arrests

that had seldom resulted in their doing any kind of serious jail time. And although Jake Spaulding may have died in Liberty

Lake, his domestic violence crimes had been committed in Seattle.

I’m well aware that female vigilantes can be tough to pick out of a crowd. After all, I married one, didn’t I? Anne Corley

had been the kind of beauty no one would ever have pegged as a possible serial killer, but she was. Maybe that homeless woman

at the food bank who had asked Darius for help with her grocery cart of goods hadn’t been nearly as helpless or harmless as

she seemed.

“A vigilante,” I said finally, repeating Ron’s word back to him. “You may have just hit the nail on the head!”

“What are you going to do now?” Ron asked.

“I’m going to go back to reading through the rest of Yolanda Aguirre’s overdose interviews to see if I can identify any other

possible victims.”

For the second day in a row, I skipped my crosswords entirely. Now that I was firmly on the trail of a killer, the crosswords

would have to wait.