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Chapter 28

Bellingham, Washington

Thursday to Friday, March 5–6, 2020

Once Mel and I repaired to the bedroom Thursday night, we stayed up late talking about any number of things besides Hank Mitchell’s

ill-advised decision to teach Kyle how to handle a stick shift on board his very expensive and recently restored Shelby.

Mel’s major concern had to do with two sets of disgruntled parents who had turned up at her office earlier in the day. They

had come to discuss their daughters, both of whom were seniors at Bellingham High and who were both involved in chorus. According

to the girls, their teacher, a Mr. George Pritchard, had been fondling their breasts under the pretext of teaching them how

to breathe properly. They had taken their complaints to the school counselor two weeks earlier, but when nothing happened,

they went to their parents. Now the hot potato had landed on Mel’s desk.

“What did you do about it?” I asked.

“Incidents like that are serious stuff,” Mel said. “Naturally I dispatched a pair of detectives to the high school. When they spoke to the counselor, someone must have let her know that the hammer was about to fall, because she had spoken to the principal earlier this morning, and together they had called our nonemergency number to make a report. According to the counselor, she’s been so overwhelmed with shutdown preparation that she hadn’t gotten around to doing it sooner.”

“Right,” I said. “Of course she’s been far too preoccupied.”

“As of noon today, Mr. Pritchard is on leave. According to the parents, the girls are both prepared to press charges, but

before that happens, I want to know exactly what we’re up against, because those two girls may be only the tip of the iceberg.

There may be lots more victims, and he may have committed far more egregious acts than just fondling breasts.

“Shortly before I left the office, I got a judge to sign off on a search warrant for Pritchard’s home and all his electronic

devices. That was executed this evening, but as far as the electronics are concerned, we’re going to have to get our tech

team to break into them because they’re all password protected. And how we’ll track down and speak to other possible victims

once the shutdown is in effect is anybody’s guess.”

“Good luck with that,” I told her.

Being a police chief is no walk in the park. Mel usually falls asleep long before I do, but that night she was still tossing

and turning when I dozed off, and she was already up and out before I opened my eyes the next morning.

When I arrived in the kitchen around ten on Friday morning, it was late enough that the coffee machine had turned itself off. While I was waiting for the coffee to brew, Sarah came over to the counter, sat down in front of me, and gave me “the look”—the one that means Where the hell have you been and don’t you know it’s past my breakfast time?

Which was a lie, of course. In case no one has mentioned this previously, dogs do tell lies. The reason I knew for sure that

Sarah was lying was due to the note Mel had left on the counter saying that she had fed Sarah before leaving the house.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” I told Sarah. “Don’t you go giving me that old song and dance. I’m not falling for it.”

I doubt she understood my spoken words, but the negative shake of my head that accompanied them got my point across. She tucked

her tail between her legs and headed for the other room.

I’d kept my nose so close to the grindstone for so many days that I figured I deserved some time off, so without even opening

my email box, which now had 163 messages in it, I went straight to my crosswords. I hadn’t made a dent in the backlog of those

before falling asleep at the Westin, and I was determined to catch up.

My phone rang half an hour later with Marisa Young’s name in caller ID. Remember the old days when you had no idea who was

calling until after you said hello?

“Good morning, Marisa,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Serena called,” she said excitedly. “Or Caroline. I still don’t know what I should call her.”

“That’s something the two of you will need to sort out in the future,” I said. “What did she have to say?”

“We talked for a long time. She said she’d like to meet me, so I’m flying into Portland tomorrow, and she’ll drive up from

Ashland. I’ve booked a pair of rooms at River Place.”

“Does Jeremy know about any of this?” I wanted to know.

“I doubt it,” Marisa replied. “She told him that I’m an old school chum of hers who’s coming to town briefly and that Saturday is the only day the two of us can get together.”

That statement caused a small lurch in the pit of my stomach. Both knowingly and unknowingly, the woman we knew as Caroline

Richards had been living a lie for years, and she’d had enough practice to be good at it. Now, even though the jig was up

and people were onto her, she hadn’t stopped lying. That told me that Caroline Richards was a scammer at heart. That didn’t

bode well for Jeremy Cartwright and not for Marisa Young, either. She had a tremendous amount of emotion invested in finding

her long-lost niece, and I worried that she was going to be disappointed.

“I’m so excited,” Marisa went on. “I can’t wait to see her and have her back in my life.”

“What you lost all those years ago was an innocent child,” I cautioned. “What you’re getting back is a grown woman who has

spent the past ten years surviving on the streets on little more than her wits. Don’t get your hopes too high.”

“Oh, I won’t,” Marisa assured me. “We’ll be fine. I wanted to thank you. I still can’t believe you found her.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Glad to be of service.”

But as I hung up, I couldn’t help but worry that the wheels I had set in motion might not turn out well for anybody.

By then, my crossword mood had totally evaporated. After the phone call, I went to the kitchen where I made myself another cup of coffee and a piece of toast. Then I returned to the living room. Settled into my recliner, I opened my email account and prepared to face the music. I now had 186 new messages. To my dismay only a small number of those were spam. The rest were all for me. Most of the emails were from Yolanda’s intern, but three were from Yolanda herself. I suspected those might have something to do with the case files I had flagged earlier.

The sheer magnitude of the problem was disheartening. That’s when I remembered Benjamin Weston and Sandra Sechrest. Ben had

skin in the game because of his relationship to Matilda Jackson. And Sandra had been willing to give me the case numbers that

had made my Evidence unit experience infinitely easier. Maybe Seattle PD itself wasn’t ready to reopen any of my overdose

cases, but there was no rule that said cops couldn’t look into something on their own time, especially if they knew the kind

of progress I’d already managed to make on my own. And if I had some help with scanning through those lengthy interviews,

maybe we could speed up the process.

So that was the next thing I did—I began assembling my very own multicase task force. Picking up my phone, I located Ben Weston’s

number in my contacts list, and pressed send.

“Hey, Beau,” Ben said when he answered. “How’s it going?”

“How many homeless people do you know who go around wearing Apple Watches?” I asked.

“That would be zero.”

“Correct,” I replied. “So what would you say if I told you that, in viewing the footage of Darius Jackson leaving the food

bank, I noticed that the woman he was accompanying, the supposedly homeless one pushing that overloaded grocery cart, was

actually wearing an Apple Watch?”

“How the hell did you find that out?” he demanded.

“By going to the Evidence unit, putting my butt in a chair, and viewing hours of surveillance footage one frame at a time,”

I told him. “While I was doing so, I saw a flash of light on her left wrist that I believe came from an Apple Watch.”

“What makes you think that?” Ben asked.

“Because in looking into a number of those overdose fatalities, I found another one that’s most likely related to Darius’s.

That victim actually died in eastern Washington, but shortly before his death, a homeless woman was spotted in that vicinity.

During the subsequent investigation, a witness mentioned having seen a homeless woman wearing an Apple Watch. When I went

back and studied the Darius surveillance video, that’s when I spotted that suspicious glow on her arm.”

“Whoa,” Ben said. “That sounds like more than a coincidence.”

“Way more,” I agreed. “Not only that, I’m convinced she might be involved in more than just those two cases. I’m worried I’m

only scratching the surface.”

That’s when I explained about how, with help from Gretchen at the crime lab and by examining Yolanda Aguirre’s five-year study

of overdose deaths, I had managed to establish several common denominators that now linked four separate cases, three of which

had happened in Seattle—the pairs of hundred-dollar bills, the domestic violence arrests, the homeless woman equipped with

an Apple Watch, and the unidentified female DNA profile.

“How can I help?” Ben asked when I finished.

“What I’ve found so far all came from studying that initial set of interviews. But here’s the deal,” I said. “There are now

several more interviews that have raised enough red flags for me to want to look into them as well. This morning I received

a whole new set of interviews, which need to be scanned to see if any similarities turn up.”

“That’s all you need, then,” Ben asked, “another pair of eyes doing initial run-throughs on that new batch of interviews?”

“Exactly.”

“Count me in,” Ben said. “Send along as many as you like. I have the next three days off. I’ll be glad to dive into them.”

“What about Detective Sechrest?” I asked.

“Sandy? She’s good people. Why?”

“When I was headed for the Evidence unit, she gave me the case numbers I needed and made my life infinitely easier. I knew

going in that at some point she had spoken with Matilda Jackson, but I had no idea she and her partner had been summoned to

the crime scene for one of my other victims, Loren Gregson. Do you think she might be interested in helping out?”

“Maybe,” Ben said. “Let me give her a call. I’ll let you know. In the meantime feel free to start sending files to me. I’ll

get right on them.”

After getting off the phone, I forwarded a dozen or so interview transcripts to Ben. About that time Sarah meandered over

to me and laid her massive head on my knee. I have now learned enough about dog-speak to know that she was ready to go for

a walk. Guilt ridden from having neglected her for the last couple of days, I complied. We went for a walk.

We’d made it to the top of the driveway and turned down Bayside when my phone rang.

“J.P.?” a female voice asked.

I didn’t recognize it right off. “Yes,” I said. “Who’s this?”

“Sandra,” she replied. “Sandy Sechrest. I’m guessing you’ve found out that I was called to Loren Gregson’s death scene.”

“I did notice that. Why didn’t you mention it when you gave me the case number?”

“Because I didn’t want to skew your investigation one way or the other, but it pissed the hell out of me when they shut down that investigation. It just didn’t look right. Gregson’s apartment was only a couple of blocks away. Given that, why the hell would he sit down under a blackberry bush in the dead of winter to shoot himself up? Why not go home to do that?”

“Why not indeed?” I agreed.

“So how can I help? Ben said something about a bunch of files in need of reviewing.”

I took her through the case, starting with Yolanda Aguirre’s five-year study of overdose deaths. By now I was feeling like

a broken record, but if she was going to help sort through files, she needed to know all the pertinent details.

“Okay,” Sandy said when I finished. “That’s what I’m looking for—victims with a history of domestic violence arrests and/or

convictions and ones found to be carrying inexplicable pairs of hundred-dollar bills. In addition to a homeless woman, especially

one wearing an Apple Watch, who may have been seen in the vicinity of the crime scenes.”

“That’s the ticket,” I said.

“You said that the Liberty Lake victim...” Sandy began.

“Jake Spaulding,” I supplied.

“Spaulding died within a week of his being released from prison. That would suggest his killer was either a family member

or someone close enough to the family to know about his upcoming release.”

“As far as I can tell, those have all been ruled out,” I told her.

“Have you considered someone with a law enforcement background?” Sandy asked.

“You mean like a cop gone rogue?”

“Not necessarily,” she replied. “What about a first responder of some kind, like a medic or even a 911 operator? When it comes to domestic violence situations, they may not be on the scene, but they’re still in the thick of it. They’re the ones who deal with women screaming while kids are crying in the background. They’re also the ones who know how many of those assholes do the same thing over and over and walk away every time because the victims are too scared to press charges. It’s frustrating as hell.”

“Am I by any chance hearing the voice of experience speaking?” I asked.

“What was your first clue?” Sandy responded with a laugh. “I spent two and a half years working in a call center before I

decided to join the force. I got tired of listening to those jerks torment their families and wanted to be the one hauling

their asses off to jail. The first time I slapped cuffs on a guy like that, I felt like a million bucks. He got off, too,

of course, but it turns out wearing a badge was the right thing for me to do.

“But what I said earlier about 911 operators is true. They may not see those domestic violence offenders face-to-face, but

they probably deal with more of them on a daily basis than regular patrol officers do, and take it from me, the fact that

most of those guys get away with what they’ve done really does get old.”

I thought about that. For me, 911 operators have always been heroes. I could imagine a renegade cop, but a renegade 911 operator?

No way!

“When those dispatchers are sitting at their computers summoning assistance,” Sandy continued, “they have all kinds of pertinent

information at their disposal. For instance, they can look at a physical address and know exactly how many domestic violence

calls have been made from that residence in the past and how many times officers have responded. Believe me, when an abuser

gets away with beating the crap out of a spouse, or a parent, or a sibling time and again, those operators tend to take it

personally. They’re not supposed to but they do. I know I did.”

“Enough to go on a killing spree?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Sandy said. “I’d hate to think that could happen, but it might. Come to think of it, they’re also on the front line

when it comes to the fentanyl crisis. Someone finds a dead body, the first thing they do is call 911.”

I was stunned. The idea of a 911 operator somehow going off the rails and morphing into a serial killer made me feel like

a little kid who’s just been told for the first time that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny aren’t real.

“So I’m all in,” Sandy continued. “When do you want me to start?”

“How about now?” I replied. “Give me your email address, and I’ll send over some transcripts. Yolanda’s study covers all of

King County, but the cases we’ve identified so far all originated inside the Seattle city limits.”

“So focus on Seattle cases then?” she asked.

“I think that makes sense.”

“Okay. My daughter has a swim meet this afternoon, but maybe I can knock out a couple of those before it’s time to go to that.”

While I had been caught up in the phone call, Sarah had been operating on automatic pilot. When we reached our customary turnaround,

she had done so without any direction from me. Now as the call ended, we were almost back at the house, but I was still lost

in thought.

I was wondering about how much information the 911 operators had available to them on their work computers and how much of that one of them might have been able to carry out of the call center on a thumb drive. And then I thought about all the supposedly secure and password-protected information Todd Hatcher had available to him at the touch of his keyboard. He wasn’t the only one with unauthorized access to a lot of supposedly private information.

In that moment I wondered if our Apple Watch–wearing homeless lady wasn’t every bit as tech-savvy as Todd Hatcher, only a

hell of a lot more dangerous.

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