Chapter 7

Renton, Washington

Thursday, February 20, 2020

At one p.m. the next afternoon, I pulled up in front of a small bungalow on NE Tenth Street in Renton, one of Seattle’s near neighbors

to the south. What set this house apart from its neighbors was the clearly newly installed wheelchair ramp leading up to the

front porch. A red Dodge minivan with a handicapped license plate sat in the driveway.

I walked up the sidewalk and used the steps to access the front door. When I rang the bell, an older Black woman, maybe in

her late sixties or early seventies, opened the door.

“May I help you?” she asked.

“My name’s J. P. Beaumont. I’m here to see Matilda Jackson.”

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Beaumont,” she said, offering her hand. “I’m Margaret Dawson, Matty’s sister. She’s inside. Won’t you

come in?”

The house I stepped into, built in the fifties or sixties, was decades away from today’s current passion for open-concept designs. The living room was tiny. By far the largest piece of furniture in the room was one of those self-rising recliners with a wheelchair parked nearby. The woman seated there so closely resembled the one who had answered the door that the two of them might have been twins.

“Mrs. Jackson?” I inquired. “I’m J. P. Beaumont.”

“Welcome,” Matilda said. “Thank you so much for coming. Do have a seat.”

She pointed me in the direction of a love seat while Margaret hovered in a doorway that most likely led to the kitchen.

“Can I get you something?” she asked.

“No, thanks. I’m good.”

“All right,” Margaret said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

The recliner had been in a laid-back position. Now Matilda pressed the button and raised the back until she was seated upright

before she spoke again.

“I really appreciate your coming,” she said. “Bellingham’s a long way from here.”

“Not that far,” I told her. “It’s a little over ninety miles. At this time of day there wasn’t much traffic.”

Between the time I had first spoken to Matilda and now I had done some online research and learned that in 2018 a total of

403 overdose deaths had been recorded in King County, approximately a third of which were attributed to fentanyl. In hospital

settings, the drug has important medical uses, but out on the streets, it’s a killer. In terms of how Darius Jackson died,

he was far from alone.

I pulled out my notebook. In private, I’m proficient with my iPad, but out in public, I find the old tech of pen and paper often makes the people I’m speaking to feel more at ease.

“Tell me about your grandson,” I said for openers.

“Darius was right-handed,” Matilda said.

That was a strikingly odd reply. In answer to that question most people will reply with a description of someone being kind,

or the sort of person who would give you the shirt off his back, or a hard worker, or a good neighbor.

“And why is that so important?” I asked.

“Because I finally got my hands on the autopsy report,” Matilda answered. “The drawing shows that the needle mark was on the

inside of his right wrist. If Darius was shooting himself up, he would have used his right hand to do it, not his left.”

That got my attention. It was something so basic that even a rudimentary investigation should have disclosed that striking

discrepancy.

“Did you point that detail out to any of the detectives on the case?”

“What detectives?” Matilda asked. “Two of them showed up that first morning and told me he was gone—that he’d been found dead.

At the time, I hadn’t even gotten around to reporting him missing. I still thought he had spent the night with Gina.”

“Gina was his girlfriend?” I asked.

Matilda nodded. “Her name is Gina Riding. Her real name’s Virginia, but she goes by Gina. She’s a young widow with three little boys. She and Darius met at Bible Study and really hit it off. Darius was crazy about her, and he adored her kids. In fact, he had told me in the October before he died that he was making payments on a diamond engagement ring he was planning on giving her for Christmas.”

“But he died on Thanksgiving.”

“Yes,” Matilda agreed regretfully. “Gina was even more devastated by his death than I was.”

Had there been any kind of investigation at the time of the incident, Gina would have been at the top of the detectives’ lists

of potential interviewees as well as potential suspects. Now she was at the top of mine.

“Do you have contact information for her?”

Matilda replied by reaching over to a cluttered side table and collecting a small notebook of her own. As she thumbed through

it, I could tell that her left hand had been more seriously impacted by the stroke than her right one had.

“Here it is,” she said, after which she rattled off both a phone number and an email address. “She’s a nurse who works nights

at Harborview, so you’re better off sending her a text or an email. That way you won’t risk waking her up when she’s trying

to sleep.”

As I mentioned earlier, fentanyl has medicinal uses and is often found in hospital settings. It was feasible that a nurse

might have been able to access doses of the drug without having to go looking for it out on the street.

“How was Darius and Gina’s relationship at the time of his death? Had there been any quarrels or disagreements between them?”

Matilda shook her head. “Absolutely not,” she declared; then, giving me a piercing look, she added, “Are you saying you think

Gina might have had something to do with this? If so, you’re a damn fool!”

“Sorry,” I said, “just trying to cover the bases. Any unhappy exes in the picture?”

“None,” Matilda said. “Like I said, Gina’s a widow. Her husband was killed by a hit-and-run driver. As for Darius’s so-called wife? Gypsy’s dead and gone, and so is her boyfriend.”

It didn’t sound like there was any love lost there, but I decided to return to the subject of Darius’s ex-wife later.

“In the days leading up to Darius’s death, did you notice anything off about his behavior? Was he out of sorts or upset about

anything?”

“No.”

“Did he seem depressed to you?”

“Not at all, and if you’re building up to suggesting that maybe he committed suicide, then I guess we’re done here.”

“I’m trying to establish his state of mind,” I assured her. “Now, going back to those officers who gave you the death notice,”

I continued. “You had no idea that anything might be amiss in Darius’s life before they showed up?”

“Nope,” Matilda answered, “except for his not answering his phone. And if those guys were detectives, they’re the only ones

I saw. After I made the identification, the next thing that happened was a week or so later when someone from the medical

examiner’s office stopped by to give me Darius’s personal effects. That was it.”

“No one else ever came around to speak to you?”

Matilda shook her head. “Not at the time, and at first I didn’t fault them for that. For one thing, I had a stroke, and that

kept me out of commission for the better part of a year. I was in the hospital a month and in rehab for another two months

after that. It took me a long time to learn to speak again and to get used to living in that thing.” She gestured in the direction

of the wheelchair.

“When Margaret offered to let me move in with her, it was an answer to a prayer. It was only after I got settled in here that I finally felt strong enough to start asking questions about what had happened to Darius and why. I couldn’t accept the idea that he had started using again. That’s when I finally reached out to Seattle PD.”

“When was that exactly?” I asked.

“About six months ago now. I saw Benny at church. I knew he was with Seattle PD by then, so I called and talked to him about

it. He told me that once a death has been ruled accidental, it’s almost impossible to reopen an investigation from inside

the system—that the cops’ hands would all be tied. But he suggested that I still try reaching out to one of the detectives.

He gave me the name and number for a Detective Sandra Sechrest and I gave her a call. She’s the one who said I should ask

the M.E. for a copy of the autopsy.”

She reached over, plucked an envelope out of the mess on her table, and handed it to me. The return address read: King County

Medical Examiner’s Office. I unfolded the paper, revealing the all-too-familiar line drawings. There were only two injuries

noted on the drawing. One was blunt force trauma to the left side of the victim’s head, a wound that could have been consistent

with someone falling to the ground. The other was the site of the needle mark on the interior of the victim’s right wrist.

The M.E.’s determination was clear. Cause of death: Fentanyl overdose. Manner of death: Accidental. That was when I knew for

sure that Matilda was right and that most likely Darius Jackson really had been murdered. No drug user on the planet would

use his nondominant hand to shoot himself up. Why risk wasting a perfectly good hit by using the wrong hand?

Matilda waited patiently until I had finished examining the paperwork, returned it to the envelope, and handed it back to

her.

“When I called Benny back and told him about the right hand/left hand business, that’s when he said I should speak to you—that you were a former Seattle PD homicide detective and that you’d know what to do.”

I understood all too well that both Sandra Sechrest and Ben Weston were on the money as far as restarting an investigation

into a death that has already been ruled accidental. Getting an M.E. to change that kind of ruling is an almost Herculean

task.

“So that’s what I’m looking for, Mr. Beaumont,” Matilda concluded, “answers. I’m an old woman and not in the best of health,

but before I pass, I want to know what really happened to Darius and who did it.”

“All right,” I said finally. “In that case, what we have to do is start from the beginning with you telling me everything

there is to know about Darius Jackson in addition to the fact that he was right-handed.”

She sighed. “My husband, Leroy, was a good man—a long-haul trucker. With him driving trucks and me working as a waitress,

we were doing fine. We’d even managed to buy a place of our own down in the Rainier Valley. At the time we made the purchase,

he insisted on buying mortgage insurance, and it’s a good thing, too. When our daughter, Breanna, was twelve, Leroy was off

on a trip in California. He drove off the road and crashed somewhere around L.A. They thought he’d fallen asleep at the wheel.

Turned out he’d had a heart attack and died. So I ended up with the house paid for and with some group insurance from his

company, too. I thought Breanna and I would be fine, but we weren’t.

“Bree had always been a daddy’s girl. For some strange reason, she got it into her head that her father’s death was all my fault because he’d had to work so hard to support me. After that things were never the same between us. She ran away the first time when she was in seventh grade and left permanently to live at a friend’s house when she was a freshman in high school. That may be when she started doing drugs or she may have started even earlier. She was sixteen when she had Darius. If she knew who his father was, she never mentioned his name, and she never married him, either. She wrote ‘father unknown’ on his birth certificate and gave him her last name.

“I knew she and her baby were mixed up with bad people,” Matilda continued, “but there was nothing I could do about it. All

I could do was pray that they’d be safe. Then, when Darius was in seventh grade, he got to running with a rough crowd and

ended up being involved in an armed robbery. Darius was charged along with the others, even though, as he told me later, he

was just along for the ride and didn’t know what was going to happen.

“The judge must have believed him, too, because, instead of sending him to juvie, she offered him probation. But once his

caseworker outlined Bree’s unsuitable lifestyle—the two of them had been living in her car at the time—it was either come

live with me or go to the slammer.”

“That’s when you took him in?”

Matilda nodded. “That’s when I took him in the first time. He may have been a bad boy, but he was my grandson. Still, even

though I did my best, he’d already started down the wrong path, and things got a lot worse after his mom died.”

“What of?”

Matilda shrugged. “What else? An overdose.”

“And when was that?”

“A year or so after he came to live with me. He was still in eighth grade at the time.” Matilda paused and wiped a single

tear from her eye. “So much bad stuff. It’s hard to come back from something like that.”

“Yes, it is,” I agreed.

“Once Darius got to high school, he was totally out of control, even before he met that she-devil, Gypsy. After that it was

all downhill.”

“Tell me about her.”

Matilda sighed. “Her name was Gypsy Tomkins. Her daddy was the local drug dealer so she had money to burn. As far as the kids

at school were concerned, she was practically royalty. She was a beauty all right, but wild as they come and dangerous, too.

If she was wearing boots, you could count on her having a knife hidden inside one of them. Why she picked Darius out of the

crowd and turned him into her personal property, I’ll never know, but she did. I saw through that little bitch, pardon the

expression, the moment I met her, but Darius never did. He was nothing but a lovesick puppy in her hands.

“Everybody thinks that in domestic violence cases it’s always the man,” Matilda continued, “but not with Gypsy. I heard from

some of Darius’s friends that she liked to flirt with other guys in front of him, just to make him jealous. The two of them

fought constantly, and when those fights turned violent, by the time cops showed up, who do you think they blamed? Not pretty

little Miss Priss, that’s for sure. Their last fight, she pulled a knife on him. He managed to get the knife away from her,

but she ended up with a cut on her hand. According to the cops, he was the one at fault.”

“That’s when he went to jail?” I asked.

Matilda nodded. “He did six months for assault. Once Darius got out he learned that, in the meantime, she’d gone to court

and taken out a restraining order. He couldn’t even go home for his things.”

“How long did he live with you?”

“For close to a year before he died. A friend of mine helped him get a job, and I could tell that he had cleaned up his act. He was working steady and going to church.”

“Where he met Gina,” I supplied.

Matilda nodded.

“What happened to Gypsy?”

“She and her boyfriend both were murdered, shot to death in an alley in downtown Seattle a few months after Darius got out

of jail on her bogus assault charge. It was most likely a drug deal gone bad, but naturally the cops came looking for Darius,

thinking he was responsible. At the time, he was working as a bouncer at a place called Jojo’s. It’s an unsavory dive in a

bad neighborhood, so they have security cameras everywhere. They had video of Darius on the job during the time Gypsy was

killed. Even so, the cops still had him take a lie detector test, which he passed with flying colors.”

“They cleared him?”

Matilda nodded again. “More or less, but as far as I know, that case is still unsolved, and so is Darius’s.”

“Getting back to his case,” I said, “was there any indication of a robbery gone bad?”

“No,” Matilda replied. “Nothing was taken.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Absolutely. This is what they gave me when they brought me his personal effects.” She reached down beside her chair and produced

another envelope, a brown manila one this time, which she passed over to me. It was preprinted with the local M.E.’s return

address, and the flap was held down by the attached metal clip.

“May I?” I asked.

She nodded. I opened the envelope and shook out the contents: a cheap Timex watch—no longer ticking—a long-dead iPhone, a

worn brown wallet, and some pocket change.

Of all the items, the phone seemed to be the most promising. If it could be unlocked and brought back to life, it might reveal all kinds of information about Darius’s last days on earth. Among the coins I found something I recognized—a one-year chip from Narcotics Anonymous.

“How long had Darius been out of jail before he died?” I asked.

“A little under a year,” Matilda said. “Why?”

I handed her the chip. “Having that chip means he’d been drug free for at least a year, so he must have started with Narcotics

Anonymous while he was still incarcerated.”

Matilda nodded. “That’s what he told me. He was very proud of that.”

“You saw no evidence that he had slipped?”

She shook her head. “None.”

“And you didn’t find anything related to drug use in his room after his death?”

“Nothing at all.”

I opened the wallet and thumbed through it. Among the contents were a driver’s license, a bank debit card, a Costco card,

a Safeway loyalty card, and a single photograph of a smiling young woman.

Holding it up, I asked, “Gina?”

Matilda nodded. “Yes, that’s Gina.”

In the back of the wallet, concealed under an interior flap, I found two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. “Did you know these

were here?”

“No, and I have no idea where they would have come from. His paychecks from Jojo’s were on direct deposit. As far as I knew,

he never in his life had two hundred-dollar bills to rub together at the same time, unless...”

As her unfinished sentence faded away into nothing, a worried expression passed over Matilda’s face. For the first time in the course of our conversation, she seemed uncertain. It didn’t take long for me to figure out why. Just because Darius wasn’t using drugs didn’t mean he wasn’t selling them.

“Do you mind if I take this?” I asked, returning everything to the envelope.

“Take whatever you need, but bring it back when you’re done with it. Except for the money. Knowing where it might have come

from, I don’t care if I ever see it again.”

After that, Matilda gave me contact information for Darius’s boss at Jojo’s along with the names for several of the guys who

had been part of Mount Zion’s Thanksgiving Day volunteer crew, all of which gave me some leads to follow. However, when I

left her residence, it seemed as though my visit had done the exact opposite of what I had intended. Rather than improving

Matilda Jackson’s frame of mind, I feared I had left her feeling infinitely worse.

I wasn’t happy about that—not in the least.