Judgment Calls (31 page)

I used the morning’s custodies as an excuse not to complete the dismissal order for Derringer. And not to call Chuck. He’d already left me two messages asking why I’d been so cold the night before. As much as I knew that I’d eventually have to answer that question, it was the last thing I wanted to think about right now. So, I stayed cold and worked on custodies.

Today’s custodies were typical. Thirty-two new cases,

almost all of them identical. Knock and talk, traffic stop, jaywalking ticket. Something small usually a ruse starts the encounter between police and someone who looks like they’re up to no good. Sometimes the no-goodnik consents to the search. Sometimes it’s a pat-down for officer safety reasons, or maybe the officer claims exigent circumstances. Whatever the basis, the search always occurs, and the police find either heroin, coke, or meth. I timed it out once and figured I spend an average of seven minutes to review and issue the typical drug case. Nothing to be proud of, but, like I said, they’re all the same.

When I finished up, I changed into my running gear and headed out into the drizzle. The loop around the downtown and east side waterfronts of the Willamette is almost exactly three miles. I ran hard, trying to chase visions of Kendra and Chuck from my head, and I finished in twenty-two minutes. Not quite as fast as our current president, but I work a lot harder at my day job.

Back at the office, I bought myself some more time, drafting a procrastinated response to a motion to suppress. But I couldn’t ignore the clock’s reminder that my time to write the dismissal order for Derringer was running out.

It’s surprisingly easy to make a criminal case go away. I prepared a one-sentence motion and order stating that the case was dismissed in the interests of justice in light of exculpatory evidence produced by the defense at trial. Lesh signed and filed it, and I faxed copies to Lisa Lopez and the jail. Derringer would be out in a couple of hours.

By the time I finished, I was pretty sure that Kendra would be home from school.

After a couple of minutes of small talk, I told her I wanted to come out to talk about the case. The tone of my voice must have given her an idea of what was coming. “Go ahead and tell me,” she said. “God or Edison or whoever invented the phone for a reason, you know.”

This wasn’t going well. When I insisted on driving out, I got a “whatever” in response. I signed myself out on the DVD board, grabbed the file, and made it to Rockwood in record time. When I knocked on the door, I heard what I recognized as Puddle of Mudd blasting from Kendra’s CD player. In my neighborhood, that kind of volume would trigger a call to police. In Rockwood, it was background music.

She apparently didn’t have any plans on answering the door for me. I banged on it and pressed the bell for a full two minutes before walking around the back of the house to knock on her bedroom window. “I know you’re in there, Kendra. I’m not leaving until you open the door.” I rapped the bottom of my fist against her window with the beat of her music for a couple of songs until she finally turned it off.

A few seconds later, I heard her holler from the front door in a singsong voice, “I don’t know how you expect to get into the house if you’re not here when I open the door.” I sprinted around the house like a famished cat responding to a can opener, before Kendra could change her mind. When she didn’t say anything about making me wait, I pretended like she hadn’t.

“You really didn’t have to drive all the way out here, you know,” she said, sitting on her bed and going through her CDs, probably searching for the one most likely to give me a headache.

“I know,” I said, even though it wasn’t true. “But I wanted to see you. You hungry?”

“You trying to give me an eating disorder or something?

French fries and a milkshake don’t make everything OK, Sam.”

Since when? “Fine,” I said. “I want to talk to you about the case, though.”

I started by showing her the Oregonian articles about the Long Hauler. Andrea didn’t subscribe to the paper, and I suspected Kendra had never seen the articles themselves. “What are these?” she asked.

“Please, just read them, and then we’ll talk.”

She took them from me and spread them out in front of her on the bed, but I could tell she wasn’t really reading them.

“Do you mind if I get a glass of water from the kitchen? I’m kind of thirsty,” I said, backing out of the room. I got another “whatever” in response, but it gave me a way to leave her alone in her room with the articles for a few minutes. When I returned, she was clutching a pillow on her lap and staring at the photographs on the front page.

“I could’ve sworn it was him,” she said.

“You’re not sure anymore?” I asked.

She held the paper up to her face, staring at the photograph of Derringer. “I still think it looks like him, but it can’t be him, can it?”

I should’ve given Kendra more credit. I had been clinging to our theory of the case because I was too stubborn to admit we were mistaken. Here she was, five minutes after reading the article, accepting the unavoidable conclusion. We had the wrong man.

“No, Kendra, I don’t see any way it can be him. I know that the newspaper only says the Long Hauler letter had details about your case, but it actually had a lot of information that no one could have had without being one of the men who did this to you.”

“So does everyone think I’m a liar now?” she said.

“No one thinks you lied about anything.” Looking at her, knowing she was doubting my faith in her, made me want to cry. “We know you told the truth about what happened to you, but you might have made a mistake about who did it. You shouldn’t feel bad. You had just been through a horribly traumatic experience. Plus, there was a lot of other evidence pointing to Derringer. Even if you hadn’t identified him, we would have wound up focusing on him anyway after his fingerprint came up on your purse.”

“My mother did not steal that purse,” she said.

“I know that. It looks like it came from Meier & Frank. The problem is that Derringer worked there too.”

Kendra gave what I thought was a growl of exasperation into the pillow. But when she didn’t lift her head, I realized she was crying. I held her and patted her on the back. There was nothing to say.

Once the tears had stopped and she was breathing regularly again, she wanted details on where the Long Hauler investigation stood.

“Well, you already knew that a girl named Jamie Zimmerman was killed a few years ago. Her body was found in the Gorge, not too far from where” I didn’t know how to refer to what happened to her with her: Not too far from where you were dumped? were found? “from where the ambulance picked you up. Like the paper says, a couple named Margaret Landry and Jesse Taylor were convicted of killing Jamie, but they claim they’re innocent. You knew that Derringer’s attorney was suggesting in your trial that whoever did the bad things to you had also killed Jamie. With these letters, it’s starting to look like one person, someone other than Margaret Landry and Jesse Taylor, killed not only

Jamie but four other women. And he’s claiming he was one of the people involved in what happened to you.”

“Will the police be able to find out who the Long Hauler is?” she asked. I wanted so much to assure her that they would, that we’d nail him and justice would be served. But I learned a long time ago that you should never make promises to victims unless you don’t mind breaking them.

“I know they’re trying. They’ve got the FBI involved. The police chief and the DA are making this a top priority. The feeling is that if the guy’s writing letters to the newspaper and naming himself, he’s escalating.”

I could tell from the way she looked at me that she didn’t know what I meant.

“The suspicion is that he’ll start to kill even faster,” I explained. “That he’ll come up with a signature or something now that he’s interested in notoriety.”

“Oh, so that’s why they want to catch him, to keep him from getting to anyone else. They don’t actually care about the people he already hurt,” she said.

“Hey, you know that’s not what I meant. Kendra, the man has killed five women. Of course they want to catch him. I was just trying to tell you how much this matters to the police.”

She was quiet while it all sank in. “I guess I wasn’t really thinking of it like that. That guy killed other people. And he meant to kill me.” She looked dazed. “I knew you’d charged him with attempted murder and all, but I never thought of it as someone trying to kill me. That I’m lucky I lived through it.”

“Shows you’re a survivor, kiddo. You’re tougher than him; you beat him.”

“Do the police know anything yet?” she asked.

“Well, enough to think that this guy did the things he said he did. The paper didn’t mention all the details, but the letter included pretty specific descriptions of all the attacks. The information he provided about what happened to you and Jamie was accurate, and it’s stuff he couldn’t have taken from a newspaper or something. Also, the police have found unsolved homicides that match the other murders.”

“Did they find anything when they searched the Gorge?” she asked.

“Yes, I was going to get to that. Again, the paper didn’t publish this detail, so it’s important that you keep this between us for now. But the Long Hauler told police he’d taken Jamie Zimmerman’s purse and thrown it off the side of the road in the Gorge. Using that information, the police were able to find the purse, and it’s absolutely Jamie Zimmerman’s. It even had her fake ID in it.”

“I guess that’s another thing that makes her case like mine, huh? That he left us in the Gorge and took our purses?”

I hadn’t thought about that before. Lisa Lopez had had the prescience to argue that Kendra’s case was just like the murder of Jamie Zimmerman, but what exactly had she said about it?

I went out to the Jetta to grab what had grown into several volumes of files on the Derringer case. I knew I’d seen the trial transcripts in a binder somewhere. After Duncan turned the case over to O’Donnell, O’Donnell must have ordered them so that he and Duncan could get up to speed. Something was nagging at the forefront of my brain, something someone had said during the trial. I flipped through the transcript pages frantically. It was going to be lost if I didn’t find a trigger to pull it forward.

Then I spotted it.

“What’s going on?” Kendra asked.

“Wait a second, Kendra.” What else had I missed? I started from the beginning of the file and reread everything. When I was finished, I knew exactly where I had gone off track. It wasn’t just what someone had said at trial. I’d also missed the Tasmanian Devil.

I looked up at Kendra. “Tell me more about Haley.”

I looked for her first outside of the Pioneer Place Courthouse, the waterfront, the Hamilton motel, all the places I could think of. I finally found her at midnight, standing on the corner of Burnside and Fourth Avenue. She had her thumb out and looked like she’d just shot up.

I stopped the Jetta in front of her, and she walked over to the passenger side and opened the door. Guess she couldn’t see through the tinted windows at night.

“Hey, Haley. Want a date?” I said.

“What the fuck are you doing out here?” She looked around. Not seeing any police, she said, “Nothing you can do to me without a cop around.”

All those Law & Order shows had done some serious damage to my image out there. Now that everyone understood that whole “separate but equally important parts of the criminal justice system” thing, no one is afraid of being arrested by prosecutors anymore. Sometimes it’s just a matter of reeducation.

“Not today, maybe. But I can go drive my little Volkswagen back to the courthouse, type out an affidavit, and have an arrest warrant for you in the system by tomorrow morning. It’s not like it takes the cavalry to find you or anything.”

She thought about that for a while. “Yeah, well, I can handle another loitering pop. Nothing but a thing at juvie.” Her eyes were barely open. It’s probably hard to care about being arrested when you’re pumped full of heroin.

“I’m not talking about juvie this time, Haley. I’m talking Measure Eleven time.”

She might not know the details, but anyone on the street as long as Haley knew the gist of Measure 11. It meant being charged as an adult and getting real time. The threat was enough to fire her up as much as could be expected in her current state.

She pretended to laugh. “You ain’t got shit on me. Now you better move along, bitch. I got work to do.”

I suppressed the impulse to mow her down with the Jetta. I would’ve opened a six-pack of Fahrfegnugen on her ass over the c-word, but under the circumstances I could handle the b-word.

“I’d be careful about how you choose to work, Haley,” I said. “From where I sit it’s called promoting prostitution, not loitering. And promoting prostitution for a thirteen-year-old lands you under Measure Eleven.”

“Pimping? Lady, you got me confused with some Cadillac-driving, purple-velour-wearing, platform-shoe-stomping dude.” She was laughing uncontrollably now, rattling off some more descriptors I couldn’t understand.

“Haley, listen to me. You’re in major trouble here, and I’m not fucking around.” My tone got her attention. “You arranged dates for Kendra in exchange for a cut of the fee. You set her up at the Hamilton, knowing she was using the room to work. You sold her condoms when she ran out, again at a profit and knowing she was using them for prostitution. Plus, you knew she was only thirteen years old. All I have to do is go down to the Hamilton, and I suspect I’ll find several other girls who’ll say you do the same things for them. Guess what, Haley? That’s promoting prostitution, even if you don’t wear purple velour.”

“That’s bullshit. I was helping her out, is all. Safer to work at the Hamilton than out of cars. And, big deal, I hooked her up with a few guys who liked younger girls and who I knew were all right.”

“Too bad, Haley. I’d heard you were smart. At this point, I’d advise you to shut up until you’ve talked to a lawyer, because what you just said amounts to a confession to a Measure Eleven charge.”

I rolled up the window and hit my turn signal like I was going to pull out into traffic on Burnside. I was beginning to think she was going to let me leave when I heard the tap on the window. I rolled it down again.