is. But we had fun, too. We walked on the beach. Went into town for shopping. Did the whole tourist thing. And the food was wonderful. Sarah is a marvelous cook.”
“And did any of the women know your story-about what had happened between Sarah Matthews and her father?”
“All of them did,” Mel answered. “Anyone who was on the board, and we all were, would have known about it.”
I tried to quell the sudden flare-up of anger I felt, but it didn’t go away.
“How can that be?” I demanded. “I didn’t find out about any of it until yesterday, when you finally told me. But in the meantime, you’re saying the rest of the world already knew?”
“It’s part of the board of directors’ selection process,” Mel explained. “Prospective members are encouraged to write individual essays explaining how and why they came to be involved in sexual assault prevention programs. Once the essays are written they’re circulated among existing board members.”
Maybe that was part of what had made me so uncomfortable at the SASAC banquet. Maybe the group’s ultimate aim was to help people affected by sexual assaults, but there had been that exclusionary sense about the organization-an in-crowd, private-club chumminess about the women, “those women,” an us-and-them mind-set, that had left me cold while at the same time leaving me out.
“So you have essays for all the other women on the retreat?” I asked.
“I’ve read them,” she said, “but I didn’t keep them. They’re painful stories, Beau, all of them. When I was finished reading, I ran them through the shredder.”
“Would anyone else still have them?” I asked.
“Maybe. Why?”
“Because we need to check. If the guy who attacked Destry Hennessey’s grandmother is dead and if Richard Matthews is dead, maybe some of the other responsible parties have met the same fate.”
For a moment Mel didn’t answer. Then, with no further explanation to me, she dredged her own phone out of her pocket, scrolled through some numbers, and pushed “send.”
“Hey,” she said breezily when someone answered. “Mel here.”
There was a pause. “Oh, no. The food was fine. Great. Not to worry. No complaints on that score whatsoever.”
Which told me Mel was calling Rita Davenport, her fellow SASAC board member and the lady who ran the catering company.
“So I was calling with a favor,” Mel continued. “You wouldn’t happen to have a copy of all the board member essays, would you? I’m one of those people who unload that kind of stuff as soon as I read it, but now I need to see one of them…You do? Hey, that’s great. If you could just shoot them to me in an e-mail…sure…that’s terrific. Appreciate it. Wrong? Oh, no. No, nothing’s wrong, and it’s no big deal. I just wanted to compare notes on a couple of things. Fine. Thanks.”
Mel closed her phone and heaved a sigh. “I suppose I’ll go to hell for lying,” she said, “because it is a big deal.”
Indeed it was.
Once back at Belltown Terrace, we did just what I’d said we would. Mel started a new pot of coffee. Then, armed with computers and notebooks, we began to go over what we knew and what we didn’t know.
We had barely figured out where to start when Ralph called. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Hold on,” I told him. “This is Mel’s story. You’d better hear it from her.”
I punched the phone onto speaker and handed it over to Mel. My trust in Ralph is well founded. He listened to the whole story without ever hinting that very little of what she had to say was news to him.
“What do you need from me?” he asked when she finished.
Mel sighed. “I guess I’d like you to find out whatever you can about the ongoing investigation down in Cancun.”
“And if they haven’t tumbled to your possible involvement, you’d just as soon I didn’t mention it,” Ralph concluded.
“Yes,” Mel said.
“Give me a while,” Ralph said. “But if you don’t mind, I probably should swing by in a little while so you can give me that retainer. With a situation this serious, I don’t want there to be any question at all about my being your attorney of record.”
One of the good things about working with a partner is that you gradually come to terms with a division of labor. Without our even having to discuss it, Mel opened Rita’s e-mail containing the SASAC board member essays. While she started studying those, I opened the file she had brought home from the office.
Mel had given me the broad outline of Destry Hennessey’s grandmother’s case, but the collection of articles gleaned from various newspapers laid out the story in much greater detail. I skimmed over the ones that dealt with the physical attack on Destry’s grandmother, Phyllis Elaine Hammond, and focused instead on what had happened to her attacker. Taking detailed notes, I was gradually able to gain a reasonably clear picture of the chain of events.
After serving four years for one count each of rape and robbery on seventy-nine-year-old Phyllis Elaine Hammond, Juan Carlos Escobar had been released from the North Utah Juvenile Correctional Institute in Logan on October 6, 2003. On the day of his twenty-first birthday, he had been driven to the bus terminal in Logan and handed a Greyhound ticket to Salt Lake City, where his own grandmother, Maria Andrade Escobar, had been expecting him. His bus ticket was never used, however, and he never arrived in Salt Lake, either. Several witnesses had reported seeing him in conversation with a nun near the Greyhound terminal an hour or so before his scheduled departure. Two days later, Escobar’s battered body had been discovered in an irrigation ditch on a deserted blacktop road outside Bountiful.
At the time Escobar was sentenced to serve his time in a juvenile facility, several relatives of his victim had appeared in public strenuously objecting to his having received special treatment. One or two of them had even gone so far as to vow seeking revenge.
“With that kind of history, naturally that was the first place we looked,” the lead investigator, Bountiful homicide detective Ambrose Donner, reported. “Members of Mrs. Hammond’s family were initially considered persons of interest, but at this point they’ve all been questioned and cleared of any involvement.”
Investigators continue in their efforts to locate the unidentified nun who was seen speaking to Escobar shortly before he disappeared. They’re also trying to locate the vehicle involved in the incident, reportedly a dark blue Buick Riviera with a broken front headlight and extensive front end damage.
The mention of a nun’s possible involvement was an immediate red flag, but for right then I let it go because I finally had what I needed. Flipping open my phone, I set about finding Detective Donner. He had been investigating a homicide that involved a dead sexual predator, which, it so happened, was what SHIT was doing, too. More or less.
It took a while. “Sorry to interrupt your Sunday,” I said when I finally reached the man at home and had introduced myself. I was worried he’d give me the third degree and want to know all about me-who I was and why was I horning in on his weekend, to say nothing of messing around in one of his cases.
“No big deal,” he said. “I’m watching golf. Tiger’s cleaning everybody’s clock, as per usual. What can I do for you?”
“I’m looking into one of your old cases,” I said. “Wondering whether or not you ever closed it.”
“Which one?”
“Juan Carlos Escobar.”
Donner didn’t even hesitate. “That punk? No, we never closed it. Doubt we ever will. Near as we can figure, he pissed someone off while he was in juvie and they took care of him as soon as he got out. He was sent up because he raped and robbed some helpless little old lady,” Donner added. “The victim died eventually and probably because of what Escobar did to her, but he was never charged with murder like he shoulda been.”
“And none of her relatives were involved in his subsequent death?” I asked.
“We thought so at first, but they all came out squeaky clean. We ended up settling on the gangbanger theory. What can I tell you?”
“Did you ever find the vehicle?”
Donner hesitated. “Yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact, we did. Two weeks after the fact, this guy comes
