Board of Supervisors meeting. After that, you and I are supposed to have our farewell lunch with my mother and George, followed by a haircut and a wedding rehearsal.”
The plate Butch set in front of Joanna contained a piece of buttered toast along with a hunk of leftover steak. “Have some protein,” he advised. “Even the Energizer Bunny needs to refuel sometime. Oh, and about that lunch,” he added.
George and Eleanor Winfield were about to embark on their second snowbird season, driving back to George’s Minnesota cabin in their motor home. They had delayed their spring departure in order to attend Frank Montoya’s wedding. Now they were due to leave on Sunday morning. Hence the scheduled get-together today.
“What about it?” Joanna asked.
“I may not make it,” Butch said. “My editor sent me an e-mail early this morning. They want to have a telephone conference later on today so we can get the next book tour organized. If the call is over in time, I’ll come. If not…”
“That sounds a little lame,” Joanna said.
Butch grinned. “I know,” he said. “But it’s a good excuse. Besides, she’s your mother.”
Based on Jaime Carbajal’s phone call, Mel and I had stayed up until the wee hours tracking down information on Paco Castro-no relation to Fidel and Raul, by the way. It didn’t seem likely that a tip from a grieving relative would lead us straight to a killer. That hardly ever happens. But what our research did do was show us that Paco Castro had an extensive rap sheet dating back to juvenile days. If he was representative of the caliber of Marco and Marcella Andrade’s friends, they had run with a pretty tough crowd.
The next morning, Mel and I filled our traveler’s cups with java, got in our two separate vehicles, and headed across the water to our office in Bellevue’s Eastgate neighborhood. It’s a fifteen-mile commute that, under good traffic conditions, can take as little as twenty minutes. As I’ve mentioned before, during rush hour in Seattle, there are no good traffic conditions. That day the drive took over an hour door-to-door in wall-to-wall rain. Once inside the building, we settled into our tiny but nonetheless private offices. My job that morning was to go nosing around in the world of a now-deceased two-bit thug named Marco Andrade.
From the multiple offenses listed on Marco Andrade’s rap sheet, everything from aggravated assault to attempted murder, I was mystified as to why he would have been transferred from a maximum security facility near Lancaster in southern California to a medium-security lockup called Wild Horse Mesa Prison near Redding. While doing time in Lancaster, Marco had been tagged with numerous infractions, including fighting and being nonco- operative. If it had been up to me, I would have left him where he was instead of transferring him to something less severe.
Anyone who has ever tried to outwit a recalcitrant two-year-old will be happy to tell you, chapter and verse, why it’s never a good idea to reward bad behavior.
Once again, however, I was grateful to be working for Ross Connors. When I’m initiating contact with folks in other jurisdictions, it always gives me a big leg up on the credibility ladder when I’m able to drop the name of Washington State Attorney General into the mix. If I need to go to the top, using his name makes it possible for me to take the express elevator, so to speak. It was a lot tougher back in the old days when I was a grunt working for Seattle PD.
In this instance, the top turned out to be a guy named Donald Willison, the warden of Wild Horse Mesa Prison. When his secretary put me through to him at ten past nine, Willison sounded surly and argumentative, but then again, if I had to spend every day and hour of my working life locked up inside an institution right along with a bunch of convicted criminals, maybe I’d be surly, too.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “And what do you want?”
I told him who I was and that I was calling about Marco Andrade.
Willison sighed. “Oh, crap,” he said. “Him again? You and everybody else. I knew that mope was going to be trouble the minute they dropped him off in my sally port. And once I got a look at his paperwork, I was even more convinced. I could see right off that he was going to be a problem and had no business being here. Sure enough. As soon as he got in a pissing match with one of my guards, I started trying to send him back where he came from, but reversing transfers is a lot like trying to push a rope uphill.”
That’s the way it works in bureaucracies. It may be possible to undo whatever’s been done, but you can count on it taking lots of time and extraordinary amounts of effort.
“And now that he’s dead,” Willison continued, “things will probably get worse. I expect that a whole army of grieving relatives will come crawling out of the woodwork in time to file a bunch of wrongful death lawsuits against me and the state of California. As a matter of fact, I’ve already heard from one. He called on the pretext of working a missing persons case on Andrade’s wife, but I checked the paperwork. Surprise. That so-called detective also happens to be Andrade’s brother-in-law. He said nobody had told his family that Marco was dead. God knows we tried. But it turns out Marco’s wife-this detective’s sister-seems to have gone to ground. If he can’t find her, why the hell does he think we should be able to?”
“What happened to Marco?” I asked.
“I already told you. He’s dead.”
“I mean, what happened to his body?”
Willison sighed. “We buried him.”
“On site?”
“Not exactly,” Willison said. “We’ve got a little plot just outside the gate that’s dedicated as a cemetery. When guys die in prison, it often happens that no one’s willing to step up and take responsibility for the body or for final arrangements. We do it here, but we bury them outside the fence, not inside. I’m of the opinion that a life sentence shouldn’t turn into more than that.” He paused and then added, “But you still haven’t explained why the Washington State Attorney General is interested in one of my dead inmates.”
“We’ve been investigating a series of homicides up here in Washington. In the course of the last year and a half, we’ve had six women with known or suspected connections to prostitution who have been murdered and dumped. As of yesterday, Marco Andrade’s wife, Marcella, was positively identified as one of our six.”
“And you’re wondering if what happened to Marco had anything to do with what happened to his wife.”
“Exactly,” I told him.
“Hang on just a minute,” Willison said. “Let me get his file. I had it pulled after I heard from the alleged brother-in-law so I’d be able to know what I’m talking about.”
I heard paper rustling somewhere in the background. I found it reassuring to know that paper files still exist somewhere in the world. I’ve met a few wardens in my time, and they’re not often likable, but behind Willison’s gruff delivery I glimpsed a guy who sounded a lot like me-like someone determined to do a tough job to the best of his ability and someone who doesn’t need everything in life boiled down into bare-bones computerese.
“Here it is,” he said at last. “Name is Marco Javier Andrade. Age thirty-four. Died as a result of homicidal violence at four forty-six P.M. on October 31 of last year. He was doing five to ten for drug dealing and for attempted homicide. What else do you want to know?”
It interested me to hear that Marco Andrade had been murdered within two weeks of the time his wife had disappeared from her new home in Federal Way. That seemed like more than a mere coincidence.
“Halloween,” I said. “Not my idea of trick or treat. Do you know who killed him or why?”
“There’s an ongoing investigation into that incident,” Willison said.
That’s CYA-speak for “I don’t know squat.” I waited long enough. Finally Willison continued just to fill up the dead air.
“Andrade’s throat was slit with what started out as a toothbrush with a handle that got turned into a deadly weapon. Twelve guys went into the showers; eleven came out. He bled out right there on the shower floor.”
“What about surveillance cameras?”
Willison paused again. “Funny you should ask,” he said with some reluctance. “It turns out we just happened to be having a facility-wide problem with our surveillance equipment at that very same time. We have no tape of what happened in that shower and no way of knowing who was responsible.”
How convenient, I thought, but I could hear what he left unsaid. Willison didn’t know who had murdered Marco Andrade, and he also didn’t know who had sabotaged his surveillance equipment. It seemed to me, and most likely to Warden Willison as well, that Marco Andrade had attracted the unwelcome attention of someone with a lot of deadly horsepower.
“I suppose your investigators have talked to all the inmates who were in the shower at the time.”
