Page 18 of Den of Iniquity

“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 whathad 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—thatyou 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’shouse 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?”

---