Page 25 of Den of Iniquity

Alice Patterson is a feisty little fiftysomething who drives a school bus during the week and cleans other people’s houses onweekends. I’m not sure when she cleans her own. She doesn’t have any use for the vacuum system we installed when we remodeled the house. Instead, she shows up on Saturday mornings with her trusty Dyson at the ready while lugging a five-gallon plastic container loaded with her approved cleaning solutions along with a whole collection of dustcloths and -rags.

During breakfast, Mel leveled a look at Kyle and said, “How’s your room?”

“Fine, I guess. Why?”

“Because Alice, our housekeeper, comes today,” Mel explained. “Sheets, pillowcases, and towels need to be in the laundry room before she gets here, and anything that might interfere with her dusting, vacuuming, or cleaning needs to be put away.”

I’ve always gotten a kick out of Mel’s propensity for cleaning the house before the cleaning lady arrives, but in this case it was necessary. After breakfast she walked Kyle to the guest room and performed a preliminary inspection—which he failed. Mel grew up with a US Army colonel for a father, so she comes with fairly stringent standards, and Kelly’s and Jeremy’s expectations regarding room cleanliness were obviously lower than Mel’s. It took half an hour of remedial work on Kyle’s part before Mel pronounced the room as “Alice ready.”

Once released from cleaning duty, Kyle headed out to the garage where he began whaling away on his drums. I didn’t blame him. After school the day before, while the two of us were walking Sarah together, I had asked him if he’d met anyone at school who interested him.

“Why bother trying to make new friends?” he had asked hopelessly. “They’re going to shut down school in a couple of weeks anyway.”

He was right about that, of course. Breaking into a new social circle in high school isn’t easy under the best of circumstances, and these were anything but normal. He was brokenhearted, lonely, and living with a pair of old people he barely knew. With that in mind, I figured beating the living hell out of that drum set was good for what ailed him. As for disturbing the neighbors? I didn’t worry too much about that. Once spring comes around, weekend mornings all over Fairhaven are punctuated by the noise of lawn mowers followed by a barrage of leaf blowers come fall. Compared to the noisy racket from those, the steady beat on his drums barely counted as a disturbance.

As chief of police, Mel is regarded as an important player in terms of city government. As a result, she’s part of several citywide networking organizations. I was deep in my crosswords when she looked up and remarked, “This isn’t going to be good.”

“What’s that?”

“I talked with people from the school district last night. Our shutdown will most likely hit sooner than later, probably by the first or second week in March. The big delay right now is trying to figure out how to switch over from in-person to online learning.”

“A complete shutdown?” I asked. “Are you sure? And is that even a good idea? For years the experts have been telling us that too much screen time is bad for kids. Now they want them to use screen time instead of going to school?”

“Evidently,” Mel said.

“And is this whole Covid thing going to be as bad as everyone is making it out to be? Have we had even so much as a single case here in Bellingham?”

Mel and I don’t share the same mental health regimen. She tolerates my aversion to news these days, but she doesn’t necessarily approve of it.

“You can bury your head in your news blackout all you want,” she answered, “but believe me, cases will be coming to Bellingham. I’ve been watching the numbers, Beau. People, especially older people, are dying of Covid all over the world, and so far nobody knows how to treat it. So, yes, it’s going to be bad—very bad. They’re saying as bad as or even worse than the Spanish flu in the early part of the last century.”

“But how exactly is this school shutdown going to work?” I asked. “It’s Kyle’s senior year, for Pete’s sake.”

“It’ll be mandatory for everybody, seniors included,” she said. “We’ll just have to figure out how to live with it.”

I went back to my crossword, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was thinking about how things had been back in my senior year of high school. At that point in my life I’d never met any of my grandparents, but being eighteen years old and having to be locked up for an unknown period of time with only a couple of elderly folks for company didn’t sound like my idea of a good time. Would Kyle have been better off staying in Ashland or moving to Eugene with his mom? Maybe. Probably. Was it too late now for him to change his mind?

Just then a call came in from Todd Hatcher.

“Sorry, I know I said I’d get back to you on this last night, but that didn’t happen.”

“That’s all right. What do you have for me?” I asked.

“Things are getting more and more interesting,” he replied. “I ran Caroline Richards’s driver’s license photo through a number of law enforcement facial rec databases. The first hit I got was to an eighteen-year-old named Lindsey Baylor. Seven years ago, she was arrested in Seattle and charged with prostitution. She was bailed outby her mother, Phyllis Baylor, and the charges were later dropped. But here’s the problem. As near as I can tell, those initial IDs dating from 2003, both hers and her mother’s, were as fake as the one belonging to your son-in-law’s new main squeeze, Caroline. Between that first arrest and her emergence as Caroline Richards late last year, there’s no sign of her.”

“You’re saying those other IDs first surfaced back in 2003?” I asked.

“That September is when Phyllis used a Washington State driver’s license ID to sign her daughter up for the free/reduced-cost lunch program at Bow Lake Elementary School in SeaTac. Their address at the time was at a place on Pacific Highway South called the TaxiWay Motel, which has since been demolished. I found a much later address for them in a mobile home park located in Federal Way. Like her daughter, Phyllis had numerous arrests for prostitution, dating from early on up until 2015.”

“Sounds like prostitution was the family business,” I suggested. “If her first arrest was at age eighteen, my guess is that the daughter started working the streets earlier than that. So where’s Phyllis now?”

“Deceased. Died of natural causes—hep C—in October of 2016. Her last arrest was in early 2015. After that she may have been too ill to work. She was alone and homeless at the time of her death. The King County Sheriff’s Office attempted to locate her daughter or some other relative to take charge of her remains, but those efforts were unsuccessful. Eventually Phyllis was laid to rest in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Renton, along with 215 other homeless individuals. I’m thinking both mother and child may have been in Witness Protection.”

That story—where a mother and a young child or two all turn up with fake IDs—sounded all too familiar to me, because I’d heard it before, and always in connection with Witness Protection.

WITSEC is shorthand for the US Marshals Witness Protection Security Program. The only things most people know about Witness Protection is what they see on TV or in the movies. In those fictional stories, prosecutors often assure terrified individuals that they won’t need to worry about testifying against some dangerous bad guy because they’ll be placed in Witness Protection.

Sounds good, right? Viewers who don’t know better probably imagine that the Witness Protection program comes complete with a modest two-bedroom/one-bath bungalow surrounded by a picket fence. The reality is often far different. In my experience many of the so-called protectees are dropped off at run-down apartment buildings or fleabag hotels in not-so-nice parts of strange towns. For women in those kinds of situations, especially ones with little kids and no marketable skills, working the streets ends up being their only option. In my work as a cop it’s something I saw all too often.

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