Page 64 of Den of Iniquity

“What was your first clue?” Sandy responded with a laugh. “I spent two and a half years working in a call center before I decided to join the force. I got tired of listening to those jerks torment their families and wanted to be the one hauling their asses off to jail. The first time I slapped cuffs on a guy like that, I felt like a million bucks. He got off, too, of course, but it turns out wearing a badge was the right thing for me to do.

“But what I said earlier about 911 operators is true. They may not see those domestic violence offenders face-to-face, but they probably deal with more of them on a daily basis than regular patrol officers do, and take it from me, the fact that most of those guys get away with what they’ve done really does get old.”

I thought about that. For me, 911 operators have always been heroes. I could imagine a renegade cop, but a renegade 911 operator? No way!

“When those dispatchers are sitting at their computers summoning assistance,” Sandy continued, “they have all kinds of pertinent information at their disposal. For instance, they can look at a physical address and know exactly how many domestic violence calls have been made from that residence in the past and how many times officers have responded. Believe me, when an abuser gets away with beating the crap out of a spouse, or a parent, or a sibling time and again, those operators tend to take it personally. They’re not supposed to but they do. I know I did.”

“Enough to go on a killing spree?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Sandy said. “I’d hate to think that could happen, but it might. Come to think of it, they’re also on the front line when it comes to the fentanyl crisis. Someone finds a dead body, the first thing they do is call 911.”

I was stunned. The idea of a 911 operator somehow going off the rails and morphing into a serial killer made me feel like a little kid who’s just been told for the first time that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny aren’t real.

“So I’m all in,” Sandy continued. “When do you want me to start?”

“How about now?” I replied. “Give me your email address, and I’ll send over some transcripts. Yolanda’s study covers all of King County, but the cases we’ve identified so far all originated inside the Seattle city limits.”

“So focus on Seattle cases then?” she asked.

“I think that makes sense.”

“Okay. My daughter has a swim meet this afternoon, but maybe I can knock out a couple of those before it’s time to go to that.”

While I had been caught up in the phone call, Sarah had been operating on automatic pilot. When we reached our customary turnaround, she had done so without any direction from me. Now as the call ended, we were almost back at the house, but I was still lost in thought.

I was wondering about how much information the 911 operators had available to them on their work computers and how much of that one of them might have been able to carry out of the call center on a thumb drive. And then I thought about all the supposedly secure and password-protected information Todd Hatcher had available to him at the touch of his keyboard. He wasn’t theonly one with unauthorized access to a lot of supposedly private information.

In that moment I wondered if our Apple Watch–wearing homeless lady wasn’t every bit as tech-savvy as Todd Hatcher, only a hell of a lot more dangerous.

Chapter 29

Bellingham, Washington

Friday, March 6, 2020

Knowing I had Ben and Sandy backing me up on going through the interview transcripts, it was easier to face up to the ones Yolanda had sent me overnight—the ones where people had agreed to second interviews.

But before I did so, I thought about the logistics involved. Yolanda’s study covered all of King County. So far all our cases had originated inside Seattle’s city limits. With that in mind, it made sense to limit our examinations to deaths that were Seattle-centric. Before I opened any of Yolanda’s emails, I sent one of my own to Ben and Sandy as well as to Elena Moreno, letting them know that from now on we would focus on Seattle cases only. To my way of thinking, narrowing the scope of our investigation would automatically reduce the workload.

My mother died of breast cancer when I was in my early twenties. Now that I’m so much older, I’m surprised by how often the words she said to me way back then resurface in my head. Only a few minutes after telling my mini task force that we could probably ignore cases occurring outside Seattle’s city limits, I remembered Mom telling me time and again that “pride goeth before the fall.” I took a hit on that score as soon as I started reading through Yolanda Aguirre’s next interview, file number 143.

That one was with a woman named Felicity, the widow of one Xavier Jesus. Xavier, age thirty-six, had died of a fentanyl overdose—delivered by means of a vape pen—on August 14, 2016, in Kent, Washington. Yolanda gave me Felicity’s phone number, indicating that she was eager to speak with me.

Prior to calling Xavier’s widow, I quickly reviewed her initial interview. Her husband’s body had been found next to the railroad tracks in Kent’s warehouse district, where he had worked as a forklift operator. Kent may be inside King County, but it’s well outside Seattle’s city limits.

When I had initially flagged the file, I had done so because of the commonality of the crime scenes between the two incidents. Although miles apart, both bodies had been found in close proximity to railroad tracks. Now I saw that, like Jake Spaulding’s, Xavier’s fatal fentanyl overdose had been administered by means of a vape pipe. And the similarities didn’t end there.

According to what Felicity had told Yolanda, there had been several instances of increasingly violent physical confrontations between her and her husband in the months prior to his death, during some of which law enforcement had been summoned. Xavier had been taken into custody on three separate occasions,but as the mother of three young children, Felicity had never gone through with pressing charges against him, although she had filed for a divorce the week prior to her husband’s death.

Although Felicity admitted that her husband had often become violent when he was drinking, she had insisted that he had never, to her knowledge, been a drug user of any kind—no marijuana, no cocaine, no crack, and most definitely no fentanyl. That was not unlike Matilda Jackson’s claim that Darius Jackson hadn’t been using at the time of his death.

In addition, Felicity claimed that Xavier loved his kids and would never, ever have committed suicide and certainly not by using a vape pen filled with fentanyl. That was the only reason Felicity had agreed to speak to Yolanda in the first place—she was convinced that Kent PD and the King County Medical Examiner had gotten her husband’s manner of death all wrong. The vape pen detail hadn’t leaped out at me while I was bingeing my way through files the previous weekend, but now, knowing Jake Spaulding had also died of an overdose delivered via a vape pen, the connection was stunning.

At that point I picked up my phone and dialed her number. “Ms. Delgado?” I asked when she answered.

“Yes, who’s this?”

“My name’s J. P. Beaumont.”

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