Page 72 of Den of Iniquity

“For keeping me from stepping in it any worse than I already have.”

Chapter 33

Bellingham, Washington

Saturday, March 7, 2020

That’s about the time Kyle came breezing into the house. He went straight to the fridge where he grabbed two sodas.

“How was the stick shift lesson?” I asked.

“It was great,” he answered with a wide grin. “And that Shelby is amazing!” Then he headed for the door.

“Where are you going now?” Mel asked.

“Back to the garage,” Kyle replied. “Hank went home to get his drums. He’s going to bring them over here so we can try jamming together. Later.” With that he ducked back out the door.

I was stunned. Three weeks earlier when Kyle had first shown up, Hank was the one who had voiced concern about the advisability of taking in a teenager. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to me that in short order Kyle and Hank Mitchell would not only be on afirst-name basis, they’d also be such good pals that they’d be playing drums together.

“I never saw that one coming,” Mel murmured as the door slammed shut behind him.

“That makes two of us,” I said.

That’s when Mel’s phone rang. She listened for a time before saying, “Okay. I’ll be on the scene in twenty.”

That sounded serious. “What’s up?” I asked as she grabbed her coffee cup and headed for the bedroom.

“My guys just got an arrest warrant for George Pritchard,” she told me. “It’s bound to be a media firestorm, so I need to be on hand when they take him into custody.”

While she headed out to attend to that unpleasant duty, I turned back to my iPad. An email from Yolanda told me that she had sent a message to an interviewee named Norma Adams regarding her son, Lawrence, age forty-three, who had died of an accidental drug overdose on May 16, 2018. It turned out that Norma herself had passed away only two months after doing that initial interview. The person who had responded to Yolanda’s request for additional information was Norma’s daughter, Janelle, who had been keeping tabs on her deceased mother’s email account in case there were any lingering items that needed to be handled.

Before attempting to make contact with the daughter, I did the same thing I had done previously and read through the applicable case file. Lawrence, a decorated veteran of Desert Storm, had been found dead next to a dumpster in a Denny Regrade alleyway. His death had been ruled accidental, but throughout his mother’s interview with Yolanda, Norma had insisted that her son had been murdered, and Ben Weston had flagged the file due to Norma’s staunch insistence that her son was the victim of a homicide asopposed to an accidental death. Norma had admitted to Yolanda that Larry had been a homeless drug user, largely attributable to PTSD resulting from his military service. She also believed that he had been killed in the course of a robbery gone bad since his treasured collection of military medals had not been found with the body.

Since Janelle had expressed an interest in connecting with us, I was taken aback by her hostile response when I reached her by phone a little while later.

“Why the hell are you people going through all this crap again?” she demanded, once I identified myself. “Why can’t you just give it a rest?”

I explained that we were looking into overdose deaths that had been mistakenly identified as suicides or accidents when they should have been investigated as homicides.

“Well, you’re dead wrong on that score here,” she responded. “My brother wasn’t murdered. Larry Adams was a lying SOB who had my mother wrapped around his little finger. The part about his being homeless because of PTSD is a bunch of BS. He never saw a single day of combat duty. He ended up being dishonorably discharged after getting into a beef with his commanding officer during basic training. As for all his precious medals? They were stolen all right—from somebody else.

“Does the term ‘stolen valor’ mean anything to you? My brother could have written the book on that. I don’t know how he ended up with all those medals, including the Purple Heart he liked to wave around, but he sure as hell didn’t earn them. As for the drug paraphernalia found on his body? Mom insisted those were planted there by his killers to throw the investigation off track.”

“So you have no quarrel with the accidental death ruling?”

“None whatsoever, but my mother was outraged. Finally, in hopes of shutting her up, I actually went downtown and spoke to the M.E. She told me there were indications of long-term intravenous drug use on his body, and that he had most likely run into a batch of something that had more of a kick to it than he expected. My understanding is that, when it comes to fentanyl dosages, there’s a very small margin of error between living and dying.”

“How did he support that kind of habit?” I asked.

“How do you think he supported it?” Janelle retorted. “My mother. I didn’t know until after she died that she was virtually penniless. Her death was a suicide, by the way. She overdosed, too, on Ambien as opposed to fentanyl. Maybe somebody should be doing an interview with me about her death. I’d be only too happy to give them an earful. Larry was already gone at the time she died, but he’s the one who killed her.”

Once off the phone with Janelle Adams, I sat for a long time lost in thought. The situation was eerily similar to Loren Gregson’s. Both men had had loving mothers who refused to accept or even recognize their sons’ shortcomings, and both had left behind sisters who were now doomed to carry far more than their fair share of the family’s emotional burdens. It made me wonder about all those other fractured families out there.

Yolanda Aguirre’s careful study was uncovering those wherever we looked. For King County, each death was just another hash mark in the ever-increasing numbers in their overdose column. My job was to identify the unknown serial killer who was lurking inside those indifferent statistics, but the depth of Yolanda’s interviewing technique was also allowing me to see beyond the nonexistent headlines and giving me an understanding of exactly howeach of those individual deaths—so easily shrugged off by everybody else—was an all-consuming tragedy for the loved ones left behind.

Each was a pebble dropped into some family’s existence that sent long-lasting ripples of sorrow and hurt in every direction. The overdose death of someone found next to a dumpster or in a back alleyway wasn’t an attention grabber. Those kinds of deaths don’t garner headlines or public attention. They also often fail to attract serious scrutiny from law enforcement.

And what had brought all this home to me? A caring old woman named Matilda Jackson trying to learn the truth about her grandson’s death. In the process of doing that, she had given me something I had maybe lost track of in this overly virtual world—a healthy dose of basic human empathy. Because that’s what I was feeling right that minute, not only for my particular overdose victims—the ones who had been murdered—but also for all those other affected people—the friends and relations who would spend the rest of their lives dealing with the absence of those who were gone.

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