Page 92 of Den of Iniquity

“Of course he’s desperate,” she said. “He’s been played for a fool and had his heart broken to boot, but it’s not your job to fix him,Kyle. If you would rather go home than stay here, that’s up to you. But even though Caroline is gone, don’t assume that somehow you’ll be able to wave a magic wand and get your folks back together. I’m pretty sure there were serious issues in their marriage long before Caroline showed up on the scene, and those aren’t going to go away, either, not without some serious work and soul-searching on both their parts.”

“What did you tell him?” I asked.

“I told him I’d think it over.”

“You do that,” I said, “but remember, this is a situation where you need to put yourself first. Don’t let your father’s mistakes, or your mother’s, either, for that matter, impact your own future. They’re supposed to be the grown-ups here, but they’re not exactly acting like it.”

“And you really don’t mind either way?”

Mel and I both shook our heads. “Either way,” I said.

At that moment I would have bet money that he’d end up knuckling under to his father, but somehow I managed to stifle saying anything more. My lobbying him in one direction was no more fair than his father’s pulling him in the other.

All I could do was shut my mouth, and hope things would turn out all right. Obviously being a parent isn’t easy, but sometimes being a grandparent isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, either.

When I finally had a chance to take a look at my email, the one from Scott was the first one I opened.

Hey, Dad, what a night! That storage unit was a treasure trove. We found an ice chest that functioned as Constance’s killertoolbox—bags of fentanyl tablets, a mortar and pestle, needles, a box of latex gloves, and all kinds of vaping equipment.

We also found an envelope full of mug shots, twenty-three in all. Five of them we already know—Darius Jackson, Jake Spaulding, Xavier Delgado, Loren Gregson, and Raymond Loper. The others are from jurisdictions all over the Pacific Northwest. The ones Sandy has checked so far are all dead of fentanyl overdoses. As for the framed photo of her father? It was part of his old FBI Wanted poster.

For right now Seattle PD isn’t releasing any information about the arrest. It’s a CYA maneuver on their part, because too many of those other cases were originally ours. We’ve been asked not to notify any of the victims’ family members until after the brass are ready to go public.

The part about the brass didn’t surprise me in the least, but thinking about a total of twenty-three victims was mind-blowing. Constance Herzog wasn’t just a serial killer, she was a serial killer on steroids. Operating from her brightly lit den of iniquity, she had escaped detection for years by hiding behind the facade of a harmless little old lady and garnering sympathy by pretending to be homeless. Her father’s stolen hundred-dollar bills had been her calling cards, and her trophies were the collection of mug shots found in her van.

I thought about how Yolanda Aguirre’s painstakingly conducted interviews had helped reveal the pattern and modus operandi that connected all the cases. But now there were eighteen additional families—grieving families—who may or may not have been interviewed and whose lost loved ones had never had a chance at justice being served. Maybe now it would be.

Finally, I went back to reading.

I wish you could have seen Constance’s face when we walked into the call center armed with our search warrants. She was dumbfounded. She didn’t have a clue that anyone was onto her, but once she realized we didn’t have an arrest warrant, she took off. Thank God for you and that AirTag.

At this point she’s still in the Snohomish County Jail, but Liberty Lake’s arrest warrant has come through. As soon as she’s released from Everett, she’ll be transferred directly to the Spokane County Jail to face charges in the death of Jake Spaulding.

Ballistics have matched the gun she used last night to two other drug-related homicides that took place years ago when a war broke out between two competing networks of dealers. The thinking is that Constance wasn’t directly involved in any of those, but bought the weapon on the street later for her own protection. Why she went nuts and shot the hell out of your car is anybody’s guess. I think she had gotten away with murder for so long that the thought of being caught sent her into panic mode.

As for the money? It adds up to 86k. If we hadn’t caught her when we did, she would have been able to hide out and live on that for a very long time.

In other words, good job, Dad! No, make that GREAT job! But what’s the word on your car?

Scotty

Of all the people in the conference room at the time, my son was the only one who had understood how pissed I was at beingexcluded from the search warrant team. And now he had done something about it by filling me in on the details. I hoped he hadn’t sent the message on a work computer, because he could easily be fired for discussing an ongoing investigation with someone outside the department. But I wasn’t going to breathe a word about it, and I knew he wouldn’t, either. My response was suitably brief.

Thanks for keeping me in the loop. As for the car? It’s totaled, and I’ll be shopping for a new one.

Dad

For the rest of the day things were pretty quiet around our place. When it was time for dinner, Mel wasn’t hungry. I settled for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Kyle rummaged around in the fridge and found the tail end of his package of bologna, so no one starved to death. Everybody went to bed early, but when I fell asleep, Mel was still tossing and turning.

Chapter 42

Bellingham, Washington

Wednesday to Thursday, March 11–12, 2020

I don’t know what life was like in anyone else’s household on the first morning of “distance learning” in March of 2020. I can tell you it was hell at our place, and very little learning occurred.

A gloomy Mel, still agonizing over George Pritchard’s suicide, left for work early, leaving Kyle and me to duke it out with something that was, to all intents and purposes, totally unworkable. The portal he was supposed to use went through endless cycles of downloading without ever letting us enter. Hours into the process we finally gained entry, but then in one class the video didn’t work, and in another the sound didn’t. At the end of the day, he had managed to be marked present in only a single class, but missing the others wasn’t for lack of trying on our part.

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