One Last Kill (Tracy Crosswhite), page 26
“I’ll leave you two alone to talk,” Marilynn said, but not before she gave her husband a hard stare. If looks could kill, Tracy would have been measuring Michael Edwards for a coffin.
Edwards turned from the windows and pointed to the sitting area. Tracy sat in one of the chairs. Edwards at the end of the sofa, as far away as he could get. He set his glass down on a coaster on the table between them. Tracy noticed a thin manila file. He looked up at her with resigned disdain. She didn’t much care.
“My wife says you have some questions of me?” he said with none of the fire and brimstone he had unleashed the prior visit. “Am I to assume the offer you made yesterday afternoon, giving me an out, is no longer on the table?”
Tracy wanted very much to tell Edwards to pound sand, and she had no reason to again offer the deal. She’d used it hoping to create leverage, unaware Marilynn had enough leverage for the entire Justice Department. But this was not just about Michael Edwards. This was about Marilynn, her children, and her grandchildren she’d worked to protect.
“I want to know the name of the man you fathered.”
“I don’t know his name.”
Tracy paused. She was tempted to call in Marilynn to rap Edwards’s knuckles with a wooden ruler.
“That doesn’t help me much.”
“I don’t know his name or if he even exists, but I suspect, from what you told Marilynn, that he does,” Edwards said.
“What can you tell me?” Tracy asked.
“I can tell you the name of his mother.”
“Then let’s start there.”
Edwards drank from his glass. His hand shook. This was not the poised politician Tracy had previously encountered. This was a frightened old man who had been put in his place. “I was young, in my early twenties. My parents had a maid. She was young, Hispanic, very good looking. Sexy. She had an accent. I learned Spanish in school, and I’d just spent a semester in Barcelona before coming home to graduate and assimilate into the family construction business. I was living at home, which meant I was home on days Rosie came to clean the house. I spoke to her in Spanish and sought her tutelage. We flirted, innocently at first, then more serious. One day she called me, crying. She had been to the doctor and needed to speak to me.”
“She was pregnant,” Tracy said.
“And Catholic,” Edwards said with some disdain.
“She wanted to keep the baby.”
“I didn’t know where to turn. Eventually, I didn’t have a choice. I turned to my father. He was mayor at the time. Before he ran for governor and lost. He was angry. He didn’t understand how I had allowed myself to be taken advantage of by this woman.”
“An interesting take,” Tracy said.
“My father had my career planned. I would succeed him at the construction company, then politics. I’d become mayor, then governor. He told me everything he had worked for on my behalf would be ruined because Rosie had lied and said she was on the pill.”
“Again, an interesting take,” Tracy said. It was no wonder Edwards didn’t learn his lesson. He’d never had to.
“I asked him what to do. He said to get rid of it.”
“But she wouldn’t,” Tracy said.
“She wouldn’t.” Edwards sighed. His shoulders sagged. “She said she’d raise the child on her own. That didn’t satisfy my father. He wasn’t about to have terms dictated to him by some uneducated maid. I don’t know for certain what he did, but he came into my room one night and told me Rosie had agreed to an abortion. He said the matter was concluded. I never saw or heard from her again.”
“So you don’t know if she got the abortion?”
Edwards shook his head. “I didn’t. Not for certain.”
“Or if your father actually paid her to get an abortion or threatened her with deportation or something else?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were there any other women? Any other children?”
“Other women, yes. Other children, no. I learned from my mistake.”
Tracy released a derisive burst of air. “But she paid for your mistake.”
Edwards offered no response.
“What was the woman’s name?”
“Rosenda Alvarado. We called her Rosie.”
“How old was she?”
“Twenty-six or twenty-seven.”
“Where was she born?”
“Someplace in Mexico.”
“Illegal?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t even know if Rosenda Alvarado was her real name or one she made up when she came into the country; do you?”
“I don’t.”
“She had no documentation?”
“She had an ITIN number.”
ITIN stood for Individual Taxpayer Identification Number. “Do you have her number?”
He opened the file on the table and handed Tracy a single-page tax document with a nine-digit individual identification number just beneath the name. Rosenda Montemayor Alvarado. “My father didn’t want to see his or my political career derailed because he’d hired an undocumented alien who cheated the government out of its taxes. It’s why Rosie had the ITIN and paid taxes.”
“Did the killer ever contact you—either now, after Bonnie Parker’s death, or back twenty-five years ago?”
“Never.”
“But you knew the connection; didn’t you? You knew these women had all at one time worked as special assistants in your administration. You knew because you had affairs with each of them.” Again, Edwards did not answer, but his silence was as profound as any admission of guilt.
Tracy reached into her briefcase and removed a forensic DNA kit. “I’ll be collecting your DNA, Mr. Edwards, and checking it against the DNA obtained at the crime scene. This time there will be no mistakes.”
Edwards did not dare object.
CHAPTER 33
Tracy left the Edwards home disgusted by the man’s audacity, his huge ego that prevented him, even now, from fully understanding the gravitas of what he had done. Edwards didn’t respect women; that much was clear. He hadn’t respected Rosie, his wife, or the young women he had systematically seduced, who then died for his transgressions. But it was like Marilynn had said. His was learned behavior, and he’d learned from a man just as egocentric and narcissistic. Women became only something else for him to conquer. He hadn’t learned love, but he’d learned fear. He’d feared his father. And he feared Marilynn, what she knew. Tracy hoped he now feared her.
Tracy shook the thought. She did not want to waste any more time on the man. She focused instead on what she had learned. It invigorated her. For the first time since Chief Weber had reopened the investigation, Tracy had a direction, a path that might lead to the killer. She hated the thought that Edwards would get away, again. But this was no longer about Michael Edwards. This was about the victims and their families, and about Tracy issuing her own justice and finally putting the killer behind bars.
She called Nolasco from the car and told him what she had learned, providing him with Rosenda Alvarado’s name and ITIN number. “It gives us something we can run down, a last known address we can follow.”
“I’m on it,” Nolasco said. Tracy heard him scratching a pen across paper. “Where are you now?”
“Just leaving Edwards’s home and heading back in. With traffic, I could be as long as an hour.”
“That will give me time to run this down. Any chance I’m going to get a call from Weber?”
“None,” Tracy said.
“You sound certain.”
“I am. Weber can’t help him now. Someone has more leverage.”
Traffic was lighter than Tracy expected, with the heavier flow leaving the Seattle city limits. When she arrived at Police Headquarters, Tracy took the elevator to the seventh floor and hurried through the maze of cubicles to Nolasco’s interior office. Being in his office had once made her skin crawl. Not this time. She knocked and stepped inside.
Nolasco glanced at his computer screen and read. “Rosenda Montemayor Alvarado, aka Rosenda Aranda from Montemayor, Mexico, died in 1984 of breast cancer in Tacoma, Washington.”
Tracy swore and slumped into one of the two seats across from Nolasco’s desk. “Did she have a son?”
“One dependent declared on her income taxes.”
“Name?”
Nolasco grinned. “Michael Edward Montemayor.”
Tracy almost laughed. “Seriously? She named her son after Edwards?”
“It’s official.” Nolasco handed Tracy a printout of a birth certificate for a baby boy at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Tacoma. The space to list the father’s name had been left blank.
Another thought came to her. “The son would have been in his early teens at the time of his mother’s death. Relatives?”
“Apparently not. He was placed in foster care, a ward of the state until he turned eighteen.”
“Did you run him?”
“Every which way. No criminal record. No DNA ever provided. No fingerprints. No social media of any kind.”
“High school? College?”
“No college I could discern. He graduated from Lincoln High School in Tacoma in 1988.”
“Work history?” she asked.
“No Social Security number ever issued to that name. No Tax Identification Number. No credit cards. No license. No wedding certificate. No credit checks. No social media. Nothing. It’s as if Michael Edward Montemayor never existed.”
“What about the foster care family?”
“Foster parents are deceased. Looks to me like it was more of a business than a family. They had many foster kids. I’m not optimistic about finding any who might have information on Montemayor. I intend to call the school tomorrow and determine if anyone there recalls him. See if they have any yearbooks from that time, and if we can get a photograph. Maybe we can find a teacher or a student who knew him and who can provide us with something to go on.”
Tracy wasn’t sure what more they could do, not at this hour of the evening. “I’m going to do some work on the computer and see if I get any hits for this guy, though I suspect from what you’ve learned so far that the name Michael Edward Montemayor has been buried for years.”
Tracy went back to her office, called Dan, and told him she’d be home soon but wanted to do a little hunting on the internet. She pulled up an online search engine and tried to find a Lincoln High School yearbook from 1984 through 1988. She was surprised to find one for sale on Amazon and another on eBay, which made her wonder just how big a market existed for used yearbooks. The two sites displayed only the cover, not interior pictures. She looked up alumni sites. Not surprisingly, given Nolasco’s lack of luck, she did not find anything on Michael Edward Montemayor. She used search engines and entered his name and high school. Again, she found nothing promising.
As she was about to shut down her computer and head home, Tracy’s desk phone rang. She answered it while closing out open screen pages.
“Detective Crosswhite,” Tracy answered.
“Detective.” A man’s voice. He sounded surprised. “It’s Bill Kinney. I didn’t think I’d reach you. I was going to leave you a message and follow it up with an email.”
Kinney was the fifth wheel working with the Violent Crimes Section’s A Team. What was once her team. “What can I do for you, Bill?”
“I think the question is what can I do for you.”
“Okay, what can you do for me?”
“Captain Nolasco asked me to review Wash-DOT tapes looking for a Ford F-250 truck last Sunday afternoon leaving Ellensburg, Washington.”
Henry K. England, the former police officer who had manned the Route 99 Killer tip line. “I apologize if I was abrupt. I didn’t know Captain Nolasco delegated that job. What did you find out?”
“Picked up his truck on a camera on I-90 near Cle Elum early Sunday morning.” Papers shuffled. “At 6:14 a.m.” That sounded about right for someone getting up early to fish. “Wasn’t difficult after that,” Kinney added.
“What wasn’t difficult?”
“Tracking him.” Because he parked along the river to fish, she thought, anticipating what Kinney would say.
“He stayed on I-90 all the way into Seattle.”
Tracy’s mind kick-started, thinking of all the things she needed to do. She hurried back to Nolasco’s office and told him what Kinney had found. Nolasco said they could cover more ground if they split up. He’d drive to Tacoma and try to find a yearbook with a photograph of Montemayor, or someone who knew him. Tracy would drive to Ellensburg and confront England.
She agreed, but she intended to do more than confront England.
She called the Ellensburg Police Department, this time not just as a courtesy. She needed their help. She spoke to the captain she had previously spoken with, which saved her from having to explain the situation. She asked if the Ellensburg Police Department could perform surveillance on England’s truck and let her know if it appeared to be on the move toward Seattle.
The captain said it could be done, but they’d have to take a soft approach due to the topography and ease of being noticed. He said he’d send an unmarked car to the access road leading to the hay farm to determine if the truck was parked in the drive. If so, they would do periodic drive-bys to ensure the truck didn’t go anywhere. If they sat on the truck, they weren’t going to sneak up on anybody.
Tracy also worried about England learning of their interest, but she was more concerned about the women who still lived in Seattle. She didn’t want to have another Bonnie Parker.
The captain said she had two choices. “I can give my officers verbal authorization to follow England if he leaves, or you can contact the state patrol to take over pursuit.”
Knowing England was more likely to notice Washington State Patrol vehicles, and not wanting to further complicate the matter by involving another law enforcement agency, Tracy asked that the Ellensburg PD stay on England.
He agreed.
They didn’t have enough evidence to take England into custody. They had tracked his truck into Seattle, but they couldn’t yet pinpoint where he’d gone. More specifically, they couldn’t place him on Queen Anne. And the Tacoma high school was closed for the evening, preventing Nolasco from possibly confirming England was Montemayor.
Tracy looked at her watch. She wanted to get to HR. She needed to review England’s personnel file before traveling back to Ellensburg.
The details were starting to fit together. England had performed work, at least tangentially, on the task force. He could have known about the suspects the task force had been pursuing, including Dwight McDonnel. He could have followed McDonnel, learned the identity of the woman McDonnel had slept with, then picked up that same woman and killed her, hoping to throw detectives off his trail. He would not have known about fragmented DNA back then because the technology did not yet exist. He would have been banking on McDonnel’s DNA already being in the system for another crime. He also would have known from the information coming in over the tip line that the task force realized each of the latter four women killed had worked on Edwards’s staff, and probably believed Edwards would soon be exposed. But that never happened, because the message had stopped at Moss Gunderson. Perhaps frustrated, England could have accessed the vault where the stored boxes had been kept and taken the disk on which Cesare had downloaded the information, believing, perhaps, there would be a more opportune time to reveal the information. He married, moved away from Seattle, and stopped killing. Then Weber announced Tracy would pursue the case, and he saw it as a second opportunity. He sent Tracy the disk with renewed hope the evidence would lead to and expose Michael Edwards.
She rode the elevator to the fourth floor and met Augustus Cesare, who had on a lightweight jacket and looked to be leaving for the day.
“No rest for the wicked,” Cesare said. “What brings you back?”
“Looking for Henry England’s personnel file,” she said.
Cesare’s eyes narrowed. “What for?”
“I need to determine if he lied on his application about his identity or his background.”
“You think England could be the Route 99 Killer?”
“I’m not thinking anything at the moment except to get enough evidence so a judge will have to grant me a warrant for his DNA.”
“Why? You have the killer’s DNA?”
“Fragmented DNA. We identified Dwight McDonnel’s DNA, and Melton made a partial match to someone in the system. A half brother.”
“No shit.”
“No shit,” Tracy said.
“It would be definitive then, if you get England’s DNA.”
“If he’s our guy, and a judge grants me the search warrant.” She checked her watch. “I need to call the on-call homicide prosecutor and get an affidavit put together to send up to the Kittitas prosecutor’s office. If the judge grants the request, I’ll take a drive up there tomorrow morning.”
“Why don’t you let me run down his application?” Cesare said. “It’s what I do. At least for a few more days. I can run down England’s application a lot more quickly than you can, and it frees you up to put together the warrant. It would be a fitting end to my career if I helped you wrap up this case. Those killings were as personal to me as they were to everyone else. I’d like to know that when I retire, I can do so without the investigation hanging over my head also.”
“You aren’t the only one.”
They exchanged cell phone numbers, and Tracy went back to the office and called the on-call homicide prosecutor. Together they put together a search warrant supported by Tracy’s affidavit to obtain England’s DNA when she was in Ellensburg. The prosecutor told her she’d spoken with a prosecutor in Kittitas County who said the chances of the warrant being granted were fifty-fifty. The judge on call was a former public defender, and the prosecutor could see him ruling the evidence, mostly speculative at this point, did not justify such an invasive intrusion of England’s privacy.
