Buried Evidence (29 page)

“She didn’t change her mind,” John said. “She stayed out all night. I was worried sick, afraid the rapist had come back and killed her. She didn’t even call me to tell me she was okay.” He struck himself in the chest with his fist. “I’m the one who called the police.”

“Where was your wife?”

“Lily pulled into the driveway around seven or eight the next morning,” John told him. “The police were already at the house talking to Shana. When I asked Lily where she’d been all night, she said she’d been so upset, she accidentally took the wrong freeway and ended up lost somewhere in downtown Los Angeles. Then when she finally figured out where she was and started driving back home, she got stuck in rush-hour traffic.”

Having reviewed some of the particulars of the Hernandez homicide, Jameson asked, “Did Lily own a shotgun?”

“Yeah,” John said, “she had a Browning twelve-gauge semiautomatic. I mean, it wasn’t really her gun. It belonged to her father. I remember because when we split up, and she moved to that house she rented in Ventura, I’m the one who packed her stuff. There was a box of ammo as well. Lily’s father used to take her deer hunting when she was a kid. The man’s been dead for years, but she used to tell me how her father bragged about what a good marksman she was, how she could always hit the bull’s-eye when they went target shooting. I guess she kept the gun because it belonged to her father. You know, it had sentimental value to her. The reason I say that is Lily was dead-set against guns.”

Now the man was finally coughing up the type of information Jameson needed to get the department to reopen the investigation. “Where’s this shotgun now?”

John sighed. “I have no idea.”

“You haven’t seen it since the day you packed it?”

“No,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I just now remembered that Lily had that gun. In the months after Shana was raped, I didn’t think about anything but my daughter.”

Seeing his other phone line blinking, Jameson knew he had to return his attention to the more pressing matters at hand, particularly completing the paperwork on the Bachman homicide. Thus far, Forrester had provided him with some interesting tidbits. He would love to put the screws to Lily. However, he hadn’t heard enough as yet to drop what he was doing and try to convince the brass to reopen the case. “Listen, Forrester,” he told him. “I’m going to check this out as soon as I free up some time. We’ll be in touch.”

Before John could say anything else, the detective disconnected. “Damn,” he said, tossing the crushed beer can at the wall. Even though Osborne and Carruthers hadn’t been willing to give him special treatment for providing them with information regarding Lily and the Hernandez homicide, he thought there was a possibility that Jameson would. After his DWI arrest he’d decided that at least a third of the police officers were only a few steps away from criminals, some of them nothing more than legally sanctioned thugs. No matter what they told him, Lily was one of them. It was only a matter of time before he was convicted and sentenced to prison. Over the past two days he had come close to a level of acceptance of his fate, but he could never accept the loss of his daughter. They were all just using him, treating him like he was a joke or some kind of amusement. He’d be in prison, and Lily would still be prancing around the courtroom as if she’d never done anything wrong. “Not fair,” he mumbled aloud, deciding he had to find a way to teach Lily a lesson.

Of course he was devastated over the accident, sorry that the young man had died. But nothing he could do could bring him back. He had to focus on his own life, find a way to survive.

In John’s mind, the road that had led him to this point stretched far into the past. Once Lily had graduated from law school, she had decided she no longer needed him. When they had first met, she had reminded him of a gentle, wounded fawn. Looking at his daughter’s image in what was left of the photo, he superimposed the youthful face of her mother gazing up in innocence, always eager to please, listen, to do whatever he said. He had picked Lily’s clothes, taught her to cook, cared for her
like a father. After all he had done, she had walked off and left him.

Knowledge could be a terrible thing, he thought, his bloodshot eyes gazing out over the cluttered room. How could he have imagined that attending college and obtaining her law degree would change Lily so much that she would gain such strength and independence that she no longer needed him? The woman who had talked to him like a dog on the phone the day before was not the woman he had married. The Lily he knew was gone, as dead as the boy he had struck and killed with his car. In her place was a cruel and heartless woman.

Even before the accident, Shana had taken on many of her mother’s characteristics, bossing him around, failing to understand that a man was supposed to make the decisions, steer the ship, rule the roost. Even the Bible depicted women as an afterthought. His lips compressed as he wondered how women had come to believe in their own self-importance.

John picked up the phone, flicking the button off and on, trying to figure out what kind of action he could take next. Suddenly a light came on in his head. The cops and D.A.’s might hang together and protect one another, but politicians would accuse their own mother of committing a crime if the result was free publicity. He punched in the area code for Ventura information.

“I’d like the number to the mayor’s office.”

A
S SOON
as Fred Jameson returned from lunch Friday afternoon, Detective Keith O’Malley advised him that the captain was looking for him. “Why?” he asked, scowling. “Don’t tell me they’re accusing me of falsifying evidence again.”

“Hey,” O’Malley answered, shrugging, “I’m just the messenger.”

Jameson dropped his head and shuffled off down the corridor, stopping outside Captain Andrew Nelson’s office to speak to his secretary. Monica Bell was a pretty blonde in her late twenties who appeared habitually exhausted. She had four young children
to support, and the previous year her husband had abandoned her. “Good news or bad news, Monica? One of my kids was up puking all night. With my luck, I’ll probably come down with whatever he’s got by tomorrow.”

“The flu bug is bad this year,” she said, picking up a file from her in-basket. “Drink lots of hot water. That’s what my grandmother used to tell me. That way you stand a chance of flushing it out of your system before it gets too bad. I have no idea why the captain wants to see you,” she added, a tinge of annoyance in her voice. “You guys are all the same, you know. Every time he sends for someone, everyone asks me to tell him what he wants. Why would you think I’d know? I’m just his secretary.”

“Can I go in now?”

“Be my guest,” she said. “He’s waiting.”

Andrew Nelson was a fairly small man in his late thirties, with dark hair, a slender frame, a personality that was as dry as the desert. His expertise rested in the fact that he was an excellent administrator and had managed to obtain a master’s degree in business as well as computer science. He peered up at the detective from behind wire-rimmed glasses, his computer screen blinking in the background.

“Sit,” Nelson said, continuing to shuffle through some paperwork on his desk.

Jameson fidgeted in his chair, thinking the captain was intentionally making him wait. Nelson was a wimp when stacked against the men who had traditionally sat in the captain’s chair before him. From what people were telling the detective, though, things were only going to get worse rather than better. A guy either went with the flow, or he would end up looking for a new occupation.

Nelson had made it to the top almost overnight, leapfrogging over men who were far more deserving and experienced. No one doubted he would become chief before he turned forty, if not in Ventura, then with a larger department. People around the office joked that he was the Bill Gates of law enforcement. The majority of men in uniform, the ones who still worked in the trenches, couldn’t stand him. No one considered him a bona fide cop, not
when he had served only a year in patrol before being promoted to sergeant. “You wanted to see me, sir,” Jameson said, wondering how long he was going to ignore him. “I’ve got some pretty pressing cases on my agenda right now. You know, homicides, that type of thing.”

Nelson let his sarcasm pass without comment, considering it counterproductive to reprimand him. “A call came in this morning via the mayor’s office regarding vital information on a six-year-old homicide.”

The detective leaned forward. “Great, I’m in the process—”

“May I finish?” Nelson asked, giving him a stern look before he shifted his eyes to his computer screen, then back again. “John Forrester is listed as the reporting party on the message I received this morning from the mayor’s office. He claimed he was willing to testify that his wife, Lilian Forrester, a former district attorney in our jurisdiction now actively employed in Santa Barbara, shot and killed an individual by the name of Bobby Hernandez. Mr. Forrester additionally stated that he informed the Los Angeles authorities of this information, and to date, they’ve failed to follow through on it. Do you know anything about this?”

Fred Jameson was rocking back and forth. Here he had thought some idiot had filed another grievance against him, and instead the biggest jerk of all time had handed him exactly what he wanted. “I’m already looking into it,” he said, his speech rapid-fire. “At first I had trouble locating the files and tracking down the evidence. Yesterday, I hit pay dirt.”

“What did you find?”

“Okay,” Jameson said, “I feel fairly certain everything we need to take this to the D.A.’s office is intact in the property room. Last night I went down there myself and sorted through all the containers. Some stuff, of course, is on ice at the crime lab. We have sworn depositions of eyewitnesses, forensics, basically the whole ball of wax.” He paused to take a breath. “Not only that, I managed to track down the Oxnard detective who originally handled the case. You might have heard of him. His name is Bruce Cunningham.”

“I see,” Nelson said, tapping his pen on his glass-topped desk.
Even if he had at one time worked with Cunningham, he tried to clear his mind of unnecessary details such as the names of former employees. “What problems do you foresee in pursuing this, other than the fact that we have had more than our share of recent homicides?” He had already pondered the opportunities that might present themselves if John Forrester’s story was true. When something sensational went down, he served as the department’s press liaison. That kind of exposure could be valuable in advancing his career.

Jameson cracked his knuckles. “You do know that John Forrester has been arraigned on a vehicular-manslaughter case in Los Angeles, right?”

The captain maintained the same stoic expression. “No,” he said, not liking what he was hearing. “Is the manslaughter in any way related to the Hernandez homicide?”

Jameson made a wavy motion with his hand. “It is and it isn’t,” he said, waiting for Nelson to nod for him to continue. “One of the investigators in Los Angeles who passed this along, Hope Carruthers, thinks Forrester might simply be trying to manipulate his ex-wife into paying his legal bills.”

“Are you saying her husband fabricated the story?”

“Not at all,” Jameson said, shaking his head. “I stumbled across a composite drawing of the suspect last night that would blow your mind. I don’t have the actual drawing itself. Someone may have accidentally destroyed or misplaced it during the Ventura/Oxnard merger.”

The captain frowned. “That’s unfortunate,” he told him. “It’s always better to be able to provide the prosecutor with an original document.”

“Yeah,” Jameson said, having no desire to listen to a long-winded lecture on the preservation of evidence. “When the case was hot,” he went on, “the composite was published in the local paper. I pulled it off the archives from the computer. If you hold the drawing up next to a photo of Lily Forrester from the county personnel files, the facial features are strikingly similar. This lady is shrewd, Captain. Trust me on this one, and not just because she’s a district attorney. She’s almost six feet tall, and from the
composite, she must have disguised herself to look like a man, knowing this would throw everyone off track. Most people would never consider that such a brutal crime could be committed by a female. The autopsy photos are pretty gruesome. Not only did Hernandez have a hole in his chest almost as a big as a football, one of his arms was attached only by a few tendons.”

“Your analysis, then, is the gender issue was one of the primary reasons the case was never resolved.”

Jameson said, “Precisely.”

“Give me the date of the article,” Andrew Nelson said, “and we can pull it up right now. I have a direct link to every major newspaper and news agency.”

Jameson rubbed his fist over his chin. Bully for him, he thought, tired of listening to people brag about all their links, channels, Web sites, or how they could put their fingers on just about any information they wanted in a matter of minutes. They even had computers in the patrol cars now, linked directly to what they used to call NCIC, the National Crime Information Center. When they weren’t conducting police business, officers could park under a tree and surf the Net on their department-issued portable computers. It was a crazy world they were living in, and Jameson was sometimes afraid of where it was all leading.

“You were saying,” Nelson said, pulling him out of his thoughts.

“I can’t tell you the date off the top of my head,” the detective answered. “To tell you the truth, Captain, I wasn’t rushing headfirst into this for a variety of reasons.” He proceeded to fill his superior in on the McDonald-Lopez homicides, the rape of Lily and her daughter, and how it all appeared to be intertwined. Then he felt he had no choice but to remind him that Lily was the person who had tarnished his career by implying that he’d falsified evidence in the Walter Evans homicide. “I mean,” he added, “that Evans mess went down almost five years ago. It’s doubtful if anyone even remembers.”

Propping his head up with one hand, Nelson took a drink of water as he attempted to think through all the underlying issues. “O’Malley can take over,” he said finally. “That way we won’t
have to deal with anyone claiming that you’re pursuing this only because you have a personal vendetta regarding this Forrester woman.”