The Tattoo Collector, page 10
If whatever lawyer she hired actually won an acquittal, they’d have to start saving for retirement all over again. That was if Donald could even find a job after the notoriety of a murder trial. Something like this shouldn’t happen to an innocent person. The thought that he might not be innocent crossed her mind again. What if his telling her about his dreams and then connecting it to the photo of a victim he had seen in a news story was his way of preparing her for his eventual arrest? What if he had, somehow, actually killed that girl? No, I refuse to believe that. But they had found his DNA on the victim. Surely, some of that DNA had come from semen inside the victim. DNA that matched Donald’s. That seemed to prove that he had done the crime. It had certainly proven it to the FBI agents who had arrested him.
Her phone vibrated with another incoming text, this one from Sandy from the resort. “I don’t believe the story I saw. Tell me it isn’t true.”
For a moment, Jean thought about typing that she didn’t know. But instead, she typed, “It’s not. Know any good lawyers?”
“I wish I did,” Sandy typed back.
It was then that Jean noticed the time on her phone, almost ten o’clock, time for her video visit with Donald. She put a long t-shirt on just in case the video visits were recorded. The jailers didn’t need to see a naked Joan talking to her suspected murderer husband. Jean connected to the site and logged in, flubbing the password the first time, hating that she had to do this on her phone with its small screen.
When she did get logged in, the video screen took such a long time to load that Jean was about to get up and reboot her wi-fi router. Jean stopped getting up when it did load, displaying the same empty chair and blank wall she had seen the day before, and she could only hope that the video would play cleanly when Donald sat down and started talking. He finally walked into the picture at 10:02 still wearing the striped jail inmate uniform.
“Hey babe,” he said when he sat down.
“Hi. How are you holding up?”
Donald shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m starting to question reality, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“How are you doing on the lawyer search?”
Jean shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s going to cost a fortune. I may have to cash out both our 401Ks. With no guarantee of success.”
“I don’t see that we have any choice. Public defenders are only good at cutting plea deals, which means I spend the rest of my life in prison for something I didn’t do.”
“Or we could spend everything we’ve ever made in our working lives, and you could still end up on death row.”
“That’s not going to—“ Donald started to say, but Jean cut him off.
“How the hell did this happen? How did your DNA wind up on that victim? And don’t tell me that someone is setting you up? In the first place, why would anyone do that?”
“I never said anyone set me up.”
“Then how did your DNA get there? What aren’t you telling me Donald?”
“There’s nothing I’m not telling you Jean. I don’t know how that DNA got there. That is the honest truth. Are you doubting me?”
He looked to be on the edge of tears, but Jean couldn’t lie to him. “I don’t know. This can’t just have happened. What did you do?”
Donald was shaking his head. “Baby, please don’t do this. Don’t leave me all alone. Everyone thinks I did this horrible thing, and I didn’t.”
Jean was crying now. She grabbed a tissue from the night stand and blew her nose. “I’m sorry. This is just all overwhelming.”
“I know. Imagine how I feel.”
Jean tried to give him a smile. The words “for better or worse” entered her mind. She and Donald had had so many good years, and now they were experiencing the worst she could imagine. She had to stand by him, now most of all.
“I do love you,” she said. “I’m just not in a good state of mind right now.”
“I love you too.”
“I’ll find a lawyer by the end of the day today. I won’t worry about the money. We’ll have to just trust God, that He has a plan.”
“I hope He does,” Donald said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ONCE SLOAN WAS finally back at the office, he planned to compare White’s time off records to the cases in New Mexico. He and Blackman had been in separate cars, both having gone straight from their homes to White’s workplace, so Sloan hadn’t been able to sit in the passenger seat and look at what they’d gathered. From White’s workplace, they had gone to the home of Patricia Garcia’s parents, meeting up with a uniformed Dallas County Sheriff deputy there, to inform them that their daughter’s remains had been found. Their reaction had been heartrending as so many scenes were, but Sloan and Blackman remained the ever stoic FBI agents. Sloan did tell them that they believed they had her killer in custody which gave them some small measure of comfort.
But Sloan was a little less certain they had her killer now than he had been then. On the way back to the office from the Garcia’s, he had called Agent Melissa Taggart to get an update. She and Agent James Malone had gone to the nudist resort the Whites said they frequented.
“A search of their travel trailer didn’t reveal anything. They only keep non-perishable food inside, and a few sheets and towels. Other than that, it was clean. It was hot as hell though. I guess they unplug the power when they’re not there. This Bob and Sandy they mentioned weren’t on site,” she said. “The lady in the office said that they usually don’t arrive until Friday evening if they come out for the weekend at all. And she said weekends after a holiday were normally slow. But Handyman Bob was there. Real name Robert Sadler. He confirmed that he saw both Mr. and Mrs. White in the hot tub at around 4:30 AM on Sunday the third of July.”
The coroner had put Patricia Garcia’s death at between midnight and five AM on that same date.
“And the lady also pulled up the gate records. The Whites’ code was used to enter the park at 4:37 PM on Friday July first and to exit the park at 8:43 AM on Sunday July third. They re-entered the park, or at least their code was used to enter the park, at 12:56 PM on July third. And they exited again at 7:24 PM on that same day.”
“And no one can drive out of that gate without a code?” Sloan asked.
“No. They have a generic code for visitors that changes every weekend, just so they can get out, or back in I guess.”
“So anyone leaving could have used the generic code?”
“Yeah. But presumably, no one but the Whites know their personal code.”
“How many generic codes were used?”
“Overnight July second to third? None.”
“All right. Did you get contact information for Bob and Sandy?”
Melissa sighed. “No, the resort wouldn’t give that out.”
“That’s all right. I didn’t think they would. Thanks.”
The first thing he did after sitting down and checking his messages was to compare the dates of the New Mexico cases with the work attendance and vacation schedule White’s manager had printed for him. Nothing matched. Donald White was busy at work in Irving, Texas on the days that four different murders were committed in various locations throughout New Mexico. Sloan was triple checking this when his alarm dinged. It was time for his call with assistant DA Lawrence DeLuca.
“How does our case look?” DeLuca asked after the greetings and pleasantries were dispensed with.
‘Well, the DNA swab taken from Donald White at the jail matched that found on the bodies of Elena Robles and Patricia Garcia. White’s DNA also matches that found in connection with four other murders in New Mexico over the past six months. And one week ago, Donald White was recorded by a Parker County Sheriff’s deputy trying to get into the crime scene where Elena Robles’s body was found.”
“All right,” DeLuca prompted when Sloan stopped and remained quiet. “What else?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? But that’s enough, right. I mean, shit, the DNA ought to be enough all by itself.”
Sloan took a deep breath. “I’m not so sure about that anymore.”
“What? What’s wrong, Jeremy?”
“Nothing else is falling into place like it’s supposed to. We have gate records and witnesses that show White to have been at a nudist RV park outside of Decatur when both of our murders are supposed to have taken place. Company records show that White was in his office in Irving during the time that all four murders occurred in New Mexico.”
“Is all that enough to establish a reasonable doubt?”
“You tell me, Larry.”
“Shit. You know I have to officially charge him by tomorrow.”
“I know. The investigation is still ongoing. But I swear, it’s almost like someone else with DNA that matches White’s is out there doing this. But that can’t be. Only eight billion people in the world and the chances of someone having the same DNA profile as someone else is one in seventy trillion. It’s impossible.”
“And you said White is an only child?”
“Yeah, but he’s…”. Sloan stopped, his mind working.
“He’s what?”
“I’ll have to call you back,” Sloan said.
Without waiting for DeLuca to say anything else, Sloan disconnected the call and pulled up Melissa Taggart’s contact page. Agent Taggart answered after the second ring.
“Where are you now?” Sloan asked.
“Eating lunch at a Panda Express in Decatur.”
“Where are you going after that?”
“We were going to go see Donald White’s mother.”
“Scratch that. Text me the address. I’m going to talk to her myself.”
“OK. What do you want us to do?”
“Go talk to White’s neighbors. I’ll probably head over there after I finish talking to the mother.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“All right then. We’ll go canvass White’s neighbors then.”
Sloan killed the call, locked his workstation, and grabbed the file folder of papers related to Donald White and walked out of the office. Sam Blackman had returned from checking White’s work computer into evidence and gave Sloan a quizzical look. Sloan ignored it, realizing after he exited the parking garage in the Navigator that he should have had Blackman with him as their directive had been never to interview witnesses one on one. But Sloan’s focus was on only one thing.
The drive to White’s mother’s house didn’t take long as Sloan kept at 85 miles per hour most of the way. The house was small and old, built probably in the 1940s, on Birchman Avenue near the museum district of Fort Worth. Sloan parked on the curb and walked up to the front door, making sure that his suit jacket hid the service pistol strapped under his left arm.
The woman who answered the doorbell looked to be about seventy years old with gray shoulder-length hair that hung loose and a pair of glasses perched low on her nose. She wore a long house dress and pink socks.
“Yes?” she said after she had opened the front door, leaving the screen door closed.
Sloan held his badge up so she could see it through the glass part of the screen door.
“Mrs. White, my name is Jeremy Sloan. I’m a Special Agent with the FBI’s Violent Crimes Division. May I come in and speak with you?”
Her expression grew cross, but she unlocked the screen door and opened it.
As Sloan stepped inside, Mrs. White said, “You want to talk about my son, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
She sighed and walked through the living room toward the kitchen, which was visible from the front door. Sloan followed her, noticing her crochet project on the couch in front of a television which was playing a soap opera, and sat when she motioned to the small breakfast table. She sat across from him, elbows on the table leaning toward him.
“I’m not going to say anything that will hurt my son.”
“Mrs. White, I’m not after your son. I’m after the truth. But to get to the truth, I have to uncover a few more facts.”
Mrs. White leaned back and said, “My name is Nancy.”
“All right Nancy. My name is Jeremy.”
“Jeremy. Nice name. What do you want to know?”
“I want you to tell me all the circumstances around Donald’s adoption.”
Nancy shrugged. “We went through an adoption agency, and it was a traditional closed adoption. So there’s not much I know about anything.”
“You don’t know anything about Donald’s biological mother?”
“If I did, that would have defeated the purpose of a closed adoption. It’s better that way. The kids don’t grow up conflicted between two sets of parents.”
It was Sloan’s turn to put his elbows on the table and lean forward.
“Nancy, this is very important. Was Donald a single birth?”
“A what?”
“A single birth. Or was he one of twins? Or triplets even?”
Nancy sighed and looked away, toward the refrigerator with its array of photos held onto it by magnets.
“It’s very important,” Sloan said after a long silence.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “When you keep a secret so long, you tend to forget what the true story really was.” She turned to look at Sloan again. “We were supposed to adopt both of them. And we were surprised when they only brought us one baby. Donald’s brother had to go into the neonatal intensive care unit, they told us. Something about his umbilical cord. He had come up underweight and struggling to breathe. He might have to stay there two or three weeks, they told us. A month later, someone from the agency came to our house. We were afraid that she was going to tell us that Donald’s brother had died. But instead, she told us that the birth mother had changed her mind. We were scared to death, of course. We had so fallen in love with Donald. Much to our relief, the lady said that the mother had already signed Donald away. But she was keeping the other baby. Well, our adoption wasn’t final yet. We were so afraid someone was going to come take Donald from us. When all the paperwork was done and we were officially named as Donald’s permanent parents, you wouldn’t belief the weight that had been removed from us. We, my late husband and I, agreed to never speak of Donald’s brother, either to each other and most especially to Donald.” Nancy shrugged. “So we didn’t. And I honestly hadn’t thought of Donald’s brother in over twenty years.”
“But you know that the other twin was a boy?”
“That’s what they said.”
“I don’t suppose you know whether the twins were fraternal or identical, do you?”
“No. That never even came up.”
Sloan pushed his chair back and stood up.
“Thank you Nancy. You may have just helped Donald and everyone else involved in this case a great deal.”
“That’s all you needed to know?”
“Yes, for now.” She didn’t look in a hurry to get up, and Sloan had other places to go and people to see. “I’ll show myself out.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AFTER ENDING HER video call with Donald, Jean showered and then got back on her phone. She made an appointment for 3:00 that afternoon with the William Masters law firm, what looked to be one of the most prestigious ones in the area. If they couldn’t help her or if they felt wrong for the job, she had the addresses of several other firms still loaded in her browser. The trouble was, how would she know if they were wrong for Donald’s defense? She had no clue what she was doing.
Jean then spent several hours answering texts and taking calls. She spoke to her mother, Sandy from Bluebonnet, Brenda from church, and several other people who had tried to call her. Talking about Donald and the arrest was exhausting, but she did it to hopefully slow down the calls and texts. At 1:30, she got up and styled her hair and then put on her red blouse and a checkered gray skirt. Just as she was about to walk out of the house, her doorbell rang. When she looked through the peephole, she was surprised to see one of the FBI agents from the day before.
“Yes?” Jean said after cracking the door open.
“Mrs. White? Could I have a quick word with you?”
“I was just about to leave for an appointment.”
“This won’t take long.”
She had planned on giving herself plenty of time to get to the attorney’s office, so she wasn’t in a big hurry.
“All right.”
Jean closed the door behind the agent and led him into the living room. “I’m sorry; I don’t remember your name.”
“Jeremy Sloan.”
He handed her a card which she looked at and set on the coffee table as she sat down on the love seat. Agent Sloan sat on the sofa across from her.
“I just spoke to your mother-in-law,” he began and then stopped. “Actually, let me start further back than that. We arrested your husband based on DNA evidence. His DNA matched that found on two murder victims in Texas and four in New Mexico.”
“New Mexico?” Jean said. Sloan had told her that there had been murders in surrounding states, and Donald had talked about Arizona and New Mexico in the dreams he’d had. “Surely, you don’t think Donald went to New Mexico without me knowing.”
“What I think doesn’t matter. My job is to document facts. Evidence. We had the DNA evidence which is convincing and a lot more reliable than eyewitness testimony. But the prosecutor always wants the strongest case possible. My job is to build that case. Normally, when we get a DNA match like this, we look to place the suspect at the scene through other evidence. But the evidence in your husband’s case kept telling us the opposite over and over again. The two of you were at that nudist colony—“ He paused to look at his notepad.
