Stemming the Tide, page 12
During the spring of her sophomore year, though, the situation changed.
“She came on to me,” Mayer said. The sound of him hitting the table came through the phone and startled Mack. “She said she’d had a crush on me since cheer camp. She wouldn’t pretend to be interested in boys her own age, because she wanted me. All the boys were interested in her, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”
It was her idea for Mayer to buy her a burner phone. He didn’t understand why, at first, but she had explained it would keep their relationship safe from prying eyes like her mother’s and sister’s.
“She said that her family would never understand, they’d think it was wrong, what we were doing. I—I’d never had this kind of a connection with a student, but she seemed to know exactly what she was doing. She said I shouldn’t tell anyone, because I’d get in trouble. She said no one would understand or love her like I did. So I did what she wanted.”
Mack was struck by the familiarity of Mayer’s words. She’d heard these justifications before. Countless girls had told her that their abusers had said these very same things to them, trying to convince them to stay in abusive relationships. She wondered whether Mayer was making this up on the spot, or just twisting things he had said to Morgan to paint himself in the best possible light.
“We were in love,” Mayer insisted. “Morgan was helping me. When we got together, you can’t even understand how broke I was. A good dinner was two packs of ramen noodles. But Morgan helped me afford to get out of my mom’s house. She wanted me to go back to school. Said if I finished my degree I could be a real teacher, not just a coach. At first, she gave me what she was making at the vet clinic, but that wasn’t enough.”
“You know, I looked you up,” Dave said. “That’s some car you’re driving. Fully loaded F-150s aren’t cheap.”
Mayer scoffed. “She hated my old beater. If we were going to be together—really together—I had to get something she’d be proud to ride in. The payments…they just put me further behind. That’s when”—he sniffled—“that’s when she had the idea to start charging men for, you know…for doing it with her.”
The level of cognitive distortion driving Mayer’s version of events was insane. Mack could barely listen to him. She wanted to hang up and just get the highlights from Dave later, but she needed to know firsthand if Mayer killed Morgan.
“Morgan,” Mayer said, after a long silence, “found an article online describing how much money the right girl could make doing sex work. I tried to talk her out of it. I said I could get a second job, but I guess she was stronger than I was. I would never have forced her to do anything, let alone something so degrading as sex work, but she wore me down. She asked me to be her muscle, make sure that none of her customers got violent.”
“What’d you say to that?” Dave asked. Mack could hear the revulsion in his voice. No matter how many times they heard these stories, it never got any easier.
“I was just happy to help keep her safe.”
Mack rolled her eyes. You fucking liar.
The story continued.
“Morgan started turning tricks in July, and by August I could afford a tiny studio apartment downtown. It was a longer commute for me to get to school, but she was happy to be in the city. She ran away from home, stopped going to school, and started staying with me full time.
“I was thrilled, you know? It was like we were a real couple. She called me her hubby, and I called her my wife. Just to each other, of course, but still. I encouraged her to go back to school, to graduate and go to college. I wanted her to live the rich, full life she deserved. But she loved me too much to leave. We were like Romeo and Juliet.”
“Two problems with that, Coach,” Dave said. “Romeo wasn’t twenty years older than Juliet, and Juliet wasn’t the only one who died.”
Yeah, Mack thought. You were a Romeo. A Romeo pimp, more like. You convinced her you loved her, and she did whatever you told her to do.
“What about the tattoo?” Dave asked. “We’ve seen those barcodes before, but always on working girls. Their pimps pick them out.”
“I saw it online,” Mayer said, “but I was not her pimp. I never forced Morgan to get the tattoo. Didn’t even ask her. I just showed it to her, one night when we were getting ready for bed in that shitty little apartment downtown. I wasn’t suggesting anything—just showing her how crazy some people are. We laughed about it together. I never thought she’d do anything that stupid, but it turned out she liked the idea of marking herself as my property. She swiped her sister’s ID and used it to get the tattoo.”
Yeah, right, Mack thought. She didn’t believe Mayer’s story for a second. She’d never once met a sixteen-year-old who wanted to be someone’s property, but she’d met plenty of men who wanted to own a young girl. Unfortunately, she didn’t know how she could disprove Mayer’s claims. They could canvass every tattoo parlor in town, but there was no way an artist would remember a basic tattoo they’d given six months earlier. Even if they found the right artist, they still wouldn’t be able to prove that Mayer had forced her to get the tattoo. The barcode was a dead end.
“When Morgan disappeared in October, I was happy about it. I thought she’d gone back to her mom’s house. She’d begun using marijuana—and then other drugs, too—and I worried that she shouldn’t be staying with me anymore. She needed to go home. A girl needs her mother. And besides, the drugs were eating into the rent money.”
Besides, Mack thought.
“But she wouldn’t listen to me. She’d visit sometimes—like when we fought about money—but then she always came back.”
“And then she went missing,” Dave said.
“We were fighting. I—I slapped her, once. She was spending all this money on weed and whatever else she was using, and we were fighting. She said it was her money, not mine. She didn’t seem to understand that it was our money, same as the money I earned at school. Everything was for the two of us. Then I came home one day from work to find her phone on the bed. I never saw her again. Not at school, not at home, not on the streets.”
Mack wondered if he was relieved to have gotten all this off his chest. His story was bullshit, of course, but he didn’t know they knew that. From Mayer’s perspective, Mack figured he was congratulating himself on skating through the interview with nothing worse than a few bumps and bruises. He’d twisted things to turn himself into the victim and blame Morgan for everything that had happened. He wouldn’t realize how stupid his story sounded until the victim behavioral expert testified at trial.
Dave asked for the burner phone, and Mack was hopeful that they could use it to prove she had never called or been called by Morgan.
“I smashed it,” Mayer said. “Broke it into pieces against the bedroom wall. I was so angry she left—she didn’t even tell me she was going. I threw away the pieces.”
The burner was a prepaid Boost Mobile phone. Mayer couldn’t give them the number, because he’d deleted it. The asshole had an answer for everything. Mack’s limited experience with Boost told her that, without a phone number, there was no way to get call records. They could seize his phone and search it—if they could get into it—but she expected that he really had deleted the number. Mayer was an idiot, but he was probably too smart to have left such an obvious loose end.
“Is that everything?” Dave asked. “Nothing else you need to tell me?”
Mack heard Mayer crying. “I didn’t kill her,” he said. “I loved her.”
Chair legs scraped across the classroom floor.
“Jeffrey Mayer,” Dave said. “You’re under arrest for sex conduct with a minor and sex trafficking. Stand up, sir, put your hands behind your back.”
The call cut off. Mack considered Mayer’s fate. He’d admitted enough—even with his distorted view of events—that he wouldn’t get out of prison until he was a very old man. But he’d adamantly denied killing Morgan, and Mack was inclined to believe him. Morgan was his meal ticket. Mack suspected that, if they looked at Mayer’s bank records, they’d find that Morgan had been bringing in big money. Even if she’d threatened to leave him, threatened to expose him, Mack couldn’t see him sticking her in the freezer or dumping her in the desert in a Rubbermaid tub. It would have been a crime of passion, not a calculated single stab wound. Mayer was the type to claim self-defense—they’d struggled for control of a gun, he wouldn’t have known how it went off, and he would have had no memory of how she wound up dead. He would have called 911 himself and begged the EMTs to save her.
No, Morgan’s had been a careful murder—a murder with a purpose, planned and premeditated—and Mayer wasn’t that kind of guy. He would pay for his crimes, but that wouldn’t get Mack off the hook. There was still work to be done.
Chapter Nineteen
Mack was sprawled on her couch, napping under a fuzzy blue blanket she’d snagged at a white elephant exchange the previous Christmas. It was Valentine’s Day, and she was planning to spend the evening with reality TV and takeout Thai food. Alone again, naturally. Jess was busy with Adam, who had swapped shifts with another bartender to take her to Vivace, an Italian restaurant and fancy by Tucson standards, up in the foothills. The judge had continued the Dorothy Johnson trial because Noah Gardener, Frank Jefferson’s defense attorney, had filed a motion saying he needed more time to complete an investigation. He hadn’t specified what exactly he was investigating, and Jess hadn’t asked. The longer it took for trial to begin, the more likely it was that Mack would be back at work and able to try it with her.
“The motion is very dumb,” Jess had said during their brief call. She hadn’t wanted to linger—despite the burner phones, she was breaking the rules to have any contact at all with Mack, let alone to talk about cases. “We have DNA, and Jefferson’s story makes no sense. What on earth could Noah be ‘investigating,’ other than a hitherto unknown identical twin to explain away the DNA?”
It felt so good to laugh. There hadn’t been much cause for laughter in the last month.
Mack hadn’t heard from Anna in almost five weeks, not that she was keeping track. At week three, she had changed the contact in her phone from “Anna Lapin” to “No Thank You,” but then she changed it back at week four. If Anna reached out, Mack didn’t want to be reminded of her own pettiness. A box of the psychologist’s stuff was collecting dust by Mack’s front door—shirts, toothbrush, some books, and other belongings that were inevitably left behind when two people stopped sharing a living space.
She jerked awake to the sound of the burner buzzing on her coffee table, D on the screen. She answered, her voice thick with sleep. “’Lo?”
“Check your email,” Dave said and hung up.
The DNA results were in.
Mack scrolled through the charts to the summary. The sperm fraction of the vaginal aspirate showed a mixed profile, with at least three contributors. Given that sperm only lived in the body for a maximum of two days, it seemed likely that Morgan had still been working, right up until her death. Even if one of the profiles was a match for Mayer—a safe assumption—that left two or more other men unaccounted for. One of the profiles didn’t hit on anything in CODIS, so there was nothing to be done with that.
One, though, popped on two cases and was linked to a felon named Ron Simon. The more recent case was a drug conviction, just a year old, for meth possession up in Phoenix. When Simon was convicted, he would have given a DNA sample in response to the standard court order requiring DNA from felons to be entered into the national database. The older hit, though, was from an unsolved sex assault from 1999 in Tucson.
Simon’s profile, which had been entered on the meth case, had apparently not been run against the open-unsolved backlog, so his connection to that investigation had slipped through the cracks, as so many did. Dave had helpfully attached the police report on the old case for Mack’s review.
The victim, Eileen Travis, had been a very young sex worker—though the reports from back then labeled her a teen prostitute—and had been brought to the ER by a friend on the Track after a client had pushed her out of his car without paying her and taken off. The friend had gotten a partial license plate, but not enough for law enforcement to do anything with. Now here Simon was, seventeen years later, back in Tucson and raping another sex worker. This time, a minor.
This might just do the trick. Excited, Mack reached for the burner to text Jess and Dave but found that Jess had beaten her to the punch. They’d be there in an hour.
Restless, Mack got up and began cleaning her living room just to burn off some of her nervous energy. She folded the blue blanket, fluffed and reorganized the pillows, and looked down at her grubby sweats. Should she change? What did you wear to turn your life around?
Simon looked like a prime suspect in Morgan’s death. Mack knew that the DNA analyst would hedge her bets on the stand, wary of overstating the facts. Even with that caution, though, Simon couldn’t have left that DNA sample any earlier than about three days before Morgan died, and likely more recently than that. Rapists escalated. His last known rape was before Morgan was even born, and yet his interest in sex workers had persisted. He was a meth head, and meth was a disinhibitor—it wouldn’t have made Simon kill, but it might have lowered his inhibitions and allowed him to act on the same urges that had resulted in him beating the shit out of Eileen back in the nineties.
Mack called up OSINT, the open-source intelligence website she used for research on defendants, potential jurors, and witnesses. There was nothing law-enforcement specific about it, it just collected publicly available data and spat it back at anyone who asked for it. OSINT was used by people in all kinds of fields who wanted more information than a standard “getting-to-know-you” conversation typically provided. She typed in Simon’s name and scrolled through the results, looking for the right Ron Simon. Finally, she found the guy she thought she was looking for. A home address in a low-rent part of town, an old pickup truck, and several photographs. Simon was a big, grubby-looking guy who appeared to like expensive guns and cheap women. He worked in a butcher shop, one of the ones with the big old-fashioned freezers inside. Perfect.
Mack paced her living room, waiting for her team to arrive. She didn’t know if Simon had raped Morgan by force or through sex trafficking, and she wasn’t sure it mattered, from a strictly legal perspective. Either way, he was looking at substantial prison time if the case went to trial. On a personal level, she vowed that Simon would pay for the harm he had perpetrated against the teenager Mack had grown quite fond of since her death. Once upon a time, Morgan had been bright, charming, and on a good path for the future. If not for Coach Mayer’s intervention, she could have turned out like Mack—driven, devoted to her work, alone on Valentine’s Day, on administrative leave, a suspect in a homicide case. Okay, maybe ending up like Mack wasn’t a consummation devoutly to be wished, but anything would be better than winding up in a Rubbermaid tub in the middle of the desert.
Chapter Twenty
Mack was told that Dave got to Simon and Son’s Meats early the next morning and found the butcher opening up. Simon grudgingly relocked the door and accompanied Dave to the station for an interview. This time, Jess was present in the video monitoring room, and she was the one who had Mack’s burner, muted, on speakerphone. Mack, frustrated by her inability to be more actively involved in the investigation, was grateful to both of them for including her. Listening to a description of the interview later—over a beer or lunch—would have been more than she could take.
Jess texted her a photo of Simon so Mack could picture the large butcher as he sat across the table from Dave in the sterile interview room. Simon was in his fifties, and his methamphetamine addiction had taken a toll on his skin and teeth. His stained white T-shirt stretched thin over his stomach. He leaned back in the chair, apparently immune to its wobbling legs and the flickering overhead light. Mack wondered if he’d spent a lot more time in interview rooms than his two priors suggested.
As Dave went through the demographic questions and read Simon his rights, Mack was struck by the butcher’s casual tone. He seemed completely unfazed by having been accosted outside his workplace at six a.m. and dragged into the police station. Mack was used to a wide range of reactions from men in this position, but “mildly inconvenienced” was one she hadn’t encountered before.
Things started to get interesting almost immediately. Dave asked Simon to confirm his prior felony conviction, and expected that to be a pro forma question, as did Mack, but they were both surprised when Simon responded with, “Nope, not me. Never been convicted of anything.”
Dave took a beat to recalibrate. Mack heard papers rustle.
“This isn’t you?” Dave asked, and Mack knew he must be showing the prior paperwork to Simon. “Not even this packet from the Department of Corrections? Looks like you ended up there after a probation violation.”
“Nope, I never went to prison.”
“This sure looks like your picture on this prison pack, wouldn’t you say?”
“Big world. Lot of faces look alike.”
“Alrighty then,” Dave said. “Let’s move on, then.”
He began to lay out the basics of the unsolved sex assault, without mentioning the DNA results.
“Nah,” Simon said. “I never had to pay for sex. Certainly never raped no prostitute.”
OMG, Jess texted, his shirt rode up and he’s scratching his belly. It’s exceedingly gross.
Mack shuddered, glad she couldn’t see it.
“Okay,” Dave said. “What about this girl? Do you know her?”
There was a long pause before Simon spoke. “This picture doesn’t look like it’s from ninety-nine.”
“No,” Dave said. “This is a different case.”
“She came on to me,” Mayer said. The sound of him hitting the table came through the phone and startled Mack. “She said she’d had a crush on me since cheer camp. She wouldn’t pretend to be interested in boys her own age, because she wanted me. All the boys were interested in her, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”
It was her idea for Mayer to buy her a burner phone. He didn’t understand why, at first, but she had explained it would keep their relationship safe from prying eyes like her mother’s and sister’s.
“She said that her family would never understand, they’d think it was wrong, what we were doing. I—I’d never had this kind of a connection with a student, but she seemed to know exactly what she was doing. She said I shouldn’t tell anyone, because I’d get in trouble. She said no one would understand or love her like I did. So I did what she wanted.”
Mack was struck by the familiarity of Mayer’s words. She’d heard these justifications before. Countless girls had told her that their abusers had said these very same things to them, trying to convince them to stay in abusive relationships. She wondered whether Mayer was making this up on the spot, or just twisting things he had said to Morgan to paint himself in the best possible light.
“We were in love,” Mayer insisted. “Morgan was helping me. When we got together, you can’t even understand how broke I was. A good dinner was two packs of ramen noodles. But Morgan helped me afford to get out of my mom’s house. She wanted me to go back to school. Said if I finished my degree I could be a real teacher, not just a coach. At first, she gave me what she was making at the vet clinic, but that wasn’t enough.”
“You know, I looked you up,” Dave said. “That’s some car you’re driving. Fully loaded F-150s aren’t cheap.”
Mayer scoffed. “She hated my old beater. If we were going to be together—really together—I had to get something she’d be proud to ride in. The payments…they just put me further behind. That’s when”—he sniffled—“that’s when she had the idea to start charging men for, you know…for doing it with her.”
The level of cognitive distortion driving Mayer’s version of events was insane. Mack could barely listen to him. She wanted to hang up and just get the highlights from Dave later, but she needed to know firsthand if Mayer killed Morgan.
“Morgan,” Mayer said, after a long silence, “found an article online describing how much money the right girl could make doing sex work. I tried to talk her out of it. I said I could get a second job, but I guess she was stronger than I was. I would never have forced her to do anything, let alone something so degrading as sex work, but she wore me down. She asked me to be her muscle, make sure that none of her customers got violent.”
“What’d you say to that?” Dave asked. Mack could hear the revulsion in his voice. No matter how many times they heard these stories, it never got any easier.
“I was just happy to help keep her safe.”
Mack rolled her eyes. You fucking liar.
The story continued.
“Morgan started turning tricks in July, and by August I could afford a tiny studio apartment downtown. It was a longer commute for me to get to school, but she was happy to be in the city. She ran away from home, stopped going to school, and started staying with me full time.
“I was thrilled, you know? It was like we were a real couple. She called me her hubby, and I called her my wife. Just to each other, of course, but still. I encouraged her to go back to school, to graduate and go to college. I wanted her to live the rich, full life she deserved. But she loved me too much to leave. We were like Romeo and Juliet.”
“Two problems with that, Coach,” Dave said. “Romeo wasn’t twenty years older than Juliet, and Juliet wasn’t the only one who died.”
Yeah, Mack thought. You were a Romeo. A Romeo pimp, more like. You convinced her you loved her, and she did whatever you told her to do.
“What about the tattoo?” Dave asked. “We’ve seen those barcodes before, but always on working girls. Their pimps pick them out.”
“I saw it online,” Mayer said, “but I was not her pimp. I never forced Morgan to get the tattoo. Didn’t even ask her. I just showed it to her, one night when we were getting ready for bed in that shitty little apartment downtown. I wasn’t suggesting anything—just showing her how crazy some people are. We laughed about it together. I never thought she’d do anything that stupid, but it turned out she liked the idea of marking herself as my property. She swiped her sister’s ID and used it to get the tattoo.”
Yeah, right, Mack thought. She didn’t believe Mayer’s story for a second. She’d never once met a sixteen-year-old who wanted to be someone’s property, but she’d met plenty of men who wanted to own a young girl. Unfortunately, she didn’t know how she could disprove Mayer’s claims. They could canvass every tattoo parlor in town, but there was no way an artist would remember a basic tattoo they’d given six months earlier. Even if they found the right artist, they still wouldn’t be able to prove that Mayer had forced her to get the tattoo. The barcode was a dead end.
“When Morgan disappeared in October, I was happy about it. I thought she’d gone back to her mom’s house. She’d begun using marijuana—and then other drugs, too—and I worried that she shouldn’t be staying with me anymore. She needed to go home. A girl needs her mother. And besides, the drugs were eating into the rent money.”
Besides, Mack thought.
“But she wouldn’t listen to me. She’d visit sometimes—like when we fought about money—but then she always came back.”
“And then she went missing,” Dave said.
“We were fighting. I—I slapped her, once. She was spending all this money on weed and whatever else she was using, and we were fighting. She said it was her money, not mine. She didn’t seem to understand that it was our money, same as the money I earned at school. Everything was for the two of us. Then I came home one day from work to find her phone on the bed. I never saw her again. Not at school, not at home, not on the streets.”
Mack wondered if he was relieved to have gotten all this off his chest. His story was bullshit, of course, but he didn’t know they knew that. From Mayer’s perspective, Mack figured he was congratulating himself on skating through the interview with nothing worse than a few bumps and bruises. He’d twisted things to turn himself into the victim and blame Morgan for everything that had happened. He wouldn’t realize how stupid his story sounded until the victim behavioral expert testified at trial.
Dave asked for the burner phone, and Mack was hopeful that they could use it to prove she had never called or been called by Morgan.
“I smashed it,” Mayer said. “Broke it into pieces against the bedroom wall. I was so angry she left—she didn’t even tell me she was going. I threw away the pieces.”
The burner was a prepaid Boost Mobile phone. Mayer couldn’t give them the number, because he’d deleted it. The asshole had an answer for everything. Mack’s limited experience with Boost told her that, without a phone number, there was no way to get call records. They could seize his phone and search it—if they could get into it—but she expected that he really had deleted the number. Mayer was an idiot, but he was probably too smart to have left such an obvious loose end.
“Is that everything?” Dave asked. “Nothing else you need to tell me?”
Mack heard Mayer crying. “I didn’t kill her,” he said. “I loved her.”
Chair legs scraped across the classroom floor.
“Jeffrey Mayer,” Dave said. “You’re under arrest for sex conduct with a minor and sex trafficking. Stand up, sir, put your hands behind your back.”
The call cut off. Mack considered Mayer’s fate. He’d admitted enough—even with his distorted view of events—that he wouldn’t get out of prison until he was a very old man. But he’d adamantly denied killing Morgan, and Mack was inclined to believe him. Morgan was his meal ticket. Mack suspected that, if they looked at Mayer’s bank records, they’d find that Morgan had been bringing in big money. Even if she’d threatened to leave him, threatened to expose him, Mack couldn’t see him sticking her in the freezer or dumping her in the desert in a Rubbermaid tub. It would have been a crime of passion, not a calculated single stab wound. Mayer was the type to claim self-defense—they’d struggled for control of a gun, he wouldn’t have known how it went off, and he would have had no memory of how she wound up dead. He would have called 911 himself and begged the EMTs to save her.
No, Morgan’s had been a careful murder—a murder with a purpose, planned and premeditated—and Mayer wasn’t that kind of guy. He would pay for his crimes, but that wouldn’t get Mack off the hook. There was still work to be done.
Chapter Nineteen
Mack was sprawled on her couch, napping under a fuzzy blue blanket she’d snagged at a white elephant exchange the previous Christmas. It was Valentine’s Day, and she was planning to spend the evening with reality TV and takeout Thai food. Alone again, naturally. Jess was busy with Adam, who had swapped shifts with another bartender to take her to Vivace, an Italian restaurant and fancy by Tucson standards, up in the foothills. The judge had continued the Dorothy Johnson trial because Noah Gardener, Frank Jefferson’s defense attorney, had filed a motion saying he needed more time to complete an investigation. He hadn’t specified what exactly he was investigating, and Jess hadn’t asked. The longer it took for trial to begin, the more likely it was that Mack would be back at work and able to try it with her.
“The motion is very dumb,” Jess had said during their brief call. She hadn’t wanted to linger—despite the burner phones, she was breaking the rules to have any contact at all with Mack, let alone to talk about cases. “We have DNA, and Jefferson’s story makes no sense. What on earth could Noah be ‘investigating,’ other than a hitherto unknown identical twin to explain away the DNA?”
It felt so good to laugh. There hadn’t been much cause for laughter in the last month.
Mack hadn’t heard from Anna in almost five weeks, not that she was keeping track. At week three, she had changed the contact in her phone from “Anna Lapin” to “No Thank You,” but then she changed it back at week four. If Anna reached out, Mack didn’t want to be reminded of her own pettiness. A box of the psychologist’s stuff was collecting dust by Mack’s front door—shirts, toothbrush, some books, and other belongings that were inevitably left behind when two people stopped sharing a living space.
She jerked awake to the sound of the burner buzzing on her coffee table, D on the screen. She answered, her voice thick with sleep. “’Lo?”
“Check your email,” Dave said and hung up.
The DNA results were in.
Mack scrolled through the charts to the summary. The sperm fraction of the vaginal aspirate showed a mixed profile, with at least three contributors. Given that sperm only lived in the body for a maximum of two days, it seemed likely that Morgan had still been working, right up until her death. Even if one of the profiles was a match for Mayer—a safe assumption—that left two or more other men unaccounted for. One of the profiles didn’t hit on anything in CODIS, so there was nothing to be done with that.
One, though, popped on two cases and was linked to a felon named Ron Simon. The more recent case was a drug conviction, just a year old, for meth possession up in Phoenix. When Simon was convicted, he would have given a DNA sample in response to the standard court order requiring DNA from felons to be entered into the national database. The older hit, though, was from an unsolved sex assault from 1999 in Tucson.
Simon’s profile, which had been entered on the meth case, had apparently not been run against the open-unsolved backlog, so his connection to that investigation had slipped through the cracks, as so many did. Dave had helpfully attached the police report on the old case for Mack’s review.
The victim, Eileen Travis, had been a very young sex worker—though the reports from back then labeled her a teen prostitute—and had been brought to the ER by a friend on the Track after a client had pushed her out of his car without paying her and taken off. The friend had gotten a partial license plate, but not enough for law enforcement to do anything with. Now here Simon was, seventeen years later, back in Tucson and raping another sex worker. This time, a minor.
This might just do the trick. Excited, Mack reached for the burner to text Jess and Dave but found that Jess had beaten her to the punch. They’d be there in an hour.
Restless, Mack got up and began cleaning her living room just to burn off some of her nervous energy. She folded the blue blanket, fluffed and reorganized the pillows, and looked down at her grubby sweats. Should she change? What did you wear to turn your life around?
Simon looked like a prime suspect in Morgan’s death. Mack knew that the DNA analyst would hedge her bets on the stand, wary of overstating the facts. Even with that caution, though, Simon couldn’t have left that DNA sample any earlier than about three days before Morgan died, and likely more recently than that. Rapists escalated. His last known rape was before Morgan was even born, and yet his interest in sex workers had persisted. He was a meth head, and meth was a disinhibitor—it wouldn’t have made Simon kill, but it might have lowered his inhibitions and allowed him to act on the same urges that had resulted in him beating the shit out of Eileen back in the nineties.
Mack called up OSINT, the open-source intelligence website she used for research on defendants, potential jurors, and witnesses. There was nothing law-enforcement specific about it, it just collected publicly available data and spat it back at anyone who asked for it. OSINT was used by people in all kinds of fields who wanted more information than a standard “getting-to-know-you” conversation typically provided. She typed in Simon’s name and scrolled through the results, looking for the right Ron Simon. Finally, she found the guy she thought she was looking for. A home address in a low-rent part of town, an old pickup truck, and several photographs. Simon was a big, grubby-looking guy who appeared to like expensive guns and cheap women. He worked in a butcher shop, one of the ones with the big old-fashioned freezers inside. Perfect.
Mack paced her living room, waiting for her team to arrive. She didn’t know if Simon had raped Morgan by force or through sex trafficking, and she wasn’t sure it mattered, from a strictly legal perspective. Either way, he was looking at substantial prison time if the case went to trial. On a personal level, she vowed that Simon would pay for the harm he had perpetrated against the teenager Mack had grown quite fond of since her death. Once upon a time, Morgan had been bright, charming, and on a good path for the future. If not for Coach Mayer’s intervention, she could have turned out like Mack—driven, devoted to her work, alone on Valentine’s Day, on administrative leave, a suspect in a homicide case. Okay, maybe ending up like Mack wasn’t a consummation devoutly to be wished, but anything would be better than winding up in a Rubbermaid tub in the middle of the desert.
Chapter Twenty
Mack was told that Dave got to Simon and Son’s Meats early the next morning and found the butcher opening up. Simon grudgingly relocked the door and accompanied Dave to the station for an interview. This time, Jess was present in the video monitoring room, and she was the one who had Mack’s burner, muted, on speakerphone. Mack, frustrated by her inability to be more actively involved in the investigation, was grateful to both of them for including her. Listening to a description of the interview later—over a beer or lunch—would have been more than she could take.
Jess texted her a photo of Simon so Mack could picture the large butcher as he sat across the table from Dave in the sterile interview room. Simon was in his fifties, and his methamphetamine addiction had taken a toll on his skin and teeth. His stained white T-shirt stretched thin over his stomach. He leaned back in the chair, apparently immune to its wobbling legs and the flickering overhead light. Mack wondered if he’d spent a lot more time in interview rooms than his two priors suggested.
As Dave went through the demographic questions and read Simon his rights, Mack was struck by the butcher’s casual tone. He seemed completely unfazed by having been accosted outside his workplace at six a.m. and dragged into the police station. Mack was used to a wide range of reactions from men in this position, but “mildly inconvenienced” was one she hadn’t encountered before.
Things started to get interesting almost immediately. Dave asked Simon to confirm his prior felony conviction, and expected that to be a pro forma question, as did Mack, but they were both surprised when Simon responded with, “Nope, not me. Never been convicted of anything.”
Dave took a beat to recalibrate. Mack heard papers rustle.
“This isn’t you?” Dave asked, and Mack knew he must be showing the prior paperwork to Simon. “Not even this packet from the Department of Corrections? Looks like you ended up there after a probation violation.”
“Nope, I never went to prison.”
“This sure looks like your picture on this prison pack, wouldn’t you say?”
“Big world. Lot of faces look alike.”
“Alrighty then,” Dave said. “Let’s move on, then.”
He began to lay out the basics of the unsolved sex assault, without mentioning the DNA results.
“Nah,” Simon said. “I never had to pay for sex. Certainly never raped no prostitute.”
OMG, Jess texted, his shirt rode up and he’s scratching his belly. It’s exceedingly gross.
Mack shuddered, glad she couldn’t see it.
“Okay,” Dave said. “What about this girl? Do you know her?”
There was a long pause before Simon spoke. “This picture doesn’t look like it’s from ninety-nine.”
“No,” Dave said. “This is a different case.”
