Sadly, Ashley was reaping what she had for so many years sown … and it was a bitter harvest.
According to the case report, Ashley’s 1995 Hyundai was parked and locked in her numbered parking spot at Dorchester Apartments, a low-income housing project near the center of town. When she never returned, never paid the meager rent, and never picked up her car, it was towed and later sold at an impound auction for $325.
I’m not interested in Ashley’s apartment or the dumpy tavern with the gaudy red neon sign where she worked. I just want to see her car. I want to see if Sad Face touched it, sat in it, drove it, used the trunk. I want to see if Ashley’s shine is in the trunk.
Or did he just leave a sad-face circle on her window?
Perhaps Ashley isn’t one of Sad Face’s victims. It’s possible. Perhaps her age and height and hair are just a coincidence. After all, she doesn’t have much in common with the other victims—except Valerie Heagle, the prostitute.
Diane might be wrong on this one.
For Ashley’s sake, I hope so.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles shows her car currently registered to Jacob Aase, five-foot-seven, 155 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes. His driver’s license photo looks hollow around the cheeks and eyes. I recognize the look. His license is suspended due to unpaid tickets and his address is on the north side of Red Bluff.
Simple enough, right?
But when we pull to the curb in front of Jacob’s house, simple becomes suddenly complicated, and complicated becomes, well, frustratingly typical.
Planted at the edge of the dead lawn, snug up against a cracked and weathered sidewalk, is a red, white, and blue FOR SALE sign that looks like it may have aged and faded since being placed. The house itself looks naked: no blinds, no drapes, no ratty moth-eaten curtains. The large window to the left of the front door opens into a stark and empty house. The walls have a coat of fresh paint, but the lousy patch job on the abused interior walls leaves them looking pockmarked and worn.
Some would call it a quaint single-story bachelor’s pad, which is, no doubt, how the real estate agency listed it.
I call it a shack …
… with an apology to shacks.
The house is barely nine hundred square feet, has a noticeable downward pitch on the southeast corner, and green paint on the exterior that’s so far gone it looks like some faded, curling, alien fungus. The front door is off-kilter and even from the road I can see the frame is damaged at the latch where it’s been booted open more than once—either by cops or crooks, maybe both.
And those are the better features.
The crowning glory is so redneck I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream: someone has stapled a giant blue tarp to the roof. Bright blue. Big. Yacht-sized. It covers most of the backside of the roof and drapes over the peak by several feet, giving the house a fluorescent-blue Mohawk.
“Safe to say Jacob Aase doesn’t live here anymore,” I say casually.
“Safe to say,” Jimmy echoes.
We stand at the sidewalk a moment just staring at the house, wondering what our next move is. After a moment Jimmy says, “Tweaker TV,” and points to the front door. My eyes follow his finger and I see it, hidden above the door and tucked up under the eaves.
“There’s another one.” This time Jimmy points to the right front corner of the house.
“Probably a couple more in the back and one on the other side,” I say.
Tweaker TV.
It’s a bit of a joke within law enforcement. Whenever you see a $500 house with $2,000 worth of surveillance equipment, it’s a good bet you’re dealing with drug dealers, meth cooks, or a nest of dope fiends. Sometimes it’s just one monitor and a single camera at the front door. Other times it’s a wall of monitors, each dedicated to a single camera.
The tweakers—meth addicts, so named because of their sudden, jerky, tweaky mannerisms—have a particular affinity for surveillance cameras, especially when they haven’t slept for days on end and paranoia and hallucinations are starting to kick in. When that happens, Tweaker TV is the best show on the box.
“Looks like they left in a hurry,” I say. “Didn’t even take the cameras.”
“Why bother?” Jimmy replies. “They can steal more.”
Both Jimmy and I know what this means. It’s not just that Jacob Aase has relocated, he’s likely an addict or a dealer, which means tracking him down is going to be problematic. It’s easy to get lost in the drug community. There are always flophouses, drug dens, motor homes, and transient camps to disappear into.
“What now?”
“Call Diane.” Jimmy sighs. “See what she can dig up. I’ll call the PD and see what they have on Jacob.”
*
Sometimes it all comes down to luck … or good timing.
I’m still on the phone listening to Diane churn through one database after another in a high-speed digital pursuit of the elusive Mr. Aase when Jimmy taps me on the shoulder, grins, and says, “We caught a break.”
Back in the car, Jimmy tries pulling a U-turn from the curb, but the rental—luxurious as it is—has the turning radius of a nine-legged pig. After three trips to drive and two trips to reverse we finally get straightened out, and Jimmy starts to fill me in.
It seems that Jacob Aase landed himself in the Tehama County Jail three weeks ago after multiple motorists called to report a naked man walking down the center of Manzanita Avenue swearing at cars as they passed by and sometimes cowering behind light poles talking to himself.
After a ten-day meth binge, Jacob was tweaking hard. The skin on his face and right arm was covered in red sores where he had repeatedly picked at the imaginary bugs under his skin—meth mites—until he was covered in scabs, then he picked the scabs. Then he picked some more.