“I’m sorry, Anita,” Mel said. “You’re under arrest on suspicion of murder.”
Anita Bowdin was shocked. “No!” she exclaimed. “I’m under arrest? That’s insane. What for? You can’t possibly mean—”
“Oh, but I do mean it,” Mel said grimly. “Hands on your head. Now!”
Anita Bowdin did as she was told without further protest. By then I think she knew we knew and there was no need for any further discussion.
Halfway between the sunporch and the front door we met up with Dory. She was carrying a silver tray laden with a complete coffee service along with an ice bucket, glasses, and a selection of sodas.
“Call Calvin,” Anita snapped at the maid as we went past. “He’s at the office. Tell him I need him.”
We walked on. Behind us we heard the tray crash to the floor, glasses and cups shattering as they fell.
CHAPTER 26
Mel Soames and I had both worked high-profile cases before, but nothing could have prepared us for the storm of controversy we’d fallen into this time. It’s one thing for a derelict pig farmer to be murdering folks society is ready to label throwaway prostitutes. Cops who bring down a guy like that are heroes while, through some warped logic, society views those kinds of victims as somehow complicit in their own deaths—as in, they were asking for it. As for the killer? He’s a nutcase, to be sure, but he was also doing some of society’s dirty work, so let’s put him away somewhere and move on.
Anita Bowdin and her gang of female vigilantes turned that whole scenario on its ear. She and Destry Hennessey were and are well known and ostensibly respectable women in Washington State, with plenty of people who, without knowing any of the story, were ready to back them to the hilt. As far as those folks were concerned, the two of them could do no wrong, whereas Mel and I were nothing but a pair of malcontents who should never have brought any of this up. Ditto Todd Hatcher, who, I learned much later, did indeed turn his fifteen minutes of fame into a whopping two-book publishing contract.
What really ended up pulling all the various threads together, however, was a young IT wizard, also a friend of Todd Hatcher, who, search warrant in hand, went on a mission through Anita Bowdin’s computer’s hard drives. The information he uncovered there was nothing short of a gold mine.
Destry Hennessey’s initial position—that she had been duped the same way Mel had—went bye-bye when we uncovered and decoded a secret recording Anita had made of a telephone conversation between her and Destry. In it the two women not only discussed exactly when Juan Carlos Escobar was due to be released from jail but also how serendipitous it was that both Destry and her husband would be in Washington, D.C., at the time. Ambrose Donner of Bountiful, Utah, was especially pleased to hear about that one.
Anita was someone who liked to keep score. Several weeks into the now-public investigation, Mel and I found ourselves scrolling through one of Anita’s files that the IT guy had lifted from her computer. It was a chilling rogue’s gallery of the people she had successfully targeted and had taken out. With the exception of Richard Matthews, who had never been arrested, the record for each man came complete with mug shot, copies of fingerprints, and rap sheets. No doubt all that official information had been obtained with the help of Destry Hennessey. And side by side with each mug shot was a second photo of the same face, often a postmortem one, taken by a grainy cell phone camera and annotated with a caption that listed the date of death.
As we worked our way through the list by Analise Kim’s preferred LIFO fashion, the names we saw were far more familiar to Mel than they were to me. After all, these were “her guys”—violent sexual predators—who were dead now for crimes they had committed but for which they had never been either officially tried or convicted. It was only when we scrolled down to the last one—the earliest one—that we found another record missing its mug shot.
“What’s he doing here?” Mel demanded.
I had gone to refill our coffee cups. When I returned I was looking at the head-shot photo of a pleasant-faced balding man in a jacket and tie. The caption beneath it read: “Professor Armand P. Bowdin.”
“I thought he committed suicide,” Mel added.
“So did I.”
We went back through the now dog-eared collection of papers Todd Hatcher had amassed for us the day we started closing in on the truth. Searching through them all, we came up with nothing more than “died unexpectedly in his home.” A call to the Ann Arbor Police Department didn’t add much to what we’d already surmised. Armand P. Bowdin had committed suicide by taking an overdose of prescription medications.
“That doesn’t change the fact that his picture is here,” Mel said determinedly.