“It’s part of the board of directors’ selection process,” Mel explained. “Prospective members are encouraged to write individual essays explaining how and why they came to be involved in sexual assault prevention programs. Once the essays are written they’re circulated among existing board members.”
Maybe that was part of what had made me so uncomfortable at the SASAC banquet. Maybe the group’s ultimate aim was to help people affected by sexual assaults, but there had been that exclusionary sense about the organization—an in-crowd, private-club chumminess about the women, “those women,” an us-and-them mind-set, that had left me cold while at the same time leaving me out.
“So you have essays for all the other women on the retreat?” I asked.
“I’ve read them,” she said, “but I didn’t keep them. They’re painful stories, Beau, all of them. When I was finished reading, I ran them through the shredder.”
“Would anyone else still have them?” I asked.
“Maybe. Why?”
“Because we need to check. If the guy who attacked Destry Hennessey’s grandmother is dead and if Richard Matthews is dead, maybe some of the other responsible parties have met the same fate.”
For a moment Mel didn’t answer. Then, with no further explanation to me, she dredged her own phone out of her pocket, scrolled through some numbers, and pushed “send.”
“Hey,” she said breezily when someone answered. “Mel here.”
There was a pause. “Oh, no. The food was fine. Great. Not to worry. No complaints on that score whatsoever.”
Which told me Mel was calling Rita Davenport, her fellow SASAC board member and the lady who ran the catering company.
“So I was calling with a favor,” Mel continued. “You wouldn’t happen to have a copy of all the board member essays, would you? I’m one of those people who unload that kind of stuff as soon as I read it, but now I need to see one of them…You do? Hey, that’s great. If you could just shoot them to me in an e-mail…sure…that’s terrific. Appreciate it. Wrong? Oh, no. No, nothing’s wrong, and it’s no big deal. I just wanted to compare notes on a couple of things. Fine. Thanks.”
Mel closed her phone and heaved a sigh. “I suppose I’ll go to hell for lying,” she said, “because it is a big deal.”
Indeed it was.
Once back at Belltown Terrace, we did just what I’d said we would. Mel started a new pot of coffee. Then, armed with computers and notebooks, we began to go over what we knew and what we didn’t know.
We had barely figured out where to start when Ralph called. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Hold on,” I told him. “This is Mel’s story. You’d better hear it from her.”
I punched the phone onto speaker and handed it over to Mel. My trust in Ralph is well founded. He listened to the whole story without ever hinting that very little of what she had to say was news to him.
“What do you need from me?” he asked when she finished.
Mel sighed. “I guess I’d like you to find out whatever you can about the ongoing investigation down in Cancún.”
“And if they haven’t tumbled to your possible involvement, you’d just as soon I didn’t mention it,” Ralph concluded.
“Yes,” Mel said.
“Give me a while,” Ralph said. “But if you don’t mind, I probably should swing by in a little while so you can give me that retainer. With a situation this serious, I don’t want there to be any question at all about my being your attorney of record.”
One of the good things about working with a partner is that you gradually come to terms with a division of labor. Without our even having to discuss it, Mel opened Rita’s e-mail containing the SASAC board member essays. While she started studying those, I opened the file she had brought home from the office.
Mel had given me the broad outline of Destry Hennessey’s grandmother’s case, but the collection of articles gleaned from various newspapers laid out the story in much greater detail. I skimmed over the ones that dealt with the physical attack on Destry’s grandmother, Phyllis Elaine Hammond, and focused instead on what had happened to her attacker. Taking detailed notes, I was gradually able to gain a reasonably clear picture of the chain of events.
After serving four years for one count each of rape and robbery on seventy-nine-year-old Phyllis Elaine Hammond, Juan Carlos Escobar had been released from the North Utah Juvenile Correctional Institute in Logan on October 6, 2003. On the day of his twenty-first birthday, he had been driven to the bus terminal in Logan and handed a Greyhound ticket to Salt Lake City, where his own grandmother, Maria Andrade Escobar, had been expecting him. His bus ticket was never used, however, and he never arrived in Salt Lake, either. Several witnesses had reported seeing him in conversation with a nun near the Greyhound terminal an hour or so before his scheduled departure. Two days later, Escobar’s battered body had been discovered in an irrigation ditch on a deserted blacktop road outside Bountiful.