The Murder of Janessa Hennley (10 page)

25

The color monitor in the room next to the interrogation room, which was also the conference room, flickered a few times before clearing. Mickey, Suzan
, and one of her detectives, Taylor Yazzie, stood in front of the monitor and watched Jason Delasortos fidget in the next room.

“He’s nervous,” Yazzie said, “no doubt about it.”

“You’d be nervous too, in a police station after one of your ex-girlfriends was murdered,” Suzan said.

“Do you have the kni
ves back from the lab?” Mickey asked.

“
I did get confirmation that the switchblade had been rusting out there at least a few years. It had nothing to do with our case. Still waiting on the other knife.”

“Do you have a photo of the knife?”

“Just the photo I took on my cell phone when I found it.”

“Can you print that photo off for me?”

“Sure.”

Mickey
entered the interrogation room and placed the photo down on the table between him and Jason. He shut the door behind him and sat down, looking Jason in the eyes.

He was there at least half a minute before Jason said, “So, you gonna
ask me some questions or what?”

Mickey didn’t blink
. He didn’t say anything or even move. He kept his gaze locked on Jason’s.

“This is bullshit, man.
” Another long while passed. “Hey man, I’m just gonna go if this is all you’re gonna do.” He leaned back in the seat and blew air through his teeth. “Bullshit, man.”

Mickey sat across from him another hour. He never spoke a word
, and the only movement was the occasional glimpse to the photo. Jason tapped his foot and rubbed his hands together the entire time. He started pulling on his fingers and popping them, and then finally started swearing under his breath. Just when Jason was on the verge of losing it, Mickey spoke.

“You hid something from me about Janessa the other day,” Mickey said. “What was it?”

“Nothing, man.”

Mickey went silent again.
After about ten minutes, Jason stood up to leave but found the door locked. He yelled into the camera and called for the sheriff. Mickey didn’t move.

After a solid twenty minutes, and after Jason had kicked the door twice, Mickey said, “What are you hiding?”

He sat back down at the table and ran his hand through his hair. “Fuck,” he shouted.

“What is it, Jason?”

“She was into trains, man.”

“Trains with who?”

“Whoever, man. She was wild. She’d go to a party and fuck five dudes if she was drunk enough. She said she wanted to be in porn.”

“How do you know this?”

“I was at one of ’em parties.”

“And you had sex with her there?
”

“I ain’t sayin’ that, man. She
was sixteen. I’m just saying that’s what she did.”

Mickey
leaned back in his seat. “When was the last time she did something like that?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t keep up with her, you know? Last time I saw her was at that prick Nathan’s house. Last month. He got her really high
, and she gangbanged all the dudes at the party. Like twenty of ’em. But she didn’t want to.”

“And you just happened to be standing around while twenty guys
raped your ex-girlfriend?”

“What was I supposed to do, man? She dumped me
; I didn’t have no control over her. I tried to take her home, and Nathan threw me out, man.” He paused and looked away. “Fucker bought her a watch later to make up for it.”

“What else, Jason?”

He hesitated a moment and glanced down at the table. “I taped it.”

“Taped what?”

“The train. I taped like thirty seconds of it.”

“So you could jerk off to it later?”

“Nah, man. I ain’t like that, I’m telling you. I taped it on my phone to give to the cops. But the next day I called Janessa and told her, and she said to erase that shit. That she wanted to do it and to leave it alone. But I know she didn’t wanna do it. Not that many guys. She could get AIDS and shit, you know?”

Mickey didn’t respond for a moment. “Do you still have that recording?”

“Yeah, man. I got it right here. I thought she might change her mind. But she didn’t get a chance to.”

26

Mickey, Suzan and Detective Yazzie sat in the conference room. One of the techs, a part-time computer repairman who also handled the IT for the Sheriff’s Department, had transferred the video from Jason’s phone to a DVD. He set up a laptop to play the disc.

“Okay, it’s ready
,” he said. “What’s on this any… Holy shit.”

“Please leave, Randy,” the sheriff said.

“Um, yeah. All right.”

The
shaky, poor-quality video was clearly taken on a cell phone. Over a massive bed, where the headboard should have been, was what looked like an Italian Renaissance painting. Three nude women, plump and smiling coyly at the painter.

L
ike the women in the painting, Janessa Hennley lay nude on the bed. She was incoherent and groaning, and several men were raping her. Groups of them stood around the bed, nude and waiting their turn.

Mickey had to look away. His own daughter wasn’t that much older.

“Lord have mercy,” Suzan mumbled.

“That’s not twenty guys like Jason said,” Yazzie
murmured. “There’s at least thirty men on this video.”

“Do you recognize any of them?” Mickey said.

Yazzie pointed. “Yeah, that guy there, the big one with the tattoo, his name’s Roger something. He works at the gym downtown as a personal trainer. That guy there, the bald one, he’s Carl Tomsell. He owns that used-car lot you see coming in from the airport. Couple other guys, too. I don’t think it’ll be too hard to find all of them.”

The sheriff turned the video off. “I want all of them in my cells tonight. You hear me
, Taylor? Not tomorrow, tonight. You take who you have to and pick these rapist sonsabitches up.”

He nodded without saying anything and left the room.

“This isn’t going to be good,” Mickey said. “You don’t have a victim. Just Jason with his camera.”

“So?”

“Juries like a tearful victim telling their story. Without it, all these guys are going to say it was consensual, and even our witness is going to back that up.”

“The video—”

“Shows her having sex. She’s not screaming or fighting them off. The most you’ll be able to charge is sexual assault in the third degree. It’s a felony, but barely. Most of these guys won’t even go to prison. And that’s if you can land convictions by convincing a jury this wasn’t consensual.”

“But it’s a registerable offense. I’ll have these bastards pegged as sex offenders for a good ten.”

“If your DA’s like every other, they’ll settle with misdemeanors, non-registerable.”

She thought a moment. “What the hell do we do?”

“What we want is for them to give us everything they know about who was there and what happened. They won’t do that knowing they’re just going to get slapped with misdemeanors. What we need is someone to say that she was prostituting herself. Exchanging sex for something of value. Then it becomes exploitation of a prostitute. We can charge that in federal court and threaten them with ten years in a federal penitentiary, minimum.”

“Should we talk to Jason again?”

“No, I think we need to go to the source.”

Nathan Goodall answered the door in a bathrobe with his initials on the breast. He looked from the sheriff to Mickey
. “Can I help you with something, Sheriff?”

“Sit down,” she said, brushing past him. “I have something to show you.”

Suzan flipped open her iPad. The two men followed her. She began the video and turned it to Nathan. His mouth fell open.

“I want a lawyer.”

“No, you don’t,” Suzan said. “What you want is to cooperate and tell me everything, and I mean everything, Nathan, so that I don’t arrest you and send this video to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Not the DA, Nathan. The Feds. We’re talking federal penitentiary.”

“For what? I’m not even having sex with her there.”

“Exploitation of a prostitute.”

“What? She wasn’t a prostitute.”

“Jason told us you bought her a watch. I’m sending someone to Janessa’s house to find that watch, and then I’m going to trace where it came from. Knowing you, it’s probably something fancy. Something where the store will have a video camera. And guess what? That watch is payment. Sex for payment, Nathan.”

“That’s absolutely ridiculous.
And you guys can talk to my lawyer.”

“Fine. But we’ll talk to him down at the station.” She pulled out her handcuffs and slapped them on his wrists, pulling his arms behind his back. “You have the right to remain silent.”

27

Mickey took his medication and then topped it with another Percocet. He sat outside the Sheriff’s Office, really just a small town police station with two cells that likely never saw more than drunks and potheads. The sun was at its zenith, but the temperature never rose above seventy-five.

He watched people
passing in and out of the station. He’d read that the Kodiak Basin Sheriff’s Office employed fourteen uniformed deputies and four detectives. The detectives didn’t have specialties. They were sex crimes and homicide, property and gangs, narcotics and vice all rolled into one.

He wondered how they had time for all their cases
, but their pending cases board displayed only fifteen in the entire city. Less than four per detective. At the top of the board were the names of the Hennley family with the letters “FBI” written next to them. Apparently, the case had been passed on to him without his knowledge.

Mickey’s throat hurt
, and his tongue was swelling. It created the odd sensation of having to concentrate before speaking for fear the words wouldn’t come out. He took two ibuprofen he’d purchased from a convenience store before going back inside.

Nathan sat in the conference room right where Jason had
been, waiting for his lawyer. Suzan put him there because she wanted to watch him, since the cells did not have cameras.

“He say anything?” Mickey said, walking up to her.

“Just asked when his lawyer was going to get here.”

“And when is that?”

“I called him, and he said he was coming down as soon as he got a second.”

Mickey
examined Nathan’s face. It didn’t appear like Jason’s, panicked and uncertain. Nathan was calm and collected.

“He’s not afraid of us. He’s gotten off similar charges before.”

“I pulled his rap. There was nothing on there.”

“Did you run a nationwide?”

“No. I’ll have Yazzie do that right now.”

“
I can get it done faster.” He texted his secretary. Within two minutes, he received a message with Nathan Goodall’s criminal history, including his juvenile history, his credit history, banking information, email account information and phone records attached.

The sheriff looked at him like
she had just seen him walk on water.

“National security,” he said.

“You think a sheriff of a town of five thousand could claim national security?”

He
grinned and flipped through the histories. Apparently, Nathan liked to travel, as he had residences set up in Utah, Colorado, and California, staying no longer than a year at each. He boasted criminal histories in all of them, including charges for sodomy and sexual exploitation of a minor. A warrant in Colorado stated that he had failed to register as a sex offender six years ago. Another in Utah for forcible sodomy.

“I don’t think you need to worry abo
ut your registry,” Mickey said to her. “He’s already on it.”

After presenting Nathan with an extradition petition, he told them to cancel
his lawyer. He would tell them anything they wanted to know in exchange for not pursuing extradition. The forcible sodomy charge still pending in Utah came with a mandatory fifteen to life sentence.

“I’ll think about it,” Suzan said. “Depending on what you tell me.”

He exhaled. “I could use a drink. Do you have anything?”

“I’ll have my receptionist get you
a Coke. Now start talking.”

He tapped his fingertips together and drew in a deep breath.
“I moved around a lot. Did things I shouldn’t do and always came back here. What else is there to say?”

“Not about you, about the video I just showed you.”

“What do you want to know?”

“How did you get Janessa involved in this?” she said.

“I didn’t. She asked me about it.”

“About orgies with thirty strangers while she was passed out?”

“She wasn’t passed out. And no, I didn’t get her involved. She wanted to be in porn. She thought that if she made some tapes and sent them in to the studios, they would pay for her to fly out to Los Angeles. I told her I would just pay for it.”

“But she had to do some things first,” Mickey said.

Nathan put his hands to his face. “I want immunity.”

“Immunity from what?”

Nathan leaned back and folded his arms. Then he set them on the table. Mickey got the impression that he couldn’t get comfortable. “I can give you some people you really want. Some bad folks.”

“Unlike you?” Suzan said.

He stared at the table a moment. “I want immunity and a promise that I won’t be extradited.”

“Tell me what you have first
, and I’ll think about getting the DA down here,” Suzan said.

He looked to both of them. “There’s some men here that have certain tastes. Not just here. It goes to Anchorage and up to Homer. All over. They like younger girls. Not too young
, but like teenagers. They have these parties where they get the young girls to come and then they… drug them and do what you saw on the video. Then they trade the girls with other groups.”

“Trade?” she said. “What do you mean
trade
?”

“I mean they take the girl over to another city and trade her for some other girl. Or girls, sometimes there’s more than one. And they bring that girl back for the parties. Then they’ll trade her too.”

“Slavery,” she said, breathless. “Are you talking about slavery?”

“That’s not what they’d call it. A lot of the girls do it voluntarily.”

“You find vulnerable children, drug them, rape them, rip them away from their parents, and then have the balls to say it’s voluntary?”

He held up his hands.
“I didn’t say it was. Some of these guys do.” He swallowed. “Janessa was supposed to be traded with a girl from Fairbanks. Some black girl. She refused.”

“And so one of these assholes killed her, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I read about how she died and that’s… that’s what I thought. But I don’t know.”

“You sick son of a—”

“Sheriff,” Mickey said, “how about getting that Coke?”

Suzan held his gaze for a few seconds and then walked out of the room, shutting the door behind her.

“Sorry about that,” Mickey said, “she gets excited. You know women.” Mickey understood that Nathan, deep down, had to resent women to do what he did. “They’re all emotion, unlike us.”

He grinned anxiously
and pulled at his fingers, his gaze darting around the room.

“How many girls are traded in a month, Nathan?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have anything to do with that. I swear. I just let them use my house. That’s all. I didn’t even… I mean, I didn’t touch Janessa.”

“No one’s accusing you of anything, Nathan. We just need information. Who organizes these parties?”

“A guy named Bill Mathias. He’s an accountant. He organizes everything. He’s the one that called me about using my house.” He looked to the camera mounted on the wall. “Is that thing on?”

“Yes.”

He folded his arms again. “I want immunity. I can give you everything. I know all of them, I have phone numbers. Girls they’ve picked up… They told me everything.”

“And you didn’t participate at all, huh? Just sat back and relaxed.”

“That’s right. I didn’t do anything. I just let them use my place. They paid me a fee to do it, but that was all.”

“If you had to guess which one of these men
killed Janessa, who would you guess? Bill?”

“No. I don’t know. Maybe. Bill’s got a real mean streak. Short fuse. I guess he could do something like this.
There’s a couple of ’em that are real shady characters.”

“We’ll be in to talk about immunity in a minute.”

He left the interrogation room and found Suzan in the next room, her arms folded as she watched the monitor. She wasn’t blinking.

“I know Bill Mathias. I can’t believe this. Any of it.
That this happened, that these… things were going on….”

“The world’s always been a mess, Suzan. Nowhere’s immune.”

“My grandfather, hell, my father, they never had to deal with this.”

“Maybe they did
, and they just never talked about it. Would you discuss it with your children?”

She
didn’t remove her gaze from the monitor.

“You have to give him immunity,” he said.

“What? You can’t be serious. There is no way in hell I’m giving this sick bastard immunity.”

“You have to. He can give you
a lot more than he’s worth. This probably goes across the state. I think the Bureau field office should get involved. And the U.S. Attorneys’ Office.”

She shook her head.

Mickey stood beside her until she looked at him. “Suzan, I’ve seen things like this before. This is much bigger than you can handle. If you really want to help those girls, you have to let the Bureau and the U.S. Attorney take over.”

“Slavery. Slavery, Mickey. In my town.”

“I know. But you have to get past that now.”

She exhaled. “Call your field office.”