Page 22 of Den of Iniquity

I thought that was the end of the conversation, but it wasn’t. We were in bed and I had almost dozed off when Mel said onemore thing, and that final comment turned out to be the most important one.

“Drug users don’t ever shoot up with their nondominant hand,” she told me. “That never happens.”

She fell fast asleep after that. I didn’t. Maybe someone else had given Darius that fatal dose of fentanyl, but finding out who was responsible for that wouldn’t fix everything. Darius Jackson may have stopped using, but if it turned out he was selling drugs, learning that was bound to break whatever was left of Matilda Jackson’s heart.

Chapter 9

Bellingham, Washington

Friday, February 21, 2020

It pains me to admit it now, but back when I was a cop, I had very little respect for private investigators. I regarded most of them as annoying pains in the ass. They always seemed to be sticking their noses into places where they didn’t belong. And, from where I stood, their primary job was getting the goods on philandering spouses to improve whatever was due to their clients in the course of upcoming divorce proceedings.

Now that I’m a PI myself, the shoe is on the other foot, and I see things differently. Private investigators often function as courts of last resort for people for whom the justice system has devolved into an injustice system. Although I didn’t have an official private investigator license when I volunteered for The Last Chance, I was doing similar work there, gathering leads and tracking down evidence in cold case homicides that had been left unsolved fordecades. In my work with TLC I had helped bring down a number of killers who had gotten away with murder for decades and who figured for sure that they were home free. Much to my surprise, however, I also discovered that there’s a flip side to cold cases. My work for TLC has also helped exonerate two people who had spent years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

Having a PI license gives me the opportunity to investigate cases, but it doesn’t oblige me to charge for my services, and mostly I don’t. I’ve helped identify long unidentified human remains and located a missing person or two without a single divorce lawyer in sight. In the face of Jeremy and Kelly’s contentious marital situation, my divorce-free practice record might be about to change, but working to sort out what had happened to Darius Jackson on behalf of his grandmother made me feel as though I was still on the side of the angels.

And that’s what I did on Friday—I went to work on the Jackson case. Once Mel left for work and Kyle set off for school, I settled in with my notebook and started following up on the leads Matilda had given me. Ironically enough, I began by placing a call to my old stomping grounds, Seattle PD’s Homicide unit, where, instead of requesting to speak to my son or to Ben Weston, I asked for Sandra Sechrest.

“Detective Sechrest,” she said when her phone stopped ringing.

“Good morning,” I said. “My name’s Beaumont, J. P. Beaumont.”

I had been away from Seattle PD for so long that I didn’t expect my name to ring any bells, but it did.

“Any relation to Scotty?” she asked.

Karen and I had always called our son Scotty as a child, but once he started working for Seattle PD, I had deliberately banished that nickname from both my lips and my consciousness. I figured thatinside law enforcement circles, someone named Scotty might not be taken seriously. Turns out, I needn’t have bothered with that kind of self-censorship. Ben Weston wasn’t the only member of the Homicide squad who called my son that, and chances were, everybody else did, too.

“He’s my son,” I said.

“Good to know,” Detective Sechrest replied. “So what can I do for you today, Mr. Beaumont?”

“I’m working as a PI these days,” I explained. “My client, Matilda Jackson, has asked me to look into the death of her grandson, Darius Jackson.”

“Is this an open case?”

“No,” I replied, “it’s actually closed. Darius died of a fentanyl overdose on Thanksgiving Day in 2018. The M.E. ruled it as accidental.”

“Oh, that’s right,” she said. “I vaguely remember speaking to a female relative about that case several months ago. As I told her on the phone, once a death has been ruled accidental, the case is closed and we’re no longer able to investigate it.”

“Yes,” I assured her. “I understand all that, but on your advice Mrs. Jackson went ahead and ordered the autopsy report. According to the autopsy, the needle mark was in Darius’s right wrist. The problem with that is he was right-handed.”

“Really?” she asked. “Knowing that might make a difference, but I doubt it’s enough to reopen the case.”

“Probably not,” I agreed, “but I’d still like to look into it. So I was wondering, is evidence from closed cases still stored in that warehouse south of CenturyLink Field?”

“As far as I know.”

“I’d like to stop by and take a look at what’s there,” I told her,“but it would be helpful to have a case number. Would you mind looking it up?”

“Sure thing,” she said. “Hang on.”

She put down the phone, and I heard computer keys clacking in the background. Moments later she said, “Hey, Scotty, your dad’s on the phone. Want to talk to him?”

“Not right now,” he said from some distance. “Tell him we’ll talk later.”

That was a relief because I suddenly realized that Scott and Cherisse were most likely completely in the dark about what was going on with Kelly and Jeremy. The last thing I wanted to do was have to deliver that troublesome information over the phone while Scott was at work.

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