Detective Wade Jackson Mystery - 01 - The Sex Club (37 page)

Wednesday, October 27, 3:05 p.m.

A young woman in her early twenties opened the door, and Jackson could see that she was Fieldstone’s daughter. She had the same dark eyes and glowing skin. She scowled at Jackson but let him in.

“How is Mrs. Fieldstone?” Jackson tried to disarm a potentially hostile situation.

“She cracked up. I thought you knew.” The young woman walked him back to the den.

“Dad, your favorite cop is here to see you again.”

Fieldstone was staring at a home remodeling show. He looked up at Jackson and shook his head, then gestured for him to come sit on the couch. Jackson sat. Fieldstone muted the TV but didn’t turn it off.

“Good afternoon, Detective Jackson.” The mayor spoke the words carefully but couldn’t mask his whiskey-sour breath.

“Mr. Fieldstone.” Jackson nodded. “Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

“Sure. I’m on vacation. I’ve got lots of time.”

Jackson reached in his shoulder bag for his recorder. “Do you mind if I tape? It’s so much easier than taking notes.”

Fieldstone shrugged, so Jackson started the mini-cassette. “We have all the lab results now. They don’t look good for you.”

“I imagine not.”

Jackson glanced at the door, where the daughter stood in the opening. “Please close the door,” he said. She looked at her father with disgust, then sharply pulled it shut.

Jackson spoke gently. He was here to sympathize, to nudge. If Janice Fieldstone had killed the girls, the mayor probably knew about it. And probably felt somewhat responsible. “We know you had sex with Jessie right before she died. You left body hair on her pubis. And she was suffocated with a sheet that matches the sheets in your apartment. You’ll get a life sentence unless you tell me what really happened. Start with when your wife stopped into the apartment and caught you with Jessie.”

The mayor looked startled. “What are you talking about?”

“Your wife. She killed the girls didn’t she? Jealousy can be a powerful emotion.”

Fieldstone emphatically shook his head.

“Tell me what happened.”

The mayor’s handsome face was distorted with alcohol and despair. His eyes watered copiously. He stood slowly and headed for the mini-bar in the corner of the room. Fieldstone came back with a tumbler full of ice and what looked like whiskey.

“My wife had nothing to do with this.”

“The baby was yours,” Jackson threw out. “I got the DNA test this morning. A son.”

Fieldstone hurled the full tumbler across the room. It missed the TV and broke against the wall. His daughter, who must have been right outside the door, burst in. She looked at her father, then at the mess of glass and booze, then at Jackson.

“Get out,” she yelled at Jackson. It was both a command and a plea.

“No, you get out.” The mayor shouted back, his voice hoarse and pathetic. The daughter backed away. Jackson was upset by the distraction. He thought the mayor had been on the verge of talking.

Jackson said nothing while Fieldstone poured himself another drink. But the mayor didn’t return to the couch. Instead he paced the room, pausing in front of the windows that faced the lush backyard and the forest beyond.

“I could have been a senator,” he said finally. “But I was weak and lonely. Does that seem strange to you? To be married and lonely?” He turned back to Jackson, clearly needing some empathy.

Jackson didn’t have to fake it. “I was married and lonely for a long time. It’s like being in a box with the only exit leading to more loneliness, and a big dose of stress and guilt.”

Fieldstone gave a little laugh. “I found another exit. It cured my loneliness, but it also led to stress and guilt.”

“Tell me about Jessie. She must have been quite a girl.”

Fieldstone hesitated for a moment, then—looking for redemption—began his story.

He had noticed Jessie the summer before at the First Bible Baptist’s annual potluck picnic, held at Armitage Park on the McKenzie River. She was blond and pretty and tall for her age. Jessie reminded him of his wife, Janice, when she was young, whom he had met in high school and married soon after. He couldn’t believe Jessie was only thirteen and a half. The way she moved and smiled and spoke was beyond her years. She was confident and friendly, complimenting Fieldstone on his softball skills. When they were alone together at the beverage coolers, she flirted with him, flicking her perfectly straight hair off her shoulders and smiling coyly.

Fieldstone had been flattered. He was used to being flirted with—it came with his job and his good looks—but that a girl so young would find someone his age attractive appealed to his vanity and his fear of aging.

“She came on to me,” Fieldstone said emphatically. “From that first day. She touched me in church. She rubbed against me at a garage-sale fundraiser. She teased me for months, and I resisted. Oh, I enjoyed it. I had not experienced that kind of sexual anticipation in a long time.” Fieldstone smiled dryly. “The curse of man.”

The apartment, he swore, was meant only as a place to escape to during long workdays and for his parents to use when they came to town. But then one time, at a prayer breakfast, Jessie had expressed a need for a place to get away from her mother. Fieldstone had invited her to his apartment. They had agreed to meet there after school, a safe place where she could talk about her problems.

The talking hadn’t lasted long. Jessie had her tongue in his ear within five minutes of walking in the door, he claimed. Thirty minutes later, Fieldstone was naked, spent, and stunned at what he had just done. But Jessie’s obvious sexual experience mitigated his guilt. He had not taken her virginity. Or even been asked politely if he wanted to tango.

“I know this sounds like blaming the victim, but believe me, that girl was a sexual force. She was the aggressor. At least at first.” Fieldstone sucked down the remains of his drink. “I got hooked though. In fact,” he looked at Jackson with guileless eyes, “I fell in love with her.”

Jackson’s thoughts went immediately to the orange panties he’d found in the mayor’s robe in the apartment bathroom. They didn’t belong to Jessie or Nicole. Were they Janice Fieldstone’s or was the mayor a serial cheat? Jackson kept his thoughts to himself and let the man continue. He hoped the mayor would get to Jessie’s death before the tape reached the end and needed to be flipped over. Fieldstone had probably forgotten that he was being recorded, and Jackson didn’t want to remind him.

Their sex play had become experimental. Fieldstone wanted to try everything his prudish Christian wife wouldn’t do, and Jessie was game. They were both into bondage, with Jessie being the one who liked to be tied up. Toward the end, though, Jessie had started showing up at their Tuesday trysts high on Vicodin. Fieldstone had mixed feelings about her recreational drug use. It made her sexually more pliable, but he missed the spark in her eyes and the sharp banter they had exchanged.

Yeah
, Jackson thought,
You were in it for the conversation.

The mayor continued his story. The last time they were together, Jessie had been high again. But Fieldstone hadn’t realized just how much she’d taken. He had tied her to the bed, face down as usual. He wanted to have anal sex, but Jessie said no, and that surprised him. She said she was too sore. And he realized that she’d been with someone else. Maybe even that day.

“At first, the idea of it bothered me,” Fieldstone admitted. “But I let it go. After all, I was still giving it to my wife every once in a while. And Jessie and I never talked about fidelity to each other.”

So they’d had vaginal sex, with Jessie face down on the bed, a pillow under her hips. Fieldstone had been excited, strangely turned on by thinking about another guy with his dick in her ass. He’d taken a Viagra earlier, so the encounter had gone on for a long time, maybe forty minutes. He remembered pushing on her shoulders, maybe even the back of her head. He remembered that she became kind of quiet, which was unusual for her. But he was caught up in his own passion and didn’t stop until he climaxed.

“Afterward, I said her name. I worried that she hadn’t had her usual noisy orgasm.” He closed his eyes at the memory. “She didn’t respond. I slapped her ass playfully, and she didn’t even flinch. Then I got scared.”

“I untied Jessie and rolled her over on her back. Her eyes were open, but vacant. I grabbed her face and shouted at her to wake up. But it was too late.” Fieldstone choked back a sob. “I felt for a pulse, but she didn’t have one.”

“She must have passed out from the Vicodin while we were screwing,” he said, his voice wrecked with alcohol, grief, and shame. “Somehow, her air must have been cut off. The sheet was bunched up around her face, and maybe I held her too hard. I don’t know. I didn’t mean to hurt her.” Fieldstone began to sob. “I was devastated. I loved her.”

“Tell me what happened next.”

The mayor wiped his face with his bathrobe sleeve and tried to control himself. “At first I couldn’t even think straight. I held her in my arms and cried.”

But when the mayor’s brain did kick in, it went into self-preservation mode. He had a career to think about. He could do a lot of good in the world as a politician. Nothing would be served by his spending twenty years in prison, he rationalized. So he douched her vagina to rinse his sperm out and combed her pubic area to eliminate his hair. Then he stuffed her body into one garbage bag, and her clothes and backpack into another.

Fieldstone had pulled on a baseball cap and sunglasses—which he often wore when coming and going from the apartment—and went out to the parking lot to turn his car around. With the trunk backed up next to the front door, he carried the bags out to the car and dumped her in. He knew it would have been better to wait until dark, but he had a city council meeting that he could not miss. And other people had keys to the apartment: his assistant Mariska, the apartment manager, and his parents. Leaving her body there for six hours was a risk he couldn’t take.

He thought he would take her out of town and dump her from a deserted road, but his phone rang. It was his assistant. He knew he had to answer the phone to give himself an alibi. Mariska wanted to know why he hadn’t made it back to the office. He told her he was on his way. After hanging up, he’d become nauseous. The idea of Jessie, dead in his trunk, made him want to vomit. So he’d simply crossed the alley and shoved her in the dumpster. Then he’d driven down the alley, tossed her clothes in a trash can, and returned to work.

“I loved her. It was an accident.” Fieldstone looked relieved to have it off his chest. He also looked smashed. “I want to make a deal. I’ll plead to a lesser charge.”

“What about Nicole Clarke?”

“I never touched her. I’m not sure I ever even spoke to her. I swear to you on my mother’s life, I had nothing to do with her death.”

“Let’s get you some coffee, then we’ll go talk to the DA.”

Later, as they drove downtown, a haunting question plagued Jackson: So who killed Nicole?

Wednesday, October 27, 3:35 p.m.

According to the return address information, Danette’s last name was Blake, and Kera had called every Blake in the Salem phone book. She’d taken her cell phone and the white pages out to the back deck just to get out of the house, but after about twenty minutes, the rain and wind had kicked up and, even under the patio umbrella, she’d ended up wet. So she’d come back inside and put on a Tracy Chapman CD, thinking it would soothe her. She had never been indoors continuously for three days. It was making her stir crazy, and she was running out of fresh food. Thank god, the alarm people were coming in the morning.

Kera made twenty-six calls, leaving fourteen messages and speaking to ten people who claimed they had never heard of Danette. While waiting for return calls—that would not likely come—she tried an online search, plugging Danette’s name into Google. A Danette Blake was president of Windhover University in Montana, but she was fifty-six years old. No other solid hits. Kera came up empty-handed from a search of Yahoo’s online white pages too.

She was not discouraged. She would keep trying the fourteen numbers where she had left messages until she talked to each of them. As a last resort, she might try calling her friend Cher at the Planned Parenthood branch in Salem, just to see if an abortion was scheduled, or had been performed, for Danette Blake. But that would be a desperate call, and she probably wouldn’t go through with it. It wasn’t fair to ask Cher for that information.

As she took out the Chapman CD, which had made her sad instead of soothed, her cell phone rang. Kera checked the number displayed but didn’t recognize it. It was a local number, so she knew it wasn’t a telemarketer.

“Hello?”

“Is this Kera?”

“Yes.”

“This is Rachel. I was a friend of Jessie’s. I need to talk to you.”

“Okay. When?”

“Can you meet me now at Starbuck’s on 28th and Willamette?”

“I can’t. Not today.” Kera felt guilty for putting her off. But she really did not want to leave the house until she had an alarm system installed.

“This is pretty important.” Rachel sounded a little desperate. “I know you care about what happens to us. That’s why you posted that safe sex message on our website.”