following among the city's law enforcement crowd. A three-dollar tray
of grease dished out by lunch ladies in hair nets had a certain retro
appeal.
I exercised some moderation and got a bowl of oatmeal while Garcia
waited for his plate to be loaded up with bacon and home fries. After
he'd paid for our meals, he led me to a corner table.
"Jack Walker, Raymond Johnson, this is Samantha Kincaid."
I shook their hands. Jack Walker was a beefy man in his fifties,
starting to lose his hair, with a full mustache. His short-sleeved
dress shirt stretched tight across his belly, the buttons pulling in
front. His grip was almost painfully firm, and his palms were rough.
He looked like a cop, through and through.
Johnson was a different story altogether. A tall well-built African
American in his mid-thirties, Raymond Johnson looked and dressed like a
GQ model. He wore a collarless shirt with a three-button charcoal
suit. His hair was close-cropped, and he wore a diamond stud in his
left ear. He shook my hand and held it just a little longer than
necessary, which was fine with me.
"It's nice to meet you both," I said. "I've seen you around the
courthouse, but I don't think we've ever actually met."
Jack Walker spoke first. "Yeah, likewise. I've been hearing a lot of
good things about you from Tommy, here, and Chuck Forbes says you guys
go way back."
Suddenly, Johnson's handshake made a little more sense. To say that
Chuck Forbes and I go way back is to sanitize the situation
considerably. I didn't think Chuck would tell all to his cop buddies,
but I wouldn't be surprised if he had said something in a certain way
with that grin of his that would clue a guy like Raymond Johnson in to
the gist of his reminiscing.
I hoped I wasn't blushing. "Well, I don't want to disappoint you, but
it's a long shot that I'll be able to help." I asked them to tell me
about the case from the beginning, and Johnson took over.
"We got the call around three on Sunday morning. A group of high
school kids went out near Multnomah Falls to party. They were all
pretty drunk, and a couple of them hiked into the forest to get it on.
The girl tripped over what she thought was a log. Turns out the log
was Kendra Martin."
He explained the facts in detail; I could see why he enjoyed a
reputation among the DDAs as one of the bureau's best witnesses. "She
was wearing a bra and a skirt pulled up over her hips, nothing else. No
purse, no ID. Real beat up, finger marks on her neck, blood coming out
of her bottom." I looked down, trying to hide my discomfort. Johnson
continued. "The kids called police and medical. Looking at her,
everyone assumed the worst. Her pulse was slow, she wasn't moving or
talking, her face and body were covered with blood. The med techs took
her straight to Emanuel Legacy, and patrol cops called in MCT. We page
O'Donnell and tell him what we have, and he says we don't need a DA to
come out. We don't have a suspect in custody yet, and the scene where
we found the vie, even if it turns out to be the crime scene, is
already fucked up by the high school kids. He tells us to keep working
and to page him if we get a suspect or if anything big comes up over
the weekend."
This was promising to be a long meeting if Johnson didn't speed it up,
so I broke in. "How'd you guys split up the investigation?"
"Chuck and his partner, Mike Calabrese, supervised patrol in securing
the scene, and Jack and I went to Emanuel to follow up with the vie. By
the time we arrive, she's been there almost an hour and doing a lot
better. The ER doc told us that most of the blood was from the anal
tearing and a single large laceration on her face. She was out of it
and had a slow pulse because she was on heroin. To be on the safe
side, the doctor gave her Narcan to knock the heroin out of her system
and keep her from ODing. She was bruised up pretty bad, but she was
basically OK by the time we got to the hospital."
"So that's when you realized it wasn't a Major Crimes Team case after
all," I said, letting them know that Garcia had already filled me in on
the jurisdictional problems.
Jack Walker responded. As the senior detective he probably felt the
need to justify the decision to keep the case with MCT. "Depends on
how you look at it. Yeah, if patrol had known at the scene what the
vicactual injuries were, they probably wouldn't have called us out. But
once we got involved, we had a teenage vie saying that a couple guys
pulled her into their car and raped and beat her. She told the doc she
didn't know how heroin wound up in her system; that they must have
injected her during the assault without her realizing it. It looked
like a straight stranger-to-stranger kidnap, doping, rape, and sod of a
little girl. It didn't seem right to bump the case down to shift
detectives."
"What charge did you use to hang on to the case, attempted murder?" I
asked.
Walker nodded. "Yeah, we decided we had enough. Actually, it's an
attempted agg, since the girl's under fourteen."
Intentionally killing a person under fourteen is aggravated murder,
which can carry a death sentence. Luckily, Kendra Martin didn't die,
so the defendants would at most be charged with Attempted Aggravated
Murder.
"So what did you do after you decided to keep the case?" I asked.
Johnson answered. "We go in to talk to her, and I'm telling you the
girl was a real piece of work, cussing us out, calling us every name in
the book. Accusing us of keeping her there against her will when there
was nothing wrong with her so SCF would make her go home." Runaways
were notoriously distrustful of the state's Services for Children and
Families department.
"She wasn't making a lot of sense, so we had to explain to her that we
were there to investigate her statement to the doctor. That calmed her
down a little. Still pretty bitchy, though." Johnson caught himself
and looked over at Garcia for a read on his choice of words. I assured
him his candor was fine and asked him to continue as I pulled a legal
pad from my briefcase.
"Anyway, the vie initially said she was walking in Old Town around ten
on Saturday night, on her way to Powell's Books, when Suspect One comes
up from behind and pushes her into the backseat of what she called a"
he looked down at his notebook " 'some big, seventies, four-door, loser
shit box." Said it was a dark color. Suspect One gets in back with
her while Suspect Two drives to a parking lot somewhere in southeast
Portland.
"She says Suspect One acted like the one in charge. He starts getting
real rough with her in the backseat, saying a lot of dirty stuff and
pulling her clothes off. Thing is, right when she thinks he's about to