Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(17)
The story also quoted a traffic-accident investigator from the Dallas Police Department. Todd Whitney said he wouldn’t close the case until he was confident the death of Jamie Flynn was an accident.
“A young healthy woman with a lot going for her doesn’t just go off the road and down into a ravine and get her neck broken,” he said. “It may be purely an accident. She could have seen a deer or something and swerved. But there are no skid marks and no animal tracks. I wish I could tell her parents I have the answers, but I don’t. Not yet.”
I noted that there was nothing in the story about whether Jamie Flynn might have driven off the road on purpose in an attempt to disguise a suicide as an accident. It was not an uncommon occurrence. But if it had been considered, it was not publicly reported. There was such a stigma attached to suicide that most newspapers avoided it like the plague. It was only when public figures offed themselves that suicide stories were written.
I moved on for the moment from Jamie Flynn. I wanted to keep my momentum. I was certain that I was closing in on something and did not want to be delayed.
7
The last case I reviewed was the first mentioned on the causes-of-death message board. It had been posted with a short case summary. The death of thirty-two-year-old Mallory Yates in Fort Lauderdale was open and being treated as a homicide because, like the case in Dallas, there were incongruities about the supposed traffic accident that took her life. Histamine levels in some of the wounds to her body suggested that the injuries were postmortem and the accident was staged. But moving on from the post, I found no funeral notice or news story about the case. A second-tier search brought up a Facebook page that was publicly accessible and had been turned into a memorial page for Yates. There were dozens of messages posted by friends and family in the sixteen months since her death. I scrolled through them quickly, picking up bits and pieces of the dead woman’s history and updates on her case.
I learned that Mallory had grown up in Fort Lauderdale, had attended Catholic schools and gone to work in her family’s boat-rental business operating out of a marina called Bahia Mar. She had apparently not attended college after high school and, like Jamie Flynn in Fort Worth, lived alone in a home owned by her father. Her mother was deceased. Several of the Facebook posts were messages of condolence directed to her father in regard to losing both his wife and daughter in the space of two years.
A message posted three weeks after Mallory’s death caught my eye and brought my casual scroll through the page to a dead stop. Someone named Ed Yeagers posted a message of sympathy that identified Mallory as his third cousin and lamented that they were just getting acquainted when she was taken away. He said, “I was just getting to know you and wish there was more time. Profoundly sad to find family and then lose family in the same month.”
That sentiment could have come from the obituary for Charlotte Taggart. Finding family in this day and age usually meant DNA. There were heredity-analytics companies that used online data to search for family connections but DNA was the shortcut. I was now convinced that both Charlotte Taggart and Mallory Yates had been searching for connections through DNA heritage analysis. And so had Christina Portrero. The coincidence extended to three of the women and might include all four.
I spent the next twenty minutes running down social-media links to relatives and friends of Mallory Yates and Charlotte Taggart. I sent every one of them the same message asking if their loved one had submitted DNA to an analytics company and, if so, which one. Even before I finished I got an email response from Ed Yeagers.
Met her through GT23. It was only 6 weeks before she died so never got the chance to meet in person. Seemed like a really good girl. What a shame.
My adrenaline hit the floodgates. I had two confirmed cases that shared a rare cause of death and submission of DNA to GT23. I quickly went back to the story about Jamie Flynn in the Fort Worth paper and got the name of her father and the family business he ran, selling boots, belts, and equestrian products like saddles and reins. I googled the business, got a phone number for the main office, and called it. A woman answered and I asked for Walter Flynn.
“Can I ask what this is regarding?” she asked.
“His daughter Jamie,” I said.
Nobody likes to cause someone more grief than they already carry. I knew that I would do that with this phone call. But I also knew that if I was right about my instincts I might eventually be able to lessen that grief with answers.
A man picked up the call after a very brief hold.
“Walt Flynn, what can I do for you?”
He had a no-nonsense Texas drawl that I guessed went back generations. In my head I pictured the Marlboro Man in a white Stetson sitting on a horse, his chiseled features set in a frown. I chose my words carefully, not wanting him to dismiss me or grow angry.
“Mr. Flynn, I’m sorry to disturb you. I’m a reporter calling from Los Angeles and I’m working on a story about the unexplained deaths of several women.”
I waited. The bait had been thrown out. He would either bite or hang up on me.
“And this is about my daughter?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, it could be,” I said.
I didn’t fill the silence that followed. I started to hear a background noise, like running water.
“I’m listening,” he said.
“Sir, I don’t want to cause you any more grief than you’re already going through,” I said. “I am so sorry about the loss of your daughter. But can I speak frankly to you?”