Kem Nunn - Chance

I explained to Hammond that I wanted to question him at the headquarters of the San Diego Police Department and that I felt the college was not the appropriate place for an interview. I asked Hammond if he would voluntarily go to the SDPD headquarters building for an interview. Hammond told me he would. Hammond also told me he had no problem with taking a polygraph exam and that I could search his vehicle if I wanted.

At approximately 1830 hours Detective Lopez and I interviewed Hammond inside the SDPD Homicide interview room. The described interview was video and audio recorded. This report is not intended to be a verbatim representation of his statement. This is an “in essence” report.

Detective Lopez explained to Hammond that he was not under arrest and was free to leave at any time. Paraphrasing, the following represents Hammond’s statement in response to questions Detective Lopez and I asked him.

“I like Mexico. I go to Mexico once a week, sometimes more. I like to go to the racetrack at Agua Caliente and to the offtrack betting. I like going in the daytime because it is not so crowded. I go during the week. Sometimes I go to the red light district. I go to the Zona Norte. I go to The Alley in the red light district. The Alley is a club in the Zona Norte. I like The Alley because it seems clean and it is not too expensive.

“About six months ago, I met a girl in Tijuana. Her name is Jane. I met her in front of The Alley but, to be honest, I am not even sure if that was where she worked or not. I have been going to Tijuana for several years and had never seen her there before till that point. Her complexion is very fair. I always assumed that she was of mixed blood. We had drinks there once or twice but usually we would walk back across the border and go to my apartment. She had some kind of work visa and her English was better than mine. It has been a while since she called me, about a month. She would call me just to be friends. I have her phone number in my cell phone. Jane was nice. Some of the girls don’t like to go with me so much, because of the scars. But this Jane didn’t care about that. She was different from the other women I had met there. She is educated. She told me she was a teacher. I assumed she taught English in Mexico. But then once, when I was having trouble with this algebra class I had to pass for one of my breadth requirements, she helped with all of my math homework, to the point that I received an A-plus in the class.”

It began to blur a bit after that. The night ran to cold sweats and spasms, moments of lucidity bordering on the hallucinatory. Chance read on.

… I would pay her for sex and then a little more for helping me with my homework. I think it was about fifty dollars… for both things… She said she was doing what she was doing because she needed money to leave the country… She’s strung out on heroin… She has a daughter who lives with her mother in Ensenada… She is about thirty years old… She is about 5'6"… She has light hair… and light-colored eyes… She has a nice figure… The last night that I saw her… we met at The Sports Book near the racetrack… We were going to cross… We were going to walk back to my apartment… She got scared… she became very paranoid… An incident had occurred… It was this kind of wild story… not sure how much to believe… but she was definitely scared and wanted to leave the country… She thought maybe my sister could help as I had told her that my sister is a travel agent. She said she had met this guy… he had money and was a doctor… he took her to somewhere in the Bay Area… an expensive place with a view of the water… some kind of doctor like I said and he was going to help her get off heroin but all he really wanted was a sex slave… he’d found something out on her… that there was a warrant in the state of Texas… She was pretty wired and it was pretty hard to understand… He wanted to tie her up but she talked him into letting her tie him up instead then busted him on the head and got away… That’s all she told me and that’s all I know. I am willing to cooperate… to help you in any way… to find Jane…

Blackstone’s reports on the murder investigation of Gayland Parks ended there. A handful of newspaper articles found online, and Chance was at some pains to seek out as many as he could, had little to add. There were some salacious details concerning the psychotherapist-turned–life coach. A stash of child pornography, mostly pictures of underage boys, had been found in his condominium along with what was described as a “rather large collection of women’s clothing.” Details regarding the detectives’ trip to San Diego in search of the mysterious prostitute who was also good with math had apparently been kept from the press. A “mentally disturbed” homeless man under investigation for the rape of two high school girls in the city of Oakland, according to the articles Chance found, was being considered as a suspect.

And that was pretty much it. As to whether or not detectives Blackstone and Lopez had ever escorted Woody Hammond across the border to look for Jane, there was no record of it in Blackstone’s files. One could, Chance supposed, track down Woody Hammond and ask him. His address was after all right there in the report. Whether or not one could do this without rousing the kind of suspicion that might send Woody back to the police was another matter and Chance saw little point in risking it. Jaclyn Blackstone was now thirty-six. She was, according to Chance’s own reports, exactly five and a half feet tall. She had a nice figure and light hair and light-colored eyes. She was good at math. Her English was not half bad either.

In certain of the literature on dissociative identity disorder it has been observed that nearly twenty percent of multiple-personality patients have worked as prostitutes. It is also the case that many prostitutes have dissociative disorders and that prostitutes with such disorders, who are also victims of childhood abuse, are often amnesic with regard to their prostitution. But that was in the literature and Chance felt no great need to go there. Sometimes you just knew a thing.

Twenty-five hundred dollars bought for him the Austrian-made Swarovski EL 10x50 SwaroVision binoculars. A Japanese salesperson of no more than twenty assured him they were the best his money could buy and that he would never need another, alternately referring to them as either bucket list or lifetime binoculars, to Chance’s mind an unfortunate choice of words. He had presented himself as an avid bird-watcher and world traveler. Neither of course could have been further from the truth. The cash he placed upon the glass counter before him, a small portion of the ill-gotten gains from the recent sale of his furniture, was hardly his to keep as somewhere out there in the gloomy San Francisco morning an IRS agent was undoubtedly waiting, numbers in hand. And that was if things went well.

An hour later found him at the wheel of the Cutlass, parked in front of the Mongolian Grill at a long diagonal across a gutted parking lot from the European Massage Parlor where he had gone to case the joint. He was thinking of D’s concerns regarding surveillance equipment, this in concert with what Jaclyn had said about Blackstone saying he would handle things . What did this mean? What did the man know? What had he seen? Perhaps, with the high-powered glasses, Chance would see something that D had missed in the poor light with the naked eye. If nothing else, it was a place to start and the best he had, save of course seeing patients, filing reports, preparing for his coming court appearance on behalf of the Doc Billy estate, meeting with attorneys to further his divorce proceedings, or sitting with the IRS to hear their number. The thing about all of that… it was too sedentary is what it was. It was time… to ponder the mystery of Big D and every other fucked-up thing that had gotten him here, time to think about Jane and Jaclyn and Jackie and the things he had read in Blackstone’s files. And as of just now, he was running on empty, tapped dry by some weird type of information/sensory overload and sedentary was the last thing he needed. Movement was the thing, the engagement in something requiring his full attention, a high stakes distraction. It didn’t help that Jaclyn was unavailable for comment.