Kem Nunn - Chance

Chance waited until she had gone before opening the manila envelope, alone now in the room where they had once been together, recognizing at once the work of Raymond Blackstone…

On May 5, Gayland Parks was found murdered inside his apartment in the city of Oakland. I, along with Homicide Team 1, responded to investigate the incident.

Phone records obtained at the time suggested that Parks’s cellular phone was still in use and that calls were being made to parties in San Diego, California. Detective Lopez and I obtained permission to travel to San Diego to question the parties involved.

During the initial investigation, it was also learned that the victim, Gayland Parks, was a collector of Empire State Buildings. The buildings were made from a variety of materials, including paper. Many were quite elaborate and worth considerable money. Many of these collectibles were still in the original boxes or in plastic display cases.

After two days in San Diego Detective Lopez returned to Oakland in response to a family emergency. I traveled alone to Tijuana, Mexico, to meet with Detective Raul Moreno of the Mexican State Police. Detective Moreno was familiar with the case and informed me that Jane, whose real name was Jo Ann Patterson, had been picked up on the previous day in the Zona Norte region of the city and brought to police headquarters, where she had confessed to the murder of Gayland Parks but stated that it was in self-defense. She further stated that she had stolen several of the collectible Empire State Buildings from the Parks condominium and taken them to her mother’s address in Ensenada, Baja California, and that her mother’s name was Gladys Patterson. According to Patterson, her mother lived at 1416 Calle Nuevo in Ensenada, Mexico. (See Jo Ann Patterson Arrest Report and Interview of Jo Ann Patterson.)

Detective Moreno and I spoke to Gladys Patterson shortly thereafter and obtained permission to search her residence in Ensenada. According to Mrs. Patterson, the collectibles were in Jo Ann Patterson’s daughter Sky’s bedroom at that location.

The same day, at approximately 1530 hours, Detective Moreno and I met with Mrs. Patterson at her residence in Ensenada. Mrs. Patterson directed us to a bedroom where items belonging to Gayland Parks were recovered.

It should be stated that these items were no longer in their original condition but had been cut apart, reassembled, and joined with additional materials to make what appeared to be a dollhouse of elaborate proportions. The work, while of interest in and of itself, effectively destroyed the value of Parks’s original collection.

Mrs. Patterson informed us that Jo Ann often brought gifts to the room and in fact the room was filled with all manner of items, everything from dolls and dollhouses to jewelry and children’s clothes. When I inquired after Mrs. Patterson’s granddaughter, Sky, I was further informed that Sky had died at birth some eleven years prior to our visit to Ensenada.

Mrs. Patterson broke down at this point and began to cry. She told me that her daughter would have been a good mother but that drug addiction had ruined her life, then went on to give us further details regarding her daughter.

Jo Ann’s father, now deceased, had served in the Foreign Service for the United States government and had spent considerable time in Central and South America. Mrs. Patterson stated that she and her daughter often accompanied Mr. Patterson and that at the age of thirteen, while living in Lima, Peru, Jo Ann had been kidnapped by a guerrilla faction of the Shining Path and held for nearly a month, during which time she was subjected to torture and rape. Her father later committed suicide. As a teenager Jo Ann became promiscuous, having at least two abortions for which she later felt guilty. Her first husband was a musician. Both Jo Ann and her husband became addicted to drugs. He died of an overdose. She had a daughter she named Sky who was born addicted to drugs and who died in the hospital… Her mother says that in her opinion, her daughter was never the same after the kidnapping and that there were instances of cutting and other “strange” behavior.

During the conversation I asked Mrs. Patterson to explain to me when and how the various items were brought to her granddaughter’s bedroom. Mrs. Patterson essentially told me the following:

My daughter, Jo Ann, has, over the years, come here from time to time to live. I made her her own front apartment unit attached to the house. She sometimes works in Tijuana and comes and goes. As far as I know, Jo told me she is on her feet a lot and that she works for a flooring company.

I did notice that my daughter wears gloves whenever she comes to the house. She told me that she wears the gloves because she is always cold. I noticed she has been very fidgety lately and nervous. I suspected she might be using drugs again. I really didn’t want to know what was going on. Jo Ann spent about a year in a drug rehab center in New Mexico prior to this.

I’m not sure exactly when Jo Ann brought all the items to Sky’s room. I think it was about a month or a month and a half ago. She showed up with two duffel bags. She told me someone owed her some money and gave her what was inside instead of the money. She put the items in Sky’s room then spent considerable time constructing the dollhouse, which I thought was kind of strange but I also have gotten used to her doing strange things, and I guess I just did not want to know any more about it.

When, at one point, I asked Mrs. Patterson if, in the wake of Jo Ann’s childhood ordeals, any psychiatric help or evaluation had ever been sought, Mrs. Patterson informed me that this was something she did not wish to discuss further.

This concluded Gladys Patterson’s statement.

At exactly 0800 hours on the following morning, I drove to the headquarters of the Mexican State Police for the purpose of taking custody of Jo Ann Patterson. What I found there was a scene of considerable commotion and confusion. Federal soldiers had been called in and were present. A shooting had occurred hours before my visit. The shooting had taken place on the grounds of the headquarters and was believed to have been carried out by a newly formed splinter unit of the Tijuana Cartel. Three officers of the state police had been murdered. The station house was in a very chaotic state. I was informed that Detective Moreno was one of the officers who had been shot and that Jo Ann Patterson was no longer on the premises. It was unknown what had become of her. It was unknown if she had been hurt. It was unknown whether she had been abducted, or had simply found a way to walk away at the height of the confusion.

I spent one more day in Tijuana, but as the state police were occupied in dealing with the aftermath of the gun battle, and as Jo Ann Patterson was now very much aware of her situation and probably already gone from the city, there seemed little point in remaining. I returned to San Diego.

It was difficult, Chance thought, to know where the truthfulness of Blackstone’s final report ended and began, why he had kept it, whether or not it had ever been filed or really, when one thought about it, if he was even its author. She was after all handy with both language and math. But even if one were to take the report at face value, there remained the matter of the detective’s final hours in Tijuana and Blackstone’s claiming them as uneventful —most certainly the beginning of the great long lie that would one day do him in. For if it was true that Jo Ann Patterson had vanished into Mexico, it was equally true that Jackie Black had come home with Raymond Blackstone and Chance was at least thirty seconds in trying to imagine what all of that must have looked like before abandoning it in favor of sleep. What did it matter now, the thing that had taken place between them, the cop and the whore? Already, he felt it slipping away—one more bit of chicanery, of which the planet was already filled to overflowing.