Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

knew.
    As it happened, Cloyd Steiger knew Yancy Carrothers; he had followed up on what Yancy had told him on two murder cases, and found that it was the truth. Yancy had helped bring about convictions in both instances. He had also helped prevent a jailbreak in which corrections officers could have been injured.
    Steiger had received a collect phone call from the King County Jail on the afternoon of July 23, listened to what Yancy Carrothers had to say, and within an hour walked over to the jail and arranged to bring Yancy back to an interview room in the Homicide Unit. Before he did that, Steiger checked to see if there was a prisoner named William Jensen on the eleventh floor of the jail.
    There was.
    On the way back to Homicide, the detective and the prisoner stopped at the property room and removed something from Yancy’s belongings—a piece of paper.
    In the newly constructed Seattle Police Headquarters, every interview room was wired for sound and videotaping. Yancy neither asked for nor was offered any payment for what he was about to say. He knew he was on camera. He showed Cloyd Steiger the sheet of paper he’d kept in his property box. At first glance, it was only a list of names, physical descriptions, addresses, car makes, and license plates—but it made an unnerving kind of sense as Yancy explained what it was.
    The three names were a hit list. And the victims-to-be could be found at those addresses or driving the cars listed on the page.
    Steiger had begun a more thorough investigation into what almost surely was a murder-for-hire plot. There were only three names on the first list he saw: Sue Jensen, Carol Harris, and Jenny Jensen. That was why he had driven to Newport Hills and knocked on Sue’s door late on a Wednesday night.
    She validated everything that Yancy Carrothers had told him about her husband’s vendetta against her. She just hadn’t known that he had already hired someone to kill her.
    Cloyd Steiger wasted no time. Early Thursday morning, July 24, he conferred with Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Marilyn Brenneman. She had been the lead prosecutor in at least two King County cases where greedy and controlling husbands had murdered their trusting wives, and she had been responsible for both of their killers going to prison for life. It had been too late for those hapless women, but it wasn’t too late for Sue Jensen. Marilyn Brenneman agreed with Steiger that they needed to move ahead rapidly to forestall any murder scenario that Bill Jensen might have put in motion when Yancy Carrothers hadn’t delivered as quickly as he wanted.
    Cheryl Snow, the senior deputy prosecuting attorney who was the new head of the King County prosecutor’s Domestic Violence Unit, was also consulted. Her unit had been concerned about Bill Jensen for months and had been responsible for his arrest and his upcoming court hearings. They knew a lot more about Bill Jensen than Yancy Carrothers did. Yancy didn’t know that Bill was an ex-deputy—but Marilyn Brenneman and Cheryl Snow did.
    And so, with Steiger, Marilyn Brenneman had agreed that they had to send someone into jail to talk to Jensen, someone who would pretend to be an emissary from Yancy Carrothers, so that he would believe his original plot was going forward.
    They could not do anything to entrap Bill Jensen; he had to be the one who brought up his desire for three murders to go forward.
    Sharon Stevens had listened to Cloyd Steiger’s request for her help, and she volunteered at once to become “Lisa”—a woman Yancy had described to Bill Jensen as someone he trusted.
    Sharon met with Yancy, but only to learn just enough about him and what he had told Bill Jensen so she wouldn’t give herself away.
    “I wanted her to go in there cold [about the murder plot],” Steiger said, “and see what she could get out of him, knowing just what she did.”
    Yancy had written the letter of introduction, and Lisa had been instructed to tear it up after Bill Jensen read it through the glass, and seal the fragments back up in the envelope.
    Sharon went into the jail alone, made that first contact, and came back to the Homicide Unit, where she immediately typed out a report of what had transpired. After another meeting with Marilyn Brenneman, the investigators decided to move their probe up a notch. They had requested and received authorization for Lisa/Sharon to wear a wire when she visited Bill Jensen a second time.
    It had been a technical