“The problem is, we don’t even know where she is” or, worse, what pimp and/or drug dealer she was now beholden to. In a November 2017 phone call, Tess was hopped up on crystal meth, Patricia believed, and paranoid that “gang stalkers” were trying to kill her. As she walked down the streets of Las Vegas, she thought people in passing cars were flashing their lights at her. She thought strangers were shouting her son’s name.
“All Tess has to do is tell us where she is, and the treatment people will come and pick her up.”
Of the 132 addicted users who had come to the Hope Initiative in its first year, fewer than ten had gone to residential treatment and stayed sober.
But Patricia still slept with her cellphone every night, waiting and praying that Tess would one day be among them.
*
In early December, Tess seemed better, judging from sporadic text messages and calls to her mom. She’d decided to make her way home to Roanoke, though her plans for the journey were vague. Patricia lined up a bed at an abstinence-only treatment center fifteen minutes from her home, Tess’s grandfather agreed to cover the flight and rehab, and Patricia spent a week navigating the Department of Motor Vehicles bureaucracy to get Tess a temporary ID that would allow her to board an airplane.
But where to send the ID? Tess was still homeless, and another week passed before she called Patricia with an address via a borrowed phone, possibly belonging to a current or former pimp. “Are you in danger?” her mom asked, and Tess claimed she was not, repeating a line she often said: “I’m a soldier, Mom. I’ll be fine.”
“Yes, love,” Patricia responded. “But sometimes even soldiers fall.”
On December 9, Tess may have used that same borrowed phone to respond to one of my Facebook posts, about an early reading I’d given in a Richmond bookstore from the prologue of this book. “Yay,” she wrote. “I helped make it!”
I told her, via instant messenger, that her mother and I were eager to see her. She asked if she could read an advance copy of this book, I said she could, and later she texted that she really wanted to “work on it.” It was unclear whether she was referring generally to her recovery or to the trip back to Roanoke for her fourth rehab attempt.
Tess was walking the Las Vegas streets at night, I would later learn, often picking up johns, sometimes sleeping in corners of a casino. Her last known residence was an abandoned minivan in a parking lot. During one winter freeze, she turned up at a friend’s house wrapped in a blanket. “Some nights I’ve talked to her, and she’d just be up walking all night,” said Mark Sharp, who befriended Tess in rehab in the spring. “She missed her son a lot. She wanted her mom. She said she was all right, but I was like, ‘No, you’re not.’”
A construction laborer and former heroin user now working in Portsmouth, Virginia, Sharp said he offered to fly out and drive her back in a rental car, but Tess told him not to worry; her mother was making arrangements to fly her home.
“For a drug addict trying to be clean, Vegas is really no place to be,” Sharp said. Tess was aware of Las Vegas gangs, but she wasn’t mixed up in them, to Sharp’s knowledge. “She wasn’t afraid to go into the wrong part of town, though,” he added. “She really weren’t scared of nothing.”
Tess gave Sharp the same line she gave her mother: She was a soldier, not to worry, she would make it home.
*
In the days leading up to Christmas, Tess sent her mother scattered texts with mixed messages, telling her she loved her, thanking her for looking after her son and her beloved dog, Koda. She’d be home soon, she insisted, though she had yet to pick up her ID.
“Our poet has been begging for money, saying she is sick but no trip to ER,” Patricia texted me on December 22.
The next day, Tess wrote to say she’d just gotten on Suboxone, to prevent her from becoming dopesick during her trip. But she still hadn’t picked up her ID.
“I am thankful for my dad and have peace of mind knowing that when she is ready I can make something happen quickly,” Patricia said, the day before Christmas Eve. “It is for the angels to watch over her.”
*
The morning after Christmas, Patricia got the call. Las Vegas police had traced Tess’s identity through her fingerprints and her tattoos—the Tree of Life on her shoulder and another on her side that said “God forgive me my sins.”
On Christmas Eve, in the Dumpster of a central Las Vegas apartment complex, a homeless man foraging for cans discovered Tess. She was naked, inside a plastic bag, and there were partial burns on her body and the bag, as if whoever murdered her had tried to erase the evidence of her death. The cause of death was blunt head trauma.
The story made national news, and Patricia, determined that people should understand both the disease of addiction and her daughter’s incredible strength, spoke to every reporter who contacted her. The attention made some family members uncomfortable.
I saw a family riven by Tess’s death as it had been throughout the last five years of her life, some members second-guessing each other’s actions and still debating enabling versus helping and the meaning of tough love. “As my son is fond of saying, ‘Whenever Tessy was presented with choices, she was expert at making the very worst choice,’” said her father, Alan, enumerating the many times that he and Tess’s siblings had tried to help, paying for rent, rehab, or food. But those efforts were primarily in the earlier years of Tess’s addiction.
By the time Tess left for Nevada, as she wrote in her journal around that time, “I was stealing, robbing, selling my body, and anything else I could do to make money for drugs. I was beaten, raped, robbed, and malnourished. I ended up in the hospital with my mom’s help where I detoxed and got on medication and where I am writing this now. I am going to die if I keep living the way I am.”
She was dead now, her grieving family a perfect microcosm of the nation’s response to the opioid epidemic: well-meaning but as divided as it was helpless, and utterly worn out.
Police were investigating, but Alan Henry theorized that Tess “had gotten crosswise with somebody she owed something to,” possibly a drug dealer or a pimp—an argument Patricia rejected outright as blaming and unjust “when we have no idea of what happened to her.”
A former counselor of Tess’s who works with addicted and sex-trafficked women in Las Vegas said it was entirely possible that Tess had in fact been a victim of gang stalking. Addicted women who do sex work are sometimes threatened with rape or murder if they refuse to join a gang trying to “turn them out,” or coerce them into prostituting themselves on the gang’s behalf.
Another rehab worker who knew Tess and had herself been a heroin-addicted sex worker from 2003 to 2010 told me that four of her prostitute friends had been murdered by gangs and left in Dumpsters and, in one case, the air-conditioning ducts of a motel. “These gangs will stalk you and hurt you and block you from making money,” said Kathleen Quirk, who does street-level counseling with addicted prostitutes in Las Vegas, offering cookies she bakes in her home as a way to forge an initial bond. “They make your life miserable until you do what they say—or you end up dead.”
The scenarios were almost beyond comprehension for those at home closest to Tess.