by JA Jance
“Why? What have you found?”
“Whoever hijacked your evidence box must not have had enough horses to put in the same fix here. I found some tissue samples hidden away in evidence storage.”
“What kind of tissue samples?”
“Two separate kinds—from under Monica’s fingernails and from her fetus, both,” Rosemary answered.
“Enough to do DNA testing?”
“I expect so, and I’ll be working on that tonight, as soon as I go back to the lab. There was no such thing as DNA profiling in 1981. Given the fact that the tissue samples have been on ice this whole time, I’m thinking I may be able to pull this one out of the hat and identify your killer for you.”
“You’re right. If you can do that, dinner is definitely on me. Your choice. How long will it take?”
“Five to ten days,” Rosemary answered, “that’s if the crime lab isn’t already overloaded with something else. Which they usually are.”
I happened to have two aces in the hole on that score. One was Ron Peters, who had a murdered police detective on his hands, and the other was Attorney General Ross Connors, the same guy who had rushed through the tox screen results for Mel on the dead protester in Bellingham. Between the two, my money was on Ross. The problem was, I wasn’t supposed to be working.
“Thanks,” I said. “Let me see what I can do to get that testing moved to the head of the line. And in the meantime,” I added, thinking of Delilah Ainsworth, “be careful.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m pretty sure working on this case is what got Detective Ainsworth killed,” I cautioned.
Rosemary thought about that for a moment. “Well,” she said, finally, “as far as I can tell, only two people have any idea I’m working on this. If you promise to keep it quiet, I’ll do the same.”
“Fair enough,” I told her.
Just then I heard the key in the lock and voices in the hallway. Mel and Marge had somehow connected with each other in either the garage or the elevator. From the chatty quality of their animated conversation, they had already managed to become pals. That was potentially bad news for me, but right that moment, between my pain meds kicking in and the news from Rosemary Mellon, I was feeling so euphoric that nothing could rain on my parade.
“So here’s the girl who singlehandedly saved the city of Bellingham?”
“I’m the one.” Mel grinned as she kissed me hello. “As for you? You look remarkably comfortable.”
“I am. It’s great to be home.”
“You’re telling me? My first priority is a visit to my shower. The hotel shower was so low on water flow that I could barely rinse the shampoo out of my hair. And I didn’t like the hotel shampoo, either.”
She grabbed the oddball collection of luggage and bags that had served her on her TDY stint in Bellingham. Meanwhile, Marge dropped a dusty banker’s box at my feet before straightening up and giving me her usual hands-on-hips glare.
“Well,” she said, “I suppose now that the missus is home, you’ll be giving me my walking papers.”
I would have thought so, too. Except the condolence trip to Brian Ainsworth’s house had brought me face-to-face with what life would be like until I was once again able to drive myself. Without a driver, I’d be totally dependent on Mel. And even if she took some comp time off work, she’d still have to go to work eventually. Yes, I knew in advance that there were some real drawbacks in having Marge as a combination nurse/driver, but right that minute the good seemed to outweigh the bad even though her skills behind the wheel could be nothing less than hair-raising at times. She would give me some independence of movement that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like you to stay on for a while. Long enough for me to be cleared to drive again.”
Marge’s face brightened considerably. “Really?”
For the first time, it occurred to me that part of Marge’s general surliness might have something to do with the fact that she really needed the money.
“Yes,” I said. “Really.”
“Does fried chicken sound like a good idea for dinner?”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “And I’m sure Mel would agree.”
“I’ll get started then,” she said. “I’ll get dinner ready to go on the table, then I’ll take off.”
While Marge headed for the kitchen, I turned my attention to the box. I knew what was inside—my past, or at least the part of my past that I kept at arm’s length most of the time. Most of what I found inside were things I had taken with me when Karen and I divorced. The top layer contained the kind of mementos that parents save forever.
The treasure trove included two Altoid boxes, designated by name, which contained Scott and Kelly’s respective collections of baby teeth. One layer was devoted to Scott’s scouting experiences—his Cub Scout cap, his Pinewood Derby car, and the sash covered with his collection of Boy Scout badges up to and including his Eagle. There were the two plaster-of-paris plaques containing tiny handprints that had come home from first grade. There were Christmas ornaments that included school pictures of toothless kids. The one of Kelly looked so much like Kayla that at first I wondered if I had somehow slipped one of my granddaughter’s photos into the mix.
Kelly’s part of the jumble included the programs for the various plays she had participated in both in grade school and in high school. In third grade she’d had a speaking part in a food group skit as a talking carrot. In high school, as a junior, she had done a star turn as the Old Lady in a production of The Old Lady Shows Her Medals. After that, I personally had thought she was headed for a university drama program. That, of course, was before she had dropped out of school during her senior year.
The kids’ part of my treasure trove took up half the box, and it was separated from the rest by a wall of yearbooks—four years of Ballard High School Shingles. And at the very bottom, in an ancient cigar box, was the rest of the story.
First up was the faded velvet jewelry box that held the ring my father had given my mother. As a sailor during World War II, I’m sure that tiny solitaire diamond was all he could afford, and his unexpected death a few days later meant that the engagement ring was never accompanied by a wedding ring, not until the day I married Anne Corley in Myrtle Edwards Park down on Seattle’s waterfront.
Slipping it out of the box, I remembered how graciously Anne Corley had accepted it. Of course, she had been conning me for weeks. At the time she had allowed me to slip the ring on her finger, she must have known the jig was almost up. She had taken the ring without a murmur to seal the deal. When she died, I left the simple gold wedding band on her finger, but I had returned the engagement ring to its box and stowed it, out of sight, in the cigar box. Now, though, I slipped the velvet box into my pocket. Between now and Christmas, maybe I’d be able to find a jeweler who could use that tiny diamond to design a pendant for my granddaughter.
And then, at the very bottom of the cigar box, I found what had caused me to open the banker’s box in the first place—three jagged pieces of metal and my three aces of spades. I was holding the pieces of metal in my hands and studying them when Mel emerged from the shower. She was barefoot, wearing a robe, and had her wet hair wrapped in a towel. As I had been unloading the box, I had put the contents on a nearby hassock. She moved those aside and then sat down next to me.
“What are those?” she asked.
“Hold out your hand,” I told her. When she did so, I dropped the chunks of metal into her hand. “These are the three pieces of shrapnel that should have killed me on August 2, 1966,” I told her. “The only reason they didn’t is because of a guy from Bisbee, Arizona. He was our lieutenant. His name was Doug Davis. That’s what people in Bisbee called him, but for us in C Company, he was always Lennie D.”
Mel’s father is retired military. She knew that I had been in Vietnam, but we had never discussed it, not until that afternoon. I told her the whole story—about the aces of spades, an
d showed her the ones that were still in the cigar box. They had been stored away for all that time, but I knew that if I took them down to the crime lab, a capable latent fingerprint tech could probably still lift one of Lennie D.’s prints off the smooth cardboard surface.
And finally, I told her about Doug’s dreamscape appearance.
“So what does this all mean?” Mel asked when I finished.
“I think he wanted me to let Bonnie know how much he loved her.”
“Wait,” Mel said. “This was only a dream. I mean, that other dream situation has already caused no end of trouble. What if you end up tracking Bonnie MacLean down and she doesn’t want to be reminded of what happened back in 1966? She’s had a whole lifetime to put it to rest. Why should you bring it all back up?”
“Because it’s unfinished business,” I said. “Why did Doug show up in my dream now, after all these years? Guilty conscience, most likely, for my not doing what I should have done back then. I came back home, married Karen, and got on with my life. I put the metal pieces away. I put the cards away. What I really should have done at the time was track that poor girl down. I should have thanked her and told her what he did for me. Instead, I buried it. Forgot about it. And I’ve always been ashamed of that. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never visited the wall in Washington. It’s one of the reasons I never show up at any of the reunions.”
“What reunions?” Mel asked.
“The Thirty-fifth Infantry has multiwar reunions every year. I’ve never gone to any of them. I opened the first invitation maybe, but that’s about it. Ever since, the envelopes go straight into the round file. If that’s not a sign of a guilty conscience, I don’t know what is.”
Mel was quiet for a long time after I finished. The sun was going down, turning Puget Sound into a blinding slate of glimmering silver. Mel’s hair had dried enough that the towel had slipped off, leaving behind a charming tangle of damp blond tendrils.
“Well then,” she said finally, “I suppose we’d better see what we can do to find her.”
Mel got up to go finish drying her hair, while I started scooping everything but the shrapnel and the playing cards back into the banker’s box. I had the lid back on the box when Marge came into the den.
“All right,” she said. “Dinner’s in the warming oven.” I knew we had a warming oven in the kitchen, but to my knowledge Mel and I had used it only as a handy junk drawer.
“I’ve laid out your evening pills,” Marge added. “I found some egg cups to put them in. The ones that are on the table you should take with dinner. The ones on the counter you should take with food at bedtime. And remember, I really am only an elevator ride away.”
With that, Marge left the room, stomping away in her heavy-footed fashion. I called my thanks after her, but she didn’t wait around long enough to hear me.
Mel came out minutes later, wearing a pair of pj’s I’d given her for her birthday. She paused in the doorway and sniffed the air. “What smells so good?”
“That would be dinner,” I told her. “It’s in the warming oven. How about if we eat it now while it’s fresh?”
Mel reached out a hand to help me up and out of the chair. I think she was a little surprised to see that, with the help of the walker, I was capable of getting myself up and down. I wasn’t much help with setting the table, however. While she did that, she asked about my visit with Brian Ainsworth.
“Whoever did it, you’re calling them out, aren’t you?” Mel said when I told her about my request to be an honorary pallbearer at Delilah’s funeral. “What you’re saying is that, in a service that won’t include the usual fallen-officer police presence, you intend to be front and center.”
“That’s right. I want Delilah’s killer to know that she and I were working the Monica Wellington case together. Whether she died because of Monica’s homicide or because of the promotion situation, I want the killer to be under the impression that whatever Delilah knew, I know. Eventually word is going to get out that Delilah’s death was a double homicide.”
“As soon as that happens, you’re hoping he’ll come after you.”
I nodded.
“Which means I’m going to the funeral, too.”
“I hoped you would,” I said. “You’ll be the eyes in the back of my head.”
“I’ll be good for more than just eyes,” she said.
The food was delicious. We scarfed it down as though we were starving. Over dinner I told Mel about Rosemary Mellon’s discovery of what was most likely never-tested physical evidence in the Monica Wellington case.
“She thinks she can get a DNA profile?” Mel asked.
“Yes.”
“How long.”
“Best-case scenario five to ten days; that’s if she can walk it around whatever backlog the crime lab has at the moment.”
“Did you call Ross?” Mel asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “The Sammamish cases aren’t really ours.”
“Do you know that for sure?”
“I didn’t see anyone from S.H.I.T. at the press conference.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Mel allowed. “And just because it’s not officially our case doesn’t mean Ross couldn’t pull strings and grease wheels. Call him. Give him a heads-up. That way, when Rosemary walks her samples over to the crime lab, they’ll be looking for them. They won’t come as a surprise.”
That was one of the things I had come to appreciate about Mel. I always looked at bureaucracy as an insurmountable obstacle. She always looked for ways to make it work.
We were still sitting at a dining room table laden with dirty plates when I took out my phone and called the attorney general.
One of the best things about working for the AG, at least this particular AG, is that Ross gives us access. Everyone who works for Special Homicide has his home number along with his office and cell phone numbers, too. When we need him, we can reach him.
“Hey, Beau,” he said. “You still in the hospital? I’m coming to Seattle tomorrow, and I was planning on stopping by.”
“They cut me loose,” I explained. “I’m at home. So is Mel. If you want to stop by here sometime tomorrow, you’re more than welcome.”
“She did a great job for us in Bellingham,” Ross said. “Harry couldn’t be happier. The police chief up there has always been a pain in his butt, and now she owes him big-time. Couldn’t be better.”
“Mel isn’t why I’m calling,” I said. “It’s about that cold case in Seattle.”
The slight hesitation in his voice told me Ross Connors already knew a lot about it. “The one that got the detective killed?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s the one. Detective Ainsworth told me that evidence from the Wellington homicide—evidence that should have been there—had been removed from a secure Seattle PD evidence storage facility. She also discovered that some possibly relevant microfiche data, Seattle PD HR data, had been tampered with. The evidence tampering didn’t make it as far as the M.E.’s office, however, because earlier this morning, Rosemary Mellon located some tissue samples from back then, samples from the Wellington case. She’s going to submit them for DNA profiling. I was hoping to enlist you in doing something to speed the process along.”
“To say nothing of paying for it, right?” Connors asked. “You know as well as I do that DNA profiling is expensive, but if what you’re telling me is true, shouldn’t the cost of any relevant testing be coming out of Seattle PD’s Internal Affairs budget instead of mine?”
“That’s something else we both know,” I countered. “If Internal Affairs is calling the shots and paying the fare, the testing is going to go to the end of the crime lab backlog rather than to the front of it.”
“When was this case again?”
“The homicide itself happened in 1973. It’s the first case I ever worked for Homicide, and it was never solved. My partner back then, Milton Gurkey, and I worked the case sporadically between then and 1975, when we were told in no uncerta
in terms that spending any more effort on it was a waste of time and resources. That’s when we finally let it go. I don’t ever remember getting back to it. Then, without our knowledge, the case was deemed officially closed in 1981.”
“You were never notified of that?”
“Never.”
“And all of this happened long before any kind of DNA profiling capability,” Ross said.
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Who closed it?”
“I don’t know. Delilah may have discovered something about that. If so, she didn’t clue me in.”
“But now, Rosemary thinks she can pull something usable off the samples she has?”
“Yes. Whoever was able to manipulate records inside Seattle PD wasn’t able to work the same kind of disappearing act inside the M.E.’s office. According to Rosemary, the samples in question have been locked away in cold storage all this time. She’s confident that it’ll work.”
Ross sighed. “All right,” he conceded. “I’ll call Rosemary and tell her to submit her samples to the crime lab under S.H.I.T.’s name and that she should contact my office on Monday to get an official case number. I’ll also call one of the supervisors down there and let him know this is urgent.”
“Thanks, Ross,” I said. “Solving this case will mean a lot to me.”
“I’m a little puzzled about why it came up in the first place. What put it back on the front burner after all this time?”
“I did,” I answered. “I guess it’s been festering the whole time. Lying around in the hospital for a couple of days brought it to the surface.”
That was close enough to the truth to sound plausible, and I let it go at that. It’s something my mother used to tell me. Quit while you’re ahead.
By the time I was off the phone, Mel had cleared the table, put away the leftovers, and started the dishwasher. Pouring herself a glass of wine from the bottle in the fridge, she made her way to her favorite spot in the unit. For me, the best spot in the house was my recliner, but for Mel it would always be the window seat in the living room with its 180-degree view of Puget Sound, from the grain terminal to Safeco Field. In the far distance, the snow-denuded Olympics stood as a jagged dark dividing line between the fading blue of the water and the darkening evening sky.