by JA Jance
Kelly flew up from Ashland to visit. She spent two nights in the visitor’s suite Marge had just abandoned. And I made arrangements to book it again when Scott and Cherisse were due to arrive in town and would need a place to stay while they closed on their new house in Burien.
By then my knees were making so much progress that I was amazed. When I went to see Dr. Auld to have my staples taken out, I walked into the treatment room carrying both of the canes. That put a smile on his face. “Hey,” he told me. “I do good work, don’t I?”
He told me the numb spots I was feeling on my legs might or might not go away eventually, but he pronounced me a great patient. I left his office feeling as though I had been given a gold star right along with my new knees.
And all the while, in the background, while I was waiting, I was also working. While my original iPad was still being held hostage in the crime lab, I had gotten a replacement, and I used that to learn everything there was to know about the second Kenneth James Adcock.
It turned out he wasn’t one of the earliest Microsofties, but he was close. He was a smart kid who had graduated from WSU with a degree in electronics engineering by the time he was twenty. He had gone on to get a master’s and a Ph.D. from UCLA before going to work for Microsoft in the early eighties.
Retired with a bundle of stock and money while still in his forties, Adcock and his wife, Yvette, were known for their philanthropic efforts in the Pacific Northwest in general and in Bellevue and Seattle in particular. There were no blemishes on Kenneth’s record—no arrests, no speeding tickets, not even so much as a parking infraction. On the surface, at least, he appeared to be a totally upright, law-abiding guy—a politically active, churchgoing model citizen.
Almost a month passed. I had more or less given up all hope of getting the answers I needed when the phone rang bright and early one morning. When I answered, Ross Connors was on the line.
“Are you sitting down?” he asked. “If you’re not, you should be, because I wouldn’t want those new knees of yours to go splat.”
“Why?” I returned. “What’s up?”
“The crime lab just called. They’ve got a match. Or rather, two of them.”
My heart started hammering in my chest. “What do you mean, two?” I asked.
“The DNA off your iPad matches the M.E.’s defensive fingernail scrapings. Adcock’s your guy!”
“Amen,” I breathed. “But I thought you said two matches.”
“I did. The DNA expert assures me that Kenneth James Adcock Junior was the father of Monica Wellington’s unborn child. How do you like them apples?”
It was what I had expected all along. It had to be. That was why Faye Adcock had been willing to commit not one but two murders and then leap to her death besides. She had been protecting the one thing she had left in the world—her son and all he stood for.
“I talked to the prosecutor’s office about this,” Ross continued. “Even with the DNA evidence, he’s not ready to swear out an arrest warrant. He wants more. He wanted to know if anyone ever looked into the kid’s involvement back during the time of the initial investigation.”
“We didn’t,” I said. “I can tell you that his name never came up, not once.”
“It has now,” Ross said. “As of now, I’m putting some of my S.H.I.T people—Mel included—on the case. I know it was a long time ago, but someone out there might know something, might still remember something. It’s just a matter of finding those people and jogging their memories.”
Ross is a smart man, and he was right. With Mel keeping me apprised of how things were going, I stayed on the sidelines while my fellow investigators combed through Kenneth Adcock’s high school chums and acquaintances. It didn’t take long to discover someone who remembered a rowdy party where a bunch of guys from WSU had gone over to Leavenworth one snowy December weekend and had used the Christmas lighting ceremony as an excuse to get hammered. Several of them remembered that Kenneth had been smitten with one of the young local girls. Yes, things had gotten pretty hot and heavy. No, no one remembered her name. They had never seen her again, but when they were shown Monica’s senior yearbook photo, three of the guys on that trip agreed that that was most likely the girl.
These days, if someone falls for someone else, there’s an instant trail of the budding romance in Facebook postings, texts, or tweets. In 1973 there was no such thing. There was no way to connect the dots between Monica’s coming to the lonely realization that she was most likely pregnant as a result of that unexpected coupling and her equally lonely decisions about what, if anything, she should do about it.
There were no hidden diary entries to tell us if what had happened between them had been consensual or if it had in fact been date rape. Had she contacted Kenneth in Pullman? Had she contacted his parents? Who knows, but by now I was convinced that one Friday evening in late March Monica left her University of Washington dorm for the last time, wearing that WSU sweatshirt, and that Kenneth James Adcock Junior was the guy who was going to be her “blind date” that night—her date and her killer.
I was still officially on medical leave on the day it was time to go pick up Adcock, but they let me be a part of it anyway. It was a Friday afternoon, late in October, when we drove up to the Adcock mansion in the wilds of Bellevue. It was raining. The streets were slick with fallen leaves. Puddles of water had backed up around leaf-clogged storm drains.
Even though I had recently been given permission to drive, Mel was at the wheel and I was in the passenger seat with the arrest warrant in my pocket. We were in Mel’s Cayman, caravanning with two detectives from Seattle PD’s Cold Case squad in their own unmarked car. They would be the officers taking Adcock into custody.
We all knew this was a big deal. You don’t pick up a murderer with those kinds of connections without running a certain amount of risk. Not life-and-death risk. I didn’t figure Adcock would come out of his house shooting. I knew it was more likely that he would immediately try to see to it that anyone connected to the case was committing career suicide.
I went along for the ride because if that’s what happened, I wanted to be his natural target.
We had thought on the way there that we might have some trouble getting in through the gates, but it turned out Adcock was a sociable kind of guy. He and his wife were having a Day of the Dead party and the front porch was strewn with brightly lit jack-o’-lanterns and weirdly posed skeletons. Considering the relatively recent death of his mother, that seemed like an odd choice, but maybe the party had been scheduled before Faye Adcock staged her very dramatic exit.
The gates to Kenneth Adcock’s mansion were wide open, and we drove right in.
When we got out of the cars, we could hear mariachis playing somewhere in the background. I have no doubt that deep inside that spacious mansion a uniformed bartender was busy handing out margaritas, but Mel and I were bringing our own particular element to the Day of the Dead, one Kenneth Adcock most likely wasn’t anticipating. Somebody else had brought the tequila. We were bringing the worm.
We rang the bell. Again, the person who came to the door was part of a catering staff, and again I asked to speak to Mr. Adcock. When he came to the door this time, he looked at me blankly, the way you do when you see someone you think you should know but can’t quite place.
“Yes?” he said, questioningly.
“Mr. Adcock, I’m Special Investigator J. P. Beaumont with the Special Homicide Investigation Team. This is my partner, Mel Soames. We have a warrant for your arrest. Please turn around and place your hands on your head.”
“Wait. What’s this all about?”
“You’re under arrest for the murder of Monica Wellington.”
He looked at me for a very long moment. In the background, I heard a woman’s anxious voice. “What is it, Kenny? What’s going on?”
Kenneth shook his head. “Call Winston,” he said over his shoulder as we led him away. “Tell him I’m being arrested. I need my attorney.”
When I closed the cuffs around his wrists, the sound of the locking mechanism was music to my ears.
CHAPTER 27
I wish I could say it felt triumphant that Saturday morning when Mel and I went back to Leavenworth to tell Hannah Wellington that we had solved her daughter’s murder for real this time, but it didn’t. It felt like too little, too late. Kenneth Adcock would have the best legal representation money could buy. By the time the judicial wrangling was over, it would be a miracle if he served any prison time.
Still, as we drove back to Seattle, it seemed as though I had done all the things I had been charged to do by the people who had emerged from my past and thrust themselves into my drug-fueled present. A sudden snowstorm hit as we headed down Stevens Pass. Driving into it and trying to see the road through a snow-obscured windshield, I suddenly realized that there was something else I should do, not because I had to but because I wanted to and because I was the only person who could.
The next day, Sunday, I made several phone calls. Only when I had the arrangements in place did I call Bonnie Abney.
“What are you doing on November eleventh?” I asked her.
“November eleventh?” she said. “I don’t know. Why?”
“Mel and I would like you to meet us at Boeing Field at eight o’clock that morning. We have a surprise for you. We’re going to take a little trip.”
“What kind of trip?”
“I’m not telling, but dress warmly. It’ll probably be cold.”
“All right,” she said. “But before I say yes, I’ll have to see if I can board Crackerjack. On such short notice that might not be easy.”
“Don’t bother boarding him,” I said. “He’s welcome to come along.”
That was how three humans and one very large black-and-white dog flew out of Boeing Field bright and early on Veterans Day.
“Have you figured out where we’re going?” I asked.
“Bisbee?” she asked.
“That’s right.”
“But why?”
“I’m not telling. You’ll see when we get there.”
We landed in Tucson a scant two and a half hours later. We’d had a catered breakfast on the plane, so we didn’t need to stop for lunch.
Instead, we got into our waiting rental SUV and drove straight to Bisbee, where we spent some time driving around and doing sightseeing. Bonnie pointed out the house Doug had grown up in and had us drive past the ballpark where he had played both football and baseball and the Catholic church where he had served as an altar boy.
We stopped by Evergreen Cemetery. That’s where I discovered that one of Doug’s two younger brothers, Blaine, was also laid to rest there. Bonnie explained that he had come home from his service in Vietnam as one of the “walking wounded.” He had died in 2002. I left the cemetery shaken by the terrible price that one family had paid in the course of a misguided war.
Last but not least, we drove by all of the schools Doug had attended. We arrived at the last one of those, the one she referred to as the “new” high school, at exactly three o’clock, which, according to my schedule, was right on time.
Joanna Brady had told me that was when they usually held the memorial ceremony—right after school got out, so teachers and students could attend if they chose to do so.
It wasn’t until Bonnie saw the crowd of people assembled in the parking lot—the uniformed band standing at attention, the cops and Boy Scouts also in uniform and standing at attention—that she finally realized this wasn’t just an ordinary trip down memory lane.
I had called my friend Joanna Brady, and, as promised, she had pulled out all the stops. She had put together the largest Veterans Day gathering Bisbee, Arizona, had seen in many a year, including the appearance of a military band from Fort Huachuca. Joanna had told me to come to where the flagpoles stood in front of the school office and that the memorial to the Bisbee boys lost in Vietnam was nearby.
Mel stopped the SUV long enough for Bonnie, Crackerjack, and me to step out of the car. Then she drove away. Spotting a small lectern set up on a raised stage, I led the way there with Bonnie leaning on my arm and Crackerjack following sedately at her heel.
Once we reached the stage, I led her up on it and seated her on a chair someone had thoughtfully provided. Two months after my knee-replacement surgery, I was able to negotiate the three steps leading up to the stage with no difficulty and no assistance. Under my breath, I breathed a silent thank-you to the doctors and nurses and OT ladies who had made that possible.
I turned back to the audience in time to see Mel slip into an empty chair in the second row, next to Sheriff Brady. Not knowing what else to do, I stayed where I was, standing next to Bonnie on one side while Crackerjack guarded the other.
Eventually, a man who referred to himself as the mayor stepped to the microphone and called the event to order. He introduced a woman minister whose name was Marianne something, who opened the proceedings with a short invocation. The prayer was followed by the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and a stirring rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by a young uniformed soldier with the band playing the accompaniment.
When the last strains of the national anthem died away, Sheriff Brady came forward, stepped up to the microphone, and introduced me. Then, with my new knees knocking behind the lectern, it was my turn to speak.
I had told the story to Mel and to Bonnie Abney in the privacy of Bonnie’s living room, but that chilly afternoon, under a cloudy sky and in the face of a blustery wind that threatened rain, I told my story in public for the very first time. I don’t see myself as any kind of orator, but when you have an important story to tell, the words you need seem to come of their own accord.
I wanted the people in Doug Davis’s hometown to know the real story about one of the young men whose names were carved in that stone. They knew him as Doug, but I told them about Lennie D. I told them about the four aces and about how he was the lieutenant who did the best job of bringing the scared newbies into the platoon. I told them how he had earned his Silver Star and Purple Heart by showing extraordinary bravery during second watch on the afternoon of August 2, 1966. I wanted the townspeople to know that he had given his life in the service of his country and out of loyalty to what he called “his guys.” I wanted them to know that I was one of those guys and that he had saved my life as well.
Finally I told them about my own Purple Heart, also earned on August 2, 1966. That’s the one I keep hidden away in the cigar box because I have never felt I really earned it.
When I finished speaking I stepped away from the microphone to a round of subdued but respectful applause while a local priest took my place at the lectern. Slowly and with all due respect, he read aloud the names of the seven men listed on the monument—Leonard Doug Davis, Richard Allen Thursby, Leonard Carabeo, Richard Lynn Embrey, Robert Nathan Fiesler, Willard Wesley Lehman, and Calvin Russell Segar.
I had come to Bisbee in order to pay my respects to Lennie D., but I was glad the others were remembered and honored as well. They all deserved it.
After reading the names, the priest gave a short benediction, and then someone played “Taps.” The bugle echoed clear as a bell across that cold parking lot while a team of uniformed Boy Scouts carefully lowered the flag and folded it. As they did so, I realized that it wasn’t a new flag, one that had been taken out of its box and flown for the first time on that occasion. No, it was an old flag, one that had flown for months or maybe even years on that very flagpole. The colors had faded some in the hot desert sun, and the seams were slightly frayed from flapping in the wind. That struck me as right, somehow. This was Doug’s flag, Lennie D.’s flag. It had flown over the school he loved in the town he loved.
When the well-seasoned flag was folded and tucked into its proper triangle, one of the Boy Scouts, a kid wearing a newly minted Eagle badge, stepped up onto the podium and offered it to Bonnie, just as I had requested. As far as she was concerned, the gesture was co
mpletely unexpected. She shot me a questioning glance. I gave her a slight, confirming nod.
“Thank you,” she whispered. Then, reaching out, she gathered the flag into her arms and clutched it to her breast. There were tears on her face by then and on mine as well. Doug’s mother’s flag had been lost. It was high time Bonnie Abney had another.
After the ceremony ended, we drifted up the breezeway to the cafeteria, where some of the mothers from the Boy Scout troop had put together a reception complete with homemade cookies served with weak coffee and genuine Hawaiian punch. Crackerjack went with us into the cafeteria, and no one objected to his doggy presence.
I stayed close by and eavesdropped on the people who came to pay their respects to Bonnie. Some of them were strangers to her because they were parents and brothers and wives of the other men whose names were on the monument down by the flagpole. One by one, they exchanged greetings and hugs. One woman pressed a jagged-edged photo into Bonnie’s hand.
“From our Latin Club,” she murmured. As the woman melted back into the crowd, I caught a glimpse of the photo over Bonnie’s shoulder. It was Lennie D., Doug, wearing a Roman toga and with a garland on his head.
Another guy handed her a gold pin shaped as a football. “I played football with Doug,” he said. “This is one of the varsity pins that went on our Letterman sweaters. I thought you might like to have it.”
Bonnie looked at the pin and then slipped it into her pocket.
An older woman approached Bonnie and whispered something in her ear. The look that crossed Bonnie’s face was indecipherable, but then she turned to me and handed me Crackerjack’s lead. “I’ll be right back,” she said.
She hurried away from me, walking out of the room and disappearing from sight behind the cafeteria. I caught Mel’s eye. “Is she all right?” Mel mouthed.
All I could do was shrug in answer, because I didn’t know. Bonnie was gone only a few minutes. When she came back into the cafeteria, there was a smile on her face, as though she knew a secret to which no one else was privy. She was actually glowing.