Proof of Life

by J. A. Jance

  She frowned. “What?”

  “Since both you and your son stand to benefit financially from Max’s death, and if this does turn into a homicide investigation, it’s possible you’ll both be under suspicion. That leads me to ask a pertinent question. Where exactly were you and Christopher on Saturday night?”

  “Chris was in Pullman,” Erin answered. “I was at work.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I’m a bartender,” she said. “I work at Jake’s Place, a bar in downtown Bellevue. I got off at midnight and was home in Renton by half past twelve, which is much earlier than when the fire must have been called in to 911. I went home and stayed there the rest of the night. I don’t live in the best of neighborhoods. My apartment complex has had more than its share of car prowls. In case you’re interested, there are security cameras all over the parking lot outside my building. You’re welcome to check for yourself. You’re bound to see me coming and going.”

  “That’s probably not necessary,” I told her, “but all the same, if you could give me the name and number of the property manager, it would probably be a good idea.”

  Frowning in concentration, she consulted her phone and read off the requested information. If Erin did end up needing an alibi at a later date, it couldn’t hurt to have one that came complete with a time and date stamp. That in turn meant I’d need to track down the security footage before it had a chance to disappear for good.

  “Christopher didn’t come home for the funeral?” I asked.

  “No,” she answered. “He wanted to, but I wouldn’t let him. For one thing, the weather in the pass has been a mess. He was on his way back to Pullman after Christmas vacation when that first storm came through. The trip took more than eight hours, and he barely made it. I told him I didn’t want him to risk life and limb coming back over the mountains for the funeral.”

  “Does Christopher have a phone?”

  Erin gave me a quizzical look. “Are you kidding? He’s a college student. Of course he has a phone.”

  “Could I have his number?”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you need an alibi, so does he,” I said. “It’ll be far easier to nail one down now than it will be weeks or months from now, if and when someone from Seattle PD’s Homicide Unit finally gets around to asking questions.”

  Reluctantly, Erin recited another phone number, which I typed into my phone.

  “Yours?” I asked.

  In answer she reeled off several numbers—home, work, and cell. I took those down as well.

  “Is there a Mr. Howard?” I asked.

  Erin looked uncomfortable. “As far as I know,” she said. “I suppose if he had corked off, someone would have let me know. I haven’t seen the man since our divorce was final six years ago.” She paused and then shrugged. “Married three times, divorced three times. I guess you could say I have trust issues.”

  Given her history, that was hardly surprising.

  “But I don’t understand why you need all this information,” she added.

  “Because you’ve asked me to look into this matter,” I explained. “That means, since I’ll be working for you, presumably I’ll need to contact you from time to time.”

  “So you really will do it, then?” she asked.

  “With some conditions,” I said.

  “What kind of conditions?”

  “As Max mentioned in his text, I’m no longer a cop. However, if my investigation turns up information that points in the direction of homicide, I will go to the cops. Understood?”

  Erin nodded. “All right,” she agreed, “but there is one other thing that worries me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How much is all this going to cost?”

  “You mean how much is my involvement going to cost?”

  She nodded again. “I don’t have much money right now. I suppose, with the will situation, when all is said and done, there’ll be some money, but I don’t know how much or how long it will take for me to receive anything from an inheritance. If you’d be willing to wait until that all comes through for me to pay you . . .” Her voice drifted off.

  All you had to do was look at Erin Howard to know she was leading a hardscrabble life. Scholarship student or not, she had a kid in college, and that’s bound to cost money. Her less-than-fashionable clothing, the unbecoming cut of her hair, the fact that she was driving a car that was probably the same age as her son—all of those things pointed in the same direction. She was getting by financially, but just barely.

  When I first met Erin all those years ago, she had been a pert college sophomore with ambitions of going on to law school after graduation. The murder of Marcia Kelsey had evidently derailed all those plans. Now she was a middle-aged bartender and a single mother, surviving on minimum wage and tips, which couldn’t be easy. For someone living in such straitened circumstances, any bequest like the one from Max would be a huge windfall, but I doubted she had any clear concept of what that would amount to, just in terms of property values, if nothing else.

  If Queen Anne Hill is considered to be one of Seattle’s most desirable areas, Bigelow is one of the neighborhood’s most desirable streets. Yes, Max’s house may have been severely damaged in a fire, but these days a lot of prospective buyers go looking for properties with the express intention of tearing down existing dwellings in order to build anew.

  In the case of Max’s house, extensive fire damage might make a teardown unavoidable, but with or without a house, the lot itself comes with a killer view of downtown Seattle, and it would be worth a bundle all on its own. In addition, there was bound to be a hefty settlement from Max’s homeowner’s insurance. That amount, combined with whatever sums were realized from the sale of the house, would leave Erin sitting pretty, most likely with enough funds to pay cash for a modest place of her own somewhere else.

  She was still grieving the loss of Max, her trusted friend and godfather, so now wasn’t the time to mention that there might be a silver lining in all this, but I was pretty sure that, due to Maxwell Cole’s generosity, Erin, after years of living a hard life in the low-rent district, was about to be better off financially than she’d ever dreamed possible.

  Right now, though, I decided it was time to take her current concern about paying for my services off the table. “I’m not a licensed private investigator,” I told her. “That means, you can’t hire me at any price.”

  Disappointment washed over her face. “But I thought you said . . .” She shook her head, took a deep breath, and grabbed for her purse. “Sorry for wasting your time. I’ll be going then.”

  “Wait,” I said, motioning her back into her chair. “Don’t rush off. That doesn’t mean that I won’t do the work, but it does mean I won’t charge you for it.”

  She sank back down on her chair. “You won’t? Really?”

  “Really,” I answered. “I believe you qualify for what I like to call the friends-and-family discount—you and Max both.”

  Erin’s eyes brimmed with tears again—tears of gratitude this time rather than grief. “Thank you,” she murmured.

  At that point she seemed to regain her appetite and did more than pick at her salmon. When the meal was over and the server had cleared our plates, we settled in to do a more in-depth interview.

  As far as I could see, Max had no other close relations. Erin was his sole survivor. If I was going to gain any traction in finding out the truth about his death, it was important to understand who his friends were—if any; what he’d been doing both while he was in California and since his return to Washington; and, since he had evidently believed himself to be in danger as late as Saturday afternoon, what kinds of current projects he’d had in the works.

  Now that our rules of engagement had changed, Erin was more forthcoming. She said that Max had recently told her that his literary agent had found a publisher who was interested in buying the book he was working on.

  “What kind of book?” I asked.
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  “Some kind of overview of his career that would include stories about some of the investigations he’d covered through the years as well as follow-ups with some of the people involved.”

  “Journalistic cold cases, in other words,” I offered.

  Erin nodded. “I suppose.”

  “How far along in the process, would you say?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not sure. I know he’d signed a contract. He may have even received an advance.”

  “Do you know the name of the publisher?”

  “Sorry, no idea, but he did have an agent.”

  “A literary agent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Had you seen any of what he’d written?”

  “Nope,” Erin said. “Uncle Max promised that I’d get first dibs when it was finished, but he was afraid that letting someone else read the manuscript before he was done writing it would be bad luck.”

  “And this ‘big thing’ he’d found, it’s something he discovered in the process of writing the book?”

  “I guess,” Erin said.

  For me, in the process of embarking on an investigation into Max’s death, talking to someone who had read all or part of the manuscript would be a huge first step.

  “Do you happen to know his agent’s name or how I could reach him?” As I asked the question, I envisioned a shady-looking guy holed up in a dinky office somewhere in a less-than-desirable neighborhood in New York City.

  “Sure,” Erin said. “His name is Tommy Raines, although it’s probably really Thomas. Tommy is what Max always called him. They’ve been friends for a long time—since high school. I’m not certain, but I think he lives in Madison Park somewhere.”

  If Thomas Raines had been at Queen Anne High School with Maxwell Cole, he had most likely also been attending at the same time as Erin’s adoptive mother, Marcia Riggs Kelsey. Years later, after Queen Anne High was shuttered, the building was sold to a developer who turned the old classrooms into condos. In a supreme irony, at the time Marcia was murdered, her long-term girlfriend was living in one of those converted units.

  Pete and Marcia themselves had seemed entirely at ease with the idea that a third person was part of their somewhat unorthodox relationship, but I was relatively certain that that was one of the parental lies that still haunted this troubled woman who had once thought of herself as their daughter. That being the case and out of fear of bringing our now-civil exchange to a screeching halt, I made no mention of any of that to Erin.

  Instead, I dutifully thumbed the name Thomas Raines into the note page on my cell phone. In the old days, when it came time to locate someone, I generally carried a phone book in the car along with the latest edition of the local Thomas Brothers Street Guide. Now I have my cell phone and a GPS. If this Raines character was doing business somewhere in the greater Seattle area, I was pretty sure I’d be able to find him.

  “No problem,” I said. “I’ll be able to track him down.”

  I was about to ask something else when Erin glanced at her watch and then jumped to her feet. “Crap!” she exclaimed. “Sorry, I’ve gotta go. I’m supposed to be at work in a little over an hour. If I don’t leave right now, I’ll be late.”

  It hurt me to think that her job situation was so sketchy that she couldn’t even take the full day off for her godfather’s funeral. “Sure,” I said, waving her away. “Go.”

  She left the restaurant at a half run. Driving distance from Fishermen’s Terminal to Jake’s in downtown Bellevue is around sixteen miles, give or take. But it was after three now, which meant rush hour was already under way.

  I recently read an article that said that in terms of traffic congestion, the Seattle/Tacoma area is home to 5 of the top 21 knottiest traffic jam spots in the country. Last year Seattle tied for the dubious honor of being fourth worst in terms of overall traffic congestion. When it comes to evening rush hour, however, the traffic needle dials all the way up to number two, directly behind San Francisco. We’re the kind of place where something as relatively minor as a semi spilling a load of frozen crab onto a stretch of single roadway can turn the whole region’s hour-long evening commute into a six-hour ordeal.

  As I watched Erin race out of the restaurant, I wished both of us luck in dealing with traffic, and luck was definitely needed. There’s no direct way to get from Fishermen’s Terminal back to I-5. Rather than zigzag up and over Phinney Ridge, I headed back toward downtown, planning to enter the freeway from Mercer. That proved to be a strategic error of massive proportions.

  On I-5 the Mercer interchange is the nearest one to Seattle Center. For generations it has been referred to as “the Mercer Mess.” Despite years of unending detours around supposed traffic improvement projects, it still merits the name—that day especially.

  I was on Mercer itself, inching along toward the freeway entrance in gridlocked traffic, when a fire engine and an aid car blasted their way past and onto the northbound lanes. Not good. At that point I turned on the radio for a traffic update—something I should probably have done before leaving Chinook’s. There was a multicar injury wreck northbound on the Montlake Bridge. Alternate routes were suggested.

  Thank you so very much. Giving up northbound I-5 altogether, I went south and got stuck in another mess crossing the I-90 bridge. Two hours after leaving the restaurant, I’d made barely fifteen miles of progress and was inching northward at two miles per hour on I-405. Just past the turnoff to Woodinville, I was in the right-hand lane when I realized I was approaching the intersection I had used several times on those occasions when, as a favor to my grandmother, I had either dropped Mandy off at or picked her up from the Academy of Canine Behavior. Curious after all these years to learn if the place was still in business, I posed the question to the lady whose voice lives in my GPS.

  “Directions to Academy of Canine Behavior,” I told her.

  The mechanical AI response came through the speaker only a few seconds later. “In one half mile, exit to the right on 195th,” she said. “Then keep right.”

  I didn’t have to worry about changing lanes in a hurry. Traversing the half mile from there to the exit took another twenty minutes. By the time I turned off, it was twenty past five. By then I didn’t give a damn if the academy was open or closed. What I needed more than anything was to get off the freeway and out from behind the vehicle directly in front of me, a looming motor home that belched diesel exhaust and was plastered with trophy state emblems from all over the country. No doubt it belonged to a retired couple who wanted everyone to know that they’d been everywhere there was to go. That was perfectly fine with me, as long as they took their obnoxious bragging rights somewhere I wasn’t.

  CHAPTER 10

  AS A COP—MAKE THAT AS A FORMER COP—I PRIDE MYSELF in having pretty much a total recall when it comes to places I’ve visited in the past. If you’re on patrol and some kind of emergency arises, knowing how to get into some obscure neighborhood or out of same in the most efficient manner possible can mean the difference between life and death.

  The neighborhood just off the freeway qualified as an obscure one, all right, but as far as remembering it, I could just as well have landed on the planet Dalvar. Nothing was familiar. The last time I had been in this neck of the woods, I had a pretty clear recollection that it was mostly rural in nature—forested terrain, in fact. Now was made up of full-fledged industrial parks complete with low-rise office buildings, a hotel, stoplights, and, of course, the obligatory Starbucks.

  As for the academy? It’s located at the crown of a nearby hill. In my memory the road leading there had been lined by mostly empty fields. Now recently constructed housing—apartment complexes and single occupancy houses—lined both sides of the street. The gated entrance to the academy complex was as I remembered it, but the grounds themselves, not so much. Just inside the gate, I encountered yet another traffic jam. Most of the cars waiting in line seemed headed in the direction of what a banner on the side of the building proclaimed to be D
OGGY DAYCARE. Really? I have kids and grandkids. I know about day care for children, but for dogs? I guess if something doesn’t seem to apply to you and yours, you just let those items flow past without their registering.

  I dodged the day care melee and drove around to the main building. The parking area there was jammed as well with people and dogs coming and going—either being picked up or dropped off for training and/or boarding. Inside the lobby area, some of the dogs along with their owners were being given lessons on how they should conduct themselves in public.

  “Are you picking up or dropping off?” a young woman inquired as I approached the front desk.

  “Neither,” I said. “My grandmother used to bring her dog here a long time ago. Now my wife and I have sort of inherited a dog, and I’d like to talk to someone about it.”

  “Name?” she asked.

  “My name? Beaumont—J. P. Beaumont.”

  “Dog’s name?”

  “Rambo.”

  Without a pause, she picked up a phone. “Colleen,” she said, “would you please come to the front desk? A Mr. Beaumont is here to discuss Rambo.”

  Soon a small woman with brown eyes and short curly hair emerged from a back room. The name tag on her plaid flannel shirt identified her as Colleen McDaniel. She glanced around the waiting area and then settled on me. I guess the fact that I was there accompanied by no visible dog made me something of an anomaly.

  “You’re here about Rambo?” she asked.

  It was clear to me that at the academy, the dog’s identity took precedence. “Yes,” I said, nodding, then held out my hand. “That would be me.”

  The academy boasted no such thing as a private office. Colleen invited me into a side room where a large long-eared mutt named Mitzi was practicing something called “wait on the rug.” Watching a dog perform “wait on the rug” is about as interesting as watching paint dry, but the trainer was explaining to the dog’s entranced family how mastering this command would make the arrival of newcomers at their home far less traumatic for everyone involved.