Proof of Life

by J. A. Jance

  Al went over to where I was pointing and stared up at it. “Yup,” he said. “That’s what it is all right. Looks like the battery’s been removed, most likely by the dead guy himself. You’d be surprised how often that happens. People get sick and tired of listening to that annoying new-battery warning, so they disable the damned things, which, if you ask me, is pretty damned stupid.”

  “Do you mind taking a look in the bathroom?”

  “Why?”

  “Just curious,” I said.

  The bathroom was severely smoke damaged but otherwise mostly intact. “What?” Al asked.

  “Can you open the medicine chest?”

  Shaking his head in annoyance, Al complied, prying the medicine cabinet door open with the point of a pencil. “What now?” he asked.

  I shone my light across the contents: toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving equipment, cologne, nail clippers, and several varieties of over-the-counter cold medicine. The cabinet also included a hair brush and a jar of mustache wax, neither of which, sadly enough, Max had needed to use in the recent past. The top shelf contained a lineup of prescription bottles, but an examination of those didn’t yield what I was looking for—a brand-name sleep aid. I realized that didn’t mean one hadn’t existed. A plastic prescription bottle might well have melted into charred invisibility in the debris of that burned-out bedside table.

  At that point we heard the building inspector coming up the stairs. Al used the pencil to close the medicine cabinet and off we went, back down to the main floor. I had been inside Max’s house only once before, and that had been years earlier, in the course of the Marcia Kelsey homicide investigation. Max and I had sat in this very living room for our heart-to-heart talk, and I remembered that there had been a den of some kind just off the living room. If Max had been using either a laptop or a desktop to work on his manuscript, it seemed likely that was where we’d find it.

  Once inside the murky room, we discovered it to be more of a library than it was a den. The shelves sagged under the heavy weight of bulging, water-saturated books. There was a desk of sorts—an old-fashioned library table. Both ends of it were covered with loose papers that had welded themselves into sodden masses of mush. In the middle of the table, however, was a four-foot-wide clear spot. And on the floor on the far side of the table lay one of those multiple-outlet extension cords. Situated next to that was a perfectly recognizable cable modem along with an older model daisy-wheel printer.

  “The modem’s here and so’s the printer,” I told Al, “so where the hell is his computer?”

  “Here you go again,” Al grumbled, “back to the same old song and dance. But let me ask you this. If a crook went to the trouble of setting the place on fire, why would any bad guy in his right mind take off with a computer that, depending on its age, wouldn’t be worth more than two hundred bucks on the open market and leave behind a perfectly good Rolex?”

  I didn’t have a ready answer for that one, but once a homicide cop, always a homicide cop. Instead I posed a question of my own. “Do you happen to have an evidence bag on you?”

  With an annoyed sigh, Al extracted a clear bag from his hip pocket. “What exactly would you like me to bag and tag?”

  “That extension cord,” I said, pointing. “Max lived here alone, so his prints should be on that cord. If he had a cleaning service of some kind, his housekeeper’s prints might be there as well. But if someone else, some third party, was in the house that night and if they’d already started the fire upstairs, they would have been totally focused on getting the hell out of Dodge. Supposing they came down here in search of Max’s computer. Even if the guy had worn gloves the rest of the time, he might have thought he was in the clear enough to risk stripping them off down here. After all, he fully expected that oxygen tank would blow sky-high any minute and that the house would burn to the ground.”

  Al gave me a dubious smirk. “You really think we’re going to find a killer’s prints on this extension cord? You want to bet money on that?”

  “Sure,” I said. “How about ten bucks? Just take the damned thing down to the crime lab and have somebody check it out.”

  “Okay,” Al conceded, “ten bucks it is.”

  By the time the building inspector reappeared in our midst on the ground floor, the extension cord—evidence bag and all—had disappeared into one of the capacious pockets on Al’s ABS jumpsuit.

  “We’re done here,” the building inspector told us. “I’ll notify you once I finish filing my report so you can green-light the insurance folks. The sooner they get this nasty mess of wet carpet dragged out of here, the better.”

  CHAPTER 18

  WHEN AL AND I HEADED BACK DOWN QUEEN ANNE FOR Belltown Terrace, I was surprised to see that it was almost five. We had spent the better part of two hours poking around in the murky ruins of Maxwell Cole’s home. I didn’t remember touching anything other than the sodden carpet, but my clothing—my very pores—reeked of smoke and mold.

  Lucy came to the door to greet me. I was sure she was overdue for a walk, but after giving me a cursory sniff, she sneezed and then stalked back to her bed in the kitchen. Obviously my unpleasant mixture of odors offended her as much as it did me. I went straight into my bathroom, where I stripped off my clothes and stepped into the shower. When I finished, I noticed that although I was now smoke-free, the bathroom sure as hell wasn’t. As soon as I was dressed, I retrieved my smoke-drenched clothing and shoes and banished them to the lanai just off the bedroom in hopes of airing them out.

  Emerging from the bedroom, I discovered that a plastic bag of takeout food had magically appeared on the kitchen counter. That meant Mel was already home, and you could color me surprised about that. Even in Bellingham she seldom arrived home before six. The fact that she had made the eighty-mile drive to our Seattle condo prior to five thirty told me she had left work far earlier than usual.

  Curious about what was for dinner, I sorted through the three food containers inside the bag. The two larger ones, labeled with a Magic Marker, contained beef stew and Caesar salad, respectively. No doubt the smaller one contained dressing for the salad.

  Leaving the food where it was, I decided to take the dog out for her somewhat delayed walk. Since she wasn’t in her usual spot in the kitchen, I went looking for her. “Hey, Lucy,” I called. “Do you want to go get busy?”

  When there was no response, I headed for Mel’s room in search of both wife and dog. It hadn’t taken long after the wedding for Mel and me to discover that the condo’s bathroom and closet—which had worked just fine during my bachelor existence—were totally inadequate for the two of us together. We overcame the woeful lack of closet and counter space by converting the guest suite into Mel’s private domain, giving her not only a separate sitting room/dressing room combo but also her own private bathroom and closet, which counted for a lot in her book.

  I found Mel’s purse and briefcase in her room. Her uniform had been draped over the back of the love seat. Her high heels and pantyhose had been abandoned nearby, but Mel was nowhere in sight and neither was Lucy. Doubling back to the kitchen, I noticed for the first time that Lucy’s leash, which I had left hanging on the doorknob, was no longer there, either. That’s when I pulled out my phone and dialed Mel’s number.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “I took Rambo for a run,” she panted into the phone. “We’re down in Myrtle Edwards Park.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Call me when you’re on your way home. I’ll have dinner on the table.”

  I puttered around the kitchen—setting the table, loading the stew into a microwavable bowl, and tossing the dressing into the salad before dividing it into separate bowls. But while I was performing all those mindless tasks, I was worrying, because I had the distinct impression something was wrong. Chief Melissa Soames wasn’t one to take off work early on a Friday afternoon. To my knowledge, this was the first time it had happened. As for going on a run in the middle of a wintry late afternoon squall? T
hat wasn’t a good sign, either.

  Mel and Lucy turned up forty-five minutes later, both of them soaking wet. One look at Mel’s face told me I had been right to be worried. Something was definitely amiss. While she went to shower and change, I toweled off the dog and fed her. By the time Mel emerged from the shower, wearing a robe, I had dinner on the table.

  “So what gives?” I asked, handing her a glass of Cabernet.

  “It’s that obvious?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Somebody posted Ken Purcell’s bail,” she answered bleakly. “Just like that, he’s back on the streets. I let Nancy know, and we also informed the people at the shelter, so they’ll know to keep an eye out for him, but still . . .”

  Mel has been a cop for a long time. By now she should be accustomed to the whole law enforcement catch-and-release game, but this case was different somehow, and she was taking it personally.

  “Who coughed up the bail?”

  “Some relative or other,” she said. “I don’t even know, and it doesn’t matter. The point is, he’s out, and for right now I don’t want to discuss it. Let’s talk about something else. What have you and Rambo been up to?”

  With the conversational ball squarely in my court, I had plenty to tell her. I told the stories more or less in chronological order, starting with what I’d learned from Colleen McDaniel at the academy about Lucy Rambo’s history.

  “It’s a shame the poor dog was locked in that damned bathroom when all hell broke out,” Mel observed. “It would have served Purcell right if she’d taken a hunk out of his hide. But I’ll bet you’re right. He’s probably the one who stuck her with that name, so from now on, it’s Lucy all the way.”

  Mel listened quietly through my recitation of the surprising information I’d gleaned from Thomas Raines about Maxwell Cole’s sexual orientation and gave me high marks for the way I’d handled the complexities surrounding the impending arrival of Scott and Cherisse’s unexpectedly expected baby.

  “I’ll give Cherisse a call tomorrow and see if there’s anything I can do.”

  “Would you?”

  “Of course.”

  I told her about how Todd Hatcher had managed to come up with a location for Erin’s estranged foster father and gave her a blow-by-blow description of Al Thorne’s and my exploration of Max’s burned-out house earlier that afternoon. By the time I finally ran out of steam and subject matter, Mel seemed more relaxed. When she got up to clear the table and pour herself a second glass of wine, an alert on my phone announced an arriving e-mail, which turned out to be from Todd:

  You probably shouldn’t go looking for a career in photography. You suck. The enhancement isn’t much better than what you sent. What follows is a typed version of what I believe was on the page, including names and phone numbers along with the time of the dinner reservation. Be aware, some of the numbers may be off by a digit or two. Hopes this helps.

  T.

  Below the body of the text was a list of forty or so names—sometimes first and last names and sometimes a first name followed by an initial only—but all of them were followed by a phone number.

  “What’s that?” Mel asked, peering over my shoulder.

  “It’s the list of people who had dinner reservations at El Gaucho last Friday night,” I told her. “Since Maxwell Cole’s name isn’t on the list, I have to assume that he either didn’t have a reservation or else he was there as someone else’s guest.”

  “Who would most likely be one of the last people to see him alive,” Mel concluded. “You’re going to call all of them?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Don’t let me stand in your way, then,” she said. “I may have left the office early, but I brought home a mess of paperwork because it’s impossible to get any of it done with the phone ringing off the hook every ten seconds.”

  While she retrieved her briefcase and spread papers out across the dining room table, I took my phone and retreated into the family room, far enough away, I hoped, that my phone conversations wouldn’t disturb her.

  I was about to dial the first number from the reservation list when I noticed the last number on my recent calls list was the one with the 360 area code that had gone unanswered. John Madsen hadn’t been home earlier in the day, but maybe he was now. I hit redial.

  After the third ring and just when I expected the call to switch over to voice mail, he answered.

  “Hello.”

  “John Madsen?”

  “Yeah, who’s this?”

  “A voice out of the past,” I told him, “and probably not a very welcome one at that. It’s Beaumont, J.P.”

  “Detective Beaumont?”

  “I haven’t been Detective Beaumont in quite some time, but yes, that’s me. I tried calling earlier today, but you weren’t home. I didn’t want to leave a message.”

  “I was at work.”

  That surprised me. Since John was several years older than I was, I thought he would have been retired by now, but then who was I to talk?

  After a small pause and as though he had somehow read my mind, Madsen continued. “It’s not work, really,” he explained. “I volunteer one day a week at the Veterans Museum here in Chehalis. Since you know all about me, that probably strikes you as odd—that someone with my history and who was an army deserter back in the day would volunteer at the museum. But you’d be surprised. I’m not the only one who got screwed up by that war. When I went there the first time, I wasn’t at all sure what I would find or even why I felt compelled to go.”

  John Madsen fell silent again.

  “What did you find?” I prompted.

  He cleared his throat before he answered. “Forgiveness,” he said quietly, “a whole lot of forgiveness from the very people I would never have thought would be able to forgive me. And now, when other guys like me show up—which they do occasionally—I try to do unto them as was done unto me.”

  That took my breath away. I wouldn’t have expected that result, either—that a suffering army deserter would find comfort in the company of veterans who had served with honor, but then again, maybe forgiveness is part of what serving with honor is all about.

  “But no forgiveness from your daughter,” I suggested quietly.

  I heard John’s sharp intake of breath. “No,” he agreed, “not from Erin.”

  “She’s the reason I’m calling,” I said.

  “Really? She wanted you to call me?”

  The naked hope in his voice was heartbreaking.

  “No,” I said. “I’m sure she has no idea that I’d be reaching out to you. She’s asked me to look into the circumstances surrounding Maxwell Cole’s death. I was at the funeral. I saw you there.”

  “I only went because I hoped Erin would be there,” he said. “I wanted to see her and know firsthand that she’s all right.”

  “She’s struggling,” I said. “Max’s death has hit her hard.”

  “It hit me hard, too,” John said quietly. “I know that what Marcia and I did to Max was terrible, but it turns out our faith in him wasn’t misplaced. He’s been there for Erin all this time when we couldn’t be.”

  “Are you aware that Erin is Max’s only heir?” I asked.

  He seemed dumbstruck by that. “You mean like in his will?”

  “From the document I saw, he left her everything. I’m guessing that when the dust settles, she and her son will both be in pretty good shape financially.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it,” John said. “He never told me he was considering doing such a thing, but I’m aware of Erin’s financial struggles. I tried reaching out to her several years ago, after her most recent divorce, but she refused to have anything to do with me. Still, if she didn’t ask you to contact me, why are you calling? You don’t think I had something to do with Max’s death—”

  “No,” I said, cutting him off, “nothing of the kind. It has come to my attention that Max was working on a book—something that might hark back to around the
time when Marcia was killed. Do you have any knowledge of that?”

  “I did know about the book,” John said. “Max told me about it.”

  Now I was the one taken aback. “Max told you?”

  “We’ve been in contact for a number of years now,” John continued. “From time to time he would keep me in the loop about what was going on with Erin and her son. As for the book? He said something to the effect that what he was writing might bring up some of that bad old stuff, and he wanted me to have some advance warning.”

  “Did he go into specifics about what kind of bad old stuff?”

  “Not really,” Madsen said. “He hinted around that it maybe had something to do with a crooked cop, but that was about it. No other details. Why do you ask?”

  A crooked cop? That one gave me pause. As far as I knew, the only cops involved in the Marcia Kelsey homicide had been Paul Kramer and me. I sure as hell wasn’t crooked. And Kramer has always been a brownnosing jerk, but nothing I’d seen about him said he was dirty!

  “Because,” I answered finally, “some of that bad old stuff may be the reason Maxwell Cole is dead.”

  CHAPTER 19

  ONCE OFF THE PHONE WITH JOHN MADSEN, I DIDN’T IMMEDIATELY try dialing any of the other numbers. Instead, I sat there puzzling over the crooked-cop comment. Truth be told, Seattle PD has had its share of crooked cops—my first partner in Homicide, Rory “Mac” McPherson, being a prime case in point. His malfeasance hadn’t come to light until decades after the fact, and that revelation had been accompanied by especially dire consequences for any number of people.

  What if this was the same thing? Max had made no secret of the fact that he was writing a book that would most likely deal with some aspects of the Marcia Kelsey homicide. If a crooked cop had been lurking in the shadows back then, he might still be there, hiding in plain sight and worried about being thrust into the light of day.

  Still, besides Kramer and me, what other cops had been involved in the case? That one left me stumped. The two who immediately came to mind were our sergeant in Homicide at the time, Watty Watkins, along with the guy running the unit, Captain Lawrence Powell. As far as I knew, both of those guys—now long retired—were as honest as the day is long.