by J. A. Jance
My answer didn’t have much of a beneficial effect. Tracy turned away from me and stared out the window, saying nothing.
“Look,” I said. “What’s happened to your family is terrible. Your mother was never a responsible parent, and that’s too bad—for you and, even more so, for her. But having even a bad parent murdered is an incredible tragedy. It’s not something that goes away. It stays with you forever. When something like this happens, it comes completely out of the blue. It’s so unexpected that it hits you in all kinds of ways. Many of these reactions won’t make sense. Your mother essentially abandoned you to drugs, so maybe you think you shouldn’t feel anything right now, but you’re hurting anyway. And part of you is mad as hell at your mother for dying. That’s a standard reaction, too. It’s like she’s abandoned you all over again. That’s how grief works, Tracy. You’re alive and she’s dead. You’re operating in a storm of warring emotions. Anger is only one of them.”
Tracy took a ragged breath. “I’m scared, too,” she whispered.
“Scared of what?” I asked. “That the same thing will happen to you? That your mother’s killer will come looking for you?”
“No,” Tracy said, shaking her head. “I’m scared he did it.”
“He who?”
“I’m scared my dad did it, Uncle Beau. I’m afraid he’s the one who killed her.”
There it was, out on the table. The admission was shocking enough to take my breath away.
“That’s crazy!” I exclaimed. “Why on earth would you even think such a thing?”
“You don’t know what Dad’s been like lately,” she said. “It’s been like living with a stranger. And you should have seen what happened the other night when that poor guy served the papers about the hearing.”
“What night?”
“Friday. At dinnertime. It was like Dad went crazy or something. I’ve never seen him act that way. And then there’s whatever’s going on with him and Mom,” Tracy added. “They don’t even sleep in the same bedroom anymore. I’m afraid they’re going to get a divorce.”
I had been best man at Ron and Amy’s wedding. For years, while they rented a unit here in Belltown Terrace, Ron, Amy, and the girls had paraded in and out of my place with easy familiarity. I had known about the little comings and goings in their lives, their tragedies and triumphs. I had heard about soccer games and Girl Scout cookies and bandaged knees and fingers. Once they had moved into Amy’s folks’ old place up on Queen Anne Hill, a lot of that close, day-to-day interaction had fallen by the wayside. Still, hearing from Tracy that Ron and Amy’s marriage might be in trouble gave me another shock. Ron certainly hadn’t hinted anything about marital difficulties when he had stopped by earlier.
So I did the first thing people do under those circumstances—I hit the denial button.
“It probably just seems that way to you,” I said. “Maybe things aren’t as bad as you think they are.”
“They are, too,” Tracy sobbed. “Amy’s the only real mother I’ve ever known. What if Dad goes to jail and Amy divorces him? What then? She’ll keep Jared, but what about Heather and me? What’ll happen to us? Our whole family will be wiped out.”
While I was doing denial, Tracy was busy conjuring up every worst-case scenario in the book. If my SHIT squad colleagues were going to be asking me questions about Ron Peters tomorrow morning, this was information I would have been far better off not knowing, but I couldn’t ask Tracy to stop talking. She needed somebody to listen to her right then, and J. P. Beaumont was the only guy who was handy.
“I had no idea things were this bad,” I said quietly.
“And it’s all because of her!” Tracy said forcefully. “It’s been getting worse ever since she came to live with us.”
Teenagers aren’t long on using proper pronoun references, and her statement confused me. “Who’s living with you?” I asked.
“Amy’s sister,” Tracy said. “Aunt Molly.”
I had met Amy’s prickly older sister, Molly Wright, on only one occasion. What little I knew about her came more from published news stories rather than anything Ron and Amy had told me. Molly’s now former husband, Aaron, had been a high-flying dot-com millionaire CFO before the dot-coms all became dot-gones. Molly and Aaron had been an integral part of the local society scene, with their pictures prominently featured in the press coverage of various high-profile charitable events. When the dot-coms disappeared, lots of people lost jobs and money. Aaron lost both, and his freedom as well. In the subsequent financial meltdown, someone discovered that he’d been cooking the company books. What ultimately got him locked away in a federal prison cell was tax evasion.
“I had no idea Molly was living with you,” I said.
“Well, she has been,” Tracy said, “for months now. And she’s like, well…she’s not a very nice person. She’s always picking away at Dad behind his back and causing trouble.”
My one personal interaction with Molly Wright had been at Ron and Amy’s wedding. Had it been up to me, I would have upgraded Molly from Tracy’s tame “not nice” to a J. P. Beaumont eighteen-carat bitch. If Molly had installed herself under Ron Peters’s roof, I could see how the man might be feeling a little stressed out.
But Tracy hadn’t come jogging down Queen Anne Hill in what was now a full-scale blizzard to cry on my shoulder about her evil step-auntie. She had come to talk about her father. In light of the fact that SHIT was going to be investigating the case, I knew I should stay out of it, but Ron Peters is a friend of mine—my best friend. I couldn’t leave it alone.
“Tell me about your dad, Tracy,” I said. “What was going on between him and…”
I paused, uncertain of how I should refer to the dead woman.
Tracy stepped into the breach. “Rosemary?”
“Yes.”
Tracy shrugged and put down her empty mug. “I guess she started talking about the custody thing a few months ago, saying she wanted us to come live with her. I turn eighteen in just a couple of months, so I wasn’t worried about it, but Heather was. She turns sixteen in three months. It would mean changing schools just before her junior year, and that sucks. Dad asked Heather what she wanted to do. She said she’d run away from home before she’d go live in Tacoma, or else she’d do something drastic, whatever that means. Dad said fine, that he’d talk to Rosemary and tell her the answer was no. And he did, but then, last Friday, when we were having dinner, there was a knock on the door, which Jared opened. This guy comes in and serves Dad with papers because Rosemary isn’t taking no for an answer. She’s decided to take him to court.”
“What happened then?” I asked.
Tracy sighed. “Like I said, Dad went nuts. Friday is pizza night at our house. When the guy left, Dad picked up a pizza box and Frisbeed it at the door. Pieces of pizza went everywhere. I’ve seen Dad angry sometimes, whenever Heather and I did something bad, but I’ve never seen him act like that. It scared me, and it scared Mom, too. I know because I heard her talking about it with Molly later, after Dad was gone.
“Anyway, after he threw the box, he turned and wheeled himself out of the room. We all followed Dad out to the carport. Mom asked him where he thought he was going. He said Tacoma. He said he was going to talk to Rosemary and set her straight about a few things. Mom kept trying to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t listen. He just got in the car and drove away like he hadn’t heard a word she said. She was crying when he left.”
“How long was he gone?”
Tracy paused before speaking. “A long time,” she answered finally. “Mom was upset, so I took Jared into the family room to watch Finding Nemo. I thought I heard Dad come home while we were still watching the movie, but I must have been mistaken. Jared and I both fell asleep on the couch. I woke up around two. I put Jared to bed in his room, and then I went to bed, too. My bedroom is right over the driveway. I had just gotten into bed and turned out the lights when I heard Dad’s car.”
I thought about that for a minute.
“Your father said he talked to two Tacoma detectives this afternoon. Did he give you any details about how Rosemary died?”
Tracy shook her head. “It happened over the weekend. Some guy out walking his dog found her body by the water yesterday afternoon. They can’t tell exactly how long she’s been dead because of the cold.”
I nodded. Extreme cold weather delays some of the tissue changes medical examiners rely on in approximating time of death.
Exhausted, Tracy closed her eyes. Once again she leaned back against the cold window, as though she no longer had the energy to sit up on her own. She had come to me looking for a place to unload her worst nightmare—her suspicion that her beloved father had murdered her biological mother. I understood the kind of emotional barriers that had stood in the way of her doing that.
When a loved one turns homicide suspect, family members are usually the last to tumble to the idea that their husband or son or daughter or wife could possibly be guilty of such a heinous crime. Some, no matter how convincing the evidence, never do accept a family member’s guilt. The fact that Tracy had reached such a damning conclusion so early in the process was something I couldn’t ignore. The guys from my office wouldn’t ignore it either. No wonder Tracy was worried. So was I. Tracy was focused on her father’s angry outburst with the pizza box. I was concerned about how much Ron hadn’t mentioned when he stopped by to tell me about Rosemary’s death.
“I’m sure everything will be fine,” I told Tracy, trying to sound more reassuring than I felt. “No doubt your father has some perfectly reasonable explanation for where he went and what he was doing so late on Friday evening.”
Tracy looked at me pleadingly. “Do you really think so, Uncle Beau?” she asked. “Or are you just saying that to make me feel better?”
For an instant a terrible thought crossed my mind. Was Tracy as innocent as she seemed, or was her trip to see me a preemptive strike designed to point suspicion in her father’s direction and away from her? The thought was there, but looking into her guileless blue eyes, I banished it as quickly as it came.
“Would you believe a little of both?” I asked.
She gave me a faint smile. “I’d believe it,” she said. Unfolding her legs, Tracy reached for her jacket. “I’d better be going,” she said.
I glanced outside. Far below, streetlights and headlights glowed in golden halos through the falling snow. I looked down at the stoplight at First and Broad. While I watched, a vehicle stopped on the steep incline west of First began to slip backward. The first vehicle slid until it bashed into a second one that had been coming up the street behind it. The second car spun like a slow-motion top before ending up sitting astraddle the opposite lane. Just then a westbound car came through the green light. The driver slammed on his brakes and then skidded down the hill until he T-boned the passenger side of the second vehicle.
There’s nothing like Seattle in the snow. It can be an incredibly entertaining spectator sport as long as you’re not out in it.
“No,” I declared, turning away from the window. “You’re not going anywhere in this weather. You can sleep in the spare room. We’ll figure out how to get you home in the morning.”
“But what about…?”
“Your parents?” I asked.
Tracy nodded.
“I’ll call and let them know you’re here. I’ll tell them you came by because you were upset about Rosemary’s death and needed to talk.”
“They’re still going to be pissed at me,” she said.
“No, I don’t think so,” I told her. “They have so much on their plates right now, I doubt they’ll even notice.”
I gave Tracy one of my T-shirts to sleep in and a robe to wear. After she headed for bed, I called her house. No answer. That wasn’t a big surprise. It was late. Knowing what Ron and Amy were going through, I should have expected they’d turn off their phone. I left a message saying Tracy was with me and that I’d bring her home in the morning. I hit the sack then, too, but I didn’t sleep.
Ron Peters’s marriage was in trouble and he had been having serious difficulties with his ex-wife. I knew nothing about any of it, and yet I was supposedly his best friend. So what kind of friend did that make me?
Not so hot, I concluded. And not nearly as good a friend as I thought I was.
CHAPTER 5
I AWAKENED THE NEXT MORNING to the unwelcome news that there were five to seven inches of snow in the Denny Regrade area of downtown Seattle where I live, with more than twice that on the East-side and at higher elevations. What followed was a droning recitation of school closures. Many offices and businesses were suggesting that unessential workers stay home.
Which am I? I wondered. Essential or not?
Scrambling out of bed, I pulled on some clothing and then went to make coffee. I stood in the kitchen and looked out onto a beautiful winter wonderland where the streets were practically deserted. With the exception of a chained-up bus or two and a couple of speeding SUVs, no one else seemed to be out and about.
When the phone rang I knew it would be Ron, and I was right. “What the hell was Tracy thinking, taking off like that in the middle of the night? Where is she?”
“In the other room and still asleep, if the phone didn’t wake her, that is,” I said.
“Wake her up,” Ron told me. “I want to talk to her.”
“I told her you wouldn’t be mad.”
“Well, you were wrong,” he grumbled. “I am mad. With everything else going to hell around here, the last thing I needed was for her to go AWOL.”
“She was scared,” I said.
“Of what?”
“She’s afraid you did it.”
“Did what?”
“She’s afraid you’re responsible for Rosemary’s death.”
This stopped Ron cold. “Tracy thinks I killed her mother?” he asked after a long pause.
“Evidently,” I responded.
It was one thing for homicide detectives from Tacoma to hint around that they suspected Ron Peters of being a killer. Ron already understood that, as far as the investigation was concerned, he, as the ex-husband, was bound to be a prime suspect. I understood that, too. It was quite another thing for him to realize that his own daughter was drawing that same conclusion. The realization did nothing to improve Ron’s frame of mind.
“Let her sleep then,” he said finally. “She isn’t going to school today anyway, but when she wakes up, tell her from me that since she got herself down to your place, she can jolly well get herself home.”
“That’s not going to work,” I said. “The snow accumulation wasn’t that bad when she got here, but she showed up dressed in a jogging suit and tennis shoes. She can’t walk home in that outfit in several inches of snow. I’d be glad to give her a ride, but I put off changing to winter tires too long, which makes my 928 pretty much worthless for driving in snow.”
“Okay,” Ron said. “I guess you’d better wake Tracy up after all. Amy’s outside now, putting chains on the Volvo. I’ll ask her to stop by your place before she goes to work.”
“You’re not going in today?” I asked.
“As of yesterday I’m on bereavement leave,” he answered. His tone was grim.
We both knew that would change. If and when Ron became an acknowledged suspect in the homicide investigation, bereavement leave would become a thing of the past. Paid administrative leave would be more like it—if he was lucky. Unpaid if he wasn’t.
“And it’s just as well,” he added. “I guess I need to start planning Rosemary’s funeral. She’s been estranged from her family for years, so there’s nobody else to do it. But with no way of knowing when the body will be released…Wait a sec. There’s another call coming in. Gotta go.”
Expecting to waken Tracy, I ventured as far as the guest-room door. Before I could knock, I heard a toilet flush and the shower come on. With my houseguest already up and about, I returned to the kitchen and poured another cup of coffee.
The
showers in my condo are equipped with demand heaters, which means you can shower until hell freezes over without ever running out of hot water. Tracy, being a typical teenager, was nonetheless prepared to try exhausting the inexhaustible supply of hot water. The shower was still running sometime later when the phone rang again. This time Amy Peters was calling from the security phone on the first level of the parking garage.
“Tracy’s still in the shower,” I told her.
“That’s okay,” she returned. “I wanted to talk to you. Can I come up for a minute?”
“Sure,” I said and buzzed her into the elevator lobby.
After a car accident had left Ron Peters paralyzed from the waist down, he was pretty much lying in a bed of pain and wallowing in self-pity until Amy Fitzgerald walked into his hospital room and into his life. She was there to do physical therapy, but it turned out she performed mental therapy as well.
In the years I had known her, I had never seen Amy Peters upset. She has always struck me as someone with a permanently positive attitude, and she’s mostly unflappable. When she stepped off the elevator that morning, though, I could see she was flapped. Clearly she’d been crying, and she wasn’t over it yet. Was it possible she was this upset over Rosemary’s death?
No, I reasoned silently. More likely she and Ron have had some kind of quarrel.
“Amy,” I said aloud. “What’s wrong?”
She looked around. “Where’s Tracy?”
“Still in the shower.”
“Thank God!” She spoke in an urgent whisper and then took a deep breath. “While I was putting the chains on my car, I got grease on my hands and needed a towel. Ron usually keeps a supply of washrags in the back of his Camry. I opened the trunk and—” Amy stopped speaking. Her face crumpled, letting loose a fresh spate of tears.
“And what?” I demanded.
“There was dried blood inside Ron’s trunk, Beau. Lots of it. Like somebody or something bled out in there.”
I felt like I was in free fall with no parachute. Tracy’s concerns were one thing. Incriminating bloodstains were something else. “Are you sure about that?”