Long Time Gone

by J. A. Jance

  “Still,” I said, “it’ll be easier to have the names, addresses, and phone numbers of who has been interviewed and who hasn’t. I don’t mind going back over the same territory, but I shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel to do it.”

  “Yes,” Ross Connors agreed. “You’re right. Fortunately for you, I can apply a certain amount of pressure in all the right places.”

  As the call ended, I was coming up on the Northgate Exit on I-5. In all the hubbub of the last day or two, I realized, I had barely thought about my grandmother, much less called or stopped by since Lars told me she was in the hospital. Maybe, if I hurried, I could get to Swedish in Ballard before visiting hours ended. Abruptly crossing three lanes of traffic, I exited the freeway and headed straight there.

  But I was too late. “Beverly Jenssen?” the receptionist said, typing in the name and then frowning at the answer that appeared on her computer screen. For a moment I held my breath.

  “I’m afraid she’s not here,” the receptionist said. “She was released earlier this afternoon.”

  Hearing the word “released” allowed my breathing to resume. I hurried back outside and stood in the haze of secondhand cigarette smoke that surrounds the entrances to most of Seattle’s public buildings. When I called Lars and Beverly’s apartment, he was the one who answered.

  “Oh, ja,” Lars said. “The doctor sent her home today. Shouldn’t have, if you ask me. Beverly’s still weak as a kitten, but she wanted to be home with me. Doesn’t t’ink I can take care of myself.”

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I should have come by the hospital long before this.”

  “You’re busy,” Lars said, excusing me. “Beverly and I don’t expect you to drop everyt’ing and come running every time one or the other of us ends up in the hospital. That’s why we have each other.”

  “Can I speak to her now?” I asked.

  “She’s already asleep, and I don’t want to wake her up. Coming back from the hospital pretty well wore her out,” Lars said. “Why don’t you give her a call in the morning. She’ll be glad to hear from you.”

  I was on my way home from the hospital when my phone rang again. It was Ross Connors. “I’ve been in touch with Seattle PD,” he said. “If you’ll drop by the main lobby in the next little while and ask for Denise, she’ll have a care package waiting for you.”

  It seems to me I spent most of my Seattle PD career at odds with one superior or another. Having Ross Connors go to the mat for me like this was an entirely new experience. Not sure what to expect, I drove straight to Seattle PD.

  Denise was a uniformed officer womaning the Seattle PD reception desk. I gave her my name along with my ID. When she returned my ID, she also handed me a thick manila envelope. Standing off to one side of the nearly deserted lobby, I tore open the envelope and sorted through its contents. Inside I found copies of the official police reports on Elvira Marchbank and Wink Winkler. And at the very bottom of the envelope was a laminated special visitor’s pass that, for the next thirty days, allowed me unlimited access to come and go as I pleased in and around Seattle PD without the need of an escort.

  In other words, Ross Connors was nothing short of a miracle worker.

  Just to see if it would work, I left police headquarters and went downhill to the old Public Safety Building. The pass worked like a charm on both the outside entrance as well as for controlling the elevators. I went straight downstairs to the evidence room. There I filled out the proper form requesting access to the Madeline Marchbank evidence box. In Kramer’s eagerness to sign off on the other two cases, I guessed that he would have returned the box to where it belonged, and I was right.

  Through some quirk in scheduling, the clerk behind the counter—the same one who had sicced Kramer on me two days earlier—found the box and handed it to me with no sign of recognition and without so much as a raised eyebrow.

  “Is there someplace I can sit to look this over?” I asked.

  She pointed wordlessly at the old wooden library carrel, and I didn’t bother to argue. The scarred surface at least offered a flat place for me to work.

  When I opened the box, I discovered that, after three days of handling, the cardboard cover wasn’t nearly as dusty as it had been earlier. The first item I removed from inside—a bloodstained apron—sent a shiver of recognition down my spine. I wasn’t sure in which tape Sister Mary Katherine had mentioned the apron, but I remembered her saying in one of them that Mimi Marchbank had been wearing a flower-covered apron on the day she was murdered, but subsequent newspaper accounts of the crime had indicated that Mimi had been found stabbed to death in her bed. In my experience, not that many people wear aprons in bed. In addition to the apron I found a bagged and still-bloody knife, along with several more items of bloodstained clothing and bedding.

  None of that surprised me. The contents all seemed perfectly normal. What wasn’t normal was what wasn’t there—the case log. With that missing, there was no official written account of Mimi Marchbank’s murder investigation—no record of where and when the physical evidence had been gathered and no list of who had been interviewed by detectives or why. Without that background information, the physical evidence itself was virtually useless.

  So where did the case log go? I asked myself.

  How long had it been missing? Had it been gone for decades—say, from the time Wink Winkler had left the department in disgrace—or was its disappearance as recent as this last Tuesday morning?

  I replaced the items I had removed, and returned the box to the counter. “Did you find everything you needed?” the clerk asked.

  “Absolutely,” I told her with what I hoped sounded like a hint of a swagger. “Everything I needed and more.” I walked out the door hoping that conversation, too, would be reported back to Captain Kramer.

  I went home, dragged out my computer, and used my notes to type up the report I had promised to deliver to SHIT in the morning. Next I tackled the police reports I had collected on the deaths of Elvira Marchbank and Wink Winkler. It made for slow going.

  Elvira had been found at the bottom of the stairs. A partial shoe print had been found on the glossy cover of a magazine that had landed close to the body. There had been no sign of forced entry; no sign of an altercation. Hair and fiber trace evidence had been collected for analysis, but that would take time. Detectives Jackson and Ramsdahl had conducted a series of interviews with people from the surrounding neighborhood, including one Raelene Landreth, executive director of the Marchbank Foundation. None of the interviewees had reported hearing or seeing anything amiss at Elvira’s residence.

  With Wink Winkler there was obviously a crime scene somewhere, but so far no one had found it. Dead bodies sink. They don’t float back up to the surface until there’s a certain amount of decomposition. Wink’s body had been found snagged by a piling under a dock on Harbor Island. What that said to me was that the unknown crime scene was most likely relatively close to where the body was found and that the fact that he had come to the surface had more to do with currents and flood and ebb tide than with anything else.

  Wink’s son, William Winkler III—Bill—had been interviewed twice, both times at corporate offices of Emerald City Security, the firm Wink had founded but which was now being run by his son. The first interview had occurred on Wednesday morning, when a uniformed officer had been dispatched to speak to him in regard to the missing person report called in by Wink’s assisted-living facility. The second interview had been conducted late that afternoon by Detectives Jackson and Ramsdahl. By then Wink’s body had been found and identified. Bill Winkler told them that his father had been unhappy about living in the “home” but that he hadn’t seemed either despondent or suicidal.

  My spirit was willing, but the flesh is weak. Halfway through Detective Jackson’s interview with Wink’s son, I fell sound asleep. I woke up sometime later to find the loose pages of the reports scattered around the legs of my recliner. I took that as a sign that it was time t
o toddle off to bed.

  The next morning my back was killing me. I lay in bed for a long time, drifting and dozing and waiting for the kinks to straighten out.

  When I had first heard Sister Mary Katherine’s account of what had happened on that glorious day in May so long ago, I had thought Elvira Marchbank would be the only surviving person who would know whether or not the story was true. Then Wink Winkler had been added into the mix. Now, with both of them dead, I had too many years of homicide work behind me to buy into Kramer’s notion that the two deaths—an accident and a suicide—were purely coincidental.

  I happened to believe that Elvira Marchbank had been alive when Sister Mary Katherine left the old woman’s home. I also believed that, as Sister Mary Katherine left, Wink Winkler had arrived. That meant that Wink was, if not the last, then certainly among the last to see Elvira Marchbank alive. Had he killed her and then rearranged the evidence so her death would appear to be an accident rather than a homicide? And what was the point of killing Elvira in the first place? What in Sister Mary Katherine’s account of Mimi Marchbank’s death was so damaging that Wink Winkler would be willing to commit yet another murder in order to avoid having that story revealed more than half a century later?

  Presumably Elvira, determined to make things right, would have identified the long-silent witness who had effected Elvira’s remarkable change in attitude. And if Wink’s sole purpose had been to suppress the story, wouldn’t he have attempted to silence not only Elvira but Sister Mary Katherine as well? And what was the point in his killing himself?

  Or had he? Was there another person involved in all this—another person who knew all the particulars and who was smart enough to manipulate evidence? What if Elvira had been murdered and the evidence had been doctored to make it look as though she had died of an accidental fall? And if that was the case, could the same be true of Wink Winkler’s supposed suicide? What if someone other than Wink held the gun to his head and pulled the trigger? Suicide can be successfully faked, but only if the killer is smart enough to take bullet trajectories, blood spatter, and gunpowder residue into consideration.

  Half awake and half asleep, I tried to catalog everything I had learned in the last several days. I was jolted out of my half-sleep by the recollection of the photograph Sister Mary Katherine had shown me in Bakeman’s at lunch the day before—the one of her and her father posing together, with her perched on the hood of his spanking-new car.

  Hurrying into the living room, I found the phone book and tracked down the number for the Department of Licensing.

  After passing through the required verbal identification process, I gave the clerk the year I was interested in and the name—William Winkler.

  “Which one?” she asked. “Senior or junior?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Give me both.”

  And that’s when I hit pay dirt. In 1950, William Winkler Sr., the man who was evidently Wink’s father, was still making do with a two-year-old 1948 Oldsmobile Futuramic 98. William Winkler Jr., on the other hand, began the year driving a 1946 Ford Super Deluxe, but in June of 1950, he must have landed in tall cotton. Suddenly he was listed as the proud owner of a Ford Custom Deluxe two-door convertible.

  Was it my imagination, or had Sister Mary Katherine’s father’s new Ford arrived at almost the same time as Wink Winkler’s? So I checked the DOL records for Sean Dunleavy as well. Sure enough, his new Ford had arrived on the same day as Wink Winkler’s. And the Dunleavys’ new address was listed as an apartment on Market Street in Ballard.

  The same day? Two brand-new Fords for two guys who both were probably having a hard time making ends meet? This had all the trappings of a classic payoff and cover-up. Between them, Wink Winkler and Sean Dunleavy had managed to keep Bonnie Jean from coming forward to reveal what she had seen.

  Was that the first time Wink had stepped outside the bounds? I wondered. Maybe, but it certainly wasn’t the last. I suspected he had gone on to bigger and better scores, right up until he was drummed out of Seattle PD and maybe even beyond that. Sean Dunleavy, on the other hand, had hit it big just that one time before he’d had to swallow his pride and go back to buying used cars.

  I dialed the number for Saint Benedict’s Convent. It was still relatively early in the morning, but long after 5:00 A.M. prayers. I identified myself and was put through to Sister Mary Katherine.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Has something else happened?”

  “Do you remember that picture you showed me yesterday, the one with you sitting on the hood of your father’s new car?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “Who else do you think got a new Ford about the same time your father got his?” I asked.

  “Who?” she asked.

  “William Winkler,” I answered. “Wink’s vehicle was a slightly different and more expensive model than your dad’s, but he got his car on the exact same day.”

  “Are you telling me that somebody bribed my father?” Sister Mary Katherine asked. “You’re saying they bought him a car on the condition that he keep me from telling what I knew?”

  “And they bought Wink a car to ensure that whatever you said, he wouldn’t hear it.”

  “So I must have told somebody,” Sister Mary Katherine breathed after a long pause. “At least I must have tried to tell someone.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I believe you did.”

  “Thank you, Beau,” she managed, stifling a sob. “Thank you for telling me.”

  With that she hung up. I didn’t blame her for crying. Bonnie Jean Dunleavy’s silence hadn’t wronged her murdered friend. The five-year-old girl had tried her best to help Mimi Marchbank and to tell what she knew, but the system had betrayed her. It had betrayed them both, and I was the one tasked with setting it right.

  CHAPTER 16

  ONCE I GOT OFF THE PHONE with Sister Mary Katherine, I headed to Bellevue to deliver the written report I had promised Ross Connors. When I arrived at the building, Mel and I rode up in the elevator together. “Any sign of Dillon and Heather?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “We’ve been in touch with Dillon’s father in White Rock and with his mother in San Francisco. Both claim they haven’t heard a word. What do you know about the sister?”

  “Whose sister?”

  “Amy Peters’s sister, the one who lives with them.”

  “Oh, Molly,” I said. “Molly Wright. Not exactly my cup of tea. Why?”

  “Brad and I got a search warrant for Dillon’s apartment. We found an empty packet of birth control pills with Molly Wright’s name on the prescription.”

  “You think she got them for Heather?” I asked.

  “That would be my guess,” Mel said. “And Molly is the person Dillon sat with at the funeral. Considering how much Ron and Amy disapprove of Dillon, why would Molly be so chummy with him?”

  “Causing trouble?” I asked.

  “But why?”

  “Jealousy, maybe?” I suggested. “Molly and her husband used to be big deals here in Seattle, then her life went to hell. They lost everything. Her husband went to jail and she was forced to file for bankruptcy. From what I can tell, Ron and Amy took her in because she had nowhere else to go. She’s got nothing—no home, no husband, no kids. From where she’s standing, it must look like her sister has everything.”

  “So she repays Ron’s and Amy’s kindness by undermining their authority with their own kids?” Mel asked.

  Suddenly I was in the odd position of defending Molly Wright. Compared with her, Melissa Soames was a newcomer. “I guess she helps out with the kids,” I said lamely. “Makes meals, that kind of thing.”

  Mel was not appeased. “She also helps by arranging for their fifteen-year-old to get birth control pills,” she returned. “If I were them, I’d throw her out.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought you were a compassionate conservative.”

  “Conservative, yes,” she responded. “Compassionate? Not necessarily,
and certainly not when it comes to dealing with someone like her.”

  Harry, coffee cup in hand, was standing near Barbara Galvin’s desk when Mel and I came in. “Someone like who?” he asked.

  “Ron Peters’s freeloading sister-in-law,” Mel said and then stalked off to her office. Moments later the sounds of morning talk radio drifted down the hall.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Harry asked.

  “Beats me,” I said.

  “And what have you been up to?” he asked slyly. “I haven’t seen you in several days, but I hear tell you’re going around town rattling chains and pushing buttons. And a little bird told me that you’re supposed to have a report on my desk first thing this morning.”

  “It’s in my laptop,” I told him. “You’ll have it as soon as it’s printed and signed.”

  “So stop standing around jawing about it and get it done,” Harry said.

  I went into my own office and shut the door. I booted up my laptop, located the document, and revised it enough to add in what I had learned about the apparent payoffs to both Wink Winkler and Sean Dunleavy. I was about to press “print” when my phone rang.

  “So you went back to the evidence room again,” Paul Kramer said. “What the hell do you think you’re up to?”

  Obviously the evidence-room tattletale was still in Kramer’s corner. “Just doing my job,” I said.

  “I won’t have you messing around in my cases or second-guessing my decisions.”

  “Kramer,” I said. “What you will or won’t have is irrelevant to me. I don’t answer to you. I’ve got a mandate from the attorney general to look into a cold case, and I’m going to do just that.”

  “I already told you. We’ve reopened that old Marchbank case.”

  “Where’s the case log, then?” I interrupted. “Was it there the other day when you grabbed the evidence box out from under me?”

  “Are you implying that I removed it?”

  “I’m not implying anything. I’m straight-out asking.”

  “The log wasn’t there,” he said. “I have no idea what happened to it, but whatever did happen is none of your business, Beaumont.”