by Ford, G. M.
Knowing I had a few hours before chugging back over to Everett, he decided to give me the grand tour. It didn’t take long. The whole damn island was just slightly under five hundred acres. Last time the United States census came around, in 2010, there were forty-one residents.
He said there were a dozen or so cars on the island. All of them barged out from the mainland. Couple of which belonged to the island community association and were for public use, the rest of them in private hands.
He told me how the island’s real name was Gedney Island, probably named after the first dumb shit who rowed a skiff out here, and how the island’s only tourist rental was an apartment at the marina owned by the community association.
Like most folks who live in odd places, he’d worked up a tour and spiel for visitors. Kinda like, if your South Dakota relatives show up in Seattle, you pretty much gotta take ’em to the Pike Place Market so they can watch the guys lob salmon around. It’s simply de rigueur. No gettin’ out of it.
The whole thing took about forty minutes. Mostly we made small talk and drove around. I was trying to be patient and let him bring up Sidney Crossfield, so it wasn’t until he braked to a stop that I bothered to look around.
Interestingly, we were back where we’d started—at the ferry dock. He turned off the engine. I could hear the rhythmic tick tick tick as the engine began to cool. That’s the moment when I realized the fifty-cent tour wasn’t going to, as I’d imagined, end up back at Villa Standish, where we’d sip tea and nibble at scones. No . . . this was as close as I was going to get. The old you can’t know my address thing was apparently genetic.
He pinned me with a gaze. “Do you imagine that Sidney was in some way responsible for what happened to his children?”
I gave it some thought. “It’s possible,” I said. “What I am sure of is that somehow this all relates back to the night his daughter Tracy was killed.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t know. All I know for sure is that a girl ended up dead. A young man’s life nearly came to an end and the only witness is their father.”
He looked away, out the driver’s side window, at the dark, rippled water of Possession Sound. “Charles was such a sweet boy.” He swallowed hard and ran a hand over his face. “He deserved a better fate.”
“And Tracy?”
His face lost a little more color. “God knows nobody deserves to be murdered . . . but that poor thing was a walking disaster.” He shrugged. “While I certainly won’t say she deserved her fate, I can hardly say it was totally unexpected either.” He looked my way. “I mean, that’s the cliché, isn’t it? If you live that lifestyle, that’s precisely what will happen to you.”
I had to agree. Tweakers don’t generally come to good ends, that’s for sure.
“How come Sidney left the diplomatic corps?” I segued.
He took a minute to answer. “You do realize, I hope, that whatever I tell you here is strictly confidential. If necessary, I’ll deny having told you this.” He paused for a beat. “First of all, you must understand that no one is ever publicly fired from the diplomatic service. That would mean they’d made a hiring miscue to begin with, which, of course, would serve to undermine public confidence in the corps, and thus the country. So what happens is that you’re simply not promoted. Everyone involved knows the drill. If you’re not promoted, it’s time to polish your résumé.” He made a resigned face. “If you don’t take the hint, you get a new posting to some garden spot like Kabul, where one can’t go out to lunch without an armored division in attendance.” He showed the truck’s headliner a palm. “Then, of course, for the truly pigheaded, there’s always East Africa.”
“Is that what happened to Sidney?” I pressed.
He thought it over. “More or less . . . except that Sidney was an old, experienced hand and saw it coming well in advance, and . . . he went into business for himself.”
“What business was that?”
“Selling identity papers and American visas to Bosnian war criminals.”
“To who?” Yeah, yeah, I know it should be whom, but the word creeps me out.
“War criminals. My sources seem to think he managed to get something like twenty of them out of the country and into the USA over a span of nine months or so, before somebody at the embassy caught wind of what he was doing and blew the whistle on him.” I was trying to come up with another question when he went on. “At something like half a million dollars apiece, I’m given to understand.”
“And then?”
“He took the money and ran.” He frowned. “I tried to talk Patricia out of getting involved with him, but she was beyond obdurate, and my position didn’t allow for me to be specific. I told her what a piece of unprincipled scum he’d turned out to be, but she wouldn’t listen. She hasn’t spoken to me since. She won’t even take my calls,” he said bitterly.
That was the moment when I knew I’d been correct in assuming he was still holding a serious grudge. He blamed Sidney Crossfield for alienating him from his sister.
“You ever met Charles’s caregivers?”
“No. I have not.”
“Couple Croatian guys.”
He made a rude noise with his lips. “Draw your own conclusions.”
“I met Charlie very briefly and, you know, he didn’t seem to me as if he needed watchdogs. A little scattered and confused, maybe, but not like somebody who needed full-time care.”
“Nothing would surprise me. Sidney will do whatever is necessary to protect himself. He has no ethical foundation other than that of self-preservation.”
“His daughter—” I began.
He held up a restraining hand. “I won’t speak any more ill of the dead. I’ve already said more than I should have.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He leaned closer to me. “You should be careful, Mr. Waterman. Life is cheap in the Balkans. Their primary problem-solving technique involved killing anyone who got in their way. There were a myriad of rumors regarding Sidney’s bodyguards. Murderous Croatian thugs, I’m told. Worked directly for Sidney, not the embassy. I’ve also been told there was an undersecretary who confronted Sidney privately about some of the visas he was approving. Seems Sidney sent him into the city on an errand, and he mysteriously disappeared. Never been seen since.” He gave it a chance to sink in, before adding, “A word to the wise.”
I assured him that caution was my middle name.
He started the truck. I took the hint and got out.
Before I could close the door, Standish shot me a glance and said, “Bring him to bay, Mr. Waterman. I don’t know if the world will be a better place without the likes of Sidney Crossfield, but I’m quite certain it will be for my sister.”
I never did shut the door. When he dropped the truck in gear and started off, the door closed itself. I wandered over to the concrete bench, sat down, and watched his dust float up toward the steel wool clouds and disappear.
Rebecca hadn’t said anything for forty minutes, while she sat at her kitchen table and went over the DNA test results. She’d stopped reading only for long enough to jot down a few notes now and then, and then was right back at it.
I was on my second cup of coffee by the time she pushed herself back from the table and heaved a massive sigh. “All these tell us is who it’s not.”
“Do tell.”
“Terrence Poole’s DNA profile from the night of September eleventh, twenty twelve, is actually the DNA profile of Gilberto Duran. Lamar Hudson’s sample was actually the late Mr. Frost’s. And Willard Frost’s DNA profile, by process of elimination, was probably recorded as Charlie’s, although we can’t be certain without a sample from Charlie. Kevin Delaney, who I’m given to understand was unconscious at the time the samples were taken . . . his profile is consistent with his own sample, and unequivocally proves him guilty of the crime with which he was charged, so it’s safe to assume he wasn’t part of their little charade.”
“How can w
e not have a genetic profile for Charlie?” I groused.
She slowly shook her head. “Probably disappeared along with his juvenile file for the night of Tracy’s death. What Patricia Harrington wants, Patricia Harrington gets.”
“So we’re right back where we started.”
“Not quite,” she said. “What I can tell you is that none of their profiles—not Poole’s, not Duran’s, not Frost’s or Delaney’s—none of them is consistent with the genetic material found in Tracy Harrington’s rape kit. Doesn’t matter who was pretending to be whom. The tests eliminate all of them from being the donor of that genetic material, regardless of how the swab is labeled.”
“So none of them was the donor.” Conversation by repetition was the best I could manage at that moment.
“Right.”
“You know . . . Jessica Harrington said Tracy had an amazing ability to get drugs no matter how broke or destitute she was at the time. Got me to wondering if maybe she wasn’t . . . you know . . . giving it up for money.”
“If that was the case, the profile could belong to anyone. Except . . .”
She had her smug face on. Same look she used to get when she was the only one in the class who knew the answer to the algebra problem.
“Except what?” I prodded.
“Reading these things has become quite the scientific specialty, and I’m by no means an expert, but if I’m reading these at all correctly, Tracy Harrington’s DNA profile is about a thirty percent match to her attacker’s.”
I started to open my mouth, but she cut me off. “Understand . . . a thirty percent match isn’t in the same area code as a successful prosecution. Not even close. They’re looking for a less than one percent of one percent of a one percent chance of it being somebody else. We’re talking about truly astronomical figures here.”
She took a deep breath. “It’s not my field, but whoever left that genetic material, specifically the saliva, shares at least one common ancestor with Tracy Harrington. Somewhere in the past two generations. Which brings us back to Charlie.”
“Or Sidney Crossfield,” I said. “He’s their father by different mothers.”
“That’s too horrible to think about.”
“What if . . . ,” I said.
“We need a sample from Charlie.”
“I’m drawing a blank on how that might be possible. He’s on private property owned by his stepmother. He’s supposedly being cared for because he’s not capable of caring for himself. It’s posted no trespassing. Virtually anything we tried to do would result in a kidnapping charge. Worse yet, those Croatian croakers of his would be within their rights to shoot us if we tried to interfere.”
The pin-drop silence suggested I wasn’t alone in my frustration.
“What if . . . ,” I said again after a minute.
“What if what?” she snapped.
“You said you attended an insurance company board meeting in support of Ibrahim’s claim when he was trying to get the company to pay for Nikka’s treatment.”
“Twice. What about it?”
“Can you look up and see which board members were in attendance?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Humor me. Can you do it?”
“The meetings are a matter of public record.”
“Then there should be minutes . . . no?”
“Theoretically.” She reached out and pulled the MacBook Pro closer. “Who are you looking for?”
“Patricia Harrington.”
“She wasn’t there. I’d remember if she’d been in attendance.”
“What about Sidney Crossfield? Jessica Harrington told me that her mother sits on all these charity and public service boards but doesn’t actually attend the meetings. She said that Sidney always goes in her place. She said he likes it. Makes him feel important.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Sidney Crossfield.”
“They’re crème de la crème of the Seattle social set. There’s bound to be a picture of him swallowing a canapé somewhere online.”
Took her ten minutes of pecking before she sat back in the chair.
“That asshole,” she said.
“Was he there? At the board meeting?”
“Oh yes . . . what a patrician son of a bitch. Sat up there and said people had no God-given right to experimental medicine or, for that matter, to any medicine they couldn’t afford to pay for. He and I got into a major shouting match. Things got rather heated, on both occasions.”
“You know . . . yesterday when I was waiting for the Hat Island ferry to come and pick me up, I had an hour with nobody around and nothing to do. So I was sitting there running every possible scenario I could think of, trying to come up with some kind of story that made sense, and the only thing I could think of was almost too crazy to talk about.”
She laughed out loud. “You’ve never let that stop you before.”
I took a minute to gather my thoughts. “Suppose everything Tracy Harrington told people was more or less true. What if Sidney had been molesting her since childhood? Her stepsister told me that every time Tracy started going into withdrawal, she’d start telling anybody who’d listen that she was a victim of abuse, that the house phones were bugged. That Patricia Harrington had assaulted her. That would explain why she always had money for drugs: Sidney gave it to her to keep her quiet. When she was wasted, she was less of a problem than when she wasn’t, so he kept her wasted.”
“And as long as she was a junkie, nobody would believe a word she said.”
“Exactly.”
“So it was in Sidney’s best interest to keep her addicted.”
“Which also explains why Sidney was so adamantly opposed to having his children move to Seattle, even when they didn’t have any other place to go.”
“So . . . somebody murders Tracy Harrington. Somebody who’s a partial genetic match to her. Crossfield says he found Charlie passed out on the grass next to her body—out of his mind, foaming at the mouth. I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to see that the most likely scenario is that Charlie killed his sister and then tried to kill himself. And, crazy as it sounds, I think Crossfield was prepared to let his son take the rap for it. Except that”—I held up a stiff finger—“crazy ol’ Lamar Hudson confesses to the crime, and the cops, predictably, take the line of least resistance. Not only don’t they have to prosecute a Harrington or face a battalion of high-priced lawyers in a lengthy and expensive trial, but they’ve got a ready-made patsy volunteering to go down for the crime. Sidney breathes a huge sigh of relief and goes back to trying to figure out how to get some of the Harrington fortune to fall in his lap.”
“That’s awful.”
“Sidney’s a first-class scumbag . . . and unlike Ibrahim, Sidney’s children weren’t his weakest link. He really didn’t give a shit about either of them, one way or the other, as long as they didn’t get in the way of the gazillion-dollar gravy train he’d stumbled onto.”
“Jesus,” Rebecca whispered.
“Everybody’s been working on the assumption that on the night she died, Tracy called her brother for drug money. So if I’m right, she called Sidney. What if she always called Sidney? What if what she said about the house phones being bugged was true? Crossfield claims he overheard Charlie on the phone with Tracy. I mean . . . that place is the size of a department store. What’s the chance of anybody overhearing anybody else? More likely the place was wired for sound, if you ask me. The guy spent twenty-five years in the cloak-and-dagger business. Wiring up the house phones couldn’t have been too hard for a guy like that. What if Charlie overheard what was going on between his sister and father and followed Crossfield up to the park that night, instead of the other way around?”
“And then what?”
“One of them injects him with some deadly drug cocktail that permanently screws up his brain. Which one we’re probably never gonna know for sure. And then Sidney gets rid of Charlie by privately institutionalizing him, and every
thing quiets down for a while.”
“Until the Innocence Project starts talking about reopening the case, and Sidney gets real nervous.”
“And then, to make matters worse, Willard Frost hits him up for money.”
“Yeah. Hush money to keep his mouth shut about Lamar being in jail when the murder was committed.”
“Exactly.”
“Crossfield pays him but goes looking for a way, short of killing him, to make sure he can’t come back for more. He remembers Ibrahim from the board meeting. Remembers getting into it with you. Approaches Ibrahim . . . or I’m betting gets somebody to do it for him. Probably one of those two gorillas posing as caregivers. They cut a deal with a desperate man. He steals Lamar’s file for them, along with the four others as a smokescreen, just in case somebody clicks to the theft. Which is just what happens when Kevin Delaney files an appeal. They can’t find the Delaney file, so they start to investigate. Find out there’s a bunch of files missing, and because of the slipshod way deliveries to and from the precincts are handled, they suspend all four of you.”
“Then why kill Ibrahim?”
“I’m thinking that at about that point, Willard Frost comes back trying to hit him up again, this time about the DNA samples being all mixed up. This gets Willard pureed by the Croatian goons but gives Sidney something new to worry about. He decides it’s time for those files to magically reappear, so that the driver’s license can be found and hopefully stop the investigation of Tracy Harrington’s death from being reopened. He’s hoping that the license will put the squash on the Innocence Project’s effort to get Lamar Hudson a new trial, because he knows a new trial is going to dredge everything up all over again, and his position is so tenuous, he can’t take any chances. That’s what the whole thing was about. Not stealing the files, not trying to get somebody out of jail, but adding that driver’s license to the mix, so it could be found later, ensuring they’d keep Lamar Hudson behind bars.”
“But Ibrahim couldn’t put the files back because he’d been suspended, which was not part of the original plan.”