by J. A. Jance
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Still Dead
An Excerpt from Proof of Life Prologue
Chapter 1
About the Author
Also by J. A. Jance
Copyright
About the Publisher
Still Dead
“So,” my wife, Mel Soames, said to me offhandedly over coffee one stormy Saturday morning in November, “have you given any more thought to maybe getting a dog?”
We were at home in Fairhaven, a part of Bellingham, Washington, sitting in the living room of our recently remodeled and even more recently occupied home. The house is situated on a bluff overlooking Bellingham Bay. That blustery morning, our floor-to-ceiling triple-paned windows offered a relatively unobstructed view of wicked waves hurling themselves toward the perpendicular cliffs at the base of our bluff. When I say relatively unobstructed view, I was referring to the sturdy wooden fence we’d installed at the base of the lawn in order to keep overly adventurous grandchildren from venturing beyond the yard and out onto the cliffs themselves.
Mel is my third wife—as in third time’s the charm—and I like to think that I’m a little older—well, much older—and a little wiser than I was with numbers one and two. Unlike my younger self, I was able to sense the possible presence of a trap long before the iron jaws themselves clamped shut around my ankle. The fact that I regarded the question as a trap has nothing to do with my hating dogs in general, but there’s some unfortunate history here—with me, dogs, and ankles.
I met Karen Moffitt, my first wife, back when we were both students at the University of Washington—the U-Dub as it’s affectionately referred to by residents of Washington State. Karen showed up at one of my fraternity’s formals on the arm of one of my frat brothers, a guy by the name of Maxwell Cole. By the end of the evening, Karen and I were an item, and Max was in a permanent state of snit, a situation which has lasted for decades. The fact that Karen and I divorced eventually and she subsequently died of cancer has had no effect on Max. His nose is still out of joint.
All of this was back in the old days—the sixties. Although dinosaurs no longer roamed the earth, it was still a time when boys taking girls out on first dates were expected to show up on the front porches of family homes, dressed to the nines, and prepared to meet the parents before escorting their daughters out of the house. I was worried about making a good impression on Karen’s father, Amos Moffitt—Pop, as he later insisted I call him—and on her mother, Doris. I should have been more worried about the dog, whose name was Snooks.
Snooks was an ill-tempered, full-sized, wide-load dachshund who took one look at me and promptly bit a big chunk out of my ankle. One of his canines went straight through my sock and into my Achilles tendon, deep enough to draw blood. Karen’s dad dragged the dog off me and locked him in the kitchen. Karen’s mother treated the wound with mercurochrome and a Band-Aid, all the while assuring me that Snooks had indeed had all his shots. With the bleeding stopped and me noticeably limping, I escorted Karen out of the house to go to a movie—Around the World in Eighty Days, as I recall. As for Snooks? For the next five years, as long as the dog remained on the planet, he viewed me as evil incarnate—a reality that made going to the in-laws’ home for Sunday dinners and holiday get-togethers somewhat problematic.
So, yes, I admit straight out that I have dog issues. Maybe if I’d had a dog when I was younger and had known something about them, Snooks wouldn’t have regarded me as a mortal enemy, but that wasn’t the case. I grew up as the son of a single mother—an unmarried World War II not-quite widow. My parents hadn’t managed to tie the knot when my father, a sailor based in Bremerton, was killed in a motorcycle accident on his way back home. My mother gave birth to me eight months later, leaving her with all the responsibilities of wartime widowhood and none of the benefits. She raised me totally on her own, with no help either from her family or from my father’s, by working as a seamstress. We lived in an apartment over a bakery in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. The fact that we had no yard automatically precluded the idea of having a dog, nor could we have afforded one. What I do remember is that all my friends who did have dogs were forever complaining about having to take care of them.
All this is to say that, as far as dogs are concerned, Mel and I might just as well have been raised in separate universes. Mel grew up as an army brat, but her family was always attached to at least one dog as well as the occasional cat. Whenever her father was posted overseas, whatever pets were then in residence were carted off to Mel’s maternal grandparents’ farm near Odessa, Missouri, where they remained for the duration.
I find it amusing that Mel is always more effusive when it comes to talking about her lifetime’s worth of dogs than she is about Greg, her ex-husband. For example, she’d been far more dispassionate in telling me about coming home and finding Greg and her best friend in bed together than she had been when it came to relating the story of having to take her beloved sixteen-year-old springer spaniel, Marty—named after Marty Robbins—to the vet to be put down because his back had given out and he could no longer walk.
Her loss of Marty had occurred shortly after her divorce and just prior to her move to Seattle, where, I like to think, she had exchanged one old dog for another—yours truly.
Mel is something of a physical fitness buff. Before I got my relatively new fake knees, I liked to say that my favorite form of exercise was jumping to conclusions. I’ve upped my game in the walking department some since then—a lot, actually—but Mel was of the opinion that having a dog would kill two birds with one stone—get me out walking more and provide me with some companionship while she was off at work. In other words, this conversation had been ongoing for some time.
“Well,” Mel prompted, “have you?”
I had wandered so far off into the woolgathering woods that I had lost track of her original question. It took a moment for me to get back in the right groove. One thing I knew about any venture into dog ownership was that, with Mel working long hours and with me performing househusband duties, I would be the one looking after said dog.
“No,” I admitted, “not really.”
Which was probably not a good answer, either, since Mel immediately got up, took her cup to the sink, rinsed it, and placed it in the dishwasher.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To work,” she said.
“But today’s Saturday,” I objected. “Do you have to?”
I probably sounded like a petulant four-year-old objecting to his working mommy’s very necessary workday departure.
“If we’re going to be going to Ashland over next weekend, I need to clear some of the paperwork off my desk,” Mel said. “That mountain of paperwork is going to be the death of me yet.”
When I was a street cop and a homicide investigator, I always considered paperwork the bane of my existence. To my way of thinking, it was something forced on the rest of us from the top down. But now that I was married to a police chief, I realized that the gods of paperwork rain the stuff down on everyone’s head in a totally indiscriminate manner—top brass included. In addition, our upcoming Thanksgiving weekend jaunt to Ashland to see the kids and grandkids would amount to a four-day road trip, including two full days—ten hours apiece—in the car. However, since this was the first official long weekend Mel had scheduled off since assuming the role of chief, I didn’t want anything—most especially an accumulation of unfinished paperwork—to screw it up.
“You’d better hop to it then,” I told her, “and I’ll quit whining.”
Mel went off to work. I may have stopped whining, but that didn’t mean I stopped thinking. I did the tasks that pass for doing housework these days. I started a load of laundry.
I ran the dishwasher, and then, with the gas log fireplace burning and with the iPad on my lap, I set out to do my crossword puzzles, but it didn’t work. The printed clues didn’t add up in my head because I was too busy thinking about my mother. Thinking about my not having a dog as a kid had reminded me of my mother—Carol Ann Piedmont.
Remember that old Frank Sinatra song, the one that that goes “regrets, I’ve had a few”? As far as my mother is concerned, regrets are all I have. I wish she could see me as I am now: sober, for one thing. She was the first one who ever told me I had a booze problem back when I was still in high school. I seem to remember telling her she was dead wrong about that, but of course she wasn’t. I wish she could see my kids—her grandkids, to say nothing of her great-grandkids. I was only twenty years old when I spent all those hours sitting by her side in a hospital room, one long night after another, while she lost her brief but fierce battle with breast cancer. Karen came to the hospital with me, too, on occasion, but we weren’t yet married at the time, and our kids, Scott and Kelly weren’t even a blip on the radar.
A sudden rain squall blew in off the bay, leaving the westward-facing windows covered with a scenery-blurring sheet of flowing water. I looked around our spacious great room—at the clean surfaces; the stylish furnishings; the massive island; the gleaming stainless steel appliances in the kitchen—and remembered the dingy, cluttered apartment filled with other people’s cast-off furniture where my mother raised me entirely on her own by dint of the one thing she most assuredly inherited from her father—stubbornness in its purest and most unadulterated form.
My mother was only seventeen and still in high school when she discovered she was pregnant. Upon learning the news, her parents, Jonas and Beverly Piedmont, had immediately packed their daughter off to Portland to a home for unwed mothers, where she stayed for the better part of a week before running away. When my mother told her father that she was keeping the baby rather than giving me up, Jonas had banished her from his house and his life.
That was one of my profound regrets, of course, that although my mother always hoped there would be some kind of reconciliation with her family—that was one of the reasons she named me after her father—she never lived to see it. My grandparents didn’t become part of my life until much later when I was in my forties—at a time when I’d already been divorced and remarried. Jonas and Beverly Piedmont got to meet their great-grandkids, Scott and Kelly, and even their great-great-granddaughter, Kelly and Jeremy’s baby girl, Kayla. My mother missed all of it.
So there she was—a high school dropout, seventeen years old, unmarried, and pregnant. Only in recent years have I learned that initially she turned to my father’s parents for help. They declined to do so, leaving her to make her way entirely on her own. She got a job as a dishwasher in a neighborhood bakery—the one under the apartment where we lived the whole time I was growing up. It wasn’t until those long nights in the hospital that she told me that Olga Johansson, the woman who owned the bakery, had despised my grandfather for the way he treated us. Olga’s way of getting back at him had been to give my mother a job and a place to live along with providing a way for her to make a living—by gifting her with a treadle Singer sewing machine Olga had rescued from a local pawnshop.
The first things my mother made—under Olga’s guidance and tutelage—were aprons for the people who worked downstairs. Soon she had a thriving business making aprons for some of the other neighborhood businesses—cafés and coffee shops. Eventually she became a skilled seamstress—with an excellent eye for fashion. Over time her business model changed. She could look at a designer dress in a photograph and create a respectable knockoff for far less than the original. By the time I was in high school, she was making what amounted to inexpensive haute couture dresses for the money-conscious Scandinavian ladies of Ballard who would never consider parting with enough hard-earned cash to pay for an original design.
That’s one of my major regrets—the one that, even now, can keep me awake at night—that I didn’t appreciate what my mother did; that I didn’t understand the terrible price she paid for not giving me up for adoption; that I was ashamed of having to wear “homemade” shirts to school when all the other boys had store-bought shirts. One day when I was in the fourth grade, I told her that I wouldn’t go to school if I couldn’t wear a “real” shirt.
“Fine,” she said. “Take it off then, but you’re still going to school. By the way,” she added, “it’s February. Running around without a shirt may not be such a good idea.”
She was right, of course; it wasn’t a good idea at all. She won that round fair and square.
On the subject of shirts, however, homemade or not, I never said another word about them to my mother, and the reverse was also true. When I got an after-school job in high school and was able to buy my own shirts, I did so, but it wasn’t something she and I ever discussed. Is it possible some of old man Piedmont’s stubbornness came down through her DNA to me? You be the judge.
But during those long, empty nights in the hospital, did I ever mention anything about that to my mother? Are you kidding me? I was a twenty-year-old kid who thought I knew everything, even though I didn’t know squat. I was arrogant enough to feel sorry for myself and to think that it wasn’t fair for her to up and die on me—ON ME—when I wasn’t even out of college yet. What an unmitigated twerp I was!
By then it was only ten o’clock in the morning, and I was deep in the emotional weeds. Finally, since there wasn’t a damned thing I could do to make things right with my mother, I pried my butt off my self-pity pot and did the only thing that made sense at the time—found an eleven o’clock meeting and went to it. I’ve spent a long time in AA. One of the hallmarks of Alcoholics Anonymous is knowing the difference between what you can change and what you can’t. Having had that pointed out to me, I emerged from the meeting at noon in time to meet up with Mel afterward for lunch, where she had a chef’s salad and I had a chili burger.
“What have you done with yourself all morning?” she asked.
“I’ve been thinking about getting a dog,” I told her. Surprisingly enough, my nose didn’t start growing like Pinocchio’s, but it should have.
“Have you come to any conclusions?” Mel asked.
“Not so far,” I answered. I believe that’s what’s called a sin of omission.
I went home after lunch, determined to fill the hours between then and the time Mel came home with something worthwhile besides thinking about whether or not to get a dog. I left my phone and keys on the kitchen counter while I went to change into my current favorite at-home wear—a pair of sweats. Picking up the phone a few minutes later, I was surprised to see that I had a voice message. When I played it back, I was even more surprised.
“Gus Loper, here, of the Island County Sheriff’s Department. We’ve got a hit on that print! Call me.”
A hit on a print in a cold case? And just like that, even though the Special Homicide Investigation Team is no more, worrying about getting a dog was off my list, and I was back in the harness.
The case had started out a couple of weeks earlier with a call from Ralph Ames. Ralph has been my attorney and my friend for decades now, but we met back when he was my second wife’s attorney. Anne Corley is a whole other story and one I won’t go into right now, but after her death, I discovered that not only had I inherited her fortune, she also had bequeathed me Ralph. His abiding friendship and wise counsel are things I’ve come to treasure more with each passing year. And it’s due to him that I became involved with an organization called TLC—short for The Last Chance—that uses the volunteered skills of retired homicide investigators and forensic folks to tackle long-unsolved cold cases.
TLC was started by one of Ralph’s longtime clients, Hedda Brinker. After taking home a fortune in a Mega Millions lottery, she had used her winnings as seed money to establish the cold case unit. In the aftermath of the shuttering of the Special Homicide Investigation Team, Ralph had realized
I was at loose ends, and he had brought me onboard, putting me in touch with a number of TLC operatives located in far-flung corners of the country. And that is how I became involved in the Janice Harrison case—a more than thirty-year-old missing persons case in Washington State, one that had been closed without ever being solved. As far as TLC is concerned, if there’s a case based in Washington, I’m their go-to guy—their boots on the ground.
At Ralph’s suggestion, I had contacted Estelle Manring—the woman who had connected with TLC, asking for help. Speaking with me over the phone, she supplied me with part of the story—her side of the story anyway—about her long-lost sister.
On Saturday morning, June 22, 1985, a 1983 Ford T-Bird belonging to one Janice Marie Harrison was found parked near one of the viewpoints on the Whidbey Island side of Deception Pass on Washington State Route 20. People from Washington often refer to it as “the bridge at Deception Pass,” but that’s actually . . . well . . . deceptive. The crossing between Whidbey Island and the mainland is composed of two two-lane bridges—one over Canoe Pass and the other over Deception Pass.
A Washington State trooper discovered Janice’s abandoned vehicle at 1:45 a.m., not far from the two bridges. The keys were still in the ignition, and her purse was on the front seat. There was no sign of a struggle or of foul play. Scratched into the dirt next to the car was a single printed word, “SORRY.” The implement used to write out what was assumed to be a one-word suicide note was never recovered, and neither was Janice’s body. If she had leapt to her death from the bridge deck, the assumption was that her remains must have been washed out to sea, since they were never seen again.
Janice’s grieving husband, Anders, was a local guy—a Whidbey Island native—who had been an all-star football player at Oak Harbor High and who was expected to go on to a stellar football career at the University of Washington. Unfortunately, once he arrived at the U-Dub, it hadn’t all been smooth sailing. He had partied too much and washed out of college halfway through his freshman year. Had he been born in other circumstances, not completing his education might have been the beginning of a permanent downward spiral, but that wasn’t the case. Anders’s forebears had been early settlers on Whidbey Island, and coming from pioneer stock meant that, with a degree or without, his future was padded with a certain amount of a: money and b: pull.