by J. A. Jance
“Betts?” I asked.
“Betsy Davis Parmenter—Anders’s second wife. They had been close in high school. They lost track of each other for a while, married other people, and got back together much later. She was the thing after Janice’s death that made Anders decide that maybe his life could still be worth living. They married and raised three kids together—Betts’s son from a previous marriage and two daughters of their own. All good kids, by the way. They’re all through college and doing well.”
“So a good second act then?” I said.
There may have been the smallest hint of sarcasm in my question. Loper caught it and called me on it. “Losing Janice wasn’t an act, Mr. Beaumont, and marrying Betts wasn’t an act, either.”
“You never considered that Anders Harrison might have played some role in his wife’s disappearance.”
“Not once,” Loper declared, “and neither did anyone else, except for Estelle Manring, that is. Why can’t she just let it go?”
“Because her sister is still dead,” I replied.
The answer was an understated rebuke calculated to sort out real cops from the pompous assholes of the world. It worked like a charm, and Sheriff Loper landed squarely on the correct side of that equation.
“What do you need?” he asked with a sigh.
“I’d like to go through the case files,” I said. “That’s what we used to do at Special Homicide, and it’s what we do at TLC as well. We go through the records with new eyes. Occasionally we spot something important that everyone else may have missed.”
Loper picked up my card again and stared at it in silence for a long moment. “You know that Anders Harrison and I have been best friends since grade school?” he asked at last.
“I do.”
“Well, go ahead and knock yourself out then,” Loper told me.
With that he turned back to the receptionist who had lingered in the doorway, watching and listening goggle-eyed as words volleyed back and forth between us. “Daisy,” he said, “would you please be so kind as to take this gentleman down to the evidence facility and tell Stanley to give him whatever assistance he may require.”
“Yes, sir,” Daisy said. To me, she added, “Right this way.”
The so-called evidence facility was in one of those modular buildings that school districts usually refer to as “portables,” although once installed, they are anything but. Deputy Stanley House, the evidence clerk, was a wheelchair-bound former Island County officer who mentioned to me in passing that he had been run down ten years earlier by a drunk driver. I had to give Sheriff Loper credit on that score, too. He was the kind of guy who looked after his own.
Deputy House took me in hand. He gave me his undivided attention and complete access to everything I needed.
As I sorted my way through the materials he provided, I was forced to conclude that Gavin Miller, the Island County sheriff back in 1985, had done a pretty thorough job of investigating the case. I’m in favor of making video recordings of all witness and suspect interviews. Most people aren’t trained actors. When you’re looking at videos, it’s relatively easy to spot when somebody is hamming it up and faking a level of grief that’s as phony as a three-dollar bill.
But the Janice Harrison investigation predated the now routine practice of doing video recordings of everything. Back then the department had relied solely on audio recordings. Among the case artifacts I found a whole cache of labeled audio cassettes that indicated the interviews had been conducted in a timely and orderly fashion.
Deputy House wasn’t able to produce a working cassette player, and even had he done so, I think there’s a good chance that the tapes themselves would have deteriorated to the point that listening to them would have been impossible. Fortunately, someone had gone to the considerable trouble of transcribing each of the interviews. Reading through the transcripts didn’t allow me a window into any of the visible or audible emotions behind the words of each individual, but in reading the words themselves, I was unable to find anything amiss.
The interviews with the three poker players—Anders Harrison himself, Deputy Gus Loper, and Clyde Lewis—all seemed to substantiate each other’s story. They reported that they’d started playing about eight, paused for pizza around ten or so, and then shut the game down for good a little after midnight, whereupon everyone went their separate ways. In answer to questions about the topics discussed that night, all three mentioned Anders’s concern about his wife’s current state of mind, but there was no indication that he feared she might do herself harm. The fourth transcribed interview had been conducted with a guy named Buzz Buford who was the other regularly scheduled poker player, the one who had missed that night’s game due to the late arrival of a load of cement at a home construction site where he was project foreman.
I paid especially close attention to every word of Anders’s interview. He claimed that he’d arrived home at his and Janice’s place outside Coupeville around 12:30 a.m. and had discovered that Janice wasn’t there. Relatively unconcerned by her absence, he’d gone to bed, only to be awakened some two hours later when an Island County deputy, alerted by the state patrol, stopped by to report that Janice’s abandoned vehicle had been found near Deception Pass.
Reading through what Anders said at the time, the words sounded right to me—like the bewildered maunderings of a grieving man trying to come to terms with the inexplicable losses of first his two children and now his wife. Nothing he said in the transcript raised my hackles or my suspicions. In addition, he was entirely cooperative with every aspect of the investigation. He had invited the cops to search both the house and the grounds even though Sheriff Miller had insisted on having a valid search warrant in hand before allowing his officers to set foot inside the property.
But the resulting exhaustive search had yielded nothing. The house held no sign of any kind of altercation or any trace of homicidal violence. Nothing was missing from the residence. A single unidentified fingerprint was lifted from the front door, suggesting that Janice might have had a visitor on the night she disappeared, but no one came forward to admit to having called on her.
Several days later some tourists from British Columbia had called in to report that they’d been driving back to Vancouver in the early morning hours that Saturday morning and had seen what appeared to be a lone woman walking along the shoulder of the road, coming west from the bridge and walking in the direction of Oak Harbor. Assuming she was a stranded motorist, the husband had wanted to turn around and offer assistance. His wife initially rejected the idea but eventually relented. When they made a U-turn and returned to where they had spotted her, the woman had disappeared.
The presence of a mysterious woman on that stretch of roadway on the night Janice disappeared had given rise to the idea that perhaps Janice had faked her suicide as a way of escaping a life that had turned out to be anything but what she’d expected, but that theory had never gained any traction.
A forensic examination of the abandoned T-Bird had come up empty. Janice had been a little bit of a thing—only five-foot-two. The seat and mirror adjustments had both been in what appeared to be their normal positions for someone of that size and stature. The only fingerprints found on the steering wheel or anywhere else in the vehicle had belonged to either Janice or Anders.
After spending three hours browsing through the Janice Harrison files, I thanked Deputy House for his assistance and made my way back to Sheriff Loper’s office.
“Well,” he asked, looking up from his desk when Daisy once again ushered me into the room. “Did you find anything of interest?”
“Not much,” I admitted. “But I’m curious about one thing. Did you ever run that one unidentified print through AFIS?”
If you want to be picky about it, the proper term should be IAFIS—for Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System—but most old-time cops, yours truly included—drop that initial I in favor of sticking with the original acronym. Regardless of what I ca
lled it, Sheriff Loper wasn’t amused.
“This was 1985, remember?” he said. “I don’t think AFIS was even a glimmer in the FBI’s eye back then, and my department didn’t have either the necessary equipment or the capability of getting on line with AFIS until sometime in the mid-nineties, years after Janice Harrison was declared legally dead and the case deemed closed.”
“So that would be a no then?”
Sheriff Loper answered my question with a baleful shake of his head.
“Did you read through the interviews?” he asked.
“I read them,” I answered. “All of them were surprisingly consistent.”
“Did you see any indication that Anders Harrison was anything other than a grieving husband?”
“No,” I admitted, “I did not.”
“And did you notice we all mentioned the same thing—that Janice’s state of mind was one of the topics we discussed that night. Anders told us he was worried about her, too, but I don’t think any of us even remotely considered the possibility that she’d drive out there in the middle of the night and throw herself off a bridge.”
“What about that woman who was spotted out walking along the highway?”
“That was looked into but never corroborated,” Loper told me. “In fact, a search was conducted along that stretch of roadway to see if perhaps there had been some kind of hit-and-run with a dead body lying hidden in a ditch somewhere. Nothing was found. We also had people out searching the coastline for miles on either side of the bridge. Nothing ever turned up, and nothing is going to turn up.”
I didn’t like having to agree with him, but there wasn’t much choice. “All right, then,” I said. “Thanks for the help. I’ll get back to Estelle Manring and let her know that I’ve come up empty.”
I had made that difficult phone call the same afternoon as I drove from Coupeville back to Bellingham. It had not gone well. “So you’re giving up,” Estelle demanded, “just like that?”
“I went through all the files,” I said. “And came up with nothing.”
“I should have known,” she said.
“So what should I do about the yearbook. Do you want me to mail it back to you?”
“As far as I’m concerned, you can burn the damned thing,” she stormed. “Or put it where the sun don’t shine.” Whereupon she hung up.
Right, I told myself, yet another dissatisfied customer.
Now, however, just days after my giving up on the Janice Harrison case, here was a message from Sheriff Loper saying they had a hit. Really? My finger shook as I dialed him back.
“A hit?” I repeated.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m about to send out an invitation for her to come in for an interview.”
“Her?”
“Betts,” he said. “Betsy Harrison. Five years ago she signed up to be a substitute teacher.”
“And these days teachers are required to give prints,” I concluded.
“Exactly,” Loper replied. “So after you left my office the other day, I called down to Seattle PD and did some checking on you. Everyone there gives you pretty high marks. That’s when I decided to take your advice and run that print after all.”
Obviously in his conversations with Seattle PD, Loper hadn’t turned over the rock labeled Captain Paul Kramer. If he had, Loper and I probably wouldn’t have been having a cordial conversation. And although our discussion was most likely leading somewhere at that point, I had no idea where that might be.
“Are you saying it came back as hers?” I asked.
“Yes, it did.”
The simplest answer to any given question is usually the right one. “Maybe this Betsy person stopped by for a visit—maybe a condolence call of some kind.”
“No, she didn’t,” Loper said.
“You’re sure about that?”
“I was best man at Anders’s wedding,” Sheriff Loper told me. “At both of his weddings, as a matter of fact. I remember talking to Betts at their reception. She was talking about how, after she left Whidbey, it was years before she came back. She said that Anders had always been her one true love, and that she felt as though she had behaved so badly toward him that she couldn’t bear facing him. Then, a year or so after Janice’s death, they accidentally crossed paths at a mutual friend’s house in Seattle, that was it. She claimed it was only after they reconnected and started dating that she was finally able to come home to Whidbey.”
“The presence of that print tells us she lied about that.”
“Yes,” Loper agreed somberly, “and that got me wondering about what other lies she might have told.”
“And?” I prompted.
“I’m looking at a copy of her first husband’s death certificate,” he said. “It says here that Ron Parmenter died of an accidental drug overdose on August 8, 1985.”
I was starting to connect the same dots that Sheriff Loper had already connected. “That’s only a couple of months after Janice died. Are you thinking maybe it wasn’t accidental?” I asked.
“Do you?” Sheriff Loper’s voice was bleak. “I’m thinking Betts came up here determined to take Janice off the board so she could have a clear shot at getting Anders back. That would only be possible, of course, if Betts got rid of her own husband, too.”
“This Ron person, her husband,” I said. “What about him? Was he a known drug user?”
“Not exactly. Ron Parmenter was a hotshot, name-brand snowboarder, back when snowboards were the new thing on the block. That was a big part of his appeal. At the time, he was way more showy than Anders was. The problem is, Ron had an accident of some kind, screwed up his back real bad, and was ruled permanently off the slopes.”
“Was he an invalid then?”
“Pretty much. He was bedridden. Betts had to look after him.”
“So rather than having to take care of him for the rest of her life, you’re thinking Betts got rid of him?”
“What do you think?”
“How can I help?”
“I want to get Betts Harrison inside one of my interview rooms, but if I tell her straight out that we’re reopening Janice’s case, she either won’t show up or else she’ll lawyer up.”
“So?”
“I’d like to lure her into stopping by. I want to tell her that you’ve come around asking questions about the case, and that I suggested you talk with her rather than bringing all this bad old stuff up with poor Anders. I’ll assure her that the conversation is for informational purposes only, and that just chatting with about what went on will most likely be enough to set Estelle’s mind at ease. Once your interview with her is over, that will probably be the end of it.”
I was listening to what Loper was saying, but I was pretty sure there was something he was leaving out. I needed to know about that missing piece of the puzzle.
“What else?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“There’s more to this story,” I told him. “Something you haven’t quite gotten around to telling me.”
Sheriff Loper took a deep breath. “It goes back to what Betts said at the wedding reception,” Loper answered reluctantly. “The part about Anders being her one true love.”
“You’re saying that wasn’t true?”
“Not exactly. It turns out Betts Davis had a lot of true loves. I happen to know there was at least one other guy who both predated and postdated Anders.”
It has taken me years to learn the art of keeping my trap shut long enough for the other shoe to drop. This was one of those times.
“Buzz Buford,” Loper said at last in a strangled whisper.
“The construction foreman?” I asked. “The one who missed the poker game that night?”
“He’s the one,” Loper answered. “Buzz and Betts were a hot item our sophomore year, before Betts hooked up with Anders.” He paused for a moment. “I happen to know that they were involved for a while after Anders as well. I always thought it was a harmless little affair that had ended long bef
ore Janice died, but . . .”
“But the ID on that fingerprint sheds a whole new light on things.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Did anyone ever look at Buzz’s alibi for the night in question?”
“There didn’t seem to be a need to. Now there is. I just stopped by the evidence room and read through the transcript. He said he was pouring footings at the Creagers’ new house. That’s located just a half mile or so up the bluff from the place where Anders and Janice were living at the time. I’m thinking that could be where Janice’s body ended up—buried in a load of wet cement. Maybe that’s why we never found her.”
I could see Sheriff Loper’s dilemma. This was all circumstantial evidence at best, and in order for this to work, he would have to have a confession. The suspects involved were longtime friends of his—lifelong friends—and he was about to throw them under the bus. No, that’s not true—he needed a fall guy there to do the actual throwing.
“Obviously you can’t be part of the interview.”
“Obviously.”
“So who will be?”
“Detective Gonzales,” Loper answered. “He’s ex-navy who was stationed here on Whidbey while he was in the service and decided to come back once he got out. He’s a good guy who spent some time working NCIS. Smart, too. My department is lucky to have him.”
I could see Loper’s strategy here. By sending in two relative outsiders—Detective Gonzales and me—Loper was unofficially recusing himself from the investigation. He suspected where at least one body was buried, and now so did I. My next job was to bring Gonzales up to speed.
“When do you want to do this?” I asked.
“Tomorrow afternoon, maybe?” Loper suggested. “A Sunday afternoon sit-down will look a little less official than inviting Betts in on a weekday.”