Long Time Gone (5 page)

I left the door to my unit open and went out into the hallway to wait for Ron to emerge from the elevator. Actually, I was a little surprised that he would drop by without calling first. Years ago a work-related accident left him a paraplegic. Getting himself in and out of his wheelchair and the chair in and out of his Camry isn’t an easy task.

Eventually the elevator doors opened to reveal him sitting inside. As soon as I saw his face, I knew something was wrong.

“It’s Rosemary,” he said at once. “She’s dead.”

Rosemary was Ron’s ex-wife. She had been gone from Ron’s life long before I ever met him. One night while he was working the graveyard shift at Seattle PD, Rosemary had split the scene, taking their two young daughters, Tracy and Heather, along for the ride. The three of them had ended up living on some far-out, pot-growing commune in the wilds of eastern Oregon. With the help of Ralph Ames, my friend and attorney, Ron eventually managed to extricate the girls from their wayward mother’s indifferent care, leaving her in a sort of drug-induced free fall. The last I remembered hearing about Rosemary Peters had been several years earlier. She had been headed into treatment and was trying to get her life in order.

“I’m so sorry, Ron,” I said, and meant it. “What happened? Did she OD?”

Ron shook his head. “She was murdered,” he said. “Somebody shot her.” Grasping the wheels of his chair, he pushed away from the elevators and headed for my unit. I followed him inside and closed the door.

“When?” I asked, sounding like a newspaper reporter looking for those elusive four Ws. “Where?”

“Sometime over the weekend,” he said. “Down in Tacoma. They found her body by the water yesterday. It took until today for them to identify her. Two Tacoma homicide detectives came by the office a little while ago to let me know. Oh, God, Beau. What the hell am I going to tell the girls?”

The girls. Heather and Tracy. They’re fifteen and seventeen now, but whenever I hear their names without having them right there in front of me, I always picture them the way they were the first day I saw them. Once Ralph Ames had enlisted in Ron’s custody battle, I watched from the sidelines while the attorney worked what I would later come to realize was his customary magic. First Ralph managed to convince a judge to grant Ron full custody of the two girls. Court order in hand, Ralph had flown down to Pendleton, Oregon, and personally retrieved Heather and Tracy from the commune where they had been living.

Ron and I were waiting at the airport when their flight landed at Sea-Tac. Ralph came off the Jetway leading Tracy with one hand and packing Heather on his other hip. I had first met Ralph when he showed up in Seattle as Anne’s attorney, and he’s the kind of guy you love to hate. No matter what, his trousers are always properly creased, his hair is always neatly in place, and his ties are usually spotless. Not that day, though. For the first and only time in my life I saw him looking frazzled and disheveled. Single-handedly looking after the girls had taken its toll on both him and his clothing. His expensive yellow tie was marred by a long dark dribble of chocolate, but with Heather nestled up under his chin, he seemed totally unconcerned about the un-sightly, and no doubt permanent, stain.

Heather and Tracy wormed their way into my heart that day, just as they had into Ralph’s. And that was permanent, too, all these years later.

“You just come straight out and tell them,” I advised Ron. “They’re sensible, smart girls. You and Amy have done a great job raising them. They’ll be able to handle the news.”

I sat down in the recliner so Ron and I would be on the same level. He looked totally distraught—more so than I would have expected given the fact that he and Rosemary had been divorced for the better part of fourteen years.

“Look,” I said. “I know what it’s like when an ex-spouse dies. I’ve been there, remember? Divorces are all about the bad times, but when somebody dies, the good times resurface. They come back to bite you in the butt when you least expect it.”

“The divorce wasn’t exactly over,” Ron said bleakly.

“What do you mean?” I demanded. “Wasn’t I the best man when you and Amy got married?”

“Rosemary was trying to regain custody,” he answered. “Of Heather. Tracy’s close enough to her eighteenth birthday that it’s not really an issue for her, but Rosemary claimed that since I’ve had Heather all to myself for so long, she wanted some time with her as well.”

“When did all this come about?” I asked. “The last I heard, Rosemary was just out of jail and was going into a drug-treatment facility. Was she clean and sober then?”

“That’s all a matter of opinion,” he replied. “Whenever she got involved in something, she always went overboard. While she was in treatment, she hooked up with this religious group, and she dove into that the same way she dove into drugs. It’s called Bread of Life Mission. They operate soup kitchens for the down-and-out all over the country. Rosemary ended up managing one for them. It’s down near the Tacoma Dome, corner of Fifth and Puyallup. She lived in an apartment over the storefront.”

I thought of the nice home on Queen Anne Hill in which Ron and Amy Peters were raising their three children—Tracy, Heather, and Jared Beaumont Peters—a cute little guy who happens to be my namesake and who’s already charming the socks off the little girls in his kindergarten class.

“Surely Rosemary didn’t expect Heather to go live there, did she?” I demanded.

“As a matter of fact she did,” Ron replied. “In a run-down building that backs up to the railroad tracks and with drug-using bums lined up outside day and night.”

“Sounds like the perfect place to raise a precocious, headstrong teenager,” I said. “If you want her to turn into a druggie, too, that is.”

“That’s exactly what I told Rosemary on Friday,” Ron said. “And I told her I’d see her in hell first.”

“Probably not the best choice of words,” I said. “Especially in light of what’s happened. What did she do?”

“Called her lawyer, evidently. He’s the one who sicced the Tacoma cops on me. He told them I had threatened her. I didn’t, Beau. I swear. It was strictly a figure of speech. Rosemary’s been so big on hellfire and damnation lately that I thought I’d put the situation into terms she’d understand.”

“So what happened?”

“Two Tacoma homicide dicks turned up at my office down at Internal Affairs about three this afternoon. They claimed they were coming to notify next of kin, but I wasn’t born yesterday. I did that job long enough to know the drill. They notified me, all right. Then they asked as many questions as they thought they could get away with without having to read me my rights. You know where all this is going, don’t you?” he asked.

Unfortunately I did. “Straight to the SHIT squad, right?”

Ron nodded. “I wanted to give you a heads-up, Beau. I owe you that much.”

“Believe me, Ron. You don’t owe me a thing.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I needed a place to vent. Now I’d best get home. I have to tell the girls what happened—before someone else does.”

For some time after Ron left, I sat and wrestled with the uncomfortable knowledge that one of my best friends was about to come under the scrutiny of my colleagues at the Special Homicide Investigation Team.

A year earlier Tacoma’s chief of police had run off the rails. He had used a gun to murder his estranged wife and had then taken his own life while their horrified young children observed the carnage from a few yards away. Subsequent investigations had revealed that for years Tacoma PD had either ignored or covered up reports of domestic violence at the chief ’s house. Had those reports been handled differently, a terrible family tragedy might well have been avoided. The city of Tacoma hasn’t exactly stood up and accepted responsibility for the mishandling of the case, but I personally have no doubt the city’s coffers will be greatly depleted by the wrongful death suit that’s been filed on behalf of the dead woman’s survivors.

Police-related domestic violence has long been one of law enforcement’s dirty little secrets. When cops are involved in such incidents—as either perpetrator or victim—we tend to turn a blind eye. That had certainly been the case with my dead partner, Sue Danielson. She had gone to great lengths to conceal her former husband’s violent nature and the recurring bouts of domestic violence that had preceded her divorce. I’ve often wondered what would have happened had she reported it. Would he still have managed to kill her? I don’t know.

But when Sue died, she was just a cop—an ordinary foot soldier—and hardly anybody noticed. Besides, she was the victim, not the perp. When a police chief is the one pulling the trigger, though, everybody pays attention—even the state legislature. They got busy down in the state capitol and have been drafting a slew of new laws that will require uniform policies and procedures for reported cases of police-related domestic violence. And if one of those cases results in a fatality, it’s automatically kicked upstairs to the attorney general’s office, where his Special Homicide Investigation Team becomes the lead investigating agency.

Ron and I were close friends. That meant I wouldn’t be one of the investigators working the case, but I’d still be part of the investigation. I’d be one of the witnesses my colleagues would be questioning, and the fact that Ron had come straight from the next-of-kin notification to talk to me wouldn’t look good for either one of us.

Now instead of one disaster-bound case, I was dealing with two.

It was enough to make me wonder why I’d even bothered to come back home from Hawaii. Bored as I was, I should have known when I was well off and stayed there.

F
OR SOME STRANGE REASON,
after that, my heart wasn’t into analyzing Fred MacKinzie’s taped interviews. Instead, I called Lars Jenssen—my stepgrandfather and AA sponsor—at Queen Anne Gardens, the assisted-living facility where he and my grandmother, Beverly, have taken up residence.

“Hey, Lars,” I said, once he’d adjusted his hearing aid so he could talk on the phone. “It’s Monday. Want me to come pick you up and bring you down the hill for the meeting?”

On Monday nights Lars and I usually grab a bite to eat and then attend the AA meeting that’s held at the old Rendezvous Restaurant on Second Avenue. And since Lars no longer drives (he’s ninety-three, so that’s a good thing!), I pick him up and drop him off. Lars has been sober for so long that I’m not sure he actually needs to go to meetings anymore, but he gets a kick out of being the oldest guy there—in terms of age rather than sobriety. As for Beverly? She let me know once that she appreciates having him out from underfoot occasionally, too. That way she can spend time hanging out with some of the other “girls.”

But on this particular evening, Lars turned me down. “No,” he said. “I t’ink I’ll stay home tonight.” His Norwegian accent tends to be thicker on the telephone than it is in person. “The missus isn’t feeling too good. I need to stick around and keep an eye on her.”

Beverly Piedmont Jenssen is a sprightly ninety-one. “Nothing serious, I hope,” I said.

“Oh, no. She’s yust a bit under the weather.”

Lars, a retired fisherman, loves his fish—baked, deep-fried, grilled, sautéed, stewed, and chowdered. On Monday nights when he’s out with me, we usually stop off at Ivar’s for clams. I can take fish or leave it. And on this occasion, leave it is what I did, opting for Mexican food instead, something Lars won’t eat.

Pulling on a leather jacket, I braved the weather and hoofed it up Second to Mama’s Mexican Kitchen. The after-dinner meeting was short. Only about eight guys showed up, all of them regulars. The people in attendance were far more interested in talking about the weather than they were in the Big Book or the drunkalogue, and rightfully so. By the time we came back out onto the street, it was snowing. And sticking.

Back at Belltown Terrace, the night doorman was among the missing, so I buzzed myself into the building with the keypad. Then I went upstairs and turned on the gas log. I checked the phone for messages, hoping to hear how things were going for Ron at home. All evening long I had been wondering how Heather and Tracy had handled the disturbing news of their mother’s murder, but my light wasn’t blinking. There was no message from them, and none from Harry I. Ball, either.

I wondered briefly if I should call Harry at home and tell him what had happened, but I got over it. Harry would find out about the case through regular channels soon enough.

You’re better off letting the wheels of bureaucracy grind away at their own pace on this one,
I told myself.
No sense borrowing trouble.

And trouble was coming. As soon as news of Rosemary Peters’s death hit the media, I’d be in it up to my eyeballs. For one thing, the fact that Ron and I were former partners was a long-established fact. Unearthing our friendship wouldn’t be difficult for anybody. I hated to think what someone like Maxwell Cole, an old fraternity brother and my longtime nemesis, who was a columnist down at the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
would make of the fact that Ron had stopped by my condo to tell me about his former wife’s death before he went home to tell his two daughters. With a little imagination combined with journalistic license, Max would probably turn that visit, along with my presence on the Special Homicide Investigation Team, into the second coming of
Conspiracy Theory
.

After a several-hours-long hiatus, I forced myself to return to the VCR. I watched all three of the Sister Mary Katherine tapes in order. Carefully, in a nonthreatening fashion, Fred encouraged her to delve more deeply into the forgotten memories of that awful day that had clearly become pivotal in Bonnie Jean Dunleavy’s childhood. It was a fascinating and eerie process. By the time the third tape ended, I felt as though I had been standing on the kitchen chair beside that traumatized and frightened little girl as she witnessed a vicious stabbing and murder. If I hadn’t been convinced beforehand, the clincher would have come during that last tape when Bonnie Jean revealed that when she had returned from her hiding place, she had discovered the body was gone and the blood washed away.

With my notebook open and a pencil handy, I went through the tapes again, jotting down questions and comments as I watched.

How much hand-eye coordination does it take to play jacks or hop-scotch? BJ has to be five or maybe six. Doubt kids younger than that could do either. So we’re talking about 1950 or, at the very latest, 1951.

She’s evidently not in school. It could be because it’s summertime (sunny) or that she isn’t going to school yet. If they were living in Washington State, when did schools around here start offering half-day kindergarten? Need to check school records to see if I can find her listed.

Need to take a look at the photos she still has, the ones in the boxes her foster mother kept for her.

Need details about the perpetrators’ vehicle. What make and model?

Need to check old DMV and driver’s license records for possible addresses on her parents.

What happened after the murder? There must have been an investigation. Did detectives ever take a statement from Bonnie Jean? If not, why not?

It was interesting to realize that I was treating this as an unsolved case simply because it was unresolved from Sister Mary Katherine’s point of view. More than half a century had passed since the murder. It was likely that the two people responsible for Mimi’s death had long since been brought to justice. Hopefully they had paid for their vicious crime either through execution or by serving long prison stays. Verification of that would, I hoped, put a stop to Sister Mary Katherine’s haunting nightmares. And, with any kind of luck, it would also short-circuit my own potential problem with the attorney general and the archbishop’s right-hand man.

I was so involved in watching the videos and taking notes that I completely lost track of time. Since my body was still functioning on Honolulu time, I was astonished to realize it was close to midnight. I was on my way to bed when the phone rang. I picked up, expecting the caller to be Ron Peters. Instead, it was his daughter Tracy.

“Uncle Beau?” she asked. “I’m downstairs. Can I come up?”

I buzzed her into the building. Despite the long elevator ride, when she greeted me, her light brown hair and her purple-and-gold Franklin High School jogging suit were both dotted with not quite melted snowflakes. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks flushed.

“Tracy!” I exclaimed. “Come in. What on earth are you doing here?”

Overheated and still out of breath, she stripped off the damp jacket and dropped cross-legged onto the window seat. “You heard what happened?” she asked.

“Your dad stopped by and told me on his way home,” I said. “I’m sorry, Tracy, so very sorry.”

“I’m not,” she returned hotly. “Sorry, I mean. She never was much of a mother.”

By any standard, this was an unarguably true statement. Still, it was a hurtful admission for a teenager to have to make, and there were tears in Tracy’s eyes as she said it.

“Your mother was a troubled woman,” I countered, trying to make the poor girl feel better. “I’m sure she did the best she could.”

“Her best was pretty damned lame.”

While Tracy leaned back against the window, I hovered uncertainly near the front door. Now the hurt and anger in Tracy’s voice prodded me into action. “Can I get you something?” I asked. “A soda, maybe, or hot chocolate?”

“Hot chocolate would be nice. I remember how, when we were kids and came upstairs to visit, you always had marshmallows to put in our hot chocolate. Big ones, too. Not those puny little ones that taste like cardboard.”

“I remember all right,” I said. “But no marshmallows today. Sorry. When you and Heather stopped dropping by on a regular basis, that last bag of marshmallows turned to solid rock. If I had known you were coming…”

A few minutes later, when I returned from the kitchen, Tracy was staring outside at the falling snow. It was coming down steadily—the flakes as big as feathers whirling in the city lights. I handed her a mug of hot chocolate and then sat down beside her.

“Do your folks know you’re here?”

“No.”

“How did you get out without their knowing about it?” I asked.

“Through a door in the furnace room,” she answered. Tracy glanced up at me through lowered eyelashes. Catching what must have been a clear flash of disapproval on my face, she bristled. “Heather’s always sneaking in and out that way and getting away with it. Why shouldn’t I? After all, I’m older than she is.”

Sneaking in and out of the house hadn’t been part of my teenage years. I doubt it was for many kids back then. For one thing, my mother would have killed me. But things are different now. My own kids had straightened me out on that score while they were still in junior high.

“Heather sneaks out, too?” I asked.

“All the time,” she answered. “To see Dillon.”

“Who’s he?”

“Her boyfriend—Dillon. He’s a jerk. Mom and Dad don’t like him either. Since they won’t let her hang out with him, he comes by when they’re at work, or else she sneaks out to see him late at night, after they’re asleep.”

I wondered if Tracy was telling me this with the expectation that I wouldn’t tell her father. Or was she hoping I would?

“You said you needed to talk,” I told her. “What about?”

Suddenly Tracy’s tears began to flow. “Why did Rosemary have to try to get custody of Heather?” Tracy wailed. “Heather didn’t want to go. Why would she? Her friends are here. If she’d had to go live in Tacoma, she wouldn’t have known anybody. It would have been awful for her. Why did she have to go and spoil everything?”

I was struck as much by Tracy’s blaming the victim as I was to hear her referring to her biological mother by her first name, rather than calling her “Mother” or “Mom.” I certainly shared Tracy’s sentiments about Heather’s being plucked out of her comfortable home and settled situation in the Seattle school district in order to be dragged off to the wilds of Tacoma, but since it was now clear that Heather wouldn’t be making that move, how could everything be spoiled? Besides, with Rosemary Peters dead, I somehow felt obliged to defend the poor woman.

“I’ve never been a mother,” I told Tracy, “so I certainly don’t know everything that went on in Rosemary Peters’s life. I’ve been a father, though. I’ll be the first to admit that when my kids were little, I wasn’t much of a dad. I had a lot of the same difficulties your mother had.”

Tracy looked at me. “You did drugs?” she asked.

“My drug of choice was alcohol,” I told her. “I was into booze big-time. For years after Karen and I got divorced and while I was still drinking, Scott and Kelly didn’t have much to do with me. I don’t blame them. And you shouldn’t blame your mother either. Once she ditched the drugs, she probably realized what she had been missing all those years and simply wanted to reestablish a relationship with you two girls. It’s understandable that she’d like to get to know her daughters again. She was hoping to make up for lost time.”

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.