Justice Denied (14 page)

Riding the elevator up to the Sheraton’s Presidential Suite without having had the benefit of any liquid courage I found myself having second thoughts about the whole thing—second thoughts and very damp palms. Mel must have been reading my mind, or maybe she noticed my hands were so sweaty I could barely manage the elevator buttons.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s going to be fine.”

And it was. I stepped into the spacious but crowded room and discovered, to my immense relief, that I was properly attired. Thanks to Mel’s timely intervention, my tuxedo held its own with every other tuxedo in the room. That definitely improved my outlook. And Mel didn’t just measure up to the other women—she outshone most of them. That made me feel even better.

She knew everyone, of course, and was immediately caught up in first one conversation and then another. Wanting to make myself useful, I wandered over to the bar and ordered a tonic with a twist for me and a glass of Merlot for her. Then I settled in by the windows and stared out over the surrounding glowing high-rises to the distant darkened mass of Elliott Bay, twinkling now with moving ferries and a border of reflected city lights.

“Great view, isn’t it?” someone said.

I turned to look. The man standing beside me was about my age and size. Since there were no conveniently placed tables, he, too, was holding two drinks—a rocks glass with an amber liquid that was probably Scotch and a glass of white wine.

“Name’s Beaumont,” I told him. “J. P. Beaumont. Since we both seem to be functioning as window dressing at the moment, I guess we’ll have to shake hands later.”

The man chuckled. “Cal Lowman,” he said. “You’d think they’d be able to spring for a couple of tables at things like this so we wouldn’t have to stand around looking like a pair of idiots. I always wanted to be a drink stand when I grew up, didn’t you?”

Cal Lowman was a name I recognized. He was a senior partner with one of the big-deal corporate law firms in town—Henderson, Lowman, Richards, and Potts.

I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, raised by a single mother who supported us by working as a seamstress. She made a meager living by sewing knock-off copies of designer dresses for Seattle’s social elite. All through grade school I had to endure endless teasing over showing up each day in one or another of my mother’s homemade shirts. Eventually I fought back, winning some and losing some and being sent to the principal’s office on an almost daily basis.
The fights didn’t stop for good until I was in high school and was old enough to get an after-school job at the local theater. Only then did I achieve the pinnacle of sophistication by showing up at school in a store-bought shirt.

But America’s a great place. Here I was, decades later, having a tuxedo-clad male bonding conversation with one of Seattle’s prime movers and shakers.

“Your wife’s on the board?” Lowman asked.

This is one of the reasons I’m no good at chitchat. If I couldn’t explain Mel Soames’s position in my life to my children, how would I manage with this stranger? Mel most definitely was not my wife, but the more dispassionately accurate U.S. Census Bureau term, POSSLQ—a person of opposite sex sharing living quarters—just didn’t do it for me. And we were both far too long of tooth for the old standby terms of boyfriend/girlfriend to apply.

“Mel Soames is my partner,” I said finally. “And yes, she’s on the board.”

Just then the woman we had met days earlier at the California Pizza Kitchen arrived on the scene. She was dazzling in a strapless green silk gown topped by an amazing emerald necklace. “Hello, there,” she said to me. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” Then, reaching past me, she collected the glass of wine Cal Lowman had been holding.

“So you’ve already met my Anita?” Cal asked with a possessive smile.

As I said, Cal was about my age. Mel is fifteen years younger than I am, and this delectable piece of arm candy was far younger than that.

I brushed off my conversational skills as best I could and tried
to measure up. “Briefly,” I said. “But I’m not up on exactly what you do.”

“I’m retired,” Anita told me, sipping her wine. “And trying to make the world a better place. That’s why I started the SASAC in the first place.” She turned to Cal. “Okay,” she said, “time to go to work. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

She dragged him away so unceremoniously that I was surprised Cal didn’t object. Their abrupt departure left me wearing the conversational equivalent of two left feet.

About that time Mel showed up and relieved me of her glass of wine. “So let me guess,” I said, nodding in Anita and Cal’s direction. “Now that Anita’s hooked up with a sugar daddy like Cal Lowman she can forgo working for a living and can afford to devote herself to charity.”

Mel gave me a bemused look. “There you go,” she said. “You’ve fallen back into that age-old trap of gender stereotyping. You’ve got this story upside down and backward. If anybody’s a sugar daddy, it would have to be Anita. She left Microsoft at age thirty-three with a pocketful of loot. That’s where she met Cal—at Microsoft. She plucked him off Microsoft’s team of corporate legal beagles and took him home to play house. A lot like you and me, babe; only, in our case, you’re the one with the moolah. Anita could probably buy and sell Cal Lowman a dozen times over.”

That’s when it came home to me. Times had changed; women had changed. My second wife, Anne Corley, had died and left me with an armload of money, but tux or not, I was still that unsophisticated hick from Ballard. No amount of money in the world was going to fix that.

“And plan on being nice,” Mel added. “I’m pretty sure we’re seated at the same table.”

Convinced I had somehow bungled that initial encounter, I was dreading sharing dinner with Cal and Anita, but then I got lucky. When we went down to the cavernous ballroom and made our way through to the table directly in front of the speaker’s podium, I caught sight of someone I actually knew—Destry Hennessey.

I had encountered Destry years earlier, when she had been a lowly criminalist working on a master’s at the U. Dub during the day and toiling away in Seattle PD’s crime lab by night. Once she earned her degree, she had taken a job somewhere else—I wasn’t sure where. Sometime in the course of the last several years, Destry had returned to the West Coast as the newly appointed head of the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab.

I went up and shook her hand. “Des,” I said, “long time no see. What are you doing here?”

“I’m the speaker,” she said. “I hate doing public speaking. In terms of phobias, it’s supposed to be right up there with fear of dying. With a room this big I can tell you I’m scared to death.”

“You’ll do fine,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said. “It’s nice to have a friend in my corner.”

When I went to introduce her to Mel, I was surprised to learn they already knew each other. “We’re both on the SASAC board,” Mel explained. “We roomed together at a retreat down in Mexico last fall.”

“Funny,” I said. “You never mentioned it.”

Mel shook her head. “You and I weren’t exactly an item back then, remember?”

While the two of them chatted I checked out our table, where I was dismayed to discover someone had taken the liberty of assigning seats. The good news was that Destry was on
my right. On my left was a dragon lady named Professor Rosemary Clark, who, I soon learned, turned out to be the University of Washington’s distinguished professor of women’s studies. Since the good professor was far more interested in talking to Cal Lowman than she was to me, Destry and I spent dinner exchanging small talk.

We brought each other up to date on what had happened in our lives since we’d last crossed paths. After leaving Seattle PD she had worked for several years as second in command for the state crime lab in Massachusetts. However, her kids, now in high school, and her husband had all hated living on the East Coast. When the opportunity had arisen for her to come back home to Washington as head of the state patrol’s crime lab, she had jumped at the chance.

“Heard you’re working for SHIT now,” she said.

I nodded, glad that for once I was dealing with a fellow bureaucrat who didn’t have to make a joke of the agency’s name.

“How do you like it?” she asked.

“Not bad,” I said. “Ross Connors is a pretty squared-away guy.”

As we started in on the salad course, I asked Destry about the talk she would be delivering.

“It’ll be on our DNA pilot program,” she said.

Her answer left me entirely in the dark. “What pilot program?” I asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re here at the major donor table, so I figured you knew all about it. SASAC is paying the freight for a full-time DNA profiler in the crime lab. There’s so much DNA evidence coming in now that we’re falling further and further behind. If we raise enough money tonight, we may be able to fund
another one. Someday we may be able to start making progress on that backlog of rape kits that have sat untested in evidence rooms for years on end.”

DNA’s impact on crime solving has changed significantly in the last few years. Cold cases that were once deemed unsolvable were now being cleared as new techniques came online.

“With all this high-tech stuff,” I said, “pretty soon old-time detectives like me will be completely obsolete.”

Destry Hennessey laughed and patted my hand. “That would be a shame,” she said.

“Why?”

I thought she’d say something about society losing the benefit of our law enforcement experience and cunning and skill, and maybe even our flat-out stubbornness, but she didn’t.

“Because some of you old guys are so darned cute,” she said with a smile.

I did not want to be cute! And I certainly didn’t want to be old! What I really wanted was get up and stalk out of the ballroom without waiting around for the main course or for Destry Hennessey’s upcoming speech, either. But I didn’t. My mother raised me to be more of a gentleman than that—at least she tried to. So I plastered a phony smile on my face, chatted civilly with the professor when called upon to do so, and stayed right where I was.

I’m doing this for Mel,
I thought glumly.
And she damned well better appreciate it!

I
f you fall in love when you’re young, you stake a claim on that other person’s life. You want to know everything about them. But Mel and I fell in love later. We both had a past—maybe more than one each—and we arrived at the conclusion that the other person’s past wasn’t anybody else’s business. For one thing, you can’t change the past. And since we couldn’t change what had happened to us before we met, it didn’t make sense to go into all of that in any great detail, either. To that end we made a mutual and conscious decision to live in the present. We didn’t go digging around in each other’s personal history. So far that had worked for us.

But just because we didn’t sit around jawing about our pasts didn’t mean there was some big secrecy program going on, either.
For instance, Mel knew about what had happened to Sue Danielson because Sue’s death was work related. And I’m sure she could have found out about Anne Corley’s death for the same reason. It had been big news in all the local newspapers at the time. Mel is, after all, a detective. I have no doubt she had picked up bits and pieces both good and bad about my relationship with Karen by paying attention to what my kids said about our marriage and subsequent divorce.

Mel’s and my unspoken agreement did mean that Mel hadn’t ever asked me about the whys and wherefores of my going to AA, although, come to think of it, that’s pretty obvious. It also meant that I hadn’t ever delved into her involvement with SASAC, although I have to admit to a certain amount of curiosity. My hands-off attitude on that score ended the night of the dinner at the Sheraton.

There was a lot about the evening that made me uncomfortable. For one thing, there was a whole “Male Evil; Woman Poor Victim” theme to the event that rankled. Yes, I know that most victims of sexual assault are women, the major exception, of course, being generations of traumatized and equally victimized altar boys. But it turns out the villains there are also male, so being a nonabusing heterosexual male in that particular Sheraton ballroom was not a comfortable fit.

Still, I was expected to sit there and share the guilt and blame while a lineup of women revealed a litany of abuse that was enough to curl your hair. As a man, I was automatically under indictment. Whatever had happened to those women was somehow
my
fault. I was also expected to haul out my wallet and make a sizable donation to the cause, which included the funding of a twenty-four-hour rape hotline and Internet site, funding for victim advocates
and victim counseling, as well as continuing to fund the rape-kit examination project that was, it turned out, Anita Bowdin’s special focus.

That rankled even more. It was bad enough that Ross Connors was now passing off police work to underemployed economists. But to find out that the crime lab was outsourcing DNA profiling as well was enough to make this old cop feel like a member of an endangered species—an exceedingly cranky endangered species.

So I handed over my credit card number, kept my mouth shut, and just tried to make it through.

“What’s the matter?” Mel asked.

We had finally escaped the overheated ballroom and were standing outside the hotel in a crush of people waiting for an outnumbered and overwhelmed crew of parking valets to retrieve the Mercedes from the garage.

“How did you ever get mixed up with that bunch of women?” I asked, thinking most particularly of the good professor of women’s studies who had given me an earful of invective over the dessert course.

Okay, my comment was more of a growl than anything else. And it could have been phrased far more diplomatically. But I didn’t expect what happened next. Mel simply turned and walked away. Make that stalked away. The manner in which she took off was far more definitive than mere walking.

“Where are you going?” I asked, trailing after her.

“To catch a cab,” she said over her shoulder.

“But…” I objected.

“I’m going home,” she added. “To Bellevue.”

I guess our voices were somewhat raised, and people started
to gawk. Just then the valet showed up with my car and honked twice from the curb. By the time I tipped him and retrieved the Mercedes, Mel was nowhere in sight.

So, since she had said she was going to Bellevue, I drove there, too. There were no lights on in her apartment, so I parked outside and waited. And waited. Finally, forty-five minutes later, and needing to use the facilities, I headed back to Seattle. When I drove down into the underground garage I realized the error in my thinking. Her BMW was gone. So she had ridden the cab back to Belltown Terrace to pick up her car so she could drive herself across the lake to Bellevue. No wonder I had missed her.

Up in the apartment I soon discovered that her briefcase and her computer, along with Todd Hatcher’s stack of abstracts, were all among the missing. So were her nightgown, bathrobe, and makeup. I glanced in her closet. I’m sure some of her clothing was gone as well, but I couldn’t tell how much. If I could have sorted that out, it might have told me if I was dead or really dead. By then it was too late to consider driving back to Bellevue. I tried calling both her cell and her landline, but she didn’t answer. Finally I gave up. I removed my newly purchased tuxedo, which hadn’t exactly done me a hell of a lot of good, and took myself to bed.

When the phone rang bright and early the next morning, I grabbed for it eagerly, hoping Mel would be on the other end of the line. She wasn’t.

“Hi, Dad,” Scott said. “How’s it going?”

Medium,
I thought. “Fine,” I said. “How was your day yesterday?”

“Great!” he said. “I took Cherisse out to Lake Tapps and showed her our old stomping grounds. Geez, there are lots of houses out
there now. I mean, our house used to be way out in the country. And the lake’s a lot smaller than I remembered.”

“But it was fun?” I asked.

“Sure. We had a blast. This morning we’re going to pick Lars up and take him to breakfast at the Mecca. Do you and Mel want to come along?”

I looked at Mel’s empty pillow. “I think we’ll take a pass on that,” I said.

“And then we’re going to go on playing tourist,” he said. “The Arboretum, Snoqualmie Falls, the aquarium. Care to join us for any of that?”

If I ever go back to Snoqualmie Falls, the place where Anne Corley died, it will be way too soon. “No,” I said. “I’m working on a case. I should probably spend some time on that, but a man’s got to eat. What are your plans for dinner?”

“Don’t really have any,” Scott said, sounding a bit abashed. “We’ve pretty much blown our budget.”

I remembered what it was like to be young and broke and wanting to impress your new wife but worrying about whether or not you’d be able to pay next month’s bills if you did so. Thanks to Anne Corley, my financial situation had taken an amazing turn for the better since those tough old days.

“Dinner’s on me, then,” I said. “What sounds good?”

“Steak?” Scott asked hopefully.

“We’ll go to El Gaucho, then,” I said. “They have some of the best steaks in town, and it’s only a couple of blocks from here. Say around seven or so. I’ll call for a reservation.”

“What happened to Kelly and Jeremy?” Scott asked. “I called to invite them to breakfast. The guy at the front desk said they’d checked out.”

“I guess Kelly wanted to go home.”

“She was acting weird,” Scott said. “Even for Kelly. I mean, if this is all because of Mel, it’s ridiculous. You do get to live your own life, don’t you?”

My sentiments exactly,
I thought, although looking at Mel’s empty pillow made me wonder if her presence in my life was still an issue.

“Seems like I should,” I said.

“See you this evening,” Scott returned. “Where’s the restaurant, by the way?”

“Just come to the house,” I said. “We can walk from here.”

Missing Mel, I rolled out of bed and went out into the kitchen to make my own coffee. Then, while the coffee brewed, I called Nick down at El Gaucho. Mel and I go there enough that I have the number programmed into my cell phone. No one answered that early on a Saturday morning, but I left my name and a message. I brought in the newspapers from the front door, but I didn’t bother opening them. For some reason I didn’t feel up to working a crossword puzzle.

Instead, I sat in my recliner, sipping coffee and brooding. Finally I threw caution to the winds and dialed Mel’s cell.

Much to my surprise, she answered. “I’m not speaking to you, remember?”

This seemed like an egregious overreaction to whatever I had or hadn’t done, so I decided to ignore it. “If you were speaking to me,” I countered, “what would you say?”

“‘Those women’!” she said, repeating my ill-chosen words with an inflection I recognized all too well. “How did I get hooked up with ‘those women’?”

“Mel, look. I’m sorry. I’m sure I was out of line, but you’re not
seeing this from my point of view. I spent dinner stuck next to that dreadful professor, who really does hate men, by the way, and listening to all of those awful stories. It seemed like every story and every single one of the women there said pretty much the same thing—that whatever had happened to them was all my fault. That I was somehow responsible. I’ll bet even Anita Bowdin’s husband…”

“Calvin Lowman,” Mel supplied. “And he’s not her husband.”

“Whatever,” I said. “I’ll bet even he was squirming in his seat. Every man there was probably doing the same thing.”

“Is there a purpose to this call?” Mel asked.

Her crisp tone would have deflected even the most determined of life insurance salesmen. “I invited Scott and Cherisse to dinner at El Gaucho tonight at seven,” I said hurriedly. “I was hoping you’d come, too.”

“What about Kelly and Jeremy?”

“They went home,” I said. “To Ashland.”

There was a pause. “I’ll think about it,” Mel said. “But don’t hold your breath. And there is a reason,” she added.

“I’m sorry?”

“A reason I’m involved with ‘those women.’ A reason I’m on the board. I just don’t like to talk about it, but maybe I’ll tell you sometime. If I start speaking to you again, that is.”

With that she hung up, leaving me with no clear idea of where I stood. She claimed she wasn’t speaking to me, but she had been. And the other part—the part she had left unsaid—about the reason behind her involvement with SASAC put a hole in the pit of my stomach. I had never even considered that someone as slick as Mel might have some dark corner in her past where she, too, had
been gravely mistreated. If something like that had happened to her, I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear about it. Once I did, would I feel obliged to go out, track the jerk down, and throttle him with my bare hands? That would make a lot more sense than sending donations to SASAC!!!

I called Mel right back. “I know you’re still not speaking to me,” I said quickly, “but if you wanted to come back to the house and work together on Todd Hatcher’s stuff, I promise I won’t say a single word out of line.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said, “but I need some space, Beau—space and time.” She hung up again.

Rebuffed, I knew I couldn’t afford to spend the day sitting around thinking about Mel and what I did or didn’t know. I needed to do something, to take some kind of action. Twiddling my thumbs wasn’t an option when what I really wanted to do was go out and knock a few heads. So I did the next best thing. I called the DMV and ran a check on Carol and Jack Lawrence. Once I had their address information, I headed for Leavenworth, two and a half hours away, on the far side of the Cascades.

Many small used-to-be logging towns in rural Washington have drifted into almost ghost-town obscurity. Several of the burgs along Highway 2 run perpetual going-out-of-business sales in the form of retired churches, which, now devoid of parishioners, live on in a tawdry, makeshift fashion as threadbare antique malls.

Leavenworth, too, was once headed in that direction and might well have suffered the same fate had not some enterprising city fathers—and mothers, I’m sure—decided to reinvent the place. They slapped on layers of Bavarian facades, dressed everybody and his uncle in lederhosen, and declared the city a tourist
attraction. Such is the magic of self-fulfilling prophecies that the ploy worked remarkably well. Now thousands of people flock there for their faux Octoberfest and for their annual Christmas-lighting ceremonies. For authenticity’s sake, it helps that Leavenworth is high enough in the mountains that this holiday extravaganza usually takes place in frigid snow, with the occasional blizzard thrown in.

If I sound somewhat churlish about all this, let me say that the one time I bravely went there is also when the “occasional” blizzard happened. That storm resulted in a combination of record snowfall in Stevens Pass and an avalanche on I-90 at Snoqualmie Pass, a one-two punch that brought most of Washington’s east-west travel to a halt. Karen and the kids and I didn’t make it back over the mountains until Tuesday afternoon, two days late for both work and school. Since this was March instead of November or December, however, I figured I was safe enough on the weather score. And since it wasn’t Christmas, there was no need for me to be brimming over with peace on earth and all that jazz—especially when it came to Mr. Jack Lawrence.

During the long solitary drive from Seattle across a still snow-bordered Stevens Pass I had plenty of time for thinking. Gradually I was able to let go of the Mel situation and turn my attention to the problem of Jack and Carol Lawrence. As I drove I realized this would probably be nothing more than a useless fishing expedition. In fact, if Lawrence hadn’t given his stepdaughter such a tough time, I probably wouldn’t have bothered trying to interview him at all. It turns out, though, that I’m a great believer in giving people like him the opportunity to reap what they sow. Besides, I found his interest in
not
discussing Tony Cosgrove’s decades-old disappearance most interesting.

It was late on a sunny but surprisingly chill morning when I pulled up at the Lawrences’ mailbox on Lavetta Road south of Leavenworth proper. Lavetta Road isn’t so much a road as it is a very angular circle. Maybe they should have called it Lavetta Oblong. With the help of my trusty GPS, I managed to locate the long winding driveway marked “Lawrence,” which took off from the southernmost curve of Lavetta and headed off into the forest.