by Dale Mayer
“It’s pretty amazing,” she said. “Nan seems to think nothing of leaving all this stuff behind.”
“I think she left it behind for a very specific reason, and she was more than happy to share this with you,” he said.
She smiled. “Maybe. I just hadn’t expected it.”
“No,” he said, “but it’s all good. I think you’re doing the right thing.”
She appreciated that. “I have to admit that it does wake me up in the night. I feel like I’m letting my family down.”
“Not at all,” he said. “I think the worst thing you can do is hang on to things out of guilt or because you think it’s the right thing to do. I think it’s time for you to do what’s right for you.”
She beamed at him. “You know what? Honestly it’s been a pretty good week so far.”
“No kidding,” he said. “Yesterday certainly made it a great week. That was a very good thing you did.”
“But it wasn’t necessarily what I did.” She hated to feel guilty about it. “I mean, really anybody could have sorted that out.”
“The difference is,” he said, “at the time, we didn’t have most of the technology we do now. And that cold case hadn’t been reopened because nothing new had been added in the way of facts or evidence or witness statements. We would have eventually reviewed it before boxing it up and putting it aside, but that’s just the facts of life. You came at it from a very different angle, and you solved it.”
“It was the license plate,” she said.
He nodded. “That makes sense. And that’s when we got that needed pop on the case. However, we didn’t have time to take another look because you’d solved the case already.”
She beamed at him. “Praise from you is high praise, indeed.”
“Have you made another omelet yet?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t had time,” she confessed. “And I’m scared to. I figured that was beginner’s luck.”
He chuckled. “I haven’t had dinner. If you haven’t touched the ingredients, there’s probably enough for another one. I suggest you try again, and we’ll split it again.”
She looked at him in surprise, then the nearby clock. It really was dinnertime. “I haven’t touched anything. Do you think it’s all still good?” She looked at him anxiously. “That’s another thing I don’t know anything about. How long does food keep?”
“Four to five days for sure,” he said. “Come on. Let’s take a look.”
Downstairs again, they walked into the kitchen, and Mack opened the fridge. He pulled out the bacon first. “See here? A Best Before Date is printed on the packaging, and that’s still another four days away. And the spinach, it’s okay. It’s wilting a little, but it’d make a good spinach omelet. And the eggs …” He brought out the carton, checking the Best Before Date on the end of it, nodding, putting everything on the counter. Then he leaned against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. “Go for it.”
She looked at him nervously. “I haven’t prepped.”
“No prep required. No videos to watch. Just go by memory.”
She wrinkled her nose at him as she stepped forward. “Are you trying to put me on the spot?”
“No,” he said. “I’m trying to get food. It’s been a very long day.”
She laughed and got started. Since he had stopped by to lift her bed frame—and ended up moving that bookshelf as well—it was the least she could do.
Chapter 6
Wednesday Dinnertime …
As they sat down to eat—and, boy, was she proud of the fact that her second attempt was damn near as perfect as the first—Mack looked at the big business-size envelope beside their plates.
“Johnny Jordan?” He frowned. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
Shoot. “I don’t know,” she mumbled. “Do you know that name?”
He glanced at her sideways as he took a bite of the omelet. “First, the omelet is divine. You did a great job.”
She beamed at him. “It’s not as hard as I thought.”
“Nothing is,” he said. “You just have to learn how.”
She hoped so. But she didn’t have the confidence yet to make that discernment.
Then he said, “And, second, you’re up to something.”
She sat back with a sigh. “How do you know?”
He snickered. “Because you get this weird little glare in your eyes and a wrinkle in your forehead as you bring your brows together. And it’s almost always directed at me, as if to say, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She glared at him but could feel the wrinkles forming between her eyebrows. She reached up and eased them back.
His grin just widened.
She glared at him once more. “I’m not up to anything.”
“Well, you just admitted you were,” he said.
“Not really,” she said. “But I do have an odd request.” She patted her pocket and pulled out the letter and handed it to him.
As he popped another bite into his mouth, he picked it up and read it. His eyebrows rose toward his hairline. “Wow. Now they’re bypassing the police and coming straight to you?” He shook his head. “What the hell will you do with this? Do you realize how dangerous this could be for you?” He looked at the letter again, then at the envelope. “Did she mail you that too?”
She groaned and sat back. “No, I didn’t know what to do,” she said, “so I called her. The end result is, she was here this afternoon and dropped off that envelope. I did warn her that I could probably tell her nothing because not only was it a long time ago but no crime scene was found. And no further word came from the young man in all these years. … For all we know, it was possible he drowned, but he went missing after the heavy flooding that year. So it was doubtful he ended up in the lake.” She let Mack ponder that for a moment, then added, “The dagger Penny was concerned about is in the bigger envelope she left with me earlier today.” She tapped the big business envelope on the kitchen table.
“Yeah, for a while there,” he said, “they were doing these ‘stabbing it into the ground as hard as they could’ kinds of things. Like darts, but downward with knives. It was a cool move but wasn’t very good for the blades.” He looked at the envelope. “You haven’t opened it yet?”
She shook her head. “Mugs had just found whatever was under the bed when she arrived. I had to run downstairs, and, after she left, I set the alarm and came back upstairs. Then you came.”
“You know what? For somebody who has nothing going on,” he said, slightly sarcastically, “you’re sure busy.”
She nodded. “Almost too busy,” she admitted. “But that’s all right because it’s pretty hard to not love life right now. The trick is, is there any way to figure out what happened to this poor Johnny guy?”
“I didn’t know the family well. I can’t recall much about the cold case. I remember opening it at some point, but there was nothing new to move forward with.”
“No,” she said, “and I’m not sure there is now either. It’s a hard case. I’m also not sure what clues might be found in the witness statements either. So many witnesses have died.” She hesitated. “I can’t read the statements in the police file, can I?”
He shook his head.
She nodded. “That’s what I expected. His girlfriend from around that time died of breast cancer last year. And his brother is gone now too.”
“That is sad because then his brother never got closure, and even the girlfriend must have always wondered right up to the end.”
“She certainly didn’t leave any confession saying she’d murdered him,” Doreen said drily.
“To date, we have no reason or no evidence to think Johnny was murdered,” Mack said. “That was an excellent omelet.” He slid the last bite in his mouth, put down his fork, and pushed back his plate. “The young man could have just gotten up and walked away.”
“I get that,” Doreen said. “But what would make a young man do that? What
makes somebody, who is close to his brother—and we only have his brother’s wife’s word on that—but supposedly close to his brother and his sister-in-law, yet who gets up and walks away forever?”
“I think at the time they leave, they plan on returning, riding high on some future big successful wave. When that doesn’t happen, they don’t want the family to know they are a failure. A lot of people, after too much time has gone by, don’t know what to say anymore, so they never say anything. Meaning they don’t return either.”
“That’s very sad,” Doreen said. “Somebody has to know what happened to Johnny.”
“There’s always another option,” he said quietly. “You have to consider that, even though we have much higher statistics today, still an awful lot of suicides of young men happened back then.”
“Wouldn’t his body have shown up though?”
Mack frowned. Thinking about that, he pushed back his chair and looked at her. “Do you mind if I put on a pot of coffee?”
“Please,” she said. She collected the dishes and walked to the sink. “I mean, surely if he’d shot himself, jumped off the bridge, or I don’t know—I guess one of the favorite ways is a drug overdose or even driving into a semi coming down the highway or something—there would be a body. Obviously I don’t know anything about committing suicide, but there’s always a body left behind.”
“There’s almost always a body,” Mack corrected. “But we don’t always find everybody who is lost at sea, like we don’t always find everybody who’s been lost in the lake.”
“Right,” she said.
“And, if you think about all the country backroads we have here, all kinds of places exist where Johnny may have gone for a joyride and driven off into a ravine.”
She stopped what she was doing, turned around, and looked at him. “Do you think, even after twenty-nine years, that would still hold true?”
“Of course it would,” he said. “Think about the miles and miles of roads around here. And what would have been seen back then wouldn’t necessarily be seen now, considering all the natural growth since then. Maturing trees and bushes can hide a lot.”
“But we have satellite now,” she argued. “People have drones traveling all over the place.”
“Sure. That doesn’t necessarily mean they know what they’re looking at because a piece of shiny metal doesn’t mean a vehicle is stuck underneath there. Besides, did Johnny have his own vehicle?”
“I forgot to ask Penny,” she said. “She’s sending all the digital files to my email too.”
“Forward them to me as well,” he said. “I’ll take a look at what’s in the police files again. I’m not promising anything, but, if something pops, maybe it’s due to a communication error. Unfortunately we’ve seen that happen with cold cases too.”
“What do you mean by communication error?”
“Different departments don’t share info. Particularly back then. What if Johnny headed to Vancouver and got absorbed into the big-city life? He could be homeless. He could have been a John Doe in the morgue. We didn’t any automatic way to check across multiple jurisdictions. It had to be done manually.”
“What if we got something of George’s? Could we run DNA and check through some database to see if his brother has shown up elsewhere?”
“We could, except there’s no budget money for things like that,” Mack said. “In a perfect world we’d have lots of money, and we could run DNA for every missing family member. And, even if something still exists of the brother’s DNA to check, sometimes it’s not a close-enough match to ID a sibling.”
Doreen sighed. “I know Penny is hoping to put her house on the market, but she hasn’t done a heavy clean out yet. Maybe, if she kept a locket with strands of her husband’s hair, we should ask her to preserve it, just in case.”
“Back then DNA had to be directly collected from the missing person. So some evidence of Johnny’s DNA might be hanging around related to his missing person file.”
“That would be evidence, wouldn’t it?”
“Obviously,” he said. “But unfortunately stuff goes missing. So, when I return to the office tomorrow, I’ll take a look and see if we have anything on file. And you might want to send Penny an email, asking her if she has anything of her husband’s. A hairbrush would be ideal.”
“Right. How much do you need?”
“Not too much,” he said. “But we do need something. Hair, nails, skin, blood, tissue, bone. Things like that.”
She wrinkled her nose at him. “What if he was cremated? I doubt there’d be much left in that case.”
“Possibly not,” he said. “It depends if she kept the ashes.”
“She did. The urn is on her mantel. Can you get DNA from the ashes?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I hear bone fragments remain, even with cremations at high heat. Bones retain DNA. However, in most cases, those remaining fragments are ground to ash before being handed over. I don’t know that the ashes can be tested for DNA. It seems like DNA testing is moving forward in leaps and bounds, and nobody knows what we can get from whatever until the test is done. Now they’re doing ancestry DNA, and that’s making huge changes in cold cases.”
“But, in this case, we don’t have any foul play suspected. So we have no suspects to go after, like a killer.”
“If you mean that we don’t have any DNA of a killer at a crime scene, you’re quite right. We don’t even have a crime scene. All we have is that this young man got up one day and walked away.”
“Supposedly. What about the dagger?”
“Same problem,” he said. “Found years later, buried in the ground. When we opened the missing person’s case, no DNA testing was really done back then. Great advances have been made, so who knows what it’ll tell us now? It’s a knife that Johnny owned, that he played with all the time. Of course he cut himself on it. Everybody would have at least once.”
She sighed. “I get that, but it just seems like, if somebody had murdered him with the dagger, there would be skin cells of whoever killed him.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But I doubt it after all that time.”
“Right, but can they test for other tissue?”
“Lab tests can certainly separate different people’s DNA, plus what kind of tissue was found for each person,” he said, “as in semen versus epithelial versus hair, for example.”
She nodded. “I just don’t know enough about it, but at least I have the knife, and, no, I know it won’t be of much value. I think what Penny is really hoping for is that her brother-in-law won’t be forgotten.”
“That’s the hardest thing for any cold-case file. It’s a cold case to the public. But it’s never cold to the family. It just sits there forever.”
“That’s why she hung on to the dagger. It’s a reminder. Not just of Johnny but of his life and probably his death. Of all that’s hanging over her life all this time.”
He stared at her. “And seriously? A dagger in the dahlias?”
“They had a bench in the backyard, where Johnny was last seen. It became something they found very difficult to look at. So they moved it and were digging a new bed and putting in dahlias when they found his dagger.”
“Which makes sense, if he always sat there.”
“I agree,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t have any angle to go on. And there was another thing,” Doreen said with a sigh. “Penny was hoping that because of my association with you—and how the heck does everybody know about that?—she was hoping I might have access to Johnny’s cold-case file. But …”
“Which you know I can’t give you,” he said firmly.
“I told her that. I did explain that I couldn’t do much,” she said. “She seems to think I can do more than I can.”
“But knowing you,” he said, “you’ll do your best anyway.”
Chapter 7
Thursday Early Morning …
As soon as Doreen had breakfast the next morning, she cleared off t
he kitchen table, except for her coffee cup, took out the large envelope from Penny, opened it up, and carefully spread out everything from inside. The dagger was small but had a lethal-looking blade with a very fine tip to it. She laid that off to the side.
She then read the collection of papers. There wasn’t much—a couple newspaper articles about Johnny having gone missing, a poster asking for anybody to come forward who knew anything about Johnny’s whereabouts, and a couple statements with a time line the family had given to the police. They all offered nothing new.
She frowned. “There isn’t anything to go on. I’m sorry, Penny, but I have no clue what I’m supposed to do with this.”
As she sat here pondering, an email came through from the appraiser about the letter she’d found under Nan’s bed.
This is lovely, he wrote, and definitely proof of provenance.
She smiled at that. As she read further, she realized he still wanted her to go through the accordion folder of documents for any more paperwork related to the antiques. She didn’t know why she was hesitating, but she needed to sort through it.
Putting everything back into the envelope Penny had given her, Doreen worried that she could do nothing for Penny. All Doreen could hope for was that Mack would send her something of interest from the police file when he had time.
After a trip to her bedroom, she walked into the living room with the accordion folder she’d found in the bottom dresser drawer. She sat on the couch and pulled out the envelopes stuffed inside, each with a handwritten generic label of its contents. Everything was in here from Last Wills and Testaments and personal certifications to medical records. They were important documents, but nothing to do with the antiques.
The very last envelope she brought out was only half the size of the others. She slowly set out its contents on the coffee table. The receipts were old; some were handwritten and hard to read. She could not make out very much of any of it. Maybe it would make sense to the appraiser, but she had no reason to believe these receipts had anything to do with what she and Scott were particularly looking for.
