“Did you know her well?”
Evelyn shook her head. “Never really got much chance. Right from the get-go, she started alienating him from everyone who cared about him, or anyone who might try to talk some reason into him.”
“And did you try to talk some reason into him?”
“Of course I tried. Zach and I both tried. What was the rush? we asked him. If this was right, it would still be right in a year or two, after they’d had a chance to get to know each other, and could separate the love from the hunger. But her exotic perfume must have been a lot stronger than our common sense. She led him around on a very short leash, and he followed right along after her just like a puppy. And of course, him being such a fine young gentleman, he didn’t know what to do with all those hormones except marry her. And wasn’t that a disaster?”
“What?”
“Why the wedding, of course. That boy came to me in tears. Seems he and the girl had their hearts set on this lovely affair up at the Kiana Lodge. It’s such a beautiful place, sitting right out there on the water. Do you know it?”
“No,” Jessup murmured, “can’t say as I do.”
“Well, anyway, her parents refused to pay for it. Told Corey flat out, if he wanted a fancy wedding, he’d have to pay for it himself. Can you imagine that? Well, he came home all upset, of course, and he asked me what he should do. I should have told him to get out of that whole relationship as fast as he could. To my regret, I didn’t. I told him, the groom pays for the ring, the rehearsal dinner, and the honeymoon, period. And if her parents wouldn’t pay for the wedding, well then they could just march themselves on down to city hall and say ’I do’ right there.”
“What happened?”
Evelyn shrugged. “The parents finally agreed to shell out for a peanut affair at the family church in Bothell.”
“A peanut affair?”
Evelyn Biggs rolled her eyes. “That’s what I call it when all they serve is a glass of sparkling wine and a few nuts in a bowl.”
“It sounds like there was trouble with that marriage before there even was a marriage,” Jessup told his wife.
“Yes,” she agreed. “But where was it coming from—inside or out?”
“There are five of us,” Ronna Ethridge Keough, short and chubby and looking nothing at all like her spectacular sibling, told the investigator. “Two brothers and three sisters. Elise is the oldest. I never thought much about it before, but looking back, I guess it really bothered her that she was the only one of us who wasn’t married.”
“Your mother said something about Elise marrying Corey on the rebound,” Jessup prompted.
“Yeah,” Ronna said with a nod. “She’d been dating this other guy, Steve—Dr. Steven Bonner, to be exact—for about two years, and was totally crazy about him. Never mind Cloud Nine, she was on Cloud Ninety. He was some kind of surgeon, really smart, really good-looking, really high on himself, with this mansion on Mercer Island, no less. It was obvious to me, anyway, that he had a roving eye for anything in a skirt, but Elise either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. She had dreams of where she wanted to go in life, and I guess she figured sleeping with Steve for two years gave her more than a leg up. It entitled her to a first-class ticket.”
“That sounds rather calculating, doesn’t it?”
Ronna shrugged. “Elise is nothing if not practical. She’s bright enough for most men, but she always thought her way to the top was going to be through her looks. My mother was beautiful when she was young, and it didn’t take a genius to see how long good looks last. I guess, at twenty-seven, Elise got scared. So one day she told Steve it was time to fish or cut bait.”
“Don’t tell me. He cut bait, didn’t he?”
“Well, that’s what we all were sure he’d do. But the next thing we knew, they’d set a date, and she was floating around, wearing this three-carat rock on her finger. You could’ve knocked us over. My folks weren’t exactly thrilled, I don’t think they liked him much, but they didn’t want to rain on Elise’s parade. So they planned this really elegant wedding for her. Spent a small fortune they couldn’t afford. I guess simple wasn’t good enough for a surgeon from Mercer Island.”
“Let me guess,” Jessup suggested. “He called it off at the eleventh hour?”
“Worse,” Ronna said with a sigh. “He just never showed up. Left her standing at the altar in front of two hundred guests and melting ice sculptures. He didn’t even have the courtesy to phone. He sent her a telegram, can you believe it? She cried for a month, and then she went out and found Corey.”
“I see what your mother meant,’ Jessup said. “It was kind of quick, wasn’t it?”
“And then there was that awful abortion thing,” Ronna said with a sigh. “My parents don’t know it, but I went with her.”
“You went to Hill House with Elise when she had the abortion?”
Ronna nodded. “She needed someone to be with her. To get her home afterward, and all. We were always the closest.”
“So you knew she lied to Corey when she said she had miscarried.”
“Yes, but what went on between them was none of my business.”
“What do you think of Corey?” Jessup inquired.
Ronna shrugged. “I’ve met him exactly three times: at the engagement party, at the wedding, and last Christmas,” she replied. “Elise didn’t bring him around much. He seemed nice enough, a little immature for her maybe. But if you’re asking me whether or not I think he bombed Hill House, I’ll tell you the same thing I told the police when they asked me. I have absolutely no idea.”
“Naive,” Zach Miller said. “I think that’s the word I’d use to describe Corey Latham. That and idealistic, too.”
“How so?” Jessup asked the former roommate.
“Well, he’s a real decent guy, but it’s kind of like he lives in this world that just doesn’t exist anymore,” the lieutenant said. “He’s like right out of Ozzie and Harriet, if you know what I mean. The American flag, mom, and apple pie. I think he honestly sees himself as a knight on a white horse with right on his side, chosen by God to defend his country and protect the honor of women. Not that this is necessarily bad, mind you. It’s just that he takes himself so seriously.”
“And what about his relationship with Elise?”
“Well, that was bound to happen, him being who he is, and all. He fell for her like a ton of bricks, right off the bat. Put her up on a pedestal so high, I doubt he could even see her.”
“Do you like her?”
“Barely know her. Met her at the bar the same night Corey did. As I recall, he met her first, but she made a play for both of us. He bit, I didn’t. After that, she seemed pretty intent on the two of them not spending much time around the people he used to hang with. I think she saw us as a major threat.”
“To what?”
“To ruining things for her, I guess,” Zach replied. “Corey might have been too smitten to see it, but desperation literally oozed out of her. The package might have been okay, but women who are that desperate always set my, alarm bells off.”
“Any idea what she was desperate about?”
“God knows,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe it had something to do with being twenty-seven years old and unmarried, although in this day and age there’s no disgrace in that. A few of us tried to talk him out of tying the knot so soon. After all, what was the rush? But she was pushing hard, and he was so innocent. I think maybe he was afraid if he hesitated, he’d lose her.”
“Have you noticed any sort of change in Corey since he and Elise got married? Or since he came back from his last cruise?”
Zach considered for a moment. “He seemed a little more tense, maybe, but that could be related to things that have no connection to his marriage.”
“How did he handle the abortion?”
“He was furious, and he was very hurt. But then he told me he had started going to church a lot, and the minister there got him into some group that was helping him wo
rk through it.”
“Is he quick to anger?” Jessup asked. “Does he have a short fuse?”
“Not that I ever noticed.”
“Do you see Corey as the kind of person who would blow up a building full of people?”
“Never,” the lieutenant declared. “Whatever effect the marriage has had on him, his basic personality hasn’t changed. And like I said, he’s all about defending and protecting, not attacking.”
“Even if he thought he was avenging his unborn child?”
Zach sighed. “Only if the guy snapped,” he said reluctantly. “I sure didn’t see any signs of it, and I don’t know anyone who did, but if you push me to the wall, I’d have to say that would be the only way—if he snapped.”
“It sounds like the best friend is in his corner,” Louise observed. “Even if he did equivocate there at the end.”
“No one seems to want to point a finger at the kid,” Jessup said. “But no one wants to come up looking like a fool, either.”
“Corey Latham is a fine human being,” Tom Sheridan declared in his resonating pulpit voice. “In fact, I’d have to say, they don’t come any finer.”
Jessup had found the minister in his rectory office, a heavily beamed, Tudor style adjunct to his church, and Sheridan was quick to make his guest feel welcome, first by enveloping the investigator’s hand in both of his huge paws, and then by holding a chair for him.
“He’s a member of our Thursday supper club, you know.”
“No, I didn’t,” the investigator said. “What is that?”
“A number of churches here in Seattle have gotten together to provide hot meals to some of our homeless people. Puget Sound Methodist is responsible for Thursdays. Let me see now, Corey joined our church just about a year ago, I think it was, and to the best of my recollection, except when he was out in his submarine, of course, he never missed a Thursday.”
“That’s good to know,” Jessup murmured, filing that tidbit of information away for the time being. “Now, can you tell me something about the support group you got him into?”
“Oh yes, of course,” Sheridan said. “It’s not officially a church group, you understand, but it was organized by one of our parishioners. It’s for people who have lost a child.”
“To abortion?”
“To anything,” was the reply. “Death is death, and loss is loss, any way you look at it. And the loss of a child, well, that always seems to be the hardest for people to come to terms with.”
“Was Corey doing well in the group?”
“I’m told he turned out to be as much of an inspiration to the rest of the members as they were to him,” the minister said with a little smile. “Corey’s like that, you see. And it also might interest you to know that those are the folks who are raising most of the funds for his defense.”
“You sound like you’d make an excellent character witness,” Jessup said.
“Whenever and wherever I’m needed,” Sheridan said without hesitation. “This is a travesty, you know, what they’re doing to that boy. He reveres life and he abhors violence.”
“You’d testify to that, in court, under oath?”
“In a heartbeat. I’d do whatever I could to convince a jury that Corey Latham couldn’t possibly have committed such a mindless act of destruction. Should it come to that, of course.”
Jessup stood up. “I’m not the attorney,” he said, “but I think you can pretty much count on it coming to that.”
“At long last, an unqualified endorsement,” Louise observed. “Unfortunately it’s coming from someone who’s known the boy barely a year.”
“Maybe so,” he said with a shrug. “But at this point, I don’t think we can afford to look a gift horse in the mouth.’
There were about a dozen people in the rustic room, warmed in the cool spring evening by a crackling blaze in a rough stone fireplace that took up most of one wall.
According to their host, they met on a weekly basis, but were available to one another more often if any of them signaled the need. The common bond was that they had all lost a child, in one way or another, and were either trying to come to terms with the grief themselves, or trying to help someone else do so.
“It helps to know you’re not alone,” Damon Feary told Jessup when the investigator knocked at the door of his Woodinville home on a Tuesday evening. “We all have to deal with the pain, and there is comfort in knowing that there are others in the same place you are.”
“Corey Latham was grieving the loss of his child?”
“Certainly,” Feary said. The man was tall and lean, with wild red hair, and he lived in a rough log home that he had helped to build and that his wife had decorated with lace curtains and crocheted doilies. “You don’t always have to have known the child to feel the pain.”
Jessup glanced over the group. “How many of these people have lost a child to abortion?”
Feary sighed. “Three,” he replied. “The two men over there on the sofa who, like Corey, didn’t know until it was too late, and the woman by the window who allowed herself to be talked into an abortion, only to regret it later.”
“Tell me about Corey Latham,” the investigator prompted those gathered, blending easily into the fabric of the room, the mix of people.
“He’s so young,” one woman said with a sigh. “In many ways, practically a baby himself.”
“He has a very caring heart,” said another. “In the midst of his own grief, he wanted to help others.”
“None of us has much money of our own,” a man said. “We’re just ordinary working people. But whatever we do have, and whatever more we can raise, will go to help defend him.”
“We’ve already organized an all-you-can-eat spaghetti supper, two yard sales, and a car wash, and we’re working on a talent night,” a woman said. “Anything, no matter how small, helps.”
They almost made Jessup feel like he should dig into his own pocket for a contribution. “Do any of you think he was capable of bombing Hill House?” he asked.
“Never,” three people said together.
“Then why do you think he’s been arrested?”
“It’s a frame,” Damon Feary said, and several others nodded. “They needed to blame it on someone, and given all the pressure the police were under, they had to come up with someone pretty fast. Somehow he just got in the way.”
Jessup nodded thoughtfully. “Do you think the police fabricated evidence?”
Feary shrugged. “I’m not saying they did that,” he replied. “On the other hand, if they did, we all know it wouldn’t be the first time.”
“There may have been a couple of coincidences that started them looking in his direction to begin with,” one of the other men said. “After that, the police just shut their minds and ran with it.”
“I understand Corey was coming to these meetings pretty regularly,” Jessup said. “How would you say he was coping with the abortion of his child?”
“I can only speak for the meetings he came to up until February,” Feary replied. “Then I was out of town for a while. But I know the group got together while I was gone, so some of the others might know.”
There was a pause then, as the people in the room turned to look at one another, searching for the right words. Finally, the young woman who regretted having had an abortion replied.
“As with all of us,” she said softly, “God was helping him to see the way.”
“I must be developing a suspicious mind,” Louise said. “They sound like very nice people, but they hardly know the boy. Why would they go to such lengths to help pay for his attorney?”
Jessup nodded. “And such an expensive one, at that,” he murmured, “when there are so many other competent ones who could have been hired for less. I wonder if they’re doing it because they really believe he’s innocent, or because they’re afraid he might be guilty.”
“After all the fine things they said to you about him,” Louise scoffed, “how could they be
lieve he was guilty?”
“Well, what have you got?” Dana asked.
“So far,” Jessup reported, “a fairly consistent picture of a thoughtful, caring, nonviolent young man, who would no sooner blow up a bunch of people at a clinic than he would step on a sleeping cockroach. Unless, of course, he snapped. And to this point, we have no evidence of that.”
“Pretty much my conclusion,” Dana concurred. “So, what are we missing?”
Jessup scratched his right ear. “I’m not sure. There’s something about this whole thing that bothers me. The first night I came home with this case, I thought Louise was going to leave me on the spot. She was that upset that I would even think of working in behalf of the—what did she call him?—the animal who bombed Hill House. But now that she’s in it as deep as I am, well, she may not be entirely sure he’s innocent, but she’s come a long way from assuming he’s guilty. And that bothers me.”
“Why?” Dana asked, not getting it.
“Look, here I am, barely into my investigation,” he explained. “And there’s Louise, already thinking this case hasn’t got any legs. This is Hill House, for God’s sake. She knew a lot of the people who died there. Some of them were good friends. At the very least, I’d expect her to be at the head of the lynch mob. But she’s not. Instead, she’s starting to convince me they got the wrong guy. What’s wrong with this picture?”
Dana shrugged. “I don’t know, but I must admit, I’m with Louise on this.”
“Well, at the risk of ruining my reputation,” Jessup admitted, “that makes three of us.”
“Good,” Dana declared. “Now all we need to do is find twelve like-thinking people to put on the jury.”
“Well, it’s obvious the prosecutor’s office isn’t about to let that happen,” Jessup observed. “The minute the indictments were handed down, the floodgates opened, and out went the spin doctors to trumpet their position. A regular colony of marching pissants.”
In cases like this, despite the terrible tragedy and lingering consequences, Dana knew the tendency for most people would be eventually to drift back to their normal lives. It was already three months since the bombing, and the trial was not scheduled to start until September. She understood why Brian Ayres wanted to keep everyone’s emotions fresh and churning until then. It was what she would have done had she still been a prosecutor.
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