Justice Denied

by J. A. Jance

  “How long do people stay?” I asked.

  “As long as it takes,” Sister Cora answered. “Sometimes it’s only a couple of months. Sometimes it’s longer. I’ll be leaving in another month or so, after I get my new teeth.”

  “New teeth?”

  “I get fitted for them next week. A dentist volunteered to fit me for free. I can hardly wait.”

  Without teeth Sister Cora looked like an old woman, although she was probably only in her midthirties. I tried to imagine how she’d look with new teeth. She’d most likely still look like she’d been rode hard and put up wet, but not as bad as she did right now.

  “What about money?” I asked. “If you’re doing all this volunteer work and taking classes and studying the Bible, what do you do for spending money?”

  “We don’t need spending money,” she said simply. “The Lord provides for our needs while we’re here. We earn credits for the chores we do and for however many classes we take. If we do work at outside jobs, we turn that money over to the treasurer, who holds it until we leave. Then, when it’s time to go, we have that money and whatever is in our credit account to use to get started outside—for an apartment deposit or whatever. It’s like a little savings account.”

  Yes, I thought. At the bank of Pastor Mark.

  I wondered what kind of interest rate the good pastor paid, or if he paid any at all. Sister Cora’s impending teeth notwithstanding, I kept trying to figure out if this wasn’t some kind of scam. Maybe King Street Mission was the sort of place where if Pastor Mark directed the residents to swill down a cup of arsenic-laced Kool-Aid, they would all say “Bottoms up” and guzzle away.

  The front door opened. A man in a suit and properly knotted bow tie slammed his way in through the door and then strode across the room. I had him pegged for an attorney long before he opened his mouth.

  “Is this man disturbing you, Sister Cora?” he demanded.

  She looked at him in some confusion. “Not at all, Mr. Ramsey. He was just asking a few questions.”

  I recognized the name. That would be Dale Ramsey, of Ramsey, Ramsey, and something else, a name I vaguely remembered from some of the published legal papers regarding God’s Word, LLC. Which meant Pastor Mark had run up the flag for help and here was Mr. Ramsey riding to the rescue.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave now, Mr. Beaumont,” he said. (Pastor Mark’s careful study of my ID had obviously allowed him to remember my name with uncanny accuracy. He had also duly reported it.)

  “Sister Cora has work to do,” Ramsey continued. “You’ve kept her from it long enough. Furthermore, Pastor Mark tells me that you’re from the attorney general’s office. Our people have spent all weekend answering questions for investigators from Seattle PD concerning the unfortunate death of Brother LaShawn. Unless Ross Connors’s office has some reason for horning in on someone else’s jurisdiction, I see no reason for this to continue.”

  Ramsey was pushy in a stilted, officious, and overly formal way. It’s no wonder I took an instant dislike to the man. But for Ross Connors, deniability was still everything. If I made even the slightest objection, phone calls would be made to Seattle PD downtown. Questions would be asked. Attention would be paid.

  “Of course,” I said, equally formally, and bowed slightly in Sister Cora’s direction. “You’ve been most helpful.”

  Pastor Mark emerged from behind his closed office door in time to watch me leave. With his tattooed arms folded across his chest, he stood and smiled—smirked, really—at my being ejected. I nodded and sent my own half-baked smile in his direction, just to make sure we were even.

  It doesn’t matter if we’re talking bars or missions. I don’t like being run out of places before I’m ready to go. It rubs me the wrong way. In this case it made me think that God’s Word, LLC, had something to hide. But thanks to Sister Cora, I wasn’t walking away empty-handed. I knew which Seattle cab company had green cabs, and since they keep records, that meant that, whether the folks at God’s Word liked it or not, I also had a lead on Elaine Manning’s whereabouts.

  I had left my cell phone in the car while I visited King Street Mission. I had been inside for far longer than I had anticipated, and again the phone was awash in messages. I hurried through them one by one.

  “Hi, Dad,” Scott said cheerfully. “Mel wanted me to call you with our flight information, but we’ll be renting a car, so you don’t need to worry about coming to pick us up. By the time we get our luggage, it’ll probably be close to six-thirty or so. Are there dinner plans? Should we go there directly or just check into the hotel and wait for marching orders?”

  The next caller was Mel: “Where are you?” she asked. “Why aren’t you picking up? Did you remember to order the flowers?”

  Next was one from my son-in-law: “Hello. It’s me. Jeremy.” He sounded nervous, and I can understand why. We hardly ever talk on the phone. “We’re in Salem at the Burger King,” he continued. “Kelly’s in the restroom changing Kyle’s diaper. We’ll probably be in Seattle around two or so. I guess we’ll be coming straight to the house. I think that’s what Kelly wanted me to tell you. If it isn’t, I’ll call back.”

  If Kelly had charged her husband with calling me, did that mean she and I weren’t speaking, or at least she wasn’t speaking to me? If that was the case, it would make the occasion of my grandmother’s funeral more than a little awkward.

  Mel again: “Harry wants to know if the funeral is a private affair or if it would be all right if some of the SHIT guys came along,” Mel said. “I told him it was fine, but now I’m wondering. Should I have checked with Lars? Do we know how many people really are coming? Had we better order some food and reserve the party room? Call me.”

  Awkward and complicated. This was beginning to sound like putting on a wedding—minus the bride and groom.

  Next was Men’s Wearhouse: “Mr. Beaumont, when you were in on Monday, we were told that you needed your tux in time for Friday. It’s ready now. Could you please stop by at your convenience and try it on? That way, if any additional alterations are required…” Checking on a tux for Friday seemed like a very low priority.

  Mel again: “I’ve been trying to think of where we should go to dinner with a new baby and all. I finally decided that we’d be better off eating at home. So I’ve called that new catering place, Magical Meals, and I’ve cleared it with the doorman. They’ll deliver a roast beef dinner with all the trimmings to the condo, complete with someone to serve and clean up. They’ll be at the house at six. If you think that’s a bad idea…” In fact, it seemed nothing short of brilliant.

  Then a message from Lars: “Ja, sure,” he said. “If you have time, give me a call…”

  I hadn’t been writing anything down, and by then my head was spinning. I called Lars back first. “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I t’ink I’d like to go to another meeting,” he said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “I’m on my way,” I said.

  I called Mel back and breathed a small thank-you when I reached her answering machine instead of her. “Busy with Lars,” I said. “Taking him to a meeting. Dinner sounds great.”

  I forgot about the tux, but on the way to Queen Anne Gardens I remembered to call the flower shop and got the flowers ordered. Several different arrangements. Big ones. Spare no expense. So I may not be great, but at least I’m not entirely useless. In between all that I even managed to call the cab company and started the process of tracing Elaine Manning’s Saturday-morning ride.

  Lars came out to the car looking like death warmed over. I’d managed to find another noontime meeting, this one over on the east side at a place called Angelo’s. I’d been there before, years ago. So had Lars.

  “Thank you,” he said, once he got in the car.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I cannot believe t’ose women,” he said. “The first one knocked on my door this morning to see if I needed someone to hel
p me with breakfast. Ja, sure, I can eat my own breakfast! And it’s been that way all day long, one of them after another.”

  Are we going to a meeting just to get away from a bunch of pushy women? I wondered. Or is he afraid one of them will haul out a bottle of booze and slip some to him?

  So we went to the meeting. Then, because Lars was in no hurry to go home, we went by and picked up my tux. And then, because he still didn’t want to go back to Queen Anne Gardens, I took him along on a jaunt through the grocery store to stock up on essentials and then home to Belltown Terrace with me, where he settled into my recliner and snored like a jackhammer for the remainder of the afternoon.

  I did my best to work around him. The dispatcher from the cab company called to say Elaine Manning had been dropped off at the YWCA on Fifth. I called there and made inquiries, but to no avail. It’s a lot easier to tell someone to buzz off when you’re talking to them on the phone than it is when they’re standing right there in front of your desk. So I figured I’d try talking to the ladies at the YWCA another time when I didn’t have Lars Jenssen underfoot and a whole contingent of company bearing down on me from every point of the compass.

  Then, because the house was still quiet—relatively quiet due to Lars’s Olympian snoring—and because I couldn’t think of anything more to do about LaShawn Tompkins right then, I called up LexisNexis one more time and, just for the hell of it, typed in the name Anthony David Cosgrove.

  All right. So I complained about computers for years. Resisted using them. Griped about having to use them. But now I’m a believer. Within seconds of typing the name, there it was—a whole list of hits concerning Anthony David Cosgrove. To my surprise one of them was only two months old. It came from an obscure magazine called Electronics Engineering Journal. It was a long, amazingly dull article on corruption and payoffs among defense contractors. The reference to Cosgrove came near the end of the article.

  According to industry analyst Thomas Dortman, payoffs with dollar signs on them are the ones that gain big headlines, but payoffs that result in job offers are almost standard operating procedure. One of the earliest Dortman recalls happened at Boeing in the early eighties. In that instance charges came to nothing, however, when the alleged whistle-blower, electronics engineer Anthony David Cosgrove, disappeared in the Mount Saint Helens explosion.

  That was it. But still, it was intriguing. The missing persons report had said nothing about Cosgrove being involved in any kind of at-work investigation. And DeAnn hadn’t mentioned anything to me about it either, but she had been a little girl at the time. Something could well have been going on at work without her having any knowledge of it. The wife would have known, however, and I was interested to see that she had made no mention of it.

  I jotted down Thomas Dortman’s name. If, as he claimed, he had personal knowledge of what was going on at Boeing in the early eighties, maybe he had personal knowledge of Anthony David Cosgrove as well.

  The next listing for Anthony Cosgrove predated the previous one by almost twenty years. It turned out to be the 1988 announcement in which the man was declared legally dead. It seems to me that being declared legally dead would be enough to get your name removed from a missing persons list, but bureaucracies really are bureaucracies, and the right hand often has no idea what the left is doing.

  I would have plowed on. I was about to put Dortman’s name into my search engine when the phone rang.

  “Okay,” Detective Kendall Jackson said. “Thought you’d want to know that you’ve flunked Miss Congeniality one more time. You’re back on everybody’s bad list again.”

  “Me?” I asked with feigned innocence. “What have I done this time?”

  “Stepped on somebody’s toes hard enough that we’ve been told we’re not to share information about LaShawn Tompkins’s murder with anyone, most especially anyone with the initials J.P. So what did you find out?”

  “I found out that the King Street Mission gives me the creeps,” I replied.

  “I hear you loud and clear on that one,” Jackson said.

  “And I wouldn’t trust Pastor Mark any farther than I can throw him.”

  “Ditto on that,” Jackson agreed.

  “I learned that King Street Mission will be holding a memorial service for LaShawn on Thursday night, and I know I can’t attend.”

  “No problem,” Jackson said. “Hank and I already have that one covered.”

  I had saved the best for last. “And I’ve traced Elaine Manning as far as the YWCA on Fifth Avenue, arriving at ten-oh-six on Saturday morning. I have no idea where she went from there.”

  “That’s something I didn’t know,” Jackson said. “Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll check it out.”

  “So you and I are still good, then?” I asked.

  “As far as I know,” he replied. “Your name’s Beau Beaumont, right? Never heard of anyone named J.P.”

  Detective Kendall Jackson was indeed my kind of guy.

  About then I thought everything was in good shape, but before I could return to LexisNexis, the phone rang. It was the doorman calling to let me know that my daughter and her family were downstairs. Could he send them up?

  “Of course,” I said. After that, everything went straight to hell. In a handbasket.

  I expected Kyle to be a handful. After all, he was only a month or so old. And Lars? Of course he would need attention. His wife had just died. And Kayla? She’s four. What could you expect, especially considering the fact that my penthouse condo is anything but kid-proof. (Then again, when it comes to four-year-olds, is anything ever really kid-proof?) What I didn’t anticipate was that Kelly would be more of a pain in the neck than all of the rest of them put together.

  Because, as I had gathered from our nonphone conversation, she really wasn’t speaking to me. She spoke to Lars. She spoke to Jeremy, who looked as though he would much prefer being anywhere else in the universe to being cooped up in his father-in-law’s domicile. Kelly spoke to Kayla. When she went into the guest room to feed Kyle and put him down for a nap, I went gunning for Jeremy. I found him hiding out in the family room with Kayla, who was watching a cartoon about someone named Elmer or Elmo—something like that. Kayla and Lars were both engrossed in watching the TV. Jeremy was dozing. Like Kelly, he, too, had that dim, chronically sleep-deprived look which, as I remember, is part and parcel of having a newborn in the house. I woke him up.

  “What’s going on with Kelly?” I asked.

  Jeremy shook his head and shrugged. “Beats me,” he said miserably. “All I know is I can’t do anything right.”

  “That makes two of us,” I said.

  At which point Kelly suddenly reappeared in the doorway. “Let’s go,” she announced.

  Jeremy said, “Where?”

  “To the hotel,” Kelly said. “Obviously that’s somebody else’s room! I wouldn’t want to be in the way.”

  “No!” Kayla wailed. “I don’t want to go!”

  In actual fact, it was someone else’s closet. Mel didn’t use the bedroom at all, but with Mel’s clothing and makeup clearly evident in both the bathroom and the closet, I could see how Kelly might have gotten that mistaken idea into her head.

  “I thought we were going to stay for dinner,” Jeremy objected.

  “We’ll eat at McDonald’s,” Kelly said firmly. “Kayla will like that better anyway.”

  “I don’t wanna go!” Kayla said. “I want to stay here. With Gumpa.”

  Lars said, “Is there a problem?”

  Dutifully Jeremy began collecting things—the diaper bag, the baby carrier, and all the other little necessaries that go with being parents of young children—while Kelly simply headed for the door with the blanket-swaddled Kyle in her arms. By then Kayla was wailing at the top of her lungs and stamping her feet. “Don’t wanna go. Don’t wanna go.”

  At which point the telephone rang again. “Your caterer is here,” the doorman announced. “Should I send her up?”

  Why the hell not?
I thought. “By all means,” I said.

  Kayla was still screeching as the elevator headed for the lobby. It was enough to make me long for the old days and the relative peace and quiet of the Seattle PD homicide squad—even if Captain Paul Kramer was the guy running the show.

  CHAPTER 8

  The catered dinner was not a huge success. In fact, although the food itself was excellent, the company was lacking. Kelly and Jeremy did not attend. Lars wasn’t hungry. Scott and Cherisse showed up an hour and a half later than expected due to their Seattle-bound aircraft having had some kind of mechanical problem while it was still on the ground at SFO. Their food was cold. Mel didn’t show up for dinner at all. And she didn’t call.

  This should probably be filed under the heading of “Just Deserts,” because if my ex-wife Karen were still alive, I’m sure she could recount, chapter and verse, the many times I missed meals—and didn’t call, either. But knowing it was payback time didn’t make me feel any better. About 9:00 p.m., when I came back from returning Lars to his digs at Queen Anne Gardens, Mel was home. I found her at the dining room table. Still damp from taking a shower and clad only in a robe, she was chowing down on leftovers.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “Could have been better,” I muttered. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Crime scene,” she replied. “Out by Mount Si. We were out in the boonies far enough that we ended up in a telecommunications black hole. Cell phones don’t work there.”

  “What kind of crime scene?” I asked.

  “Homicide,” she said. “What did you think it would be?”

  Barring unusual circumstances, SHIT isn’t often called in on homicide crime scenes. First response usually falls to local agencies and jurisdictions.

  “Whose case is it?” I asked. “And how come you took the call?”

  “It happened in rural King County,” Mel explained. “But it turns out the victim is one of mine—one of my registered sex offenders, that is. So we’re running a joint investigation. The guy’s name is Kates—Allen Christopher Kates. That’s still tentative, even though it’s based on ID we found on the body. We’ll need dental records to get a positive, and we won’t have those from the Department of Corrections until tomorrow at the earliest.”