by J. A. Jance
The call for dental records implied that the body had been there for a while. I’ve been to grim crime scenes like that. The fact that Mel could come from a sickening homicide investigation with her appetite for dinner still intact said a lot about who she was—and why I liked her.
“Kates lived by himself in a little camper shell out in the woods, sort of like the guy down in Oregon,” Mel continued. “He wasn’t big on friends and family, since he’d been dead for a month or longer before anyone bothered to report him missing.”
“Meth lab?” I asked.
People who live by themselves in the woods often participate in the manufacturing sector. Mixing up batches of meth is a growth industry in rural areas all over the country.
“Nope,” Mel said. “No sign of meth. He was growing plenty of grass, however.” And she didn’t mean Bermuda.
“What did he die of?” I asked.
“A single bullet wound to the head. It was fired from pointblank range. Blew out most of his skull.”
“Self-inflicted?” I asked.
“Not likely,” she answered, “since no weapon was found at the scene.”
“And how did you get dragged into it?”
“Like I said, he was one of the guys on my list. I happened to be checking on him at the same time someone else was busy finding the body.”
“That makes what, now—three of your guys, as you call them—dead? One in Oregon, one in Bellingham, and now this?”
“More like seven,” Mel said as she stood to clear her plate and carry the remaining containers of roast beef, mashed potatoes, and gravy back to the fridge. “I thought Ross wanted me to verify addresses of living sex offenders. I had no idea so many of them would have croaked. And the dead guys are all over the map—literally. Two now in Washington, one each in Idaho, Oregon, and Montana, and two more in Arizona.”
It didn’t surprise me to think that any given list of ex-cons, violent sexual predators or otherwise, would have a high mortality rate. They’re not exactly the kind of folks who avoid what insurance actuaries like to call “risky behavior.” Accidental overdoses of illegal drugs routinely take out far more bad guys these days than executioner-administered lethal injections ever will.
“So your guys are dying like flies. What of?”
Mel smiled at my inadvertent rhyme. “Three car accidents,” she said. “The guy on Chuckanut Drive and the two in Arizona. Ricardo Fernando Hernandez and Felix Andrade Moreno were cell mates in Monroe and later roommates down in Phoenix. Their vehicle ended up upside down in an irrigation canal outside Phoenix. Hernandez was behind the wheel and drunk. That one’s been ruled an accident. Idaho and Montana were both overdoses, most likely suicides, although no notes were found.”
“Maybe they couldn’t write,” I suggested.
“And maybe there was too much pressure,” Mel said. “At least that’s how it looks for some of them. Once they’re out of the slammer they’re required to register with local authorities and their information is posted on the Internet. The guy in Pocatello, Frederick Jamison, lost his job and was being evicted once his information became public. Pretty much the same thing happened to Ray Ramirez in Helena, Montana. There was a huge public outcry from the neighbors about him coming back there to live with his parents.”
“Pardon me while I don’t go all warm and fuzzy over a bunch of loser sexual predators,” I told her. “And what’s the matter with you? Sounds like you’re saying ‘evil, nosy neighbors’ and ‘poor, pitiful sexual predators.’”
Mel looked troubled. “I’m not saying anything of the kind, but it does strike me as odd. I’ve only worked my way through a hundred and fifty names or so, and seven dead strikes me as a pretty high number. These are reasonably young guys, mostly in their thirties and forties. I think something’s amiss here, and I don’t know what. I also think that’s why Ross has me looking into it—because, as you said, they are dying like flies.”
I was starting to feel better by then, lulled by the simple normality of talking shop with Mel, of discussing the nuts and bolts of her several cases. I have no doubt that my visit to the King Street Mission would have benefited from a dose of Mel Soames’s insightful analysis, too, but asking for her help on that one would have meant admitting I was working a case when I was supposedly off work on bereavement leave and looking after Lars. The same went for Anthony David Cosgrove. Since I wasn’t supposed to be working, I didn’t bring that one up, either.
We went from the table to the window seat, where Mel moved a cushion and unearthed one of Kayla’s toys, a red hand puppet that looked a lot like the cartoon character she’d been watching on TV earlier in the afternoon. Obviously Jeremy’s rushed toy-collection mission hadn’t been entirely successful.
“Elmo,” Mel said, slipping the puppet onto her hand.
“I never heard of him,” I told her. “How do you know this guy’s name is Elmo?”
Mel laughed. “I’m a detective, remember?” she said, whacking me playfully on the noggin with Elmo’s semi-hard head. “I get paid for knowing things. Actually, my niece loves anything Elmo. What’s your excuse for not knowing? And where did everybody go? I expected to come home to a houseful of company.”
And so I gave her a blow-by-blow description of my disastrous “family” afternoon and evening, including the part about Kelly decamping in a huff once she found Mel’s personal items lurking in the guest room closet and bathroom.
“Sounds like she’s suffering from a severe case of separation anxiety,” Mel said. “She’s afraid of losing you to me.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I argued. “Kelly isn’t losing me. I’m not going anywhere.”
“She just had a baby,” Mel pointed out. “I’m guessing her hormones are all out of whack at the moment. You need to be patient.”
“She’s the one who could use some patience,” I grumbled.
Shaking her head, Mel changed the subject. “Did you ever get around to making some kind of arrangements for a post-funeral reception for Lars?” she asked.
I had been playing social director all afternoon, but this one responsibility had somehow fallen off the radar. “Damn!” I said.
“I take that to mean no?” Mel asked.
I nodded. She immediately reached for her cell phone. “I’ll call Rita, then,” she said. “I’m sure she’ll do it.”
“Who’s Rita?” I asked.
“Rita Davenport. She runs the same catering company that served dinner tonight. She and I are both board members of SASAC. That’s how I knew to call her. Why don’t you check with the manager on party room availability. I’ll see what I can do about rounding up some food.”
Luckily, the party room was open for early Thursday afternoon. While I reserved it via the landline, Mel made arrangements for Magical Meals to provide food and beverages. In less time than I would have thought possible, Beverly Jenssen’s post-funeral reception was a done deal.
“You do good work,” I told Mel when she put the phone back down.
“Thank you,” she said, turning to give me a long, inviting kiss. “I’m actually a multitalented girl.”
And that was absolutely true.
I awakened the next morning to the smell of brewing coffee and to Mel’s voice on the telephone telling Harry I. Ball in no uncertain terms that Allen Kates or no Allen Kates, Mel was taking the day off.
“The man’s already been dead for more than a month,” she said. “If King County comes up with anything today, I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to bring me up to speed tomorrow.”
Harry Ignatius Ball was fearless, except when it comes to dealing with irate women. He’s liable to say something politically incorrect in the process, but he always capitulates. This was no exception. Harry buckled.
“Now that I’m not going in,” Mel said, handing me my coffee, “do we have a schedule?”
We didn’t, but Mel managed to organize one in short order. Scott and Cherisse were dispatched to Queen Anne Gardens t
o collect Lars and bring him to the Shanty on lower Queen Anne for a family breakfast. Despite the risk of occasionally running into Maxwell Cole, I’ve come to appreciate the Shanty in the past few months. It’s old enough for me to feel comfortable there, and I know Lars likes it, too. It had the added advantage of being within easy walking distance of the kids’ hotel.
I expected breakfast to be another disaster, but it wasn’t. Mel disarmed Kelly’s emotional Molotov cocktail by charming Kayla with a pocketful of stickers and by holding Kyle and cooing over him in a way that would have dumbfounded her fellow SHIT officers, Harry I. Ball included. And while Mel and I looked after the kids, Lars had everyone else’s undivided attention as he passed around Beverly Piedmont Jenssen’s treasured scrapbooks.
On that particular day, that collection of yellowed newspaper clippings served as my grandmother’s parting gift to me—and an incredible blessing. It amounted to pretty much a hard-copy LexisNexis report on the life and times of J. P. Beaumont, but this one had been done the old-fashioned way, with scissors and Elmer’s glue.
Back in the days when names meant business for local community newspapers, Beverly had culled all kinds of bits and pieces of my life from the pages of the now-defunct Ballard Dispatch. There were items about Cub Scout activities and high school athletic events, all of them carefully clipped and dated. I don’t think either of the kids had ever seen Karen’s engagement photo or our wedding announcement. (Our divorce announcement was there, too, but that was much later. Beverly wasn’t one for editing out bad news.)
Later on, the stories shifted away from the Dispatch and onto the pages of the Seattle Times and the P-I, as my career as first a Seattle PD beat cop and later as a detective took off and occasionally became newsworthy. There were secrets lurking among my grandmother’s treasures that neither of my children had ever known or suspected about their father. It turned out Beverly had managed to glean things about Kelly and Scott as well—their published birth announcements, for example. Beverly had continued keeping her loving long-distance vigil even after I had reconciled with her and my grandfather.
And at the very last, tucked into the first empty page in the most recent notebook, was the cardboard-framed hospital photo of Kyle. I’m sure Lars put it there for the simple reason that he needed to put it away. I don’t know if his choice of the notebook was deliberate or accidental, but I gave him credit for a stroke of pure genius when I saw the tearfully grateful look Kelly shot in my direction when she found it. The look was utterly priceless—and due entirely to Mel’s efforts rather than my own.
By the time we left the restaurant it was almost time to go to the funeral home.
I don’t like funerals, probably because I’ve been to far too many of them in my time. And I expected this one to be bad news. I realized it was going to be different, however, as soon as we walked into the chapel, where an invisible organ was playing “Love Is Lovelier the Second Time Around.” The back two rows were packed with people—mostly women and one lone man—from Queen Anne Gardens. Also near the back was the contingent from SHIT—Harry and the two other guys from Squad B, Brad Norton and Aaron Oliver. Close to the front were my friends Ron and Amy Peters, along with their three kids. Ralph and Mary Ames were also in attendance.
The whole front of the chapel was arrayed with floral arrangements. Maybe I had overdone it a little, but not that much. As Beverly had specified, there were two separate boxes of cremains on the altar. Between them stood a color photo of a beaming Beverly Piedmont Jenssen, dressed, for once in her life, in sparkling formal attire.
The photo had been one of those shipboard rites of passage taken prior to the formal-night dinner on the Starfire Breeze during their honeymoon cruise to Alaska. Seeing Beverly’s very sophisticated upswept hairdo, I remembered the firefight that had resulted when Lars had made the tactical blunder of comparing Beverly’s hairdo to the fender on a ’57 Cadillac. If you studied the photo closely, you could see the edge of Lars’s glasses where someone, using one of those computerized photo-editing programs, had excised him from the formal pose.
Lars leaned over me. “Ja, sure,” he said. “Yust look at all the flowers. Who do you t’ink sent them?”
“No idea,” I said.
Robert Staunton, the chaplain from Queen Anne Gardens, officiated at the ceremony and did a credible job of it. It was clear from his remarks that he knew Lars and Beverly well, and that he had liked and respected them. What he had to say was in fact a celebration of the love and caring they had brought to each other late in life.
Toward the end of the service Staunton opened the proceedings for comments from friends and family. I was surprised when Kelly handed Kyle over to Jeremy and stepped up to the microphone.
“I didn’t meet my great-grandmother at all until just a few years ago,” Kelly said. “But I know she loved us even when we weren’t together, and I’m grateful to have known her at all. And I’m grateful to Lars for making her so happy.”
That pretty well said it for me. There wasn’t a single thing I could have added to that statement, so I didn’t try.
When it came time to leave the chapel, Lars handed the two boxes of cremains over to Scott for safekeeping. Then he picked up the photo and carried it with him for the remainder of the day, clutching it to his chest as though it were a talisman that would drive away the several elderly women who did tend to cluster around him. As far as they were concerned, however, Lars Jenssen’s opinion to the contrary, I never saw anything at all in the women’s behavior that was the least bit inappropriate. They seemed like nice, ordinary women who were clucking in order to express sincere concern for someone who had lost his mate. Period. If one of them was dead set on maneuvering Lars into the sack, I didn’t see any evidence of it.
Scott and Jeremy loaded all the flowers into the back of Scott’s rented Taurus to take back to Belltown Terrace for the reception. As they were doing the loading, Lars was busy obsessing about how he’d manage to write all the thank-you notes.
“Not to worry,” Mel assured him. “I’ll handle it.”
Thus saving my bacon one more time.
We made it through the reception in fairly good shape. I had been prepared to take the whole group out to dinner, but Scott let me know that wasn’t necessary. “Jeremy and Cherisse haven’t spent much time in Seattle,” he said. “And, according to them, Kayla spent her whole day’s worth of good behavior at the funeral. We’re going to go out for pizza and then tomorrow we’re going to go sightseeing. If you want to come along…”
Somehow the idea of my kids’ spending some adult time together because they wanted to, without squabbling and without parental enforcement, was an idea that warmed me. “I think I’ll take a pass on pizza and sightseeing,” I said. “But maybe we can have dinner together tomorrow night.”
Mel caught my eye. “We’re booked tomorrow evening, remember?” she said. Then she added, “Although, if you want to spend time with your kids, I can go alone.”
Then I remembered—the fund-raising auction and the tux.
I also knew that the day had gone as well as it had due, in no small measure, to Melissa Soames’s efforts. I owed her.
“How long are you staying in town?” I asked.
Scott grinned. “The desk clerk said our bill is paid until Sunday, so we aren’t going home before then. Really, though, Sunday is when our plane leaves, and that’s when Kelly and Jeremy plan to head back, too.”
“Saturday, then,” I said. “We’ll make a day of it and have dinner together on Saturday.”
By six everybody was gone. Lars had returned home. The floral arrangements had been dispersed—some to Queen Anne Gardens, some to the front lobby of Belltown Terrace, and some to our living room. I was in the recliner with my feet up. Mel had just kicked off her shoes and curled up on the window seat to browse through Beverly Jenssen’s scrapbooks when her cell phone rang. She had to get up and track down her purse in order to answer.
I listened in on
her part of the conversation, but her noncommittal yeses and uh-huhs didn’t tell me much. By the time she ended the call, though, she was visibly upset.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Lenny Kessleman,” she said. “Head of CSI for King County.”
“What’s the matter?”
“The bullet from the Kates homicide scene is missing.”
“Maybe one of the detectives who was there yesterday picked it up and failed to put it in the log.”
“It’s missing from the wall,” Mel clarified firmly. “We all saw the hole in the wood paneling inside the camper. Since it didn’t penetrate the outside of the camper shell, we assumed it was lodged between the paneling and the shell and was probably stuck somewhere in the insulation. We decided to leave the paneling as is until after the CSIs had finished up with the other evidence.”
When a bullet exits a human skull, there’s always plenty of biological evidence—blood, bone chips, and brain matter—left behind. I understood why detectives on the scene would have left the bullet undisturbed until after all that evidence, including blood spatter and possible shoe prints, had been properly photographed, collected, and cataloged.
“So today they cut out that chunk of paneling and dug through the insulation, but the bullet wasn’t there,” Mel continued. “And from what Kessleman just told me, when they took the piece of paneling in for processing, they found evidence that would be consistent with the bullet having been removed from there at the time of the shooting.”
I’ve done plenty of head-shot crime scene investigations in my time. Encountering the physical evidence of one of those can be a soul-shattering experience—even long after the fact. If Allen Kates’s killer had been tough enough to wade through fresh blood and gore in order to retrieve damning evidence of his crime, it was likely we were dealing with someone who was appallingly cold-blooded. Most murderers don’t come equipped with the presence of mind to clean up after themselves. Most of them aren’t that smart.
