Proof of Life

by J. A. Jance

  DEDICATION

  For Howard G. Malley, whose ongoing battle with muscular

  dystrophy constitutes a daily and courageous Proof of Life.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  About the Author

  Also by J. A. Jance

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  THE DOOR SLAMMED SHUT AND CHRISSY PURCELL’S EYES popped open. She groped under the covers until she found the comforting softness of her frayed teddy bear, Oscar, and then lay there, staring up at the ceiling, waiting to see what would happen next. Maybe, if she was lucky, he would go to sleep. That’s when the window-rattling snoring would start, but she could sleep through that. They all could.

  The bedroom door was shut, but it wasn’t dark in the room. The lights from the parking lot made the ceiling above her glow in a strange, orangish light. Chrissy was grateful for that light. Sometimes, when she did something wrong, Daddy would lock her in the closet, where the only light was from that tiny crack that showed at the bottom of the door. She would lie there with her heart pounding and gasping for breath until Mommy would finally come and let her out.

  Mommy knew Chrissy was afraid of the dark. That was why, when they set up the bunk bed, Chrissy had been given the top bunk.

  “You’re three years older than Lonny,” Mommy had said. “Since he still falls out of bed sometimes, he should be in the lower bed. Besides,” she had added, “the lower bunk is a lot darker than the upper one.”

  The part about their ages was true, of course. Chrissy had just turned seven. Lonny was only four—a baby almost. But so was the part about the lower bunk being darker. Once or twice, when the scary sounds from the other room got to be too much, Chrissy had scrambled down the ladder and tried snuggling in with Lonny, but that hadn’t worked. It was too dark—like being in a cave. She needed the brightness of the ceiling overhead.

  And so Chrissy lay there and waited, sometimes holding her breath, sometimes not. Grandma Louise, Mommy’s mother, said that when you were scared like that, it was a good idea to pray. The problem was, whenever Chrissy prayed, she always asked for God to take Daddy away and not let him come home. Obviously her prayer hadn’t been answered, at least not tonight.

  Time passed, and she had almost drifted off again, when the expected quarrel finally started. At first it sounded like the distant rumbling of a thunderstorm blowing in off the ocean. Soon after that came the sound of raised voices.

  “You stupid . . .” Chrissy wasn’t sure what that last word was or what it meant, but she knew it was one of her father’s mean words. Whenever he called her mother that, it usually made Mommy cry. Only tonight that didn’t happen. Instead of crying, her mother argued back. Chrissy knew that was a mistake and she understood what would happen next. Not right away, but eventually, she’d hear the unmistakable sound of flesh on flesh. In the morning there would be a new bruise somewhere on her mother’s body—on her upper arm maybe or else on her back. The bruises usually ended up in spots that didn’t show once Mommy put her clothes on.

  Waiting for it to happen was worse than listening to it happen. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, Chrissy climbed out of bed and clambered down the ladder, dragging both Oscar and her blanket with her. Instead of crawling into the lower bunk with Lonny, she made her way to the foot of the bed and to the spot where Rambo lay curled up on her own bed.

  Rambo was a tall, scrawny dog, coal black, and with fringes of long, soft hair on the ends of her ears and on her shoulders. When Grandma Louise had first brought her to live with them, the dog had been a lot smaller—little more than a long-legged puppy. Naturally, that had caused another big fight, with Daddy insisting that he didn’t want a dog and wouldn’t have one, but that time Mommy hadn’t backed down. Rambo had stayed, but only on the condition that Daddy give her a new name.

  When Grandma Louise showed up with the dog, she had brought along a dog bed. Back then, the bed had been too big for the dog. Now it was too small. As she lay stretched out flat, Rambo’s nose rested on the floor on one side of the cushion and her long tail trailed off the opposite side. When Chrissy approached the bed, Rambo raised her head and thumped the floor with her tail.

  Pulling the blanket down over both of them and still clutching Oscar, Chrissy snuggled up next to the dog, with her back pressed tight against Rambo’s very warm tummy. Once Chrissy was settled, Rambo gave a contented sigh. With the dog’s warm breath humming steadily in Chrissy’s ear, the angry voices from the other room receded into the background, and after a time they both slept.

  CHAPTER 1

  WHEN THE PHONE RANG AND MY SON’S NAME APPEARED in the caller ID window, it was as though someone had thrown a lifeline to a drowning man. “Hey, Pops, it’s Scotty,” he told me unnecessarily. “How’re you doing?”

  Most of the time when people ask a question like that it’s rhetorical only—no one expects a real answer, and my reply was a long way from real.

  “Great,” I said with as much heartiness as I could muster. “Couldn’t be better.”

  Which could not have been further from the truth. I was anything but great. I was at home alone at Mel’s and my recently remodeled cliffside home on Bayside Road in what real estate professionals like to refer to as Bellingham’s “historic Edgemoor neighborhood.” The view outside our floor-to-ceiling west-facing windows was gray—an unrelenting gray sea beneath a gray sky, glimpsed through a gray fog of drizzle. Despite the splashes of color our talented decorator, Jim Hunt, had installed here and there as furnishings and wall hangings, the mood inside the house was unremittingly gray as well. Mel Soames, my lovely wife, was hard at work at her relatively new job as chief of police in Bellingham, Washington, while I was stuck at home alone, trying to come to terms with the realities of retirement.

  I had done some occasional work for TLC, The Last Chance, a volunteer cold case unit that my friend and attorney, Ralph Ames, had hooked me up with. That included a case I’d been able to help resolve that had come up just prior to Thanksgiving. The reality of TLC work is that it often involves plowing through old police reports searching for something someone else has missed. The problem with plowing through police reports is that it’s too much like . . . well . . . plowing through old police reports.

  Besides, what alternatives did I have? Golf has never been my thing, and there are only so many crossword puzzles you can do in the course of a week before you’re ready to blow your brains out. As our neighbor up the street, Johannes Bodner, a guy who spent his formative years in the South African Defense Force, likes to say, I was not a happy chappie. The words “clinically depressed” hadn’t yet surfaced in my conscio
usness, but they were lurking around the edges.

  “How are things for you?” I asked.

  “So-so,” Scott replied, which was probably a far more honest answer than mine had been. If you’re in search of actual information, listening in on father-son conversations probably isn’t the right place to go looking.

  “Any chance you’ll be coming into Seattle tomorrow?”

  The truth of the matter is, I was free as a bird—no schedule to speak of; no mandatory meetings; no due dates on case reports. And I have to admit, the idea of having a chance to spend some one-on-one time with my son when there wasn’t a houseful of holiday company gladdened my heart. Driving eighty-some miles one way to do it? No problem, but I didn’t want to sound too eager. When it comes to father-son relations, being too eager is also bad news.

  “Hadn’t planned on it,” I said cagily. “Why? What’s up?”

  “I’m having my wisdom teeth pulled,” Scott answered. “Because of the anesthetic, I’m required to have someone there to drive me home afterwards. The trouble is, when I made the appointment I forgot that Cherisse is in Vegas for the big consumer electronics convention this weekend. Still, it’s not that big a deal. If it’s not good for you, I can always run up the flag to Uber.”

  The problem for me is that it really was that big a deal. I wasn’t there on the day when Scotty Beaumont, age six, bit into a Taco Bell burrito, lost his first tooth, and swallowed same. My first wife, Karen, was in charge of parental duties at the time because, when the initial lunchtime crisis happened, I was in Seattle conveniently at work as a Seattle homicide cop. I wasn’t home later on when the second part of the lost tooth incident occurred, either—when Karen sat Scott down at the kitchen table and helped him pen a note to the Tooth Fairy, explaining how, although the tooth itself had gone AWOL, he hoped money would appear under his pillow all the same. (It did, once again as a result of Karen’s due diligence.) By that time of day—night, really—I was done with actual work, but I had stopped off for a few stiff ones on the way home, with the ready excuse that I needed to have some “decompression time” between being a cop and being a husband and father.

  This is a scenario that will be all too familiar to far too many—including all those guys I’ve met during the intervening years as a result of my long-term involvement with Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s usually among the collection of regrets that are a common denominator in one AA drunkalogue after another. That’s what happens when people finally decide to sober up and begin discovering what they missed out on while they were drunk out of their gourds, sometimes for years on end.

  Occasionally, though, life reaches out and gives you a second chance, and this was one of them—a missed Tooth Fairy do-over, if ever there was one!

  “What time’s the appointment?” I asked. “And where? Just let me know what time you want to be picked up.”

  Because the appointment was set for 9 A.M., and because I didn’t want to be driving into Seattle from Bellingham at the peak of rush-hour traffic, I decided to go down that evening—early afternoon, really—because I didn’t want to be driving in afternoon rush-hour traffic, either. That’s one of the advantages of Mel’s and my keeping the condo at Belltown Terrace in downtown Seattle—it makes it easy for us to come and go whenever it suits us.

  It turns out police chiefs need decompression time every bit as much if not more than homicide cops do, so I usually drive into Bellingham proper at midday each day so Mel and I can have lunch together, as long as she doesn’t have to go hobnobbing with some visiting dignitary or other.

  Our favorite spot is a greasy spoon diner on Dupont called Jack and Jill’s. Jack died years ago. Jill, somewhere north of seventy, is a wiry, white-haired dynamo who is at the restaurant every day, running the show and keeping an eagle eye on things. The restaurant is two blocks from Mel’s office and comes with a side door that allows her to slip inside and duck into our permanently reserved back-corner booth without garnering a lot of attention.

  Some second wives might have objected to my driving eighty miles each way in order to take a forty-something son to a dental procedure, but not Mel. She’s been a huge asset in helping me reestablish better relationships with all my offspring—Scott and Cherisse along with my daughter, Kelly, and her husband, Jeremy, who live down in Ashland, Oregon, with their own two kids. Taking my poor parenting history into account, let’s just say I’ve had some serious overcoming to do, and Mel has guided and facilitated that process as much as possible.

  “What time are you heading out?” she asked, tucking into her Cobb salad.

  Salads aren’t exactly my thing. I’ve always been more of a burger or bowl of chili kind of guy. “Right after lunch,” I told her. “I want to get a haircut this afternoon and then go to a meeting tonight.”

  I may have changed residences, but I haven’t changed barbers, and my AA meetings of choice still mostly take place in Seattle’s Denny Regrade neighborhood, or as it’s currently referred to, Belltown.

  “You’ve probably forgotten that Saturday afternoon is when we have our Fifth Avenue tickets,” Mel mentioned.

  The Fifth Avenue is a longtime theater in downtown Seattle that specializes in musical productions. Mel has had season tickets for as long as she’s lived and worked in Seattle. She used to go with a friend. Now she goes with me. She was right, of course. I had completely forgotten about our theater date, but I managed to spare myself some embarrassment by not asking which show.

  “Since you’ll already be in town,” she continued, “how about if I come down after work tomorrow? We can grab a late dinner at El Gaucho and then see Man of La Mancha the next day.”

  Whew. At least I now knew which play we were seeing, and I took the idea of Mel giving herself a weekend off as a very good sign. “Sounds good to me,” I said. “Like an actual date.”

  “Right,” she said. “Let’s just hope nothing happens to screw it up. I have a meeting with Mayor-Elect Appleton this afternoon. Keep your fingers crossed.”

  When Mel had signed on for the Bellingham chief of police gig, she had walked into a political hornet’s nest where she’d been forced to go head-to-head with the then mayor, a woman named Adelina Kirkpatrick. From the moment I met Mayor Kirkpatrick, I’d had a bad feeling about her—a gut instinct that unfortunately had turned out to be dead-on right. Mel had uncovered some serious corruption issues in Mayor Kirkpatrick’s administration, which had resulted in the now former mayor’s surprise election-day ouster by a dark-horse, write-in candidate named Lawrence Appleton. The new mayor’s swearing-in ceremony was scheduled for two weeks from now. That meant that Mel was currently walking a tightrope between her incoming boss and her outgoing boss. Not fun.

  “One-on-one?” I asked.

  “Yup,” she said, “a cozy little meeting for just the two of us.”

  Mel had met the man previously, but this would be their first comprehensive meeting. Given what had gone on before, I didn’t fault Mel for being concerned about it.

  “You’ll do fine,” I assured her with more confidence than I actually felt. “He’ll be totally blown away.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I needed that.”

  By the time lunch was over, my bad attitude had been adjusted for the better. As I headed south on I-5, it was raining pitchforks and hammer handles, but I even found a way to be grateful for that. The mountain passes were a mess, but down in the lowlands it was rain rather than snow, and a warm rain at that—a Pineapple Express, as the talking weather-heads like to call it. Unfortunately, according to the weather reports, the rainstorm was likely to be followed by an arctic blast—a sudden dry spell that would drop temperatures to frigid and turn wet road surfaces to glass. No doubt that was just the kind of foul-up Mel was worried about. From my point of view and considering our plans for the weekend, continuing rain for as long as possible was just what the doctor ordered.

  I pulled into the parking garage at Belltown Terrace, parked on P-4, and then stopped off in
the lobby on my way upstairs to empty the nonforwarded junk mail from our mailbox. Bob, the doorman, greeted me like a long-lost pal.

  “Hey, Mr. Beaumont,” he said. “Great to see you. How’s retirement treating you these days?”

  “Terrific,” I said, passing off the lie with what I hoped appeared to be a sincere smile. “Couldn’t be better.”

  “Have you heard about Marge?”

  Margie Herndon was a registered nurse—a cranky one at that—who happened to be a longtime friend of Bob’s wife, Helen. That connection was enough to explain why I had ended up with her as my home-health nurse in the aftermath of my bilateral knee replacement surgery. She had turned out to be your basic Nurse Ratched–style rehab Nazi. Naturally she and Mel had gotten along like gangbusters. To be fair, the fact that my no-longer-new-but-still-fake knees work as well as they do can be attributed, in large measure, to Marge Herndon’s ability to crack the whip. We had gotten through rehab together, but it hadn’t exactly been a match made in heaven.

  “What about her?”

  “Helen tells me that she and Harry I. Ball are planning to tie the knot.”

  Back before my unexpected and unwelcome retirement, Harry Ignatius Ball used to be my boss. That was when I still worked for the attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team, S.H.I.T. (Unfortunate acronym. Sorry about that, but the name is not my fault.) Slightly more than a year earlier, Ross Connors, the attorney general, and Harry had been involved in a spectacular Christmastime traffic accident near Seattle Center. Ross Connors had been declared dead at the scene.

  By the time someone used the jaws of life to extricate Harry from the smashed limo in which he’d been riding, the man was barely clinging to life. He survived. For months he had been a wheelchair-bound double amputee, only recently being fitted with prosthetics. Shortly after the incident, when he had required nursing care in order to be released from the hospital, I had suggested that Marge Herndon might fill the bill. At the time I had expected interactions between the two of them to be your basic oil-and-water combo. For a serious romance to have blossomed between the two of them? Nobody saw that one coming, most especially me.