Proof of Life

by J. A. Jance

  By my forties, whether I knew the deceased or not, I began paying attention to the ages of the people who had died. It always felt better somehow—or at least less threatening—if the dead person in question happened to be “really old,” which is to say at least a couple of decades older than I was. Now that situation has changed dramatically. People a lot younger than I am routinely show up among those death notices along with plenty of people my age.

  Maxwell Cole was one of the latter—a contemporary. Because we had been in the same fraternity back in college, I happened to know that his birthday preceded mine by a mere three months. His birthday in the frat house at the end of August our freshman year was the excuse for the first drunken party I experienced after enrolling in the University of Washington—or the U Dub, as that institution of higher learning is known to locals.

  Even with all the bad blood between us, Max’s death hit far closer to home than I would have expected, especially since Mel and I had seen him on Friday night, only two nights before his death. With Mel gone for the day, I had plenty of time to think—and if you’ve been a homicide cop for as long as I have, extended periods of solitary thought have the potential to be hazardous.

  I’ve investigated fatality fires. To say they’re gruesome is a huge understatement. Once you’ve been exposed to the distinctive smell of burnt human flesh, it’s something that never goes away. There’s always the faint hope that the victim was overcome by smoke long before the flames reached him. Sometime in the course of that long afternoon, I had a heart-to-heart chat with my Higher Power hoping that had been the case here—that Max had died as a result of smoke inhalation rather than from something much more horrific.

  Had I wanted to, I could have found out about what was really going on by checking with some of my longtime contacts at either Seattle PD or at the medical examiner’s office. I could have done so, but I didn’t. At the time it was none of my business. During the course of the day, as the story was updated, I contented myself with reading the updates, and toward the end of the day, a familiar name jumped out at me.

  A close family friend, Erin Kelsey Howard, serving as family spokeswoman, said that funeral arrangements are pending with the Poindexter Funeral Home and will be announced once the medical examiner’s office releases the body. In the meantime, in lieu of flowers, it is suggested that donations be made to the local chapter of the Right to Try.

  My initial impression was that “Try” was a misprint of some kind—a mistaken rendition of the Right to Die, but then I googled the term and discovered that Right to Try is a national organization devoted to passing laws that allow terminally ill patients to avail themselves of groundbreaking drugs that have not yet been completely vetted by the Byzantine obstacles put in place by the FDA.

  Here’s the deal. Imagine you’re someone who has just been given a terminal prognosis by your friendly neighborhood oncologist. In the course of giving yourself a graduate-level education in whatever version of the Big C is currently threatening your existence, you have just discovered that there is an experimental drug that is thought to improve life expectancy of patients dealing with that malady.

  In hopes of helping yourself and, as a consequence, helping others as well, you sign up to participate in a trial. Because the drug has not yet been deemed safe, if you’re actually allowed into the program, you have a fifty-fifty chance of receiving a) the drug you want or b) a placebo. If you do sign on, that means you’re agreeing to a situation where you may get the real medication—the one you want—which might kill you, or the placebo, which for sure will do nothing to help you. Good luck with that. Any resemblance to a rousing game of Russian roulette is purely coincidental.

  I thought about a thin, bald Maxwell Cole—a mere shadow of his former self—standing in El Gaucho, minus his mustache, leaning on his cane and dragging an oxygen canister behind him. Had he been a cancer patient perhaps? Maybe. And then I remembered that cigar—no doubt of the Cuban, hand-rolled variety. Cigar versus cancer? If you’re already terminal and you want to smoke a cigar, why the hell not?

  The first thing I did, right then and there, was locate the Right to Try’s website, where I made a sizable donation in memory of Maxwell Cole.

  About that time, the clouds parted and the sun came out. After days of unrelenting rain, that burst of sunlight was especially welcome. Before the sudden clearing had time to turn frigid, I decided that after days of being cooped up in the house, I needed a walk.

  Ever since our move to Bellingham, or rather, our half-move to Bellingham, Mel and I had been discussing the possibility of getting a dog, partially under the most likely mistaken impression that having a dog would make me walk more. Mel’s take on the matter was that I should make some effort to walk without using a dog for cover.

  So I threw on a jacket and went outside. As I started off through the winding up-and-down streets of Edgemoor, despite having salved my conscience with a monetary donation, my mind was still stuck on what had happened to Maxwell Cole and on the fact that, for the second time in my life, I felt sorry for him. And that realization took me back to the first time I felt sorry for him, some twenty years or so earlier, and to the familiar name that had leaped out at me from the online article—Erin Kelsey Howard.

  It had been about this same time of year and in the aftermath of a record-breaking snowstorm that I, along with my least favorite partner of all time, Detective Paul Kramer, was summoned to a double homicide in the old Seattle Public Schools District office up on Queen Anne Hill. One of the victims, Marcia Kelsey, was thought to be Erin’s mother. Unfortunately, our subsequent investigation revealed that everything Erin thought she knew about her past and her presumed family had been a complete fabrication.

  When I first met her, Erin was a college sophomore—an Oregon Duck. Her real father and Marcia’s first husband, a nut job by the name of Chris McLaughlin, was a sometime drug dealer with delusions of polygamous grandeur. He had enticed Marcia to marry him and run away to a commune in Canada despite the inconvenient fact that he was already married to someone else. I’m sure at one time I knew the name of the first wife, but as I walked around Edgemoor that cold but sunny Sunday afternoon, I couldn’t for the life of me remember it.

  Once at the commune, things went haywire in a hurry. Chris and his first wife already had one child and were expecting a second when eighteen-year-old Marcia turned up on the scene. She came from a staunch Mormon household. At the time of the elopement, she may or may not have known about the existence of that other wife. That early on, she also may or may not have known that she was prone to lesbian leanings. I’ve often wondered if her running off with Chris was an attempt to squelch those very tendencies.

  Sometime after she arrived, the commune experiment went south. For one thing, the other women involved—including Chris’s first wife—all seemed capable of getting pregnant at the drop of a hat. Marcia, desperate to have children of her own, could not. I learned later that she was what’s known in the West as a “downwinder.”

  During the fifties, as a young child visiting her grandparents in Utah for summer vacation, the family farm was directly in the path of fallout from a particularly dirty nuclear bomb set off on the Nevada test site. As a result of that exposure, both grandparents subsequently died of cancer. As for Marcia? She might have developed cancer eventually, but she was murdered long before that happened. Still, from what her husband told me at the time of her death, she always attributed her inability to have children to that one fateful fallout encounter.

  Once the commune experiment blew up, Marcia returned to Seattle to live with her parents, go back to school, and try to put the whole Canadian experience behind her. Meanwhile, things weren’t going so well for Chris. With money in short supply, he tried his hand at drug smuggling, sometimes using his infant daughter’s blankets and diapers as cover for his illicit goods. Whether it was done with our without the consent of the baby’s mother, that moderately successful scheme continued for a ti
me, until the day Chris ended up dead, stabbed to death in the course of a drunken brawl in one of his favorite south-of-the-border hangouts—a bar in Puerto Peñasco, aka Rocky Point—in Mexico.

  At the time of Chris’s death, the bartender on duty happened to be an American expat, a Vietnam War army deserter named John Madsen. A day after McLaughlin died, the local woman he had hired to look after his daughter, Sasha, while he went drinking, turned up at the bar with the baby in hand, along with a collection of Chris’s goods. Worried that she might be accused of kidnapping the Anglo child, the woman was eager to have someone else take charge of Sasha, and that’s exactly what John Madsen did.

  Hidden in the bottom of a diaper bag, he discovered a cache of several sets of fake IDs, ones Chris had had created for both himself and for Sasha in order to facilitate their being able to move back and forth across the border at will. John Madsen’s physical resemblance to McLaughlin was close enough that in cursory examinations, the photos worked. Madsen saw that collection of fake IDs as nothing short of a godsend—as a way of ending his long exile from the States. Choosing one set of IDs—those for someone named Pete Kelsey and his daughter, Erin—John Madsen packed up Sasha and headed north.

  Among Chris’s effects, Madsen had found Marcia’s name and address. Thinking she might be able to point him in the direction of Sasha’s real mother, that’s where Pete and Erin headed—to Seattle. When he reached out to Marcia, she did indeed know where to find Sasha’s biological mother. Unfortunately, Marcia also knew that the commune she had left behind was no place for a child to grow to adulthood. The fact that Chris had used his own child as an unwitting accomplice in his drug trafficking pretty much sealed the deal.

  In the end, Pete Kelsey and his “daughter” stayed on in Seattle. Considering his identity irregularities, finding a regular job was out of the question, so he established himself as a star in the local home remodeling industry. In order to legitimatize their relationship, Marcia pulled a fast one on of her long-term acquaintances, Maxwell Cole, and duped him into believing that he was the one who first introduced Marcia to Pete.

  Their resulting marriage came with a number of benefits for Pete and Marcia. He acquired newfound standing in the community while an otherwise childless Marcia had a child to raise. In addition, Pete and Marcia’s stable but nontraditional relationship provided cover for Marcia’s longtime relationship with a female lover. And what did Erin get from all this? A supposedly stable family that, upon examination, turned out to be nothing but a pack of lies.

  The whole scheme had collapsed when one of Chris McLaughlin’s other children, Erin’s half sister, Jennifer, came to Seattle intent on taking revenge on Pete Kelsey—the man her mother had held solely responsible for her father’s death. Jennifer had murdered Marcia, attempted to frame Pete for the crime, and burned the family home to the ground. Her final act, one that very nearly succeeded, had been an attempt to drag Erin to her death in a suicidal plunge off the Magnolia Bridge.

  I had been caught up in that terrible life-and-death tug of war, with me grasping Erin by the wrist and pulling in one direction while Jennifer attempted to drag her in the other. When it was over, Jennifer had fallen to her death, and Erin was still alive—broken but alive.

  All these years later, during my increasingly chilly walk through Edgemoor that suddenly icy Sunday afternoon, I could still hear the dull pops as Erin’s shoulders dislocated, along with the howls of agony that followed.

  It was after that awful confrontation that I’d finally had to tell Maxwell Cole the ugly truth—that for the better part of twenty years he’d been played for a fool by Pete and Marcia Kelsey, the two people he had assumed were his best friends in all the world. Much as I disliked the man, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him when he finally learned the truth.

  Police involvement in the aftermath of Marcia’s death meant that Pete Kelsey’s decades-long charade came to an end. Unmasked as a Vietnam-era army deserter named John Madsen, he had been taken into custody. Charged with desertion, he was eventually released from federal custody with a general discharge from the U.S. Army. He emerged from the process a seemingly broken man. His wife had been murdered and his house destroyed. The resulting notoriety had cost him not only his business, but also the love of the girl he had raised and loved as if she were his own. Erin was his no longer.

  From what I had learned today, the only piece of Erin’s previous life that had evidently remained intact was her friendship with Maxwell Cole. Sadly, now that, too, had come to an end. Since the online article had referred to Erin as Maxwell Cole’s “family spokesman,” their close relationship had endured despite everything that had gone before. The connection between them, forged in the fire of mutual betrayal, was a bond even death itself couldn’t sever.

  Wheels crunched on the roadway as a car pulled up beside me. The honk of a horn and a flash of headlights startled me out of my reverie. I had no idea how long I had been walking, but I was chilled to the bone, and the sun was definitely going down.

  “What the hell are you doing out here?” Mel demanded as she buzzed down the passenger window of her shiny new Ford Interceptor. “Come on. Get in. You’ll catch your death.”

  For as long as I’ve known her, Mel Soames has always been one sweet talker. How the hell could any guy in his right mind resist an invitation like that? I got in, and away we went.

  CHAPTER 5

  “HOW ARE THINGS?” I ASKED.

  “You might want to take a look in the backseat,” Mel said.

  I turned around to check. There was a lumpy black blob huddled in the corner of the backseat, directly behind where I was sitting. It might have been a blanket or a coat, but then we passed under a streetlight and the glow from that lit up an unblinking pair of black eyes. What I thought was a blanket turned out to be a dog—a very large dog.

  “What the hell?” I demanded.

  “The name is Rambo,” Mel said with a sigh, “and it’s a long story.”

  One of the things I’ve learned in life is that you have to watch out what you ask for or even what you think about because Someone is out there listening—Someone with a very dry sense of humor.

  “Are we taking him to the pound maybe?” I asked hopefully.

  “Rambo’s a girl actually,” Mel answered. “And she’s not going to the pound. She’s coming home with us.”

  Okay, so if you can have transgender bathrooms in this day and age, maybe having a transgender-named dog isn’t completely out of the question, either.

  Mel eased down the steep hill that is our driveway, pulled into our two-car garage, and popped the trunk latch. “Rambo’s stuff is in the back. If you’ll get that, I’ll take her inside.”

  Once out of the car, Mel opened the back door and picked up a leash, which she attached to the dog’s collar, one of those very fierce-looking pinch collars designed to keep troublesome dogs under control.

  “Come on, girl,” Mel urged. “Let’s go.” Obligingly Rambo unwound her incredibly long legs, stood up, and gave herself a full-body shake. She was nothing short of immense. A fringe of smooth, six-inch-long hair dangled from the ends of both her ears, and a cape of similarly long hair covered her massive shoulders.

  “What the hell kind of dog is that?” I demanded.

  “Mostly an Irish wolfhound,” Mel told me, “possibly mixed with something else.”

  Once out of the car and on the ground, Rambo was tall enough that the top of her head was even with the top of Mel’s hip. I believe I may have mentioned before that Mel isn’t anybody’s idea of a “little lady.” Not only was Rambo tall, but she probably weighed in at a hundred pounds or so. She was a big dog—a very big dog—who accompanied Mel into the house without making any objections, so I did my part, too. I went to the back of the car to collect Rambo’s “stuff.”

  It consisted of a large but very worn gray dog bed; a grocery bag full of several battered chew toys; a pair of equally worn tennis balls; two large metal dog dishe
s; and a forty-pound bag of dry dog food that was more than half-empty. It took two trips to drag everything into the house. I put the dog bed down in one corner of the kitchen, next to the trash drawer. When I came back into the house with the other load, Rambo was already curled up on her bed. With only her eyes moving, she watched me warily while resting her nose on her outstretched front paws. Her coat was black and so were her eyes. I found the steady gaze from those unblinking eyes to be unnerving, to say the least.

  I filled one of the two dishes with water and the other with a measuring cup full of food and put them down on the floor next to her. She didn’t budge. “There you go, Rambo,” I said. “Make yourself at home.”

  Because Mel had gone to work that morning expecting to have interactions with the press, she had worn her dress uniform. When she reappeared in the kitchen a couple of minutes later, she had already changed into the fleecy lavender tracksuit I had given her for Christmas.

  Mel gave me a glancing kiss as she crossed the room, then knelt down in front of the dog and patted the animal’s head. “There you go, Rambo,” she crooned softly. “How’s it going?”

  Rambo responded with a weak thump from her long, lanky tail.

  “So tell me,” I said, “what’s the deal with the dog, and how’s the guy in the hospital?”

  “The guy in the hospital is named Purcell—Kenneth Purcell,” Mel told me. “Things have settled down with him for now, and it looks like he’s going to make it.”

  “That’s got to be a huge relief.”

  Mel nodded. “A shooting incident is bad enough, but a fatality shooting would be a whole lot worse.”

  “Purcell,” I repeated. “Sounds Anglo.”

  “That’s right,” Mel answered. “He’s not even Hispanic, and neither is my cop, which might help dial back some of the deadly-force outrage and rhetoric.”

  “Good luck with that,” I said.