Proof of Life

by J. A. Jance

  That remark reminded me of the man I’d once known as Pete Kelsey. I took a steadying breath before broaching the next topic. “Have you thought about being in touch with John Madsen?” I asked.

  Erin drew back in her chair as though I’d just reached out and slapped her. “Why on earth would I do that?” she demanded. “Besides, I have no idea where he is.”

  “I happen to know he lives in Chehalis,” I told her. “Did you know he came to Max’s funeral?”

  “He did? I never saw him there.”

  “You didn’t see him because he didn’t want you to, but he came hoping to catch a glimpse of you. He and Max evidently stayed in touch over the years. Did you know that?”

  Erin shook her head.

  “Max kept him updated on what was going on with you and Chris. He still cares about you, Erin. He took care of you when you were an abandoned orphan in Mexico, and you were his little girl for a very long time after that. Although his and Marcia’s relationship wasn’t one that most people would regard as standard, they lived the way they did in order to protect you. And it turns out you needed protecting. Jennifer came after all of you, Pete Kelsey lost everything, including the two women he loved more than anything in the world. The poor guy has spent years wandering in the wilderness with two holes in his heart. Your reaching out to him would go a long way toward filling one of them.”

  A silence settled between us then, and I let it sit there for a time, giving my words a chance to sink in.

  “I’m not promising,” Erin said at last, “but I’ll think about it.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  It was the best I could do.

  When I stood up to leave, Erin walked me to the door.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for everything you did for me—and for Chris.”

  “You’re welcome,” I told her. “Any time.”

  On the drive home, all I could do was hope that what I’d said had been enough.

  Considering Lucy’s condition, Mel and I were no longer meeting up for lunch. When she came home that evening with that day’s selection of takeout, I told her about my visit with Erin. While we were cleaning up after dinner, Mel stopped in the middle of scraping a plate into the trash and gave me an appraising look.

  “Aside from the actual knife fights, this whole thing was good for you, wasn’t it?” she said. “You really enjoyed helping Erin.”

  Why accept a compliment when it’s so easy to deflect one? “Max is the one who helped her,” I said.

  “You’re still helping her,” Mel pointed out.

  She had me there. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “So I’m signing you up for your own subscription to LexisNexis,” she said.

  “Why on earth would you do that?”

  “Because you need it. I also brought home the paperwork for you to apply to become a PI. It’s in my purse. All you have to do is fill it out. Think about it. You have a whole lifetime’s worth of people that you know in Seattle. If some of them show up on your doorstep in the future, asking for help, as a PI you’ll have the benefit of some official standing, and you’ll also have some up-to-date tools to work with. Being able to work when you want to and call your own shots will be a hell of a lot better for you than waiting around until TLC decides to call you in on one of their cases.”

  When Mel handed me the application, I said the same thing to her that Erin had said to me about Pete Kelsey. “I’ll think about it,” I said, but later on that evening, I stuffed the form into my in-basket on the kitchen counter and left it there.

  On Friday morning both Mel and I declined to drive down to Seattle for Kevin Blaylock’s funeral. Lucy and I had gone down and back the day before. Mel’s excuse was based on the fact that she had already missed one day of work that week. Rather than going herself, she dispatched her second in command along with a group of officers to participate in her place.

  Let’s just say I’ve attended far too many fallen-officer memorials in my time. Even though I’m sure there was wall-to-wall coverage of all the pomp and circumstance on TV, I didn’t watch any of it, for the very real reason that that I was still struggling with having pointed Kevin Blaylock in Bian Duong’s direction.

  Friday evening, Mel came home from work and gave me the latest. “Nancy Purcell called today.”

  “How are she and the kids doing? What are their names again?”

  “Chrissy and Lonny,” Mel answered. “And it sounds like they’re doing fine. Great, even.”

  It turned out that’s exactly the news I’d been dreading—that they really were doing well. Any minute, they’d be out of the shelter and into either transitional or permanent housing. Once that happened, they’d probably also be ready to take their dog back.

  I looked down at Lucy, who was lying peacefully on her bed in the kitchen. She caught the glance and obligingly thumped her tail.

  “I told Nancy all about what happened with Lucy,” Mel continued. “By the way, they still call her Rambo.”

  I didn’t say anything at all. I was too busy waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “Then, just before I came home, Nancy called me back and told me that she and the kids talked it over as a family and decided that, if we don’t mind keeping Rambo, once they get into a place where they can have a pet, she’s promised the kids they’ll get a new dog—only a small one this time.”

  I cannot tell you how happy that news made me feel. I didn’t let on, or at least I tried not to let on, but Mel probably figured it out all the same.

  CHAPTER 37

  OVER THE WEEKEND, WITH MEL HOME TO HELP WITH Lucy, I decided it was time to contact Patrick Donahue. Bian Duong’s story had been getting blanket coverage in the media, and Todd’s death was now considered a homicide, but I felt as though I owed Patrick more information than what was public fodder. We still didn’t know exactly what had prompted Todd Farraday’s visit to his stepfather’s home, but I still suspect it had something to do with Bian’s illicit property transfer.

  When I called the Refuge and asked to speak to Patrick Donahue, the response was curt. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Donahue is no longer with us.”

  I thought I recognized the voice as belonging to the very unhelpful Mr. Bannerman. Under the circumstances, those words, “no longer with us,” could mean two very different things—that Patrick might have pulled up stakes and gone to live elsewhere, or else he was dead. I knew for sure that if I asked for details, I’d get zilch, so I gave up and was able to spend the rest of the day castigating myself for not trying to reach him sooner.

  On Monday morning I woke up gasping for breath and thinking I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t breathe. At all. When I turned on the light, I found Lucy standing next to the bed, with her lips almost touching mine and with her intense black eyes boring into me. She was up to her old tricks again, and robbing me of air at every breath.

  When Scotty and Kelly were little, I remember Karen complaining about my being able to sleep right through the sound of crying babies. Later, when the kids were older and needed something during the night, they always went to Karen’s side of the bed rather than mine. Now, with Mel sleeping soundly on her side of the bed, Karen Moffitt Beaumont was getting a little of her own back.

  “How did you get here?” I whispered to Lucy as I scrambled out of bed, although the answer to that was pretty obvious. She had gotten up from her bed all on her own and had come to waken me.

  I grabbed the sling and put it around her, but as we headed out it was clear that Lucy needed less support from the sling than she had before. I hadn’t taken the time to put on slippers. Out in the yard, the wet grass was cold as hell on my bare feet. Thankfully Lucy didn’t linger. She did what needed to be done, and we went back inside.

  By then it was five o’clock in the morning. I suppose I could have gone back to bed, but there wasn’t much point. I made a cup of coffee, and then Lucy and I decamped into the living room, where I lit the gas log fireplace
and sat down to think. Lucy lay down next to my chair, close enough that periodically I could reach down and stroke her head. Whenever I did so, she thumped her tail at me. A man and his dog, what could be better?

  I sat there thinking about everything that had gone on in the previous couple of weeks, starting with taking Scott to the dentist that Friday morning and then, later on that evening, running into Max at the restaurant. Those events seemed forever ago now, but they weren’t, not really. The time between then and now had been scary and exhausting and exhilarating. Bringing down Bian Harden and Kenneth Purcell had given my life a sense of purpose that had been missing for a very long time.

  When I went back to the kitchen for my second cup of coffee, I retrieved the PI application from the in-basket and sat down at the kitchen island to fill it out. When Mel came into the kitchen awhile later, the completed application was sitting on top of the coffee machine.

  “What’s this?” she asked, picking it up.

  “Remember Scott and Cherisse’s sonogram?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Mel said, “but what does that have to do with this?”

  “It’s the same thing,” I told her. “Let’s just call it proof of life. It turns out this old guy’s still got it.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  J. A. JANCE is the New York Times bestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, the Ali Reynolds series, and five interrelated thrillers about the Walker family, as well as a volume of poetry. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.

  www.jajance.com

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  ALSO BY J. A. JANCE

  J. P. BEAUMONT MYSTERIES

  Until Proven Guilty

  Injustice for All

  Trial by Fury

  Taking the Fifth

  Improbable Cause

  A More Perfect Union

  Dismissed with Prejudice

  Minor in Possession

  Payment in Kind

  Without Due Process

  Failure to Appear

  Lying in Wait

  Name Withheld

  Breach of Duty

  Birds of Prey

  Partner in Crime

  Long Time Gone

  Justice Denied

  Fire and Ice

  Betrayal of Trust

  Ring in the Dead: A J. P. Beaumont Novella

  Second Watch

  Stand Down: A J. P. Beaumont Novella

  Dance of the Bones

  JOANNA BRADY MYSTERIES

  Desert Heat

  Tombstone Courage

  Shoot/Don’t Shoot

  Dead to Rights

  Skeleton Canyon

  Rattlesnake Crossing

  Outlaw Mountain

  Devil’s Claw

  Paradise Lost

  Partner in Crime

  Exit Wounds

  Dead Wrong

  Damage Control

  Fire and Ice

  Judgment Call

  The Old Blue Line: A Joanna Brady Novella

  Remains of Innocence

  Random Acts: A Joanna Brady and Ali Reynolds Novella

  Downfall

  WALKER FAMILY NOVELS

  Hour of the Hunter

  Kiss of the Bees

  Day of the Dead

  Queen of the Night

  Dance of the Bones: A J. P. Beaumont and Brandon Walker Novel

  ALI REYNOLDS NOVELS

  Edge of Evil

  Web of Evil

  Hand of Evil

  Cruel Intent

  Trial by Fire

  Fatal Error

  Left for Dead

  Deadly Stakes

  Moving Target

  A Last Goodbye: An Ali Reynolds Novella

  Cold Betrayal

  No Honor Among Thieves: An Ali Reynolds/Joanna Brady Novella

  Clawback

  Man Overboard

  POETRY

  After the Fire

  CREDITS

  Cover design by Richard L. Aquan

  Cover photograph © urbanglimpses/Getty Images

  COPYRIGHT

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  PROOF OF LIFE. Copyright © 2017 by J. A. Jance. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  EPub Edition September 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-265756-5

  ISBN 978-0-06-265754-1 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-06-269957-2 (international edition)

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