Judgment Calls

by Alafair Burke

There was no arguing it, so I laughed instead. “Who’s in the back?” I asked, leaning my head toward the ongoing murmurs.

  “Walker’s back there with the husband and the sister. We got here about a half an hour ago, and the sister showed up right after. We haven’t been able to do much more than try to calm them down. We need to start working on the timeline, though. I stayed out here to wait for you. I suspect Dr. Easterbrook’s still getting used to having a brother in the house.”

  It was unusual to have MCT involved so early in a missing persons case, but Walker and Johnson were here from the bureau’s Major Crimes Team for the same reason I was: to make sure that our offices looked responsive and concerned when the missing judge showed up and to triple-check that the investigation was perfect, just in case she didn’t.

  “Sounds good. I’ll do my part for the family and any press, but for now you guys take the lead on interviews.”

  “Music to my ears, Kincaid.”

  He began walking toward the back of the house, but I stopped him with a hand on his elbow. “I assume you’re keeping things gentle for now, just in case. And absolutely no searches, not even with consent.” If Clarissa Easterbrook had encountered anything criminal, everyone close to her would become a suspect, especially her husband. We couldn’t do anything now that might jeopardize our investigation down the road.

  “I should’ve known it was too good to be true. All DAs just got to have their say. It’s in the blood.” I could tell from his smile that he wasn’t annoyed. “No worries, now.”

  We made our way to the kitchen, walking past a built-in rock fountain that served as a room divider. The Easterbrooks had sprung for marble countertops and stainless steel, Sub-Zero everything, but it looked like no one ever cooked here. In fact, as far as I could tell, no one even lived here. The only hint of disorder was in a corner of the kitchen, where the contents of a canvas book bag were spread out on the counter next to a frazzled-looking woman. She had a cell phone to one ear and an index finger in the other.

  Jack Walker greeted us. With his short sleeves, striped tie, and bald head, he had enough of the cop look going to make up for his partner. “Welcome back. You look great,” he said into my ear, as he shook my hand with a friendly squeeze. “Dr. Easterbrook, this is Deputy District Attorney Samantha Kincaid.”

  There are women who would describe Townsend Easterbrook as good-looking. His brown hair was worn just long enough and with just enough gray at the temples to suggest a lack of attention to appearance, but the Brooks Brothers clothes told another story. On the spectrum between sloppy apathetic and sloppy preppy, there was no question where this man fell.

  He seemed alarmed by the introduction. At first I assumed he was nervous. I quickly realized it was something else entirely.

  “Please, call me Townsend. Gosh, I apologize if I was staring. I recognized you from the news, but it took me a moment to draw the connection.”

  It hadn’t dawned on me that, at least for the foreseeable future, former strangers would know me as the local Annie Oakley. One more daily annoyance. Terrific.

  “I’m sorry to meet you under these circumstances, Dr. Easterbrook. Duncan had to be in Salem tonight, but he wanted me to assure you that our office will do everything within our power to help find your wife.”

  When Griffith called, he had insisted that I use his first name with the family and assure Dr. Easterbrook that he would have been here personally if he weren’t locked in legislative hearings all week. Other missing people might disappear with little or no official response, but Dr. Easterbrook’s phone call to 911 had ripped like a lightning bolt through the power echelon. Until the wife turned up, here was Griffith’s chance to say “I feel your pain.”

  And Easterbrook clearly was in pain. “Thank you for coming so quickly,” he said, his voice shaking. “I feel foolish now that you’re all here, but we weren’t sure what we should be doing. Clarissa’s sister and I have been calling everyone we can possibly think of.”

  “That’s your sister-in-law?” I asked, looking toward the woman in the corner still clutching the phone.

  “Yes. Tara. I called her earlier to see if she’d heard from Clarissa today. Then I called her again after I found Griffey was missing.”

  Walker tapped the pocket-size notebook he held in his hand with a dainty gold pen that didn’t suit him; most likely a gift from one of his six daughters, it looked tiny between his sausage fingers. “Dr. Easterbrook was just telling me he got home from the hospital at six-thirty tonight. His wife was home when he left this morning at six.”

  A twelve-hour day probably wasn’t unusual for the Oregon Health Science University’s attending surgeon, even on a Sunday. Looking at him now, though, it was hard to imagine him steadying a scalpel just four hours ago.

  Easterbrook continued where he must have left off. “She was still in bed when I left. Sort of awake but still asleep.” He was staring blankly in front of him, probably remembering how cute his wife was when she woke up. “She hadn’t mentioned any plans, so when I got home and she wasn’t here, I assumed she went out to the market. We usually have dinner in on Sundays, as long as I’m home.”

  “You’ve checked for her car,” Walker said. It was more of a statement than a question.

  “Right. That was the first thing I did, once I was out of my scrubs: I changed clothes and walked down to the garage. When I saw the Lexus, I thought she must have walked somewhere. I tried her cell, but I kept getting her voice mail. Finally, around eight, I thought to look out back for Griffey—that’s our dog. When I saw he was gone too, I drove around the neighborhood for what must have been an hour. I finally got so worried I called the police.”

  In the corner, Clarissa’s sister snapped her cell phone shut and blew her bangs from her eyes. “That’s it. I’ve called everyone,” she said, looking up. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize anyone else was here.”

  “From the District Attorney’s office,” Townsend explained. “Ms.… Kincaid, this is Clarissa’s sister, Tara Carney.”

  It was hard to see the resemblance. My guess is they were both pushing forty, Tara perhaps a little harder, but they had been different kinds of years. Clarissa was a thin frosted blonde who favored pastel suits and high heels. Tara’s dark brown pageboy framed a round face, and she looked at ease—at least physically—in her dark green sweatsuit and sneakers.

  She acknowledged me with a nod. “I called everyone I can think of, and no one’s heard from her today. This just isn’t like her.”

  “She’s never gone out for the day without telling someone?” Walker asked.

  They both shook their heads in frustration. “Nothing like this at all,” Townsend said. “She often runs late at work during the week, we both do. But she wouldn’t just leave the house like this on the weekend. With the dog, for hours? Something must be wrong.”

  We asked all the other obvious questions, but Tara and Townsend had covered the bases before dialing 911. They had knocked on doors, but the neighbors hadn’t noticed anything. Clarissa hadn’t left a note. They didn’t even know what she was wearing, because when Townsend left that morning she was still in her pajamas.

  Her purse and keys were missing along with Griffey, but Townsend doubted she was walking the dog. She always walked him in the morning, and sometimes they walked him together after dinner if they were both home. But she didn’t take Griffey out alone after dark. Anyway, these were ten-minute potty trips, not all-night strolls.

  Walker was rising from his chair. “Finding out how she’s dressed is a priority.” He was shifting into action mode. “If we go through some of her things, do you think you might be able to figure out what she’s wearing?”

  “You would be the one to go through your wife’s belongings,” I corrected. We had to keep this by the book. “I think what Detective Walker is suggesting is that you might be able to tell what clothes are missing if you look at what’s here.”

  “Right,” Walker agreed. “And it would help to
get a detailed description out as fast as possible.” It would also help us determine if we were all wasting our time. Maybe Clarissa had packed a suitcase and her dog to run off voluntarily with a new man or simply to a new life without this one.

  “You either overestimate my familiarity with clothing or underestimate Clarissa’s wardrobe. Tara, can you help? I doubt I can be of any use.”

  I suggested that we all go upstairs together while Tara looked through Clarissa’s closet. Johnson offered to stay downstairs in case anyone knocked, but Easterbrook assured him that the house’s “smart system” would alert us if anyone approached the door. Of course, Johnson already knew that, so I gave him a warning look over my shoulder to join me as I followed Townsend and Tara up the hammered-steel staircase. No way was he sneaking around here while the family was upstairs, especially in a house with its own intelligence system.

  The Easterbrook master suite was the size of my entire second floor, a thousand square feet of spa-style opulence. Townsend led us through a large sitting area, past the king-size bed, and around the back of a partial wall that served as the bed’s headboard. I couldn’t help but notice that the lip balm on the nightstand was the same brand as my own, the paperback novel one I’d read last year.

  The back of the suite contained a marble-rich bathroom adjoining a dressing area roughly the size of Memphis. Townsend wasn’t kidding about his wife’s wardrobe.

  Tara started flipping through the piles of folded clothes stacked neatly into maple cubes. The hanging items looked work-related.

  After she’d gone through the top two rows, Tara blew her bangs out of her face again. “She tends to wear the same few things when she’s around the house, but the ones I can remember are all here. I just don’t know.”

  Townsend stood in the corner of the closet, seemingly distracted by a pair of Animal Cracker print pajamas that hung from a hook. Tara was seemingly unfazed by the moment’s poignancy, or at least she did not let it halt her determination. She was examining rows of shoes stacked neatly on a rack built into the side of the closet. “Well, it looks like her favorite black loafers are gone. Cole Haans, I think. But I can’t tell what clothes are missing; she’s just got too much stuff.”

  She walked over to a Nordstrom shopping bag on the floor next to the dressing table. She pulled out a red sweater, set it on the table, and then reached back in and removed some loose price tags and a receipt. “These are from yesterday,” she said, looking at the receipt. “Town, these are Clarissa’s, right?”

  She had to repeat the question before he responded. “Oh, right, she did mention something about that last night, I think.”

  “Can you tell anything from the tags?” Walker asked.

  “No,” Tara said. “Well, the brand name, but then they use those silly style names and numbers instead of actually describing the item.”

  “Did anyone go shopping with her? We could find out what she bought from them,” I suggested. I knew I told Johnson I’d leave the questions to them, but I couldn’t help myself.

  Townsend seemed to wake up for a moment. “I believe she went with Susan—”

  “I’m sorry.” Walker interrupted, holding up his pen and pad. “What’s Susan’s last name?”

  Tara looked disappointed. “Susan Kerr, a friend of my sister’s. I’ve already tried calling her, and all I got was the machine.”

  A store clerk would be able to determine from the item numbers what clothes Clarissa purchased Saturday. It wouldn’t be easy to get that information at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night, but it was worth trying.

  “We’ll track someone down from the store,” I suggested, looking toward Ray and Jack. “Can’t we pull a number for someone at Nordstrom out of PPDS?” The Portland Police Data System compiled information from every city police report and was the handiest source for accessing an individual’s contact information.

  Within a few minutes, Walker had the home telephone number of a store manager mentioned in a recent theft case. A manager would not be involved in your average shoplifting case, but this one had been unusual. An employee at one of the local thrift stores had bilked Nordstrom out of thousands of dollars in cash by taking advantage of its famously tolerant return policy. The bureau estimated that every Nordstrom brand dress shirt donated to the thrift store during the last two years had been returned to Nordstrom stores for cash by either the employee or one of her friends.

  Perhaps the manager would be sufficiently grateful to the bureau for cracking the case that he’d forgive us for calling him after ten o’clock at night. Walker made the call on his cell to leave the Easterbrooks’ line open, just in case.

  As it turned out, the Easterbrook phone rang just a few minutes later. I found myself watching Townsend to see how he responded. Did he really expect the caller to be Clarissa? Or did he act like a man who already knew we wouldn’t be hearing from her? So far he seemed legit, if dazed. He hadn’t made any of the obvious slipups, the ones you see on Court TV: using the past tense, buying diamonds for another woman, selling the wife’s stuff, things like that.

  Whoever was calling, it wasn’t Clarissa. Listening to one side of the conversation was frustrating: “I see … Where was he?… No, in fact, she’s … missing”—Townsend’s voice cracked on that one. “The police are here now. Yes, that’s terribly kind of you, if you don’t mind.” Some more earnest thank-yous and a good-bye, and Townsend set the phone back on its base.

  “That was a fellow who lives a few streets down. He works with me at the hospital. He and his wife were leaving the Chart House and found a dog running in the parking lot with its leash on. It’s Griffey.”

  Walker had reached the Nordstrom manager, who generously offered to meet him at the store to track down what Clarissa Easterbrook had purchased yesterday and was—we hoped—still wearing.

  About fifteen minutes after Walker left, a voice similar to the one that announces my e-mails at home declared, “Good evening. You have a visitor.” Ray was right. Creepy George Jetson house.

  I looked out the living room window to see a man in his fifties struggling to keep up with an excited yellow Lab dashing up the slope to the front door, straining against his leash. A woman of roughly the same age followed.

  When Easterbrook opened the door, the lab finally pulled free from his temporary handler, dragging his leash behind him. He leaped on Easterbrook’s chest, nearly knocking him over. He was a sticky mess from the drizzle, but you could tell he was a well-cared-for dog. Townsend absently convinced Griffey to lie down by the fountain, though the panting and tail thumping revealed that he was still excited to be home.

  A dog like Griffey probably had an advanced degree from obedience school, unlike my dropout, Vinnie. Vinnie was actually expelled. Or, more accurately, I was. When it became clear to the teacher that, despite her instructions, I caved to Vinnie’s every demand to avoid his strategic peeing episodes, she suggested that I re-enroll my French bulldog when I felt more committed to the process. Two years later, Vinnie and I had come to mutually agreeable terms. He has a doggie door to the backyard, an automatic feeder, and a rubber Gumby doll that he treats like his baby, but if I don’t come home in time to cuddle him and hear about his day, there’s hell to pay. Griffey, on the other hand, appeared to do whatever Easterbrook told him.

  Easterbrook introduced Griffey’s new friends as Dr. and Mrs. Jonathon Fletcher. I guess you have to give up both your first and last names when you marry a physician. Dr. Fletcher’s looks said doctor more than Townsend Easterbrook’s. In contrast with the flashy Expedition and high-tech house, I noticed that the Fletchers pulled up in a Volvo station wagon.

  Mrs. Dr. Fletcher did her best to provide comfort. “I’m certain Clarissa’s just fine, Townsend. A misunderstanding, is all. We just have to find her, and that’s that. Now when’s the last time you saw her?”

  She made it sound like we were trying to track down a lost set of keys.

  “This morning,” Townsend said. “She was
still in bed. I had back-to-back surgeries all day, and when I got home she was gone.”

  “Well, dear, I’m surprised you even get a chance to operate anymore. Jonathon tells me how busy you are, developing the new transplant unit. Sounds like that’s going extremely well.”

  Apparently Mrs. Dr. Fletcher was so used to her job as conversationalist to her husband’s colleagues that she was slipping into autopilot. Understandably, Townsend cut her off.

  “Who knows? Still so much to do,” he said. Translation: Who the fuck cares about the hospital right now? “I didn’t even realize Griffey was gone until a couple of hours ago. When did you find him?”

  “Right around ten,” Dr. Fletcher said. “A group of us were leaving our function at the Chart House, and this feisty fellow was running around in the parking lot. Initially, everyone assumed he escaped from one of the neighborhood yards or something. But then someone noticed that he was dragging his leash around. Our friend went after him, figuring someone had lost hold of him. When he checked the tag, what do you know? Our own Griffey Easterbrook.”

  The Chart House sat just a couple of steep miles down from the Easterbrook home. The elegant restaurant was located on the winding, wooded section of Taylor’s Ferry Road that ran from the modest Burlingame neighborhood in southwest Portland, up about two miles to OHSU and back down again into downtown Portland. Spectacular views of the city made the route one of the most popular spots in the area for walks, runs, and bike rides.

  It was not, however, the safest place for a woman alone at night. About a year earlier, two guys from the DA’s office were taking a run there after work. They heard what they thought was a couple goofing around behind the bushes, a man wrestling his squealing wife or girlfriend to the grass. Fortunately, the woman heard them talking as they ran past and yelled, “Help! I don’t know him.” The bad guy got away, but the ensuing publicity called the city’s attention to the potential dangers of the area. It was no longer common to find women alone on the path after dark.