Long Time Gone

by J. A. Jance

  Sister Mary Katherine studied the photo for only a matter of seconds before she nodded. “This is the one,” she said. “Or one just like it.”

  “The officer in charge of the investigation was a Seattle Police Department detective named William Winkler. Do you ever remember talking to him about what you had seen?”

  “No.”

  “And you never spoke to any other police officer about what happened that day?”

  “As far as I know, no one ever asked me about any of it,” Mary Katherine said. “They may have talked to my parents, but not to me. They should have, shouldn’t they?”

  “If they’d been doing their jobs,” I responded.

  Bonnie Jean may have been scared by what she had witnessed and by being threatened by one of the killers, but I couldn’t believe she would have kept quiet if any of the detectives on the case had actually bothered asking her about it.

  “What about Mimi’s funeral?” I continued. “Did you go?”

  Sister Mary Katherine shook her head. “Not that I remember. My parents probably thought I was too young to understand what was going on.”

  “Did your parents attend?”

  “I don’t believe so, but I don’t know for sure.”

  “But the woman was your friend,” I objected. “It seems to me they would have gone if for no other reason than to pay their respects.”

  “It’s strange,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “It’s as though seeing the pictures has reopened that whole chapter in my life. Now I remember it all—not only Mimi’s death, but the rest of it, too. I thought we were friends, but Mother didn’t agree. She said Mimi felt sorry for us because she was rich and we were poor. Mother said that whatever Mimi did for me she was doing out of pity or charity, not out of friendship. But regardless, Mimi was nice to me. She seemed magical, almost like a fairy godmother. She taught me to play hopscotch and jacks. Sometimes she’d read to me from books she brought home from the library. A few times, we even walked up the street to the drugstore and she bought me strawberry sodas.”

  Mary Katherine reached across the table and picked up the picture of the Marchbank Foundation headquarters. This time she nodded in recognition. “Now I remember. That’s her house—the one where Mimi used to live. The house we lived in, Mrs. Ridder’s house, was right over here—to the right of this driveway.”

  On the tapes, Bonnie Jean couldn’t remember the landlady’s name. Now the name emerged effortlessly.

  “How long did you live there?”

  “Not very long—a few months maybe. We must have moved out within weeks of when Mimi was killed, but I could be mistaken about that.”

  “Any idea where you went?”

  Sister Mary Katherine shook her head. “We moved so many times over the years, I’m really not sure.”

  The waitress stopped by to refill our cups. “Is Elvira Marchbank still alive?” Sister Mary Katherine asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “She could be. Nothing I found this morning indicated otherwise. Albert died in the early seventies, but as far as I know, Elvira’s still around.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “How is it possible that Mimi died so young and yet Elvira is still walking around free as a bird after all these years? If she’s still alive, she must be in her eighties. I can’t imagine living with that kind of guilt for so many years. I wonder if she ever feels any remorse about what she did.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Most of the killers I’ve met come up short in the remorse department.”

  “After such a long time, could she still be convicted and go to jail?”

  “There’s no statute of limitations on murder,” I said. “And I’m sure they have some sort of geriatric wing in the women’s prison down at Purdy, but I wouldn’t count on a conviction if I were you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Time, for one thing. As you said, the crime happened years ago. I’m going to do my best to send her there, but you’ll have to be patient. It won’t be easy.”

  “Why not? There’s a witness,” Sister Mary Katherine objected, “an eyewitness who saw the whole thing.”

  “Yes, but we’re talking about an eyewitness who took half a century to speak up. A good defense attorney will tear your testimony to shreds. And a jury is going to wonder what caused you to suddenly recall those events now. There are a lot of people out there who don’t go along with the idea of repressed memories, so I can’t base my entire case on your word alone. I’m going to have to dig up enough corroborating evidence that a prosecutor and a jury will be willing to go with it.”

  “Can you find that kind of evidence?” she asked.

  “I’ll do my best,” I told her. “Finding evidence is what I do. It’s what I’ve done all my life.”

  “While all I’ve been doing is praying and sewing,” she said. I heard the self-reproach in her voice and knew Sister Mary Katherine was still holding Bonnie Jean Dunleavy’s silence against her.

  “Sometimes,” I told her, “praying is the only thing that works.”

  “It seems to me I should be the one telling you about the wonders of prayer,” Sister Mary Katherine said with a tight smile.

  “That’s all right,” I told her. “No extra charge.”

  She raised her hand, flagged down the waitress, and asked for her bill. She turned down my offer to pick up the check. “I like to pay my own way,” she said. “And I need to be heading out. I have some shopping to do before I leave town, but Sister Therese expects to have the road cleared by early this afternoon, and I want to be home well before dark.”

  “I hadn’t realized the highway on Whidbey was closed.”

  “Not the highway,” she said. “That’s open. The problem is our road—the private one that goes from the highway to the convent. There’s snow and several downed trees as well. But I’ve been away for days now, and I’m ready to be home, even if I have to get out and walk.”

  Sister Mary Katherine struck me as the kind of woman who wouldn’t be above hiking through snow and ice to get where she wanted to go, but I wondered if she was strong-willed enough to deal with all the emotional fallout from that long-ago Saturday afternoon.

  I helped her retrieve her bags from the bellman, then we stood together under the covered portico waiting for our vehicles to be brought around. A steady downpour was falling on the street outside. Compared with the previous days of bitter cold, the forty-degree weather felt downright balmy.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” I asked again.

  Sister Mary Katherine nodded. “Yes,” she said. “But it’s not easy. I just never thought I’d be involved in something like this. These kinds of things aren’t supposed to happen to people in my line of work.”

  “You’d be surprised,” I said.

  The parking valet drove up in a white Odyssey minivan. Once Sister Mary Katherine’s bags had been loaded, she turned back to me and held out her hand. “Thank you, Beau,” she said. “I’m sure working with you and Freddy—with people I know and trust—has made this far less traumatic than it would have been otherwise.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. I handed her one of my cards. “Call me if you remember anything more.”

  She studied the card for a moment before slipping it into the pocket of her coat. “All right,” she said. “And you’ll let me know what’s going on?”

  “Yes, but remember, this is going to take time.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.

  I watched her drive away. By then my 928 was there as well. I got into the Porsche and headed for SPD. Melting snow and the warm driving rain combined to turn Seattle’s downtown streets into rivers. I felt sorry for hapless pedestrians trying to stay out of the way of rooster tails of oily, dirty spray kicked up in the wake of passing cars.

  Even though the department is now in its new digs up the hill from the old Public Safety Building, out of habit I drove to the old parking garage on
James where I used to be a regular customer. No one there recognized me or the 928. And the same thing was true for the new Seattle Police Department Headquarters building on Fifth Avenue. None of the officers on duty in the classy lobby had any idea of who I was. After being issued a visitor’s pass, I went upstairs to Records.

  When I told the woman in charge what I wanted, she shook her head. “Oh, honey,” she said. “All cold case stuff that old is still down in the vault at the old Public Safety Building. You know where that is?”

  “I’m pretty sure I can find it,” I assured her.

  “Good. You go right on down there then. I’ll call ahead and let them know you’re coming.”

  Being a typical Seattle native, I have a natural aversion to umbrellas. By the time I walked first up the hill and then back down again, I was wet through. And once I reached the building that had been my place of employment for so many years, I found out you really can’t go home again. The Public Safety Building, soon scheduled to meet the wrecking ball, was a pale shadow of its former self. One side of the once busy lobby was stacked with the cots used by a men’s homeless shelter that temporarily occupies that space overnight. A janitor was haphazardly mopping the granite floor. He nodded at me as I made my way to the bored security guard stationed near the elevator bank.

  “Basement, right?” he asked, putting down his worn paperback.

  That meant someone had called ahead to say I was coming. “Yes,” I said.

  “Downstairs,” he said. “Take a right when you exit the elevators and go to the end of the corridor.”

  Here no pass was necessary. The lobby may have been a cot warehouse, but the basement corridor was worse. It was stacked floor to ceiling with a collection of decrepit gray metal desks, shelving units and cubicle dividers, along with dozens of broken-down desk chairs missing backs and casters. I suspect my old fifth-floor desk was there in that collection of wreckage that looked more like a gigantic garage sale than a corridor.

  I dodged my way through the maze of furniture and into what’s called the vault. The clerk in charge of the evidence room was a middle-aged lady whom I didn’t recognize. “This is from a long time ago,” she said, examining my request form complete with the specifics of the Mimi Marchbank murder. “It may take a while for me to dig this out,” she added. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

  The only place to sit was at a battered wooden study carrel that looked as though it predated the junk in the corridor by several decades and made me wonder if it wasn’t a displaced refugee from an early version of the U. Dub Library.

  Convinced I had come into the building entirely under everybody’s radar, I was taking a load off when, two minutes later, the door slammed open. A fighting-mad, rain-drenched Paul Kramer marched into the room.

  That would be Captain Paul Kramer. At the time I left Seattle PD, it may have looked to the world as though I was bailing because of Sue Danielson’s death. Sue, my partner at the time, had been gunned down by her ex-husband, and I admit it—her murder was a contributing factor to my leaving when I did. Sue’s senseless slaughter was one more than I could stand. But the other part of it was the fact that the departmental hierarchy had seen fit to promote a backstabbing worm like Paul Kramer to the rank of captain.

  Sure, he had aced the test. I don’t question the fact that he had the scores to justify a promotion. What Kramer didn’t have were people skills. He was an ambitious, brownnosing jerk who flimflammed his superiors by being utterly scrupulous about his paperwork, but he wasn’t above hanging his fellow detectives out to dry whenever it suited him. He and I had been on a collision course from the first day he turned up in Homicide. Back then it was all I could do to tolerate being in the same room with him. In the aftermath of Sue’s death, the idea of having to report to the guy was more than I could handle.

  Now, years later, someone had gone to the trouble of sounding an alarm and letting him know I was in the building. Territorial as any dog, he had hurried down the hill and down to the basement to lift his leg metaphorically and pee in my shoe.

  “Hello there, Beaumont,” he said, sounding as obnoxiously official as ever. “Long time no see. Imagine meeting you here.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Imagine that.”

  He meandered over to the counter and looked around for a piece of paper that might give him a clue as to why I was there. Fortunately, the clerk had taken my request with her when she had wandered off through the towering maze of sagging metal shelving. If Captain Kramer wanted to find out what I was doing in the evidence room, he was going to have to come straight out and ask—which he did with as much hail-fellow-well-met phoniness as he could muster.

  “What brings you back to the old stamping ground?”

  “Working a case,” I said.

  “Really,” he said. “For SHIT?”

  “Yup,” I told him. “That’s where I hang my hat these days.”

  Kramer leaned back against the counter and folded his arms across his chest. “Your being here wouldn’t have anything to do with what’s going on with Ron Peters, would it?”

  I could have answered the question straight out, but Kramer has always brought out the worst in me. This was no exception. “Since Ron and I are good friends, wouldn’t that be a clear conflict of interest?” I asked.

  Kramer made a sour face. “When has that ever stopped you?” he asked.

  “It might not have stopped me, but I happen to work for the Washington State Attorney General’s office. Ross Connors doesn’t tolerate that kind of thing.”

  “That must mean you’re working one of our old cases then? Did you clear it with anyone upstairs before you came down here?”

  When he said “upstairs,” he wasn’t talking about the sleepy security guard up in the lobby. He meant upstairs upstairs—back on the top floors of the new building where the brass hang out.

  “Paul,” I told him patiently, “I have a badge, and I have an assignment. Special Homicide means just exactly that—special. I don’t have to clear what I’m doing with you or with anyone else.”

  “It seems to me that as a simple matter of interdepartmental courtesy, you would have stopped by…”

  “Look, Kramer,” I interrupted. “Can it. I don’t work for you. I don’t answer to you. If you have any questions about what I’m doing here, you’re more than welcome to contact my boss and find out.”

  “And your boss would be?”

  Before I could reply, the clerk returned to the counter carrying a document box. She looked from me to Kramer.

  “Oh, Captain Kramer,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in. Is there something I can do for you?”

  “Sure,” he said, staring pointedly at the box she was carrying. “I’ll sign for that, Sandy. Mr. Beaumont and I can take it back to my office where we can go through it together.”

  In the bad old days, I probably would have punched him out, but I like to think I’m older and wiser now. Besides, there was no point. Eager to be of help, the clerk produced the proper form, which Kramer signed with all due ceremony. Then, picking up the box—my evidence box—he turned back to me. “Shall we?” he asked.

  Kramer had the box in his hands—a box that contained all the surviving evidence as well as the musty case books to Madeline Marchbank’s murder, a homicide that was more than fifty years old. Kramer had the box, but he didn’t have access to the information I had recently unearthed—eyewitness accounts to that murder from both Bonnie Jean Dunleavy’s and Sister Mary Katherine’s separate points of view. Without those bits of the puzzle or the information I had managed to pull together, the box was just that—a useless thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with all the critical pieces missing. Kramer could study whatever was in the box until hell froze over. Without my help, he wouldn’t learn a thing.

  “No, thanks, Paul,” I said after a moment. “That’s all right. Be my guest. Go through it on your own.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of my business cards. “Here’s my number,”
I added, dropping the card on the dust-laden lid to the box. “Give me a call a little later. I’ll be very interested to hear what you find out.”

  With that, I opened the door to the evidence room and stepped back into the cluttered basement corridor. I left Paul Kramer standing there with his mouth open, holding on to the box and holding on to all his unanswered questions as well. It wasn’t a very dramatic exit. It wasn’t one of those high-testosterone departures where you go out in a blaze of gun-firing glory, but from my point of view, it still felt damned good.

  Even if Harry I. Ball or Ross Connors ended up calling me on the carpet later, it was still worth doing. And given half a chance, I’d do it again.

  CHAPTER 10

  I COULD HAVE BAILED RIGHT THEN. I could have called Harry and dropped the case along with the dust-covered evidence box right in Kramer’s lap, but I wasn’t ready to do that. I guess what I really wanted to know was where all this was going. Was the attorney general’s office’s involvement really as benign as I’d been told, or was there more to it than the simple fact that Ross Connors and Father Andrew had played football together back in high school? I wouldn’t know what Paul Harvey and his much younger successor continue to call “the rest of the story” until I had followed the Marchbank murder trail all the way to the end.

  I spent more than twenty years at Seattle PD, most of it in Homicide. I’ve forgotten the details of most of the killers we caught and sent to prison, but every day of my life I carry around a complete catalog of the ones who got away. I can tell you the names and ages of the victims along with where, when, and how they died. Those ugly memories sit lodged in my heart, but unlike grains of sand trapped inside oyster shells, my remembered victims don’t turn into iridescent pearls. Instead, they show up in the middle of the night, waking or sleeping, as an ugly Greek chorus of accusatory ghosts demanding to know why I allowed their unnatural deaths to pass into oblivion and their killers to go free.