by J. A. Jance
Failure to appear
( J P Beaumont - 11 )
J. A. Jance
J. A. Jance
Failure to appear
PROLOGUE
I hate hospitals. I hate the smell of them and the shiny glow on long, empty-looking corridors. I hate the ominous swish of white clothing that precedes nurses as they bustle down hallways or march unannounced into rooms. But most of all I hate waiting. Even for supposedly tough-guy homicide cops, there's nothing in the world that makes you feel more powerless than cooling your heels in some obnoxious waiting room while a person you love goes under the surgeon's knife.
When I couldn't take it any longer, I escaped outdoors, retreating to the relative safety of a concrete bench next to an overflowing ashtray. There I sat, exiled to the smoker's outdoor dungeon, even though I don't smoke and never have. There was no tree to keep off the worst of southern Oregon's blazing late June sun, but then I wasn't looking for shade. I felt chilled. From the bones out. The 90-odd-degree weather could neither penetrate nor melt the ice floe building up around my heart.
Ralph Ames, my attorney, followed me outside. He glanced in my direction but left me alone. Instead, he walked over to the other pair of worried people, the one made up of Karen, my ex-wife, and her present husband, Dave Livingston. As Ralph spoke to them, I noticed that, periodically, Dave would reach over and pat Karen's shoulder or pull her close and let her lean against him. Karen isn't the "helpless female" type, not by a long shot, but she was taking it hard. Real hard. I was thankful she had Dave there to lean on when she needed it.
I could have had someone with me as well if I hadn't been so damn stubborn. Alexis Downey was willing. In fact, she had offered to come outside with me, but I had sent her back into the waiting room to stay with Jeremy. He needed someone there with him, too, and God knows I wasn't it. How could I possibly comfort him when I could barely stand to look him in the eye?
Ashland Community Hospital. Why did this have to happen here in a little Podunk town like Ashland, Oregon? I fumed for the hundredth time. Why couldn't it have been in a big city like Portland or Seattle? Someplace civilized, where the number of hightech doctors outnumber high-priced lawyers. Someplace where, in spots like Seattle's Pill Hill, glass-and-concrete hospitals stand cheek by jowl, stuck so close together that you can walk from one to another in a driving rainstorm without ever wetting your feet. I had suggested hiring a helicopter to fly Kelly to Portland, but the doctor nixed that idea. He shook his head and said there wasn't time. Not for either one of them.
Alexis stepped outside then, too. With the highlights in her auburn hair gleaming in the afternoon sun, she walked over to where Ralph Ames stood huddled with Dave and Karen. The murmur of their conferring voices carried through the still, hot air even as far as my stand-offish bench. If I had tried, I suppose I could have made out what they were saying, but the way I felt, not knowing was better than knowing. Ignorance may not be bliss, but at least it allowed a slim margin for hope.
I glanced down at my watch. Two-thirty. The minister, a determinedly cheerful woman from the yellow Unity Church, had spent the better part of an hour at the hospital, sticking closer to Jeremy than to anybody else. Now she had gone off to Lithia Park to make sure all the guests knew the wedding had been canceled due to lack of a bride rather than lack of interest.
I saw Alex turn toward me, her eyes questioning, but I ignored her. I didn't want to talk to anybody right then, not even Alex. In my case, misery most definitely does not love company. Coward that I am, when she started toward me, I abandoned the bench and beat it down the hill. For what seemed like hours, I wandered aimlessly through Ashland's boiling midday heat, thinking about the unlikely chain of events that had conspired to bring us all here together.
As I walked, I brooded. I wondered if, after all this was over, anything would ever again be the same.
CHAPTER 1
It had started only three days earlier, although now that seemed a lifetime ago. It began with a ringing telephone and with me cursing the noisy instrument that I regard as technology's worst blight on the human race. Telephones follow me everywhere. Even in my car. There is no escape.
The blaring phone jarred me to my senses sometime around seven o'clock on a drizzly Saturday morning toward the end of June. Friday night had been a late one. I wasn't nearly ready to rise and shine, but homicide cops at Seattle P.D. are used to unscheduled, early-morning wake-up calls.
Around what locals call the Emerald City, people tend to knock each other off in the middle of the night or in the wee small hours of the morning, especially right after the bars close on weekends. If the work load gets too heavy for the regular night-duty squad to handle, they start calling for reinforcements. Being off-duty doesn't mean you're home free. When your name comes up on the rotation, you're called and you go in, regardless of what you may or may not have been doing the night before. Having a personal life is no excuse.
I figured my early-morning phone call meant it had been another one of those busy Saturday-night-special Friday nights around Seattle P.D.
"Beaumont here," I grumbled into the phone, wishing we could somehow convince the city's crooks-the gangs, the thugs, and the variously affiliated drug dealers-to use each other for target practice during regular daytime eight-hour shifts. "What's up?"
"This is Dave," an unfamiliar male voice replied. "You know, David Livingston?"
I was still muffled in a warm, sleep-induced cocoon, and this joker had me stumped. I could have sworn I didn't know anyone in the whole wide world by the name of David Livingston. The telephone must have passed along my blank silence, because a moment later good ol' Dave gave me a helpful hint.
"You may not remember, but we met once, a while ago, down in Wickenburg, Arizona. I don't think we were ever properly introduced."
Jump-started now, the old brain finally fired and caught hold. Of course! That Dave Livingston. My ex-wife's second husband. No wonder I didn't recognize him!
I sat up a little straighter in bed. Of all people, what did Dave Livingston think he was doing calling me up? So early on an otherwise peaceful Saturday morning that I had not yet tasted a single sip of coffee, here was Dave, already up and about and letting his fingers do the walking.
In a universe full of complicated matrimonial merry-go-rounds, second husbands don't often reach out and touch first husbands. By telephone, that is. It isn't done. Not unless it's a dire emergency-a matter of life or death or missing child support. We're all reasonable adults, but there is a limit.
Now, though, I heard Dave, talking to me as calmly as if conversations between us were an everyday occurrence. Since child support has never been a source of controversy, my mind leaped instantly to all the other worst possible conclusions.
"Dave," I croaked. "What is it? Karen?"
He paused a moment and cleared his throat. "No, not Karen."
"The kids then?"
I said "kids" aloud, but even as I said the word, I knew it was a lie. I have fathered two offspring-Scott and Kelly. Scott, my firstborn, is as steady and responsible a kid as any parent, good or otherwise, has any right to hope for or expect. He's never given any of us-Dave Livingston included-a moment's trouble.
Kelly is something else, our collective problem child-a wildhaired, pain-in-the-ass-type kid who started wearing makeup and testing limits at the tender age of eleven and has been off the charts ever since. She had run away from her stepfather's home in Cucamonga, California, some four months earlier, disappearing one week shy of her eighteenth birthday and several months short of high school graduation. Once Karen finally saw fit to tell me what was going on, I had hired an L.A. based private investigator to look into Kelly's disappearance. All he
had sent me so far was an outrageous bill.
"Kelly then," I added. "Did you find her?"
"Sort of," Dave Livingston allowed gloomily. "More or less."
For a supposedly hotshot accountant, Dave was being damnably nonspecific. Meanwhile, my homicide cop's mentality was working overtime, filling in the most gruesome kinds of missing-person details-the dry ravines where unsuspecting people sometimes stumble over vulture-scattered human remains. Memories of long-overlooked and rotting corpses loomed in my mind's eye. Unfortunately, cops have chillingly realistic imaginations. We've seen it all. More than once too often.
"Tell me then, for God's sake!" I urged. "What the hell do you mean, ‘more or less'? Is she alive or not? And if she's alive, is she all right?"
"I haven't talked to her yet," Dave put in quickly. "Not in person; neither has Karen. As a matter of fact, Karen knows nothing about all this. She was so bent out of shape when Kelly ran away that I didn't exactly tell her I was hiring a detective."
Great minds think alike. So Dave and I had both hired private eyes. His had gotten results. I'd have to fire mine.
"So where is she?" I prompted. "Is she okay?"
"In a little town in southern Oregon. A place called Ashland. Ever heard of it?"
I had heard of it, as a matter of fact. Months earlier, the town of Ashland had been nothing more than a green-and-white freeway exit on 1–5, the last stop in Oregon before hitting the California border. Now, thanks to my new friend Alexis Downey, the director of development for the Seattle Repertory Theater and the lady with whom I had spent most of the previous evening, I knew a whole lot more than I would have otherwise.
From listening to Alex, as she likes to be called, I knew that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland has, over the last fifty-some-odd years, created a multimillion-dollar business out of doing Shakespearean reruns every summer. In Ashland the Bard of Avon translates into big business. People come from all over the country year after year to see the seven or eight plays that run concurrently in three separate theaters.
Because of increasingly stiff competition for regional arts dollars, Alex Downey keeps a close eye on all the theaters on what she calls "the 1–5 route." She had even suggested that we might want to skip down to Ashland for a romantic weekend once over the summer to take in a couple of plays, all in the name of knowing what "everybody else is doing."
At the time Alex mentioned it, a trip to Ashland had sounded like a treat-your basic roll in the hay with a dollop of culture thrown in for good measure. Now, that selfsame Shakespearean weekend didn't seem like nearly such a good idea. The thought of running into my daughter on the streets of Ashland threw a real wet blanket on my fantasies of sexual/cultural adventure.
Call me a prude if you will, but I didn't want to give my already headstrong daughter any bright ideas that she might not think up on her own.
"What's Kelly doing there?" I asked. "Acting?"
When she was little, that's what Kelly always said she wanted to be when she grew up-an actress. In high school she had played major roles in several school productions, but by then her mother and I were divorced. I never actually saw her perform onstage. My experience with Kelly's acting capability came primarily from being on the receiving end of emotional temper tantrums whenever the two of us wound up in a nose-to-nose confrontation. Highpowered theatrics aside, I didn't regard acting as a realistic career choice. All little girls can't become actresses any more than millions of little boys can all grow up to be cops or firemen.
"Hardly," Dave answered. "She's working as a hotel maid and doing some baby-sitting on the side."
Baby-sitting was no surprise. All her life Kelly had been exceptionally good with little kids, but I couldn't imagine her working as a maid. Neither could anyone who had ever seen her room. Incredible irony-that's what Mrs. Reeder, the beautiful woman who taught my senior English class at Ballard High School, would have called it. Kelly is the only person I've ever met who can totally trash any given room within fifteen minutes of entering it. On the odd occasion when she's stayed with me in Seattle, I've watched her make a shambles of my whole apartment in far less time than it takes to say, "When's dinner?"
"Kelly, a maid?" I choked. "You've got to be kidding." I did my best to stifle a relieved chuckle, but Dave Livingston was not amused, and he wasn't laughing, either.
"I'm not kidding," he returned doggedly. "And I'm not making this up. I just found out. She plans to get married sometime early next week."
That got my attention.
"Hold it! Did you say married? She can't do that. She's only eighteen years old, for Chrissakes. And she hasn't done a damn thing about getting her education."
"I know," Dave agreed. "I was hoping you could go down there and maybe talk some sense into her thick skull."
"Karen's way better with her than I am. Has she tried?"
"Like I said," he confessed uneasily. "I haven't exactly told Karen about this. She was upset enough to begin with. When she hears what's going on now, she'll go crazy."
Dave had a point-a good one. Once or twice I've had the misfortune of being in close proximity to Karen Moffit Beaumont Livingston when she's busy kicking ass. It isn't a pretty sight. Karen is a lady who knows how to indulge in histrionics. By comparison, Kelly is a rank amateur.
Wide awake now, I sat up and groped on the nightstand for pencil and paper. "Who's the boyfriend?" I asked.
"His name's Jeremy Todd Cartwright, the Third," Dave answered.
"Sounds impressive. What does he do?"
"I've got a short bio right here. It says he's a part-time actor and musician. Up in Ashland this season he's in something called the ‘Green Show.' He plays a character called ‘The Laredo Kid' in a play called The Majestic Kid, and he's ‘servant' in Taming of the Shrew."
I might have known-an actor. Talk about music to a future father-in-law's ears. I could already visualize the flaky son of a bitch. Long, greasy hair. At least one earring. Maybe even a single tasteful diamond chip in one side of his nose. But then I forced myself to look on the bright side. If Dave's bio information came from a current playbill, Kelly's intended was at least working. He had a job. From what I know about actors, that's highly unusual in and of itself.
"Great. Do you have an address for this boy genius?" I asked, sitting there with my bare feet on the carpeted floor and with pencil poised over paper.
"As a matter of fact I do," Dave Livingston answered. "One-forty-six Live Oak Lane-the same as Kelly's."
The pencil lead snapped off as I wrote down the address. I wasn't upset. Not much.
"So will you go see her?" Dave asked, almost pleading. "I need to hear what she has to say for herself before I tell Karen. I'll give you my work number so you can call me here. It's the end of the fiscal year. I'll be working off and on all weekend. If you don't mind, I'd rather Karen didn't find out I've gone behind her back on this."
I can only describe it as one of life's supremely surrealistic moments, finding myself involved in an underhanded plot with my ex-wife's second husband, both of us scheming together behind Karen's back. But then, that's what makes life interesting-those little unforeseeable surprises. I took down Dave's work telephone number at the chicken-raising conglomerate in Rancho Cucamonga where he was the chief financial officer.
"How soon will you go?" Dave asked.
"That depends," I told him, "on how soon I get off the phone."
With that, we hung up. After a quick detour to the kitchen to start a pot of Seattle's Best Coffee in my Krup's coffeepot with its thermal carafe, I headed for the shower. I figured I could go a long way in my little red Porsche on a full tank of gas with a full pot of coffee along for the ride. While I showered, though, reality set in. Alex and I were supposed to have dinner together that evening, and Ralph Ames, my attorney from Phoenix, was scheduled to arrive on Sunday afternoon.
Once out of the shower, I called Ralph first. He's an early riser. Alex isn't. Ralph listened quietly while
I brought him up-to-speed. When I finished my tale of familial woe, Ralph's reply was infuriatingly unflappable and lawyerly.
"What's the plan?" he asked.
"What do you think? I'm going to drive down, tell Kelly how the cow ate the cabbage, and put her on the first plane home."
Ames cleared his throat. "That's not exactly realistic, is it, Beau? What if she won't go?"
"Won't go?" I echoed. "Of course she'll go. She's just like me, stubborn as all get-out, but she'll listen to reason. She has to."
"Not necessarily. If she's planning a wedding for next week, she may have decidedly different thoughts on the matter. After all," he added, "she is eighteen, you know."
"I don't care how old she is. She may be eighteen, but she doesn't have the sense God gave little green apples."
Ralph Ames and I have these kinds of disagreements all the time. He came on the scene at approximately the same time that Anne Corley, my second wife, shot through my life like some brilliant, sky-illuminating meteor. The profound impact she had on me is totally out of proportion to the amount of time the two of us actually spent together. When she died, she left me with more money than I know what to do with.
Along with the money came Ralph Ames, who serves as general overseer of not only the money, but also of me. Through the years, and despite our somewhat divergent views, I've come to value both his unwavering friendship and his innate good sense. We argue from time to time, but more often than not I end up paying attention to what he says and doing things his way.
"Don't you still have some use-it-or-lose-it-type vacation time coming to you?" he asked me after a slight pause.
When Ralph asks a question, he usually does so in the same way most good detectives do-knowing, before he ever opens his mouth, exactly what the right answer should be.
"You know I do," I returned irritably. "We talked about it last time you were here."
