Eddie laughed. “I'm sorry I wasn't here until later. That must have been one memorable moment!”
“Trust me Eddie, it’s one I’ll never forget.”
They wandered back and forth through the combined living room, dining room, kitchen area, and then around the bedroom with the small nook that Warren used to write his now-infamous column.
Afterward, Eddie and Rob stood back to back and considered where they would look in the relatively brief time that they had left.
Eddie wanted to start by going through the Chippendale oak wood curio cabinet. It had a variety of plaques and awards from various cooking contests and “volunteer of the year” framed certificates from a variety of Sausalito organizations. He carefully slipped them out and looked behind each one.
Inside of one frame that had a back that quickly slipped off was the picture of a kid Eddie guessed to be about twelve to fourteen. From the washed-out colors of the photo and the clothing the boy was wearing, it was probably twenty-five years or older.
Perhaps it was a son Bradley left behind?
Eddie’s curiosity was heightened when a second photo revealed another boy—maybe four to five years younger, sitting in the back of a rowboat tied to a crumbling wooden dock.
He slipped both photos into his pocket.
Rob’s search focused on an antique mahogany bedroom dresser and the battered old Queen Anne desk in the bedroom nook. He took out each of the desk’s two narrow and deep side drawers. One by one, he turned them over and emptied their contents onto the floor. He quickly looked through every scrap of paper, hoping to find something that placed Warren somewhere, anywhere, other than Sausalito.
He found nothing.
He piled the papers back into what he hoped was their original drawers, but then he realized that it was highly unlikely anyone alive today would know what papers went where. Just knowing that he was a few feet from where Warren may have been suffocated and later mutilated sent a shiver down Rob's spine.
He pulled out the third drawer—the widest and flattest, from below the center of the desktop—when his hand felt something strange on the drawer’s bottom, backside. It was enough to make Rob’s heart skip a beat. Excitedly, he flipped over the drawer.
A blank white plastic card was taped to the aging wood.
“Eddie, get in here! I think I found something important.”
Eddie came running. When he saw what Rob was indicating, he took the small penknife that was attached to his house keys and carefully cut the tape around the card’s edges. On the flip side of the card was the photo of a man they both barely recognized as Warren Bradley, probably in his mid-thirties. This Warren had no gray hair, no bushy salt and pepper mustache, and no tired eyes. But after a few moments of careful consideration, they were both certain this was Warren, only several decades younger.
The card was an ID badge from the department of biomedical research at Northern Arizona University. There was no date of issuance on the card, but there was a name:
William Benedict.
They both stood and stared in silence for a few moments.
Finally, Eddie put his arm around Rob’s shoulder and pulled him in close. “Rob, say hello to William Benedict. He must have had some shirts he liked with ‘WB’ on the cuffs. I guess he didn’t want to give up his old initials.” He handed his find to Rob: the photos of the two young boys. “Now, take a look at these! You’re not the only one to come away with a prize.”
“Do you think they might be Bradley’s kids?”
“Could be,” Eddie said. “Hopefully, William Benedict will be able to tell us who he was, and who these boys are as well.”
“Eddie, let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Just what I was about to say.”
Carefully they checked that everything was put back as they found it, with the only items removed being those only Warren Bradley likely knew were there all the time. Eddie relocked the door and they both removed their surgical shoe covers and gloves, which Eddie slipped back into his pocket.
“Remember when I told you that you have to keep pulling at all the different threads until you find the one string that causes all the others to unravel? In this case, let’s hope William Benedict is that string.”
When Rob got home, he quickly shaved, showered, and got ready to head down to the office for the official start of his workweek.
“First a break of dawn jog, then you’re ready to hustle down to the office before eight? My God, you’re a new man!” Karin said teasingly. But from her tone, he could tell she was curious about what he and Eddie had been doing since the first light of day.
Rob smiled innocently and waved as he went out the door. In truth, he was bursting to tell Karin about the discovery he and Eddie had made sixty minutes earlier, but he knew that no one could know about that for now—not even his life partner.
As usual, Holly was in the office before Rob arrived. She greeted him with the question: “What did you decide to do on the Bradley retrospective?”
“I have to punt. We’ll pull together file photos and story clips of Warren doing his cooking and serving bit for every volunteer group in town. Other than that, as far as I can tell, the guy was dropped here one night by an alien spacecraft.”
“That’s a plausible theory. Still, you probably shouldn’t put it into print.”
“All I’ve got now is a senior citizen who was born twenty-five plus years ago. And I’m not making that my lead paragraph.” Rob felt guilty holding back on Holly, particularly knowing how much the news regarding William Benedict would have thrilled and delighted her.
Rob couldn’t imagine how big a story Eddie might uncover. At the same time, he had complete confidence in Eddie that, whatever the outcome of this strange case, he and his readers would
