'What does?'
'When I called Bonnie about the prints, it sounded as though there was a party going on. Maybe there was. I'll bet either Maxwell Cole was there in person, or else one of his big-mouthed sources was.'
'When Bonnie shows up for fingerprinting, we'll have to check that out,' Sue Danielson said.
'Yes,' I agreed. 'We certainly will.'
11
As it turned out, I was nowhere near the Public Safety Building by the time Bonnie Elgin and Sue Danielson finished up with the prints and sketch.
About 9:15 A. M. Detective Stan Jacek came wandering back through the fifth-floor maze of cubicles and found me sitting at my desk, holding up my head and working on paper. Paper paper. Somebody needed to let Maxwell Cole know that not everybody at Seattle P.D. had a handy-dandy laptop computer at his or her disposal.
Stan hadn't slept any longer than I, and he was equally grouchy. 'How can people stand living and working in a place like this?' he demanded irritably. 'It took me ten minutes just to find a parking place.'
I've never visited Stan Jacek's home turf up in Coupeville, but it's safe to assume that parking isn't that much of a problem in the downtown area of Island County's county seat on Whidbey Island.
'It's no big deal,' I said. 'All you have to do is be born in a parking place, and then you're set.'
Detective Jacek wasn't up for that kind of early morning quip. 'Very funny,' he said. 'You want to come for a ride or not?'
'Where to?'
He pulled out a notebook and thumbed through the scrawled-on, dog-eared pages. 'Remember the letter we found in the Caddy parked out in front of the house last night?'
'The one signed ‘Mom'? What about it?'
'I finally managed to track that back to the woman up in Anchorage who wrote it,' he answered. 'She and her husband are flying into town later on today. She's willing to help as much as she can, but she doesn't have access to any of her daughter's more recent dental records. They'll bring along whatever they do have.'
The condition of the dead woman's body had meant that dental records would be necessary to establish a positive I.D. My heart went out to those two unfortunate parents-to any parents-forced to set out on that kind of devastatingly awful mission. They might be hoping for the best, yet I'm sure they were dreading the worst.
'It's going to be rough on them,' I said.
Jacek nodded. 'I'll say. In the meantime, the mother gave me a line on their other daughter-Denise's older sister. Her name is Deanna Meadows. She lives down in Kent in a place called Fairwood. Ever heard of it?'
I shook my head, but then there are lots of places in the Puget Sound area that I've never heard of.
Jacek shrugged and continued, 'It doesn't matter. I've got an appointment with her about forty-five minutes from now. I thought maybe you'd like to ride along.'
For an answer, I stood up and put on my jacket. 'Lead the way,' I said.
We crossed Lake Washington on I-90 in fog so thick that the water was invisible. We might have been driving in a universe made of cotton balls. Detective Jacek was far too aggressive a driver for me to be able to doze off and catch forty winks. Instead, I stayed wide awake the whole time, gripping what I call the 'Oh-shit bar,' and thinking about all those fog-caused multicar pileups that happen every year on that long stretch of California freeway they call 'the Grapevine.'
I was relieved when we finally turned off Interstate 405 onto the Maple Valley Highway. Valley population and traffic has far outstripped the capacity of that piece of rural two-lane road, and it's certainly had its share of head- on collisions, but at least there Stan Jacek slowed down to a relatively sane sixty.
For all the ease of finding our way, we might just as well have been traveling in the middle of the night. The fog was that thick. But as we rose up out of the valley onto a plateau, the sun began to burn through the haze.
We meandered around a housing development that had been built around the perimeter of a golf course. For golf-course houses, the places were fairly modest. The new cedar shake roofs told me the development must be about twenty years old. The little kid tearing up the middle of the street on a Big Wheel was probably the child of a second generation of owners.
The house we stopped in front of was much newer construction than some of its neighbors. It was one of those new phony French-chateau places with a three-car garage that covered almost the whole front of the house except for a front porch three stories tall. The porch light was so far up on the wall that you'd need an extension ladder just to reach it and change the lightbulb. A brand-new white Infiniti, still wearing temporary plates, sat by itself inside one open garage door.
'Yuppies,' I muttered to myself, thinking the people who lived there were probably ex-Californians who deserved to have to use a ladder just to change a lightbulb. 'Definitely yuppies.'
Detective Jacek must have thought I was saying something important. 'Huh?' he asked, pulling his finger back from the doorbell without pressing the button. 'What did you say?'
'Never mind,' I told him. 'It's nothing.'
Deanna Meadows turned out to be a woman in her early-to-mid-thirties. She wore a thick terry-cloth bathrobe. Her carrot-colored hair was pulled up on top of her head with a dark blue band of some kind. It looked as though she had started out wearing makeup, because two twin trails of drowned mascara still lingered on her cheeks. There was nothing besides the dead mascara to cover the fine sprinkling of freckles on her cheeks. She had been crying. When she opened the door, she was still sniffling.
Detective Jacek introduced himself and showed her his I.D. Deanna nodded. 'I remember. You're the one I talked to earlier.'
'And this is Detective Beaumont of the Seattle Police Department. He's working on this case as well.'
Deanna Meadows led us into a spacious living room. Looking beyond the living room and out through the dining-room picture window, I could see one of the fairways on the golf course outside. That smooth expanse of green, evenly mowed-and-manicured grass provided a backyard that was long on lush and low on homeowner- driven maintenance. The thought crossed my mind that maybe not having to spend every Saturday pushing around a lawn mower outweighed the hazard of an occasional golf ball bouncing in through a window and landing on the dining-room table.
'I'm sorry things are in such a mess,' Deanna Meadows apologized.
Mess? I didn't see much mess. A few scattered newspapers were strewn around on the floor. There were two coffee cups sitting on an end table along with a pile of soggy, crumpled tissues. Other than that, the room was spotlessly clean, with no sign of kiddy-type debris anywhere. Unless there was an ever-vigilant nanny stowed somewhere upstairs, it was safe to assume that Deanna Meadows and her unnamed husband-she was wearing a wedding band-were childless.
Deanna motioned for Jack and me to sit down on the green-and-white living-room couch. 'Coffee?' she asked.
We both accepted gratefully. While she hurried off to the kitchen to make it, I examined the two rooms that were visible from where I sat. They were furnished in a tasteful, uniformly comfortable style. The house seemed like some kind of safe haven in which Detective Jacek and I, along with our ugly reason for being there, provided the only jarring notes.
Deanna Meadows was talking when she came back into the dining room, shouldering open the swinging door between that room and the kitchen.
'I was on the phone with my aunt just before you got here,' she said. She paused long enough to pass us mugs of coffee and to offer cream and sugar.
'Aunt Mary is my mother's sister. I was all right for a while, but as soon as she started talking about Denise, it set me off all over again. I don't know what's the matter with me. I just can't seem to stop crying. It's hard to believe that it's happened-that she's really dead.'
Sipping his coffee, Detective Jacek nodded sympathetically. 'I'm sure this is all very difficult for you-and having us show up so soon like this must seem pretty heartless. But in order to solve cases we have to gather
