said. “And all the while they were putting the cuffs on him, she kept screaming that it was an accident, that he never meant to hurt her. As soon as they let him out, it started all over again. I moved out when I was seventeen, when I couldn’t stand to be around it a minute longer. Five years later and three years after she divorced him, he came after her again. That time he killed her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. What else was there to say?
She nodded. “Me, too. And I’m sorry that Ron Peters is your friend, Beau. Because it looks like he murdered his ex-wife.”
With that she opened the door and walked out. The Rosemary Peters homicide was a case Melissa Soames was taking personally. And so was I-for entirely different reasons.
Mel’s motivation was simple. If she could nail Ron with his ex-wife’s murder, Mel would be reclaiming a measure of justice not only for Rosemary but also for Mel’s long-deceased mother. If she succeeded and Ron went to prison, I would be losing a good friend and three wonderful kids would be losing their father.
Mounting evidence to the contrary, I hoped to hell that wouldn’t happen.
Looking back at what I had told Mel about Ron, I was struck by my sins of omission, by what I’d left out of the story-the web of cracks that seemed to be appearing in his ostensibly happy marriage to Amy; the constant and unwelcome presence of a difficult sister-in-law; a rebellious and possibly drug-using daughter. Had all of those, combined with new demands from his ex-wife, turned into a volatile mix that had pushed Ron over the edge?
After drinking so much coffee, I didn’t expect to fall asleep in my chair, but I should have known better. I did, only to awake, stiff and sore, at four o’clock in the morning. I dragged my butt off to bed, but then I tossed and turned and went right back to worrying about what would happen to Ron and Amy and the kids. Finally, conceding there was no hope of going back to sleep, I went out to the kitchen and made more coffee.
My old SPD shrink, Dr. Baxter, always said that the best cure for insomnia is to work on something other than what you’re worrying about. With that in mind I hauled out the tape Freddy Mac had brought me and stuck it into the VCR. I saw at once what he had meant about there being a breakthrough. This time when he put Sister Mary Katherine under, there was far less resistance to going back to that Saturday afternoon. In her little-girl voice, Bonnie Jean Dunleavy was able to talk about what was going on outside the kitchen window without having to interpose a make-believe camera between herself and the action.
This time Fred focused Bonnie Jean’s attention on the vehicle that the killers had driven into Bonnie’s neighbor’s driveway.
“What’s it like?” he asked.
“Big,” Bonnie Jean answered. “It’s a big car.”
“What color?”
“Red,” she answered. “Sort of red. And the nose is empty.”
“Empty?” Fred asked.
“It’s just round. There’s nothing on it-nothing shiny.”
“You mean there’s no hood ornament?”
Bonnie Jean shrugged her shoulders. “I guess,” she said.
I put the VCR on pause and reached for the file folder of material I had collected from the
I’m far from being a car nut who knows the make, model, cubic inches, and horsepower of every vehicle ever made. What I had instead was direct personal experience with a very similar car.
One of my high school buddies, Sonny Sondegaard, was another Ballard kid who went salmon fishing with his dad’s commercial fishing crew. The year we all turned sixteen he came back to school at the end of the summer with a pocketful of money. He spent two hundred bucks of his hard-earned cash buying himself a teal-blue 1949 Frazer.
During our junior year we had some great times in Sonny’s car. Back then hood ornaments were all the rage, but the Frazer didn’t have one. We teased Sonny endlessly about it, even threatening to steal an ornament off someone else’s car and graft it onto his. Sonny took the teasing in stride. The Frazer was a fun car to fool around in right up until the beginning of our senior year. On Sunday of Labor Day weekend, coming back from a kegger on Camano Island, Sonny ran off Highway 99 and wrapped the front end of the Frazer around a telephone pole. He was dead before they ever removed him from the wreckage. My whole senior year was colored by the fact that the first day of school started with classes in the morning and ended with Sonny’s funeral later that afternoon.
And here, all these years later, I was dealing with another Frazer and another death. Leaving the VCR on pause, I once again dialed law enforcement’s special twenty-four-hour number at the Department of Motor Vehicles. This time I went straight to a human being, as opposed to a recorded message. When I told the clerk who I was and that I was looking for licensing information from 1950, I expected her to laugh her head off, but she didn’t. “One moment, please,” she said.
I heard the clatter of computer keystrokes in the background. Then, within seconds, I had my answer. Albert and Elvira Marchbank had indeed owned a 1950 Frazer-a Caribbean coral Deluxe. I had no doubt that in the eyes of an unsophisticated not-quite-five-year-old girl, coral would indeed be “sort of ” red.
I sat for some time, studying the freeze-frame likeness of Sister Mary Katherine staring back at me from the television screen. Bonnie Jean Dunleavy had been an eyewitness to Mimi Marchbank’s murder. Given that circumstance, surely the killers must have been caught, right? So I called the Records department at Seattle PD to see if Madeline Marchbank’s killer had ever been apprehended. Once again, after a surprisingly few keystrokes, I had my answer, and it wasn’t one I liked. Madeline Marchbank’s 1950 murder, perpetrated by person or persons unknown, was still listed as an open case of homicide-fifty-four years after the fact.
After checking in and letting Barbara Galvin know I’d be working outside the office all day, I spent the next hour or so researching the Marchbank Foundation. It had been created in 1972 on the occasion of Albert’s death from colon cancer. The financial arrangements weren’t spelled out in the material available to the general public through the foundation’s Web site. I had a feeling, though, that some provision had probably been made for Albert’s widow throughout her lifetime and that, upon Elvira’s subsequent death, any residual assets would revert to the trust. Creating a charitable foundation had no doubt been a way of dodging state and federal estate taxes while still allowing the family to maintain some degree of control over the disposition of assets. The Marchbank Foundation was into the fine arts in a big way. The Seattle Opera, the Seattle Symphony, and the Seattle Art Museum were all major beneficiaries of Marchbank Foundation grants, but other smaller organizations were listed as well.
Each time I went back to the Web site’s home page, I looked at the formally staged portrait of the founders taken on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and only a short time before Albert’s death. He couldn’t have been much older than his early sixties, but he already had a gaunt and fading look about him while his wife looked robust-and immensely pleased with herself. In the photo they looked like the fine upstanding citizens the Marchbank Foundation PR flacks claimed them to be. Could these two people, smiling broadly into the camera’s lens, actually be a pair of cold-blooded killers?
I wondered about whether or not I should print a copy of the photo to take with me when I went to see Sister Mary Katherine. I had gone off to the Westin in such a hurry the night before that I hadn’t taken my copy of the
“What’s up?” he asked. “Did you find a record of the car?”
I said, “Albert Marchbank owned a 1949 Caribbean coral Frazer-a vehicle with no hood ornament, just like Bonnie Jean said. I’ve also located photos of Mimi Marchbank’s brother and sister-in-law. One is contemporary, taken the day of Mimi’s funeral. The other is from the early seventies, almost twenty years later.”
“And?” Fred asked.
“I’m wondering if it’s a good idea to show them to her.”
Fred took his time before answering. “Well,” he said finally, “it’ll go one of two ways-either she’ll remember or she won’t.”
“Do you want to be there when I show them to her?”
“Can’t,” he said. “I’m backed up with appointments all morning long, and I know Sister Mary Katherine is hoping to head back to Whidbey sometime this afternoon.”
“But you don’t think seeing the pictures will hurt her?” I pressed.
