to see if I needed someone to help me with breakfast.
So we went to the meeting. Then, because Lars was in no hurry to go home, we went by and picked up my tux. And then, because he still didn’t want to go back to Queen Anne Gardens, I took him along on a jaunt through the grocery store to stock up on essentials and then home to Belltown Terrace with me, where he settled into my recliner and snored like a jackhammer for the remainder of the afternoon.
I did my best to work around him. The dispatcher from the cab company called to say Elaine Manning had been dropped off at the YWCA on Fifth. I called there and made inquiries, but to no avail. It’s a lot easier to tell someone to buzz off when you’re talking to them on the phone than it is when they’re standing right there in front of your desk. So I figured I’d try talking to the ladies at the YWCA another time when I didn’t have Lars Jenssen underfoot and a whole contingent of company bearing down on me from every point of the compass.
Then, because the house was still quiet-relatively quiet due to Lars’s Olympian snoring-and because I couldn’t think of anything more to do about LaShawn Tompkins right then, I called up LexisNexis one more time and, just for the hell of it, typed in the name Anthony David Cosgrove.
All right. So I complained about computers for years. Resisted using them. Griped about having to use them. But now I’m a believer. Within seconds of typing the name, there it was-a whole list of hits concerning Anthony David Cosgrove. To my surprise one of them was only two months old. It came from an obscure magazine called
According to industry analyst Thomas Dortman, payoffs with dollar signs on them are the ones that gain big headlines, but payoffs that result in job offers are almost standard operating procedure. One of the earliest Dortman recalls happened at Boeing in the early eighties. In that instance charges came to nothing, however, when the alleged whistle-blower, electronics engineer Anthony David Cosgrove, disappeared in the Mount Saint Helens explosion.
That was it. But still, it was intriguing. The missing persons report had said nothing about Cosgrove being involved in any kind of at-work investigation. And DeAnn hadn’t mentioned anything to me about it either, but she had been a little girl at the time. Something could well have been going on at work without her having any knowledge of it. The wife would have known, however, and I was interested to see that she had made no mention of it.
I jotted down Thomas Dortman’s name. If, as he claimed, he had personal knowledge of what was going on at Boeing in the early eighties, maybe he had personal knowledge of Anthony David Cosgrove as well.
The next listing for Anthony Cosgrove predated the previous one by almost twenty years. It turned out to be the 1988 announcement in which the man was declared legally dead. It seems to me that being declared legally dead would be enough to get your name removed from a missing persons list, but bureaucracies really are bureaucracies, and the right hand often has no idea what the left is doing.
I would have plowed on. I was about to put Dortman’s name into my search engine when the phone rang.
“Okay,” Detective Kendall Jackson said. “Thought you’d want to know that you’ve flunked Miss Congeniality one more time. You’re back on everybody’s bad list again.”
“Me?” I asked with feigned innocence. “What have I done this time?”
“Stepped on somebody’s toes hard enough that we’ve been told we’re not to share information about LaShawn Tompkins’s murder with anyone, most especially anyone with the initials J.P. So what did you find out?”
“I found out that the King Street Mission gives me the creeps,” I replied.
“I hear you loud and clear on that one,” Jackson said.
“And I wouldn’t trust Pastor Mark any farther than I can throw him.”
“Ditto on that,” Jackson agreed.
“I learned that King Street Mission will be holding a memorial service for LaShawn on Thursday night, and I know I can’t attend.”
“No problem,” Jackson said. “Hank and I already have that one covered.”
I had saved the best for last. “And I’ve traced Elaine Manning as far as the YWCA on Fifth Avenue, arriving at ten-oh-six on Saturday morning. I have no idea where she went from there.”
“That’s something I didn’t know,” Jackson said. “Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll check it out.”
“So you and I are still good, then?” I asked.
“As far as I know,” he replied. “Your name’s Beau Beaumont, right? Never heard of anyone named J.P.”
Detective Kendall Jackson was indeed my kind of guy.
About then I thought everything was in good shape, but before I could return to LexisNexis, the phone rang. It was the doorman calling to let me know that my daughter and her family were downstairs. Could he send them up?
“Of course,” I said. After that, everything went straight to hell. In a handbasket.
I expected Kyle to be a handful. After all, he was only a month or so old. And Lars? Of course he would need attention. His wife had just died. And Kayla? She’s four. What could you expect, especially considering the fact that my penthouse condo is anything but kid-proof. (Then again, when it comes to four-year-olds, is anything ever really kid-proof?) What I didn’t anticipate was that Kelly would be more of a pain in the neck than all of the rest of them put together.
Because, as I had gathered from our nonphone conversation, she really wasn’t speaking to me. She spoke to Lars. She spoke to Jeremy, who looked as though he would much prefer being anywhere else in the universe to being cooped up in his father-in-law’s domicile. Kelly spoke to Kayla. When she went into the guest room to feed Kyle and put him down for a nap, I went gunning for Jeremy. I found him hiding out in the family room with Kayla, who was watching a cartoon about someone named Elmer or Elmo-something like that. Kayla and Lars were both engrossed in watching the TV. Jeremy was dozing. Like Kelly, he, too, had that dim, chronically sleep-deprived look which, as I remember, is part and parcel of having a newborn in the house. I woke him up.
“What’s going on with Kelly?” I asked.
Jeremy shook his head and shrugged. “Beats me,” he said miserably. “All I know is I can’t do anything right.”
“That makes two of us,” I said.
At which point Kelly suddenly reappeared in the doorway. “Let’s go,” she announced.
Jeremy said, “Where?”
“To the hotel,” Kelly said. “Obviously that’s somebody else’s room! I wouldn’t want to be in the way.”
“No!” Kayla wailed. “I don’t want to go!”
In actual fact, it was someone else’s closet. Mel didn’t use the bedroom at all, but with Mel’s clothing and makeup clearly evident in both the bathroom and the closet, I could see how Kelly might have gotten that mistaken idea into her head.
“I thought we were going to stay for dinner,” Jeremy objected.
“We’ll eat at McDonald’s,” Kelly said firmly. “Kayla will like that better anyway.”
“I don’t wanna go!” Kayla said. “I want to stay here. With Gumpa.”
Lars said, “Is there a problem?”
Dutifully Jeremy began collecting things-the diaper bag, the baby carrier, and all the other little necessaries that go with being parents of young children-while Kelly simply headed for the door with the blanket-swaddled Kyle in her arms. By then Kayla was wailing at the top of her lungs and stamping her feet. “Don’t wanna go. Don’t wanna go.”
At which point the telephone rang again. “Your caterer is here,” the doorman announced. “Should I send her up?”
Kayla was still screeching as the elevator headed for the lobby. It was enough to make me long for the old days and the relative peace and quiet of the Seattle PD homicide squad-even if Captain Paul Kramer was the guy
