amount of money in the world was going to fix that.
“And plan on being nice,” Mel added. “I’m pretty sure we’re seated at the same table.”
Convinced I had somehow bungled that initial encounter, I was dreading sharing dinner with Cal and Anita, but then I got lucky. When we went down to the cavernous ballroom and made our way through to the table directly in front of the speaker’s podium, I caught sight of someone I actually knew-Destry Hennessey.
I had encountered Destry years earlier, when she had been a lowly criminalist working on a master’s at the U. Dub during the day and toiling away in Seattle PD’s crime lab by night. Once she earned her degree, she had taken a job somewhere else-I wasn’t sure where. Sometime in the course of the last several years, Destry had returned to the West Coast as the newly appointed head of the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab.
I went up and shook her hand. “Des,” I said, “long time no see. What are you doing here?”
“I’m the speaker,” she said. “I hate doing public speaking. In terms of phobias, it’s supposed to be right up there with fear of dying. With a room this big I can tell you I’m scared to death.”
“You’ll do fine,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said. “It’s nice to have a friend in my corner.”
When I went to introduce her to Mel, I was surprised to learn they already knew each other. “We’re both on the SASAC board,” Mel explained. “We roomed together at a retreat down in Mexico last fall.”
“Funny,” I said. “You never mentioned it.”
Mel shook her head. “You and I weren’t exactly an item back then, remember?”
While the two of them chatted I checked out our table, where I was dismayed to discover someone had taken the liberty of assigning seats. The good news was that Destry was on my right. On my left was a dragon lady named Professor Rosemary Clark, who, I soon learned, turned out to be the University of Washington’s distinguished professor of women’s studies. Since the good professor was far more interested in talking to Cal Lowman than she was to me, Destry and I spent dinner exchanging small talk.
We brought each other up to date on what had happened in our lives since we’d last crossed paths. After leaving Seattle PD she had worked for several years as second in command for the state crime lab in Massachusetts. However, her kids, now in high school, and her husband had all hated living on the East Coast. When the opportunity had arisen for her to come back home to Washington as head of the state patrol’s crime lab, she had jumped at the chance.
“Heard you’re working for SHIT now,” she said.
I nodded, glad that for once I was dealing with a fellow bureaucrat who didn’t have to make a joke of the agency’s name.
“How do you like it?” she asked.
“Not bad,” I said. “Ross Connors is a pretty squared-away guy.”
As we started in on the salad course, I asked Destry about the talk she would be delivering.
“It’ll be on our DNA pilot program,” she said.
Her answer left me entirely in the dark. “What pilot program?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re here at the major donor table, so I figured you knew all about it. SASAC is paying the freight for a full-time DNA profiler in the crime lab. There’s so much DNA evidence coming in now that we’re falling further and further behind. If we raise enough money tonight, we may be able to fund another one. Someday we may be able to start making progress on that backlog of rape kits that have sat untested in evidence rooms for years on end.”
DNA’s impact on crime solving has changed significantly in the last few years. Cold cases that were once deemed unsolvable were now being cleared as new techniques came online.
“With all this high-tech stuff,” I said, “pretty soon old-time detectives like me will be completely obsolete.”
Destry Hennessey laughed and patted my hand. “That would be a shame,” she said.
“Why?”
I thought she’d say something about society losing the benefit of our law enforcement experience and cunning and skill, and maybe even our flat-out stubbornness, but she didn’t.
“Because some of you old guys are so darned cute,” she said with a smile.
I did not want to be cute! And I certainly didn’t want to be old! What I really wanted was get up and stalk out of the ballroom without waiting around for the main course or for Destry Hennessey’s upcoming speech, either. But I didn’t. My mother raised me to be more of a gentleman than that-at least she tried to. So I plastered a phony smile on my face, chatted civilly with the professor when called upon to do so, and stayed right where I was.
CHAPTER 13
If you fall in love when you’re young, you stake a claim on that other person’s life. You want to know everything about them. But Mel and I fell in love later. We both had a past-maybe more than one each-and we arrived at the conclusion that the other person’s past wasn’t anybody else’s business. For one thing, you can’t change the past. And since we couldn’t change what had happened to us before we met, it didn’t make sense to go into all of that in any great detail, either. To that end we made a mutual and conscious decision to live in the present. We didn’t go digging around in each other’s personal history. So far that had worked for us.
But just because we didn’t sit around jawing about our pasts didn’t mean there was some big secrecy program going on, either. For instance, Mel knew about what had happened to Sue Danielson because Sue’s death was work related. And I’m sure she could have found out about Anne Corley’s death for the same reason. It had been big news in all the local newspapers at the time. Mel is, after all, a detective. I have no doubt she had picked up bits and pieces both good and bad about my relationship with Karen by paying attention to what my kids said about our marriage and subsequent divorce.
Mel’s and my unspoken agreement did mean that Mel hadn’t ever asked me about the whys and wherefores of my going to AA, although, come to think of it, that’s pretty obvious. It also meant that I hadn’t ever delved into her involvement with SASAC, although I have to admit to a certain amount of curiosity. My hands-off attitude on that score ended the night of the dinner at the Sheraton.
There was a lot about the evening that made me uncomfortable. For one thing, there was a whole “Male Evil; Woman Poor Victim” theme to the event that rankled. Yes, I know that most victims of sexual assault are women, the major exception, of course, being generations of traumatized and equally victimized altar boys. But it turns out the villains there are also male, so being a nonabusing heterosexual male in that particular Sheraton ballroom was not a comfortable fit.
Still, I was expected to sit there and share the guilt and blame while a lineup of women revealed a litany of abuse that was enough to curl your hair. As a man, I was automatically under indictment. Whatever had happened to those women was somehow
That rankled even more. It was bad enough that Ross Connors was now passing off police work to underemployed economists. But to find out that the crime lab was outsourcing DNA profiling as well was enough to make this old cop feel like a member of an endangered species-an exceedingly cranky endangered species.
So I handed over my credit card number, kept my mouth shut, and just tried to make it through.
“What’s the matter?” Mel asked.
We had finally escaped the overheated ballroom and were standing outside the hotel in a crush of people waiting for an outnumbered and overwhelmed crew of parking valets to retrieve the Mercedes from the garage.
“How did you ever get mixed up with that bunch of women?” I asked, thinking most particularly of the good professor of women’s studies who had given me an earful of invective over the dessert course.
Okay, my comment was more of a growl than anything else. And it could have been phrased far more
