motivation and deadly results was far too close to ignore. I didn’t answer her question immediately, not aloud, and that in itself was answer enough. A glance in Mel’s direction showed me that she was sitting on the far side of the car with her arms folded across her chest. When Melissa Soames folds her arms, it is not a good sign.
“What happened to Richard Matthews?” she wanted to know.
“I’ve told you everything I know. He went for a walk on the beach on the morning of November first and never returned. His wife filed a missing person’s report right after he disappeared. His badly decomposed body was found sometime later, and an autopsy revealed he had died of what I believe was a single gunshot wound. I’m not sure whether or not a bullet was recovered.”
“I may have been in Cancun at the time he was shot,” Mel said, “but I had no idea that’s where he lived. And no matter what you think, I’m not responsible for what happened to him.” She paused briefly and then added, “When did you learn all this?”
“This morning,” I said. “I stumbled across it on the Internet while you were showering.”
“And you immediately leaped to the conclusion that since Richard Matthews was dead, I had to be the one who killed him?” Mel shook her head. “That doesn’t speak very highly for whatever it is I thought the two of us had going.”
“Mel,” I began. “It’s just…”
“Don’t bother with the apology bit,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it.”
My phone rang then, right in the middle of the I-90 bridge. The way my luck was going, there was no need to check the caller ID readout. I knew it had to be Ralph as soon as the phone rang and before I answered.
“Mel flew in and out of Cancun along with seven other women on board a private jet that belongs to someone named Anita Bowdin,” Ralph said. “They stayed at a beachfront home called Casa del Sol owned by Ms. Bowdin. They arrived on Thursday, October twenty-eighth, and returned to Seattle on Wednesday, November third.”
“Thanks,” I said, hoping to cut short the conversation. “I appreciate it.”
But Ralph was just tuning up. “If the guy disappeared on November first, she would have been there at the time. So we’re definitely talking opportunity. I’m printing out whatever I can find on the guy on the Web. Is there anything else I can do to help right now?”
“No,” I said. “Thanks for the invite, but I don’t think we’ll be able to make it to dinner tonight.”
“She’s with you, then?” Ralph asked. For a guy, Ralph Ames is remarkably perceptive.
“Right,” I said. “Maybe later this week. I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
“Okay then,” he finished. “Give me a call when you can.”
“What was that all about?” Mel wanted to know as soon as I hung up.
“Ralph and Mary were inviting us over to dinner tonight,” I lied. “It didn’t seem like such a good idea.”
“I’ll say,” Mel said. And that was the last thing she said to me for the remainder of the trip. It was a very long and quiet six miles.
When we reached Eastgate, Detective Tim Lander’s unmarked Chelan County patrol car was parked in a visitor’s spot in the garage. While I went to greet him, Mel bailed out of my car without a word or a backward glance and headed for the elevator. I let her go on ahead.
“Mr. Beaumont?” Lander asked, exiting his vehicle.
I nodded. We shook hands and I led him onto the elevator and then upstairs to the SHIT squad offices on the third floor. He paused at the hallway door where the offending acronym was emblazoned in large gold letters on the glass. The sign guy had wanted to spell out the words in full. Harry I. Ball, for perverse reasons all his own, had insisted on putting the more objectionable shorthand version there for all to see.
Lander stopped in his tracks. “Are you shitting me?” he wanted to know.
“Special Homicide Investigation Team,” I explained. “We never close. Our official motto is: ‘All shit all the time.’”
I led him inside. We walked past Barbara Galvin’s empty desk. Beyond that, the door to Mel’s office was shut. The merest hint of Sunday’s edition of talk radio penetrating from there to the outside world posted a not quite audible but entirely understandable message: keep out. Or maybe even keep the hell out!! We kept right on walking.
“This is all part of the attorney general’s office?” Lander asked as I cleared off the guest chair in my cubicle- sized space so he could sit down.
I nodded. “There’s a squad here, one down in Olympia, and a third one over in Spokane to cover eastern Washington.”
“And what exactly do you do?” Lander asked.
“We investigate whatever Ross Alan Connors asks us to investigate. When I first got here we were doing a lot of work on the Green River killer. At the moment he has me working on cold missing persons cases from all over the state. That’s why I went to see DeAnn Cosgrove and Carol Lawrence-looking into the case of a man who disappeared twenty-plus years ago.”
Lander pulled out a notebook and consulted a page of scribbled notations. “That would be Anthony David Cosgrove?” he asked. “Disappeared on May eighteenth, 1980.”
“Correct,” I said. “DeAnn’s father and Carol Lawrence’s first husband.”
“And you said you actually saw Carol Lawrence? You spoke to her?”
I nodded. “Yesterday,” I said. “Up in Leavenworth.” This was stating the obvious, since he clearly already had this information, but we needed to go over the basics anyway.
“What about her husband?” Lander asked. “Did you see Jack?”
“No. He wasn’t home at the time,” I replied.
“And what time was that?”
“A little before noon.” I took out my phone and scrolled through my incoming calls until I found the one from Kendall Jackson. “Here,” I said. “I had lunch in Leavenworth after I talked to Carol. This call came in about the same time my food showed up, and the call record says it came in at twelve-ten. I must have arrived at the Lawrences’ house around eleven or so. After that I came back to Seattle. By seven-thirty or so I was having dinner at El Gaucho with my kids.”
“And we’ll find your prints in the house?”
I nodded. “In the living room. I sat on a couch with wooden arms. So my prints should be there. I doubt they’ll show up anywhere else. And they’re on file. Eliminating them won’t be a problem.”
“Did Carol Lawrence tell you anything about the Anthony Cosgrove disappearance that you didn’t already know?”
“Only that she and Jack were already involved before Tony went missing.”
“Involved as in having an affair?”
“Yes.”
“Anything else?”
“Other than that, she told almost exactly the same story DeAnn told.”
“Almost?”
I liked the way Lander caught my effort at hedging. He focused in on the wobbly modifier with laser precision.
“Look,” I said, “we’re talking perceptions here. As I said, Carol told me the same story her daughter did. In fact, the two versions were virtually identical. The problem is, when DeAnn told me the story, it seemed like she was telling the truth. When Carol told me the same thing, I got the feeling she was lying. We’re talking gut instinct here,” I added. “I have no proof of this whatsoever. None at all.”
“Lying or not,” Lander returned, “what exactly did Carol Lawrence tell you?”
“That Tony Cosgrove was fishing on Spirit Lake the morning Mount Saint Helens blew up and that he died in the eruption.”
“Do you think that was a lie?”
“He may have gone fishing, but I don’t think he died in the eruption. His body was never found.”
“Nobody ever found Harry Truman, either,” Lander pointed out.
Lander looked to be somewhere in his early thirties. I doubted he was old enough to remember much about the eruption itself or the curmudgeonly old guy named Harry Truman who had lived there. In the face of a possible eruption, Truman’s adamant refusal to leave his home-his stubbornness and innate stupidity-had taken on a life of its own. Mount Saint Helens may have blown Harry Truman to bits, but his death-inducing exploits remained a part
