Long Time Gone Part 9

Maxwell Cole was the one who had provided that last little tidbit, but I knew if I told Melissa Soames that, she'd go ballistic on me again-something I wanted to avoid if at all possible.

"Ron told me that, too," I hedged. "And so did Tracy. Ron and Rosemary were in a legal wrangle over custody of his younger daughter, Heather."

From the kitchen, I heard the last of the water burble into the pot. "I hope you don't take cream," I said. "I'm out of cream."

"No. Black is fine."

Minutes later, I returned to the living room with two mugs of coffee. I knew that meant I probably wouldn't sleep very well for the second night in a row, but I wanted to appear hospitable enough to keep Mel from lighting into me again.

"You're sure you don't know anything more than that?" she asked as I handed over her cup.

"I understand that you and Brad took Ron someplace for questioning-to the office, presumably."

Mel pursed her lips as if considering what, if anything, she should say. After a pause she said, "Rosemary Peters was the on-prem manager of a soup kitchen run by an organization called Bread of Life Mission at Fifth and Puyallup in downtown Tacoma, not far from the Tacoma Dome. The place is closed over the weekend. On Monday morning, when her two cooks came in to start breakfast, the back door was unlocked, with no sign of forced entry, but Rosemary was nowhere to be found. Tacoma PD was summoned to the scene. They found a few blood spatters in the parking lot, along with a single shoe. Nothing else. No bra.s.s. No usable footprints. And, since the area is paved, no tire tracks, either.

"Michael Lujan is on the Bread of Life board of directors. He's also an attorney. He was doing pro bono work for Rosemary Peters in regard to the custody matter. She called him late Friday evening and said that after Ron Peters was served with the papers, he came roaring down to Tacoma and b.i.t.c.hed her out. Said he'd-"

"See her in h.e.l.l before he'd hand Heather over," I supplied.

Mel looked at me questioningly. "He told you that?"

"As I said earlier, Ron and I are friends-good friends."

"When Lujan heard what had happened, that Rosemary was missing, he called Tacoma PD and reported what Rosemary had told him about the incident with her ex. On Sunday afternoon a guy out walking with his dog along the edge of the tide flats stumbled across the body of a dead female. She was found at the bottom of the steep bank that runs along Commencement Bay just south of Brown's Point. Tacoma PD responded to that incident as well. Sometime late Monday morning someone put two and two together and realized that the missing woman and the dead woman were one and the same. The unidentified gunshot victim was barefoot and wearing nothing but a T-shirt, panties, and robe in frigid weather. From the looks of it, she was forced into the trunk of the vehicle, probably at gunpoint, and then shot while the vehicle was still in the soup kitchen parking lot. The killer then transported the victim to a pullout along Highway 509, where he removed her from the vehicle and rolled her down a steep embankment. Fortunately she didn't get hung up in a blackberry bramble. If she had, it might have been years before we found the body."

I thought about the muscles in Ron's arms and the upper-body strength that came from years of pushing his own wheelchair and lifting himself in and out of vehicles. Unfortunately, none of this sounded as if it were beyond his physical capabilities.

"No tire tracks there, either?" I asked.

Mel shook her head. "Blacktop," she said. "But we do have something."

"What's that?"

"There's a restaurant just up the road-at Brown's Point. We checked their security camera. We've got a grainy but identifiable video of Ron's very distinctive vehicle going past the restaurant northbound at eleven fifty-nine P.M. Friday."

"His clamsh.e.l.l wheelchair topper is pretty distinctive, all right." That's what I said, but it wasn't what I was thinking.

What time did Tracy say she heard Ron's car return to the carport? I wondered. Two A.M. or so? That would be just about time enough to make it home to Queen Anne Hill from Brown's Point, which is between Tacoma and Federal Way.

"Yes, it is," Mel continued. "So based on the security tape and your report that someone had found dried blood in Ron's car, Brad and I showed up armed with a search warrant. We also impounded his car. We found the blood, lots of it..." She paused, her eyes trained on my face. "And something else. Wedged into the wheel well, where he wouldn't have seen it in the dark, was a single shoe-a shoe that matches the one found in the parking lot outside the Bread of Life Mission."

I felt like all the air had been sucked out of my lungs. For lack of something to say, I took Mel's cup and mine and headed for the kitchen. My hands shook as I poured coffee. I stayed in the kitchen until my breathing and shaking hands were back under control.

By the time I returned to the living room, Mel had kicked off her boots and had wrapped an afghan around her shoulders.

"Did your wife make this?" she asked. "It's lovely."

"Neither one of my wives were into crocheting," I said. "My grandmother made that for me."

"Oh," Mel said.

I sat back down beside her. I had no idea what to say. Neither did she, evidently. For a time we both sipped our respective coffees in silence.

"I knew you and Ron Peters had been partners," she said finally. "But I guess I didn't realize how tight you were and still are."

"Yes," I agreed. "We're tight, all right." For a while I thought I was going to let it go at that, but then I surprised myself and told Melissa Soames the rest of it.

"When Ron and I first started working together, I thought he was a prissy jerk. He was a vegan, and that p.i.s.sed the h.e.l.l out of me. I mean, how many vegan cops do you know? I gave him a hard time about it every chance I got. Then, in the course of the case we were working on, I met this woman, an amazing woman, and fell in love with her. Anne was her name, Anne Corley. I realized eventually that she was...well, let's say troubled...but I was in love and figured it wasn't anything I couldn't handle. Except she was more than troubled, so troubled she suckered me into shooting her on the afternoon of our wedding day. They didn't call her death suicide by cop back then, but that's what it was."

"I had no idea," Mel said after a long pause. "I'm sorry."

I nodded. "It happened a long time ago. I got winged by a bullet in the shoot-out. Once the doctors got through with me, Ron Peters was the one who dragged me home from Harborview Hospital. Not here-but to my old apartment. This is the one I bought after Anne died, and soon after I found out how well off she had left me as far as money is concerned."

Mel looked around the room as if taking it in for the first time. "She left you all this?"

I nodded. "And more." I was silent for a long time. I didn't resume the story until Mel shifted restlessly on the window seat.

"But to go back to Ron. When we came home from the ER, he helped me up to my room in the Royal Crest. There, right in plain sight on the kitchen counter, was what was left of our wedding cake. Ron never said a word. He just picked it up and stuffed it down the garbage disposal. We've been friends ever since. Later on, Ralph Ames, who was Anne's attorney originally, helped Ron get his kids back from a drug-dealing commune in eastern Oregon, where Rosemary had taken up residence."

"So the three of you have a history."

"You could say that," I agreed. "Just call us the three musketeers."

I talked about Ron then, telling Mel everything I knew about him. She took notes and asked occasional questions. I probably sounded pretty lame. Maybe I was hoping that if I could convince Mel that Ron Peters was a good guy, I could also get her to disregard the mounting evidence against him. The unchanging expression on her face told me I wasn't making any progress.

"So that's it, then?" she asked when I finally ran out of steam.

"Pretty much."

She closed her notebook, stuffed it in her purse, and retrieved one of her boots from the floor.

"Where is he?" I asked, expecting her to say the King County Jail in downtown Seattle, or else the Justice Center out in Kent.

"He's back home for now," Mel answered. "At least until the preliminary hearing. We were going to arrest him, but none of the local jails would take him."

"Because he's a cop?"

"That's part of it," Mel conceded. "But also because of his physical situation. Mrs. Peters and your friend, Ralph Ames, made it quite clear that wherever he ended up, the facility needed to be prepared to handle his ongoing medical needs."

"As in elimination issues?" I asked, stating what I knew about Ron's physical challenges as diplomatically as possible.

Mel simply nodded. "That and the possibility of his developing bedsores-or maybe they call them chair sores. If the AG's office had its own detention facility, it might be different, but none of the jail commanders we talked to were willing to accept the liability. We had to take him back home for now."

"Doesn't that leave Ross Connors open to charges of playing favorites?"

Finished zipping up her second boot, Mel gave me a wan smile. "Maybe. But even Ross Connors doesn't carry much weight when it comes to local officials worrying about possible liability claims. Besides, realistically speaking, Ron Peters doesn't seem like much of a flight risk. His kids and his wife are here. We've confiscated his Camry and his weapons. What's he going to do?"

I thought of Jared not wanting his daddy to sleep over anywhere else. For tonight, at least, that was true. "Sounds like it's handled," I said.

Mel gathered up her purse and coat and started for the door. She paused in the entryway with her fingers on the doork.n.o.b. She turned back to me. Once again, her blue eyes were ablaze, but this time her anger wasn't directed at me.

"I was eleven the first time the cops carted my dad off to jail for beating the c.r.a.p out of my mother," she 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 h.e.l.l 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 b.u.t.t 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 P.-I. And there it was parked in the background of the photo taken after Madeline Marchbank's funeral. Behind Madeline's brother, Albert, and his wheelchair-bound mother was the naked-nosed hood of an automobile-a 1949 or 1950 Frazer Deluxe.

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 cla.s.ses 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 circ.u.mstance, 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 a.s.sets 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 a.s.sets. 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 Post-Intelligencer photo along with me. Finally, when it was late enough to be halfway civilized, I called Freddy Mac at home.

"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.

"In my personal opinion, not remembering is what's hurting her," Fred countered. "If seeing the photos happens to jar her to conscious memory of what went on back then, that should be all to the good."

With Fred MacKinzie's Good Housekeeping seal of approval, I printed a copy of Albert and Elvira's official Web-site photograph as well as a photo of the Marchbank Foundation corporate headquarters, an imposing-looking two-story Georgian with an address that put the place just north of the University of Washington on Twelfth Avenue NE.

At 10:00 A.M., I stuffed everything I'd gleaned through my research efforts into my briefcase and headed for the Westin for my meeting with Sister Mary Katherine. It was raining hard when I drove the 928 out onto the street from the Belltown Terrace. Rain, especially a warm rain like this one, was good news. It meant the snow would melt that much faster and life in Seattle would soon return to normal. As I waited for the light at Second and Wall, I realized that I hadn't heard a word from Ron or Amy Peters.

Oh, well, I told myself. Maybe no news is good news.

That was wrong, of course, but I wouldn't find that out until much, much later.

CHAPTER 9.

SISTER MARY KATHERINE WAS WAITING for me as I walked into the hotel cafe. "We've got to stop meeting like this," I said. "People will talk."

She smiled and shook her head. "People aren't interested in nuns," she said. "They're a lot more interested in what some priests have been up to-and with good reason. Compared with misbehaving priests, nuns are a pretty boring lot."

Considering what I'd learned about Sister Mary Katherine herself in the course of the last several days, I could have argued the point, but I didn't.

"Would you like some breakfast?"