I WAITED UNTIL ALAN’S SANDWICH WAS GONE BEFORE moving forward. “All right,” I said, pulling out my iPad. “If I’m going to help you on this, I need to know the details of what I’m up against.”
In the old days, my tools of choice would have been a ragged little notebook and a stubby pencil, but those seem to have gone the way of the buggy whip. Now I’m iPad all the way.
Alan leaned back in his chair, looked across at me, and said, “What do you need to know?”
“Everything,” I said, “starting with what you’ve been doing in the thirty years or so since I last laid eyes on you.”
“Jasmine and I went home,” he said simply, “home to Jasmine’s folks’ place in Jasper, Texas. Her dad was still alive back then. Jasper is north of Beaumont.”
Since Beaumont, Texas, my father’s hometown, is the real origin of my last name, I happen to be well versed in the location of that particular city.
“I’m from Oakridge, Oregon, originally,” Alan continued. “Jasmine and I grew up in small towns, and when we bailed on Seattle, we were ready to be away from big cities and off the road. We both figured that Jasmine’s career was over, but I was pretty sure that with my carpentry skills I could find enough work to keep body and soul together no matter where we lived. We found a house—Jasmine’s folks helped us with that—and we moved in together. We were planning to get married eventually, but when Jasmine turned up pregnant unexpectedly, we moved up the wedding date.”
“And got married in Vegas,” I put in.
“Exactly,” he said.
“And then what happened?”
“Jasper’s a small town. Everybody there knew that Jasmine had been a big star once, and in their eyes she still was. She started singing again, only at church to begin with, but people paid attention. When Helen asked Jasmine to come to perform at a statewide Christian women’s conference, something totally unexpected happened. She was a huge hit, and it was the beginning of Jasmine’s next chapter, as it were. She had started out singing gospel music. She had gone from there to rock, rock to jazz, and finally from jazz back to gospel.”
“Full circle, in other words,” I commented.
“Right,” Alan said. “She picked up several paying gigs just from that first conference alone. She did mostly church-sponsored events where she told her story and sang gospel songs. Everyplace she went, her program was a hit. There aren’t huge amounts of money to be made in the Christian-music business—at least there wasn’t back then—but by the time Naomi was three, Jasmine was making almost as much from her appearances as I was bringing in from working construction.
“And that’s when we decided to turn it into a business. She recorded a couple of albums, and then we bought a van and took our show back on the road. I went from being a head carpenter to being a tour manager. I set up the gigs, drove the van, sold the merchandise, did the billing and bookkeeping. When Naomi was little, she went along with us. When it was time for her to go to school and we needed to be gone for a couple of weeks at a time, she stayed with Helen and Gabe.”
“Jasmine’s father?” I asked.
Alan nodded. “Gabe Gibbons was the world’s best grandpa, and Naomi loved him to pieces.”
When it came to gold-star grandpas, it seemed to me as though I was currently in the presence of one of those, but I didn’t try voicing that opinion to Alan. He wasn’t in a place where he’d be able to hear a compliment, much less accept one.
“You said, ‘was,’ ” I interjected. “What happened to him?”
“Grandpa Gabe died in a car wreck when Naomi was thirteen, and she took it real hard. It was as though the bottom had fallen out of her world. She lost interest in everything. Her grades dropped. By the time she got into high school, she was a mess. She started hanging around with a bad crowd, got herself into some serious trouble, and ended up being expelled. Once she got kicked out of school, she never went back. I’m sure you know the drill.”
The truth is, I knew that drill all too well. When my daughter, Kelly, dropped out of school and ran off with a wannabe actor/musician, I was sure she was a goner, too, but I was wrong. It turns out she wasn’t then and still isn’t a goner. Eventually Kelly got her GED and enrolled in college, where she ended up earning not only a bachelor’s degree but a master’s degree as well. She runs a chain of early-childhood-development centers in southern Oregon. As for that supposedly worthless wannabe actor/musician? Jeremy, my son-in-law, is now a well-respected band director and drama teacher at the high school in their southern Oregon town.
“So Naomi ran away from home?” I asked.
Alan nodded. “Jasmine could see where Naomi was headed better than I could, because she’d already been down that road. Naomi left home and dropped out of our lives completely. For a while she stayed in touch with her grandmother, with Helen, but the last time she stopped by to visit, she stole money out of Helen’s purse. That was the last straw as far as Grandma Gibbons was concerned. It was also the last time we heard anything about her or from her until that phone call from Harborview Medical Center.”
“She didn’t come home to visit when her mother was sick and dying?” I asked.
“No,” Alan said, somberly looking off into the far distance, “and she didn’t come home for the funeral either.”
“So when did she leave?” I asked, picking up the iPad and getting ready to drill down for details.
“When did she leave Jasper or when did she leave now?”
“Now.”
“January twenty-fourth,” Alan answered, “a couple of hours after Athena was born. She stayed around long enough to fill out the birth certificate and name the baby—Athena Marie Dale. She’s listed as the mother. The father is listed as ‘unknown.’ ”
“So whoever the father is, she probably didn’t marry him or take his name.”
“I guess,” Alan replied.
“What about an address? Did she give one of those?”
“On the form it’s listed as NKA. They told me at the hospital that translates to ‘no known address.’ ”
“So she was homeless, then?”
“Evidently.”
I looked over at Athena, wrapped snugly in blankets and sleeping peacefully in her carrier with what looked like a smile on her tiny lips. She had no idea how lucky she was, but I did. In the Pacific Northwest, it’s not nearly as frigid in early March as it is in January or February, but it’s still wet and plenty cold. Six weeks earlier at the end of January would have been a terrible time to take a newborn baby—especially a frail premature one—from a hospital nursery to a tent in some homeless encampment with no heat, plumbing, or sanitation. If that had been Naomi’s only post-hospital option, maybe leaving Athena in the nursery was the best possible decision she could have made for either one of them, but that wasn’t an opinion I could voice aloud to Alan Dale—certainly not right then.
“Did Naomi have any known associates?” I asked.
Alan shook his head. “When she ran away from home originally, she took off with a boyfriend named Brad Walters. I tried looking him up when Jasmine was so sick. Turns out he was already dead—he died of an overdose. After that the trail went cold.”
“So why would Naomi come to Seattle?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” Alan told me.
“No friends or relations in the area?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Do you have a photo of her?”
Alan reached into his wallet. “This is all I have. It was taken her sophomore year in high school, just before she got kicked out and went on the lam.”
He handed me a dog-eared, well-thumbed color photo, one that he’d obviously been carrying around in his pocket for all those intervening years. It was a headshot, the kind used in school yearbooks everywhere. The dark-haired teenage girl in the picture looked decidedly unhappy, but there was something disturbingly familiar about her, and it took a moment for me to figure it out. She looked just like Kelly—just like my daughter, who also looks a bit like me.
Holy crap! I thought as a hard knot formed in my gut. Did Jasmine ever notice? Did Alan?
“She was what age when this was taken, fifteen or so?” I asked quickly, trying to conceal my discomfort.
Alan nodded. “About that, I guess.”
“You don’t have any more recent photos?”
“Nope.”
I used my iPad to copy the photo and then handed it back to Alan, hoping he didn’t notice how much my hand shook as I did so.
“You’re sure you don’t need this?” he asked before returning it to his wallet.
“For the time being, no,” I told him, “but I reserve the right to change my mind.”
I know for a fact that Harborview has all kinds of security cameras. They cover the entrances and exits, the waiting rooms, the hallways, and the lobby areas. There might even be video footage showing exactly when Naomi left the hospital and how. That would be one of the first things I did. If you’re not a cop working a case, laying hands on security-camera footage isn’t easy, but it can be done.
“Have you reported her missing?”
Alan shook his head. “Obviously Naomi’s heavy into drugs,” he said. “She may have gotten herself into all kinds of trouble trying to feed her habit. For all I know, there might be a trail of arrest warrants out there waiting for her from Jasper to here. I need to find her long enough to give her sign-off on the paperwork. I don’t want to land her in even more trouble.”
At that point I didn’t want Naomi Dale in more hot water either, but there was also a new reason for concern. There might be a much more current photo of Naomi Dale to be found in Seattle PD’s collection of mug shots. Again, those would all be readily available to cops but not necessarily to former cops turned PIs. And there was another possibility as well, a far grimmer one at that. Athena was born addicted to methadone. As I’d mentioned to Alan, it’s a drug that is often used when addicts are trying to get clean. The problem is, once you go off hard drugs for a time, if you happen to suffer a relapse, what might have been a safe dosage prior to treatment may well prove fatal after someone has been clean for a while. It occurred to me that there was a good chance Naomi’s body was lying unclaimed and unidentified in the King County M.E.’s Office.
As soon as that idea crossed my mind, I dismissed it. If Naomi had been living rough on the streets and doing drugs for a decade and a half, she was bound to have had more than one run-in with the law. Had the M.E. entered her prints into AFIS, they would have led straight back to her family in Jasper, Texas—to her father, to Alan Dale. No, if Naomi was dead, Alan Dale most certainly would have heard the news by now.
This was yet another piece of information that I couldn’t share with my new client, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he was holding back as much as I was. I doubted it. I was the real liar here, make no mistake about it.
“All right,” I said finally, setting my iPad aside. “When it comes to finding her, you haven’t given me much to go on, but I’ll do my best.”
“How expensive is this going to be?” Alan asked.
Having seen the family resemblance in that photo, there was no way in hell I was going to charge him a penny. “Sorry, pal,” I said. “There are some things friends can’t buy. Besides, I don’t need the money nearly as much as I need the work. Once a cop, always a cop, and I miss the job like crazy.”
“Wait,” he objected. “You can’t do that. I’ll be glad to pay.”
“No you won’t,” I told him. “Your hands are more than full right now. My son and daughter-in-law are expecting a baby of their own in a couple of months. I’ve been helping Scott get the nursery ready. By now they’ve spent a small fortune accumulating necessary baby gear, and you’ll need to do the same. So spend whatever you would have paid me on outfitting Athena’s nursery. If she ever asks, you can tell her the decor came from one of her grandmother’s old friends.”
“Really?” he managed, choking out the word. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You don’t need to thank me,” I told him, “and here’s another thing. Do you remember where I lived back then?”
“Vaguely,” he answered. “It was a penthouse in some fancy condo building downtown. Why?”
I doubted he remembered the exact address of Belltown Terrace, but since he and Jasmine had stayed there with me for a week or two while the homicide and drug-dealing investigations had been winding down, he had the general idea.
“Mel and I still own it,” I told him. “We go there sometimes for weekend getaways, but most of the time it sits empty. You and Athena are welcome to stay there for as long as you need.”
“For free?” he asked.
“For free,” I repeated.
I’d like to think that I’m the kind of person who would have offered him shelter under any circumstances, but in view of the fact that the infant in his care might turn out to be my own biological granddaughter, it was mandatory, especially since the cheapest digs in town—and his only viable alternative—would have been one of those by-the-hour motels on Highway 99.
“But that’s too kind,” he objected. “I couldn’t possibly take advantage of you like that.”
“You can and you will,” I told him, handing him my card. “When you get back to your hotel, send a text to my cell-phone number. That way I’ll be able to get a hold of you. Go ahead and stay there tonight. That’ll give me time enough to sort out some arrangements. Tomorrow I’ll come to town to start looking for Naomi. I’ll also help you and Athena get settled into your new digs.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Okay,” he agreed reluctantly, slipping the card into his pocket.
And that was all it took. From there on out, it was a done deal.