WHEN MEL AND I GOT BACK TO BELLTOWN TERRACE, Athena and Lucy were both down for the night. Alan Dale had waited up for us. The first words out of his mouth took my breath away.
“She called,” he said. “Naomi actually called. When the phone rang, I never dreamed it would be for me, and I almost didn’t answer it. She told me she was sorry—sorry about the way she treated her mother and me, sorry about everything. She asked me if I’d look into finding a suitable funeral home. She says she doesn’t want a funeral or a service of any kind. She just wants Petey’s ashes.”
Something else to push around in an overloaded grocery cart, I thought.
“She wanted to know how long I’d be here. I told her I don’t know how soon the judge will sign off on the guardianship, but we’ll stay around as long as Naomi needs us—if it’s all right with you, that is.”
“Not to worry,” I said. “You can stay as long as you like.”
The problem was, I heard the hopefulness in his voice. Naomi had called him, spoken to him. To his way of thinking, maybe things were going be all right and there would be a real reconciliation between them. In the back of my mind, though, I was remembering Mel’s cautioning words to me about not putting too much stock in where Naomi was right now or where she might end up in the future. I wanted to pass that same bit of wisdom along to Alan, but not right then. He was on a high, and I didn’t want to burst his bubble.
I pulled out my phone, located the names and numbers of a couple of reputable funeral homes in the area, including the one on Queen Anne Hill that had handled both my grandmother’s funeral and my stepgrandfather’s as well.
“Check these guys out,” I told Alan after texting him the information. “Once you choose one, have them be in touch with Dr. Hopewell over in Ellensburg.”
“Should I try calling tonight?”
“My guess is they’ll have someone on duty to handle calls. And remember, I’ll take care of whatever expenses are involved.”
“Beau,” Alan objected. “You can’t do that.”
“I can and I will.”
At that point the conversation veered into our telling Alan about the trip to Bellevue. Enthralled, he listened to every word. “It’s possible Athena might be in line to receive some of her great-grandmother’s estate?” he asked in disbelief.
“It is,” I replied. “Over the weekend we’ll need to see if we can find representation for someone to look out for Athena’s interests. Next week we’ll have them contact Agnes Mayfield’s attorney’s office to inquire after the stipulations in her will.”
Alan was already shaking his head. “Hiring attorneys will cost even more,” he objected.
“Yes, it will,” I told him, “and it will be money well spent.”
“Do you really think Petey’s aunt may have forged her own mother’s signature in order to gain ownership of those lots so she could sell them?”
“I do.”
“But it sounds like she’s got plenty of money of her own, so why would she cheat her own mother?”
“That’s most likely the problem,” Mel told him. “There may be plenty of money, but it’s not Lenora Harrison’s. It belongs to her husband, and I’ll bet he keeps a tight hold on the purse strings. She probably has to account for every nickel she spends.”
I nodded my agreement. “I have a feeling Isaac Harrison has zero knowledge about his wife’s real-estate transactions. Lenora wanted her mother’s money to be her money.”
“It’s a familiar pattern,” Mel told us. “When I was a kid, in sixth grade or so, we were living in the officers’ quarters at Fort Meade. Our next-door neighbors were the Blackmans. Their daughter, Silvia, and I were good friends. Her dad and mine were both captains in the army and made almost the same amount of money. Unlike my father, Mr. Blackman made sure that everyone knew he wore the pants in their family. He was also in charge of the checkbook. Mrs. Blackman had a budget for groceries and everything else. If she overspent, everyone in the neighborhood heard about it. She finally managed to get a job as a teacher’s aide at a local preschool. When she came home with her first paycheck, he demanded that she hand it over. She didn’t. There was a hell of a row. The next day she loaded the kids in the car and left.”
“For good?”
“Yes, for good,” Mel replied. “The last my mom heard from her, Mrs. Blackman had remarried and was living happily ever after somewhere in Georgia.”
“After what we saw tonight,” I observed, “I have to say Isaac Harrison is clearly an overbearing asshole and a tightwad besides. What’s keeping Lenora from pulling a Mrs. Blackman and taking off?”
“Because she’s spent years letting him handle the finances while she’s been living in the manner to which she’s become accustomed,” Mel replied. “According to what Hilda Tanner told you, Isaac was already well off before Lenora married him. I’m betting there’s an airtight prenup lurking in some attorney’s file drawer that takes a deep bite financially if she divorces him.”
“I didn’t make you sign a prenup,” I said.
“Ditto for me and Jasmine,” Alan put in.
Mel smiled at both of us. “That’s because the two of you are both nice guys,” she told us, “something Isaac Harrison definitely is not.”
At that point Athena let out a tentative cry. Alan excused himself and went to their room to tend to her and go night-night while Mel and I stayed up talking.
“On our way to Bellevue, you were thinking Lenora was going to end up as a suspect in Petey’s death, didn’t you?” she asked.
“She still might be,” I responded. “I need to check on that Mayfield Glen billboard and see when it went up. If that really is the sign Petey mentioned to Naomi, he might have gone to Bellevue on his own to read Lenora the riot act about what was going on. Depending on what Agnes told him, maybe he suspected that Lenora’s dealings with her mother were underhanded if not downright fraudulent. If he threatened her with exposure, no telling what she might have done.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Mel countered. “It seemed to me she regarded Petey as more of a nonentity rather than a serious threat. When you brought up the will situation, Lenora was downright slack-jawed. I don’t think she’d had a clue about that before you mentioned it. By the way,” she added, “did you happen to lay hands on copies of those quitclaim deeds?”
I had brought the file folder up from the car with me, but the day had been so busy that I had yet to examine them. “They’re in the bedroom,” I said, getting up. “I’ll be right back.”
Returning to the family room, I slipped one of the documents out of the folder and handed it to Mel for her examination. Donning my reading glasses, I sat down to study another. I shuffled through to the back page and concentrated on the signature line. Agnes Matilda Mayfield’s notarized signature was scrawled in a shaky and almost illegible fashion.
“When did Lenora move her mother into the nursing home?” Mel asked.
“Sometime last summer. Hilda Tanner wasn’t sure of the date.”
“In that case this looks like elder abuse to me,” Mel said. “If Agnes was already exhibiting symptoms of dementia or Alzheimer’s before she left West Seattle, would she have been in any condition to sign a legally binding document?”
The deed in my hand was dated August 1. But then as my eye fell on the notary’s stamp and signature at the bottom, a pulse of recognition shot through my body. “Holy Crap!”
“What?” Mel demanded. “What’s the matter?”
“Look at the last name,” I said handing it over.
Mel studied the document. “I think the first name’s Danielle,” she concluded at last. “I can’t quite make out the handwriting.”
“I can. It is Danielle,” I told her, “but it’s the last name that counts.”
“Why?” Mel asked.
“It’s Nishikawa.”
“The same last name as whoever bought the quitclaimed lots from Lenora?”
“Exactly, and this strikes me as a little too cozy.”
“Are you thinking there’s something irregular about Agnes’s notarized signature?”
“I certainly am,” I declared.
“Fraud or forgery?” Mel asked.
“Maybe a little of both,” I said, “with a dash of collusion thrown in on the side.”
“What now?”
“I think it’s time for us to do a deep dive into the life and times of Suzanne Nishikawa,” I answered. “I’ve seen the collection of bragging-rights photos she keeps on the wall. I’ve read what the Highline Web site has to say about her. What I need now is all the information that isn’t readily available to the general public.”
“So you’re calling for reinforcements from everyone’s favorite hacker?” Mel asked.
That was a reference to a guy named Todd Hatcher. Mel and I had first encountered Todd when we worked for SHIT and Ross Connors had brought him in as a consultant. He’s a forensic economist who absolutely doesn’t look the part. Raised on a ranch in southern Arizona, he’s a cowboy at heart and dresses that way, complete with worn jeans and dusty boots. Where other people go for baseball caps as fashion statements, Todd prefers Stetsons. When SHIT shut down, he traded his dusty boots for muddy ones. He and his wife, Julie, moved to a ranch near Olympia, where they’re busy raising quarter horses along with their now-toddler daughter, Sabrina.
Bowlegged, lean and lanky, Todd can easily be written off as a country bumpkin at first glance. That’s a mistake, however. Todd is a geek’s geek, one who has access to countless databases that can track down supposedly confidential information on anyone and everyone.
“He’ll be able to tell us everything there is to know about Suzanne and Lenora, too, for that matter. Whether any of that helps us uncover what happened to Petey remains to be seen.”
“Fortunately,” Mel told me, “what happened to Petey is not your problem.”
I glanced at my watch. It was almost midnight. Todd and Julie live in the country. They are definitely early-to-bed-and-early-to-rise individuals. In my experience, dragging someone like that out of bed in the middle of the night in order to ask a favor is not a good idea. Nor was putting my request into an e-mail. I didn’t necessarily want to leave behind a cyber trail considering what I was asking Todd to do.
“I’ll call him in the morning,” I said.
“Good thinking,” Mel told me. “Let’s hit the hay.”
I had cleared off the counter in my bathroom so Mel could unpack her daunting collection of makeup, lotions, and potions. We have dueling bathroom counters at both ends of the road for good reason. With Mel’s usual dressing room currently functioning as guest quarters for Alan and Athena, there was a bit of grumbling on both our parts before we finally managed to get undressed and into bed.
It turns out, however, that Mel was one hundred percent wrong about Petey Mayfield’s homicide not being our problem. That changed early the next morning when my cell phone, sitting on its bedside charger, jarred me awake at 7:00 A.M. Mel opened one eye. Since it was my phone ringing instead of hers, she rolled over, plastered a pillow over her ear, and tried to go back to sleep.
“Hey, Beau,” a cheery woman’s voice said into the phone when I answered, “Detective Lucinda Caldwell here. How’s it going? Long time no see.”
That would be Detective Lucinda Caldwell of the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Department. As far as I knew, no one ever called Lucinda Caldwell “Lucy,” and that was a good thing. Having a second Lucy in my life at that point would have been too much of a complication.
I had been working for SHIT when I’d encountered Lucinda Caldwell as part of an investigation involving human trafficking that stretched from southern Arizona to the Pacific Northwest. She’d been a relatively new detective at the time, and our initial interactions had been problematic at best. By the time the case was resolved, I had figured out that she was a smart and very capable investigator, working and surviving in a department where she was partnered with a male chauvinist pig who still thought a woman’s place was in the home, where she was expected to occupy herself perusing cookbooks rather than murder books.
“I’m guessing you’re working a case of skeletal remains found along the Yakima River.”
“Yup,” she said, “you’ve got that right. I’m lead, by the way.”
“Really?” I asked. “Whatever happened to that obnoxious partner of yours?”
She laughed. “Gary Fields, you mean? He got his walking papers after three different women in the department filed sexual-harassment claims against him.”
“Which you could have done but didn’t, right?” I asked.
“Correct,” she replied, “but how did you know that?”
“Because I saw you outwit the poor guy five ways to Sunday. You walked all over him, and he didn’t even realize he’d been had.”
Lucinda Caldwell laughed aloud. “When you’re stuck with a jerk like that for a partner, manipulation is the name of the game and the only way to survive.”
I could only wish someone had bothered to point that reality out to me back when I was stuck at Seattle PD with Paul Kramer as my partner.
“Anyway,” Lucinda continued, “about that case. Skeletal remains again, but at least these weren’t burned to a crisp. Dr. Hopewell tells me that you’re the one who both ID’d the victim and did the next-of-kin notifications. That surprised me. I thought the new AG shut down SHIT.”
“He did,” I said. “I’m a private investigator now, and I stumbled across Petey Mayfield as part of a missing-persons case I’ve been working. Dr. Roz—that’s short for Rosemary Mellon—is the M.E. here in King County. Once Laura Hopewell contacted her and since I know some of the individuals involved, Dr. Roz asked me to do the notifications.”
“You were investigating Peter Mayfield’s disappearance?” Lucinda asked.
“No,” I answered, “it was a related case. I was actually looking for Petey’s girlfriend, who was also among the missing. It wasn’t until after I located her that I realized he was missing, as well.”
“You’re saying the girlfriend is still alive?” Lucinda asked.
“Yes, she is.”
“Is she a suspect, then?”
“No,” I answered. “I don’t believe she’s responsible.”
“In other words, you know way more about this case than I do,” Lucinda concluded. “We’re operating on the assumption that our victim was murdered elsewhere and dumped here. In order to sort that out, I’ll be leaving Ellensburg shortly to head over the pass to your part of the state. How about if I give you a call once I get there so we can have a sit-down and you can bring me up to speed.”
For any number of reasons, I didn’t want to carry on any kind of detailed discussion of what was now an active and ongoing homicide investigation at home in front of Alan Dale.
“Tell you what,” I said, “depending on when you get here and what you’re in the mood for, we can have breakfast or lunch—your choice, my treat.”
“Deal,” she said. “See you then.”