“Jack’s a very private man,” Carol insisted. “He doesn’t like people nosing around in our private lives. We want to be left alone. Just go away.”
“The way he’s acting is enough to make me think maybe the two of you were an item long before Tony went fishing up on Spirit Lake.”
“So what if Jack and I were an ‘item’ back then, as you call it?” Carol demanded hotly. “We’ve been married for twenty-five years now. That should count for something. You don’t have any idea what my life was like then, and you have no right to judge me now. Neither does my daughter. My husband is a very private man. The idea that DeAnn brought this up-”
“She didn’t,” I interjected. “DeAnn had nothing to do with it. The attorney general’s office is doing routine follow-ups on missing persons cases from all over the state. That’s how your former husband’s name came up. Period.”
“Oh,” Carol said, sounding somewhat subdued. “We thought…”
I took a business card from my pocket and passed it through the door. I didn’t expect her to take it, but she did.
“I don’t care what you thought,” I told her curtly. “We are conducting an active investigation at this time. Please let your husband know that I am going to need to talk to both of you sooner or later. You can make it easy or you can make it hard.”
She studied the card, then unlatched the chain. “All right.” She sounded resigned. “Come on in. Like I said, Jack isn’t home right now. You probably passed each other somewhere between here and Seattle. What do you want to know?”
For the next hour or so we went over the same ground I had covered with DeAnn days earlier. I asked many of the same questions and heard the same answers, but with one telling difference. I had left DeAnn Cosgrove’s home convinced she was telling the truth, or at least the truth as she knew it.
When my interview with Carol was over I left the Lawrences’ sprawling log house living room with the distinct impression Carol had been lying through her teeth. I didn’t know why, not for sure, but I had my suspicions. All I had to do now was to learn enough about the case to catch her in one of those lies.
Like Donnie Cosgrove, I was beginning to believe that Mount Saint Helens had nothing at all to do with his first father-in-law’s disappearance.
“Have Jack give me a call,” I told Carol the last thing before I stepped off her front porch to return to my car. “You have my number.”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll tell him.”
We both knew he wouldn’t call. Most likely Jack Lawrence would play hard to get. That didn’t bother me, though. Tony Cosgrove had been gone for a quarter of a century. I had all the time in the world.
Without Mel there to ride herd on me I had missed breakfast, so I stopped off at the Brewery Pub in Leavenworth to grab some lunch before heading back to Seattle. As I waited for my hamburger, I was thinking about DeAnn Cosgrove and her mother. DeAnn evidently still disapproved of her mother’s moving on twenty-five years after it had happened. That certainly boded ill for me and Kelly.
The waitress was delivering my hamburger when Kendall Jackson called.
“Just left Elaine Manning,” he told me. “Thanks for that, by the way. What she had to say was interesting, and we’ll follow up on some of the leads she suggested, but I’m not holding my breath. Without something more solid than her suspicion…”
“That’s pretty much where I am on that, too,” I told him. “What about the nun? Any luck tracking her?”
“All bad,” Jackson returned. “But I seem to remember that your boss has way more high-level connections inside the Catholic Church than I do. Here’s an idea. How about if you see what you can do to find that missing nun?”
I was still pissed that he hadn’t mentioned the existence of a possible eyewitness without my having to find it out on my own, but there was no sense arguing over it, especially not when I still needed Detective Jackson in my corner on occasion.
“Thanks for the suggestion,” I told him. “I’ll give it a whirl.”
Ross Connors is a lifelong Catholic, and one of his best friends from O’Dea High School is now a special assistant to the bishop at the Seattle Archdiocese. So I called Ross. It was March and nippy, but it was also that rarest of rare northwest commodities-a sunny Saturday. I had no doubt Ross was out on a golf course somewhere.
I left him a message to call me back. Then I put my phone away and tucked in.
CHAPTER 14
On the drive back to Seattle, LaShawn Tompkins’s murder slipped to a back burner as I concentrated on what my trip across the mountains had produced concerning Tony Cosgrove’s disappearance. If nothing else, talking to Carol Lawrence had upped my suspicion level significantly. I was convinced that she and her husband did have something to hide, even though I wasn’t sure what.
To my mind there was now a whole new urgency in my wanting to track down Thomas Dortman, the defense analyst. If, as I suspected, he had worked at Boeing during the seventies and eighties, there was a chance he had actually known Tony Cosgrove or maybe even Jack Lawrence. What I needed more than anything right then was to talk to someone who would either confirm what Carol Lawrence had told me-or blow her out of the water.
It wasn’t until I turned south on 405 that I started thinking about dinner-and about Mel. I wasn’t looking forward to going to dinner with Scott and Cherisse and having to explain why Mel wasn’t joining us. I thought briefly about calling her. I glanced at my cell phone, but there hadn’t been any calls. Then I thought about going by her place in Bellevue on the way home to Seattle. But I didn’t want to show up outside the security door at her apartment only to be told I wasn’t welcome. So I drove onto State Route 520 and straight home.
On the parking garage ramp leading down to P-2, however, I was astonished to see Mel’s 740 parked in its customary spot. I headed up to the penthouse, not the least bit sure if it would be safe to open the door without wearing a flak jacket. When I stepped inside, however, I found Mel at the far end of the living room. The window seat was covered with stacks of papers, which I immediately recognized as excerpts from Todd Hatcher’s abstracts. She was seated cross-legged on the floor in front of a yellow pad, reading glasses perched on her nose. She stood up as soon as I came into the room, walked over, and kissed me hello.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was out of line.” I kissed her back. I would have done more, but she dodged out of my arms before I could get a good grip on her. She returned to the window seat and began gathering the papers. “I should have talked to you about this a long time ago,” she added.
“Should have talked to me about what?” I asked.
“About why I’m involved with SASAC,” she replied.
I felt a funny twist in my gut. If this was something Mel didn’t want to tell me, it was also probably something I didn’t want to hear.
“Look,” I said, “I was out of line, too. Whatever it was must have happened a long time ago. It’s none of my business. You don’t owe me an explanation of any kind.”
“But I do,” she said. “What happened back then is why I’m involved in sexual assault issues today. It’s also why I’m a cop. Coffee?”
I recognized that her offer of coffee was nothing more or less than a diversionary tactic. I accepted it for the same reason. We were waltzing around something important and uncomfortable, and we needed to get past it. Mel’s face looked so troubled-so hurt-that I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her, but she wasn’t having any of that. She went back to the relative safety of the window seat and perched there, coffee cup in hand. I, on the other hand, retreated to my sturdy recliner. We both knew that whatever was coming wouldn’t be easy to discuss, and maintaining some physical distance would serve us both in good stead.