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 of Pacific Northwest lore and legend. Dead or alive, Tony Cosgrove didn’t have nearly the same kind of media staying power.
“So you’re saying you don’t think Cosgrove’s really dead?” the young detective continued.
“I didn’t say he isn’t dead,” I answered. “Carol admitted that she and Jack Lawrence were involved before Tony’s disappearance. DeAnn told me that once Tony was out of the picture, Carol moved on in a hell of a hurry. Instead of waiting around long enough for Tony to be declared dead, she divorced him and married Jack Lawrence within months of Tony’s going missing. That’s the real reason I wanted to see the Lawrences yesterday-to assess if the two of them might have had something to do with what happened to him.”
“According to DeAnn, her stepfather seemed very disturbed to think that anyone would be revisiting Tony’s disappearance,” Lander said. “Did Carol give you any idea why that might have been the case?”
“You mean other than the fact that they might have been behind it? No, she claimed Jack was upset because he’s a ‘very private man.’ That struck me as a load of crap. He may have been private, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.”
“How did you leave things with Carol Lawrence?” Lander asked.
“I handed her one of my cards and asked her to have Jack give me a call. I told her I needed to talk to him, but I figured it would be a cold day in hell before he ever called me back. In fact, I was a little surprised Carol even bothered to take my card in the first place.”
“Not only did she take it,” Lander told me after a pause, “she kept it, too. The CSI guys found your business card in her hand. Her cell phone was on the ground next to her body. We know for sure that Carol Lawrence tried to call you on it. Your office number here at the office is the last one listed under dialed calls. She placed that call at eight fifty-seven p.m., which is about the same time the preliminary coroner’s report estimates as the time of death.”
The idea that Carol Lawrence had tried and failed to reach me left me feeling half sick.
“It was the weekend,” I muttered. “The office was closed. After-hours calls to SHIT go to our general voice mail. I can call our office manager and have her check to see what was left-”
“Don’t bother,” Lander interrupted. “I’m sure she didn’t leave a message. The duration of the call is just over thirty seconds. Long enough to show that the connection was made but not enough to for her to make it through the voice mail prompts. Believe me, I already tried it.”
“How did this whole thing go down?” I asked.
Lander considered the question for a moment, weighing how he should proceed. Either he’d treat me as a suspect or as a fellow investigator. Considering that my dinner in Seattle made it impossible for me to be the killer, I figured he’d come down on the investigator side, and he did.
“The scene’s a little chaotic,” Lander said at last. “We made casts of several different sets of tire tracks going in and out. We already know that one of those sets belongs to the kid who found the bodies. We’ve located an area where a car pulled off the road and sat for a while. We found several empty beer bottles and some discarded gum there in the dirt.”
“So there could be fingerprint and/or DNA evidence?” I asked.
Lander nodded. “If it turns out the shooter is the one who chewed it. We think he parked on the shoulder waiting for something, maybe for Jack Lawrence to come home. After that, it appears there was some kind of confrontation in the yard next to Jack Lawrence’s vehicle. All three of them were involved, including the two victims. In the course of the struggle several shots were fired. Jack was hit once in the right shoulder and once in the gut. We believe Carol tried to flee and was shot in the back.”