Mel emerged from the bedroom fully dressed, made up, and looking far better than she should have under the circumstances.
“Didn’t mean to wake you,” Todd Hatcher apologized. To her. I noticed he hadn’t bothered apologizing to me.
“It’s okay,” Mel said. “We had to get up anyway. What have you got?”
“I spent most of the weekend working on my copies of the abstracts,” he said. “I’ve gone over all but two of them and input most of my observations. If you two could sit down and work on the rest of them this morning…”
That seemed unlikely to me. On less than three hours of sleep, I wasn’t going to be in the best condition to go searching for tiny discrepancies in a stack of old dead files. Mel gave me a look, took her stack of paper and her cup of coffee, and settled down in the window seat to go to work. I was saved by a phone call from Detective Lander over in Chelan.
“Any word on Donnie Cosgrove?” I asked.
“Not since he got to the hospital. I tried checking, but the hospital wouldn’t give me any info.”
Welcome to the world of patient privacy.
“I have DeAnn’s cell phone number,” I told him. “I’ll try reaching her. When they hauled Donnie away in the ambulance, it didn’t look too promising.”
“What do you think about this supposedly suicidal non-confession?” Lander asked. “Do you think he really wasn’t involved in the Lawrence homicides, or was he just trying to throw us off?”
I had been in the room and had seen the note Donnie had left behind as the drugs and booze took effect.
“I think Donnie Cosgrove really did mean to kill himself,” I responded.
“Does that mean he meant the rest of the note as well?” Lander asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “He doesn’t claim to have witnessed the actual shooting. He says he saw a vehicle that could have been the killer’s drive away. At this point, even a description of the vehicle would give us a big leg up.”
“You’ll check on Cosgrove and let me know if and when I can come talk to him?” Lander asked.
“Will do,” I said.
“In the meantime, Ross Connors came through like a champ. The phone records we ordered yesterday were on my desk when I showed up this morning. Have you seen yours yet?”
The fact that Tim Lander was absolutely focused and on task annoyed the hell out of me. Obviously he hadn’t spent the whole night traipsing back and forth across Lake Washington.
“Not yet,” I said.
“They’re pretty interesting,” he continued. “They go along in a pretty predictable pattern. Most of the time the Lawrences were calling the same numbers and the same people over and over. That lasted right up until early last week. After that, we’ve got a bunch of calls that haven’t shown up on the records before. Who was that guy you mentioned to me yesterday, the one you’d said you’d left a message for but he hadn’t called you back?”
“Dortman,” I said. “Thomas Dortman. Why?”
“Because I have a whole series of calls from Jack Lawrence to Thomas Dortman starting first thing on Tuesday morning.”
“That would be the day after I first talked to DeAnn.”
“Like I said, there are no calls at all to this Dortman character until Tuesday morning. Then there are eight, nine, ten calls altogether from Jack Lawrence’s cell phone. Why were you looking at Dortman again?”
“Because in the process of reexamining Tony Cosgrove’s disappearance, I came across an article by Dortman that mentioned Tony by name.”
“This Tony guy is DeAnn’s father, the one who disappeared back when Mount Saint Helens blew?”
“That’s right,” I replied. “Dortman mentioned Tony as a possible whistle-blower. I wondered if there might be some connection between them. They both worked at Boeing around the same time, so I thought maybe they knew each other there or worked in the same department. I also wondered if there might be a relationship between Tony’s possible whistle-blowing activities and his disappearance.”
“Which you’re thinking may not have had anything at all to do with a volcano?” Lander asked.
“Exactly. So we probably do need to talk to Dortman. I have a phone number but no street address.”
“I have his number, too,” Lander said. “In fact, I already tried calling it. No answer. I left a message. If he didn’t get back to you, I probably won’t hear from him either. I have his street address, but I don’t know how much good that’ll do. The one other oddball phone call was placed to a number in Portland to a phone listed to someone named Kevin Stock. That one-and there was only one-was made on Saturday morning from the Lawrences’ home phone.”
I know Tim Lander was talking, but I wasn’t really paying strict attention. Suddenly I had another idea.
“Hold on a second,” I said into the phone. Then I called over my shoulder to Mel. “Hey, Mel, when you looked up Thomas Dortman the other night, didn’t you tell me he had a book coming out sometime soon?”
“Something about whistle-blowers,” Mel replied. “You’re right. I think it’s due in bookstores sometime in the next several weeks. If you need the exact date, you can always check on Amazon.”
“Give me a little time,” I told Lander. “Maybe I can figure out a way to get in touch with our friend Dortman.”
When I put down the phone, Mel was staring at me. “What?” she said.
“Supposing you were someone who had cut a corner here and there in the past. Supposing you’d done something really wrong, but as far as the world was concerned, you’d gotten away with it clean. So you’re free as a bird, with nothing but a guilty conscience. Then, all of a sudden, out of the blue, you get a call from some guy who says he works for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. Would you be eager to call him back?”
“Not me,” Mel said.
“Me either. But what do authors need more than anything else?”
Mel wasn’t at the top of her game either. “I give up,” she said finally.
“Publicity?” Todd Hatcher asked.
“Bingo,” I said. I scrolled down my outgoing calls and handed Mel my phone. “Here’s the number, but call him on your phone, not mine. Tell him you’re writing a magazine article or a newspaper article or something and you want to review his book. Tell him you’re working on a deadline and don’t have time to go through his publicity department.”
“What good will that do?” Mel wanted to know.
“You make an appointment to talk to him, only we show up instead.”
Mel was shaking her head and giving me one of her glowers when Todd took the phone from me and said, “I’ll do it.”
He did, and he did a credible job of it, too, leaving a message that was flattering enough that I figured no author in his right mind would be able to resist. In the meantime I took my own phone back and called DeAnn Cosgrove. She sounded more with-it than I would have expected, and certainly more connected than I was feeling about then.
“J. P. Beaumont,” I said when she answered. “How are things?”
“Better,” she said. “The doctor was here just a little while ago. They’re going to keep him until later on today, maybe even until tomorrow. For observation.”
For a psychological evaluation, I thought. That’s standard procedure with attempted suicides.
“Is he well enough to answer questions?” I asked.
DeAnn stalled. “I don’t think-”
“You know about the note he left, don’t you?” I interrupted.
“I know there was a note,” she said. “I haven’t seen it.”
“Your husband admitted being at the scene of the crime,” I said. “It’s possible he saw the killer drive away after that person shot your mother and stepfather. We need to talk to Donnie. We need him to tell us what he saw.”
“This isn’t some kind of trick? I mean, if he’s still a suspect, shouldn’t he have a lawyer here when he talks to you?”
“Your husband isn’t a suspect at this point,” I said. “He’s not even a person of interest. As a potential witness he doesn’t need a lawyer.”