CHAPTER 23
I was fine while we hung around the library waiting for Analise Kim to finish her volunteer shift of shelving books. I was fine while we drove to her house to pick up a copy of her “shelf list.” But after that, on the way back to Belltown Terrace in downtown Seattle, I fell off the cliff.
Once upon a time I could do all-nighters. I used to be able to go without sleep for seemingly days on end without it bothering me, but time has a way of catching up with a guy. On the drive north from Burien, as I fought to stay awake, I was forced to con-front the fact that J. P. Beaumont is no Jack Bauer from 24. It helped my ego that, despite Mel’s relative “youth” and the nap she had grabbed earlier in the day, Mel was struggling to stay awake, too.
The only thing that helped was talking. “So what do we do?” Mel asked. She was clutching the papers Analise had given us.
What they contained was more a series of diagrams than an actual list. Each sheet represented one year and was covered with consecutively numbered boxes. I could see how numbering each of the rape kits in that fashion would have made it easy for Analise Kim to scan her shelves each day to see what, if anything, was missing. Annotations in some of the boxes, “out” or “in,” followed by dates, showed when the kit had disappeared and returned.
“As in?”
“Do we call Ross, have him send someone in to isolate all the kits that have been tampered with so they can be analyzed, or, more likely, reanalyzed?” she asked.
“Bad idea,” I said. “As soon as we do that, we tip our hand. Once Yolanda Andrade knows we’re looking into this, you can bet everyone else involved will know, too. I’m sure that’s why Ross didn’t want us talking to Destry, either.”
“It hurts me to think that Destry’s crooked,” Mel said.
“Me too,” I said. The very idea left me feeling half sick.
“And if there have been evidence-handling irregularities in the crime lab…”
She didn’t finish the sentence and she didn’t need to. I knew exactly what she meant. That kind of scandal could jeopardize convictions that were years in the past.
“Todd’s on it,” I said.
“On what?”
“He called while we were at the library. Since he was still at the house, I put him to work tracking down information on Destry Hennessey.” I paused, worried that I was venturing onto thin ice. “I also asked him to track down whatever he could on Anita Bowdin.”
“Good idea,” Mel said, and that’s all she said.
When we got to the condo Todd greeted us like an eager puppy that’s been left on its own all day long. He had a fistful of papers to show us. He had stuff he wanted to talk about, and he was disappointed when I waved him off.
“Sorry, Todd,” I told him. “Mel and I are both working on two hours’ worth of sleep. Talking to us now would be a waste of breath and effort. You’re more than welcome to stay over. The guest room’s made up and available. Help yourself.”
And off to bed we went.
Women perform these mysterious but invisible rituals that men mostly miss. For instance, I never really understood that when Mel goes down the hall every night before we go to bed, she uses some potion or other to remove her makeup. That night, tired as she was, she went to bed without performing that little chore. And since she’s usually up before I am and down the hall in her bathroom, it’s usually a nonissue.
The next morning, though, I happened to wake up first, and I was shocked. Mel looked like a raccoon.
“Are you all right?” I asked when she finally blinked awake.
“Sleepy,” she said. “Why?”
“You look like someone blacked both your eyes.”
She uttered a strangled little sound that was halfway between a whimper and a legitimate eek. Then she leaped out of bed and, stark naked, raced down the hall to her bathroom. The guestroom bathroom. She came back a few minutes later wrapped in a robe, carrying her clothing, and absolutely furious-at me.
“Why didn’t you tell me Todd was sleeping over?” she demanded.
“You were right there when I told him he was welcome to stay,” I countered.
“Yes,” she hissed back. “But you never told me he’d accepted!”
In other words, the Ides of March didn’t get off to the most auspicious of starts around our place. While Mel showered in my bathroom, I went out to the kitchen to make coffee. Todd was there, eating cold leftover pizza. He didn’t say a word about Mel, and neither did I.
Todd gave me a choice of two different stacks of paper, one with reprints of articles on Destry Hennessey and the other, far larger, devoted to Anita Bowdin. I picked the Anita option and retreated to my recliner to go to work.
What I read to begin with was mostly one puff piece after another, many of them dealing with Anita’s work in founding and maintaining the SASAC. Tired of reading the same thing over and over, I skipped to what Analise Kim would have referred to as the FIFO-First In First Out-program and skipped back to the earliest one I could find, a New York Times feature article that profiled a group of six exceptionally brilliant female students, all of whom had enrolled in prestigious colleges at a time when most of their contemporaries were just venturing into high school.
Anita Bowdin, daughter of a university physics professor and an insurance executive, was one of the six very young women. All of them came from upper-crust, privileged backgrounds. All of them voiced concerns about whether or not they’d be able to fit in with the older students around them. All of them expressed some worry about being able to keep up with the course work. All of them credited teachers for encouraging them to strive. I was struck by the one Anita Bowdin mentioned-Sister Helen Thomas of Sisters of the Sacred Heart School, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
So Anita Bowdin had attended a parochial school. Was that a connection? Did the fact that Anita Bowdin had attended Catholic schools as a child have something to do with the fact that a mysterious nun was somehow involved in our series of homicides?
The next media mention of Anita Bowdin came two years later, in the July 7 issue of Ann Arbor News, where she was mentioned in her father’s obituary.
Private funeral services will be held today at 2:00 p.m. at St. Claire Catholic Church for noted University of Michigan physics professor Armand P. Bowdin, who died unexpectedly in his home late last week.
Died unexpectedly in his home. In the old days, when journalism was a more gentlemanly pursuit, those words constituted media shorthand and media newspeak for suicide. They were used primarily when either the deceased or his survivors had enough media pull that no one wanted to mention that the dead guy pulled his own plug.
The rest of the article was a mostly laudatory recitation of his educational and employment background. Anita’s name came at the very end, where she and her mother, Rachel Bowdin, were listed as survivors.
Those two snippets of Anita Bowdin’s history were as far as I’d managed to make it when Mel finally emerged from the bedroom. She was not only dressed-she was dressed to the nines: heels, panty hose, skirt, silk blouse, and blazer. Every hair was in place. Her makeup was impeccable. In other words, she was clothed in the full armor of God and ready to take on all comers.
“All right,” she said coolly, ignoring me and looking Todd straight in the eye. “What have we got?”
Wordlessly he passed Mel the Destry Hennessey file. She took that and a cup of coffee and headed for the window seat. For the next several mintues the atmosphere in the room was thick with tension. It was a relief when my phone rang.
“Detective Beaumont?”
“Yes.”
“Detective Donner here, Ambrose Donner with Bountiful PD. Sorry I wasn’t able to get that composite from the Escobar case off to you yesterday like I said I would. Turns out I ran into, shall we say, a few difficulties.”