Kelsey shook his head emphatically. “No. Impossible. Absolutely not!”
His instantaneous response reminded me of Charlotte Chambers’ reaction when we had mentioned the possibility of her husband carrying on with another woman. She hadn’t thought Alvin capable of such a thing. Why are husbands and wives always the last to know? I wondered while in the background, Pete Kelsey continued his angry, categorical denial.
“You don’t understand. Marcia was opposed to violence of any kind for any reason. She was a vegetarian, for Christ’s sake. She didn’t believe in killing animals, not even to eat. How could someone like that take someone else’s life, or her own either for that matter?”
Pete Kelsey wouldn’t have liked my stock response to that question. I know from experience that homicide is no respecter of philosophy or religion. At the moment of crisis, those who pull the triggers of murder weapons are far beyond the pale of their own moral imperatives, to say nothing of society’s as a whole.
“Let’s set that aside for right now,” I said gently. “Let’s go back to last night. Now, exactly what time did your wife leave the house?”
“Seven-thirty or eight. I’m not sure which. It was right after dinner.”
“Did she tell you where she was going?”
“To the office. That’s what she said, to work on her report for the retreat.”
“Retreat? What retreat?”
“The school district’s annual administrative retreat. Once a year about this time they all go out of town and huddle at a resort somewhere to try and figure out what they’re going to do next. This year’s retreat is scheduled for Semiah-moo, a place up near Blaine. It’s supposed to be Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week.”
“You said annual retreat. So this isn’t something out of the ordinary?”
“Hardly. It’s the same old thing every year-declining enrollment, budget cuts. As head of Labor Relations, Marcia was supposed to make one of the major presentations. She liked doing it, thrived on it, in fact. Saw creating order in that kind of mess as a challenge. She had been working on her presentation all during Christmas even though Erin was home.”
“Didn’t it bother you?” Kramer asked.
“Didn’t what bother me?”
“Your wife working so late on a Sunday night, especially in such terrible weather?”
Every time Kramer opened his mouth to ask a question, there was a not-so-subtle undercurrent of sarcasm. I’m not sure if Pete Kelsey noticed it, but I sure as hell did.
“It did bother me, as a matter of fact,” Kelsey answered testily, “but that didn’t make any difference. I already told you, Marcia was her own woman. She did what she wanted when she wanted. She liked to ski. She was used to driving in snow. I helped her put chains on the Volvo before she left.”
Right up until then, I had felt that Kelsey’s answers had been straightforward, but this one set off a chain of alarm bells in my head. Why was he suddenly being evasive and focusing on the side issue of the weather without addressing the important part of the question? Detective Kramer noticed it too and wasn’t about to be misled.
“Why was she working?” he asked again.
A slight tremor came into Pete Kelsey’s voice. “Actually, we had a quarrel about it before she left.”
“What kind of quarrel?”
“About her going. I really didn’t want her to.”
“But you just said…”
“It wasn’t because of the weather. There was something else.”
“What?”
“It’s probably not important.”
Kramer was becoming more and more impatient. “Let us judge what’s important, Mr. Kelsey.”
As Kelsey struggled with how to respond, the atmosphere in the room became so charged with tension, it felt as though someone had flipped a switch. Whatever it was Pete Kelsey didn’t want to tell us about was something Kramer and I were both equally convinced we wanted to hear. Had to hear.
“I was just feeling…well, you know, uneasy. I wanted her to stay home. That’s all.”
“You were feeling uneasy? Why?”
“We’ve been having some strange phone calls lately,” he answered reluctantly. “Nothing all that bad, I guess, just worrisome-the kind of thing where the phone rings in the middle of the night and you pick it up and you can hear someone breathing but they won’t talk to you. And then…”
“And then what?”
“Nothing, just that whole series of harassing calls.”
“Did you report them?”
“No. Marcia didn’t want to, and they didn’t seem all that important at the time, at least not until yesterday afternoon. When Erin left to go back to Eugene. I wanted her to be ahead of the storm.”
“What happened then?”
“I was helping her load her things into the car and she happened to mention that she’d been getting calls like that too. At her apartment in Eugene. I told her flat out to change her number. To get one that’s unlisted. She was planning to do it today. Before all this…” For some time he sat silently with his chin resting cupped in his hand, staring down at the countertop.
“Go on,” I urged.
“So I tried to talk to Marcia about it, tried to talk her out of leaving the house and going anywhere, but she said it was just a weird coincidence and that I worried too much. We had words about it.” He paused for a moment before adding, “I never even kissed her good-bye.”
Detective Kramer’s pager went off right then. There are times when I hate those goddamn things. Kramer asked Kelsey if there was another phone he could use besides the one in the kitchen so he could return the call without disturbing the interview further.
Interviews are delicate things. Fragile almost, with a rhythm and life all their own. Before the pager sounded, I had sensed that we were verging on something important, but now, with the interruption, I doubted we’d ever get back to it.
Pete obligingly led Kramer away through a swinging door that opened into a large dining room. They continued on through another door-way, disappearing into the living room beyond that.
Left alone in the kitchen, I realized that now my coffee cup really was empty. I got up to fill it. The coffeepot sat on the counter next to a state-of-the-art down-draft gas stove top that was very like my own except for the fact that this one was absolutely spotless.
Pete came back. He seemed to have lost some control while he was out of the room. He walked over to the sink and stood with his face averted and his shoulders hunched, staring out the window.
“I’m glad you helped yourself to the coffee,” he said at last. “Your partner said to go on without him. He could be a while.”
With backhanded swipes at his reddened eyes, Kelsey settled back on his stool while I attempted to pick up the scattered threads of the interview. “So that’s the last you talked to your wife? When she left the house right after dinner?”
“Yes. I never saw her or talked to her after that.”
“Were you here all the rest of the night?”
The minute pause before he answered made me wonder if he was telling the truth.
“Until around ten-thirty or so,” he said. “It was getting late and she wasn’t home. I tried calling her direct line, but there was no answer, so I drove over to her office. Her car was there, but I couldn’t raise anybody, not even the security guard. I checked a couple of other places and went back by her office again around midnight. By then her car was gone from the lot and I thought maybe we had just missed each other in transit, but when I got back here, she still wasn’t home. I realized then that wherever she was, she didn’t want to be found. I went to bed. There was no point in staying up any later. I had some contracting work to do early this morning.”
“You said you noticed her car was missing from the parking lot?”
“That’s right. Marcia has…had an assigned spot, and she always parked there, even at night. It’s a good one, close to the door, and the snow wouldn’t have kept her from using it.”
A possibly devious husband and a missing car were two more things that didn’t fit with Doc Baker’s suicide theory. I asked for the make and model of Marcia Kelsey’s turbocharged Volvo. With vehicles abandoned in the snow all over the city, someone’s misplaced car could be illegally parked directly in front of Seattle P.D.“s headquarters in the Public Safety Building and it wouldn’t be discovered for days.