Buried Secrets Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mysteries, Book #14 (The Charlie Parker Mysteries) (18 page)

“Sorry about that,” Jerry said to the group nearest me. “Purely a routine enquiry. Silly thing, really, but they’re just doing their jobs.”

Felina was handing out the same assurances to two couples who’d happened to be standing near the stairs. I nibbled at my plate of snacks and picked up conversational tidbits.

When Walt Frasier came back inside he seemed completely relaxed and the mood caught on. Conversations resumed and guests began to flow back up the stairs, along with Jerry and Felina.

“Walt? Is that it?” I asked, catching the attorney on his way to the bathroom. “All’s well that ends well?”

“Yes. Just routine. The little boy tumbled down three stairs and apparently his arm hit one of the balusters. Kids can be pretty flexible but they can break too. Doctors are under stringent rules anymore to report everything that happens. Then someone has to come around and check it out.” He walked away.

I debated telling Walt some of the other things Katie had told me. But I didn’t want to betray her confidence. Walt would surely have to take anything I told him straight to Jerry and Felina. I had to wonder . . . Linda Casper had told me she was the Brewster’s family doctor. Was she the one who set Adam’s broken arm? And was she the doctor who had reported the incident? I would have to devote some time to figuring out how to get the information out of my old friend.

Meanwhile, someone turned up the music and the party noises grew louder. I felt a headache begin to press at my temples. I discovered that the living room was empty now and I found a chair that faced the fireplace so I settled there for a few minutes. The clock said it was a little after eleven. I wished it would hurry up and be midnight.

Chapter 19

January first. I was probably the only person in the city who woke up without a bad case of overindulgence. I’d had one glass of wine and the few nibbles from the buffet at the Brewsters’ party. At four minutes to midnight Drake had found me alone in the quiet of the living room and we laughed together at the thunder of feet above our heads when the crowd began shouting and cheering in the new year. For ourselves, we shared a long and romantic kiss, which led to the idea of getting out of there to continue the private celebration at home.

Now, out in the unnaturally silent city, I was following Freckles as she took me through our quiet neighborhood streets. I had awakened with thoughts of those two suitcases full of information from Chet Flowers’s apartment. It had been a pretty busy end to the old year and I sent up a little wish to the universe that the coming weeks would settle down a bit for us. It was the closest thing to a new year’s resolution that I could muster.

By the time the dog finished her business and we’d walked the three blocks back home I was more than ready to load up on coffee and start finding solutions to the case. Nothing would please me more than to call Boyd Donovan later today and say, “I’ve solved it!”

But things rarely go that well. I stacked the files on my dining table knowing they couldn’t stay there. No doubt Ron would want all this at the office where we would both have access, but at the moment I just needed some sense of organization about the whole mess.

The kitchen phone rang before I could decide what to do next.

“Hi, Auntie Charlie!” Sally’s voice sounded exuberant.

“The baby! When did you go to the hospital?”

“Yesterday afternoon. There was no time to call anyone. The little guy came very quickly. He missed being the first baby of the new year by about four hours.”

“So, it’s a boy.” Sally and Ross were practically the only couple we’d known in years who wanted that part of it to be a surprise.

“Ross Bertrand, Junior,” she said. She rattled off some data about his weight and length, but I couldn’t remember them with any precision by the time we finished the conversation.

I hung up the phone, happy for them. Happy for the fact that they were happy. Sally and Ross were great parents and I wished them well.

Back at the dining table, I sorted Chet’s folders by subject matter: witness accounts, suspect interviews, court evidence, photographs, and some miscellaneous things like a ring of keys, a cassette tape, and some kind of hasty map that someone had inked on the back of a cocktail napkin. These last items had been lumped together in an envelope that Chet labeled Pending. I had no idea what that meant.

From our work together and the trip to Seattle I felt as if I already had a pretty good handle on the witness accounts and the results of the interviews conducted by the police when Tali became their chief suspect. I skimmed the pages in each of those folders, knowing that before this was all over I would probably have to go back and reread each of them carefully.

In the stack I’d called Evidence I came across the Search and Rescue reports. Teams had been called out within an hour of the call about the Donovan children’s disappearance and, according to the incident commander’s report, they had used both dogs and human tracking experts in the search for traces of the mysterious man or the children. In the SAR world you have to account for every possibility, and one that they had considered was that the two kids had simply opened the back gate and wandered away. Embarrassed that she hadn’t been watching them more closely, their mother might have invented the story of the stranger and then hoped that the teams would find the kids, disoriented and cold, and bring them home. Things like that have happened.

But the teams found no evidence whatsoever. There had been rain the night before and on the day of the disappearance, but they found no footprints—adult or child size—and no whiff of the kids, which dogs would have picked up from samples of their clothing. After two days of searching—after all, there were a lot of fallen leaves in the woods and it was possible the strange man had been careful about where he stepped—the teams were called off and this report had been filed. That’s when Tali Donovan became a real, viable suspect.

A notation on the cover letter suggested that the incident commander would be willing to assemble searchers for other areas, should the police decide that evidence pointed to some other part of the surrounding countryside. I saw what an impossible task that would be. Just about every scrap of land that didn’t have something built on it was heavily wooded. How would they have a clue where to start? I set the report aside and moved on to the photographs.

Chet had said that he ordered photos of every room in the house, even though there was no sign of violence. He hoped that one day enough information would come together so that some item in that house would provide the final piece of the puzzle. Unfortunately, that had not happened in time for the trial and we all knew how that turned out.

I studied each eight-by-ten for minutes at a time. I knew Tali’s china pattern and the colors of her bedspreads and the fact that she didn’t wash her dishes right away in the morning. I knew the family hung their coats on a bentwood rack in the laundry room and a basket of clothing sat on the dryer, waiting to be folded. I knew that the kids’ bedrooms were filled to capacity with every brightly colored plastic toy on earth, and I knew that Tali wasn’t much of a housekeeper but that she loved high-end fashion and makeup despite the fact that she was nowhere near a size two. But I still didn’t know what she had done with her children.

The photographers had been thorough. Cupboards had been opened, with a separate photo showing the items behind each door. Drawers had been dumped and the contents spread out so everything—from utensils in the kitchen to lacy lingerie from the bedroom—was visible. I cringed a little. How completely un-private our lives become if we ever get wrapped up in a mess like this. Tali’s life became an open book, and yet no one figured out what happened to those kids.

I sighed and went to the kitchen for a coffee refill. The sun was only beginning to cast long shadows across the yard. Drake came out of the bedroom and nuzzled my neck.

“I’m going to spend a thoroughly lazy day at home,” he said. “Want to start it off with some eggs Benedict?”

Knowing good and well that I don’t know how to make them, this was an offer for him to make breakfast for me and I quickly took him up on it. I did contribute by cutting up some fresh fruit. While we savored our special breakfast I ran a few things past him about the case.

“I flew a lot of SAR missions,
hon
, but it was years ago and my job was to get teams out there and to let the observers observe. I saw everything from hundreds of feet away and didn’t have much to do with evidence. Sorry.”

“Did you ever fly much in the northwest, around Seattle?”

“Yeah. Those forests are thicker than anything you can imagine around here. Miles and miles of nothing but treetops from the air. If you’re looking for something among those trees, good luck. I can see why they wouldn’t expend fuel and money to try to cover any amount of area. You have to have some idea where to start. Sometimes, even when you have a good idea where to search, you can’t find a thing. Remember the stories of that guy who jumped out of the airliner with all that money, years ago?”

I pondered all that while he swabbed up the last of his Hollandaise and headed toward the sink.

“I’ll take down the Christmas tree if you’d like,” he said.

Well, I wasn’t going to pass up that offer. By the time I’d put the dishes into the dishwasher and settled at the dining table with the files again he already had the ornament storage boxes out and the parade showing on TV to keep him company. For a guy who’d planned a lazy day, he was accomplishing a lot. I felt guilty poring over papers while he did the household chores, so after a little while I abandoned the table and got up to help him. Plus, I couldn’t help staring at the television and all those floats made of flowers.

Ornament hooks looped over my fingers, I carried a handful to the storage box. It was always a little sad saying goodbye to the memories for another year. There were old glass ornaments from my childhood, a couple of which even went back to my mother’s youth. Drake and I had collected a few from our travels—a tartan plaid wreath from Scotland, shells from Hawaii, and a replica of the Washington Monument from a quick trip we made there two years ago. I smiled, remembering that a comedian once said that the monument doesn’t look at all like the man.

I set it into the box and a snippet of conversation came back to me, full force. Boyd Donovan. He’d mentioned a little obelisk, somewhere in the woods. A place he and Tali used to go.
Oh my god.

Gingerly, I placed the other ornaments into their spots and dashed to the table. Scrambling through Chet’s notes I came across the witness file and found Boyd Donovan’s current phone number.

“Tell me exactly where that place is,” I said with little preamble.

“Um, okay. Take Interstate 90 . . .”

I wrote it all down, precisely as he described it. Then I called Detective Cunningham in Seattle.

“I think I know where the Donovan children are buried.”

* * *

The day dragged, as Elsa would say, slower than molasses in January. All Detective Cunningham told me was that he would work on getting the search launched again. I knew he wanted to reopen the case, but I could also hear in his voice that there wasn’t a lot of urgency to it. If the bodies were, indeed, in that spot they’d been there for five years. A few days, even a few weeks, wouldn’t change anything.

I paced for awhile until Drake pointed out that I might be helping him disassemble the artificial tree, since I had so much nervous energy to spare. It didn’t help. I fumbled the branches and couldn’t seem to stuff everything into the box—I swear, those things are never meant to go back into the box they came out of. Finally, he gave up and after carrying the ornament boxes out to the garage he finished doing the tree himself.

I called Ron to let him know about this new development but I could hear a football game in the background, and while he seemed genuinely excited that the case might break, he also gave out a cheer when his team scored a touchdown. I got him to put Victoria on the phone, and I thanked her again for my new party dress.

“I’m taking the boys shopping this afternoon,” she said. “Want to come along? Justin and Jason both need new coats. I can’t believe how fast they outgrow everything.”

I passed on the trip, although it probably would have helped fill the time. I called Boyd Donovan back to see if he’d heard anything from Seattle but he hadn’t. After my second call to Detective Cunningham he basically gave me the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” response. He sounded busy.

Drake had found a show on how they make the blades for wind turbines and I flopped onto the couch to see if it could distract me. That lasted all of three minutes. But at least I could stare at the screen while my thoughts roiled, giving the appearance that we were actually having couple-time. I kept up that fakery through two more episodes on how things were manufactured and a movie that involved a lot of guys blowing stuff up. At some point I went to the kitchen and rustled up some greasy snack food; New Year’s resolutions are always broken by the first week anyway.

When my phone rang at six that evening it startled me.

“Charlie?” It was Boyd Donovan. “Detective Cunningham just called me. He’s at the scene of a grave. He said you helped provide the information that pinpointed the location.”

Happiness and dread conflicted in my gut. “Were there—?”

Boyd took a deep breath. “A forensics team just got there. Cunningham said it’ll be hours before they know for sure. I’m under orders not to speak with the media until a positive identification is made, but I had to tell someone. I need you to promise that you won’t talk about this until we know.”

“Of course.”

“The detective said charges could be filed against me for talking about this too soon. Obstruction or something. If it’s—” He cleared his throat. “If it turns out to be my kids, they’ll intensify the hunt for Tali. This isn’t over for her and they don’t want to give her any advance warning.”

“That makes sense. Ron and I will keep quiet.”

He seemed a little uneasy that I would tell Ron, but after all we were on the case together.

“I’m flying up there, Charlie. I have to know. Sitting around San Diego is killing me.”

“I understand. Stay in touch and let us know what they find. And, Boyd? Take care.”

I dialed my brother after ending the call from Boyd, passing along what little I knew and swearing him to secrecy for the time being. I caught Drake watching me and I threatened no sex forever if he were to get me in trouble over this. It turned out that he really only wondered if we could order a pizza for dinner.

The night hours dragged. By the time I met Ron at the office the next morning I’d almost decided that we would never hear from them, that the case would be closed.

“After all, what Boyd Donovan paid us to do was to find his kids. This might be the end of the road for us,” Ron pointed out.

“Yeah, but—”

“Charlie, leave it. We will learn what they want us to know, when they want us to know it.”