In this case the jackpot on offer was an all-expenses-paid trip to Disneyland. Without consulting Sue, Richie had booked the flights and the hotel room for the week before Jared and Chris’s spring break rather than during their spring break. Sue had absolutely put her foot down, telling Richie that she would not allow him to pull the boys out of school in a way that would leave them with five days of unexcused absences. Eventually Richie had caved and changed the reservations, but I’m pretty sure he was pissed about it.
Then, when he finally showed up in Seattle, he did so with brand-new luggage—fancy Rollaboard bags—one for each of the boys to use and something else Sue would never have been able to spring for. I don’t know exactly what happened that night, but something about those pieces of luggage—maybe their weight when they were supposedly empty—must have aroused Sue’s suspicions. She had sliced open the interior lining on one of them, an action that had revealed that both the top and bottom were chock-full of cocaine. It turns out Richie Danielson was a drug runner, and the trip to Disneyland had been a ploy that would have enabled him to use his sons as unsuspecting mules.
And there’s a good chance he might have gotten away with it. This was back in the nineties—before 9/11 necessitated all kinds of new security measures at airports all over the world. At that point luggage wasn’t screened the same way it is now, and I have no doubt Jared and Chris would have pulled their drug-laden bags through the airport and had them loaded onto the plane without incident.
But somehow Sue must have suspected what was up. Her fingerprints and no one else’s were found on the box knife in the bottom of the shredded piece of luggage. Richie most likely arrived on the scene shortly after she’d sliced it open. Jared had awakened to the sound of quarreling. As the argument escalated, he’d called me, and that’s when I advised him to take Chris and get the hell out. That’s why the boys were safely away from the house by the time gunfire broke out.
I, on the other hand, arrived moments too late. Neighbors were calling to report hearing gunshots at almost the same time I stopped my vehicle outside the residence, and that’s the part that haunts me to this day. Had I arrived a mere thirty seconds earlier and pounded on the door, might it have been enough of a distraction to prevent Sue’s untimely death? Of course it’s impossible to know one way or the other, and the bottom line is the fact that Sue Danielson is still dead.
Needing to rescue both Jared and me from this topic of discussion, I tried changing the subject to something less emotionally charged.
“What can you tell me about your brother?” I asked.
Jared thought about that before he answered. “I guess I really didn’t care for him much,” he admitted. “For one thing he always acted like a know-it-all—a snotty spoiled brat who always got his way. He was smart—he knew his times tables up to ten before he got out of first grade, but he never did his homework, and even when he did, he didn’t bother turning it in most of the time. But he could draw like crazy. Whenever I tried to draw, I never managed anything more than stick figures. No matter what Chris drew, it looked real. Years after Mom died, he drew this for Grandma Hinkle for Mother’s Day.”
Opening the satchel again, Jared pulled out an eight-by-ten gold frame and handed it to me. Inside was a pencil drawing of Sue Danielson’s face, so true to life that it took my breath away. The hand-drawn image could just as well have been a photograph.
“He drew it from memory,” Jared said, answering my next question before it was asked.
I studied the picture for a time in silence. Chris had captured all of Sue’s features, including the direct gaze in her eyes and the determined set of her jaw. At the time I knew her, Sue was a struggling single mom with a complex job, two kids, and far too much on her plate. I don’t remember ever seeing her smile, but in her son’s re-creation of her, there was a hint of a smile playing around the corners of her lips.
“No, Jared,” I said, handing the portrait back to him, “I think you’re wrong. I don’t believe Chris drew this from memory. This drawing of your mother came straight from his heart.”
Jared stayed on for the next couple of hours, telling me everything he’d learned and everything he could remember. Somewhere along the way, it dawned on me that we’d both missed lunch, so I went out to the kitchen and whipped up a couple of grilled-cheese sandwiches.
Listening to Jared’s recitation of his investigation so far, I realized that although he might have been a priest, he was also a young priest. Including his tracking down that physical copy of The Log, all his research had been done online, where he’d found no trace of Chris since his sudden disappearance during the second semester of his senior year in high school. Back then Facebook was in its infancy. There was no such thing as Instagram or YouTube. In fact, Jared couldn’t say for sure if Chris even had a cell phone. If he’d owned one, knowing when and where it was last used might have provided a clue as to his whereabouts, but without access to the number that avenue was closed to us.