“Wait,” I said. “What’s this about an apology?”
“As soon as I saw your card this morning, I recognized your name.” Nitz paused and gave me a piercing look. “You’re the detective who urged Jared to grab Chris and leave the house the night their parents died, right?”
I nodded. “Guilty as charged.”
“Chris and I talked a lot about that night,” Danitza said. “He was still a little kid when it happened, and that terrible event haunted him. He was angry that his parents were dead, and why wouldn’t he be? When he was shipped off to Ohio to live with his maternal grandparents, things got worse. He was rebellious and acting out. By the time I met him, he was starting to feel guilty about how much trouble he’d given his grandmother before he finally ran away and came to live with his other grandparents in Homer.
“While he was living in Ohio, his mother’s parents only told him their daughter’s side of the story. Once he got to Homer, his father’s family did the opposite. They filled him full of his father’s point of view. The Danielsons claimed that Richie was the real victim—that he’d been driven to do what he did because Sue was such a poor excuse for a wife and mother.”
“So one set of grandparents said one thing and the other ones said something else?” I asked.
Danitza nodded. “Which meant Chris ended up not knowing who or what to believe. Not only that. To begin with I believe Chris was under the impression that if he and Jared hadn’t left the house that night—if they had still been there—they could somehow have prevented what happened.”
With the horrendous scene from my recent nightmare still fresh in my mind, I shook my head.
“That’s not true,” I declared. “When Richard Danielson turned up at Sue’s house that night, he came armed to the teeth. I’m pretty sure that before he ever set foot inside, he had already made up his mind about what was going to happen. I believe that if the boys had been there, Richie would have murdered them right along with their mother.” I paused for a moment before continuing. “Did you know that Sue was my partner in the homicide unit at Seattle PD?” I asked.
Nitz nodded. “Once Chris and I started talking about it, I made it my business to look up everything I could find about that night. The fact that the two of you were partners was mentioned in one of the articles I read online.”
“Take it from me, Sue Danielson was a terrific partner and an amazing mother,” I said. “No matter what Richard’s parents might have told Chris about his father, the man was a violent and abusive drunk. He was also up to his eyeteeth in the drug trade.”
Nitz nodded. “I found out about that, too,” she told me. “Back then the Web wasn’t what it is now, but I was able to track down several news accounts written at the time, and those made his involvement in drug dealing pretty clear. Chris was stunned when I told him about it. Somehow Grandpa and Grandma Danielson had neglected to mention anything about that. As far as I’m concerned, what they did to Chris was nothing short of brainwashing.”
I have to say I was impressed. When all this had happened, Chris and Danitza had both been teenagers, seventeen and sixteen years of age respectively, yet it sounded as though they had discussed some pretty serious stuff.
“You cared for him a lot, didn’t you?” I suggested quietly.
She nodded.
“How did the two of you meet—at school?”
Nitz smiled and shook her head. “Not at school. As far as school was concerned, we were never in the same class and ran in totally different circles.”
With that, Danitza rose from her chair, walked over to a bookshelf, and retrieved what I assumed to be another framed photograph. When she handed it to me, however, I realized that it wasn’t a photo at all. Instead it was a pencil drawing of Danitza, not as she was now but as she must have been back then—pert, cute, and sweet, with glowing eyes and a bright smile illuminating her face. I was instantly reminded of the pencil portrait Chris had done of his mother.
“He drew this for you?” I asked.
She nodded. “He was working in a restaurant at the time.”
That’s when I noticed that the image had been drawn on something that looked like a used paper place mat, complete with a circular brownish stain from what was probably the bottom of a coffee cup. Under the drawing was a hand-scrawled message: “Would you like to hang out sometime?”
I gave the drawing back to Danitza. “Sounds like a killer of an opening line to me,” I said with a smile, “the kind of invitation no right-thinking girl could possibly refuse.”