In case you’re wondering about that distant rumble you just heard, it wasn’t thunder. It was the sound of Melissa Soames lowering the boom. In my mind’s eye, nothing has changed, and I’m still perfectly capable of doing all the things I used to do. Usually a glance in the mirror is enough to correct that misapprehension, but right that second there were no mirrors handy, and even though her remark might have come as a blow to my ego, I knew she was right. I wasn’t in any better shape to deal with a foot or so of snow than our Sun Belt–raised Irish wolfhound was. Male pride, or maybe just plain cussedness, meant that I couldn’t concede the point without at least voicing an objection.
“I’ll look into it,” I grumbled, “but I’m not making any promises.”
Our conversation was winding down. “Sarah and I miss you,” Mel said. It was her understated way of apologizing for hurting my feelings, and I accepted it as such.
“I miss you, too,” I said, “but I feel like I need to be here. If Jared hadn’t taken my advice, grabbed Chris, run for their lives that night, there’s a good chance that Chris’s son, Christopher James, would never have been born. So I feel like I owe him and Danitza, too. It’s as though I’ve been personally designated to give Chris Danielson’s family a final answer as to what happened to him.”
“What a surprise!” Mel said with a laugh. “After all, isn’t that exactly what you’ve been doing for most of your adult life—providing those kinds of answers to grieving families?”
And as soon as she said it, I knew it was true. I was spending that night in snowy Anchorage doing exactly what I was supposed to do—finding out once and for all what had happened to Chris Danielson, not only for his still-grieving lover and fatherless child but also for someone who was no longer with us—for my former partner, Sue Danielson. She deserved answers every bit as much as they did.
So now, instead of having one pro bono client, I had three—Jared, Danitza, and Sue Danielson. I’ll give you one guess which one was most important.
Chapter 10
I awakened the next morning to a dark sky and the sounds of dead silence. You don’t realize that you’re hearing a constant din of traffic in the background until all of a sudden it isn’t there. The room was so dark I thought it had to be the middle of the night, but the bedside clock said 8:05. I got out of bed, hurried over to the window, and looked outside. It had stopped snowing, all right, but by the light from the still-glowing streetlights I could see that cars parked on the street below were literally buried in snow, and if the pavement had been plowed at all overnight, evidence of that was no longer visible. A quick glance at the local news told me that due to the storm schools were closed and all but essential workers were advised to stay home.
Great, I thought. Just what I need. I’ll be stuck here at the hotel all day and won’t be able to accomplish a damned thing.
With that unhappy thought in mind, I threw on some clothes and went down to breakfast. If the kitchen was going to run out of supplies, I wanted to be sure I had something to eat well before that happened. While I was eating, I heard a few sounds of machinery moving outside on the street level, so someone had finally gotten out the snowplows after all. Better late than never.
I went back to my room determined to let my fingers do the walking, since due to the snow being out and about didn’t appear to be an option. I had those three guys to look up in Anchorage, but until I had a better idea about driving conditions, there was no point in attempting to make appointments with any of them. Instead, realizing that police officers are considered to be essential workers, I picked up my phone, checked my contacts list, and dialed a number at Anchorage PD. Then I waited for Detective Hank Frazier to pick up the phone.
As a homicide cop or as an investigator for Special Homicide, I was pretty much assured of a cordial response when calling in to unfamiliar police departments. As a private investigator? Not so much. Since Homer PD was a totally unknown entity as far as I was concerned and because I wanted a positive result, I felt the need to have an intermediary, and Hank Frazier was it.
A couple of years earlier, while still employed at SHIT, I had teamed up with him on a case where a guy named Winston Hale had murdered both his mother and stepfather before fleeing to Alaska. Because the parents were retired and lived in a cabin out in the boonies, the homicide wasn’t discovered for several days. The son’s name came up early on, because friends and neighbors knew that he despised his mother and hated his stepfather even more, but by the time he was on law enforcement’s radar, the killer had already fled Washington State and flown to Anchorage. Frazier was the guy who had picked up the Alaska end of the investigation. Between us, and without ever meeting in person, we’d managed to bring Hale to justice. A year after being given two life-without-parole sentences and being remanded to the Monroe Correctional Complex, Hale committed suicide—thus sparing taxpayers a lifetime’s worth of trouble and expense.