She said the words with a totally straight face and then leveled an icy stare in my direction as if waiting to see how I would react. I felt as though I were undergoing some kind of evaluation. Depending on whether I arrived at the correct response, Professor Raines would either help me or tell me to piss off.
“This one may be colder than others,” I said. “It’s from 2006.”
A glint of interest appeared in her otherwise expressionless eyes. She set down the glass. “An Alaska case dating from ’06?” she asked.
I nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I believe so.”
“Have a seat, then,” she invited, waving at a chair. “Just put that junk on the floor. And none of this ‘ma’am’ crap, please. Most people call me Harry.”
As far as I’m concerned, the name Harry now and forever belongs to Harry Ignatius Ball, aka Harry I. Ball, my old boss at Special Homicide. “If you don’t mind, I’ll call you Harriet.”
“Fine with me,” she said with a shrug, “and you are?”
“J.P.,” I said, “either that or Beau. Take your pick.”
“I’ll opt for J.P.,” she said.
Since I evidently had just passed some critical point in Harriet Raines’s acceptance process, I did as I’d been told by clearing the nearest chair and taking a seat.
“Tell me about your case,” she said, and so I did.
“In 2006 a kid from Homer disappeared off the face of the earth.”
Harriet nodded. “Your missing-persons case,” she said. “What’s the name?”
“Chris—Christopher Danielson. He was seventeen at the time he went missing. The problem is, this isn’t officially a missing-persons case because he’s never been reported missing.”
“What exactly happened?”
“Chris’s family life was complicated. When he was younger, his father murdered his mother. That happened down in Seattle. His folks were divorced at the time of the homicide, and his mother, Sue Danielson, was my partner at Seattle PD.”
I’m not sure why I added that last bit, but somehow I felt a sudden need to provide full disclosure.
“So this is personal for you, then,” Harriet Raines observed, nodding sagely.
“Yes,” I agreed. “I suppose it is.”
“Go on,” she urged.
“After the deaths of their parents, Chris and his older brother, Jared, went to live with their maternal grandparents in Ohio. That lasted until Chris was about thirteen. At that point he ran away from home and came to Alaska to live with his father’s parents in Homer. At the time he went missing from Homer, he was estranged from all his surviving grandparents. He’d dropped out of school, but he evidently had a serious girlfriend, a sixteen-year-old girl named Danitza Adams. The night Chris went missing, Danitza had just discovered she was pregnant. Unfortunately, so had her parents.”
“Sounds like there was a good deal of family drama going on at the time,” Harriet surmised.
I nodded. “You could say that. Danitza and her parents had a huge row. It was serious enough that when it was over, she packed up and left home that very night. She went to the place where Chris had been living and waited, expecting him to show up after work. When he didn’t, she hitchhiked from Homer to Anchorage, where she moved in with an aunt and uncle. They looked out for her, and Danitza stayed with them up to and after the time her baby was born. Chris had been telling her that he was hoping to save enough money to go back to Ohio and fix the rift with his maternal grandmother. When Chris disappeared without a word, Danitza assumed that’s what had happened—that he’d gone back to Ohio. As a result she never reported him as missing. The problem is, neither did anyone else.
“This week Chris’s older brother, Jared, contacted me asking for help in locating him. The grandmother in Ohio is evidently close to death and hoping for a reconciliation.”
“So everybody in Ohio thought Chris was in Alaska,” Harriet put in, “while everyone in Alaska thought he was in Ohio.”
“That’s about the size of it,” I acknowledged.
“If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” she said, giving me a piercing look accompanied by a wry smile. “Since you’re a homicide cop—an ex–homicide cop—I suppose everything looks like a murder. Does this seem like a homicide to you?”
“You’ve got me there,” I admitted. “That’s what I suspect—that Chris was murdered.”