“What?” I asked.
“I believe, between the two of us, that we might have just identified this one as your missing Christopher Danielson.”
I couldn’t help but be amazed. When I started out in homicide, the best forensics could do was type any blood found at crime scenes. Blood typing eliminated some suspects but did nothing to identify the actual perpetrators. And although fingerprint evidence was often collected, the only prints it could be compared to were those on file cards stored in local police agencies. There was no such thing as a CODIS, the Combined DNA Identification System. And the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, AFIS, was still in its infancy. Under those circumstances the remains of unidentified homicide victims, those Harriet designated as UUs, were destined to remain just that—unidentified and unsolved.
Nodding in agreement, I stared down at the empty skull and thought about the little boy I’d last seen years earlier at his mother’s fallen-officer memorial. The Hinkles had brought both boys to the event wearing matching black suits with clip-on bow ties. The realization that I was most likely looking down on the only earthly remains of Sue Danielson’s younger son hit me like a punch in the gut. I was relieved when Harriet silently returned the lid to the box, shutting the skull from view. Then she reached over and laid a comforting hand on my arm.
“The water in the kettle should be hot by now,” she suggested. “Let’s go have that cup of coffee.”
A small kitchen table and two chairs sat in what evidently served as a break area. I stumbled over to one of those, dropped down onto it, and rested my elbows on the table. I’m not sure how long I sat there with my head buried in my hands while once again, as I had done countless times before, I second-guessed all my actions from that awful night years earlier. If I’d made different choices and decisions back then, would Christopher Danielson have led a completely different life? In fact, maybe if I’d simply stayed out of it and let things play out, Chris would still be among the living and so would his mother.
That merry-go-round of useless thoughts was still spinning in my head when a steaming cup of coffee appeared in my line of vision as Harriet set it down on the table directly in front of me. The coffee inside was black, all right, and strong as it could be. Once I raised it to my lips, it turned out to be by far the vilest cup of coffee I’ve ever tasted but also the kindest. A moment later a second cup was placed on the table across from me with Harriet Raines’s lined and weathered face forming a backdrop.
“Why don’t you tell me about what happened to your partner?” she urged quietly.
That’s when I remembered what Hank Frazier had said about her—that Harriet Raines was someone who knew all and saw all, and maybe it was true. So I told her the story then—the whole story from beginning to bitter end. I related each action I’d taken that night and explained how those actions had affected what came later. I regaled Harriet with every detail of the incident that had shown up in the official police reports, but along with those, I related the rest of the story, too. I had told Mel about it, but this was the first time I told anyone else.
The official determination was that that Sue Danielson had perished as a result of homicidal violence at the hands of her estranged former husband, Richie Danielson, but for me there had always been that other thing lurking just in the background, so I told Harriet about that as well—about how, in the process of recovering the stolen bones of an indigenous medicine man, Sue had somehow become targeted by an age-old curse. I might have been a homicide cop, but strange as it may seem, I’d never been able to shake the lingering idea that, in some way I didn’t understand, the medicine man’s curse was ultimately the root cause of Sue’s death.
Over the years that idea had seemed so off the wall and woo-woo that I’d never discussed it. As for why I spit it out now, after all these years? I don’t really know, but it seemed to me as though Harriet Raines might be someone who understood that part of the story, and I wasn’t wrong.
“Mishandling the bones of a powerful medicine man can indeed be dangerous,” she commented softly once I finished. “But let me assure you, Beau, nothing you did or didn’t do that night would have made the slightest difference in the outcome. Sue Danielson’s death wasn’t your fault, and neither is her son’s.”
In that moment I felt something I had never expected to feel about what happened that awful night—a sense of forgiveness—of self-forgiveness.