I sent Sarah back to the living room, ordering her to wait on the rug before I opened the door. Thanks to her academy training, she did exactly as she was told.
“May I help you?” I asked the stranger out front.
“Detective Beaumont?” he said.
People who know me now don’t call me that, so obviously this was a voice out of my past.
“Yes,” I replied uncertainly.
“You probably don’t remember me. I’m Jared,” he said, “Jared Danielson—Father Danielson now. I hope you’ll forgive me for stopping by without calling first.”
The name “Jared Danielson” took my breath away and opened a window on one of the darkest days of my life. I needed a moment to gather myself after that. It had been close to twenty years since I’d last seen him.
“Why, of course, Jared, you’re more than welcome,” I said hastily, offering him my hand and ushering him into the house. “So good to see you. How are you, and what are you doing these days?”
He stepped inside and stood there on the entryway rug, stomping off the ice and snow that had clung to his boots. “I’m here because I need your help, Detective Beaumont,” he said.
The last time I’d seen Jared Danielson was years earlier when he’d been a lanky kid of thirteen who had just lost his mother. Now he was a well-built grown man, but a shadow of that long-ago tragedy still lingered in his eyes.
“Call me Beau,” I told him. “I stopped being Detective Beaumont a long time ago. Come have a seat and a cup of coffee while you tell me what you’ve been up to since I saw you last. Black or cream and sugar?”
“Black is fine,” he said.
As I walked Jared Danielson into the house, it seemed as though all my recently installed holiday cheer had instantly vanished. Suddenly I was traveling through time and space into a very dark place in my life, headed somewhere I definitely didn’t want to go—a hell I had visited in nightmares countless times through the intervening years.
First there is an explosion of gunfire from somewhere out of sight. When nothing more happens, I realize the bad guy is dead and turn back to check on my partner. Shot in the gut, a bloodied Sue Danielson sits leaning against a living-room wall. She is holding my backup Glock in one hand, with the weapon resting on her upper thigh. As I watch in horror, her fingers slowly go limp and the gun slips soundlessly to the floor.
In real life that’s when I knew for sure that Sue was gone. Her ex, Richard Danielson, had shot her dead.
Chapter 2
While I fussed with the coffee machine to give myself some emotional distance, Jared Danielson seemed to make himself at home. He wandered over to the westward-facing windows and stared out at our water view. When he dropped down to one knee and gave Sarah a pat on the head, she acknowledged the gesture by thumping her tail.
“I’ve always liked Irish wolfhounds,” he said. “What’s her name?”
“Sarah,” I replied. “She’s a rescue.”
Straightening up, he caught sight of a framed photo on the mantel. It’s a photo of my granddaughter, Athena, and Lucy. Both of them are sound asleep, with Athena’s head resting on the dog’s massive shoulder.
“A grandchild and Sarah’s sister?” Jared asked as I carried a loaded serving tray into the living room and set it down on the coffee table. My hands were shaking badly enough that I’m surprised I didn’t slop coffee in every direction.
“You’ve got the grandchild part right,” I told him. “Her name’s Athena. The dog is a previous wolfie—Lucy. We adopted her, but she ended up adopting Athena. They live in Texas now.”
By the time Jared and I were both seated on the sofa, I had a better handle on myself. “So,” I said, “I believe the last time I saw you was at your mother’s fallen-officer memorial.”
I remembered that event distinctly. After Sue’s death her parents had flown in for the memorial service from somewhere in the Midwest—Ohio, I seemed to remember. The grandparents, whose names I had somehow forgotten, had taken Sue’s boys—Jared and his younger brother—back home with them. Right that minute I couldn’t recall the brother’s name either, but they had all flown back into town months later to participate in the ceremony when Sue’s name was added to Seattle PD’s memorial wall in downtown Seattle.
“I believe you said at the time that you might want to be a policeman when you grew up,” I added.
Cops learn to read faces. It’s something that’s drilled into your head starting on your first day in the academy, and there are times over the course of a career when being able to capture and decode a fleeting expression on a suspect’s face can mean the difference between life and death. I saw the muscles in Jared’s jawline twitch. He chewed on his lower lip for a moment before he spoke.