“Correct, “ I agreed, “which makes it all the more likely that the skeletal remains in Harriet Raines’s lab are his and nobody else’s.”
“Have you heard anything from Gretchen at the crime lab about Jared’s DNA profile?”
“Not so far, and I don’t really expect to,” I replied. “After all the uproar over the lab’s mishandling of evidence in the Mateo Vega case, I’m sure she’s going a hundred percent by the book—crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s. Once Gretchen has the profile in hand, it’ll go straight to Professor Raines, but Harriet strikes me as a straight shooter. As soon as she has the information, she’ll forward it to the Alaska State Troopers, but I’m betting she’ll let me know, too.”
“Still,” Mel said, “the instant the remains come back to Chris, you’ll be booted off the case. What’ll you do then?”
“Come home,” I said. “Alaska’s a beautiful place, if you like snow, but I wouldn’t want to live here, at least not in the winter.”
“That makes two of us,” Mel said with a laugh, “so what are you and Twink doing for dinner?”
“I’m on my own.”
“How come?”
“She’s not staying here. The rooms are all nonsmoking. There’s a breakfast room here at the hotel, but no real restaurant. The girl at the desk said there’s a steak house across the street. I’ll probably grab a bite there before I hit the hay.”
We talked for a while after that, exchanging meaningless pleasantries the way married people do. It wasn’t so much about what was being said as it was that we were chatting. The truth is, I’ve become something of a homebody of late, and I would much rather have been home in Bellingham and in front of the fireplace with Mel and Sarah that cold winter’s night instead of hanging out on my own at the Driftwood Inn in Homer, Alaska.
When the phone call ended, I turned on the TV set briefly, but there wasn’t anything scheduled that I found remotely interesting. By then it was almost eight. Those Ziggy Specials were now a long way in the rearview mirror. I got dressed, bundled up, and made my way across the street to AJ’s OldTown Steakhouse & Tavern. If you’re looking for white linen tablecloths and crystal glassware, AJ’s isn’t the place for you, but it worked for me. I ordered a ginger ale, a house salad, and a small plate of what the menu referred to as “drunken clams drowning in a white wine, garlic, butter sauce.” As long as the clams were the ones swilling down the white wine and I wasn’t, we were good to go.
I was done with dinner and considering my dessert options when my phone rang.
“Hey, Todd,” I said. “How’s it going?”
“I’ve been working the Shelley Loveday Adams problem, and I just hit on something interesting.”
Todd sounded excited enough that it piqued my curiosity. “What?” I asked.
“On April seventh, 2006, Shelley Loveday was involved in a minor traffic incident in Las Vegas, Nevada. There was evidently a big pileup on the Strip. The accident probably wasn’t her fault, but she rear-ended somebody and came away with a DUI conviction. It was a first offense. She probably could have taken a safe-driving course and had the citation removed from her record. Instead she let it ride, and that’s why I was able to find it.”
“The timing’s pretty interesting,” I said. “That’s only a week or so after Chris disappeared.”
“Exactly,” Todd agreed. “So I checked with the major hotels in Vegas. Turns out Shelley Loveday was staying in a suite at Caesars Palace, the kind of accommodations casinos usually reserve for and routinely comp to their high rollers.”
Suddenly I was making the same connection that Todd had. Shelley had told me straight out that Roger had paid Chris off in order to encourage him to disappear. She’d also mentioned that the payment would have been made from the “just in case” funds that Roger stowed in the safe at home. But what if Roger hadn’t made the payment in person? What if he’d used a courier to make the payoff and had delegated his mistress to deliver the goods?
After all, what about that unidentified woman Bill Farmdale had told me about, the one claiming car trouble who’d shown up at the back door of Zig’s Place the night Chris disappeared? What if Roger had dispatched his mistress to deliver the payoff money to Chris but she’d pulled a fast one? What if while Chris was working on her car, she’d attacked him from behind? With him on the ground and her standing over him, she would have been at the proper angle to deliver that fatal blow, the results of which were still visible in Harriet Raines’s patched-together skull. As for Chris? In that position he would have been totally oblivious to the danger and completely unable to defend himself.