Page 76 of Den of Iniquity

Mel started shaking her head. “You can’t be serious,” she said. “You’re going to spend this much on a quilt on a hunch that the person who made it is your killer?”

“Go big or go home,” I said. “Besides, what I’m really buying is the DNA.”

With the decision made, I scrolled down to the “contact us” part of the web page and sent an email.

My wife’s birthday is next week. She loves your Space Needle silhouette. Is that quilt still available? If so, would it be possiblefor me to purchase it and then drop by to pick it up rather than having it shipped? I’d be glad to drive down from Bellingham to get it as soon as possible.

Beau Beaumont

As I pressed send, I was somewhat leery about having used my real name for fear she might remember me from days past when I was with Seattle PD, but that couldn’t be helped. I intended to pay for the purchase with my credit card, which would have my name on it, too. If she somehow made the connection to Scotty, I was fully prepared to pass him off as my beloved nephew.

Once that was done and since it was too late to call, I sent Todd an email asking him to do a complete background check on Constance Herzog and on her father, too, since I had reason to suspect that if she’d grown up in a family plagued by domestic violence, that might be the source of her intense interest in the same.

After sending both messages off into the ethers, I had crossed my fingers and Mel and I had gone to bed.

There was no response to either of my emails when I got up on Sunday morning, and the same held true by the time we finished our Eggo breakfast. I was doing the Sunday crosswords when an email alert came in from Ron Peters, and it wasn’t good news.

No luck on moving the needle on your cases. The powers that be in Homicide are concerned that if they reopen those three without having an actual named suspect, it’ll unleash a flood of similar claims.

Sorry I couldn’t do more right now, but keep me posted.

Ron

Disappointment must have shown on my face.

“What?” Mel asked.

I read Ron’s email aloud.

“So what’s the problem?” Mel asked. “If your suspicions about Constance Herzog are right, you’re about to do exactly what they’re asking—you’ll be handing over a named suspect. Once you provide them with that along with her DNA and the physical evidence linking the three cases together, they won’t have any choice. They’ll have to reopen them if for no other reason than to mark them closed.”

That’s the thing about Mel. She manages to cut straight to the heart of the matter, as in, go ahead and solve them already! Now all I had to do was wait to hear back on my proposed purchase of a Constance Herzog original, but I’m not much good at sitting around waiting. In the old days I would have passed the time by belting down a shot or two of McNaughton’s. Instead I took Sarah for a walk.

We were heading back to the barn when a call came in from Marisa Young. I answered with a question. “Where are you?”

“Back home in Fountain Hills,” she said. “My flight from Portland was first thing this morning. I just got back from Sky Harbor and wanted to let you know what’s going on.”

“How was it?” I asked, more than half dreading the answer.

“It was amazing!” Marisa told me. “Absolutely amazing. I was sitting in the bar by the fireplace when she came into the room. I saw her stop and look around, and then she walked straight over to me. ‘I know you,’ she said. Then she reached into her bag and pulled out the teddy bear. ‘You’re the one who gave me this!’

“I couldn’t believe that she still had it,” Marisa continued. “Andthe fact that she recognized my face blew me away. She sat down, and we spent the next ten minutes crying. The people in the bar probably thought we were nuts, sitting there bawling like a pair of babies over a tattered, one-eared, one-eyed teddy bear. So thank you, Beau, for making that embarrassing crying jag possible.”

It was not the answer I had been expecting.

“Did I ever mention that I spent fifteen years as a high school guidance counselor?” Marisa asked after a momentary pause.

“Not that I remember. Why?”

“Because,” she replied, “that’s a job that requires an ability to recognize the difference between someone who’s telling the truth and someone who’s lying. Given Serena’s history, I was expecting that she’d try feeding me a bunch of bull, but she didn’t. She told me about the night she woke up with someone pounding on the door and being rushed out of the house and into a car, and all the while she was holding on to her teddy bear.

“Over the years she kept asking her mother about what happened to the ‘nice lady in that other house,’ the one who gave her the teddy bear. Her mother claimed that Serena was mistaken and there wasn’t any ‘nice lady’—that she was the one who had given her Mindy.”

Yup, I thought,sounds like WITSEC all right.

“They ended up living a tough life. Tricia worked the streets. From the time Serena was five or so, she remembers being left home alone at night with no supervision. At school there was a lot of bullying because she ate free lunches and wore clothing from Goodwill. And it was one of the kids at school who told her that her mother didn’t have a real job—that she was a prostitute.”

By then, Sarah and I were back inside the house. Since Mel wasnowhere in sight, I guessed she was probably doing her Sunday stint in the soaking tub. As I shed my jacket, my face flushed with embarrassment over law enforcement’s involvement in all this. Only a mindless, faceless government bureaucracy would think it would be a good safety measure to dump a young single mom on the opposite side of the country in a place where she had no friends or relations to offer support. I had been a homicide cop as opposed to a school guidance counselor, but I, too, could see this story had the ring of truth about it.

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