Den of iniquity, p.22
Den of Iniquity, page 22
“Thanks, Beth,” I told her. “Let me know what you find out, and I’ll do the same on this end.”
Detective Miller called back ten minutes later. “I can see where the serial number is supposed to be,” he began.
“But it’s been ground off, right?” I asked.
“Right.”
“Same thing over in Liberty Lake. Detective Byrd is going to submit hers to the crime lab in Spokane tomorrow morning to see if they can retrieve it. Spaulding’s death was ruled undetermined, so she doesn’t have to wait around for the case to be reopened.”
“I don’t, either,” Detective Miller told me. “I checked with the chief on my way past. Five questionable deaths with two hundred-dollar bills left as calling cards were enough to convince him. Delgado’s death may still be a suicide as far as the M.E. is concerned, but it’s been reopened here at the Kent Police Department. Marty, my partner, actually lives in Seattle. I’ll have him drop the pen off at the crime lab on his way home tonight so they can check it out.”
“Great,” I said. “Keep me posted.”
“Will do,” he said. “You do the same.”
I put the phone down with a real sense of exhilaration. The three related Seattle cases still remained closed, but two of the other ones were back on track. With any kind of luck, maybe the others would fall into place as well.
Kyle was over by the kitchen island making himself a bologna sandwich. Mel has never approved of our having bologna around, but when Kyle had come dragging it home from Costco, she had made an exception to that rule.
“Making any progress?” Kyle asked.
“As a matter of fact I am,” I assured him. “On these cases and on yours as well.”
“Really?” he wanted to know. “What’s going on with mine?”
So I told him about the call from Marisa and about her plan to meet up with Caroline Richards in Portland on Saturday. Kyle listened in silence, but by the time I finished, he was frowning.
“If Caroline’s finally getting a chance to meet up with her family, that should be good news, but you don’t sound very happy about it.”
“Because I’m not,” I admitted. “Rather than tell your father the truth, Caroline told your dad that she’s meeting up with an old school chum instead of with her mother’s sister.”
“So she’s lying to him,” Kyle surmised.
“She’s still lying to him,” I corrected. “And if that’s the case, what’s to keep her from lying to Marisa as well? I have a bad feeling that your father’s going to be hurt real bad before all this is over, and I hope Marisa Young doesn’t end up in the same boat.”
Kyle finished polishing off the last of his sandwich and then gave me a quizzical look. “Any idea what’s for dinner?” he asked.
That wasn’t too surprising. After all, he’s still a growing boy, but slick as can be, I dodged the what’s-for-dinner bullet. “I’m meeting Mel for a late lunch,” I told him, “and I’ll see what she has to say.”
“Please,” Kyle said, “but whatever you do, don’t let her make any more curry.”
“Trust me on that,” I said, “I’ll do my best.”
Chapter 31
Bellingham, Washington
Friday, March 6, 2020
Before meeting Mel for lunch, I turned to my email account; sixty-four more interview transcriptions had arrived from Elena, along with a separate one stating that those were all the ones she had at present. Ben Weston and Sandra Sechrest were continuing to make good progress going through the case files I was sending them. Between them they had flagged five more files for further study, but Yolanda had yet to notify me if any of those people had consented to additional interviews.
I met up with Mel at our favorite daytime hangout, Jack and Jill’s, an old-fashioned diner two blocks from Mel’s office. Today marked three weeks since Kyle had unexpectedly shown up in our lives. Sitting in a booth together, just the two of us, seemed special somehow—almost like a date. And having a homey meal that required no advance planning on either of our parts was like going on vacation. It also gave us a chance to talk, one-on-one.
For Mel, the breast-fondling situation at the high school was boiling over. When her detectives had done a canvass of current students involved in the school’s music program, eleven more female students had come forward with inappropriate touching complaints.
“George Pritchard has been at Bellingham High for the past five years, so there are probably additional victims who have either graduated, transferred to another school, or dropped out. I also had one of my investigators contact the school district in Sacramento where Pritchard taught prior to coming here. It would appear that he left there under some kind of cloud, but so far no one’s willing to share any details. The district didn’t out and out fire him, but they also didn’t discourage him from leaving.”
“No wonder no one’s talking,” I said. “Instead of dealing with the problem straight out, they sent a guy who should have been unmasked as a sex offender along to some other unsuspecting school district where he’s had access to a whole new set of victims.”
“Right,” Mel said bitterly. “And now he’s my problem instead of theirs. I’ll be talking to the county attorney this afternoon to see if he’s willing to swear out an arrest warrant. The thing is, Pritchard has a wife and two school-age kids who most likely have no idea about who he really is, so putting him in jail will be hell on them, too.”
I nodded my head in agreement. That’s something I had come to realize over the years. Whenever I arrested a killer, the victims’ families were always adversely affected by whatever crime had been committed, but there were often plenty of injured innocent bystanders among the offenders’ loved ones as well. It was about then that I realized that same dynamic was currently at work in my own family. Jeremy Cartwright was the one who was screwing around on his wife, but Kelly, Kayla, and Kyle were all suffering the consequences.
“I don’t remember stuff like this happening back when I was a kid,” I muttered.
“I’m pretty sure pedophiles have always been with us,” Mel said. “The big difference is that back in your day, girls—and boys, too—were far more reticent about coming forward.”
Put in my place but realizing she was right, I sat back and took the front tip off a piece of Jill’s incomparable lemon meringue pie.
“Thanks for reminding me that I’m a grouchy old man,” I said.
“Grouchy on occasion, yes,” Mel told me, “but pretty darned nice most of the time.”
Buoyed by that last remark, I was on my way home from lunch when a call came in from Lulu Benson.
“I’ve got a familial hit on that unidentified female profile your friend Gretchen Walther sent over.”
“Boy, lady,” I said. “You’re batting a thousand. How close a match?”
“Second cousin. Your unidentified female DNA belongs to this woman’s mother’s first cousin.”
“Where is she from?”
“Lexington, Kentucky.”
“That’s a hell of a long way from Seattle,” I commented.
“Yes, it is,” Lulu agreed. “She posted her DNA on GEDmatch, looking for her mother’s long-lost cousin. Do you want her name and number or not?”
I hesitated for a moment. By rights, this had to do with Detective Elizabeth Byrd’s open homicide investigation, and I should probably have turned it over to her to begin with, but it was my longtime connection to Gretchen Walther that had made the hit possible.
“Of course I want her number,” I replied.
Lulu laughed. “Somehow I thought you would,” she said.
Thirty seconds later I was introducing myself to Harriet Bonham of Lexington, Kentucky, someone with a very interesting tale to tell. Once I got her on the phone and introduced myself, she was happy to share the story of the man who ended up becoming the celebrated black sheep of her family.
“William Landon was my mother’s favorite cousin,” she said. “I grew up hearing stories about him, about how Mom and Billy used to play together when they were kids—climbing trees, building forts, swimming in the lake on my grandfather’s farm. Mom was born in 1927. Billy was a year older. She always talked about how smart he was and how handsome. After his older brother Frank died in childhood, his folks expected that eventually Billy would step up and take over running the family farm, but he wasn’t interested in farming. He left home and joined the army as soon as he turned eighteen.”
“Just in time for the tail end of World War II?” I asked.
“He wasn’t overseas for all that long, but Mom said he was a different person when he came home, and they were never close again. He moved to Cincinnati, got married, and had a couple of kids. By the midfifties he was driving an armored car for Brinks. In 1956 there was a robbery. Three men were involved, and Billy was one of them. He took off before the cops figured out it was an inside job. The other two guys ended up going to prison. Billy vanished without a trace.”
“And got away with the money,” I suggested.
“How did you know that?”
“Lucky guess,” I said.
“How did you make the connection back to me?” Harriet wanted to know.
“We got a hit from unidentified DNA found at the scene of a crime,” I told her. Two separate ones, in fact, but there was no need to go into that.
“What kind of crime?” Harriet asked. “Billy was born in 1926. That would make him close to a hundred years old by now. How’s it even possible that he’s still going around committing crimes?”
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “That information is a part of an ongoing police investigation, and I’m unable to comment at this time.”
There was a short silence between us before the reality dawned on her. “It must be one of his children then,” she surmised, “or maybe even one of his grandchildren. He abandoned a wife and kids when he left Ohio. She got a divorce and eventually remarried, and Billy must have done the same thing—starting over someplace else and ending up with a whole new family.”
That was my guess, too, but I didn’t say so. Instead I asked another question. “How much money did he make off with?”
“Four hundred thousand,” she said. “When I started doing research on my own, that’s what the newspaper articles said. I wasn’t even born when it happened, so everything I know about William Landon is secondhand. Every once in a while as a kid, I’d overhear my mother talking with one of her sisters or cousins about Billy, the black sheep of the family. Whenever I tried to ask my mother about him, though, she’d shut me down. It wasn’t until after Mom died that I started looking into what happened. That’s when I connected William Landon with her beloved Cousin Billy. Once I finally got around to googling William Landon’s name, that was the first link that turned up—one to a newspaper article about the Brinks robbery.”
She kept talking but for a time I wasn’t really paying attention, I was too busy thinking. Four hundred thousand dollars would have added up to a hell of a lot of hundred-dollar bills!
“And that got me to wondering,” Harriet was saying when I tuned back in on the conversation. “How did he manage to disappear so completely that the cops were never able to find him? Where did he go? What happened to him? Was he dead or alive?
“I watch a lot of true crime on TV,” she continued. “That’s where I heard about how long-forgotten cold cases are now being solved when relatives of a suspect post their DNA on ancestry databases. According to what I read, GEDmatch is one of the few of those that actually cooperates with law enforcement. That’s why I chose them. I wanted to find out what happened to him after he left Ohio.”
“Thank you for that,” I told her, and I meant it, too. “I can’t tell you how much you’ve helped us already. Apparently we’re dealing with far more than a single cold case—it’s actually several. Once those are solved, Ms. Bonham, I promise that I’ll get back to you with the whole story.”
“You will?”
“Mark my words.”
“And I helped? Really?”
“More than you know,” I replied.
With that I ended the call, but I didn’t put down the phone. Instead, I located my friend Ron Peters’s cell phone number and punched it. That 1956 armored car robbery had to be the source of the hundred-dollar bills that linked all five cases together, and that made me confident that I finally had enough information to compel Seattle PD to reopen those three mislabeled cases. I believed Ron Peters was the guy who could get the job done.
“Hey, Beau,” he said genially when he answered. “It’s been a while. How are things and what are you up to?”
“When you find out why I’m calling,” I told him, “you’re not going to be happy, because I’m about to become a real pain in your ass.”
“When haven’t you been a pain in my ass?” he replied with a laugh. “Tell me about it.”
So I did. Once I got off the phone with him, I called everybody else, too—Ben Weston and Sandy Sechrest at Seattle PD, Elizabeth Byrd in Liberty Lake, Boyce Miller in Kent, Yolanda Aguirre, and even Gretchen Walther from the crime lab. Once all hell broke loose on this, I wanted all of us to be on the same page.
Chapter 32
Bellingham, Washington
Saturday, March 7, 2020
I staggered out of the bedroom on Saturday morning, let Sarah out, and then went to the kitchen to start the coffee. When I found a note from Kyle next to the coffee machine, it was all I could do to keep from grinding my teeth in annoyance.
Out for a driving lesson with Hank. We’re going to grab breakfast somewhere along the way. See you later.
My head filled with visions of his burning up the clutch on Hank’s very expensive automotive antique. I couldn’t help but wonder how much fixing that would cost since I was reasonably sure I’d be the one footing the bill, and I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect. The call that came in from Todd Hatcher a while later did nothing to improve my frame of mind.
“How are things?” he asked when I answered.
“Fine,” I responded. It was one of Mel’s raised eyebrow “fines,” which means the exact opposite, but Todd didn’t pick up on that.
“Well,” he continued, “I’m still searching for any online sign of Lindsey Baylor between that initial arrest at age eighteen and her emergence as Caroline Richards late last year, but I’m coming up empty. No employment records. No tax filings. Her profile is still listed as available on several dating sites, but those didn’t start until after her new ID came online. During all the intervening years, however, there were no postings of her on any social media. I’ve also been unable to locate any further interactions with law enforcement.”
“Is it possible she left the country for that amount of time?” I asked.
“She couldn’t have done so legally,” Todd replied. “She doesn’t have a passport. It’s as though she vanished into thin air.”
Scenarios where someone goes into hiding and emerges seven years later with a brand-new identity often suggest participation in some kind of illegal financial activity, most especially tax evasion. What exactly had Caroline been dodging?
“What the hell was she doing all that time?” I asked aloud.
“Beats me,” Todd replied, “but if it was against the law, she was smart enough not to get caught. I was concerned and wanted you to be aware of that.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Appreciate it.”
As I hung up, it occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one who needed to be brought up to speed on the existence of that seven-year black hole in Caroline Richards’s history. My concern was that she might well be surviving as some kind of serial scammer, and if poor besotted Jeremy was one of her victims, what were the chances she’d do the same thing to her newly found auntie during their reunion in Portland? Not ready to tackle the issue with Jeremy, I tried contacting Marisa Young, but my call went straight to voicemail. I ended up leaving a bland message.
“It’s me, checking in to see how things are going.”
That was enough to let her know that more than two hundred fifty miles away, someone in Bellingham was watching and waiting to see how today’s meeting would turn out.
As for Jeremy? Kyle had told me early on that it was likely his dad had reeled Caroline in by convincing her that he was in far better financial shape than he really was. So what happens when scammer number one discovers he or she is being scammed by scammer number two? Probably not a good outcome for either one of them. With that in mind, I decided to put the call to Jeremy on hold indefinitely in hopes that somehow Marisa would be able to suss out some information about Caroline’s missing years.
Meanwhile, without my noticing, Mel had emerged from the bedroom. I had no idea she was there until she pressed the button, and the coffee machine ground into action.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
Once she joined me in the living room, I gave her a brief overview. She listened thoughtfully. When I finished, she took a sip of her coffee and asked, “How much time passed between the first appearance of Caroline’s new identity and her hooking up with Jeremy?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “It seems to have happened pretty quickly, a couple of months or so. Why?”
“If you’re right about her being a scammer, she’s most likely pulling the oldest trick in the book.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Getting one man to take responsibility for another man’s child.”
Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am!
“Why the hell didn’t I think of that?” I demanded.
Mel favored me with a wry grin. “Maybe because you’re a man?” she suggested. “Most guys fall for that trick hook, line, and sinker, especially ones like Jeremey who are under the mistaken impression that they’re God’s gift to women.”
“But what should I do about it?” I asked.
“For right now, leave well enough alone,” Mel advised. “If you try going into it now, it’ll only make things worse. Once the baby arrives, there’ll be plenty of time to suggest Jeremy might want to consider doing a paternity test. At that point, he’ll have to live with the results one way or the other.”
Detective Miller called back ten minutes later. “I can see where the serial number is supposed to be,” he began.
“But it’s been ground off, right?” I asked.
“Right.”
“Same thing over in Liberty Lake. Detective Byrd is going to submit hers to the crime lab in Spokane tomorrow morning to see if they can retrieve it. Spaulding’s death was ruled undetermined, so she doesn’t have to wait around for the case to be reopened.”
“I don’t, either,” Detective Miller told me. “I checked with the chief on my way past. Five questionable deaths with two hundred-dollar bills left as calling cards were enough to convince him. Delgado’s death may still be a suicide as far as the M.E. is concerned, but it’s been reopened here at the Kent Police Department. Marty, my partner, actually lives in Seattle. I’ll have him drop the pen off at the crime lab on his way home tonight so they can check it out.”
“Great,” I said. “Keep me posted.”
“Will do,” he said. “You do the same.”
I put the phone down with a real sense of exhilaration. The three related Seattle cases still remained closed, but two of the other ones were back on track. With any kind of luck, maybe the others would fall into place as well.
Kyle was over by the kitchen island making himself a bologna sandwich. Mel has never approved of our having bologna around, but when Kyle had come dragging it home from Costco, she had made an exception to that rule.
“Making any progress?” Kyle asked.
“As a matter of fact I am,” I assured him. “On these cases and on yours as well.”
“Really?” he wanted to know. “What’s going on with mine?”
So I told him about the call from Marisa and about her plan to meet up with Caroline Richards in Portland on Saturday. Kyle listened in silence, but by the time I finished, he was frowning.
“If Caroline’s finally getting a chance to meet up with her family, that should be good news, but you don’t sound very happy about it.”
“Because I’m not,” I admitted. “Rather than tell your father the truth, Caroline told your dad that she’s meeting up with an old school chum instead of with her mother’s sister.”
“So she’s lying to him,” Kyle surmised.
“She’s still lying to him,” I corrected. “And if that’s the case, what’s to keep her from lying to Marisa as well? I have a bad feeling that your father’s going to be hurt real bad before all this is over, and I hope Marisa Young doesn’t end up in the same boat.”
Kyle finished polishing off the last of his sandwich and then gave me a quizzical look. “Any idea what’s for dinner?” he asked.
That wasn’t too surprising. After all, he’s still a growing boy, but slick as can be, I dodged the what’s-for-dinner bullet. “I’m meeting Mel for a late lunch,” I told him, “and I’ll see what she has to say.”
“Please,” Kyle said, “but whatever you do, don’t let her make any more curry.”
“Trust me on that,” I said, “I’ll do my best.”
Chapter 31
Bellingham, Washington
Friday, March 6, 2020
Before meeting Mel for lunch, I turned to my email account; sixty-four more interview transcriptions had arrived from Elena, along with a separate one stating that those were all the ones she had at present. Ben Weston and Sandra Sechrest were continuing to make good progress going through the case files I was sending them. Between them they had flagged five more files for further study, but Yolanda had yet to notify me if any of those people had consented to additional interviews.
I met up with Mel at our favorite daytime hangout, Jack and Jill’s, an old-fashioned diner two blocks from Mel’s office. Today marked three weeks since Kyle had unexpectedly shown up in our lives. Sitting in a booth together, just the two of us, seemed special somehow—almost like a date. And having a homey meal that required no advance planning on either of our parts was like going on vacation. It also gave us a chance to talk, one-on-one.
For Mel, the breast-fondling situation at the high school was boiling over. When her detectives had done a canvass of current students involved in the school’s music program, eleven more female students had come forward with inappropriate touching complaints.
“George Pritchard has been at Bellingham High for the past five years, so there are probably additional victims who have either graduated, transferred to another school, or dropped out. I also had one of my investigators contact the school district in Sacramento where Pritchard taught prior to coming here. It would appear that he left there under some kind of cloud, but so far no one’s willing to share any details. The district didn’t out and out fire him, but they also didn’t discourage him from leaving.”
“No wonder no one’s talking,” I said. “Instead of dealing with the problem straight out, they sent a guy who should have been unmasked as a sex offender along to some other unsuspecting school district where he’s had access to a whole new set of victims.”
“Right,” Mel said bitterly. “And now he’s my problem instead of theirs. I’ll be talking to the county attorney this afternoon to see if he’s willing to swear out an arrest warrant. The thing is, Pritchard has a wife and two school-age kids who most likely have no idea about who he really is, so putting him in jail will be hell on them, too.”
I nodded my head in agreement. That’s something I had come to realize over the years. Whenever I arrested a killer, the victims’ families were always adversely affected by whatever crime had been committed, but there were often plenty of injured innocent bystanders among the offenders’ loved ones as well. It was about then that I realized that same dynamic was currently at work in my own family. Jeremy Cartwright was the one who was screwing around on his wife, but Kelly, Kayla, and Kyle were all suffering the consequences.
“I don’t remember stuff like this happening back when I was a kid,” I muttered.
“I’m pretty sure pedophiles have always been with us,” Mel said. “The big difference is that back in your day, girls—and boys, too—were far more reticent about coming forward.”
Put in my place but realizing she was right, I sat back and took the front tip off a piece of Jill’s incomparable lemon meringue pie.
“Thanks for reminding me that I’m a grouchy old man,” I said.
“Grouchy on occasion, yes,” Mel told me, “but pretty darned nice most of the time.”
Buoyed by that last remark, I was on my way home from lunch when a call came in from Lulu Benson.
“I’ve got a familial hit on that unidentified female profile your friend Gretchen Walther sent over.”
“Boy, lady,” I said. “You’re batting a thousand. How close a match?”
“Second cousin. Your unidentified female DNA belongs to this woman’s mother’s first cousin.”
“Where is she from?”
“Lexington, Kentucky.”
“That’s a hell of a long way from Seattle,” I commented.
“Yes, it is,” Lulu agreed. “She posted her DNA on GEDmatch, looking for her mother’s long-lost cousin. Do you want her name and number or not?”
I hesitated for a moment. By rights, this had to do with Detective Elizabeth Byrd’s open homicide investigation, and I should probably have turned it over to her to begin with, but it was my longtime connection to Gretchen Walther that had made the hit possible.
“Of course I want her number,” I replied.
Lulu laughed. “Somehow I thought you would,” she said.
Thirty seconds later I was introducing myself to Harriet Bonham of Lexington, Kentucky, someone with a very interesting tale to tell. Once I got her on the phone and introduced myself, she was happy to share the story of the man who ended up becoming the celebrated black sheep of her family.
“William Landon was my mother’s favorite cousin,” she said. “I grew up hearing stories about him, about how Mom and Billy used to play together when they were kids—climbing trees, building forts, swimming in the lake on my grandfather’s farm. Mom was born in 1927. Billy was a year older. She always talked about how smart he was and how handsome. After his older brother Frank died in childhood, his folks expected that eventually Billy would step up and take over running the family farm, but he wasn’t interested in farming. He left home and joined the army as soon as he turned eighteen.”
“Just in time for the tail end of World War II?” I asked.
“He wasn’t overseas for all that long, but Mom said he was a different person when he came home, and they were never close again. He moved to Cincinnati, got married, and had a couple of kids. By the midfifties he was driving an armored car for Brinks. In 1956 there was a robbery. Three men were involved, and Billy was one of them. He took off before the cops figured out it was an inside job. The other two guys ended up going to prison. Billy vanished without a trace.”
“And got away with the money,” I suggested.
“How did you know that?”
“Lucky guess,” I said.
“How did you make the connection back to me?” Harriet wanted to know.
“We got a hit from unidentified DNA found at the scene of a crime,” I told her. Two separate ones, in fact, but there was no need to go into that.
“What kind of crime?” Harriet asked. “Billy was born in 1926. That would make him close to a hundred years old by now. How’s it even possible that he’s still going around committing crimes?”
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “That information is a part of an ongoing police investigation, and I’m unable to comment at this time.”
There was a short silence between us before the reality dawned on her. “It must be one of his children then,” she surmised, “or maybe even one of his grandchildren. He abandoned a wife and kids when he left Ohio. She got a divorce and eventually remarried, and Billy must have done the same thing—starting over someplace else and ending up with a whole new family.”
That was my guess, too, but I didn’t say so. Instead I asked another question. “How much money did he make off with?”
“Four hundred thousand,” she said. “When I started doing research on my own, that’s what the newspaper articles said. I wasn’t even born when it happened, so everything I know about William Landon is secondhand. Every once in a while as a kid, I’d overhear my mother talking with one of her sisters or cousins about Billy, the black sheep of the family. Whenever I tried to ask my mother about him, though, she’d shut me down. It wasn’t until after Mom died that I started looking into what happened. That’s when I connected William Landon with her beloved Cousin Billy. Once I finally got around to googling William Landon’s name, that was the first link that turned up—one to a newspaper article about the Brinks robbery.”
She kept talking but for a time I wasn’t really paying attention, I was too busy thinking. Four hundred thousand dollars would have added up to a hell of a lot of hundred-dollar bills!
“And that got me to wondering,” Harriet was saying when I tuned back in on the conversation. “How did he manage to disappear so completely that the cops were never able to find him? Where did he go? What happened to him? Was he dead or alive?
“I watch a lot of true crime on TV,” she continued. “That’s where I heard about how long-forgotten cold cases are now being solved when relatives of a suspect post their DNA on ancestry databases. According to what I read, GEDmatch is one of the few of those that actually cooperates with law enforcement. That’s why I chose them. I wanted to find out what happened to him after he left Ohio.”
“Thank you for that,” I told her, and I meant it, too. “I can’t tell you how much you’ve helped us already. Apparently we’re dealing with far more than a single cold case—it’s actually several. Once those are solved, Ms. Bonham, I promise that I’ll get back to you with the whole story.”
“You will?”
“Mark my words.”
“And I helped? Really?”
“More than you know,” I replied.
With that I ended the call, but I didn’t put down the phone. Instead, I located my friend Ron Peters’s cell phone number and punched it. That 1956 armored car robbery had to be the source of the hundred-dollar bills that linked all five cases together, and that made me confident that I finally had enough information to compel Seattle PD to reopen those three mislabeled cases. I believed Ron Peters was the guy who could get the job done.
“Hey, Beau,” he said genially when he answered. “It’s been a while. How are things and what are you up to?”
“When you find out why I’m calling,” I told him, “you’re not going to be happy, because I’m about to become a real pain in your ass.”
“When haven’t you been a pain in my ass?” he replied with a laugh. “Tell me about it.”
So I did. Once I got off the phone with him, I called everybody else, too—Ben Weston and Sandy Sechrest at Seattle PD, Elizabeth Byrd in Liberty Lake, Boyce Miller in Kent, Yolanda Aguirre, and even Gretchen Walther from the crime lab. Once all hell broke loose on this, I wanted all of us to be on the same page.
Chapter 32
Bellingham, Washington
Saturday, March 7, 2020
I staggered out of the bedroom on Saturday morning, let Sarah out, and then went to the kitchen to start the coffee. When I found a note from Kyle next to the coffee machine, it was all I could do to keep from grinding my teeth in annoyance.
Out for a driving lesson with Hank. We’re going to grab breakfast somewhere along the way. See you later.
My head filled with visions of his burning up the clutch on Hank’s very expensive automotive antique. I couldn’t help but wonder how much fixing that would cost since I was reasonably sure I’d be the one footing the bill, and I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect. The call that came in from Todd Hatcher a while later did nothing to improve my frame of mind.
“How are things?” he asked when I answered.
“Fine,” I responded. It was one of Mel’s raised eyebrow “fines,” which means the exact opposite, but Todd didn’t pick up on that.
“Well,” he continued, “I’m still searching for any online sign of Lindsey Baylor between that initial arrest at age eighteen and her emergence as Caroline Richards late last year, but I’m coming up empty. No employment records. No tax filings. Her profile is still listed as available on several dating sites, but those didn’t start until after her new ID came online. During all the intervening years, however, there were no postings of her on any social media. I’ve also been unable to locate any further interactions with law enforcement.”
“Is it possible she left the country for that amount of time?” I asked.
“She couldn’t have done so legally,” Todd replied. “She doesn’t have a passport. It’s as though she vanished into thin air.”
Scenarios where someone goes into hiding and emerges seven years later with a brand-new identity often suggest participation in some kind of illegal financial activity, most especially tax evasion. What exactly had Caroline been dodging?
“What the hell was she doing all that time?” I asked aloud.
“Beats me,” Todd replied, “but if it was against the law, she was smart enough not to get caught. I was concerned and wanted you to be aware of that.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Appreciate it.”
As I hung up, it occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one who needed to be brought up to speed on the existence of that seven-year black hole in Caroline Richards’s history. My concern was that she might well be surviving as some kind of serial scammer, and if poor besotted Jeremy was one of her victims, what were the chances she’d do the same thing to her newly found auntie during their reunion in Portland? Not ready to tackle the issue with Jeremy, I tried contacting Marisa Young, but my call went straight to voicemail. I ended up leaving a bland message.
“It’s me, checking in to see how things are going.”
That was enough to let her know that more than two hundred fifty miles away, someone in Bellingham was watching and waiting to see how today’s meeting would turn out.
As for Jeremy? Kyle had told me early on that it was likely his dad had reeled Caroline in by convincing her that he was in far better financial shape than he really was. So what happens when scammer number one discovers he or she is being scammed by scammer number two? Probably not a good outcome for either one of them. With that in mind, I decided to put the call to Jeremy on hold indefinitely in hopes that somehow Marisa would be able to suss out some information about Caroline’s missing years.
Meanwhile, without my noticing, Mel had emerged from the bedroom. I had no idea she was there until she pressed the button, and the coffee machine ground into action.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
Once she joined me in the living room, I gave her a brief overview. She listened thoughtfully. When I finished, she took a sip of her coffee and asked, “How much time passed between the first appearance of Caroline’s new identity and her hooking up with Jeremy?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “It seems to have happened pretty quickly, a couple of months or so. Why?”
“If you’re right about her being a scammer, she’s most likely pulling the oldest trick in the book.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Getting one man to take responsibility for another man’s child.”
Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am!
“Why the hell didn’t I think of that?” I demanded.
Mel favored me with a wry grin. “Maybe because you’re a man?” she suggested. “Most guys fall for that trick hook, line, and sinker, especially ones like Jeremey who are under the mistaken impression that they’re God’s gift to women.”
“But what should I do about it?” I asked.
“For right now, leave well enough alone,” Mel advised. “If you try going into it now, it’ll only make things worse. Once the baby arrives, there’ll be plenty of time to suggest Jeremy might want to consider doing a paternity test. At that point, he’ll have to live with the results one way or the other.”
