My Sister's Grave (Tracy Crosswhite, #1)(71)

“I, I don’t know. I suppose it was.”

“They had a billboard right there on the highway offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward, didn’t they?”

“I didn’t receive any reward.”

“I didn’t say you did.” Dan pulled out another document and acted as though he was reading it as he asked his question. “What I asked was, even though Sarah Crosswhite’s disappearance was big news all over Cascade County, one of your geographic sales areas, are you saying you can’t recall you and Mr. Holt ever discussing it?”

Hagen cleared his throat. “I believe we probably did, you know, in general. Not in any detail. That’s the best I can recall anyway.”

“So you knew about Sarah’s disappearance before you ever saw a news program, didn’t you?”

“The news program may have jogged my memory. Or I could have spoken to Harley about it after the fact. That’s probably what it was. I’m not too sure anymore.”

Dan held up more sheets of paper as he spoke. “It didn’t come up in August or September or October.”

“I don’t recall specifically, is what I’m saying. I suppose it could have. Like I said, twenty years is a long time.”

“During your visits to Cedar Grove, did you ever discuss Edmund House with anyone?”

“Edmund House? No, I’m pretty sure his name did not come up.”

“Pretty sure?”

“I don’t recall his name coming up.”

Dan took another document from the file and held it up. “Did Harley ever tell you his service and repair shop had ordered parts for Parker House’s vehicles and had done the maintenance on a red, Chevy stepside truck?”

Clark rose. “Your Honor, if Mr. O’Leary is going to ask questions from documents, I would ask that they be entered into evidence rather than continuing with this exercise to test Mr. Hagen’s memory about discreet meetings that may or may not have occurred twenty years ago.”

“Overruled,” Meyers said.

Tracy knew Dan was acting. She had tried unsuccessfully to find a record that confirmed Harley had ordered a car part from Hagen for the Chevy Parker House had been restoring. Hagen, however, did not dare call Dan’s bluff at this point. The salesman had turned a beet red and looked as though someone had put a hot plate beneath his seat.

“I believe we did discuss that,” Hagen said, shifting to cross his legs and then parting them again. “It’s kind of coming back now. I remember saying to Harley that I saw a red Chevy on the road that night, or something like that. That must have been how I remembered it.”

“I thought you remembered it because you heard about it on a news program as you were watching a Mariners game and the Chevy stepside was your favorite truck?”

“Well, it was probably a little bit of both. It was my favorite truck, so when Harley mentioned that, you know, Edmund House drove one, then it clicked.”

Dan paused. Judge Meyers looked down at Hagen with a furrowed brow.

Then Dan stepped directly beside the witness chair. “So you and Harley Holt did discuss Edmund House by name,” he said.

Hagen’s eyes widened. This time he could not muster a smile, not even a pained one. “Did I say Edmund? I meant Parker. Right. Parker House. It was his truck, wasn’t it?”

Dan turned to Clark without providing an answer. “Your witness.”





[page]CHAPTER 44





When Judge Meyers returned to the bench for the afternoon session, he looked troubled, and considered the daunting blanket of snow continuing to fall outside his courtroom windows. “While I believe it is important to proceed expeditiously, I also do not want to be foolhardy,” he said. “The weathermen indicate the snow is supposed to let up this afternoon. Having lived in the Pacific Northwest much of my life, I prefer my own method of meteorology; I stick my head out the front door.” The audience chuckled. “That is precisely what I did during the break, and I didn’t see any blue sky on the horizon. This will be our last witness of the day so as to avoid many of you driving home in the dark.”

Dan displayed a series of charts and photographs on the flat-screen television as he walked Kelly Rosa, the King County forensic anthropologist, through her testimony. He started with Finlay Armstrong’s phone call and the photograph of the bone.

“And how long does it take before body fat deteriorates and turns to adipocere?”

“It depends on a number of different factors: the location of the body, the depth of burial, soil and climate conditions. Generally, though, it happens over years, not days or months.”

“So you concluded the remains had been buried for years. Why then were you puzzled?”

Rosa sat forward. “Normally a body buried in a shallow grave in the wilderness does not remain buried long. Coyotes and other animals will get to it.”

“Were you able to resolve this mystery?”

“I was advised that the grave site, up until recently, had been covered by a body of water, making it inaccessible to animals.”

“Did you conclude from the fact that animals had not desecrated the site—that is, scattered the bones—that the body had to have been buried shortly before the area was flooded?”

Clark stood. “Calls for speculation, Your Honor.”