Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(14)

“Did you say 1989? That would make her a year younger than Chris. They probably attended high school together.”

To confirm my suspicions, I reached around and picked up my copy of The Log. This time I turned my attention to the pages devoted to the junior class, and there she was in the very first photo at that top of the page. Danitza Adams’s head shot revealed a cute blonde with a pixie haircut and a winning smile, but a 1989 birth date meant that most likely she had been only sixteen at the time she gave birth to her son. So what we were dealing with was a sixteen-year-old unwed mother with a boyfriend who most likely hadn’t bothered to hang around long enough to do the right thing once he knocked her up. If that were the case, it’s no wonder that when Chris headed out for parts unknown, he hadn’t bothered to leave a forwarding address. Had I been in his shoes, I probably wouldn’t have either. I would have been too ashamed to show my face.

That was my first thought. It took a moment for me to remind myself that considering the existence of my own out-of-wedlock daughter, Naomi Dale, I was being a judgmental hypocrite.

“Did Danitza graduate from high school?”

“Nope,” Todd replied. “According to her college transcripts, she first earned a GED. Then, in 2008, she enrolled in the School of Nursing at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, where she graduated with honors four years later.”

That was a surprising outcome. For a single mother raising a little kid on her own to graduate from anything in four years was commendable. To do so with honors? That was downright remarkable.

“She must be pretty smart,” I said.

“Agreed,” Todd replied.

“What about the kids on the other list I sent you, the unaffiliated ones from the yearbook?”

“One of those, a guy named Augie Pardee, is deceased—accidental drug overdose. Two, John Borman and Bill Farmdale, live in Anchorage. Three more—Alex Walker, Phil Bonham, and Ron Wolf—still live in Homer. The last one, Kevin Markham, is an Army Ranger currently deployed to South Korea. I’ve got addresses and phone numbers on everyone in Alaska other than the dead guy, but I managed to locate a home phone number for his parents. They’re still in Homer, too. As for tracking down the Ranger? Good luck with that.”

“I’m guessing he’s somebody who got tired of being pushed around and decided to push back.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Todd said. “I also found Chris’s driver’s license. I’m sending along a copy of it because of the photo on it, but that original license has never been renewed.”

That wasn’t good news. In the world as it is now, no one goes anywhere without some kind of currently valid government-issued ID.

“Okay,” Todd concluded. “I just pressed send on a file containing everything I’ve located so far, and I’ll pass along whatever else I find as it becomes available.”

“And thanks for all this,” I told him. “It certainly gives me somewhere to start.”

Once Todd’s e-mail came in, I opened the file folder and then sat for a time scrolling through the material. The driver’s license showed up first. The photo had probably been taken within months of the one in the yearbook, so that wasn’t much help.

As I shopped through the various names, each was a bread crumb that might or might not lead me in the right direction for investigating Christopher Danielson’s disappearance. As Todd had pointed out, other than the guy doing a tour of duty in South Korea, everyone else was still in Alaska. That probably meant that I needed to be in Alaska, too.

I suppose I could have picked up my phone and started shopping through the collection of phone numbers Todd had helpfully supplied, but I didn’t. In my experience if you want truthful answers to difficult questions, you need to be looking at the person you’re interviewing—meeting that individual face-to-face and eyeball-to-eyeball. Talking over the phone is not the same thing. But going to Alaska in the dead of winter? Even with a brand-new parka in hand, that hardly sounded inviting.

I glanced out the window. By now the clouds had parted. Bright sunshine glittered off the thick layer of snow covering our backyard, and my iPad indicated the temperature in Bellingham right then had risen to a balmy eighteen degrees. Just for the hell of it, I checked the temperature in Anchorage. According to AccuWeather, the temperature there coming up on noon was an almost toasty thirty-nine in comparison, and the predicted low that night was thirty-three—both of which were far higher than I had expected.

Then I checked for flights. The ones from Bellingham to Anchorage all went by way of Seattle, but at the moment every flight from Bellingham to anywhere that day was either canceled or delayed due to issues with the airport’s deicing equipment. The flights going to and from Seattle and Anchorage were fine. In other words, the only way to catch a flight to Anchorage that day was to get my butt to SeaTac Airport.

Meteorologists will tell you that somewhere between Bellingham and Seattle there’s what’s called a convergence zone, a spot where competing weather systems meet up and duke it out. That’s exactly where the previous day’s Pineapple Express had collided with the polar vortex, just south of Mount Vernon. Above Mount Vernon it had been all snow all the time. By now our weather had moved east, leaving behind roads covered with ice and snow. Below Mount Vernon the drenching rains continued, triggering a spate of flash floods and mudslides.