Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(21)

That night Nitz had gone to Chris’s place and waited for him to get off work, but he hadn’t shown. Whatever had happened to him had most likely occurred on either Sunday or Monday. Had he actually gone to work that night? The only way to find out about that for sure was to get boots on the ground in Homer itself, which gave me another reason for making that side trip.

So who all was involved in Chris’s disappearance? I instantly removed Nitz herself from my list of possible suspects. Yes, either the boyfriend or the girlfriend is usually involved in love-gone-wrong homicides, but in this case I couldn’t see it. Had there maybe been another boy involved? Maybe someone else had been competing with Chris for Danitza’s attention. If that were the case, she hadn’t mentioned it.

That brought me around to her parents, most specifically Danitza’s volatile father. It was interesting to know that Richie Danielson and Roger Adams had been in each other’s crosshairs as far back as high school. It must have driven Roger nuts to find out that years later his longtime rival’s son had knocked up his sixteen-year-old daughter. Remembering the murderous thoughts in my heart when I first discovered that my daughter, Kelly, and her boyfriend, Jeremy, were in the family way, I could see how Nitz’s father might have gone off the rails. With that in mind, I picked up the phone and dialed Todd Hatcher.

“Have you been getting what I’ve been sending you?” he asked once he came on the line.

A glance at my mailbox revealed I had fifteen separate messages, all of them from him and all of them unopened. “They’re here,” I said. “I’ve been tied up with an interview, so I’ll get to them in a while. Do any of them have to do with Roger Adams, Danitza’s father?”

“Not so far,” Todd replied. “Why?”

“I think he might bear some looking into,” I suggested. “Around the time Chris went missing, Danitza’s parents had just discovered that their sixteen-year-old daughter was pregnant and that one of the boys in question was none other than the son of Roger’s longtime rival from back in the day, Richie Danielson.”

“That probably didn’t go over very well,” Todd observed.

“You could say that. There was a huge father-daughter spat that resulted in Danitza packing a bag and leaving home that very night.”

“Which night would that be?” Todd asked.

“That would be Monday, March twenty-seventh, 2006,” I told him. “After leaving her folks’ place, she went to Chris’s apartment and waited for him, expecting him to come home once he got off work. When he didn’t show, Danitza hitchhiked from Homer to Anchorage, where she moved in with her aunt and uncle—her mother’s younger sister and her husband. She never saw Chris again.”

“So when was the last time she did see him?” Todd asked.

“That would be the day before, when he dropped her off at her house.”

“Unfortunately, there’s no way to track his movements.”

“There might be,” I suggested. “It turns out Chris did have a cell phone—one Danitza gave him. I know it’s possible to track locations on those now, but I’m not so sure it was possible back then.”

“Nice try but no time,” Todd said.

I’ve been around Todd long enough to know that’s rodeo speak for some poor guy who’s just been pitched off a bucking bronco sooner than the buzzer, only now the guy biting the dust was yours truly.

“So no way to track the phone?”

“In terms of telecommunications, 2006 is the dark ages,” Todd replied. “Smartphones weren’t all that smart back then, and GPS didn’t show up on cell phones until several years later. As for finding out the last time the phone was used? Wireless companies don’t maintain call records that long.”

To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I had hoped tech magic would somehow come to my rescue, but that wasn’t going to happen. Chris Danielson’s disappearance, long gone cold, would have to be solved the old-fashioned way—by interviewing witnesses and acquaintances and asking questions rather than counting on the basics of current forensic science—DNA profiles and cell-phone pings.

“Did you have any further luck finding a missing-persons report on Christopher Danielson?” I asked.

“Nope,” Todd replied. “I’m coming up empty on that score. None of the agencies I’ve checked with have any record of one.”

Hearing those words made my heart hurt. Twelve years earlier a seventeen-year-old boy had vanished off the face of the earth, and not one person had cared enough to mention his disappearance to the authorities.

“Do we have any idea about Chris’s last known location?” Todd asked.

“Danitza believed he was at work at a restaurant called Zig’s Place in Homer that Monday night. She expected him to come home once he got off shift, but he didn’t.”

“FYI,” Todd continued, “Homer has no record of any homicides at all—solved or unsolved—in 2006. They had a couple of suicides and an accidental death or two, but no homicides. In a place as small as Homer, with a population of five thousand, give or take, even a disappearance would have been big news.”

“It wasn’t because no one knew it happened,” I told him. “Suppose Chris was attacked on his way home from work. Any killer with half a brain wouldn’t be dumb enough to leave a dead body lying around near the crime scene or inside a relatively well-populated area where someone was likely to find it. Alaska is a vast, wild, and mostly empty space, and a killer would have used that to his advantage.”