Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(29)

“So this is personal for you, then,” Harriet Raines observed, nodding sagely.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I suppose it is.”

“Go on,” she urged.

“After the deaths of their parents, Chris and his older brother, Jared, went to live with their maternal grandparents in Ohio. That lasted until Chris was about thirteen. At that point he ran away from home and came to Alaska to live with his father’s parents in Homer. At the time he went missing from Homer, he was estranged from all his surviving grandparents. He’d dropped out of school, but he evidently had a serious girlfriend, a sixteen-year-old girl named Danitza Adams. The night Chris went missing, Danitza had just discovered she was pregnant. Unfortunately, so had her parents.”

“Sounds like there was a good deal of family drama going on at the time,” Harriet surmised.

I nodded. “You could say that. Danitza and her parents had a huge row. It was serious enough that when it was over, she packed up and left home that very night. She went to the place where Chris had been living and waited, expecting him to show up after work. When he didn’t, she hitchhiked from Homer to Anchorage, where she moved in with an aunt and uncle. They looked out for her, and Danitza stayed with them up to and after the time her baby was born. Chris had been telling her that he was hoping to save enough money to go back to Ohio and fix the rift with his maternal grandmother. When Chris disappeared without a word, Danitza assumed that’s what had happened—that he’d gone back to Ohio. As a result she never reported him as missing. The problem is, neither did anyone else.

“This week Chris’s older brother, Jared, contacted me asking for help in locating him. The grandmother in Ohio is evidently close to death and hoping for a reconciliation.”

“So everybody in Ohio thought Chris was in Alaska,” Harriet put in, “while everyone in Alaska thought he was in Ohio.”

“That’s about the size of it,” I acknowledged.

“If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” she said, giving me a piercing look accompanied by a wry smile. “Since you’re a homicide cop—an ex–homicide cop—I suppose everything looks like a murder. Does this seem like a homicide to you?”

“You’ve got me there,” I admitted. “That’s what I suspect—that Chris was murdered.”

“And I’ll bet you’ve even got an idea who did it,” she added.

“According to Danitza, her father had a temper. He was also beyond furious when he found out she was pregnant.”

“Can’t say as I blame him,” Harriet Raines allowed. “Under the circumstances I’m pretty sure I’d be furious, too, but there’s angry and then there’s homicidal. Do you think it’s possible this Mr. Adams might be responsible for whatever happened to Christopher?”

Harriet might not have been taking notes, but if she had plucked that name detail out of what I’d just told her in casual conversation, she had definitely been paying attention.

“I don’t know that for sure,” I said, “but I’d certainly like to have the opportunity to ask him about it face-to-face.”

A long, thoughtful silence ensued. At first I wondered if she was about to send me packing. Instead, while I watched and waited for Harriet Raines to say something more, an odd thing happened. A subtle change came over her, as though she’d just made up her mind about something.

At that point the very atmosphere in the room suddenly shifted. It was as if some kind of emotionally charged barometer had just dropped. Even though I hadn’t said a word, Harriet nodded as if I had. Then she picked up the bottle of Crown Royal and the clean glass she’d offered me earlier and shoved both of them into the bottom drawer of her desk. Next, after stubbing out her smoldering cigar, she turned back to me with yet another appraising look.

“What do you know about bears?” she asked.

That question, coming out of the blue, caught me totally off guard and left me thinking I had somehow missed a turn and wound up in a whole other conversation.

“Not very much,” I admitted. “Why?”

“We have a lot of ’em up here,” she replied, “all kinds—black, brown, grizzly, and polar. When it comes to bears, Alaska is all for diversity.”

It took a second for me to realize that “Cold Case” Harriet Raines had just cracked another joke. By my count that was number two. She was on a roll.

“And we’ve got a bunch of people around here,” she continued, “naturalists, biologists, and the like, who make it their business to know everything there is to know about those different kinds of bears. Some of those folks go out in the wild each spring to track down hibernating bears in their dens and put battery-powered collars on the big ones and tag the little ones.”

“Not my kind of job,” I said.

At that point Harriet actually smiled at me. “Not mine either,” she agreed.

With that, Professor Harriet stood up abruptly. “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She collected her empty soup bowl and spoon as well as her empty glass and placed all those items on a serving tray that was sitting on the credenza behind her desk. Then, after donning a lab coat from a nearby coat tree, she picked up the tray and headed for the door.

“Oh,” she added as an afterthought while pausing in the doorway, “would you care for some coffee?”