Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(37)

“Zig’s Place?” I asked.

Bill seemed taken aback that I knew the restaurant’s name, but he nodded. “My Uncle Sig—Siegfried—is my mother’s older brother. Everybody calls him Ziggy, and when he decided to open a restaurant, that’s what he named it—Zig’s Place. Chris and I worked there together. I was out front waiting tables while he was mostly in the back doing the dishes, but sometimes he worked out front, too.”

“And that’s where he met Danitza?” I asked.

Bill literally winced at the sound of her name. “Yes,” he said, shaking his head. “It was love at first sight for both of them. It was like he’d been living in a dark cave and she was his bright ray of sunshine. She was a nice girl—smart, too. At first I thought she was just being kind to him because that’s the sort of person she was, but I believe now that she liked him as much as he liked her.”

“When’s the last time you saw Chris?”

“It was the end of March, the year we were seniors.”

“So 2006, then,” I supplied.

Bill nodded. “We were both at work. It was on a Monday night, I think. He came in from dumping the trash and said he was going to take off early because there was a lady outside who needed help with a flat tire.”

“What lady?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Bill said. “Just some lady with car trouble. I never saw her. He left the restaurant to go help her, and I never saw him again.”

I thought about the deep indentation on the back of that skull in the banker’s box from a blow that had most likely rained down on the victim from behind. Could the weapon involved have been a tool of some kind—a tire iron maybe? No, that would be far too narrow. The business end of a monkey wrench maybe?

“What happened then?” I asked.

“Like I said, the last time I saw him was at work on Monday. I had the next day off. When I came back to work on Wednesday, Uncle Sig was all bent out of shape because Chris hadn’t shown up for his shift on Tuesday, and he wasn’t answering his phone either. When I went by his place, his roomies hadn’t seen him and had no idea where he’d gone. After that I went by his grandmother’s place to see if she knew anything. She said he’d most likely run off to go back to Ohio.”

Hearing that shook me. In the aftermath of Sue Danielson’s fallen-officer memorial, when the Hinkles had taken Jared and Chris from Seattle to Ohio, I’d had every reason to believe that the boys would be in good hands and living in a secure, loving environment. Obviously, as far as Chris was concerned, that had been wishful thinking on my part. For some reason he’d fled Ohio in search of greener pastures with his paternal grandparents in Homer. Only that had gone sideways, too.

I gave myself a moment before continuing. “So you didn’t try to report him missing?”

Bill shook his head. “I didn’t believe it was my place. I mean, after all, Mrs. Danielson was his grandmother. I was just a kid, and she was the grown-up. If she wasn’t worried enough to do it, why should I? And then all the rumors started.”

“What rumors?”

“It turned out that Danitza Adams disappeared that same weekend. When school started on Monday morning, she was absent. Pretty soon kids at school started saying that she’d gotten pregnant and that they’d had to run away to get married. That wasn’t a big surprise.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everybody in town knew that Nitz’s parents disapproved of Chris. I mean, her dad was a big deal around Homer, and Chris was just . . .”

“A kid from the wrong side of the tracks?” I suggested.

Bill nodded. “Eventually one of Chris’s roommates called me. He said they had gathered up all of Chris’s stuff and asked if I wanted it. It wasn’t much, only a couple of boxes. I still have them, I think, probably out in the garage somewhere. And that’s how things stood for a long time. I was busy going to school, and Chris and Danitza were like out of sight out of mind. I didn’t really think about them. I just assumed they were together someplace else. When Nitz’s mother died, I went to the funeral expecting she’d turn up there, but she didn’t.

“Then, years later, shortly after I landed a teaching job here in Anchorage, the Snow-Queen went down. It was big news, of course, more so for me because one of my students lost his father on that crabber. I was watching the evening news, and there was Danitza being interviewed by one of the reporters as the widow of one of the guys lost on board, except her last name wasn’t Danielson by then. It was something else.”

“Miller,” I supplied.

Bill nodded. “Obviously she and Chris weren’t together anymore, and that made me wonder what had happened to him. But I couldn’t very well show up at her husband’s funeral and say, ‘Hey, whatever happened to that other guy, your old boyfriend?’ So I just let it go. Know what I mean?”

He gave me a hopeless shoulder shrug. The regret I heard in his voice was all too familiar. I’d pulled a similar stunt on occasion. Then Bill Farmdale looked me straight in the eye. “You think he’s dead, don’t you?” he said.

I nodded. “I believe there’s a good chance that he was murdered soon after he left the restaurant the night you saw him last, and—”