Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(63)

After the plane crash that resulted in the loss of both his legs, Jack Loveday had been hospitalized for three weeks before being transferred to a rehab facility in Anchorage for an additional three weeks. Following his release from there, he’d been sent home to Homer to for his stumps to heal completely so he could be fitted with his prosthetics. A fitting appointment for those had been scheduled two months down the road, but Jack died before that day arrived.

On February 15 his wife claimed she had awakened in the morning and found him unresponsive in the master bedroom of the home they shared. She had immediately called 911, but arriving EMTs had been unable to revive him. Initially the medical examiner had listed Jack’s cause of death as undetermined. Six weeks later, after the toxicology results came in, the cause had been amended to suicide by means of an overdose of sleeping aids and painkillers combined with alcohol.

I sat back and thought about all that. Shelley had been home with her husband at the time he died, which meant she was most likely the last person to have seen Jack Loveday alive. She was the one who called 911 to report the incident. She was also the spouse. Twink had already told me that Shelley had benefited from her husband’s death by selling off his collection of aircraft. Taking all those things together, she should have been a person of interest in his death from the get-go, and I was sure she must have been questioned then. I wanted more than anything to have access to what had been said in those initial interviews—the ones that had been conducted immediately after Jack’s death.

There was no way anyone in Homer was going to grant that kind of official access to a private detective visiting from out of town, especially one who was there presumably investigating another matter entirely. But if not official access, what about unofficial?

I scrolled back through my messages and found the one from Hank Frazier that had given me the name and contact information for Lieutenant Marvin Price, Homer’s senior detective of investigations. A glance at my watch said it was ten o’clock. This was Saturday night. If you happen to be in law enforcement, that’s generally the busiest night of the week. Hank had provided two numbers—a cell phone and a direct number at work. After a few moment of consideration, I dialed the second one.

“Lieutenant Price here,” a voice answered.

I had already decided that if I was going to ask for Lieutenant Price’s help, I was going to have to be straight with him, cop to cop with no pulled punches.

“My name’s J. P. Beaumont,” I told him. “If you’re working a case, I don’t want to interrupt, but—”

“No case,” he said, “just sitting here shuffling paperwork. What’s up?”

“I used to be a homicide cop for Seattle PD,” I explained. “After I left there, I worked for the attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team. Now I’m a private investigator, and I’m here in town looking into the disappearance of a kid named Chris Danielson, who never came home from working an evening shift at Zig’s Place in March of 2006. Hank Frazier is a friend of mine. He’s the one who gave me your contact information.”

“Hank’s a good friend of mine,” Price told me. “I was relatively new on the job and still working patrol back in 2006. I don’t remember a case like that, but I can put you in touch with the missing-persons guy from back then—”

I cut him off in midsentence and did some strategic name-dropping. “You’ve never heard of Chris Danielson’s case because he was never officially reported missing, but does the name Harriet Raines mean anything to you?”

“Harry?” he asked with an amused chuckle. “Of course I know her. Everybody in law enforcement knows Harry Raines. Why?”

“Because I believe that Chris’s disappearance can now be classified as a homicide, and so does Professor Raines. She’s in possession of unidentified human remains that were found in a black-bear den near Eklutna Lake in the spring of 2008. We’re in the process of comparing a DNA profile obtained from Chris’s older brother, Jared. We expect to have a DNA confirmation within the next day or so.”

Over the phone I heard a squawk of some kind. I imagined it was the sound of Lieutenant Marvin Price sitting up straighter in whatever decrepit chair was behind his desk. And that actually made me smile, because that’s what real homicide cops do when they get word of a case—they come to attention.

“You say that Chris Danielson disappeared in 2006?”

“Yes, Monday, March twenty-seventh, to be exact.”

“You’re working the case on whose behalf—the brother’s?” Price asked.

“Initially that was true, but now there’s another person involved—make that two people. A young woman named Danitza Adams Miller and her son, Christopher, have been added to the list. At the time Chris went missing, Danitza and he were boyfriend and girlfriend. On the day Chris disappeared, Danitza’s parents had just learned that their sixteen-year-old daughter was pregnant.”

“Wait, did you say Danitza Adams? Any relation to Roger Adams?”

“Danitza is Roger and Eileen Adams’s only child.”

There was a momentary pause. “If you’ve been investigating a missing-persons case that you now believe to be a homicide, have you identified any persons of interest?”

It was time for me to either put up or shut up.