Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(7)

“Your other grandparents went along with that?”

Jared shrugged. “What else could they do? They had done their best by both of us, and they decided there wasn’t much sense in trying to force him to come back. They figured he’d just take off again, so why bother?”

“What happened then?”

“I’m not sure. He stayed on with the Danielsons for a while—I don’t know for how long. He ended up dropping out of high school without graduating and took off again.”

“Did you try contacting your grandmother over the years?”

Jared shook his head. “I didn’t really know that side of the family. We weren’t ever close, not even before Mom died to say nothing of after. Maybe you remember that none of them bothered to come to Mom’s memorial service, and if they had one for our father, Chris and I never heard about it.”

“You weren’t even invited?”

Jared shook his head again. “So other than that one letter requesting Chris’s school information, we—meaning my grandparents and I—never heard another word from my father’s side of the family. It was like they had disappeared off the face of the earth.”

I’d seen situations like this countless times before. When domestic violence results in a homicide, the lingering aftereffects can continue to tear a family apart for generations.

“Obviously all this happened years ago,” I observed, “so why are you on a mission to find Chris now, and why come to me?”

“Gram Hinkle isn’t well,” Jared told me. “She’s in assisted living and wants to make things right with Chris before she passes on. I think she wants to see him one last time, and I took a leave of absence to try to help her get that sorted.”

“This sounds as if your grandmother took the parable about the prodigal son to heart,” I suggested. “The kid who goes AWOL gets the brass-band treatment when he comes home. As for the son who never ran off in the first place? He’s more or less taken for granted and brushed aside.”

Jared favored me with another nod accompanied by a rueful grin. “Right, he’s the guy who gets sent out searching for the one who isn’t there—if he still exists, that is.”

“You think Chris might be dead?”

“Maybe or maybe not,” Jared replied. “I have no idea. No one on our side of the family has heard from him directly since he left Ohio at age thirteen.”

“Have you filed a missing-persons report?”

“Chris may be missing from our lives, but that doesn’t mean he’s missing as far as other people are concerned, so no. We haven’t filed a missing-persons report.”

“Have you tried contacting your other grandmother?”

He nodded. “She died two years ago.”

“Have you checked with the cop shop in Homer?”

“I gave them a call, and they mostly gave me the runaround.”

“Have you looked into NamUs?” I asked.

“What’s that?” Jared returned.

For someone who was about to be teaching criminal justice at the college level, it seemed to me that NamUs shouldn’t have been a mystery to him. “The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System,” I said. “It’s an open-sourced program that allows law enforcement and even family members to upload personal information on missing loved ones so it can be compared to unidentified remains.”

Jared shook his head. “Never heard of it,” he said.

“That would be my first step. I’d start by entering every detail I could about Christopher Danielson into their database. Providing a sample of your own DNA would also be helpful.”

“I see,” Jared said.

“Is your DNA in CODIS?” I asked.

CODIS is the Combined DNA Index System. Fortunately, that piece of law-enforcement jargon was something Jared did recognize. He probably also understood the thinking behind my question. If Chris had grown up to be a clone of his biological father, there was a good chance he had ended up in enough trouble with the law to be marking time in a prison cell someplace where his DNA would have been collected at the time he was incarcerated. The same possibility might have occurred to Jared, but he didn’t mention it in his reply.

“I’m pretty sure Monroe PD took a sample of my DNA for elimination purposes when I first joined up,” he said. “That might have been uploaded into CODIS, but I’m not sure.”

Not necessarily, I thought. What I said was, “We should check and find out.”

“Does that mean you’ll help me?” he asked.

“Not so fast,” I admonished. “You still haven’t explained why you came to me for help.”

“I watch a lot of true crime on TV,” he replied. “Last fall I saw that 48 Hours episode about Justice for All getting an exoneration for that guy from down in Seattle who spent sixteen years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. You weren’t interviewed for that show, but as soon as the name Beaumont was mentioned as part of the case, I knew it had to be you.”

He was right on that score. I had indeed been involved in the Mateo Vega wrongful-conviction situation. At the time I had made it clear to the folks at Justice for All that I didn’t want my participation in the case to become public knowledge. Good luck with that. Having my name mentioned on national TV was exactly what I hadn’t had in mind.