“Sister as in she’s black?” I asked.
“That, too, but mostly sister as in that was her title at King Street Mission. Also an ex-con. Spent five years at Purdy for armed robbery. From what I can tell, that’s pretty much the prerequisite for becoming a counselor at King Street-you’ve already done your crime and your time. It’s a cachet that gives you more credibility with the clients.”
“What about Elaine Manning?” I prompted.
“We’re hearing bits and rumors that she and Brother Mark may have had something going, but that was before Brother LaShawn turned up on the scene. Once that happened, Sister Elaine more or less spun out of Brother Mark’s orbit.”
“So we could be dealing with a simple love triangle?” I asked.
Of course, love triangles are hardly ever simple.
“Maybe,” Jackson agreed. “Problem is, so far we haven’t been able to locate Ms. Manning.”
“You’re saying she’s gone missing?”
“Yup. No one’s seen her since sometime Saturday morning. Took off right after breakfast. Since then, she hasn’t shown up at work and hasn’t called in, either. No one seems to know where she is or how to reach her. We consider her a person of interest.”
Someone close to a murder victim who goes missing about the same time as the murder is always a person of interest, especially if there are hints of a love affair gone bad. Jackson made it sound like it was no big deal, but I guessed that the full powers of Seattle PD were being brought to bear on locating Sister Elaine Manning. It was probably better if I just sat back and let them do the heavy lifting. There would be plenty of time for me to talk to her once she was found.
“Tell me about Pastor Mark,” I said. “What’s his deal?”
“That would be Brother Mark or Pastor Mark, depending on who you talk to,” Kendall said. “Last name’s Granger. Former druggie. Did a fifteen-year stretch for second-degree murder. Been out for the past five years. Another unlikely prospect for a Goody Two-shoes award, but we haven’t been able to find anything new on him, either. Everybody at King Street seems hell-bent on keeping their noses clean-no drugs, no booze, no illegal activities. They don’t even allow cigarettes.”
“They just aren’t making ex-cons the way they used to,” I said.
“I guess not,” Jackson agreed with a laugh.
I started to ask him if he had any details on the payout Tompkins had received from the state. I stopped myself just in time. If my cover was that Ross Connors was worried about it, I’d better have the details of that at my fingertips. And I jotted a note to myself to make inquiries about the settlement on my own.
“So there’s nothing on the street about who might have done this?” I asked.
“So far not a word,” Jackson replied, “and believe me, we’ve been asking.”
“What about forensics?” I asked.
“A thirty-eight,” Jackson said. “We ran the bullet through NIBIN. Nothing turned up.”
NIBIN is the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network, which keeps track of bullets the same way AFIS (the Automated Fingerprint Identification System) keeps track of fingerprints. The fact that the bullet used to kill LaShawn Tompkins hadn’t shown up in the database meant that the weapon was clean-that it hadn’t been used in any other crime prior to his murder. Now that it had been entered into the system, however, if it was used again, it would be noticed. When or if that happened, it would make the killer easier to trace. Right now, though, it didn’t do us any good.
“So you’ll keep me in the loop on this one?” I suggested.
Jackson laughed. “Unofficially in the loop, that is.”
“Yes.”
“Only if you do the same,” he returned. “Quid quo pro, whatever. If you dredge something up, I want to hear about it, too.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
I put down the phone, leaned back in the recliner, and closed my eyes. I may even have drifted off for a second or two before the phone rang, startling me awake if not to full consciousness.
“How come we have to stay in a hotel?” my daughter demanded. “Why can’t we stay with you? Is it because of her?”
And there, in a nutshell, is why men find women so baffling-daughters included. Or perhaps, daughters especially.
I’ll be the first to admit that I wasn’t always the best of fathers when Scott and Kelly were kids, but in the years since I stopped drinking I’ve gone to great lengths to undo as much of that damage as possible. Maybe I’ve made more progress with Scott than I have with Kelly. Still, I’ve done my level best, and I thought we were doing fine. The previous weekend, when Mel and I had been down in Ashland, she and Kelly seemed to get along fine-at least fine as far as I could see. I remembered Kelly even teasing Mel about whether or not we were going to get married. Now Kelly uttered the word her in regard to Mel with such vivid contempt that it caught me by surprise. Between Sunday morning and Tuesday afternoon, what could possibly have changed?
“I just talked to Mel,” Kelly continued. “She told me we’ll be staying at Homewood Suites and gave me the confirmation number.”
I still didn’t get it. My first thought was that since Kelly and Jeremy live on a very tight budget, maybe she was worried about having to pay a hotel bill.
“I’m paying for the room,” I said, trying to fight my way out of a mess not of my own making. “You don’t have to be concerned about that.”
“This has nothing to do with money!” Kelly exclaimed, her voice trembling with outrage. She seemed on the verge of tears. “It’s bad enough that we have to come all the way from Ashland to Seattle with a month-old baby in the car. Is it asking too much to expect that we’d get to spend some time with you instead of being carted off to a hotel like a bunch of strangers?”
Let it be said that Mel and I had just finished squandering the better part of three reasonably pleasant days in my daughter’s company. On the face of it, her sudden antipathy made very little sense.
“Scott and Cherisse will be staying there, too,” I offered lamely. “And it’s only a couple of blocks from here.”
From Kelly’s point of view the hotel could have been on Pluto. “It’s all about Mel, isn’t it,” she raved on. “Mel this and Mel that. She’s shacked up with you there and has you completely under her thumb. Mel’s doing this because she doesn’t want to share you with anyone, not even with your granddaughter, who’s crazy about you, by the way!”
By now this amounted to the most bizarre conversation I’d ever had with my daughter-in terms of turning tables, that is. Because the truth of the matter was, having my children come stay at Belltown Terrace with Mel and me when we were obviously living in sin was a big deal-in my book, anyway. And I suspected it was in Mel’s, too. Of course I could have pointed out that Kelly and Jeremy hadn’t exactly tied the knot in a timely fashion. In actual fact, Kayla’s birthday predates her parents’ wedding anniversary by several months.
People say that there’s nothing worse than a reformed drunk, and the situation here was probably similar. Maybe now that Kelly had finished sowing her wild oats, she wanted her father to shape up and do the same. It occurred to me that Kelly’s great-grandmother, Beverly Jenssen, had been of the same opinion. DNA will out.
On the other hand, I wasn’t about to send Mel packing back to her apartment in Bellevue for the duration of the kids’ visit, either.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I said soothingly. “I won’t be going in to work. We’ll be able to spend plenty of time together.”
“We will not!” Kelly insisted. With that, she hung up on me. I didn’t call her back. There wasn’t much point.
Mel came home a little while later. She whipped out of her work clothes, put on a jogging suit and sneakers, and dragged me with her down to the running track.
Belltown Terrace is one of the few buildings in Seattle actually constructed under an interesting, short-lived, and amazingly complicated set of residential/mixed-use zoning rules. The bottom five stories are office building. The sixth floor-including the rooftop of the office building-is a common recreation area for the taller residential structure. It includes a party room, a swimming pool and hot tub, an exercise room, as well as a sport court. Much of the outdoor rooftop area is devoted to gardens, which Mel tells me include an award-winning collection of hydrangeas. (Since I know zero about flowers and/or gardens, I more or less have to take her word for this.)