When he raised his eyes to look at her, J.P. Beaumont’s gaze was suddenly wary. “Which one?” he asked, but it was only a defense mechanism. They both knew Joanna was asking about Anne Corley.
“The second one,” Joanna said.
“What do you want to know?”
“I’ve read the Denver Post article,” she told him. “Frank downloaded it from the Internet.”
“Damn his computer anyway!” Beau muttered. “Why the hell couldn’t he mind his own business? You, too, for that matter?”
“It is my business,” Joanna said. “You asked me about her, remember?”
His expression softened a little. “Well, yes. I suppose I did. I just haven’t had time…”
“As I was reading through the article,” Joanna continued, “something kept bothering me.”
“What’s that?” She heard the tightly controlled anger beneath his question.
“How many cases were there?” she asked. “Besides the two mentioned in the article and the three victims in Seattle, the article hinted there were others. Were there?”
Beau paused before he answered. Finally he nodded. “Several,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter how many. Ralph Ames and I worked with the various jurisdictions and cleared the ones we knew about – the ones Anne had kept a record of. There was no need to make a big deal of it.”
“The article implied that you did it quietly because you were worried about a flurry of wrongful-death suits.”
“That’s not true,” Beau replied shortly. “Anne was dead, for God’s sake. Just as dead as Jack Brampton back there in the riverbed. Ralph and I did it that way so Anne’s name wouldn’t be dragged through the mud any worse than it already had been.”
“Anne’s name?” Joanna asked. “Or yours?”
Beaumont’s face fell. Finally, he nodded bleakly. “That, too,” he admitted.
“My father used to be sheriff here,” Joanna said. “Did you know that?”
“I saw the picture and the name in the display case out in the lobby. I assumed the two of you might be related.”
“Dad always maintained that Anne Rowland got away with murder. He said that by claiming she was crazy and locking her up in a mental institution, Anne’s mother, Anita Rowland, caused a miscarriage of justice.”
“No,” Beau said quietly after a moment. “You’re wrong there. That’s not where justice miscarried. What Anne’s father had done to her big sister – what Anne had been forced to witness as a little girl – drove her over the edge. By the time she killed her father – which she readily admitted – she really was crazy. Locking her up was the right thing to do, but they never should have let her loose. If the legal definition of insanity is an inability to tell right from wrong, Anne never was cured. She was able to see how other people’s actions might be wrong, but never her own.”
“How did she get out then?” Joanna asked. “Why was she released?”
“Because she conned Milton Corley the same way she conned me.”
“The article hinted she might have had something to do with her husband’s death as well.”
“Yes,” Beau said softly. “I’m sure she did. Milton Corley was dying of cancer, but she helped him along. She told me so herself that last day, the day she tried to kill me, too.”
The man’s anguish was so visible, Joanna felt ashamed of herself for prying. “I can see this is terribly hurtful for you,” she said. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“No,” he replied. “Don’t be. It’s okay. If I hadn’t wanted to talk to someone about it, I wouldn’t have mentioned her to you that first day. It’s just that sometimes I feel as though Anne never existed at all, as though she’s a figment of my imagination. I knew her for such a short time, you see, and…” He shook his head and didn’t continue.
Joanna slid across the cigarette-marred bench seat. “Come on,” she said gently. “We’d better go.”
WHEN WE GOT BACK TO THE JUSTICE CENTER, I went straight to the conference room. I was glad no one else was there. I needed some time alone. I sat down in front of the stack of phone logs and put on my reading glasses, but I made no effort to read. The conversation about Anne had rocked me. I was filled with the same kind of apprehension I had felt that May morning as I had driven to Snoqualmie Falls, and in countless dreams since – that there was more to learn about the woman who called herself Anne Corley – more than I would ever want to know.
Finally, because I had to do something to keep from losing it, I picked up the first of the telephone logs.
In terms of excitement, examining telephone logs is right up there with watching paint dry. Or maybe playing with Tinkertoys.
When I was a kid being raised by a single mother in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, we were poor as church mice. One year for Christmas my mother came home from the local Toys for Tots drive with a Tinkertoy set. That’s what I got for Christmas that year – Tinkertoys and a plaid flannel shirt Mother made for me. I remember hating to wear the shirt to school because other kids knew it was homemade.
But the Tinkertoys were a hit. I loved putting the round sticks into those little round knobs with the holes and making them jut out at all different angles. Telephone logs are a lot like that. The numbers are the little round knobs with holes in them. The calls that travel back and forth between them are the sticks.
The first knob was the pay phone that had been used to make the three separate calls to Winnetka, Illinois, on the day Deidre Canfield disappeared. But Frank Montoya is nothing if not thorough. Based on Harve Dowd’s observation that Jack Brampton had used the phones on numerous occasions, Frank had collected phone logs for both of the post-office pay phones over a period of several months – for as long as Jack Brampton had been in the area. Scanning through those, I found two more calls had been placed to Winnetka, Illinois – both of those to the offices of Maddern, Maddern, and Peek.
The next set of knobs were the two phone numbers in Illinois. Because of the volume of calls, I started with the log for the residence number first. The logs were arranged in order of the most recent calls first. I worked my way down list after list after list until I could barely see straight. Until I felt myself starting to doze in the chair. And then I saw it. The words “Olympia, Washington,” leaped off the page and brought me bolt upright and wide awake.
The call had been placed two months earlier at ten o’clock in the morning and had lasted for forty minutes. Excited now, I scanned faster. Three weeks before that was another call. A month before that was another. All of the calls were placed to the same 360 prefix number. Shaking my head, I extracted my wallet from my pocket and pulled out the list of telephone numbers, and there it was. That 360 number was the unlisted home number for Ross Alan Connors.
“What the hell does this mean?” I asked myself aloud.
Actually, the answer seemed pretty clear. I remembered that long empty silence when I had told Ross about the phone calls to the Illinois law firm. Now I had to face the possibility that Washington State Attorney General Ross Connors was actually involved in the plot that had resulted in the death of his own witness.
I’ve never been long on patience. Cooler heads might have paused for a moment or two of consideration. Not me. There was a phone on a table at the far end of the conference room. I grabbed the receiver off the hook and dialed in Ross Connors’s office number, only to be told he was out to lunch. Next I tried his cell phone. As soon as he answered, I heard the tinkle of glassware and the muted hum of background conversation. Connors was in a public place – some fine dining establishment, no doubt – and most likely with friends or associates. It wasn’t the best venue for me to try forcing him to tell me the truth, but I wasn’t willing to wait any longer. If my boss was a crook, I wanted to know it right then so I could deliver my verbal resignation on the spot.