“Fine. Did Detective Kramer pick up that report on our crook, Pete Kelsey?”
Tomi got up and walked to another desk, where she riffled through a stack of papers in a wire basket. She shook one out of the pile.
“Nope,” she said, walking toward the counter. “Here it is. He said he’d be in for it later, but you can go ahead and take it now, if you like.”
“Thanks,” I told her. “Kramer’s busy in court. I want to get cracking on this right away. You do good work.”
“I know.” Tomi beamed, her dark eyes flashing humorously behind wire-framed glasses. “You dicks couldn’t get along without us.”
I waited until I was back out in the elevator lobby before glancing down at the piece of paper in my hand. When I did, my first reaction was that Tomi must have made a mistake and given me the wrong report. Pete Kelsey’s name wasn’t on it. I studied the paper for several long moments before the truth of the situation slowly began to dawn.
Pete Kelsey wasn’t Pete Kelsey at all. His real name was Madsen, John David Madsen, from Marvin, South Dakota. He was, in fact, PFC John David Madsen, who had gone AWOL from his unit in Southeast Asia on the fifteenth of March, 1969, and who had subsequently been declared a deserter on April fifteenth of that same year.
Holding the report in my hand, I almost laughed aloud, not because Pete Kelsey wasn’t who he said he was and not because he was a wanted fugitive. That was clearly no laughing matter. What was funny was that we now knew Pete Kelsey was a wanted man, but thanks to Detective Paul Kramer, we couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
Because Kramer had picked up that spoon and the damning fingerprints in the course of an illegal search.
The joke was on Kramer, and it served him right.
Chapter 15
I hurried up to the fifth floor and sat at my desk poring over the AFIS report as if reading the same black-and-white words over and over again would somehow unlock the secrets hidden behind them, because the words gave the bare-bones skeleton of a hell of a story.
John David Madsen, alias Pete Kelsey, had been on deserter status from the United States Army for more than twenty years. Why?
Picking up the phone, I dialed South Dakota information. As I waited for the operator to answer, I thought about how a son’s or brother’s or husband’s sudden reappearance after so many years of unexplained absence might affect the family he had presumably left behind. But the information operator came up empty.
If John David Madsen had any surviving relatives, they were no longer living in the vicinity of Marvin, South Dakota, wherever the hell that was.
Then, since I had come up empty-handed on the first try, I made another wild stab at it. This time I dialed Ottawa information, asking for either a Madsen or a Kelsey. Again, no Madsens, but three Kelseys were listed, one of which was a Peter. It sounded to me like one of the oldest phony ID tricks in the book-assuming the identity of a long-deceased child.
I jotted down the telephone number, but it took several minutes to work up nerve enough to dial it. The woman who answered sounded elderly and frail, and I berated myself for being an uncaring bastard even as I laid the ground-work for asking the painful questions.
“Is this Mrs. Peter Kelsey?” I asked.
“You’ll have to speak up a bit. I can’t quite hear you.”
I upped the volume. “Is this Mrs. Peter Kelsey?”
“Yes it is. Who’s calling, please?”
“My name is Beaumont, Detective J.P. Beaumont, with the Seattle Police Department.”
Had I been on the other end of the line, I probably would have demanded that my caller offer some further form of identification or verification. Mrs. Peter Kelsey did not.
“What can I do for you, Detective Beaumont?” she asked.
“This may be difficult for you, Mrs. Kelsey,” I said gently, “but I’m working on a case where someone has been living under an alias for many years. It’s entirely possible that this person has taken the name and assumed the identity of someone in your family.”
“Yes,” she said. “I see. Go on.”
“What I’m calling for, Mrs. Kelsey, is to see whether or not there was a child in your family named Peter Kelsey, a child who died at a very early age.”
The sharp intake of breath answered my question in the affirmative long before she spoke, her voice quavering tremulously. “Yes. He was my youngest,” she said, almost in a whisper. “My baby. He died of whooping cough when he was only three months old. I sat up with him all night in the hospital, but there was nothing anybody could do. Nothing at all. He died at five past seven in the morning.”
I was struck by the fact that even after all those years, the exact time of her child’s death was still engraved in her heart and brain. Mothers are like that, I guess.
She paused, waiting for me to say something. While I was still fumbling ineptly for an appropriate comment, she continued. “You say someone is living with my little Peter’s name? Someone there in Seattle?”
I didn’t want to drag this particular Mrs. Peter Kelsey, an innocent bystander, any further into the ugly morass. By just making the phone call, I had already inflicted far too much damage.
“It’s a police matter now, Mrs. Kelsey,” I said. “Knowing what you’ve told me, I’m sure we’ll be able to straighten things out in no time.”
“But this person,” she insisted stubbornly. “Has he done anything wrong, I mean anything that would reflect badly on my Peter?”
Aside from being the scum of the earth-a deserter and a suspected killer-how much more wrong can you get?
I said, “It’s nothing serious, Mrs. Kelsey. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.”
With that, I rang off. I had said the soothing words, but I didn’t believe them, not for a moment. I put down the receiver, but before I had begun to think about what to do with this new information, the phone rang again.
“Beaumont here.”
“Detective Beaumont?” It was a man’s voice, tight and tentative and uncertain.
“Yes.” I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice.
“My name is George, George Riggs. You don’t know me but…”
I recalled the name from Max’s story. “You’re Marcia Kelsey’s father.”
“Why, yes. That’s right.” I could tell he was enormously relieved at not having to complete his awkward introduction.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Riggs?”
“I’m calling because my wife, Belle, I mean, LaDonna, asked me to. We’re here at Pete and Marcia’s house with Erin, our granddaughter. Pete had told us about you, I mean, he had told Erin at least, and he showed her your card. So when we found it, LaDonna said we should call you right away. That’s why I’m calling. To see if you can come over. If you would, I mean. We need to talk to you.”
I suspected George Riggs was a shy man, a person of few words, who didn’t much like using the phone to talk with complete strangers. His nervousness broadcast itself through the telephone receiver with such force that what he said was almost unintelligible. The desperation was not.
“Of course, Mr. Riggs. I’ll be right over.”
“You know where the house is? The address?”
“Yes, I do. Is this an emergency, Mr. Riggs?”
“Oh no, nothing like that, but if you could come as soon as possible…”
“It may take half an hour or so,” I reassured him, “but I’ll be there just as soon as I can.”
“Thank you so much. I’ll tell Belle that you’re on your way.”
The garage gods were with me. I checked out a car in record time and was parked on the snow-covered street below the Kelseys’ house in something less than twenty minutes.
Sidewalk, stairs and porch had all been carefully shoveled clean of snow and ice. The red-bowed holiday wreath had disappeared from the front door, which was flung open wide by a ravishing young nymph with a wild mop of uncontrolled red hair, vivid green eyes, and milk white skin. Something about the cheekbones and the set of her eyes seemed vaguely familiar to me, but that was only a passing thought, which disappeared as soon as she spoke.