Right, I thought. Sure he did. I smiled engagingly at Margie. “You wouldn’t happen to remember any of that message, would you?”
“Let me go get my book.”
Margie writes her messages in a book that makes a carbon copy of each one. She returned carrying the spiral-bound notebook. “Erin called to tell me about her dad, to warn me. I’ve decided to leave town for a few days, just as a precaution, but…”
“But…? That’s it? She didn’t say where she was going or how we could get in touch with her?”
“I told you. Detective Kramer came in just then, and I gave the phone to him. I’m sure he has the rest of it.” The phone on Margie’s desk began to ring, and she hurried to answer it.
“What are you going to do?” Peters asked after Margie left.
“First off, I’m going to try to get those two handwriting samples. I’m sure I can get a sample of Chambers’ writing from Seattle Security, and I’ve got the name and address of Stovall’s apartment manager at a place called the Queen Anne. When I finish with those, I may track down that worthless Kramer down in District Court and clean his clock.”
With an acknowledging nod, Peters deftly maneuvered his chair back out through the doorway. “You do your thing, and I’ll do mine,” he said. “I have to read the chief’s prepared affirmative-action statement to the press at ten A.M. It’s going to be boring as hell, but it’s a job, and it beats doing nothing.”
He wheeled his way on up the corridor, with me trailing behind. “That’s where she lives, the Queen Anne? It seems like a pretty nice place.”
“You know where it is?” I asked.
“Sure. Amy and I thought about getting an apartment there until you talked us into staying awhile longer in Belltown Terrace. It’s really convenient, right across the street from the girls’ school.”
I still couldn’t place the building in my head. “I’ve got the address,” I told him. “I’m sure I’ll be able to find it.”
At that, Ron Peters laughed aloud. “Your memory must be failing, Beau. It’s not that difficult. It’s old Queen Anne High School. Somebody redid the whole thing and turned it into apartments.”
As soon as he said it, I did remember. In fact, I had picked up Tracie and Heather from John Hay Elementary on numerous occasions, but the name of the apartment building directly across the street had somehow slipped my mind. Probably deliberately slipped my mind. As far as I was concerned, Queen Anne High School was forever that, imprinted in my memory as a teeming, cheering gym-the site of my single high school basketball triumph, a last-second dumb-luck basket that won the final regular season game the year I was a senior.
The UP elevator appeared right then, and Peters wheeled himself into it.
“Thanks for jogging my memory, Ron,” I called as he disappeared into the elevator. “Where would I be without you?”
I headed back toward my office, happy in the knowledge that with Ron’s help, there was no need to look up Rex Pierson’s number. I knew where I was going and would simply show up on his doorstep at the Queen Anne unannounced.
I was relieved that for now the PI page of the phone book would continue to be off limits, because I wasn’t tough enough to look at it yet, and I didn’t know if I ever would be.
Chapter 18
I didn’t head out of the building as soon as I intended. Instead, I got stuck making phone calls, spending time talking with various lawenforcement authorities in Grant County, South Dakota. We needed to know something more than just a name about John David Madsen, aka Pete Kelsey.
After my request for information had been passed around the sheriff’s office there for some time while I cooled my heels on hold, I finally ended up talking to Undersheriff Hank Bjorensen, a man who had actually attended high school with John David Madsen, although Bjorensen had been two years younger.
What he told me was every bit as baffling as all the other puzzle pieces involved in what the media was now calling the school district murders.
According to Bjorensen, John David was the only child of a local and once well-to-do farming couple, from the nearby town of Marvin, a couple named Si and Gusty Madsen. John David had graduated from Milbank High School as valedictorian of his class and had gone on to an appointment to West Point. Shipped to Vietnam as a second lieutenant immediately after graduation, he had mysteriously disappeared during an R and R period in Saigon. The Army listed him first as AWOL and later as a deserter.
“That whole episode almost drove the old man crazy,” Bjorensen said. “Si Madsen was one of those old-time God-and-country men. He set out to prove the Army was wrong, insisting that his son should have been listed as an MIA, not as a deserter, but you know how that goes. The bureaucracy wears you down, grinds you down. They have all the time in the world; Si didn’t.
“It was like an obsession with him, took over his whole life until he hardly knew which end was up. To the Army he probably wasn’t much more than some pesky gnat. Mrs. Madsen died about five years ago. Old Si kept right on after it for a while, writing letters to his congressmen, writing letters to the editor, but when Gusty died, that took most of the spunk out of him. I think he just lost heart, finally, and gave up. After he died, the farm went to a niece and nephew on his wife’s side.”
“Are there any other living relatives?” I asked.
“Not as far as I know, other than the Lunds, the cousins I told you about, the ones living on the farm. But like I said, the Lunds are on his mother’s side. On his father’s, John David was the only child of an only child, so he was the last of the line as far as the Madsens are concerned. Do you want me to call Ruth Lund and see if she knows of anyone?”
“No, I don’t think that will be necessary,” I replied.
“So tell me. Why’s a big-city cop from Seattle interested in all this ancient history?”
Waffling, I said, “I’m working a case that might be connected.”
I didn’t want to admit straight out that I knew for sure John David Madsen was alive and well and living as a fugitive somewhere far away from Marvin and Milbank, South Dakota. Making an informal inquiry was fine, but at that point I could see no need of officially involving another jurisdiction. After successfully eluding his past for over twenty years, I was relatively certain that South Dakota was the very last place where a missing Pete Kelsey/John David Madsen would show up.
When I hung up a few moments later, I sat there in my office cubicle staring at the phone as if the answers to my questions were somehow encoded into the touch-tone numbers if only I had the ability to divine them.
What would have driven a gung ho, patriotic West Point graduate to disappear off the face of the earth as far as both his family and country were concerned? A My Lai incident or some other wartime atrocity? That might have been enough to send him AWOL, but what had driven him underground and kept him there for so many years after the war was over, while in the meantime, back home, his parents died with no word or clue about what had happened to him? What had made someone with a good family leave them all behind without a backward glance? And why would someone with a fine mind, perhaps even a brilliant one, hide out in a lifetime’s worth of low-status, craftsman-type jobs that required some skill, certainly, but didn’t begin to tap his intellect?
No matter how long I stared, the impassive face of the telephone gave me no answers to these troubling questions.
In the course of homicide investigations, I often encounter unexpected pieces of people’s past lives. Sometimes those secrets come from the victim’s side of the aisle, sometimes from the perpetrator’s. Often these pieces of history have little or nothing to do with the case at hand. But in this instance, and for no logical reason I could pinpoint, I had the uncanny sense that Pete Kelsey’s hidden past had everything to do with my unsolved double homicide.