I have to confess, I didn't have a pat answer for that question. Why should Candace Wynn have known? I said nothing, and my mind went wandering down another track.
"What else do you know about this what's-his-name, Wheeler-Dealer? Would he really mail a copy of that picture to Joanna? A picture of his own daughter? I'm a father. It doesn't sound to me like something a father would do, not even a shitty father."
Peters agreed and offered an alternate suggestion. "Maybe somebody else sent pictures to both of them."
I gave that idea some thought. It seemed somewhat more plausible. "But who?" I asked.
Peters shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. What now?"
"We'd better drag our butts down to Portland and talk to Bambi Barker."
"Today?" Peters asked in surprise, glancing at his watch. It was already well after three.
"Why not today? If we left right now, we could just beat the traffic out of town. Besides, we wouldn't have to cross any bridges."
Peters shook his head. "It would be midnight before we got back. I don't like to come home that late. Heather and Tracie still get upset if I'm not home before they go to bed."
After the divorce, Peters' two girls had spent some time in a flaky religious commune with their equally flaky mother. With the help of my attorney, Ralph Ames, we had managed to get them back home and in Peters' custody late the previous fall. Kids are pretty resilient, but the two girls still hadn't adjusted to all the abrupt changes that had disrupted their young lives. They were still basically insecure. So was Peters.
"Why don't I drive down by myself, then?" I suggested. "It's no big deal for me to come home late. Nobody's there waiting. Besides, it's important that we talk to Bambi before her dear old dad has any idea we know what's been going on."
"You've got yourself a deal," Peters told me. "You drive to Portland, and I'll handle the paperwork."
Talk about getting the best of the bargain! I headed for my apartment. No way was I going to drive one of the departmental crates to Portland when my bright red Porsche was longing for the open road.
By four, I was cruising down Interstate 5, headed south. Once I passed the worst of the Seattle/Tacoma traffic, I set the cruise control to a sedate sixty-two. Red Porsches draw radar guns like shit draws flies. Sergeant Watkins had given me a long lecture in community relations on the occasion of my second speeding ticket. I had slowed down some since then.
As I drove, I was conscious of springtime blossoming around me. Spindly blackberry clumps were green with a thin covering of new leaves. Here and there, hillsides were graced with farmhouses surrounded by blooming fruit trees.
Between Seattle and Portland, I-5 bypasses dozens of little western Washington towns-Lacy, Maytown, Tenino, Kelso-places travelers never see in actual life. They're nothing more than signs on the freeway and names and dots in a road atlas. Nevertheless, bits and pieces of small-town life leaked into my consciousness. There was the ever-present message from an eccentric Centralia dairy farmer whose private billboard still wanted to get us out of the UN, and the new chain-link fence surrounding the juvenile detention center in Chehalis that said we don't want our town contaminated by these kids. Further south, another billboard proclaimed the Winlock Egg Days.
I had never attended an egg festival. Or wanted to.
The day was flawlessly clear and bright. To the left across the freeway, Mount Rainier majestically reflected back fragile spring sunlight. It was too dark to catch sight of the shattered, still-steaming profile of Mount St. Helens.
I savored every moment of that drive south, from the thick papermill-flavored air of Longview to the cheerful lights on the grain elevator at Kalama. With every mile, the case receded into the far reaches of my mind. For those three quiet hours, I forgot about Darwin and Joanna Ridley, about Bambi Barker and her father, Wheeler-Dealer.
As a homicide cop, that's a luxury I don't give myself very often, but Candace Wynn and her mother had brought back memories of my own mother and her painful death. It had pulled me up short and forced me to recognize exactly how precious life is, had shocked me out of the trap of drifting through life without tasting or noticing.
I owed Candace Wynn a debt of gratitude. Sometime I'd have to call her up and thank her.
CHAPTER 13
St. Agnes of the Hills School sits well back from the road in the middle of Beaverton. It boasts an expanse of beautifully manicured, discreetly lit grounds sandwiched between business parks and new and used car lots. It was late evening when I drove up the circular driveway and parked in front of the building. Spotlights showed off the golden bricks and arches of a graceful Spanish facade on the front of the building.
In the darkness, one front window of the building glowed industriously. I climbed the circular stairway and tried the heavy, double door. It opened into a highly polished, tiled vestibule. Directly ahead, the doors to a plain chapel stood open, but the room itself was deserted. To one side of the vestibule, the fluorescent glow of a light revealed a tiny receptionist's cubbyhole. There was, however, no receptionist in sight. From a room beyond that room, through a half-opened door, I heard the hollow clacking of an old manual typewriter.
I paused in the doorway of the second room. A woman in a prim white blouse with a short blue-and-white wimple on her head sat with her profile to the door, leaning over a typewriter in absolute concentration, her fingers flying. She was a bony woman with a hawkish nose. Wisps of gray hair strayed out from under her headpiece.
She was typing at a small, movable typing table. The large wooden desk beside her was polished to a high gloss and devoid of any clutter. An equally polished brass nameplate on the desk pronounced "Sister Marie Regina O'Dea" in a way that said the lady brooked no nonsense.
As the unchurched son of a fallen-away Presbyterian, what I knew about Catholic nuns could be stacked on the head of a proverbial pin. My previous knowledge was limited to the convent scenes in The Sound of Music, which was, for many years, my daughter's favorite movie. The sum of my stereotypes went little beyond the schoolboy rumors that roly-poly equals pleasant and angular equals mean, and ugly girls become nuns when nobody makes them a better offer.
Looking at Sister Marie Regina's narrow face, I wondered if anybody had ever made her an offer of any kind.
I stood quietly, watching her type. The woman had no idea I was there. She typed copy from a neat stack of handwritten pages. When she reached the bottom of a page, she stopped, moved the top sheet to the bottom of the stack, straightened the pile with a sharp, decisive thwack on the table, and put them down neatly again.
When she stopped to change pages the second time, I decided to go ahead and interrupt her. "Excuse me, but I'm looking for the lady in charge, Sister Marie Regina, I believe," I said, nodding toward the polished brass nameplate.
Startled, she jumped, her hand knocking the stack of papers to the floor. Without a word to me, she bent down, retrieved the papers, and straightened them completely before she ever officially acknowledged my existence.
"Yes," she replied crossly, eventually, her tone saying she welcomed me about as much as someone welcomes the twenty-four-hour flu. And that was before she knew who I was or what I wanted. "What can I do for you?"
"For starters, could you tell me where to find Sister Marie Regina?"
"I'm Sister Marie Regina."
"Good. My name is J. P. Beaumont. I'm a detective with Seattle P.D. I'd like to speak to one of your students."
I held out my ID for her to look at, but her shrewd eyes never left my face, nor did she reach out to take the proffered identification.
"Which one?" she asked coldly. She knew which student I wanted, and I knew she knew. I went along with it, though, playing dumb just for the hell of it.
"A new student," I said innocuously. "One who's only been here a few days."