“This is Mr. Beaumont,” Danitza said. “He was a friend of your birth father’s back when he and his brother were living in Seattle.”
James was a long-legged and good-looking preteen whose striking resemblance to his uncle, Father Jared Danielson, was downright spooky.
I held out my hand. Slipping off his backpack, James walked over and returned the gesture with a surprisingly firm grip and a ready grin. “Glad to meet you, sir,” he murmured respectfully. “Did you really know my father?”
I nodded. “Your dad was several years younger than you are now, but yes, I knew him and his older brother, Jared, too.”
“What was he like?”
In all of James’s twelve years, I suspect I was possibly the only person alive, other than his mother, who had actually known Chris Danielson in the flesh.
“He was a good boy,” I answered truthfully. “He and his brother both were, and neither of them deserved to lose their parents the way they did.” I wanted to add the words “and neither did you” to that statement, but I didn’t. And it turns out I didn’t have to. Looking me in the eye, James favored me with a tiny nod that told me he got it. As someone who had already lost two parents—both his birth father and his stepfather—he understood all too well.
“How are you fixed for homework?” Danitza asked, interrupting our conversation and precluding any further discussion.
“I’ve got some math and a lot of social studies,” he answered.
“Go upstairs and work on that while I finish with Mr. Beaumont here,” she said. “Once you’re done with schoolwork, we’ll order a pizza.”
James’s face brightened. “Sounds good,” he said. With that he gathered his backpack and disappeared up the stairs.
For a moment I couldn’t speak past another catch in my throat. Christopher James Danielson was clearly a terrific, well-brought-up young man. It broke my heart to think that his grandmother never got to meet him. Sue Danielson would have been so very proud.
Chapter 9
It had been overcast and getting dark when I parked in front of Danitza Miller’s home an hour or so earlier. When I left a little after five, I came outside to discover it was pitch dark and had started to snow. So far it didn’t amount to much—mostly light flurries. In Seattle it would’ve been enough to have people crowding grocery stores’ aisles to do “panic” shopping. Once some of the white stuff stuck, drivers on Seattle’s roadways would have gone nuts and started slamming into one another. In Anchorage it was business as usual.
Back at the hotel, I sat in my room for a while and perused the notes I’d made during my long conversation with Danitza Miller. With each detail I began putting together a timeline on Chris’s disappearance. The last Sunday in March of that year would have been the twenty-sixth. Nitz had spent the previous night at Chris’s place, and then he’d taken her home the next morning because she wasn’t feeling well. The big fight with her parents that had resulted in her leaving home had happened the following day, on Monday evening.
That night Nitz had gone to Chris’s place and waited for him to get off work, but he hadn’t shown. Whatever had happened to him had most likely occurred on either Sunday or Monday. Had he actually gone to work that night? The only way to find out about that for sure was to get boots on the ground in Homer itself, which gave me another reason for making that side trip.
So who all was involved in Chris’s disappearance? I instantly removed Nitz herself from my list of possible suspects. Yes, either the boyfriend or the girlfriend is usually involved in love-gone-wrong homicides, but in this case I couldn’t see it. Had there maybe been another boy involved? Maybe someone else had been competing with Chris for Danitza’s attention. If that were the case, she hadn’t mentioned it.
That brought me around to her parents, most specifically Danitza’s volatile father. It was interesting to know that Richie Danielson and Roger Adams had been in each other’s crosshairs as far back as high school. It must have driven Roger nuts to find out that years later his longtime rival’s son had knocked up his sixteen-year-old daughter. Remembering the murderous thoughts in my heart when I first discovered that my daughter, Kelly, and her boyfriend, Jeremy, were in the family way, I could see how Nitz’s father might have gone off the rails. With that in mind, I picked up the phone and dialed Todd Hatcher.
“Have you been getting what I’ve been sending you?” he asked once he came on the line.
A glance at my mailbox revealed I had fifteen separate messages, all of them from him and all of them unopened. “They’re here,” I said. “I’ve been tied up with an interview, so I’ll get to them in a while. Do any of them have to do with Roger Adams, Danitza’s father?”
“Not so far,” Todd replied. “Why?”
“I think he might bear some looking into,” I suggested. “Around the time Chris went missing, Danitza’s parents had just discovered that their sixteen-year-old daughter was pregnant and that one of the boys in question was none other than the son of Roger’s longtime rival from back in the day, Richie Danielson.”
“That probably didn’t go over very well,” Todd observed.
“You could say that. There was a huge father-daughter spat that resulted in Danitza packing a bag and leaving home that very night.”
“Which night would that be?” Todd asked.
“That would be Monday, March twenty-seventh, 2006,” I told him. “After leaving her folks’ place, she went to Chris’s apartment and waited for him, expecting him to come home once he got off work. When he didn’t show, Danitza hitchhiked from Homer to Anchorage, where she moved in with her aunt and uncle—her mother’s younger sister and her husband. She never saw Chris again.”
“So when was the last time she did see him?” Todd asked.
“That would be the day before, when he dropped her off at her house.”
“Unfortunately, there’s no way to track his movements.”
“There might be,” I suggested. “It turns out Chris did have a cell phone—one Danitza gave him. I know it’s possible to track locations on those now, but I’m not so sure it was possible back then.”
“Nice try but no time,” Todd said.
I’ve been around Todd long enough to know that’s rodeo speak for some poor guy who’s just been pitched off a bucking bronco sooner than the buzzer, only now the guy biting the dust was yours truly.
“So no way to track the phone?”