“Why, of course, Jared, you’re more than welcome,” I said hastily, offering him my hand and ushering him into the house. “So good to see you. How are you, and what are you doing these days?”
He stepped inside and stood there on the entryway rug, stomping off the ice and snow that had clung to his boots. “I’m here because I need your help, Detective Beaumont,” he said.
The last time I’d seen Jared Danielson was years earlier when he’d been a lanky kid of thirteen who had just lost his mother. Now he was a well-built grown man, but a shadow of that long-ago tragedy still lingered in his eyes.
“Call me Beau,” I told him. “I stopped being Detective Beaumont a long time ago. Come have a seat and a cup of coffee while you tell me what you’ve been up to since I saw you last. Black or cream and sugar?”
“Black is fine,” he said.
As I walked Jared Danielson into the house, it seemed as though all my recently installed holiday cheer had instantly vanished. Suddenly I was traveling through time and space into a very dark place in my life, headed somewhere I definitely didn’t want to go—a hell I had visited in nightmares countless times through the intervening years.
First there is an explosion of gunfire from somewhere out of sight. When nothing more happens, I realize the bad guy is dead and turn back to check on my partner. Shot in the gut, a bloodied Sue Danielson sits leaning against a living-room wall. She is holding my backup Glock in one hand, with the weapon resting on her upper thigh. As I watch in horror, her fingers slowly go limp and the gun slips soundlessly to the floor.
In real life that’s when I knew for sure that Sue was gone. Her ex, Richard Danielson, had shot her dead.
Chapter 2
While I fussed with the coffee machine to give myself some emotional distance, Jared Danielson seemed to make himself at home. He wandered over to the westward-facing windows and stared out at our water view. When he dropped down to one knee and gave Sarah a pat on the head, she acknowledged the gesture by thumping her tail.
“I’ve always liked Irish wolfhounds,” he said. “What’s her name?”
“Sarah,” I replied. “She’s a rescue.”
Straightening up, he caught sight of a framed photo on the mantel. It’s a photo of my granddaughter, Athena, and Lucy. Both of them are sound asleep, with Athena’s head resting on the dog’s massive shoulder.
“A grandchild and Sarah’s sister?” Jared asked as I carried a loaded serving tray into the living room and set it down on the coffee table. My hands were shaking badly enough that I’m surprised I didn’t slop coffee in every direction.
“You’ve got the grandchild part right,” I told him. “Her name’s Athena. The dog is a previous wolfie—Lucy. We adopted her, but she ended up adopting Athena. They live in Texas now.”
By the time Jared and I were both seated on the sofa, I had a better handle on myself. “So,” I said, “I believe the last time I saw you was at your mother’s fallen-officer memorial.”
I remembered that event distinctly. After Sue’s death her parents had flown in for the memorial service from somewhere in the Midwest—Ohio, I seemed to remember. The grandparents, whose names I had somehow forgotten, had taken Sue’s boys—Jared and his younger brother—back home with them. Right that minute I couldn’t recall the brother’s name either, but they had all flown back into town months later to participate in the ceremony when Sue’s name was added to Seattle PD’s memorial wall in downtown Seattle.
“I believe you said at the time that you might want to be a policeman when you grew up,” I added.
Cops learn to read faces. It’s something that’s drilled into your head starting on your first day in the academy, and there are times over the course of a career when being able to capture and decode a fleeting expression on a suspect’s face can mean the difference between life and death. I saw the muscles in Jared’s jawline twitch. He chewed on his lower lip for a moment before he spoke.
“I tried that,” he said at last. “I got a degree in criminal justice and went to work for Monroe PD in Monroe, Ohio. It’s outside Cincinnati. They’re the ones who sent me through the academy.”
I wasn’t sure how his going through police-academy training jibed with his showing up in priestly attire. I was about to ask, but something in his expression kept me from opening my mouth.
He sighed and then, after taking a deep breath, continued. “I made it through training fine. But then, my first week of being in a patrol car on my own, I got a call to do a welfare check.”
A wave of gooseflesh passed over my body, because I knew what was coming.
“A domestic?” I asked.
He nodded. “A woman and two little kids—a boy and a girl—all of them dead, stabbed to death in their beds. The perpetrator was down in the basement. He’d taken himself out with an overdose.”
I said nothing because there was nothing to say.
“I called it in,” he continued. “I stayed there until the homicide detectives showed up so I could give them my statement. The lieutenant wanted me to be part of the house-to-house canvass. I told him I couldn’t do it. Instead I drove my patrol car back to the department, where I turned in the keys, my badge, and my weapon. Then I went home, got good and drunk, and stayed that way for a month.”
He paused and sat there staring into his coffee cup as though the liquid there might be able to deliver some enlightenment. I knew it wouldn’t.
“I think most people given those circumstances might have stayed drunk for a lot longer than that,” I offered. “What happened?”
“My grandmother sent her parish priest to talk to me, Father Joel.” Jared gave me a sidelong glance. “Did you know we were Catholic?”
“Not until your mother’s memorial service,” I answered. “Somehow our respective religious affiliations never came up in casual conversation.”
Jared nodded. “That’s one of the reasons my mother’s divorcing my father was such a big deal. They were both good Catholics, supposedly, and they had married in the Church. It’s why she put off getting a divorce for as long as she did.”
Again I managed to resist the temptation to speak. That’s another thing they try to teach you in the academy. When a suspect or witness is busy telling his or her story, don’t interrupt—just shut up and listen. I've had years of experience in that regard, so I kept quiet.
“Father Joel was a good guy,” Jared continued. “The last time I’d seen him was two years earlier when he officiated at my grandfather’s funeral. By the time he showed up at my apartment, I’d been shit-faced drunk for days. I wasn’t eating or sleeping, had lost close to twenty pounds, and hadn’t bothered to shower in I don’t know how long. The place was filthy, and yet there he was. The first thing he did was make me shower and put on clean clothes. Then he threw out the booze, made me drink coffee, and ordered a pizza. While I was drinking coffee, he started cleaning the apartment—throwing out garbage, washing the dishes. He told me Grandma had sent him to check on me because I wasn’t answering the phone.”