“Not so far, and I don’t really expect to,” I replied. “After all the uproar over the lab’s mishandling of evidence in the Mateo Vega case, I’m sure she’s going a hundred percent by the book—crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s. Once Gretchen has the profile in hand, it’ll go straight to Professor Raines, but Harriet strikes me as a straight shooter. As soon as she has the information, she’ll forward it to the Alaska State Troopers, but I’m betting she’ll let me know, too.”
“Still,” Mel said, “the instant the remains come back to Chris, you’ll be booted off the case. What’ll you do then?”
“Come home,” I said. “Alaska’s a beautiful place, if you like snow, but I wouldn’t want to live here, at least not in the winter.”
“That makes two of us,” Mel said with a laugh, “so what are you and Twink doing for dinner?”
“I’m on my own.”
“How come?”
“She’s not staying here. The rooms are all nonsmoking. There’s a breakfast room here at the hotel, but no real restaurant. The girl at the desk said there’s a steak house across the street. I’ll probably grab a bite there before I hit the hay.”
We talked for a while after that, exchanging meaningless pleasantries the way married people do. It wasn’t so much about what was being said as it was that we were chatting. The truth is, I’ve become something of a homebody of late, and I would much rather have been home in Bellingham and in front of the fireplace with Mel and Sarah that cold winter’s night instead of hanging out on my own at the Driftwood Inn in Homer, Alaska.
When the phone call ended, I turned on the TV set briefly, but there wasn’t anything scheduled that I found remotely interesting. By then it was almost eight. Those Ziggy Specials were now a long way in the rearview mirror. I got dressed, bundled up, and made my way across the street to AJ’s OldTown Steakhouse & Tavern. If you’re looking for white linen tablecloths and crystal glassware, AJ’s isn’t the place for you, but it worked for me. I ordered a ginger ale, a house salad, and a small plate of what the menu referred to as “drunken clams drowning in a white wine, garlic, butter sauce.” As long as the clams were the ones swilling down the white wine and I wasn’t, we were good to go.
I was done with dinner and considering my dessert options when my phone rang.
“Hey, Todd,” I said. “How’s it going?”
“I’ve been working the Shelley Loveday Adams problem, and I just hit on something interesting.”
Todd sounded excited enough that it piqued my curiosity. “What?” I asked.
“On April seventh, 2006, Shelley Loveday was involved in a minor traffic incident in Las Vegas, Nevada. There was evidently a big pileup on the Strip. The accident probably wasn’t her fault, but she rear-ended somebody and came away with a DUI conviction. It was a first offense. She probably could have taken a safe-driving course and had the citation removed from her record. Instead she let it ride, and that’s why I was able to find it.”
“The timing’s pretty interesting,” I said. “That’s only a week or so after Chris disappeared.”
“Exactly,” Todd agreed. “So I checked with the major hotels in Vegas. Turns out Shelley Loveday was staying in a suite at Caesars Palace, the kind of accommodations casinos usually reserve for and routinely comp to their high rollers.”
Suddenly I was making the same connection that Todd had. Shelley had told me straight out that Roger had paid Chris off in order to encourage him to disappear. She’d also mentioned that the payment would have been made from the “just in case” funds that Roger stowed in the safe at home. But what if Roger hadn’t made the payment in person? What if he’d used a courier to make the payoff and had delegated his mistress to deliver the goods?
After all, what about that unidentified woman Bill Farmdale had told me about, the one claiming car trouble who’d shown up at the back door of Zig’s Place the night Chris disappeared? What if Roger had dispatched his mistress to deliver the payoff money to Chris but she’d pulled a fast one? What if while Chris was working on her car, she’d attacked him from behind? With him on the ground and her standing over him, she would have been at the proper angle to deliver that fatal blow, the results of which were still visible in Harriet Raines’s patched-together skull. As for Chris? In that position he would have been totally oblivious to the danger and completely unable to defend himself.
And just like that, with that one blow, Shelley Loveday would have accomplished two very different things. Roger Adams had wanted Chris Danielson gone, and killing him handled that thorny issue once and for all. As a very important side benefit, however, Shelley now found herself in the possession of a sum of cold, hard cash to spend on whatever she wanted, including an expensive junket to Vegas.
According to Twink, as long as Shelley had been married to Jack Loveday, the guy had kept her on a very short leash as far as spending was concerned. Would someone like that hand over money for his wife to squander on a weekend of gambling in Vegas? Not on a bet, I told myself. I suspected that Jack Loveday had known nothing at all about that weekend junket, and there was a good chance Roger Adams, Shelley’s longtime lover, hadn’t heard a word about it either.
Prior to that moment, I had considered Roger Adams, Danitza’s aggrieved father, to be the only person of interest in the likely death of Chris Danielson. While I was still on the job, I would have regarded that kind of investigation with disdain, saying the detectives involved were suffering from tunnel vision. Hadn’t I been doing the same thing?
Most homicides revolve around one of three things—drugs, sex, or money. Here was number three staring me straight in the face—money, ten thousand dollars’ worth! Compared to that a father’s simmering anger might have to take a backseat, because now I had two things I hadn’t had before—motivation and an actual suspect.
I was still holding the phone with those ideas flashing through my mind when I heard Todd’s impatient voice in the background. “Beau, are you still there?”
“Sorry, yes, I’m here. Great work, Todd,” I told him. “Keep digging. I think you’ve just handed me the name of my possible killer.”
“Shelley Loveday Adams?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Okay,” Todd said. “I’m on it.”
He hung up then. Instead of ordering dessert, I waved for the waitress to bring my check. After paying the bill, I headed back across the street to the Driftwood. There might have been snow on the ground. It could have been frigid weather, but I didn’t notice and didn’t care, because now I had a real sense of purpose.
I was on the job again, and the old killer-chasing bloodhound had just caught a scent.
Chapter 21