Back in my room at the Driftwood Inn, I hied myself to the desk chair and began going through the documents Todd had sent me. I worked from the bottom up, starting with the ones sent earlier in the day and gradually arriving at the later ones, all the while searching for any telling details that might provide a smoking gun that would point suspicion at Shelley Adams.
In my years as a homicide investigator, I often went to a prosecutor with what I thought to be a solid case only to be told it wasn’t enough—that I needed more in order to prove the suspect guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. This time I was several rungs on the investigative ladder below that. All I had at the moment were suspicions—plenty of those—but nothing concrete and nothing solid enough to rise to the level of probable cause. This was a cold case for sure, one with no forensics or DNA or eyewitnesses. It would have to be solved the old-fashioned way, by tracking down friends and relations of both victim and suspect in order to establish exactly how the fatal encounter might have occurred.
A lot of crooks get caught because they’re just plain stupid. Shelley was anything but that. Homer, Alaska, is definitely a small town. With the notable exception of Penny Olmstead’s accidental sighting in Anchorage, Shelley and Roger Adams had managed to carry on an extramarital affair for years without anyone being the wiser. No, Shelley was smart, all right, and excellent at keeping secrets. Fortunately, I’m an expert at unearthing same.
There was no scene of the crime as such. Even had there been video surveillance cameras rolling nearby at the time when Chris went to help that supposedly stranded motorist, those tapes—that’s what they generally were back then—would have long since been overwritten and disappeared. What I had to do was re-create the crime scene in my mind, and in the quiet of my room at the Driftwood Inn that’s what I did.
I knew Chris had disappeared after his shift at Zig’s Place on March, 27, 2006—a Monday night. Consulting my notes, I verified that Bill Farmdale had said Chris had come back into the restaurant after taking out the trash. That’s when he’d mentioned he was leaving early so he could help the lady in distress. Now that I was paying attention to Shelley Adams, I thought the wording was telling. Chris hadn’t said a girl needed her tire changed. He had specifically used the term “lady.” That implied that this was someone ten or more years older than Chris was and most likely someone he didn’t know personally. If it had been a regular or occasional customer at the restaurant—someone Chris recognized—he would have identified her as such. No, the woman with the flat had been a stranger to Chris—someone he didn’t know at all
Now I wanted to know more about Chris’s final interaction with Bill, and the only way to verify that was to speak to the sole survivor of that verbal exchange. I picked up my phone, located Bill’s phone number, and called him. Fortunately, it was Saturday and not all that late, so I doubted I was risking waking someone.
“Hey, Bill,” I said when he answered. “It’s J. P. Beaumont calling again. I hope I’m not disturbing you, but I need a little more information.”
“Not at all,” he said. “Happy to help.”
“By the way, I had lunch at Zig’s Place today—the Ziggy Special. It was great. I also met your uncle. He seems like a hell of a nice guy.”
“He is that,” Bill agreed. “What do you need?”
“I believe you told me Chris came in toward the end of his shift to say he was leaving early.”
“That’s right.”
“About what time was that?”
“Eight thirty or so. He was due to get off at nine.”
“You said that he was taking the trash out when he was approached by a woman saying she had a flat tire.”
“That’s correct,” Bill answered.
“Do you happen to remember how Chris was dressed at the time?”
“Dressed? He was wearing his uniform. That’s one of the things about working at Zig’s. Everybody wears uniforms. Uncle Sig says that’s how you build an effective team, by having everybody dress the same way.”
“But when Chris came back from taking out the trash, was he dressed for going outdoors?”
“Sure,” Bill said easily. “I didn’t see his uniform, but he was probably still wearing it. He also had on his jacket and a pair of boots. I remember there was snow in his hair and on his jacket. It snowed like crazy that night—ten inches at least—and it was windy, too,” Bill added. “I ended up running off the road and landing in a snowdrift on my way home. Had to call a tow truck to pull me loose.”
Danitza had been out walking that night, too. I could have asked her the same question, and she could have told me about the snow and wind, too, although for this phase of my investigation I needed to leave Danitza Miller in the dark.
But if it had snowed heavily that night, visibility from any motorists passing the scene most likely would have been limited. And if the car had been parked on the shoulder of the road, any crime-scene evidence to be found there would have vanished the moment the snowplows came by the next morning. Ditto for any remaining blood spatter. Later in the spring, when the piles of accumulated snow finally melted into the earth, the blood evidence would have disappeared into the ground along with it.
“Anything else?” Bill wanted to know.
“One other thing,” I said. “How big was Chris back then?” The last time I’d seen Chris Danielson, he was a little kid.
“Taller than I was by at least three inches, maybe more,” Bill said. “He was always teasing me and calling me Shorty.”
“Do you remember how tall you were back then?”
“I was only five-eleven when we ordered our caps and gowns for graduation. Everyone else claimed they were six feet, even guys who were shorter than me.”
“And how was Chris built?” I asked.
“Tall but really skinny,” Bill replied. “So I’d say he weighed about one-forty, give or take. Anything else?”
“That’s all for the time being,” I told him. “Thanks.”
I ended the call and sat there thinking some more, trying to imagine how a smart killer might have come up with a plan to get away with murder. Wanting to lay hands on the money, Shelley would have thought all of this out in advance, and she would have been careful about the location. To avoid eyewitnesses, she would have chosen a place off the main drag, one that wasn’t well traveled.