“With both our parents gone, our mom’s folks—our grandparents, Annie and Frank Hinkle—took us back home to Monroe, Ohio, to live with them. It was a good place to grow up, or at least it was for me if not for Chris. I graduated from high school and won a scholarship to Ohio State. By the time Chris was in eighth grade, he was already smoking, drinking, ditching school, and sneaking out of the house at night. Gramps was an Eagle Scout kind of guy. Whenever he tried to get Chris to straighten up and fly right, Chris backtalked like crazy. He barely made it through eighth grade, but right after graduation he snuck into their bedroom one night, stole money out of both Grandma’s purse and Grandpa’s wallet, and then took off.
“Naturally they were worried sick about it and reported him missing. The cops looked for him but couldn’t find him anywhere. Three months later our dad’s mother, Linda Danielson, wrote to Grandma Hinkle saying that Chris had turned up on their doorstep in Homer, Alaska, asking to stay. She said he claimed he’d run away because Grandpa Hinkle had beaten him with his belt, something I can tell you for sure never happened. Gramps wasn’t that way. She said that since Chris wanted to live with her and Grandpa Danielson, she needed his school transcripts and shot records so she could get him enrolled in high school there.”
“Your other grandparents went along with that?”
Jared shrugged. “What else could they do? They had done their best by both of us, and they decided there wasn’t much sense in trying to force him to come back. They figured he’d just take off again, so why bother?”
“What happened then?”
“I’m not sure. He stayed on with the Danielsons for a while—I don’t know for how long. He ended up dropping out of high school without graduating and took off again.”
“Did you try contacting your grandmother over the years?”
Jared shook his head. “I didn’t really know that side of the family. We weren’t ever close, not even before Mom died to say nothing of after. Maybe you remember that none of them bothered to come to Mom’s memorial service, and if they had one for our father, Chris and I never heard about it.”
“You weren’t even invited?”
Jared shook his head again. “So other than that one letter requesting Chris’s school information, we—meaning my grandparents and I—never heard another word from my father’s side of the family. It was like they had disappeared off the face of the earth.”
I’d seen situations like this countless times before. When domestic violence results in a homicide, the lingering aftereffects can continue to tear a family apart for generations.
“Obviously all this happened years ago,” I observed, “so why are you on a mission to find Chris now, and why come to me?”
“Gram Hinkle isn’t well,” Jared told me. “She’s in assisted living and wants to make things right with Chris before she passes on. I think she wants to see him one last time, and I took a leave of absence to try to help her get that sorted.”
“This sounds as if your grandmother took the parable about the prodigal son to heart,” I suggested. “The kid who goes AWOL gets the brass-band treatment when he comes home. As for the son who never ran off in the first place? He’s more or less taken for granted and brushed aside.”
Jared favored me with another nod accompanied by a rueful grin. “Right, he’s the guy who gets sent out searching for the one who isn’t there—if he still exists, that is.”
“You think Chris might be dead?”
“Maybe or maybe not,” Jared replied. “I have no idea. No one on our side of the family has heard from him directly since he left Ohio at age thirteen.”
“Have you filed a missing-persons report?”
“Chris may be missing from our lives, but that doesn’t mean he’s missing as far as other people are concerned, so no. We haven’t filed a missing-persons report.”
“Have you tried contacting your other grandmother?”
He nodded. “She died two years ago.”
“Have you checked with the cop shop in Homer?”
“I gave them a call, and they mostly gave me the runaround.”
“Have you looked into NamUs?” I asked.
“What’s that?” Jared returned.
For someone who was about to be teaching criminal justice at the college level, it seemed to me that NamUs shouldn’t have been a mystery to him. “The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System,” I said. “It’s an open-sourced program that allows law enforcement and even family members to upload personal information on missing loved ones so it can be compared to unidentified remains.”
Jared shook his head. “Never heard of it,” he said.
“That would be my first step. I’d start by entering every detail I could about Christopher Danielson into their database. Providing a sample of your own DNA would also be helpful.”
“I see,” Jared said.
“Is your DNA in CODIS?” I asked.
CODIS is the Combined DNA Index System. Fortunately, that piece of law-enforcement jargon was something Jared did recognize. He probably also understood the thinking behind my question. If Chris had grown up to be a clone of his biological father, there was a good chance he had ended up in enough trouble with the law to be marking time in a prison cell someplace where his DNA would have been collected at the time he was incarcerated. The same possibility might have occurred to Jared, but he didn’t mention it in his reply.
“I’m pretty sure Monroe PD took a sample of my DNA for elimination purposes when I first joined up,” he said. “That might have been uploaded into CODIS, but I’m not sure.”
Not necessarily, I thought. What I said was, “We should check and find out.”
“Does that mean you’ll help me?” he asked.
“Not so fast,” I admonished. “You still haven’t explained why you came to me for help.”
“I watch a lot of true crime on TV,” he replied. “Last fall I saw that 48 Hours episode about Justice for All getting an exoneration for that guy from down in Seattle who spent sixteen years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. You weren’t interviewed for that show, but as soon as the name Beaumont was mentioned as part of the case, I knew it had to be you.”
He was right on that score. I had indeed been involved in the Mateo Vega wrongful-conviction situation. At the time I had made it clear to the folks at Justice for All that I didn’t want my participation in the case to become public knowledge. Good luck with that. Having my name mentioned on national TV was exactly what I hadn’t had in mind.
I nodded. “You’re right. I didn’t want my involvement made public, but as they say, no good deed goes unpunished.”
“But that’s why I thought of you when Gram asked if I’d try to find Chris for her. At least you’re someone I used to know.”
“I am that,” I agreed.
“So will you help me, then?” Jared asked.
“I guess so,” I agreed.
Jared’s face brightened. Reaching across the coffee table, he took my hand and pumped it. “Thank you so much, Mr. Beaumont.”
“You’re welcome, Father Danielson, but wouldn’t it be easier if, for now, we stuck to Beau and Jared?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “I’d like that.”
I pried Sarah’s head off my lap, got up, and went in search of my iPad. “Okay,” I said once I returned to the sofa. “Now it’s time to go to work. Tell me everything you can about your brother.”
“Before we do that, don’t I need to put you on retainer or something?” Jared asked.
“No,” I answered. “Whatever the bill turns out to be, it’s marked paid in full. Your mother already took care of it.”
Chapter 4