Dance of the Bones

AFTER I FINISHED GOING THROUGH Amanda Wasser’s digital files, I sat there for a while longer and thought about them. The first order of business, of course, would be to reinterview Calliope Horn. I still have the last phone book the telephone company sent out. It’s so out-of-date now that it’s close to being an antique. A check of that showed no listing for Calliope Horn. That was hardly surprising. The Kenneth Myers homicide was twenty--five years earlier. A lot can happen in that amount of time.

Had I still been part of the S.H.I.T., I would have had access to any number of public and private databases and could have used those to track Calliope Horn down on my own. That door was now permanently closed—-officially that is. Unofficially, I still had a single ace up my sleeve: my old pal Todd Hatcher.

Todd is a smart guy, a forensic economist. They’re the kind of -people who look into small things and spot coming trends. One of my first interactions with him had come about when he showed up on the attorney general’s doorstep with a dissertation in hand. The paper laid out the long--term adverse financial implications an aging prison population would have on the state budget. I had it on good authority that Todd still had access to all those highly sensitive databases that were now closed to me. Todd is also your basic IT genius. In fact, he’s the one who had used off--the--books methods to locate a madman’s cell phone, thus allowing me to save Mel Soames’s life mere weeks earlier.

This wasn’t quite that pressing an issue, but with Mel still out of town, I hoped Todd could help me find Calliope Horn in a timely enough fashion that I could have my interview with her out of the way before Mel came home.

I called Todd and passed along my request. Next I dialed Brandon Walker. When he answered, I could hear the clatter of dishes and the sounds of -people talking in the background. “Beaumont here,” I told him. “Is this a bad time?”

“No, I missed lunch, so I stopped off for an early dinner, but I’m done now. Did anything jump out at you?”

“At the time of the initial investigation here, detectives spoke to Kenneth Myers’s girlfriend, Calliope Horn. She indicated that when she last saw him, he was on his way to Arizona for some reason and that he expected to come home with a sum of money from an undisclosed source—-enough money to get them moved out of a homeless camp and back on their feet.”

“A score of some kind, maybe?” Brandon asked.

“A score with a woman involved.”

“What woman?”

“Not sure,” I said. “Calliope didn’t have a name, but she suspected it might have been an old girlfriend from Arizona. Kenneth apparently was seen in the company of an unidentified woman here in Seattle shortly before he disappeared. I’ve got someone looking for Calliope right now. If I can interview her tomorrow, I will.

“Since Lassiter was already in prison, he can’t be responsible for Ken’s death, but he might have some idea of who was.”

“Lassiter pointed me in the direction of someone named Ava,” Brandon said, “Ava Martin Hanover Richland. She was John’s girlfriend at the time of the homicide, and she also testified against Lassiter at both trials. I know she palled around with Ken, too.”

“That’s a time--honored way to keep the cops from looking at you,” I told him. “You do everything you can to point the finger at somebody else.”

“So if you can manage to track down that old girlfriend . . .”

“Calliope,” I supplied.

“Ask her if she ever heard Kenneth Mangum Myers mention Ava Martin by name.”

“Will do,” I said. “I’ll have Todd, a friend of mine who’s a whiz at data mining, look into Ava’s history as well. Could you give me that string of names again?”

While Brandon was repeating them, there was an audible blip in the line. “Just a sec,” he said. “I have another call coming in. Can you hang on?”

“Sure.” While he was off the line, I made a note of the list of names. One of the things I’ve learned from Todd Hatcher is that the Internet is no respecter of state lines. Your name is your name. A hit can come from any corner of the country—-or of the world, for that matter.

After the better part of a minute, Walker came back on the line. “That was Warden Huffman from the state pen,” he said.

His voice was different. I could tell at once that something was wrong.