“The missing persons thing,” I answered.
Harry I. Ball, with his usual flair for understatement, had shortened the handle to MPT, and MPT was definitely Ross Connors’s own personal baby. In most jurisdictions, missing persons reports could just as well go into the round file to begin with. The reports come in and they go away almost immediately. Unless the missing person in question is a little kid or a good-looking babe who catches some media attention, nothing much happens. Most agencies don’t have the time, money, resources, or inclination to follow up on them.
It had finally dawned on Ross, however, that it was time for a systematic review of missing persons reports from all over the state. He had embarked on a program that included making the effort of tracking down and interviewing surviving family members, inputting all relevant information from Washington State’s missing persons reports into a national database, and comparing our list to any nationwide reports of unidentified remains. This was all done in the hope and expectation that closing some of our missing persons cases would also help close some unsolved homicides. So far the results were disappointing.
For the past two months, from as soon as I came back from medical leave, that’s what I had been doing—combing missing persons reports, entering the information into national and statewide databases, and seeing what came out the other end. For the most part it was dull, unrewarding work that could have been done by a well-trained clerk, but if the A.G. wanted full-grade investigators working the program, who was I to argue?
“How’s that going?” Ross asked.
“It’s a lot like looking for two halves of the same needle in several different haystacks,” I told him.
“No hits yet?”
“A few. I’ve found three where the people had turned back up, but, for one reason or another, never did get taken off the missing persons list. This afternoon I have an interview scheduled with a woman named DeAnn Cosgrove whose father went missing back in 1980.”
“Twenty-five years,” Ross mused. “That’s a long time.”
“That’s what she said when I called her about it. Why bring it up now? I told her I had to—it was my job.”
Ross smiled and nodded. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry, but I was ready for the other shoe to drop.
“So how are things between you and Seattle PD these days?” he asked.
This was not the shoe I expected. “Seattle PD?” I asked stupidly.
Ross grinned. “You know. Remember the place you worked for twenty-odd years?”
His “how are things” inquiry should have been easy to answer, but it wasn’t. Yes, I had worked in Seattle PD for a long time, most of it as a homicide detective. All the way along, though, I had rubbed the brass the wrong way, and the reverse had certainly been true. I hadn’t liked them much, either. Something to do with my not being considered a “good team player.” It turned out that working for Ross Connors had proved to be the one notable exception in a career marred by ongoing feuds with many of my commanding officers.
“So-so,” I said. “Things improved a little after Mel Soames and I pulled Paul Kramer’s fat out of the fire.”
Kramer was the brownnosing, ambitious jerk who had been a thorn in my side from the moment he first stepped foot in Homicide. His, in my opinion, undeserved promotion to captain had been the final straw in the whole series of unfortunate events that had driven me off the force.
Months earlier, his singularly stupid episode of tombstone courage—of going into a dangerous situation without waiting for backup—had almost cost him his life, would have cost him his life if Mel and I hadn’t ridden to the rescue at just the right moment. And, of course, that was the very reason he had done it in the first place. He had realized that we were following the same trail he was. In his eagerness to beat us to the punch and gain all the credit, he had committed an almost fatal error.
“Good,” Ross said. “Glad to hear it, because we seem to have a little problem, and you may be able to help.”
So he wasn’t here about Mel and me after all. I breathed what I hoped was an inaudible sigh of relief. “What kind of problem?” I asked.
“Does the name LaShawn Tompkins mean anything to you?”
It took a minute but then I remembered. LaShawn was a hotshot, tough-guy gangbanger who had gone to prison years earlier for the rape and murder of a teenage prostitute. I recalled that some time in the last year or so, after sitting on death row for years, he had been exonerated through newly examined DNA evidence. After his release, the state had declined to retry him. Tompkins’s release had been a huge media event, and his subsequent wrongful-imprisonment settlement had caused a storm of controversy that was now the centerpiece of what looked to be a knock-down, drag-out battle in the upcoming campaign to elect a new King County prosecutor.