“Special Homicide Investigation Team,” I explained. “We never close. Our official motto is: ‘All shit all the time.’”
I led him inside. We walked past Barbara Galvin’s empty desk. Beyond that, the door to Mel’s office was shut. The merest hint of Sunday’s edition of talk radio penetrating from there to the outside world posted a not quite audible but entirely understandable message: keep out. Or maybe even keep the hell out!! We kept right on walking.
“This is all part of the attorney general’s office?” Lander asked as I cleared off the guest chair in my cubicle-sized space so he could sit down.
I nodded. “There’s a squad here, one down in Olympia, and a third one over in Spokane to cover eastern Washington.”
“And what exactly do you do?” Lander asked.
“We investigate whatever Ross Alan Connors asks us to investigate. When I first got here we were doing a lot of work on the Green River killer. At the moment he has me working on cold missing persons cases from all over the state. That’s why I went to see DeAnn Cosgrove and Carol Lawrence—looking into the case of a man who disappeared twenty-plus years ago.”
Lander pulled out a notebook and consulted a page of scribbled notations. “That would be Anthony David Cosgrove?” he asked. “Disappeared on May eighteenth, 1980.”
“Correct,” I said. “DeAnn’s father and Carol Lawrence’s first husband.”
“And you said you actually saw Carol Lawrence? You spoke to her?”
I nodded. “Yesterday,” I said. “Up in Leavenworth.” This was stating the obvious, since he clearly already had this information, but we needed to go over the basics anyway.
“What about her husband?” Lander asked. “Did you see Jack?”
“No. He wasn’t home at the time,” I replied.
“And what time was that?”
“A little before noon.” I took out my phone and scrolled through my incoming calls until I found the one from Kendall Jackson. “Here,” I said. “I had lunch in Leavenworth after I talked to Carol. This call came in about the same time my food showed up, and the call record says it came in at twelve-ten. I must have arrived at the Lawrences’ house around eleven or so. After that I came back to Seattle. By seven-thirty or so I was having dinner at El Gaucho with my kids.”
“And we’ll find your prints in the house?”
I nodded. “In the living room. I sat on a couch with wooden arms. So my prints should be there. I doubt they’ll show up anywhere else. And they’re on file. Eliminating them won’t be a problem.”
“Did Carol Lawrence tell you anything about the Anthony Cosgrove disappearance that you didn’t already know?”
“Only that she and Jack were already involved before Tony went missing.”
“Involved as in having an affair?”
“Yes.”
“Anything else?”
“Other than that, she told almost exactly the same story DeAnn told.”
“Almost?”
I liked the way Lander caught my effort at hedging. He focused in on the wobbly modifier with laser precision.
“Look,” I said, “we’re talking perceptions here. As I said, Carol told me the same story her daughter did. In fact, the two versions were virtually identical. The problem is, when DeAnn told me the story, it seemed like she was telling the truth. When Carol told me the same thing, I got the feeling she was lying. We’re talking gut instinct here,” I added. “I have no proof of this whatsoever. None at all.”
“Lying or not,” Lander returned, “what exactly did Carol Lawrence tell you?”
“That Tony Cosgrove was fishing on Spirit Lake the morning Mount Saint Helens blew up and that he died in the eruption.”
“Do you think that was a lie?”
“He may have gone fishing, but I don’t think he died in the eruption. His body was never found.”
“Nobody ever found Harry Truman, either,” Lander pointed out.
Lander looked to be somewhere in his early thirties. I doubted he was old enough to remember much about the eruption itself or the curmudgeonly old guy named Harry Truman who had lived there. In the face of a possible eruption, Truman’s adamant refusal to leave his home—his stubbornness and innate stupidity—had taken on a life of its own. Mount Saint Helens may have blown Harry Truman to bits, but his death-inducing exploits remained a part of Pacific Northwest lore and legend. Dead or alive, Tony Cosgrove didn’t have nearly the same kind of media staying power.
“So you’re saying you don’t think Cosgrove’s really dead?” the young detective continued.