“As a matter of fact, so am I,” I said, and we both burst out laughing.
When we arrived back at the office I got into my own car and headed out for my interview with DeAnn Cosgrove.
For years I went along with the self-congratulatory prejudice that causes people who live in downtown Seattle to maintain that the east side of Lake Washington is nothing but a vast residential wasteland. Driving across the lake and becoming instantly and hopelessly lost is a point of honor for some confirmed city dwellers. Now that I work in south Bellevue, however, I’m gradually getting over it. With the help of my newly purchased GPS, I had no difficulty making my way to the residence of DeAnn and Donald Cosgrove on the western edge of Redmond.
The house was one of a number of small neat family homes tucked onto a quiet cul-de-sac. A tiny fenced and well-maintained front yard was graced by a number of plastic vehicles and a small swing set. When I rang the bell it was answered by a woman in her early thirties who carried a relatively new baby on one hip while being trailed by a pair of what looked to be three-year-old twins.
DeAnn Cosgrove had the wan, distracted look of someone suffering through months of sleep deprivation. She wore a long-sleeved denim shirt with distinct traces of baby burp dribbling down one shoulder. Her hair was pulled back in a ragged ponytail. Looking at her reminded me of Kelly. When we’d seen my daughter down in Ashland, she’d looked a lot like that, too—weary beyond words.
“J. P. Beaumont,” I said, holding out my ID. She glanced at it with no particular interest. “I’m with the Special Homicide Investigation Team,” I added. “Are you DeAnn Cosgrove?”
“Yes, I am,” she said, nodding. “Come in. Please excuse the mess.”
She was right. The house was messy—not dirty but cluttered with laundered but unfolded clothes piled two feet deep on the couch, with the dining room table covered by a snarl of papers, and with a minefield of toys littering the carpeted floor. That, too, reminded me of Kelly and Jeremy’s place, for many of the same reasons. Taking care of kids doesn’t leave a lot of excess time for anything else, most especially housekeeping.
“I meant to shower and have this all picked up before you got here, but…” she began.
“Don’t worry about it,” I assured her. “I just came back from visiting my daughter and son-in-law down in Ashland. They have small kids, too.”
DeAnn gave me a sincere but haggard smile and then swiped an easy chair free of plastic toys so I could sit down. Then she settled into a rocker. Without practiced aplomb, she unbuttoned her blouse, covered herself with a tea towel, undid her bra, and began nursing the baby. She accomplished this while at the same time trying to cajole the twins—two impish little boys—into picking up their toys and putting them in a nearby toy box.
“So what’s this about my dad?” she asked.
I glanced at the name on the folder I was carrying. The missing person’s report for Anthony David Cosgrove had been filed by someone named Carol Cosgrove on May 19, 1980. DeAnn, the daughter, had been listed on the form by name.
“Who’s Donald, then?” I asked. “Your brother?”
DeAnn shook her head. “No,” she said. “Donnie’s my husband. Cosgrove’s my maiden name. When Donnie and I were getting married, I told him I wanted to keep my name just in case Daddy ever showed up and came looking for me. Luckily for me, Donnie’s a really practical guy. He said it made no sense to have more than one name in our family, so he changed his name to mine. His dad didn’t like the idea very much, but Donnie said he was marrying me, not his father.”
It was clear that almost twenty-five years later, DeAnn Cosgrove was still grieving for her absent father and hoping against hope that someday he would return. That kernel of knowledge was enough to break my heart. It put a personal human spin on an assignment that had been, up to that point, nothing but a list of names.
“Sounds like your husband’s got a good head on his shoulders,” I said.
An odd expression flitted across DeAnn’s face. “Yes,” she agreed finally. “Yes, he does. But you still haven’t told me. What’s this about? Why are you asking questions about Dad after so many years?”
“It turns out there are literally hundreds of unresolved missing persons cases in this state that have gotten zero attention…”
“Tell me about it,” she said.
“I work for the Washington State attorney general, Ross Connors. He’s asked my agency, the Special Homicide Investigation Team, to go through those cases and see if by cross-checking we can bring some of them to a close.”
“I’ve heard about cases like that,” DeAnn offered. “Cold cases where they eventually figure out that an unidentified body somewhere else is someone who’s been missing for a long time.”