Orchids and Stone (16 page)

“And did you call that in to dispatch?”

She shook her head. “I went over there.”

“To the lady’s house? To this Minerva Watts’s residence?”

Nodding, Daphne told him about those few minutes of her life. The hesitation. The odd, muted alarm that passed between the man and the woman. The sight of Minerva Watts inside, her face etched with barest fear. Her comment about the brooch. The other woman calling her
lady
, then
Mother
, then shouting for Guff.

“So he tells me to stand there and he grabs me. I kind of slipped out of my jacket—he was holding on to my sleeve—and I ran.” She pointed a finger in the air, thinking it out. “When the policemen came the first time, I could hardly give them a thing, hardly describe the people I saw take the old lady—Mrs. Watts—or the car they drove. I couldn’t even remember her name at the time, even though she’d told me her name a couple of hours before.”

Seton shrugged. “That’s normal. Quick description isn’t something civilians get tasked with. I see you, I can spit into a radio ‘white female adult, thirty-five, average size, brown hair pulled back, jeans and a black shirt.’ But how often have you ever needed to immediately, succinctly, and accurately describe someone? Most people don’t do description.”

“I’ll be thirty-two my next birthday.”

“Close enough,” he said with certainty. “My point is, civilians do not have to describe someone in a few words, in a manner that can let another cop hearing the description grab the target out of a crowd.”

Daphne nodded. It made sense, everything this retired detective said made sense, but the words weren’t a salve. Had she done everything for Minerva Watts? Had the police done everything for Suzanne? And how could anyone know? Maybe just one more question, one more option considered would have meant so much more, would have solved something. Maybe if she’d finagled an address earlier, then gone to Mrs. Watts’s house Wednesday night instead of Thursday afternoon, things would be different. She wouldn’t have ended up chasing after the Town Car.

What if the police had known Suzanne was missing a bit sooner? What if Daphne had reported how risky her sister ran, all the sneaking out and naughty things she did?

“Suzanne slept with one of her teachers once.” Daphne’s blurt surprised herself.

He rubbed his jaw again. “I don’t recall if we had that detail. There’s a cold case investigator at the department who should hear that from you.”

“And something would happen? He’d investigate? Or he’d just write a little report with that little detail?” She heard the trace of bitterness in her voice and saw his lower jaw extend, set. She sniffed. “I’ve always wanted an explanation. I want to know who did it. And why.”

“I get that. And I’m sorry.” Seton set down his rod, balancing it with care against the carport. He faced Daphne with his thumbs hooked in his pockets. “Now, this deal over at the Watts residence—”

“He chased me,” Daphne implored. She knew she sounded like a victim. She didn’t want to be a victim. To not be chased, one just didn’t run, right? But what if the feeling of menace told every fiber of her being to flee? “He chased me on foot.”

“And then?”

“I got away.” Now, she decided she sounded as nutty as Minerva Watts flailing in the Peace Park.
They’re trying to kidnap me. They’re trying to rob me
.

He pursed his lips, his glance flitting left and right, then checked his watch.

“I got arrested.”

Seton cocked his head. “Not for running from that man you didn’t.”

“No. You see. I saw them leave . . .”

“While you were running?”

“While I was hiding. Then I followed their car and I caused an accident and got arrested for reckless driving.”

There, she’d said it. She’d been wondering how to summarize the debacle for anyone else. Her mother? A lawyer, at some point?

“You were cited and released?”

“They took me away. I didn’t have my driver’s license with me by then because it was in my jacket and the guy who chased me got my jacket. My wallet and phone were in the pockets. The car was my boyfriend’s, but it’s in his dad’s name and I forgot about that and I guess maybe I looked or sounded—”

“More than a little suspicious.”

She nodded, glum. “I guess.”

He folded his arms across his chest. “Tell me, why did you want to talk to me?”

“Because of my sister.” Daphne heard the plaintive tone she used and squeezed her eyes shut. “It . . . just wasn’t . . . enough. We never knew who or why or anything. I never understood. It never ended and it never got better.”

“You mean because we never made an arrest.”

“Yes. Sure. And, I mean, if you’d caught the guy—” Daphne opened her hands in front of him, looking for agreement. “It was probably a guy, right?”

He nodded, waiting with his lips pressed together.

“If you’d caught the guy, wouldn’t you have gotten some information from him? Wouldn’t we have gotten to know what happened? More or less? When and how? Where it happened. And why? Just, why?”

His shoulders softened as he exhaled and his tight grimace became sympathetic. “You know, when we go to the homicide unit, we get all kinds of training. From the best. And it’s scary what we know about why twisted people perpetrate heinous crimes. Astounding what we can discern from analyzing the crime scene. One who’s organized, one who’s disorganized. Links. Quirks of the killer. A killer who knew the victim, one who didn’t. One who feels bad about himself. It’s scary. But it’s also scary . . . what we don’t know.”

“I don’t know why I had to lose my sister. She was so . . . great.”

He gave the gentlest smile and a little commiserating nod. Probably he did that for every grieving family member he came across, Daphne thought. But he couldn’t do more. He couldn’t answer the unanswerable questions.

She swallowed. “I’ve taken up enough of your time. More than enough. Thanks very much for talking to me. I apologize for coming, even. I won’t bother you again.”

He heard all this without expression. If he’d been ready to admonish her, he’d changed his mind and instead walked the driveway to her car, holding her truck door when she opened it.

“There were,” he said, “unanswered questions.”

“Besides who killed her? And why?”

He studied Daphne. “
Why
is not a question with an answer that could satisfy you or any other reasonable person. There isn’t and never will be a good answer to: For what reason was your sister murdered? Now, I hate that we didn’t get a case built on anyone, but that is the way it goes sometimes. Otherwise, we’d be expecting that every single time we could point a finger at someone, say ‘he did it,’ we could know and be satisfied that we got that far. That would be perfection. Perfection doesn’t exist. You had the misfortune to lose your sister through a senseless murder, then to be one of the families stuck with a suspended, cold case.”

Daphne wiped her eyes. Railing about leads not discovered hadn’t gotten her dad anywhere.

“I wish my father had come to see you years ago.”

He twisted his mouth. “I talked to your father a lot. I remember your folks, remember dealing with them. See, when a case starts to go cold, we’ll search the victim’s bedroom. That’s intrusive to the family. Lots of people get offended. They’ll say we should be out catching the killer instead of sifting through the victim’s personal things. They ask what we’re looking for, but we can’t say because we don’t know. We’re looking for anything. We want a name, a number, an address, anything, any clue when a case starts running dry. Anyway, I remember when we did that search.” He smiled and nodded. “Spent a couple hours poking around and drinking your mother’s coffee. She baked us cookies.”

“You searched . . .” Daphne felt her face contort as she pictured her mother handling the situation twenty years ago. The best of intentions, complete misunderstanding.
Precleaning?
“You searched my bedroom.”

One hand covered her mouth and Daphne turned away and refused, refused to cry as she pictured her mother stacking all of Suzanne’s papers and notebooks, all the scraps with phone numbers or addresses. The fliers for raves. Everything paper in Suzanne’s world. The poems and essays.
I’ve tidied your room, even the closet
, her mom had said when Daphne came home from school one day. And their closet, the closet she shared with a just-murdered sister, soon had a sealed cardboard box.

Oh, Mom. What did you do?

CHAPTER 15

Daphne felt herself wither under Arnold Seton’s careful surveillance of her reaction.

He nodded. “That’s right. Shared bedroom. But you weren’t there that day. And your father was at work, but he knew we were going to be there. That search is pretty standard when a case isn’t developing, see. Your folks got it, is what I’m saying. They didn’t make the investigation—the search—harder, like some victims’ families do. They let us search the girls’—your and your sister’s—bedroom, flip the mattresses, everything.”

She’d been eleven and not known. Her mother had been a housewife and not understood. Daphne pictured her mother in an apron, sanitizing the girls’ room in advance of the police search of her daughters’ bedroom, her good little girl and her murdered wild child. Frances Mayfield had boxed up Suzanne’s naughty poetry and other papers.

“My mom didn’t get it, I mean, Suzanne, see . . .” Daphne faltered as she concentrated on winning her battle to not cry in front of the detective.

Arnold Seton smiled. “Your folks, they’re good people. I talked to your father more than your mother. He was the one wanting constant updates, asking about leads. He was real involved, kept checking in with me. He’d call me every six months or so, right up until I retired back in, let’s see, I just started my eleventh year. Suspended cases go to the cold case guys when you retire.”

“He . . . um, my father . . .”

The detective nodded. “Real involved.”

“You retired ten years ago.” Storm clouds threatened to rupture in her mind.

“I can’t believe I’ve been retired that long. But yeah, ten years and a week now.” He grinned and pushed his thick gray hair back, assuming a more somber expression. “I can’t help you more. The cold case investigators are who you and your folks should talk to about your sister’s case.”

Tears formed as Daphne studied the soil. She stymied a wail. So. So, he didn’t know about her father’s suicide, didn’t know how much hope her dad had lost when Detective Seton told him he was retiring and the suspended case would go join other dead cases. She opened her mouth, closed it. Did the man need to know another sad thing, another piece of loss stemming from his first unsolved homicide?

“What?” he asked.

No. Here was a gift she could give him. Daphne shook her head. “Thanks for talking to me.”

He nodded. But after she sat in her truck’s driver’s seat and he backed up a few steps, he called out, “Your sister had a friend. I don’t remember her name right off the top of my head, but she’s the one who first noticed your sister was missing. Your sister wasn’t reported missing for not showing up in class—”

“It was Christmas vacation,” Daphne said. “The semester had just ended. Suzanne wasn’t at the college, she was home.”

“But not home that night, right?” he said, squinting as he recalled the details. “This friend had called your folks, wanting to talk to Suzanne, was the one who first reported your sister missing. We always go back to the beginning, to the person who reports.”

“Lindsay!” The name was out of Daphne’s mouth before the thought coalesced. Lindsay . . . Lindsay Something. Daphne hadn’t thought of Suzanne’s best friend by name in years and years.

“Did you or your parents lose contact or did you stay in touch with her?”

“No. No, we . . .” Daphne’s voice trailed. “We lost contact.”

An hour crept by in traffic as Daphne drove back from Arnold Seton’s house. Almost two hours ached away while she stood in line at the Department of Licensing to get her driver’s license replaced. Time slipped through her fingers like sand.

Downtown, she searched for a parking space near a building of smoked glass planked in brown stucco. She pushed through glass doors emblazoned with
The
Seattle
Times
. A woman at the front counter looked up and Daphne asked for Thea.

When the staffer said she’d check to see if Ms. Roosevelt was available, Daphne considered how Thea had befriended her at college. Other girls at the dorm had tried with too direct an approach, been pseudo-engaging. Daphne was the girl whose sister had attended the university and been killed during Christmas break.

Some of the old newspaper articles she’d read in grade school and high school detailed how the university offered grief counselors and held a memorial for Suzanne. Her English class had a poetry reading in her name. Another class planted a tree on campus with a plaque announcing Suzanne Mayfield would be remembered in their hearts forever. Daphne shrank from the curious who were drawn to the notoriety of murder, and she hated her minicelebrity status born of having a dead sister.

“Ms. Mayfield, Ms. Roosevelt will be out in a few minutes.”

Nodding, Daphne snapped back from the reverie. There was plenty to worry about without dragging the past around with her. One unsettled and fresh issue niggling her thoughts was Vic’s proposal and her own reaction.

Other moments deserved reflection, and Daphne had pushed them away. Back when Daphne got her union card and her first set of construction tools had early wear, she recalled Thea showing off her press credentials, saying she’d earned her wings. Thea had cut herself off from further boasting, as though it were unseemly or too professional, in light of the blue collar direction Daphne had taken. The moment had crystallized in time, a recollection Daphne could reexamine whenever she chose.

She’d always chosen not to study the moment.

Thea flung herself into the lobby, a wad of papers in one hand.

“Hey, you!” Her one-armed hug came without hesitation, and her voice was high enough to make the front counter woman gawk. “I’m doing a million things at once. What’s up?”

“Hey,” Daphne said. “I . . . wanted to see you.”

“Let’s go back,” Thea said, nodding them through a doorway.

A few cubicle walls divided the vast open office beyond. Desks crammed with computers and files covered the floor. The walls were covered in newspapers, sections flopped over wall after wall. In every cranny, shredders, waste bins, and computer towers occupied floor space. A sign suspended over one set of tables read
News Desk
.

Breezing through the first open office, they passed a glassed-in conference room. The polished table within was huge, almost square, and held the majority of the sizable room. Thea strode on, past a corridor sign for the office’s childcare area, past painted walls, vending machines, and people talking into headsets.

“I saw that detective,” Daphne said in a low voice when Thea swooped around two corners and stopped at another desk piled with papers and folders.

“So, this is about Suzanne,” Thea said.

“Everything’s about Suzanne.” Daphne shook her head, bringing a hand to her mouth. “I don’t know why I said that.”

Thea took a breath. “Even before, I mean . . . before she went away to college, you must have had questions about her.”

“When she went away to college, I realized how much I missed her,” Daphne snapped then winced. “I just mean, I never got answers. I was a kid and I didn’t know who or what to ask. So I never did.”

“And now you’re asking. What are you actually asking?”

“Everything. I want an explanation. Explanations.”

Thea pursed her lips. “And you don’t want to let things go . . .”

Daphne spread her hands. “That’s what Vic says. You sound just like him.”

“I definitely don’t sound like Vic.”

“Last night, he was all after me to stop—what did he say? Tilting at windmills. And he proposed—”

“He can’t stop you from checking on anything,” Thea said, her voice severe. “How does he propose to do that anyway?”

Daphne opened her mouth, then shut down her automatic response, thinking hard. Looking down, she mumbled about the threatening phone message they’d discovered after Thea left the house the day before.

Thea raised her eyebrows and shrugged. “Weird. But maybe it was a wrong number.”

“Right.” Daphne told her about the police officer taking Daphne to the other side of the Peace Park, knocking on doors, discovering almost nothing.

“Look, Daphne—and I’m not trying to be mean here—picture your mother being older and forgetting things, not making sense, not understanding things. Fading out like you say Vic’s dad does. And you have to pack up her stuff and move her. And she tells people you’re not her daughter and you’re kidnapping her. Can’t you picture that happening?”

“Minerva Watts sold her car. And the car I followed isn’t her car, isn’t the one that’s usually there.” Daphne looked at Thea with hope, wishing the reporter’s instincts would kick in and crucial questions would follow.

Thea shook her head. “I can’t believe they actually did a neighborhood canvass for you.”

“A what?”

“I can’t believe they actually knocked on the neighbors’ doors and asked questions just because some crazy lady spouted off nonsense.”

“She’s not crazy just because she’s old. And dementia isn’t the same thing anyway. It’s not even the same thing as Alzheimer’s.” Daphne folded her arms across her chest.

Thea gave a withering roll of the eyes. “Hello? Crazy lady wasn’t in reference to the old lady. You.
You
are the crazy lady.”

“Ah. Helpful. Thanks.” Daphne didn’t try to hide her annoyance as she struggled to recall why she’d come to see Thea. The retired detective’s parting words came back. Go back to the beginning. “What do you know about the cold case investigators at the Seattle Police Department?”

“I know,” Thea’s voice softened, “that they have a few cases they’re working on out of a bunch they’re not. On most cold cases, they have nothing to go on, but at some point every one of those cases was reviewed by their unit, step-by-step. And all their cases are reviewed at regular intervals.”

There was more, Daphne could tell. “Right. M’kay, and . . . ?”

“And I know that your sister’s case is not in their working pile. I checked. I’m sorry that’s the way it is, but they have nothing.”

Daphne felt her chin crumple and she rolled her lips in to keep herself together, until she managed to say, “That retired detective—”

“Who does not know how you found him?”

“N-n-no, not quite.”

“Oh, Christ, Daphne. You are not cut out for this.”

Daphne set her jaw. “No, I’m not. I never was. And that’s fine with me.”

Thea’s gaze drifted down to her desk, flitting to files, Post-its, the computer screen with its open documents.

“Thee, find a woman named Lindsay for me. I don’t know her last name but she went to school with Suzanne.”

“No.”

“What?”

“You heard me. No. As in, no, Daphne.
Daph
.” Thea’s last word blasted with sarcasm.

Feeling a flush rise, Daphne wondered what Thea based her decision on. Because Thea already talked to the cold case investigators? Because Daphne made Thea’s name one syllable? “Thea,” she said. “Seriously. Her name was Lindsay and she’s the one who first reported Suzanne missing.”

Thea stuck her fingers in her ears. “No. I won’t do it.”

“Come on. You could do it in a flash. It’s just a little thing that retired cop mentioned. I want to ask this Lindsay . . . I just want to talk to her.”

Thea cocked her head back, reeking offense. “Don’t you think I have better things to do?”

“Look, Thea, what’s the best-case scenario here?” Daphne asked, working it out one more time for herself: to have made the full effort or not. “And the worst?”

“Christ, Daphne. Fuck off, okay? Stop being self-important and melodramatic. Go ask for a deferred prosecution on your reckless charge and quit interfering and creating havoc. There’s nothing here. Not with your sister’s old case, not with the old lady thing. There’s nothing—”

“Wait a minute. Yesterday, you were reading old articles on Suzanne’s case. You had them in your car. What were you looking for?”

“Anything. But there isn’t anything there. We have the old police reports. I looked at everything. I read all the old stories. This is a cul-de-sac. There’s nothing.”

“When I asked you to find a way to contact Minerva Watts, you did it in minutes. You’re great at finding people.”

“That was about your little old lady thing, not your sister from twenty years ago.”

“No one on the planet has something better to do than to help a little old lady. She told me she was being robbed and kidnapped and—”

“And she wasn’t.”