“You’d be surprised how many quilters are out there,” Ellen said. “Two more girls from the What-Comm call center are taking it up, and when I worked at the call center down in Seattle, there were several there, too.”

  “Really,” I said. “When I hear someone saying, ‘911. What is the nature of your emergency?,’ I don’t envision someone whose spare time would be devoted to making quilts.”

  Ellen laughed. “They do. In fact, one of the dispatchers in Seattle, Constance Herzog, is a nationally acclaimed quilter. She’s won prizes all over the country. And she’s been recognized for donating her work to domestic violence shelters so that when the women there move on to permanent housing, they’ll have something tangible to take with them.”

  “Very commendable,” Mel said. “Most of the time they come to shelters with nothing but the clothes on their backs.”

  “As far as Connie goes, I suspect there might be a bit of personal history involved,” Ellen continued. “When she finished remodeling her studio, she held an open house, so several girls from the call center went. There was a framed picture hanging on one wall that looked like a mug shot, which was weird, so one of the girls asked about it. Connie said it was her dad and explained that was the only picture she had of him since her mother burned all the others.”

  “A mug shot?” Mel repeated. “Really? So did her father end up going to prison?”

  “Nope,” Ellen replied. “Whatever he was accused of doing, Connie said he got off.”

  By now I was all ears. Was this what we were looking for? Someone with a law enforcement connection, a personal interest in domestic violence issues, and possibly some personal experience with domestic violence? The burning of an ex’s photos made that sound like a distinct possibility. And saying “he got off” was a far cry from saying “he didn’t do it.” The killer we were looking for seemed to target domestic violence perpetrators who had indeed gotten off. As far as I was concerned, that framed picture was unlikely to be a caring daughter’s tribute to a beloved father, not by a long shot.

  “We all talked about how weird it was afterward, but we decided that what a person does in the privacy of her own home was none of our business.”

  None of your business, maybe, I thought, but it sure as hell sounds like mine!

  What I was feeling right then was that sense of euphoria that comes over you when you’re working on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle and two pieces with nothing on them but clear blue sky suddenly click together perfectly. In this instance, my two separate puzzle pieces were Ron Wang’s suggestion that our killer might be some kind of vigilante and Sandy Sechrest’s revelation about how working with domestic violence victims while serving as a 911 dispatcher had motivated her to become a police officer. Maybe Constance Herzog had been pushed in the opposite direction.

  At this point, she was still a 911 dispatcher who seemed to have a laserlike focus on domestic violence issues. So was it possible that this prizewinning Seattle quilter was also our serial killer?

  There was nothing I wanted to do more right then than to race out of the house and get Todd Hatcher on the line, but you’re not supposed to eat and run. So I minded my p’s and q’s and stayed put, all the while feeling as though I wanted to jump out of my skin. Finally, though, it was time to leave. As we gathered coats and jackets, inspiration struck and I turned back to Ellen.

  “Is that other quilter’s work anything like yours?” I asked.

  “I suppose,” Ellen said with a shrug. “She does landscapes, too.”

  “And if I wanted to see some of her quilts, how would I go about it?”

  “Google the name Constance Herzog. You should be able to see what she currently has available online.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll do that. Mel’s birthday is coming up. One of those might be just what the doctor ordered.”

  We finished thanking them for the lovely meal and headed out. Their front door had barely closed, when Mel turned on me.

  “What the hell?” she demanded. “When have I ever mentioned wanting to own a quilt? Yes, I offered to buy raffle tickets, but I was only being polite.”

  Kyle and Sarah had gone on ahead. “I’ll tell you later,” I muttered under my breath, “but not right now.”

  Chapter 35

  Bellingham, Washington

  Sunday, March 8, 2020

  The next day, Kyle took charge of Sunday morning breakfast. We had bacon and waffles—not the kind that would have required the use of a waffle iron, which we definitely don’t own. No, these were frozen ones Kyle had dragged home from his Costco shopping trip—the kind that pops up out of a toaster, which we do have. As for his Costco bacon cooked in the microwave? It was perfectly crisp without a smidgeon of grease left on the stovetop. It was beginning to dawn on me that having a teenager around wasn’t half bad.

  After getting home the night before and once Kyle had disappeared into his room, I had brought Mel into the picture and laid out my plan. Cops can compel suspects to provide DNA samples by obtaining the appropriate warrants. Private investigators can’t request warrants, but, like the clown says in The Little Engine That Could—there’s more than one way over the mountain to Yon. A handmade quilt would be covered with the quilter’s touch DNA, and, in this case, my Visa card would take the place of a warrant.

  “And you really think Constance Herzog is your killer?” Mel asked.

  “I do,” I said.

  “And you’re willing to buy a quilt to get a sample of her DNA to prove it?”

  “Yup,” I said. “It beats digging through her trash cans. If she actually made the quilt, skin cells, containing her DNA, should be all over it.”

  That sounded fine and dandy until we went online and studied Constance Herzog’s inventory of available quilts. They were jaw-droppingly expensive. The one that caught Mel’s eye contained a striking black-and-white silhouette of Seattle’s skyline with the Space Needle front and center. It was a view that almost mirrored the one from the bedroom window of our old condo. The problem was it cost a cool two thousand bucks.

  Mel started shaking her head. “You can’t be serious,” she said. “You’re going to spend this much on a quilt on a hunch that the person who made it is your killer?”

  “Go big or go home,” I said. “Besides, what I’m really buying is the DNA.”

  With the decision made, I scrolled down to the “contact us” part of the web page and sent an email.

  My wife’s birthday is next week. She loves your Space Needle silhouette. Is that quilt still available? If so, would it be possible for me to purchase it and then drop by to pick it up rather than having it shipped? I’d be glad to drive down from Bellingham to get it as soon as possible.

  Beau Beaumont

  As I pressed send, I was somewhat leery about having used my real name for fear she might remember me from days past when I was with Seattle PD, but that couldn’t be helped. I intended to pay for the purchase with my credit card, which would have my name on it, too. If she somehow made the connection to Scotty, I was fully prepared to pass him off as my beloved nephew.

  Once that was done and since it was too late to call, I sent Todd an email asking him to do a complete background check on Constance Herzog and on her father, too, since I had reason to suspect that if she’d grown up in a family plagued by domestic violence, that might be the source of her intense interest in the same.

  After sending both messages off into the ethers, I had crossed my fingers and Mel and I had gone to bed.

  There was no response to either of my emails when I got up on Sunday morning, and the same held true by the time we finished our Eggo breakfast. I was doing the Sunday crosswords when an email alert came in from Ron Peters, and it wasn’t good news.

  No luck on moving the needle on your cases. The powers that be in Homicide are concerned that if they reopen those three without having an actual named suspect, it’ll unleash a flood of similar claims.

  Sorry I couldn’t do more right now, but keep me posted.

  Ron

  Disappointment must have shown on my face.

  “What?” Mel asked.

  I read Ron’s email aloud.

  “So what’s the problem?” Mel asked. “If your suspicions about Constance Herzog are right, you’re about to do exactly what they’re asking—you’ll be handing over a named suspect. Once you provide them with that along with her DNA and the physical evidence linking the three cases together, they won’t have any choice. They’ll have to reopen them if for no other reason than to mark them closed.”

  That’s the thing about Mel. She manages to cut straight to the heart of the matter, as in, go ahead and solve them already! Now all I had to do was wait to hear back on my proposed purchase of a Constance Herzog original, but I’m not much good at sitting around waiting. In the old days I would have passed the time by belting down a shot or two of McNaughton’s. Instead I took Sarah for a walk.

  We were heading back to the barn when a call came in from Marisa Young. I answered with a question. “Where are you?”

  “Back home in Fountain Hills,” she said. “My flight from Portland was first thing this morning. I just got back from Sky Harbor and wanted to let you know what’s going on.”

  “How was it?” I asked, more than half dreading the answer.

  “It was amazing!” Marisa told me. “Absolutely amazing. I was sitting in the bar by the fireplace when she came into the room. I saw her stop and look around, and then she walked straight over to me. ‘I know you,’ she said. Then she reached into her bag and pulled out the teddy bear. ‘You’re the one who gave me this!’

  “I couldn’t believe that she still had it,” Marisa continued. “And the fact that she recognized my face blew me away. She sat down, and we spent the next ten minutes crying. The people in the bar probably thought we were nuts, sitting there bawling like a pair of babies over a tattered, one-eared, one-eyed teddy bear. So thank you, Beau, for making that embarrassing crying jag possible.”

  It was not the answer I had been expecting.

  “Did I ever mention that I spent fifteen years as a high school guidance counselor?” Marisa asked after a momentary pause.

  “Not that I remember. Why?”

  “Because,” she replied, “that’s a job that requires an ability to recognize the difference between someone who’s telling the truth and someone who’s lying. Given Serena’s history, I was expecting that she’d try feeding me a bunch of bull, but she didn’t. She told me about the night she woke up with someone pounding on the door and being rushed out of the house and into a car, and all the while she was holding on to her teddy bear.

  “Over the years she kept asking her mother about what happened to the ‘nice lady in that other house,’ the one who gave her the teddy bear. Her mother claimed that Serena was mistaken and there wasn’t any ‘nice lady’—that she was the one who had given her Mindy.”

  Yup, I thought, sounds like WITSEC all right.

  “They ended up living a tough life. Tricia worked the streets. From the time Serena was five or so, she remembers being left home alone at night with no supervision. At school there was a lot of bullying because she ate free lunches and wore clothing from Goodwill. And it was one of the kids at school who told her that her mother didn’t have a real job—that she was a prostitute.”

  By then, Sarah and I were back inside the house. Since Mel was nowhere in sight, I guessed she was probably doing her Sunday stint in the soaking tub. As I shed my jacket, my face flushed with embarrassment over law enforcement’s involvement in all this. Only a mindless, faceless government bureaucracy would think it would be a good safety measure to dump a young single mom on the opposite side of the country in a place where she had no friends or relations to offer support. I had been a homicide cop as opposed to a school guidance counselor, but I, too, could see this story had the ring of truth about it.

  “It sounds terrible,” I said at last.

  “I’m sure it was,” Marisa agreed, “and it got worse once Tricia started using drugs. A lot of the time the only food Serena had was what she got at school. On weekends, she went hungry except for what she could find dumpster diving behind fast-food restaurants. During those years, though, there were people who took pity on her and who would buy her an occasional meal or slip her a bit of cash now and then. Given the neighborhoods they lived in, some of those folks were pretty dodgy themselves, including a guy who made his living creating fake IDs, mostly for illegal immigrants.”

  “The one who created the Caroline Richards ID?” I asked.

  “You’ve got it,” Marisa agreed, “but you’re getting ahead of the story, and it’s almost like history repeating itself. Like her mother, Serena ran away at a very young age. When she was arrested for prostitution a couple of years later, her mom bailed her out of jail, but that was the last interaction between them. Serena never saw Tricia again. Instead, because of Serena’s good looks, she moved to Seattle where she was able to sign on with an escort service, which eventually led to her meeting a guy who still, to this day, is a respected local businessman as well as a mover and shaker in King County politics. He was completely smitten by her and kept her as a side dish for a number of years, paying her rent and buying her groceries.”

  “Did she happen to mention a name?”

  “Eventually. She conveniently left his name out of the story the first time around, but I managed to pry it out of her. He claimed he loved her and said that when his kids were older, he’d divorce his wife and marry Serena. She believed him, of course, but when she got tired of waiting, she decided that if she got pregnant, maybe she could speed up the timeline. That plan backfired big-time.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Instead of marrying her, he kicked her out.”

  “That’s right. It’s also when she got in touch with one of her friends from the old days, the guy who provided her with a new identity. Then she went on dating sites looking for a possible daddy replacement, because she was afraid she wouldn’t be any better at raising a child on her own than her mother had been. Even so, she didn’t want to give up the baby and she didn’t want the child to grow up without a father. That’s the real reason she zeroed in on Jeremy. Apparently he looks a lot like her ex.” Marisa paused and let out a long sigh before adding, “The whole thing is completely heartbreaking.”

  I couldn’t have agreed more. Aloud I said, “Suspicions confirmed then. Jeremy isn’t the father.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “But he’s planning on marrying her. Does she even care about him?”

  “Care about him?” Marisa said. “Yes. Love him? Probably not. She said she liked being around Kyle and his friends because they were so much closer to her own age. She told me she ended up making a pass at one of them, but Kyle saw what was going on. She was afraid he’d tell his father. Instead, he ran away and went to live with you. She says Jeremy has been so devastated at the idea of losing his family that she’s worried he might become suicidal.”

  The idea of Jeremy possibly committing suicide gave me pause. Suicide is the kind of death that leaves families forever asking themselves where they went wrong and what could they have done to prevent it. But before I had a chance to say anything, Marisa charged on.

  “So I made her a deal,” she continued. “I told her she’s welcome to come live with me. Between my divorce settlement and my inheritance, I’m in pretty good financial shape, but it’s no free ride. There are a number of conditions she has to meet. Number one—she has to go home and tell Jeremy the truth about all this because, if she doesn’t tell him, I will. Number two—she has to resume her original identity. I told her that her father died years ago. No one is looking for her anymore. That’s all over and done with. She needs to go back to being Serena del Veccio. That way she’ll have a real identity as opposed to a phony one. She’ll be able to get a passport if she wants to, and she might even be able to travel.”

  “What’s number three?” I asked.

  “Once Jeremy knows the truth about her and the baby, if they decide they want to stay in a relationship, fine. If they call it quits, then she’s welcome to come live with me, but as long as she’s living under my roof, she has to go back to school. She has to get her GED and start taking college courses. I told her that I’m prepared to take her in and look after her and the baby until she’s ready to be on her own, but if any of those conditions aren’t met, we’re done.”

  “It sounds like you made her a hell of a good offer,” I said. “What did she say?”

  “When she left the hotel in Portland last night, she said she was on her way home to Ashland to tell Jeremy. I told her to let me know what they decide. If she wants to come to Arizona, I’ll fly her down. Jeremy gave her a car to use, but she doesn’t have one of her own. I’m waiting for a call back, but so far she’s maintaining radio silence.”

  Once Marisa stopped talking, it took a moment or two for me to respond. “Wow,” I said finally. “This is all really generous of you.”

  “It’s not generosity,” she said. “It’s called looking after family.”

  “But it’s also looking after my family,” I told her. “You may be giving Jeremy an opportunity to set things right with his wife and kids. So thank you for that.”

  “You don’t need to thank me,” Marisa said. “Your efforts on behalf of your family have given me the answers for mine that I’ve been seeking for years. I’m the one who should be thanking you, and if Serena decides to take herself out of the picture, maybe Jeremy’s wife and kids will be able to forgive him.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” I replied. “Hooking up with Caroline Richards wasn’t the first time Jeremy strayed off the marital path, and I’m not sure my daughter is willing to give him another chance.”