Chapter 20

Bellingham, Washington

Monday, March 2, 2020

By the time I clambered out of bed the next morning, both Mel and Kyle were long gone. Mel had left a note next to the coffee

machine saying that she’d bring home Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner. A check in the fridge revealed that the remains of

her fire-breathing curry from Saturday night had somehow vanished. I was smart enough not to ask where it had gone, but I

suspect it made an ignominious exit down the kitchen garbage disposal.

With the house to myself, and knowing there was plenty of time to meet the FedEx pickup deadline for Bellingham, I gave myself the morning off, lounging around in a robe rather than getting dressed. I also caught up on my backlog of unworked crossword puzzles. I remember reading somewhere that doing crosswords on a daily basis is good for keeping aging brain cells alive and functioning. So far, despite our steady diet of fast food, I seem to be doing all right in that department.

The previous week the weather had been so warm that it had felt as though spring had sprung. Today winter was back with a

vengeance. It was windy, wet, and cold, with occasional snow showers mixed with rain blowing in off the Pacific. At the bottom

of our bluff, the heaving waters of Bellingham Bay were a forbidding gunmetal gray as far as the eye could see.

“No walk today, old girl,” I told Sarah.

I don’t know if she understood me, but she responded with a brief thump of her lanky tail.

It was close to noon and I was thinking about getting dressed when an email from someone named Greta Halliday showed up on

my iPad.

My name is Greta Halliday. I just had a call from Yolanda Aguirre, saying that a private investigator named J. P. Beaumont

is looking into the death of my late brother, Loren Gregson, on the off chance that he might have been murdered. I know Ms.

Aguirre is involved in some kind of study of drug overdose deaths in the Seattle area. She interviewed my mother, Alma Gregson,

about this a while ago. She wanted to interview me as well, but at that time I declined to participate.

When Loren died in 2015, his death was deemed to be accidental, but Mother always felt as though there was something unresolved

about it. She passed away two months ago, shortly after the first of the year, leaving me in charge of handling her final

affairs.

I was ten years old when Loren was born, and we were never close, but if there really are unanswered questions concerning his death, I’ll be happy to be of whatever assistance I can. Please feel free to contact me at any time at the numbers listed below. According to Ms. Aguirre, my mother’s interview is file number 87.

I was glad to know she was willing to talk to me, but rather than reach for my phone, I wanted to reread file 87 and have

all my ducks in a row.

At the time Loren died, my mother was heartbroken and insisted that he must have been murdered. My brother had a history of

mental health issues and resisted taking medications of any kind. Based on that, my mother claimed that he never would have

self-administered a lethal dose of fentanyl either by accident or as an attempted suicide.

As I said, my brother and I weren’t close, and I have to say that the idea Loren might have been murdered seems unlikely to

me, but with my mother gone, settling the question of his death once and for all is the one thing I can still do for her.

Please feel free to reach out to me at your convenience.

Sincerely,

Greta Halliday

Abandoning the whole idea of getting dressed, I turned to my iPad. File 87 was dated September 4, 2018. I had read it before, but now I knew that the redacted name had been Gregson. He had been found in Seattle’s Fremont District on the morning of Monday, January 12, 2015. A woman out walking her dog in the grassy area between North Canal Street and the Ship Canal had spotted his body lying partly concealed in a clump of blackberry bushes.

Law enforcement was summoned to the scene. The medical examiner determined that the death had occurred sometime overnight

on Saturday, January 10. Documents found at the scene—a state-issued ID card as opposed to a driver’s license—identified the

victim as Loren R. Gregson, age thirty-eight. His manner of death was deemed to be accidental. Cause of death? A fentanyl

overdose combined with exposure.

Loren was the youngest of three children born to Alma and Harold Gregson. Although he hadn’t spent much time in jail, his

interactions with law enforcement consisted mostly of arrests for being drunk and disorderly and disturbing the peace. There

were also several domestic violence arrests stemming from disputes with his widowed mother, Alma. The last one of those had

occurred in 2014. Unlike previous incidents, on that occasion, his mother had gone ahead and pressed charges, resulting in

his spending sixty days in the King County Jail. Upon release, he was met with a no-contact order on the part of his mother.

Since he had still been living at home at the time of his arrest, he suddenly found himself homeless.

In today’s vernacular, Loren Gregson represented a serious case of failure to launch. He had dropped out of school as a high

school sophomore. He worked occasionally at various menial jobs, but mostly he lived off his mother. With that much background

it was time for the meat of Yolanda’s interview.

Yolanda: Once again, I’m so sorry for your loss, but please tell me about your son.

Alma: Loren was always a challenging child. It wasn’t his fault, though. He was one of those change-of-life babies. I was forty-three

when I found out I was pregnant. I thought I was old enough to be beyond all that nonsense and had gone off the pill on my

doctor’s orders because he was concerned about their long-term side effects.

When I found out I was expecting, Harold, my husband, was thrilled at the news. I was worried. I had heard that babies with

older mothers tended to have ongoing issues, and that was certainly true for Loren. He was angry almost from the day he was

born. He was never cuddly or happy like my older two children were, and from kindergarten on, school was a nightmare.

Part of that was due to dyslexia. He was diagnosed fairly early. The schools did the best they could. They gave him tools

that would have helped him to learn to read, but he wasn’t interested in doing the work. He couldn’t be bothered.

After dropping out of high school, he went to work for his father. Harold and a partner had a boat repair shop down on Lake

Union, a few blocks down the hill from our home in Fremont. It was close enough that they could walk back and forth from home

to work. That lasted for several years, but after Harold died and the partner took over, Loren didn’t like working for him.

That’s when he quit. He took various jobs here and there, but they never lasted long. And because he couldn’t read, his choices

were limited.

Yolanda: I understand the two of you had some domestic violence issues.

Alma: That’s true. Loren always had a temper. Something as simple as asking him to take out the trash could be enough to set him off. He hit me a couple of times, and yes, I did have to call 911 on occasion, but once he cooled off everything was always fine.

Yolanda: So you never pressed charges?

Alma: Only that once, and that was all Greta’s fault.

Yolanda: And Greta is?

Alma: My daughter. She was ten years old when Loren was born, and the two of them never got on very well. Fought like cats and

dogs. She always claimed that I spoiled Loren too much—that he was handed things she and James, my other son, had to work

for. Not only that, Greta has a very high opinion of herself, and she’s always been full of business.

One night when Loren was having one of his spells, she happened to turn up at the house unannounced. I had some bruises on

my arms and my nose was bleeding just a little, but she called 911 anyway. She’s the one who insisted that I file charges

against him and apply for a restraining order. What she did was nothing short of blackmail. Greta told me that if I didn’t

do as she said, she’d wash her hands of me and that I’d be totally on my own except for Loren.

I had macular degeneration by then, you see, and could no longer drive. I had to count on Greta to get me out to the grocery

store or to the doctor or even to the beauty shop. I needed her help too much to disregard what she said, so I went along

with the program, and that’s how I ended up living here. Greta suggested it because it’s only for people fifty-five and over,

and Loren was too young.

Yolanda: Wait, about getting groceries and taking you to the doctor? Couldn’t Loren have done the driving?

Alma: He never got his license. He couldn’t read well enough to pass the test.

Yolanda: Was the no-contact order still in effect at the time Loren died?

Alma: Of course. We didn’t dare disregard it, because I didn’t want Loren going back to jail, but I didn’t want him living on the

streets, either. I had promised Harold on his deathbed that I would look after Loren, and I did. When Loren was let out of

jail, I had one of Harold’s friends track him down. I rented a room for him in a house with several students from Seattle

Pacific University. It was down near the Fremont Bridge. That way he had a roof over his head, but he wasn’t too far away,

either.

One of Harold’s old friends runs the Fremont Inn, a joint where Loren and his dad used to go for lunch. I set up an account

there so Loren could stop by and have a bite to eat and something to drink. Once a week, I’d call up the owner and put the

bill on my credit card. After Loren died, when Greta found out about that—about my renting a room for him and paying his food

tab—she was absolutely livid. I didn’t think it was any of her business.

I stopped reading momentarily because all of a sudden my homicide investigative sensors had switched into high gear. Loren’s

death had been ruled accidental. Had there been any kind of investigation, questions should have been asked about anyone with

ongoing issues with the victim. Clearly his sister, Greta, had a decades-long beef with him, and she would most likely have

been a primary person of interest.

One of the customary lines of inquiry in homicide investigations is to follow the money. How much of Greta’s insisting that Alma file domestic violence charges against Loren and obtain the protection order had been out of concern for Alma’s well-being, and how much of it had to do with protecting Greta’s future financial interests? The fact that she had been outraged that Alma had continued to pay Loren’s bills suggested that maybe her anger could have had more to do with preserving her mother’s money than it did with keeping her from physical harm.

And then there was the matter of the email I had received from Greta earlier that day. In 2018 when Yolanda had been conducting

her familial interviews, Greta had refused to participate. Now here she was volunteering to meet with me. Why? More than once

in my career as a homicide cop, I’ve had perpetrators attempt to insert themselves into investigations to find out what was

going on. And why did they do that? To find out how close we were to discovering their personal involvement in the crime.

Was that what was happening here?

Yolanda: How are things between you and Greta now?

Alma: Prickly. I never imagined myself in assisted living, and I don’t really like it, but they have vans to take people where

they need to go, so I don’t have to rely on Greta for a ride anymore now that she’s barely speaking to me. That’s the thing

that breaks my heart. When I lost Loren, I didn’t just lose one child. In actual fact I lost all three of them.

Yolanda: I’m so sorry.

Alma: Me, too.

Yolanda: If you don’t mind, I’d like to return to the time Loren died. He passed away on Saturday night but wasn’t found until Monday.

Were you aware that something was wrong and that he’d gone missing?

Alma: Oh, I knew he was missing all right. I always called the Fremont Inn first thing on Monday morning to pay Loren’s bill for the previous week. George, the owner, told me the last time Loren showed up was on Saturday. He never stopped by on Sunday at all. As soon as I heard that, I knew something was wrong.

Right away, I tried to call and report him as missing, but when the 911 operator asked me when was the last time I’d seen

him and I told her several months ago, she practically laughed her head off, especially when she found out that he was missing

from a bar rather than from home. So when those two detectives showed up on Monday afternoon to tell me that he was gone,

I wasn’t surprised in the least.

Yolanda: What kind of interaction did you have with law enforcement back then?

Alma: Not very much. The next time I saw anyone was when someone from the M.E.’s office turned up to drop off his personal effects—the

things they found at the scene—his phone, his wallet, and his father’s Elks Club ring. Those are the only remnants I have

of him. I keep them in my jewelry case. As for everything else? There wasn’t much. His roommates brought me a garbage bag

filled with what they’d emptied out of his room. I don’t know why they bothered. The only things he owned were some secondhand

clothes that he’d picked up from Goodwill.

Yolanda: Was your son known to use drugs?

Alma: Absolutely not. He drank beer and had the occasional shot of tequila, but hard drugs? No way. He had mental health issues

all his life, and he hated taking medications of any kind. I tried to tell people that at the time—that the idea of his dying

of a self-injected drug overdose was a total joke—but nobody was interested in hearing what I had to say. After all, I was

only his mother. What did I know?

Yolanda: Any final thoughts?

Alma: Only one. No matter how Loren died, I still hold Greta responsible. If she hadn’t stuck her nose into things that were none

of her business and forced me to get that so-called protection order, none of this would have happened.

That was the end of the interview, but with those last words, Alma Gregson had lit a fire under me. One way or the other,

she had held her daughter responsible for Loren’s death. I now believed, as Alma had, that her son had possibly been murdered,

although, at the time, everyone else, including Greta Halliday, had been happy to go along with the theory of an accidental

death.

But something had changed on that score. Greta hadn’t been willing to be interviewed by Yolanda Aguirre earlier, but now she

was willing to talk to me. How come? Was it possible that my poking around in the case was cause for concern on her part?

For most people an M.E.’s death certificate designations of manner of death—undetermined, accident, or homicide—are nothing

but so many words on paper. But that’s not true for perpetrators—the person or persons actually responsible. For them a change

in designation from accident or unresolved to homicide can make all the difference, with the ultimate possibility of their

spending the remainder of their lives in prison. Was that what was fueling Greta Halliday’s sudden change of heart?

Suspicions are one thing; proof is another. As of now, I didn’t have nearly enough evidence to justify reopening any of the

cases. The only way forward would be following the money on Loren’s death, but that would have to wait for a while—at least

long enough for me to pack up and deliver Caroline Richards’s cigarette butts to the FedEx office. I wanted them on their

way to Lulu Benson in Omaha without any further delay.