Chapter 21

Sammamish, Washington

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Ten o’clock the next morning found Hank Mitchell, Sarah, and me driving down I-5 through a mixture of sleet and rain. Mr.

Bean was at home, spending the day with their cleaning lady, so Sarah had the back seat all to herself. She took full advantage

of the situation by stretching out full length from one door to the other.

After my trip to FedEx the previous afternoon, I had called Greta Halliday. Turns out she’s a real estate agent who had been

working an open house at the time. Since Tuesday was her day off, we’d made an appointment for one p.m. My next call had been to Hank, letting him know that the lift he needed to retrieve his restored Shelby would be somewhat

sooner than either of us had expected.

He had said the car restoration outfit was in Seattle. That wasn’t entirely true. To people from outside the area, the word Seattle includes the entire metropolitan area. In actual fact, the address I keyed into my phone’s GPS was in Woodinville, a suburb

located on the far northeast side of Lake Washington and a good twelve or thirteen miles from Seattle proper. That address

was fine with me, however, since Greta and her husband lived in Sammamish, which is also on the Eastside.

Leaving Sarah in the car, I accompanied Hank into the garage to take a gander at his restored Shelby. It was gorgeous—a sight

to be seen! It looked as though it was fresh out of the factory and sitting on an original showroom floor. It was blue with

gray racing stripes. Blue happens to be my favorite color.

“Love the color,” I murmured.

Hank nodded. “Sapphire Blue and Silver Mist,” he said, “the original factory colors.”

He opened the driver’s door and took a seat. I bent down to examine the interior. It was mostly black with gray leather seats

and a matching steering wheel that were the same color as the racing stripes on the exterior.

“Nice,” I said.

“And take a look at this,” Hank added, patting the gearshift. “It comes with original equipment antitheft protection—a standard

transmission.”

I was still chuckling about that as I drove away, heading south. Since traffic had been nonexistent, I had some extra time on my hands before my appointment with Greta Halliday, so I stopped off at Burgermaster along the way and ordered a pair of burgers—a plain one for Sarah and a loaded one for me. I didn’t envy the carhops who cheerfully delivered our food despite the miserable weather, but the burgers were great.

As soon as we turned east on I-90, I saw a sign on the roadway warning that Snoqualmie Pass was closed at the summit due to

accidents. Fortunately for us, we weren’t going that far. After dinner the previous evening I had done some research on Greta

and her husband, Connor. They were clearly your basic power couple. He was a Microsoft exec, while she was listed as the top-selling

agent in her real estate office. The two of them were front and center at local art scene events and charity galas. She had

left her humble beginnings in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood far behind. No wonder she was so dismissive of her underperforming

and now deceased brother.

So why, if Greta was that well-off, had she been so angry to learn that Alma had been continuing to provide financial support

to Loren despite the presence of that no-contact order? Or was she simply pissed over her mother’s continuing enabling? As

the King of Siam would say, “Is a puzzlement.”

E. Sammamish Parkway runs north and south along the east side of Lake Sammamish. The steep driveway leading down to the Hallidays’

lakefront home would have been a nail-biter if the snow had actually been sticking, but this was snow mixed with rain, and

right then the rain was still winning. When I parked in front of their three-car garage, Sarah sat up and looked around. I

had a leash and could have taken her for a brief walk, but she’s still a California dog at heart, and she made her feelings

clear by shaking her head, doing three full body turns, and then lying back down. In dog language, that’s known as Thanks, but no thanks .

People who can afford sprawling water-view homes in the Seattle area all have one thing in common—they’re loaded. So when I rang the bell, the woman who came to the door wasn’t what I expected. Dressed in a pair of old sweats and grimy tennis shoes, and with her blond hair pulled back in a noticeably damp ponytail, Greta didn’t look anything at all like the social butterfly I’d seen in photos of her at various galas.

“Mr. Beaumont, I presume?” Greta Halliday asked, holding out her hand and delivering a surprisingly firm handshake. “Come

on in. Please pardon the outfit,” she added, “I just came inside from working on the boat.”

She led me into a living room with what would have been a gorgeous view of the lake. Today, however, the only view available

was an expanse of gray on gray.

“A little cold to be out working on a boat,” I commented by way of making polite conversation.

“Oh, I wasn’t outside,” she said, gesturing me toward an easy chair facing a wall of floor-to-ceiling lake-view windows. “When

we bought this place three years ago, it came complete with an empty boathouse, so I bought something to put inside it for

my husband’s fiftieth birthday—a 1956 twenty-six-foot Chris-Craft Flybridge Sedan. We’ve renamed her the Midlife Crisis .”

That comment made me smile. The Hallidays’ midlife crisis vehicle was ten years older than Hank’s.

“So far it’s been more of a project boat than a pleasure one,” she went on. “We’ve had to replace engines, repaint and revarnish inside and out, and put in a new Garmin GPS. We’re currently having all the upholstery redone. My job is polishing the chrome, and believe me there’s a lot of that. Thank God for gel manicures, otherwise my nails would be a mess. But by the time summer comes around this year, after two years of work, she should be ready to do a star turn around Lake Sammamish.”

Greta Halliday was a boat owner who actually polished her own chrome? The woman was becoming more unexpected with every word

she uttered.

“Didn’t your father own a boat repair shop?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It was called the Lake Union Boat Shed. That’s how come I knew that if I was going to buy a boat for Connor,

it needed to be a classic. That’s also where I learned to polish chrome. James and I—James is my older brother—worked in Dad’s

boathouse from sixth grade on. He paid us, of course, and encouraged us to save every penny. That’s how Jimmy and I both worked

our way through college—working for our dad on weekends and during summer vacations. I’ve never understood why the hell they

didn’t do Loren the same favor.”

I was surprised that she was the first one to mention her late brother’s name.

“I understand he was a lot younger than you,” I ventured.

“That’s true,” she answered. “Ten years younger than me and twelve years younger than James. By the time he came along our

parents were totally different people from who they’d been when Jimmy and I were little. For one thing, my mother almost died

in childbirth when Loren was born. She was in the delivery room for more than an hour before they finally did an emergency

C-section.

“Loren was always mean, from the time he was a toddler. I’ve long suspected that he might have had some frontal lobe damage that could have been attributed to that difficult delivery situation. And then, once he got to school, there was a lot of bullying because of his dyslexia, but Mom always handled him with kid gloves. He was an annoying, spoiled brat as far as I was concerned, but she treated him like he was made of spun gold.”

So far this was sounding like a case of plain old, ordinary sibling rivalry. Had it somehow turned deadly along the way? But

letting Greta tell the story her way seemed to be working, so I stifled the questions I’d been planning to ask and listened

instead.

“Loren worked in Dad’s boat shop the same way James and I did. In fact, after he dropped out of high school, that’s the only

place he ever held a steady job, but he wasn’t much of a worker. I remember Dad complaining that he was lazy and undependable.

When Dad had to retire due to health issues, he sold out to his partner who didn’t waste any time giving Loren his walking

papers. From then on Loren became my mother’s problem. Once a mama’s boy, always a mama’s boy.”

I noticed that version of the story was slightly different from the one Alma had told Yolanda. According to Alma, Loren had

quit. According to Greta, he’d been fired.

“When Dad died, he left my mother in pretty good financial shape, but that was for her on her own. Since Loren didn’t work

and was dependent on her for everything, he was a big drain on her finances, but that was the least of her problems.

“Even as a kid, Loren had a hair-trigger temper. I suspected he was mistreating her because I saw bruising on her arms a couple of times, but she always brushed it off—claimed she’d tripped on the staircase or banged her arm on a car door. But that day in 2014 when I walked in on them unexpectedly, he had blackened both her eyes and left her with a bloody nose and with her upper lip bleeding. When I called 911 to report it, he kept screaming at me to put down the phone. Mom was yelling the same thing. But then he lunged at me, trying to take the phone away from me. That’s when I put him down.”

“Put him down?” I repeated.

“I’m a woman who works in real estate,” Greta replied. “I never go anywhere without a Taser in my pocket and a loaded handgun

in my purse. After I tased him, he was out for a few seconds. By the time the Taser wore off, I had him at gunpoint. When

the cops showed up, it took a few minutes for them to sort out that Loren was the one who needed to be taken into custody.

After that I did some sleuthing and found out about all the other times cops had been called to the house—all the times he’d

been arrested without my mother pressing charges. That’s when I insisted on the no-contact order. I more or less strong-armed

Mom into selling the house and moving into an assisted-living facility where he couldn’t move back in with her.”

“It sounds like your mother was in denial.”

“You think?” Greta asked with a sad smile. “But then, when Loren turned up dead, Mom blamed me one hundred percent. Connor

and I were actually in Hawaii when it happened, but as far as Mom was concerned, it was all my fault. And I suppose that’s

why I agreed to talk to you—because I want to know the truth about what really happened, not so much for my mother’s sake

but for mine. So what’s this all about?”

Once again, I was caught up in an interview that wasn’t unfolding anywhere near the way I had anticipated. So I backed off

and pulled the standard interrogation technique of asking a question to which, thanks to Yolanda Aguirre, I already knew the

answer.

“How many times was Loren taken into custody for domestic violence against your mother?” I asked.

Greta nodded. “Seven in all, but if I hadn’t caught him red-handed that last time, I never would have known about any of them. And since she never pressed charges, he was always out of jail and back at her house the very next day. Why do you ask?”

“Before I answer that question, let me ask another. As far as you know, was your brother involved with drugs?”

“To my knowledge, Loren’s only drug of choice was booze. As I said, we were never close. If he was on drugs, the only person

who might have known about it would have been my mother. At the time he died, she wasn’t speaking to me, but she told my brother

James that the cops had it all wrong. She insisted his death was no accident. She thought he’d been murdered.”

“Turns out, I’ve unearthed several cases with circumstances surprisingly similar to Loren’s,” I told her. “A number of weeks

ago, I was contacted by a grandmother whose grandson, Darius, had died, supposedly of an accidental overdose. She thought

the cops had it wrong, too. He’d been involved in drugs in the past, but, as far as she knew, Darius was clean and sober at

the time of his death, and it seems he may well be the victim of a homicide. With Yolanda Aguirre’s help, I’ve now located

two other cases with links to Darius’s. I suspect that your brother may be number four.”

“Are you kidding?” Greta demanded.

“Not in the least. In two cases the death was ruled accidental. In another, manner of death was left as undetermined, but

one way or the other, the investigations either stopped completely or else went cold. One of the common denominators in each

case is that all of the dead victims—all of them male—had a history of domestic violence arrests, arrests, yes, but few convictions.”

“Just like Loren,” Greta murmured.

“Exactly,” I agreed.

“You said ‘one of the common denominators.’ Are there others?”

“First,” I said, “tell me about your brother’s personal effects. In your mother’s interview with Ms. Aguirre, she mentioned

having received them. Did you by any chance see them, or did your mother ever share any information about them with you?”

“No,” Greta replied. “At the time he died, we weren’t on speaking terms. James was here for the funeral. She might have shared

something about them with him. If so, he never mentioned it to me.”

“But considering the close relationship your mother had with Loren, do you think she would have gotten rid of them?”

“Not at all,” Greta replied. “She would have hung on to them for dear life.”

“After she passed away, what happened to her belongings?”

“They all came here,” Greta answered with a shrug. “The facilities manager at the assisted-living place had everything packed

up for me. I took her clothing directly to Goodwill. Everything else is still in boxes, out in the garage. Going through those

is on my to-do list, but I haven’t been up to facing that, at least not yet. Did you know my mother was in the process of

writing me out of her will when she passed away?”

“I had no idea,” I replied.

Greta took a deep breath. “That hurt,” she said. “The estate didn’t amount to much. It primarily consisted of the proceeds

from selling her house. The cost of assisted living was eating into those at a rapid clip. Had she lived another year or so,

Connor and I and James, too, would have had to pitch in to pay the freight. So taking me out of the will was sheer meanness

on her part—one final slap in the face. It was one last time where Loren would have won and I would have lost, but because

the new will hadn’t been witnessed and signed, it wasn’t considered valid.”

So much for following the money to find my killer. That strategy wasn’t going to work here—not at all.

“How many boxes?” I asked.

“Out in the garage, you mean?”

I nodded.

“Not that many,” Greta replied. “Six or seven in all, but the problem is, for me, they’re packed with a lifetime’s worth of

emotional baggage.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” I agreed, “but they might also contain information that would help me convince law enforcement to

reopen not only your brother’s case, but the others as well. I know this is a tough call, but would you allow me to sort through

them for you?”

“No,” she said after a moment’s thought. “I’m a big girl. We’ll do it together.”

“Right now?” I asked.

“Right now,” she agreed.

So out to the garage we went. As I mentioned earlier, the garage had been built to hold three vehicles. One stall contained

a bright red Maserati GranTurismo. Next to that was a sleek black Mercedes sedan, an S 400 that was a good decade newer than

my S 550. Seeing the two parked vehicles made me wonder what her husband had driven to work. As for Alma Gregson’s pitiful

collection of boxes? All six of them sat forlornly piled against the front wall of the empty stall. It was shocking to see

how little was left behind after a whole lifetime of living.

Greta quickly located a box cutter and began slicing through the strips of packing tape that had sealed the boxes shut. One

contained nothing but books, including six copies of Strenuous Life , Roosevelt High School’s yearbook. The six years covered the time both Alma and her husband, Harold, had been in attendance. Among the books was a well-thumbed Holy Bible with the name Alma Adams written in cracked and barely legible gold leaf on the faded leather cover. The remainder of the books included a slew of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books . It had been years since I had run across any of those. There were also three baby books—one for James, one for Greta, and

one for Loren. Greta glanced at those and quickly set them aside.

Several of the boxes contained a plethora of various knickknacks, each of which had been carefully wrapped in old newspapers.

It was an oddball collection of quirky things people hang on to for no particular reason—a wooden Scandinavian horse, painted

in bright orange and blue; a set of silver teaspoons from various countries; a massive crystal ashtray; a number of clay pots.

But the one item that really caught my eye was a glass bottle with a ship inside it, except the ship in question turned out

to be a miniature but clearly classic Chris-Craft.

“That was my dad’s,” Greta murmured when she saw it. “I had forgotten about it completely. Connor will want to display it

somewhere on the Midlife Crisis .”

The next box contained all kinds of personal items—as though someone had swept through a bathroom and gathered up everything

from medicine chest, counter, and drawers. A worn toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, a hairbrush, a comb, hair spray, deodorant,

shampoo, conditioner, makeup, and medications had all been tossed inside the box helter-skelter. In other words, that one

turned out to be a bust, too.

By then I was losing heart because we kept coming up empty, and we were down to the last two boxes. But the next-to-last box was where we hit the jackpot. The topmost item, perched on everything else, was a polished wooden box. Someone has used a wood burning kit to draw a heart on top of the lid—a heart with two names written inside: Alma and Harold.

Greta picked up the box and allowed her fingers to absently trace their way around the heart.

“I had forgotten about this, too,” she said. “Daddy made the jewelry box in woodshop his senior year at Roosevelt. He gave

it to my mom for Valentine’s Day that year.”

The moment she lifted the lid we both caught sight of what was inside—a still-sealed plastic bag with the words king county medical examiner printed on the red label. After the bag had been handed to Alma Gregson, she had kept it without ever opening it. Through

the clear plastic I could see that it contained three items—an old wallet, a dead cell phone, and an Elks ring.

I shot Greta a questioning look. “May I?” I asked.

She nodded. “Please,” she said.

With her approval, I tore open the seal and allowed the contents to slip out of the plastic and back onto the lid of the open

box.

“Do you happen to have any latex gloves handy?” I asked.

“Not handy,” Greta answered. “I have a whole box of them, but it’s down in the boat shed. It’ll take a minute or two for me

to go get it.”

It wasn’t long before she returned carrying an open box of gloves. Pulling out a pair, I slipped them on before ever touching

the wallet. There wasn’t much inside it: a Washington State official identification card in Loren’s name, a Social Security

card, and a photo of Loren as a kid—age six or seven at most—standing in front of a middle-aged couple I assumed to be Harold

and Alma Gregson. That’s when I finally spread open the bill container at the back of the wallet, and there they were, as

big as life—two hundred-dollar bills neatly tucked inside.

Greta saw the bills almost as soon as I did. “Where the hell did those come from?” she demanded.

She reached out to take them, but I quickly moved the wallet out of her reach.

“These came from whoever killed him,” I said. “These two hundred-dollar bills happen to be a serial killer’s calling card.”

All color drained from Greta’s face. “You’re saying Loren really was murdered then?”

“You’d better believe it,” I told her. “Now I need to get someone from Seattle PD to believe it, too. May I take these?”

“Sure,” she said. “You can have the wallet and the phone, but I want to keep Daddy’s ring. I’m the one who gave it to him,

and it pissed the hell out of me that Loren got it, instead of me.”

That’s the weird thing about sibling rivalry. Just because one or the other of them dies, the problem doesn’t automatically

go away.