Chapter 31

Bellingham, Washington

Friday, March 6, 2020

Before meeting Mel for lunch, I turned to my email account; sixty-four more interview transcriptions had arrived from Elena,

along with a separate one stating that those were all the ones she had at present. Ben Weston and Sandra Sechrest were continuing

to make good progress going through the case files I was sending them. Between them they had flagged five more files for further

study, but Yolanda had yet to notify me if any of those people had consented to additional interviews.

I met up with Mel at our favorite daytime hangout, Jack and Jill’s, an old-fashioned diner two blocks from Mel’s office. Today marked three weeks since Kyle had unexpectedly shown up in our lives. Sitting in a booth together, just the two of us, seemed special somehow—almost like a date. And having a homey meal that re quired no advance planning on either of our parts was like going on vacation. It also gave us a chance to talk, one-on-one.

For Mel, the breast-fondling situation at the high school was boiling over. When her detectives had done a canvass of current

students involved in the school’s music program, eleven more female students had come forward with inappropriate touching

complaints.

“George Pritchard has been at Bellingham High for the past five years, so there are probably additional victims who have either

graduated, transferred to another school, or dropped out. I also had one of my investigators contact the school district in

Sacramento where Pritchard taught prior to coming here. It would appear that he left there under some kind of cloud, but so

far no one’s willing to share any details. The district didn’t out and out fire him, but they also didn’t discourage him from

leaving.”

“No wonder no one’s talking,” I said. “Instead of dealing with the problem straight out, they sent a guy who should have been

unmasked as a sex offender along to some other unsuspecting school district where he’s had access to a whole new set of victims.”

“Right,” Mel said bitterly. “And now he’s my problem instead of theirs. I’ll be talking to the county attorney this afternoon

to see if he’s willing to swear out an arrest warrant. The thing is, Pritchard has a wife and two school-age kids who most

likely have no idea about who he really is, so putting him in jail will be hell on them, too.”

I nodded my head in agreement. That’s something I had come to realize over the years. Whenever I arrested a killer, the victims’ families were always adversely affected by whatever crime had been committed, but there were often plenty of injured innocent bystanders among the offenders’ loved ones as well. It was about then that I realized that same dynamic was currently at work in my own family. Jeremy Cartwright was the one who was screwing around on his wife, but Kelly, Kayla, and Kyle were all suffering the consequences.

“I don’t remember stuff like this happening back when I was a kid,” I muttered.

“I’m pretty sure pedophiles have always been with us,” Mel said. “The big difference is that back in your day, girls—and boys,

too—were far more reticent about coming forward.”

Put in my place but realizing she was right, I sat back and took the front tip off a piece of Jill’s incomparable lemon meringue

pie.

“Thanks for reminding me that I’m a grouchy old man,” I said.

“Grouchy on occasion, yes,” Mel told me, “but pretty darned nice most of the time.”

Buoyed by that last remark, I was on my way home from lunch when a call came in from Lulu Benson.

“I’ve got a familial hit on that unidentified female profile your friend Gretchen Walther sent over.”

“Boy, lady,” I said. “You’re batting a thousand. How close a match?”

“Second cousin. Your unidentified female DNA belongs to this woman’s mother’s first cousin.”

“Where is she from?”

“Lexington, Kentucky.”

“That’s a hell of a long way from Seattle,” I commented.

“Yes, it is,” Lulu agreed. “She posted her DNA on GEDmatch, looking for her mother’s long-lost cousin. Do you want her name

and number or not?”

I hesitated for a moment. By rights, this had to do with Detective Elizabeth Byrd’s open homicide investigation, and I should probably have turned it over to her to begin with, but it was my longtime connection to Gretchen Walther that had made the hit possible.

“Of course I want her number,” I replied.

Lulu laughed. “Somehow I thought you would,” she said.

Thirty seconds later I was introducing myself to Harriet Bonham of Lexington, Kentucky, someone with a very interesting tale

to tell. Once I got her on the phone and introduced myself, she was happy to share the story of the man who ended up becoming

the celebrated black sheep of her family.

“William Landon was my mother’s favorite cousin,” she said. “I grew up hearing stories about him, about how Mom and Billy

used to play together when they were kids—climbing trees, building forts, swimming in the lake on my grandfather’s farm. Mom

was born in 1927. Billy was a year older. She always talked about how smart he was and how handsome. After his older brother

Frank died in childhood, his folks expected that eventually Billy would step up and take over running the family farm, but

he wasn’t interested in farming. He left home and joined the army as soon as he turned eighteen.”

“Just in time for the tail end of World War II?” I asked.

“He wasn’t overseas for all that long, but Mom said he was a different person when he came home, and they were never close

again. He moved to Cincinnati, got married, and had a couple of kids. By the midfifties he was driving an armored car for

Brinks. In 1956 there was a robbery. Three men were involved, and Billy was one of them. He took off before the cops figured

out it was an inside job. The other two guys ended up going to prison. Billy vanished without a trace.”

“And got away with the money,” I suggested.

“How did you know that?”

“Lucky guess,” I said.

“How did you make the connection back to me?” Harriet wanted to know.

“We got a hit from unidentified DNA found at the scene of a crime,” I told her. Two separate ones, in fact, but there was

no need to go into that.

“What kind of crime?” Harriet asked. “Billy was born in 1926. That would make him close to a hundred years old by now. How’s

it even possible that he’s still going around committing crimes?”

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “That information is a part of an ongoing police investigation, and I’m unable to comment at this

time.”

There was a short silence between us before the reality dawned on her. “It must be one of his children then,” she surmised,

“or maybe even one of his grandchildren. He abandoned a wife and kids when he left Ohio. She got a divorce and eventually

remarried, and Billy must have done the same thing—starting over someplace else and ending up with a whole new family.”

That was my guess, too, but I didn’t say so. Instead I asked another question. “How much money did he make off with?”

“Four hundred thousand,” she said. “When I started doing research on my own, that’s what the newspaper articles said. I wasn’t even born when it happened, so everything I know about William Landon is secondhand. Every once in a while as a kid, I’d overhear my mother talking with one of her sisters or cousins about Billy, the black sheep of the family. Whenever I tried to ask my mother about him, though, she’d shut me down. It wasn’t until after Mom died that I started looking into what happened. That’s when I connected William Landon with her beloved Cousin Billy. Once I finally got around to googling William Landon’s name, that was the first link that turned up—one to a newspaper article about the Brinks robbery.”

She kept talking but for a time I wasn’t really paying attention, I was too busy thinking. Four hundred thousand dollars would have added up to a hell of a lot of hundred-dollar bills!

“And that got me to wondering,” Harriet was saying when I tuned back in on the conversation. “How did he manage to disappear

so completely that the cops were never able to find him? Where did he go? What happened to him? Was he dead or alive?

“I watch a lot of true crime on TV,” she continued. “That’s where I heard about how long-forgotten cold cases are now being

solved when relatives of a suspect post their DNA on ancestry databases. According to what I read, GEDmatch is one of the

few of those that actually cooperates with law enforcement. That’s why I chose them. I wanted to find out what happened to

him after he left Ohio.”

“Thank you for that,” I told her, and I meant it, too. “I can’t tell you how much you’ve helped us already. Apparently we’re

dealing with far more than a single cold case—it’s actually several. Once those are solved, Ms. Bonham, I promise that I’ll

get back to you with the whole story.”

“You will?”

“Mark my words.”

“And I helped? Really?”

“More than you know,” I replied.

With that I ended the call, but I didn’t put down the phone. Instead, I located my friend Ron Peters’s cell phone number and punched it. That 1956 armored car robbery had to be the source of the hundred-dollar bills that linked all five cases together, and that made me confident that I finally had enough information to compel Seattle PD to reopen those three mislabeled cases. I believed Ron Peters was the guy who could get the job done.

“Hey, Beau,” he said genially when he answered. “It’s been a while. How are things and what are you up to?”

“When you find out why I’m calling,” I told him, “you’re not going to be happy, because I’m about to become a real pain in

your ass.”

“When haven’t you been a pain in my ass?” he replied with a laugh. “Tell me about it.”

So I did. Once I got off the phone with him, I called everybody else, too—Ben Weston and Sandy Sechrest at Seattle PD, Elizabeth

Byrd in Liberty Lake, Boyce Miller in Kent, Yolanda Aguirre, and even Gretchen Walther from the crime lab. Once all hell broke

loose on this, I wanted all of us to be on the same page.