J. Jance - Improbable cause

Rachel handed Al a cup of coffee, too, and there we sat, the four of us, all of us drinking coffee with three of us lying through our teeth. That’s wrong. We were all four lying, come to think of it, but Dorothy Nielsen had been lying to herself and everybody else for so many years that she no longer knew the difference.

I could understand why Rachel wasn’t ready to tell Dorothy the truth about what was going on. Big Al and I followed her lead. It was the least we could do.

When George finally showed up, Rachel met him outside. His initial grin at seeing her quickly faded as she talked to him, outlining the problem. He was somber but nodding in agreement as they came into the apartment.

“I’ll be glad to stay just as long as you need me to, Rachel,” he was saying.

Rachel smiled up at him gratefully, then she turned to me. “I should go upstairs and put on my uniform,” she said. “It’ll make it a whole lot easier for us to get around in the zoo.”

Big Al and I exchanged wary glances. We’d been led down the primrose path on this kind of deal once before by the very same lady.

She read our reluctance correctly. “It’s okay,” she said. “There’s no outside door up there.”

“How about windows?” I asked.

“I told you I’d help,” she answered.

In the end, we let her go upstairs to change. She was back downstairs in her uniform in less than five minutes.

“We’d better get started,” she said, leading the way to the door. “The zoo’s a big place. It’ll be crowded.”

It was one of the world’s all-time understatements.

On the way to the zoo, Big Al drove and I rode shotgun, while Rachel sat in the backseat. Big Al looked at me and nodded toward the radio. “Get dispatch and have them send us out some help,” he suggested.

“What good would that do?” I returned. “Nobody else down there knows what she looks like.”

“But if we try to do it all ourselves, it’ll take forever. This place is huge. I brought my grandson here a couple of times. He walked both my legs off.”

“It’s only ninety-two acres,” Rachel said reassuringly from the backseat.

“Ninety-two acres is a hell of a lot of territory for three of us to cover.

Get us some help,“ Al insisted irritably.

“You know what comes with help,” I argued. “Reporters, television cameras, the works.”

“Please, no cameras,” Rachel begged.

Her whole short course in media relations came from what had happened to her as a result of her nephew’s murder. She may not have had my kind of longevity in the battle, but Rachel Miller and I were very much of the same mind when it came to the media. She didn’t want her sister hunted down with nosy cameras recording the arrest.

In the end, Rachel’s plea swung the vote. Al reluctantly conceded defeat, and that’s how the three of us-two seasoned homicide detectives and a gray-haired little old lady- scrambled out of a departmental vehicle at the western entrance to the Woodland Park Zoo. We hurried inside with one single purpose: find Daisy Carmichael.

The Woodland Park Zoo got its start in 1903 when the City of Seattle purchased a pioneer family’s estate and left a previously established herd of deer in residence. With the addition of various animals, the zoo evolved gradually over the years until the thirties when major development work was done by Frederick Olmsted, the same man who created Central Park in New York City.

Rachel had told us that the zoo covers ninety-two acres, and it’s true.

If you happen to be a wheat farmer who lives in the vast rolling hills of Washington“ s Palouse, ninety-two acres probably doesn’t sound like much. And ninety-two acres is small potatoes when compared to the eight hundred acres in Central Park. But on a rainy summer’s day, with only three people searching for a fourth, ninety-two acres is plenty big enough.

Rachel Miller took off like a shot and led us into the zoo through a building marked ARC. That may sound like a cutesy reference to Noah, but it actually stands for Activities and Recreation Center. The place was bursting at the seams with dozens of children who streamed in and out of a room marked Discovery. Echoes of laughter from a noisy slide show leaked out of the room into the lobby, where Rachel left us standing while she hurried off down a hallway marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.

“Something’s bothering me,” Big Al said after she left.

“What’s that?”

“If Daisy took all that time and trouble to clean up the dental pick and rinse off her clothes, why the hell didn’t she get rid of them before we found them?”

“Maybe she never got the chance.” I suggested.

“From what Dr. Leonard said, they’ve been busy as hell getting ready to move Dorothy into the house. Or maybe Daisy figured she’d get caught eventually and that it wouldn’t do her any good. Sometimes people want to get caught.”

“Right up until they hear the iron door of the slammer.” Big Al observed. “Then they chicken out.”

I heard his words and felt the gut-wrenching pain I always feel when something reminds me of the past I keep trying to forget. Al had no way of knowing how his words affected me. He wasn’t my partner then. We barely even knew each other. If he had heard about Anne Corley at all, it was only peripherally, but his casual comment there in the buzzing zoo lobby jarred me good.

Making a pretense of checking out the children’s slide show, I walked away from him. I wandered into the Discovery Room and stood for a long time peering over the shoulder of a little girl who was engrossed in trying to reassemble the skeleton of a long-dead turtle. Eventually I got myself back under control and returned to the lobby just as Rachel hurried into the room. She was frowning, shaking her head.

“I don’t understand it-Daisy isn’t officially scheduled to be here working at all. I was sure she told me she was leading some of the behind-the-scenes tours. She always does that, but her name isn’t on the list.”

“What did I tell you?” Big Al muttered under his breath. “This whole thing is nothing but a wild-goose chase, if you ask me.”

“I’m sure she’s here,” Rachel insisted. “Where else would she be?”

“Try Mexico, maybe,” Big Al suggested dourly. His remark wasn’t lost on Rachel, who gave him a withering look as she marched away, leaving us no choice but to tag along behind her.

She led us around to the back of the building where a waterproofed notebook hung by a chain from a peg in the wall. Rachel lifted it down. When she opened it, I could see that the notebook contained a volunteer sign in/ sign-out sheet. Rachel made a notation after her own name, then scanned up the list until she located Daisy’s.

“See there?” Rachel announced with a sharp glance in Al’s direction. “She’s here. I told you she was.”

He shook his massive head. “All that means is she signed in. She could have done that any time-yesterday or the day before, for that matter. There’s no time clock, no way to check it. And it doesn’t mean she’s still here, either.“

“So where do we start?” I asked, wanting to begin the search before Big Al could think of another reason to call the whole thing off or bring in reinforcements.

“The north meadow,” Rachel answered. “That’s where the tents are. Maybe she’s helping set up for the dinner or the auction.”

Finding a lost person at the Woodland Park Zoo would be a tough assignment on any ordinary day, but on the day of the Jungle Party, it was a joke. The Jungle Party is an annual affair, the zoo’s one big fling of a fundraiser. The place was a madhouse.

Rachel left the building and set off in a bee-line for a huge white-and-yellow-striped tent that had been erected in a clearing northeast of the activities center. To one side of the main tent were two smaller ones.