J. Jance - Justice Denied

“J. P. Beaumont,” I said, holding out my ID. She glanced at it with no particular interest. “I’m with the Special Homicide Investigation Team,” I added. “Are you DeAnn Cosgrove?”

“Yes, I am,” she said, nodding. “Come in. Please excuse the mess.”

She was right. The house was messy-not dirty but cluttered with laundered but unfolded clothes piled two feet deep on the couch, with the dining room table covered by a snarl of papers, and with a minefield of toys littering the carpeted floor. That, too, reminded me of Kelly and Jeremy’s place, for many of the same reasons. Taking care of kids doesn’t leave a lot of excess time for anything else, most especially housekeeping.

“I meant to shower and have this all picked up before you got here, but…” she began.

“Don’t worry about it,” I assured her. “I just came back from visiting my daughter and son-in-law down in Ashland. They have small kids, too.”

DeAnn gave me a sincere but haggard smile and then swiped an easy chair free of plastic toys so I could sit down. Then she settled into a rocker. Without practiced aplomb, she unbuttoned her blouse, covered herself with a tea towel, undid her bra, and began nursing the baby. She accomplished this while at the same time trying to cajole the twins-two impish little boys-into picking up their toys and putting them in a nearby toy box.

“So what’s this about my dad?” she asked.

I glanced at the name on the folder I was carrying. The missing person’s report for Anthony David Cosgrove had been filed by someone named Carol Cosgrove on May 19, 1980. DeAnn, the daughter, had been listed on the form by name.

“Who’s Donald, then?” I asked. “Your brother?”

DeAnn shook her head. “No,” she said. “Donnie’s my husband. Cosgrove’s my maiden name. When Donnie and I were getting married, I told him I wanted to keep my name just in case Daddy ever showed up and came looking for me. Luckily for me, Donnie’s a really practical guy. He said it made no sense to have more than one name in our family, so he changed his name to mine. His dad didn’t like the idea very much, but Donnie said he was marrying me, not his father.”

It was clear that almost twenty-five years later, DeAnn Cosgrove was still grieving for her absent father and hoping against hope that someday he would return. That kernel of knowledge was enough to break my heart. It put a personal human spin on an assignment that had been, up to that point, nothing but a list of names.

“Sounds like your husband’s got a good head on his shoulders,” I said.

An odd expression flitted across DeAnn’s face. “Yes,” she agreed finally. “Yes, he does. But you still haven’t told me. What’s this about? Why are you asking questions about Dad after so many years?”

“It turns out there are literally hundreds of unresolved missing persons cases in this state that have gotten zero attention…”

“Tell me about it,” she said.

“I work for the Washington State attorney general, Ross Connors. He’s asked my agency, the Special Homicide Investigation Team, to go through those cases and see if by cross-checking we can bring some of them to a close.”

“I’ve heard about cases like that,” DeAnn offered. “Cold cases where they eventually figure out that an unidentified body somewhere else is someone who’s been missing for a long time.”

“Yes, so if you don’t mind…”

But I didn’t even finish asking the question before DeAnn Cosgrove launched into her story. “It happened the day Mount Saint Helens blew up,” she said at once. “Daddy went fishing that weekend and never came home.”

The day Mount Saint Helens blew up. If you lived in Washington State or even anywhere in the Pacific Northwest at the time, those words conjure a day you remember-a beautifully clear Sunday morning in late spring when the mountain-one some Native Americans referred to as “Louwala Clough,” or Smoking Mountain-suddenly roared back to life after being quiet for 123 years. The initial blast caused a huge avalanche and sent up an immense overheated cloud of three-hundred-degree pumice and ash that killed every living thing inside a two-hundred-square-mile area.

“So your father was one of the fifty or so people who died?” I asked.

“The actual number was fifty-seven,” she said. “Daddy wasn’t ever counted in that official number because they never found any trace of him-no sign of him or his vehicle. But Mount Saint Helens is where he had told my mother he was going that weekend-he said he was going fishing on Spirit Lake.”

I had gone camping on the edge of that pristine lake myself years ago-long before the mountain blew up. In advance of the actual eruption-between the time of the first sizable earthquake underneath the mountain in March and when the first big eruption happened on the eighteenth of May-I remembered reading about a curmudgeonly old guy-memorably named Harry Truman-who had told interviewers that if the mountain ever exploded, he’d just go out on the lake in his boat and wait it out. There was only one problem with Mr. Truman’s plan-the lake was vaporized in that initial explosion, and so was he.

It seemed likely to me now that if Anthony David Cosgrove had been anywhere near Spirit Lake at the time, he had most likely met a similar fate. But I remembered, too, that investigators had found traces of many of the human tragedies left behind in the volcano’s aftermath. Etched in my memory were images of eerie shells of burned-out vehicles still smoldering in the devastated wilderness and testifying to the fact that for the people trapped inside those vehicles, there had been no escape.

In the decades since then, though, Mount Saint Helens and the surrounding area have been subjected to an almost microscopic examination as scientists study both what happened back then and what’s happening now. The area where millions of board feet of timber were felled in one cataclysmic blast is now an ongoing laboratory of Mother Nature at work, reclaiming that which she has previously destroyed.

With that in mind, it seemed strange to me that no fragment of Anthony Cosgrove’s vehicle had ever been found. Still, there was always an outside chance that something had surfaced and no one had bothered to notify his daughter. Bureaucracies are notoriously dim when it comes to taking the feelings of individuals into consideration.

By then the baby seemed to have fallen asleep. She held him to her shoulder, burped him, and then went to put him down somewhere out of sight. The process made me wonder a little. I knew that Kelly had nursed Kayla when she was a baby. Kyle, on the other hand, seemed to be a bottle baby. When we had been down in Ashland, I had noticed this and wondered about it, but there are things fathers can ask and things they can’t. This was one of the latter.

When DeAnn returned to the living room, she brought with her a small gold-framed photo of a young man wearing a vintage 1970s hairdo and equally dated horn-rimmed glasses. Grinning goofily for the camera, he held a tiny, red-faced, wrinkly baby-held her awkwardly and carefully, as though he was concerned she might break.

It was one of those standard set-piece types of photos that are part of most families. They’re usually trite, poorly lit, and unoriginal, but they’re wonderful all the same. They testify to the fact that no matter what may happen later-death or divorce, midnight arrests for shoplifting or wrecked first cars-at that point in time, that newly arrived child was a joyfully welcomed addition to his or her family.

“Your dad?” I asked, handing the photo back to DeAnn.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s the only one I have. After he was gone, Mom went through the house and got rid of most of his pictures. This is one my grandmother happened to have.”