CHAPTER 1

ANYONE WHO IS dumb enough to live on one side of Lake Washington and work on the other is automatically doomed to spend lots of time stuck in bridge traffic. Such was the case one January morning as I headed for my job as an investigator for the Washington State Attorney's Special Homicide Investigation Team, known fondly to all of us who work there by that unfortunate moniker, the SHIT squad.

I live in Belltown Terrace, a condo at the upper end of Second Avenue in downtown Seattle. My office is sixteen miles away in a south Bellevue neighborhood called Eastgate. That morning's commute was hampered by two separate phenomena, both of which were related to a mid-January blast of arctic air that had come swooping down on western Washington from the Gulf of Alaska. The first traffic hazard was black ice, which had turned most of the minor side streets into skating rinks. Unfortunately, I'm a world-class procrastinator, and the winter weather had snuck up on me while my Porsche 928 was still decked out in summer-performance tires.

The other major traffic hazard was mountains—not driving over them, but seeing them. For nine months of the year, the mountains around Seattle are mostly invisible. Hidden by cloud cover, they sit there minding their own business, but when the "mountains are out," as we say around here, and Mount Rainier emerges in all its snow-clad splendor, trouble is bound to follow. Unwary drivers, entranced by the unaccustomed view, slam into the fenders of the cars in front of them, and traffic comes to a dead stop. The frigid air had left the snowcapped mountains vividly beautiful against a clear blue sky. As a result, I-90 was littered with pieces of scattered sheet metal, chrome-trim pieces, and speeding tow trucks.

Between ice-and gawker-related accidents, my normal twenty-minute commute had turned into an hour-long endurance test. Adding insult to injury was the fact that this was my first morning back at work after a weeklong stay in Hawaii.

You'll notice I said stay, not vacation, because it wasn't. I was there as father of the groom. Anyone who's been down that road knows it's no cakewalk.

The wedding had come up suddenly when Scott telephoned the day after Christmas to say that he and Cherisse were giving up their long-planned, no-holds-barred, late-summer extravaganza of a wedding in favor of a hastily arranged and low-key affair that would take place on a private beach near Waikiki the second week in January. As plans for the summer wedding had burgeoned out of control, I had been less than thrilled about the way things were going. A low-attendance affair that would consist of bride and groom, best people, and an assortment of parental units was much more to my liking.

I did wonder briefly if a misstep in birth-control planning had accounted for this sudden change in plans. That certainly had been the case when I had masterminded my daughter's hasty marriage to her husband, Jeremy. Now, several years and 1.6 kids later, Kelly and Jeremy were doing just fine, and I had no doubt Scott and Cherisse would do the same. So I rented a tux, booked my hotel room and plane tickets, and was on my way. I didn't find out that I was wrong about the unwed pregnancy bit until after I checked into my hotel room outside Honolulu.

I had just finished stowing my luggage when Dave Livingston stopped by my room to give me the real story.

Dave, by the way, is my first wife's second husband and her official widower. He's also Scott's stepfather and a hell of a nice guy. Right after Karen died, Dave and I both made an extra effort to get along—for the kids' sake. It may have been a phony act to begin with, but over time it's turned real enough. As far as parental units go, Dave and I are all Scott Beaumont has. Dave had flown in from L.A. the night before and had eaten dinner with Cherisse's folks, Helene and Pierre Madrigal, who had arrived on a flight from France the previous day.

There are a number of things I didn't learn about Dave Livingston until the occasion of Scott's wedding. For one thing, he speaks French. I have no idea why an accountant from Southern California would be, or would even need to be, fluent in French, but he was and is. In the course of that initial dinner he had sussed out that Pierre, age fifty-seven, had recently been diagnosed with a recurrence of prostate cancer. He and his wife had decided to postpone his next round of treatment until after the wedding. This bit of bad news no doubt accounted for the sudden change in wedding plans, and rightly so. In my opinion, postponing cancer treatment for any reason is never a good idea. Scott and Cherisse were obviously concerned that by summertime his condition might have deteriorated to the point where traveling to their wedding would be impossible.

And so I found myself in the middle of a wedding event that was complicated by a family health crisis and confounded by limited communication skills. Unlike Dave, I am not fluent in French. My daughter had thoughtfully sent along a French/English phrase book that she thought might be useful. Unfortunately the usual tourist-focused contents made zero mention of PSA counts or prostate difficulties, so I couldn't have talked to Pierre about his situation even if I had wanted.

Dave and Pierre got along famously. In the course of the next several days, the two of them carried on lively breakfast-time conversations in lightning-speed French in which they discussed bits of information both of them had gleaned from that morning's Wall Street Journal, so obviously Pierre's grasp of English was far better than he was willing to let on. Meanwhile, Helene and I sipped our respective cups of coffee and smiled sincerely but wordlessly back and forth across the table. Come to think of it, idiotically might be a better way of putting it. As far as I could tell, Helene's English was as nonexistent as my French.

Thinking the wedding would be a good excuse to use up some of my use-it-or-lose-it SHIT-squad vacation time, I had agreed to come to Hawaii five days before the actual wedding. That turned out to be a big mistake because I'm not much good at taking vacations. Never have been. It's one of the criticisms Karen used to level at me both before and after we divorced. And my shrink—the one Seattle PD sent me to see after my partner Sue Danielson was gunned down—told me pretty much the same thing.

"It's one of the main reasons so many retired cops end up blowing their brains out, Detective Beaumont," Dr. Katherine Majors had said during one of my departmentally decreed counseling sessions designed to fix cops whose partners have been killed in the line of duty. "They never manage to separate themselves from their jobs. Once they stop working, they lose their identity and, as a consequence, their whole reason for living."

Okay, so I admit Dr. Majors was probably dead-on as far as I'm concerned. No doubt that explains why I went looking for the attorney general's investigative job before the ink had finished drying on my letter of resignation from Seattle PD. It also explains why the five days leading up to the wedding were unbearable. Dave, the FOTB (father of the bride), and the best man all played golf. I don't play golf. They also went deep-sea fishing. I don't like boats—big or small—so fishing was out of the question. The MOTB (mother of the bride), Cherisse, and her maid of honor were up to their eyeballs in last-minute arrangements with flowers, dresses, hairdos, and other essential pre-wedding preparations. Those left me cold as well. So, as co-FOTG, I had spent the days leading up to the wedding enjoying the bikini-clad scenery on the beach but generally feeling like the proverbial fifth wheel.

The wedding itself was a lovely affair. We gathered on a moonlit beach with the sand around us studded with flickering tiki lamps. Cherisse was tall and slender and lovely in her long white dress. Scott was tall and handsome in his tux. They were perfect together. The ceremony was read first in English and then in French. Dave sniffled unabashedly into his hankie all the way through the ceremony. When it came time for the "till death do us part" part, Helene reached over and leaned against Pierre's shoulder. That small gesture was enough to put a lump in my throat. Nobody was talking about the elephant in the living room, but it was there as big as life.

"I just wish Karen could have been here to see it," Dave told me later on that night after the multicourse wedding supper. "She would have loved it."

We were at an outdoor hotel bar where Dave was drinking Scotch and I wasn't, and I knew he was right. Karen had loved weddings. God knows she dragged me to enough of them over the years.

Some people might think it odd to find the two forlorn men who had shared their lives with Karen Beaumont Livingston sitting together consoling each other. It sounds, in fact, like lyrics from some pathetic country-western song, but the truth is, we were both coming from the same place. When someone dies, other people have to learn to go on with their lives. Weddings happen and babies are born and even the joyful events hurt because the people who are gone aren't there to witness them.

Once the busy merry-go-round of wedding festivities ended and the kids went off to have fun with their best people, Dave and I had fallen to earth like a pair of balloons with all the helium let out. Dave was grieving for Karen and so was I, but I was thinking about my second wife's death as well. Losing Anne Corley on our wedding day had left me in an emotional black hole from which I had yet to fully emerge. So while Scott and Cherisse were looking hopefully toward what the future might hold and Helene and Pierre spent the long shank of the evening dreading the future, Dave and I were mired in the regretful past. Bearing that in mind, I think the four of us deserve a lot of collective credit for not having rained on the kids' parade.

Copyright © 2005 by J. A. Jance.