Killing Thyme (15 page)

In ancient Greece, it was believed that unless the sowing of basil was accompanied by cursing or railing, it would not flourish.

—Nava Atlas,
Vegetariana

I called Detective Spencer before the staff arrived for our Wednesday morning meeting. She listened without interrupting, then said she'd get back to me.

My cell phone buzzed with her summons right as the staff and I finished discussing the calendar of upcoming events. We'd be sprinting till October. I didn't have time for distractions.

Take a lesson from Brother Cadfael.
No herb went unharvested, no tincture unbrewed, no patient untreated, but he always found the killer.

That old motto: “Pray for peace, and work for justice.”

As soon as the till was up and running and the door open, I left my dog and my shop in practiced hands and headed downtown.

Detective Spencer met me in the hallway. “Detective Washington is expecting us.”

John Washington was the man I remembered from SPD
picnics and parades, his hair now more gray than black, his chest thicker than I'd recalled. He welcomed us into his private office with a kind but curious expression and a warm handshake.

“You guys always say, when a witness to a crime reports another crime, you look for the connection,” I said. The matching client chairs needed new upholstery, likely salvaged from the old HQ a good dozen years ago. “This is an extension of that theory. It may be a coincidence that a woman intimately involved with a man killed while committing a crime thirty years ago is killed now. Or not.”

And another woman, who knew them both, had just returned to the country.
Oh, Mom.

“Violent crime is like a rock thrown into a pond.” Washington held his two large fists together, then opened his fingers and spread his hands. “The ripples extend far and wide. That's why investigation is a public responsibility. I take all concerns seriously. And, I gather you see another connection.”

He studied me as I told my story, leaning back in a brown leather chair not quite big enough for him, steepled fingers resting on his chin, lips pursed. Every so often, he shifted slightly in the chair, as if his low back hurt. Or as if my story made him uncomfortable.

“The storeroom wasn't locked, but Kristen says it hadn't been touched in decades. The house was informal headquarters for a much bigger community. Over the years, kids—young adults volunteering with some program or another—used that basement as temporary storage. Most of the stuff was probably theirs—mainly old clothes and household items, books, things that were easier to leave behind than retrieve. The bracelet was the only thing of value she found, in a black velvet case inside a shoe box tucked behind the other boxes.”

“Sounds like whoever put it there didn't want it to be found,” Spencer said.

“Right,” I said.

Washington reached for a thick black binder, its pressed vinyl seams splitting from age and use. He flipped to a section of clear plastic photo sleeves, snapped the binder open, and laid a sleeve in front of me. It held two photos: a faded Polaroid, blurry at the edges, of a woman's wrist, and a color print dated 1981, with an insurance agent's name and address stamped below it. Next to it he placed a photo of Kristen's bracelet, taken when they'd added it to their homeowner's coverage.

Each showed the same bracelet.

“Tell me,” I said, my voice as dusty as the now-demolished basement storeroom.

“The bracelet disappeared in the course of a shooting and subsequent explosion. A man and his family came home unexpectedly and discovered an intruder. The homeowner went for a hidden gun. The intruder pulled his own weapon, and the two men shot each other.”

I wrapped my arms around my cramping stomach.

“We called in experts from the fire department. Working theory was that the intruder brought an explosive device with him. Simple, but powerful. When it all cleared, two men were dead. And this”—the detective tapped the plastic sleeve with a thick finger—“was gone.”

“Roger Russell and Walter Strasburg,” I said. “June 1985.”

He nodded.

“That's why this is a cold case,” I said. “An open file, even though you reported that Russell and Strasburg shot each other. The stolen bracelet meant someone else was involved. You kept that detail out of the papers.”

“I must have visited every pawn shop and secondhand store in the city at least twice.”

“You? This was your case?”

“I was a young patrol officer. The detective squad was shorthanded, and I was eager and available. Lucky break
for me. I got to work closely with a veteran detective and eventually became his partner. He taught me a lot.” The look on Detective Washington's face said one lesson had been the pain of leaving unsolved a murder that destroyed a young family. The Strasburg case was personal to him. “It had been a family piece, left on display in the master bedroom. The only thing missing, and it never showed up.”

Until another homeowner unearthed it in a long-neglected corner of a house where countless people had come and gone. Until she shined it up and showed it off at a sparkling Seattle garden party.

Someone had not forgotten.

“And now it's missing again,” I said. “Is Bonnie Clay—Peggy Manning—the missing link? Was she—was she
there
?”

“We never knew. Now, of course, we have new questions.”

“Why she came back,” I said, “and why she's dead.”

Washington glanced at his watch and drew the photographs toward him. My cue to leave. I leaned forward, hands on the arms of my chair. “The bracelet is the MacGuffin.”

“The what?” he said, and I explained the theory.

If we found the bracelet—the Falcon—would we find the killer, and discover what this was all about?

*   *   *

Out on the sidewalk, I exhaled. Even magnified by the concrete and asphalt, glass and steel, the sun's warmth barely touched me.

My belief that there are few coincidences when it comes to crime had convinced me that Bonnie's death and the stolen bracelet were linked. My discovery of the 1985 tragedy complicated the picture.

We were trying to fit a key piece of the puzzle into a hole that kept changing shape.

If Bonnie had been at the Strasburg house, that would explain why she'd fled afterward. But it didn't explain why she'd returned.

Or why she'd been killed, or where the bracelet was now.

It was beginning to seem that Kristen's house—
our
house, back then—had been ground zero for a terrible crime.

What had my mother known—and when?

And what about Brian Strasburg? Had he gone from being victim to suspect, now that Bonnie-Peggy had surfaced and been murdered, now that a family heirloom had reappeared and disappeared again?

The whirl of questions made me dizzy.

I didn't have to ask what Brother Cadfael would do. He would ask those questions; he would listen to the answers; he would note what was said and what wasn't. He would not walk away.

Neither would I.

And so, I hiked downhill to Seattle Mystery Bookshop. For the wisdom of the pages, and of those who sell them.

“Super-good choices. No TSTL damsels in distress. The heroine solves the case on her own.” We reached the historical section, and Jen noticed my blank look. “Too Stupid To Live.”

Oh.
That would be me, more often than I cared to admit. “Mom reads 'em on her iPad, but I like book-books. They don't break when I fall asleep and drop them on the floor.”

“Some readers insist on starting a series with book one, but the flip side is, authors get better as they go along. Not a worry with your mom's authors—both real pros. But it can be fun to watch the characters develop, especially the romantic relationships.” She handed me a copy of
Murder in Morningside Heights
by Victoria Thompson.

“Maybe I can pick up a few pointers.” I flipped it over to read the back cover, then chose the first two books in the series. “Might as well start at the beginning.”

Jen added two Rhys Bowen paperbacks—
Murphy's Law
and
Death of Riley
—to my stack. “These ought to keep you out of trouble for a while.”

Ha. If it were only so easy.

I followed her to the front counter. “Jen, you seen Callie lately?”

“Not much. She's been a working fiend, in trial with Strasburg, keeping track of all the exhibits, running the computer projector. Last-minute research. All the stuff I don't miss.”

“She happy with her job?” Callie hadn't called me to complain or get a reference, both good signs.

“Oh, yeah. They totally need her, and they know it.”

“Strasburg can be pretty high-test.”

“I hear he's a new man. No temper tantrums, no last-minute freak-outs—no keeping the legal assistants so late they miss the last bus. He took the whole staff to lunch at Ivar's on Secretaries Day. Inside—not the take-out window.”

He claimed he'd gotten home Saturday, but what if he'd flown back sooner? If he'd gotten long-nursed revenge by killing Bonnie last Friday night? “That's quite a change in his MO. Wonder what happened.”

She set my books on the counter and handed back my credit card. “I should ask why you're asking, but I think I won't.”

“Just curious. You know I watch out for my employees, even when they move on. I got the idea she found the job pretty stressful.”

“She said it was like a switch flipped. His son's teachers said his anger issues and mood swings were harming the boy. His wife had complained about that for ages—that was part of why she left him. But it finally sunk in, and he started seeing a therapist. The transformation was amazing. Kinder and gentler practically overnight. And it's stayed that way for months now.”

“Good advertisement for therapy. Thanks for the intel.” I tucked my books in my tote and headed out.

Strasburg's personality change made him an unlikely suspect, but not an impossible one. You can make peace with the past, but it doesn't always stay made.

Problem was, none of the usual suspects—family, friends, coworkers—seemed any more likely. I needed to know more about what happened in 1985—not just the terrible tragedy that killed Walter Strasburg, but what had led to it.

If Bonnie-Peggy had been involved, why had she come back to Seattle?

I got the chills. It had to do with the house, with my family and our friends. The main focus had been programs for children, the hungry, and those in need of medical care. Necessary, occasionally controversial, but not truly radical.

The Strasburg attack, though . . .

I'd let my mother avoid a confrontation long enough.

The prospect called for planning and fortification. Happily, the bookshop is next to one of my favorite coffee shops—the one with the amazing mural of the Goddess Coffea on the back wall, bringing us the gift of the coffee bean. I carried my double shot to a tiny table on the lower level, near the old bank vault that houses the owner's office.

Most people think radical activism belonged to the 1960s and early 1970s. That by the 1980s, the country had been lulled to sleep by capitalism, by the soft sounds of peace and prosperity, by Ronald Reagan's soothing baritone. But I knew better. I remembered protests against nuclear buildup, pleas for disarmament, fears of nuclear holocaust. Bumper stickers had continued the fight, everything from
VISUAL
IZE WORLD PEACE
to
BOOK
S, NOT BOMBS.

I remembered taking a ferry with Carl and my parents to Bremerton for a rally against the nuclear submarines.
I remembered boycotts of GE lightbulbs to protest the giant corporation's role in building nuclear warheads. I remembered prayer vigils for immigration reform and anger over the Iran–Contra fiasco.

But I did not remember Bonnie-Peggy. And I was one hundred percent certain that my parents would not have tolerated any discussion of violence in the name of peace. They had never allowed guns in the house, not even cap guns at the Fourth of July, and they'd made Carl give away the G.I. Joe a relative sent for his birthday.

But my mother was so guarded about that time that getting her to talk seemed about as likely as the city's tunnel project finishing on time and under budget.

Who else could I ask? I pictured faces from the party and settled on one. A woman who'd been on the fringes of the group but might recall some pertinent details. We'd always gotten along. I didn't have her number, but I knew who would. Alas, I doubted he would answer his own phone.

And some questions are better posed in person, when you can see the emotion they trigger and spot where to aim the follow-up. I drained my espresso, gathered up my things, and took to the streets.

Once again, the gatekeeper's desk sat empty. The flowers had begun to droop. Three orange petals lay on the open appointment book.