Until Proven Guilty

Epilogue

We buried Anne Corley Beaumont in her blue silk suit on the bluff of Mount Pleasant Cemetery, as close as we could to Angela Barstogi. She wore the gold wedding band. I put mine in the velvet box along with the engagement ring and put the box back in my bottom drawer.

Ames handled everything. He managed to track down the minister in the pea green Volkswagen to conduct the funeral service. Ralph is nothing if not thoughtful. He squelched the assault charge Maxwell Cole was getting ready to file and handled all the details of both the Snoqualmie investigation and the departmental review. He saw them through to completion, when all charges were dropped and my record at the department had been cleared. He contacted all other jurisdictions, closing the books on other cases involving Anne Corley.

Ralph took me down to the Four Seasons and showed me Anne’s suite. Those elegant rooms and I were kindred spirits. Once we had both been full of Anne Corley. Now we were empty. Vacant. There was a difference, though. The rooms were made up, awaiting someone else’s arrival. I wasn’t. I made Ames take me home.

Peters continued working on the Angela Barstogi case, tying up loose ends. When the final count came in, he discovered Angela had been Kincaid’s third victim, all of them picked up by his unusual telephone number. He had a notebook with the names and numbers of children all over the state of Washington. Speaking as a cop, it was lucky for those other kids that Anne killed Kincaid when she did.

I operated in a haze. I developed an infection. For the better part of two weeks, I wasn’t connected to what went on around me. It was probably better that way. By the time I rejoined the world, the worst of the difficulties seemed to be over except for figuring out how to go on living without Anne. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

The day I came out of the fog was the day Ames announced we needed to go pick out Anne’s headstone. “Where do we have to go?” I asked, thinking about bus schedules.

“I checked on the map,” he said. “It’s somewhere up Aurora.”

We got in the elevator. I pressed Lobby, and he pressed Garage. He led the way. The Porsche was parked in a space on the second level. “I rented it with an option to buy,” he explained.

“I can’t afford to buy a parking place,” I said.

He handed me the keys to the Porsche. “I think we need to have a little talk about your financial position.” The results dumbfounded me, the details were staggering. There was something called a marital deduction. The fact that we had been married at the time of Anne’s death meant that most of the money went to me without anything going to estate taxes. I had more money than I’d ever know what to do with.

The night before Ames was supposed to fly back to Phoenix, the three of us went to the Doghouse for dinner — Peters, Ames, and me. I was beginning to like the idea of having Ames around, to appreciate being able to ask his advice. A couple came in with two little girls, pretty little things with long brunette hair. I saw Peters’ heart go to his sleeve. That’s when the idea hit me.

“How are you at interstate custody cases?” I asked Ames.

“I don’t usually handle those personally,” he said, “but our firm has won more than we’ve lost.”

“And deprogramming?”

“We’ve handled a couple of those, too,” he said.

Peters looked at me then. He was beginning to get my drift. I winked at him. “You know, Ames, unless you’ve got something really pressing, I think I’d like you to stop by Broken Springs, Oregon, and see if you can pull Peters’ two kids out of there.”

Ames shrugged. “You’re the boss,” he said.

I think Anne Corley Beaumont — the Anne I loved — would have approved.