“It’s fine with me,” I told him. “Do whatever you want.”
“How about you?”
“I’ve got a list of places to go and people to see, none of them necessarily dog-friendly. Would you mind looking after Lucy?”
“Not at all,” he said. “She’s a great dog.”
I remembered Alan’s initial wariness when he’d first caught sight of Lucy a few days earlier. In the course of three short days, that long-legged hairy beast had won him over the same way she had me.
When we finished eating and were putting the kitchen to rights, I handed Alan an unused sandwich bag.
“What’s this for?” he asked.
“I’m pretty sure Mel has cotton swabs in her medicine chest. I’d like you to use one of them to swab the inside of Athena’s cheek. When you finish, put the used swab in this.”
“For DNA?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Sure,” Alan said, “will do. Back in a flash.”
I went into the bedroom to change from dog-walker duds to something decent. While I was brushing my teeth and looking at my face in the mirror, I realized that another DNA profile was in order as well—my own. I left the house a few minutes later with a bag containing Athena’s DNA sample in my left-hand pocket and the one holding mine in the other. One way or the other, we were going to find out the truth. Either Athena Dale was my granddaughter or she wasn’t. As far as I was concerned, that was far more important than ascertaining whether or not Petey was her father. He was, according to his Aunt Lenora, a loser with very little to offer his daughter. On the other hand, what I could offer her was something else entirely.
A few minutes later, when I headed out the door, Lucy exhibited zero interest in riding along. I didn’t blame her. She had spent most of the previous two days confined to the backseat of the S550. Even so, I confess to being slightly miffed. At the very least, she could have pretended to want to come with me.
As I drove down Second Avenue toward Pioneer Square, I told Siri to dial Rosemary Mellon’s office number. Dr. Roz, as she prefers to be called, is a relatively new addition to Seattle’s crime-fighting community. Tired of snow, she’d left Chicago behind and had hired on with the King County Medical Examiner’s Office a number of years earlier. An uncompromising woman with a dark sense of humor, for a long time Dr. Roz had worked the morgue’s night shift, but her profound sense of duty and her penchant for helping cops solve homicides—this retired cop included, by the way—had led to her inevitable promotion. She was now King County’s chief medical examiner and permanently stuck working what she considered to be “the boring” day shift.
“Hey, Beau,” she said when she picked up. “How’s it going?”
“I need a favor and was hoping I could take you to lunch.”
“Today?”
“Yes, today.”
“Good luck with that. We’ve got no scheduled autopsies on tap, but I’ve got three groups of high-school STEM kids touring the morgue today, with exactly half an hour between them. As long as we eat in the cafeteria at Harborview, I could probably manage eleven thirty, if that’s okay with you. It’s not fancy, but it’ll work. What kind of favor?”
“Let’s talk about it when I get there.”
“In other words, this sounds like something we maybe shouldn’t discuss in my office?” she asked.
“Exactly.”
“Okay,” she finished. “Meet in the cafeteria at eleven thirty. If you’re asking a favor, you’re buying.”
“Fair enough,” I told her.
I managed to score an open slot in the Triangle Parking Garage at Second and James. It was conveniently located between my two intended destinations—across the street from the Pike Street Mission and a few short blocks away from the King County Courthouse.
Homeless shelters—legally established ones, that is—are divided into two separate categories. Some operate on a twenty-four-hour basis and people staying there are considered to be residents. The other kind is for transients and offers overnight shelter only. People come in out of the rain and cold in the evening and check out the next morning. The first version of Pike Street Mission, under the direction of Reverend Laura Beardsley, had been of the latter variety and had been limited to a total of six beds—cots, really. The new version, under the direction of Rachel Seymour, had risen to the level of residential and could accommodate up to twenty residents.
The shelter was located in what had long been restaurant space.