No One Needs to Know (39 page)

I look forward to hearing from you about a meeting time and place.

Sincerely,

Your Goddaughter, Laurie

She sent the draft to Cheryl, and got a response five minutes later:

Hi, Laurie,

This is great! Just change the closing line to:
“I look forward to hearing from you about the meeting time. As we will be coming to you, please let us know if there are any special instructions or directions required for visiting your home.”

You never know with these multimillionaires . . . I don’t want a surprise strip search at his front gate.

Please send that e-mail (with the changes) out as soon as you can.

Here’s a great big thank-you for making this happen. See you on the set tomorrow. Get some sleep!

Thanks again,

Cheryl

Laurie made the change Cheryl wanted, and sent the e-mail to Gil’s assistant.

By then, it was close to 10:30, and she just wanted to go to bed. She looked at the two fat accordion-type files on her coffee table, and told herself it could wait until tomorrow.

But she couldn’t. She poured herself a glass of Merlot and started rummaging through the files. She’d dreaded coming across photos of the murder scene in the Gayler Court house, but didn’t see any. However, she found several more Xerox pictures of the group suicide by Hooper and his disciples at Biggs Farm. It was strange, to see them all sprawled out on the ground like that—some poor, misguided hippie girls, a middle-aged woman, and a couple of innocent children. There was no visible blood—except in the photos of Trent and his friend, Jed “JT” Dalton, who had been his accomplice in the murders of July 7, 1970. Both had taken a bullet in the head.

The Xerox pictures were in black and white, and obviously copied from official police crime scene photos. Maureen must have found them amid her sheriff-husband’s files. Laurie imagined Maureen digging through a storage room for the photographs, then copying them at a Xerox machine in his office.

That must have been several years before she’d even met Cheryl.

Laurie wondered if Maureen had collected all this data out of a morbid fascination with the case. Or was she somehow personally involved in the murders? It couldn’t be just a coincidence that Cheryl ended up working on the set of the
7/7/70
film. Had going after that movie catering job been Maureen’s idea?

Laurie was beginning to think there was no such thing as a Cheryl file, but then she found a thin blue folder within the accordion-style file. In it were clippings and pages torn from magazines about Cheryl and the Grill Girl food truck. Laurie recognized a couple of the articles—from
The Seattle Times
and
Seattle Met
magazine. She also found old police records with mug shots of Cheryl at ages nineteen, twenty, and twenty-three. The name on the arrest records was
Charlene Anne Mundy,
though it was unmistakably Cheryl looking like a somber street urchin in the mug shots. The charges varied: drug possession, resisting arrest, shoplifting, and forgery.

In one of the articles Laurie had read a while back, Cheryl had admitted to having a drug problem and several brushes with the law in her youth. But Laurie didn’t know that she’d gone to the trouble of changing her name to help erase her checkered past.

Cheryl had also said she’d grown up in several different foster homes. Laurie figured that was why Maureen had collected a listing of adoption agencies in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. There were several letters from these agencies sent to Maureen Forester between 1979 and 1980, all of them basically form letters, all of them saying the same thing:
We have no record of the child you described in your letter.

From what Laurie could tell, it seemed as if Maureen had been searching for Cheryl since 1979—maybe even earlier than that. And they finally connected five months ago? She wondered how the Styles-Jordan murders figured into all this. Why was Cheryl’s folder tucked inside this file full of 7/7/70 research?

There was another police bulletin about Charlene Anne Mundy. It was a “missing child” flier, which paired her with another child. The blurry photo showed a young Charlene with her arm around a little boy. They stood in front of a swing set:

MISSING

CHARLENE ANNE MUNDY JAY “BUDDY” MUNDY

Last Seen: Eugene, Oregon, on May 26, 1974

CHARLENE ANNE MUNDY and her brother, “BUDDY” MUNDY, disappeared from the residence of their uncle, Dorian Jefferson Mundy, at 718 Polk Street, Eugene, sometime in the afternoon of 5/26/74. Charlene is a freshman at Willamette High School. She has long light brown hair, parted in the middle, and was wearing a red sweater and blue jeans. “Buddy” has dark shaggy hair with bangs and has a birthmark over his right eye. He was wearing a green-striped short-sleeve shirt, red pants, and green sneakers. Anyone with information regarding the whereabouts of these two youngsters is urged to contact the Eugene Police Department at 458-555-1212.

Laurie wondered if this baby brother, “Buddy,” was the child Cheryl had mentioned back when they’d first met for the job interview at the Elliott Bay Café.
I had a little boy of my own for a while, but I lost him,
she’d said.

There was nothing else in the Cheryl portion of the file. Laurie had dozed off with that “missing” flier in her hand.

And now Joey had finally dozed off, thank God.

Laurie carefully got up from the sofa and carried him upstairs to his crib. She tucked him in, and then wandered back down to the living room. It was after two o’clock in the morning, and she could barely keep her eyes open. But she had to look something up on Google, or she’d never fall asleep.

Laurie sank back down on the couch and set her computer notebook in her lap. She got onto the Internet, and pulled up Google. On the search line she typed: Charlene Anne Mundy. The first few results were Facebook pages for people with similar names. Laurie checked three pages of results, and didn’t find anything about a girl that went missing in Eugene, Oregon, in 1974. Her luck wasn’t any better with Jay “Buddy” Mundy
.

Finally, she tried Dorian Jefferson Mundy. The first result was an obituary from the
Oregonian,
dated September 30, 1990.

MUNDY, DORIAN JEFFERSON, 47, passed away peacefully in the home of his longtime friend, Lawrence Driscoll, of Portland. Mundy was part owner of Paws Salon Pet Grooming in Portland. He is survived by his many friends, both two-legged and four-legged. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Oregon Humane Society.

Laurie didn’t know the man at all, but she started crying.

Maybe it was because she was so tired. Part of her was crying for herself, too, because all this research wasn’t getting her anywhere. She should have been online looking up job opportunities—instead of trying to dig up something about Cheryl—or rather, Charlene.

She switched off her computer, then got to her feet and turned off the living room light. She glanced out the window at the courtyard.

There was only one other unit with a light on. It was Cheryl’s. Was she still up? Or had she gone to bed and forgotten to turn the lights off again? Maybe she’d purposely left them on.

Laurie started up the stairs to bed, and realized that maybe one person in this apartment complex was even more scared than she was.

Thursday, 2:15
A.M.

“I’m really sorry,” Adam said, standing outside the front entrance to Evergreen Manor. “It’s just I couldn’t sleep, and my dad told me the last couple of nights have been really rough for him. I think he’d feel better if I was there in his room with him.”

He didn’t know the middle-aged, East Indian nurse by name, but he’d seen her there before. She was on the other side of the door, which was held half-open by the stocky security guard next to her. “I am sorry, too,” she said in her crisp accent. “But this is most irregular. I will have to check with the doctor on duty before I allow you to come in.”

“Could you ask him to make an exception, please?” Adam said. “You might have heard my brother and sister-in-law were killed three nights ago. Anyway, my dad’s still pretty traumatized. I’m just really worried about him right now . . .”

She nodded, and then retreated to the front desk in the lobby. The guard, whom Adam didn’t know, stepped back, closed the door, and locked it. Looking at him through the window panel in the door, Adam worked up a contrite smile. But the husky man didn’t smile back.

Adam wasn’t lying. He was worried about his father. He figured if someone had come after him at his friends’ garage apartment, then they might try to get at his father here. The security was good in this place, but not infallible.

A squad car had pulled in front of Stafford and Dave’s house within six minutes of Adam’s 911 call. But by that time, whoever had broken into the garage apartment was gone. The cops gave the studio the once over, and asked Adam if he noticed anything missing. The intruder hadn’t touched Adam’s iPhone. And his wallet—with all his money and credit cards in it—was still there on the kitchenette counter. It would have helped if he’d actually seen the perpetrator. But all he’d seen was what looked like someone opening his bathroom door.

Adam started to think the cops didn’t believe him. Maybe they still considered him the only suspect in Dean and Joyce’s murders, and thought he’d made all this up about someone breaking into the garage apartment just to throw them off.

But both cops were perfectly nice. They filled out a report, gave him a card with his case number on it, and suggested he keep the door double locked tonight. As soon as they left, Adam put on a pair of khakis, a nice shirt, and a light jacket. Then he drove here to Evergreen Manor.

In a way, it was reassuring to know they had the doors covered here. Still, Adam was worried about his father’s safety. After what had just happened earlier tonight, Uncle Marty’s warnings suddenly had a lot of credibility.

Through the glass panel in the door, Adam watched the nurse come back. She murmured something to the guard, and he opened the door all the way. “Dr. Mathias said it’s all right—as long as you sign in,” the nurse said with a polite smile.

“Thank you so much,” Adam replied, stepping into the lobby.

“Are you planning to stay the rest of the night?”

Adam nodded. “Yes, if that’s okay.”

Ten minutes later, he was sitting in his father’s room—on his father’s Barcalounger. Adam listened to him snore.

He had his shoes off and a blanket tossed over him. His jacket was rolled into a ball, and tucked between the chair’s cushioned armrest and his hip.

In the pocket of that jacket was his friend’s Glock 19. It was loaded.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
NINE

Thursday, July 10, 11:18
A.M.

Seattle

“L
ord, are you three men blind?” Adam’s aunt Doris said. She was scowling at his father. “Dino, you can’t go out in that shirt. It’s got one . . . two . . . three stains on it. Am I the only one to notice these things?”

Adam hadn’t noticed. But he remembered the tomato-juice stain on the shirt his dad had worn yesterday.

“You can’t go out looking like that, Dino,” Aunt Doris went on. “Better take it off . . .”

Sitting on the edge of his bed, Adam’s dad started to unbutton the shirt. “She just wants to see me with my shirt off,” he chuckled. “Isn’t that right, Dodo?”

“You wish,” she muttered, opening up his father’s closet. “Okay, what do you have in here?”

Aunt Doris was a tall, big, bossy woman with jet-black hair—which had to be a dye job, because she was about seventy years old. She was about two inches taller than Marty, who looked a bit like a bulldog, and had hardly any hair at all.

Marty was taking Adam’s father to lunch and a Mariners game. They’d planned it two weeks ago, and Marty insisted it was probably just what Adam’s dad needed right now. Doris came along for the lunch. She was skipping the game to shop at Pike Street Market.

She kept telling Adam how terrible he looked. Did he get any sleep at all last night?

He’d dozed for about three hours. He still had the gun rolled up in his jacket, which he’d stashed on the bookcase by the TV. Adam wasn’t joining them for lunch. But before they took off, he hoped to catch a few minutes alone with Marty. While Doris tried to find a clean shirt for his dad, Adam leaned in close to his uncle. “Can I talk to you about something—in the hallway?”

Marty nodded, and then turned to Adam’s dad. “We’ll be right back. Dino, call me if she tries to make you take off your pants.”