“In terms of telecommunications, 2006 is the dark ages,” Todd replied. “Smartphones weren’t all that smart back then, and GPS didn’t show up on cell phones until several years later. As for finding out the last time the phone was used? Wireless companies don’t maintain call records that long.”
To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I had hoped tech magic would somehow come to my rescue, but that wasn’t going to happen. Chris Danielson’s disappearance, long gone cold, would have to be solved the old-fashioned way—by interviewing witnesses and acquaintances and asking questions rather than counting on the basics of current forensic science—DNA profiles and cell-phone pings.
“Did you have any further luck finding a missing-persons report on Christopher Danielson?” I asked.
“Nope,” Todd replied. “I’m coming up empty on that score. None of the agencies I’ve checked with have any record of one.”
Hearing those words made my heart hurt. Twelve years earlier a seventeen-year-old boy had vanished off the face of the earth, and not one person had cared enough to mention his disappearance to the authorities.
“Do we have any idea about Chris’s last known location?” Todd asked.
“Danitza believed he was at work at a restaurant called Zig’s Place in Homer that Monday night. She expected him to come home once he got off shift, but he didn’t.”
“FYI,” Todd continued, “Homer has no record of any homicides at all—solved or unsolved—in 2006. They had a couple of suicides and an accidental death or two, but no homicides. In a place as small as Homer, with a population of five thousand, give or take, even a disappearance would have been big news.”
“It wasn’t because no one knew it happened,” I told him. “Suppose Chris was attacked on his way home from work. Any killer with half a brain wouldn’t be dumb enough to leave a dead body lying around near the crime scene or inside a relatively well-populated area where someone was likely to find it. Alaska is a vast, wild, and mostly empty space, and a killer would have used that to his advantage.”
“So you’re saying the killer would have transported the body out into the wilderness in hopes it might never again surface?”
“And even if it did,” I added, “had the body been stripped bare, with nothing to assist in confirming an identification and no matching missing-persons report, how would anyone make the connection?”
I asked the question, and for a long moment neither Todd nor I had a ready answer. But then I thought of something. There was still no official report, but I now knew for sure that Chris Danielson was missing.
“Can you tell me who’s in charge of unidentified skeletal human remains found in the state of Alaska?” I asked.
After a few moments of swift keyboarding, Todd had an answer. “Unidentified bodies go to the state crime lab in Anchorage. Skeletal remains go to Harriet Raines, a professor of forensic anthropology at the UAA. She teaches there, but she’s also the director of a state-funded laboratory on campus where they try to identify skeletal human remains and determine causes of death wherever possible. At that point she turns her findings over to the Alaska State Police, or AST as they’re usually referred to—the Alaska State Troopers.”
“Can you give me an address and a phone number for that anthropology lab?”
“Sure thing.” Todd’s voice was interrupted by a beep on the line. “Oops, Beau,” he said. “I need to take this call. Once that’s done, I’ll send along Professor Raines’s contact information and start gathering whatever I can on Roger Adams.”
“No rush,” I told him. “And thanks.”
Once off the phone, I started scrolling through some of the information Todd had already sent, including addresses, phone numbers, and employment information on the two unaffiliated guys from The Log who lived in Anchorage—John Borman and Bill Farmdale. Since those two individuals were here in town and so was I, looking them up seemed like as good a starting point as any. There was nothing to say they were close to Chris Danielson or even knew him from a hole in the ground, but with nothing else to go on, even remotely possible leads needed to be tracked down. Better to start out in Anchorage and head for Homer once I’d exhausted the leads here. Not knowing how long any of this would take, I figured it was just as well that I’d left my return flight open.
By then it was coming up on dinnertime. I went over to the desk and examined the in-room dining menu. I used the hotel phone to place a room-service order, and then I used my cell to call Mel.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Sarah and I are on our way home,” she answered. “I don’t think she’s accustomed to the kind of adoring attention she received yesterday and today. She’s done, and so am I. What are you up to?”
“I just ordered dinner from room service.”
“All right,” she said. “Once I get home, I’ll feed her and then give you a call. We’ll have a long-distance dinner together with you eating whatever you got from room service—”
“A hamburger and fries,” I supplied.
“And I’ll have my PB&J,” she said. “That way neither one of us will be dining alone.”
“Sounds good,” I told her.
And that’s what we did. We both put our phones on FaceTime and chatted away, with Mel eating her peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich at our kitchen island while I suffered my way through the meal seated on the only available chair in the room, an ergonomic nightmare—a rolling torture machine made of metal and plastic with scrawny armrests and supposedly lumbar-supporting lumps in all the wrong places.
“How’s your room?” Mel asked.
“The room’s fine,” I said, “but this chair? Not so much. And since this is supposedly a double room, shouldn’t they have at least two decent chairs?”
“Quit your bitching,” Mel advised, “and tell me about your day.”
So I did. She was especially interested in my long conversation with Danitza Miller. “To launch off on her own while pregnant at age sixteen and be able to put herself through school, she must be one tough cookie,” Mel observed. “Most of the girls I knew growing up would have swallowed their pride and gone crying to their parents for help, and I’d like to think that most of those parents would have been more than willing to do so.”
“Only if said parents were somewhat more open-minded than Roger Adams,” I observed. “Once Danitza left his household, her father effectively banished her. At some point after Danitza moved out of the home, her mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer. A year and a half later, when Eileen was dying, Nitz tried to visit her, but her father had left orders with the hospital staff saying she wasn’t welcome. And later, when it came time for Eileen’s funeral, Roger banned Nitz from that as well. He was in the state legislature at the time and claimed that his daughter was disturbed and dangerous. When she turned up at the church, an off-duty Alaska State Trooper was stationed at the door to prevent her from entering.”