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Bellingham, Washington

Saturday, February 22, 2020

In the old days, Kelly and Scotty always took their Saturday morning Frosted Flakes with a side of Scooby-Doo. Maybe that

was true for Naomi, too, although I didn’t know her back then. For Mel’s and my second Saturday morning with Kyle in residence,

cartoons were nowhere in evidence.

Mel and I both grew up during an age when Saturdays were designated for housecleaning. That tradition holds true in our house

to this day, but with us, it’s usually every Saturday. On Kyle’s first day, she had called in sick. With only two of us, we

keep things reasonably neat, but we’re not offended by a dust bunny or two. And since neither of us is exactly skilled in

the art of domestic science, we have help.

Alice Patterson is a feisty little fiftysomething who drives a school bus during the week and cleans other people’s houses on weekends. I’m not sure when she cleans her own. She doesn’t have any use for the vacuum system we installed when we remodeled the house. Instead, she shows up on Saturday mornings with her trusty Dyson at the ready while lugging a five-gallon plastic container loaded with her approved cleaning solutions along with a whole collection of dustcloths and -rags.

During breakfast, Mel leveled a look at Kyle and said, “How’s your room?”

“Fine, I guess. Why?”

“Because Alice, our housekeeper, comes today,” Mel explained. “Sheets, pillowcases, and towels need to be in the laundry room

before she gets here, and anything that might interfere with her dusting, vacuuming, or cleaning needs to be put away.”

I’ve always gotten a kick out of Mel’s propensity for cleaning the house before the cleaning lady arrives, but in this case

it was necessary. After breakfast she walked Kyle to the guest room and performed a preliminary inspection—which he failed.

Mel grew up with a US Army colonel for a father, so she comes with fairly stringent standards, and Kelly’s and Jeremy’s expectations

regarding room cleanliness were obviously lower than Mel’s. It took half an hour of remedial work on Kyle’s part before Mel

pronounced the room as “Alice ready.”

Once released from cleaning duty, Kyle headed out to the garage where he began whaling away on his drums. I didn’t blame him.

After school the day before, while the two of us were walking Sarah together, I had asked him if he’d met anyone at school

who interested him.

“Why bother trying to make new friends?” he had asked hopelessly. “They’re going to shut down school in a couple of weeks

anyway.”

He was right about that, of course. Breaking into a new social circle in high school isn’t easy under the best of circumstances, and these were anything but normal. He was brokenhearted, lonely, and living with a pair of old people he barely knew. With that in mind, I figured beating the living hell out of that drum set was good for what ailed him. As for disturbing the neighbors? I didn’t worry too much about that. Once spring comes around, weekend mornings all over Fairhaven are punctuated by the noise of lawn mowers followed by a barrage of leaf blowers come fall. Compared to the noisy racket from those, the steady beat on his drums barely counted as a disturbance.

As chief of police, Mel is regarded as an important player in terms of city government. As a result, she’s part of several

citywide networking organizations. I was deep in my crosswords when she looked up and remarked, “This isn’t going to be good.”

“What’s that?”

“I talked with people from the school district last night. Our shutdown will most likely hit sooner than later, probably by

the first or second week in March. The big delay right now is trying to figure out how to switch over from in-person to online

learning.”

“A complete shutdown?” I asked. “Are you sure? And is that even a good idea? For years the experts have been telling us that

too much screen time is bad for kids. Now they want them to use screen time instead of going to school?”

“Evidently,” Mel said.

“And is this whole Covid thing going to be as bad as everyone is making it out to be? Have we had even so much as a single

case here in Bellingham?”

Mel and I don’t share the same mental health regimen. She tolerates my aversion to news these days, but she doesn’t necessarily

approve of it.

“You can bury your head in your news blackout all you want,” she answered, “but believe me, cases will be coming to Bellingham. I’ve been watching the numbers, Beau. People, especially older people, are dying of Covid all over the world, and so far nobody knows how to treat it. So, yes, it’s going to be bad—very bad. They’re saying as bad as or even worse than the Spanish flu in the early part of the last century.”

“But how exactly is this school shutdown going to work?” I asked. “It’s Kyle’s senior year, for Pete’s sake.”

“It’ll be mandatory for everybody, seniors included,” she said. “We’ll just have to figure out how to live with it.”

I went back to my crossword, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was thinking about how things had been back in my senior year of

high school. At that point in my life I’d never met any of my grandparents, but being eighteen years old and having to be

locked up for an unknown period of time with only a couple of elderly folks for company didn’t sound like my idea of a good

time. Would Kyle have been better off staying in Ashland or moving to Eugene with his mom? Maybe. Probably. Was it too late

now for him to change his mind?

Just then a call came in from Todd Hatcher.

“Sorry, I know I said I’d get back to you on this last night, but that didn’t happen.”

“That’s all right. What do you have for me?” I asked.

“Things are getting more and more interesting,” he replied. “I ran Caroline Richards’s driver’s license photo through a number of law enforcement facial rec databases. The first hit I got was to an eighteen-year-old named Lindsey Baylor. Seven years ago, she was arrested in Seattle and charged with prostitution. She was bailed out by her mother, Phyllis Baylor, and the charges were later dropped. But here’s the problem. As near as I can tell, those initial IDs dating from 2003, both hers and her mother’s, were as fake as the one belonging to your son-in-law’s new main squeeze, Caroline. Between that first arrest and her emergence as Caroline Richards late last year, there’s no sign of her.”

“You’re saying those other IDs first surfaced back in 2003?” I asked.

“That September is when Phyllis used a Washington State driver’s license ID to sign her daughter up for the free/reduced-cost

lunch program at Bow Lake Elementary School in SeaTac. Their address at the time was at a place on Pacific Highway South called

the TaxiWay Motel, which has since been demolished. I found a much later address for them in a mobile home park located in

Federal Way. Like her daughter, Phyllis had numerous arrests for prostitution, dating from early on up until 2015.”

“Sounds like prostitution was the family business,” I suggested. “If her first arrest was at age eighteen, my guess is that

the daughter started working the streets earlier than that. So where’s Phyllis now?”

“Deceased. Died of natural causes—hep C—in October of 2016. Her last arrest was in early 2015. After that she may have been

too ill to work. She was alone and homeless at the time of her death. The King County Sheriff’s Office attempted to locate

her daughter or some other relative to take charge of her remains, but those efforts were unsuccessful. Eventually Phyllis

was laid to rest in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Renton, along with 215 other homeless individuals. I’m thinking both mother and

child may have been in Witness Protection.”

That story—where a mother and a young child or two all turn up with fake IDs—sounded all too familiar to me, because I’d heard it before, and always in connection with Witness Protection.

WITSEC is shorthand for the US Marshals Witness Protection Security Program. The only things most people know about Witness

Protection is what they see on TV or in the movies. In those fictional stories, prosecutors often assure terrified individuals

that they won’t need to worry about testifying against some dangerous bad guy because they’ll be placed in Witness Protection.

Sounds good, right? Viewers who don’t know better probably imagine that the Witness Protection program comes complete with

a modest two-bedroom/one-bath bungalow surrounded by a picket fence. The reality is often far different. In my experience

many of the so-called protectees are dropped off at run-down apartment buildings or fleabag hotels in not-so-nice parts of

strange towns. For women in those kinds of situations, especially ones with little kids and no marketable skills, working

the streets ends up being their only option. In my work as a cop it’s something I saw all too often.

As soon as Todd mentioned Witness Protection, I was sure he was on the right track, and for the first time, I found myself feeling the smallest smidgeon of sympathy for Caroline Richards, aka Lindsey Baylor. She had to have been younger than five when she’d been saddled with that brand-new but phony name. And if she had grown up with a destitute and likely drug-abusing mother, she would have endured a difficult and chaotic childhood. No wonder she had glommed on to Jeremy Cartwright. She no doubt saw him as a meal ticket, someone who would offer her some stability. But who was she really, and what kind of criminal situation from the past had put both mother and child in that situation? Those were questions with no easy answers.

“I’ll keep looking,” Todd said, bringing me back to the conversation at hand, “but don’t hold your breath. Getting a facial

rec hit on something from 2003 and from a completely unknown location isn’t very likely.”

That evening Kyle surprised us by offering to cook dinner, and he delivered a respectable batch of spaghetti. I doubt Gordon

Ramsay would have called it elevated, but it was certainly edible and better than anything I could have conjured up.

“Who taught you to cook?” Mel asked after taking a tentative bite.

“My mom,” he said. “Dad can’t cook for beans, and neither can Caroline. I’m the one who had to do most of the cooking.”

“Their loss is our gain then,” Mel said with a smile, “but you’ll end up having to give Grandpa and me a few lessons.”

He grinned back at her. “I’ll try,” he said.

As a cop I was accustomed to not discussing active investigations, but I’m not a cop any longer. Still, since my family was

all bound up in this one, it seemed reasonable that if I wanted Kyle to be straight with me, I needed to be the same with

him.

“By the way,” I said, “her real name isn’t Caroline Richards.”

Both Mel and Kyle looked at me in disbelief. “It’s not?” Kyle managed.

I gave them a brief overview of what Todd and I had surmised about Caroline Richards’s history, leaving them both gobsmacked.

“You really think she grew up in Witness Protection starting when she was just a little kid?” Kyle asked when I finished.

“That’s only a guess on our part,” I admitted, “but the trail of multiple IDs strongly suggests that might be the case.”

“What do you think her mother did?” Kyle asked.

“I’m not sure if it’s something she did or if it’s something someone else did that she knew about. One way or another, Phyllis

ended up with a target on her back, and her daughter ended up having to go along for the ride.”

“That sounds awful,” Kyle said. “It almost makes me feel sorry for her. Is there any way to find out what really happened?”

“If the US Marshals are involved, probably not,” I explained. “Information on people in Witness Protection is never made public.

Once someone walks through that door, there’s usually no going back, not without putting yourself in mortal danger.”

“Even after this long?” Kyle asked. “I mean, in 2003, I had barely been born.”

“Any number of bad guys out there are a lot like elephants,” I told him. “Once you cross them, they never forget.”