Copyright

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

First published in the USA by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2013

Copyright © J. A. Jance 2013

Cover design © Richard L Aquan

Cover photograph © Nomadic Luxury / Getty Images

J. A. Jance asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780007531967

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007531974

Version: 2014-09-15

Dedication

For Bonnie and Doug and all those missing years, and for all those other great guys—the ones who came home and the ones who didn’t. And also for Rhys, one of the ones who did come home. Thank you.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Author’s Note

The Story Behind Second Watch

About the Author

By J. A. Jance

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

We left the P-2 level of the parking lot at Belltown Terrace ten minutes later than we should have. With Mel Soames at the wheel of her Cayman and with me belted into the passenger seat, we roared out of the garage, down the alley between John and Cedar, and then up Cedar to Second Avenue.

Second is one of those rare Seattle thoroughfares where, if you drive just at or even slightly below the speed limit, you can sail through one green light after another, from the Denny Regrade all the way to the International District. I love Mel dearly, but the problem with her is that she doesn’t believe in driving “just under” any speed limit, ever. That’s not her style, and certainly not on this cool September morning as we headed for the Swedish Orthopedic Institute, one of the many medical facilities located in a neighborhood Seattle natives routinely call Pill Hill.

Mel was uncharacteristically silent as she drove hell-bent for election through downtown Seattle, zipping through intersections just as the lights changed from yellow to red. I checked to be sure my seat belt was securely fastened and kept my backseat-driving tendencies securely in check. Mel does not respond well to backseat driving.

“Are you okay?” she asked when the red light at Cherry finally brought her to a stop.

The truth is, I wasn’t okay. I’ve been a cop all my adult life. I’ve been in gunfights and knife fights and even the occasional fistfight. There have been numerous times over the years when I’ve had my butt hauled off to an ER to be stitched up or worse. What all those inadvertent, spur-of-the-moment ER trips had in common, however, was a total lack of anticipation. Whatever happened happened, and I was on the gurney and on my way. Since I had no way of knowing what was coming, I didn’t have any time to be scared to death and filled with dread before the fact. After, maybe, but not before.

This time was different, because this time I had a very good idea of what was coming. Mel was driving me to a scheduled check-in appointment at the Swedish Orthopedic Institute surgical unit Mel and I have come to refer to as the “bone squad.” This morning at eight A.M. I was due to meet up with my orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Merritt Auld, and undergo dual knee-replacement surgery. Yes, dual—as in two knees at the same time.

I had been assured over and over that this so-called elective surgery was “no big deal,” but the truth is, I had seen the videos. Mel and I had watched them together. I had the distinct impression that Dr. Auld would be more or less amputating both my legs and then bolting them back together with some spare metal parts in between. Let’s just say I was petrified.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You are not fine,” Mel muttered, “and neither am I.” Then she slammed her foot on the gas, swung us into a whiplash left turn, and we charged up Cherry. Given her mood, I didn’t comment on her speed or the layer of rubber she had left on the pavement behind us.

I had gimped along for a very long time without admitting to anyone, most of all myself, that my knees were giving me hell. And once I had finally confessed the reality of the situation, Mel had set about moving heaven and earth to see that I did something about it. This morning we were both faced with a heaping helping of “watch out what you ask for.”

“You could opt to just do one, you know,” she said.

But I knew better, and so did she. When the doctor had asked me which knee was my good knee, I had told him truthfully that they were both bad. The videos had stressed that the success of the surgery was entirely dependent on doing the required postsurgery physical therapy. Since neither of my knees would stand up to doing the necessary PT for the other, Dr. Auld had reluctantly agreed to give me a twofer.

“We’ll get through this,” I said.

She looked at me and bit her lip.

“Do you want me to drop you at the front door?”

That was a strategy we had used a lot of late. She would drop me off or pick me up from front doors while she hoofed it to and from parking garages.

“No,” I said. “I’d rather walk.”

I didn’t add “with you,” because I didn’t have to. She knew it. She also knew that by the time we made it from the parking garage to the building, we would have had to stop to rest three times and my forehead would be beaded with sweat.

“Thank you,” she said.

While I eased my body out of the passenger seat and straightened into an upright position, she hopped out and grabbed the athletic bag with my stuff in it out of the trunk. Then she came toward me, looking up at me, smiling.

And the thought of losing that smile was what scared me the most. What if I didn’t wake back up? Those kinds of things weren’t supposed to happen during routine surgeries, but they did. Occasionally there were unexpected complications and the patient died. What if this was one of those times, and this was the last time I would see Mel or hold her hand? What if this was the end of all of it? There were so many things I wanted to say about how much I loved her and how much she meant to me and how, if I didn’t make it, I wanted her to be happy for the rest of her life. But did any of those words come out of my mouth? No. Not one.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said calmly, as though she had heard the storm of misgivings that was circling around in my head. She squeezed my hand and away we went, limping along, the hare patiently keeping pace with the lumbering tortoise.

I don’t remember a lot about the check-in process. I do remember there was a line, and my knees made waiting in line a peculiar kind of hell. Mel offered to stand in line for me, but of course I turned her down. She started to argue, but thought better of it. Instead, she took my gym bag and sat in one of the chairs banked against the wall while I answered all the smiling clerk’s inane questions and signed the countless forms. Then, after Mel and I waited another ten minutes, a scrubs-clad nurse came to summon us and take us “back.”

What followed was the change into the dreaded backless gown; the weigh-in; the blood draw; the blood pressure, temperature, and pulse checks. Mel hung around for all of that. And she was still there when they stuck me on a bed to await the arrival of my anesthesiologist, who came waltzing into the bustling room with a phony smile plastered on his beaming face. He seemed to be having the time of his life. After introducing himself, he asked my name and my date of birth, and then he delivered an incredibly lame stand-up comic routine about sending me off to never-never land.

Gee, thanks, and how would you like a punch in the nose?

After a second wait of who knows how long, they rolled me into another room. This time Dr. Auld was there, and so were a lot of other people. Again they wanted my name and date of birth. It occurred to me that my name and date of birth hadn’t changed in the hour and a half during which I had told four other people the same, but that’s evidently part of the program now. Or maybe they do it just for the annoyance factor.

At that point, however, Dr. Auld hauled out a Sharpie and drew a bright blue letter on each of my knees—R and L.

“That’s just so we’ll keep them straight,” he assured me with a jovial smile.

Maybe he expected me to laugh. I didn’t. The quip reminded me too much of the kinds of stale toasts delivered by hungover best men at countless wedding receptions, and it was about that funny, too. I guess I just wasn’t up to seeing any humor in the situation.

Neither was Mel. I glanced in her direction and saw the icy blue-eyed stare my lovely wife had leveled in the good doctor’s direction. Fortunately, Dr. Auld didn’t notice.

“Well,” he said. “Shall we do this?”

As they started to roll me away, Mel leaned down and kissed me good-bye. “Good luck,” she whispered in my ear. “Don’t be long. I’ll be right here waiting.”

I looked into Mel’s eyes and was surprised to see two tears well up and then make matching tracks down her surprisingly pale cheeks. Melissa Soames is not the crybaby type. I wanted to reach up and comfort her and tell her not to worry, but the anesthesiologist had given me something to “take the edge off,” and it was certainly working. Before I could say anything at all, Mel was gone, disappearing from view behind my merry band of scrubs-attired escorts as they wheeled me into a waiting elevator.

I closed my eyes then and tried to remember exactly how Mel looked in that moment before the doors slid shut between us. All I could think of as the elevator sank into what felt like the bowels of the earth was how very much I loved her and how much I wanted to believe that when I woke up, she really would be there, waiting.

CHAPTER 1

Except she wasn’t. When I opened my eyes again, that was the first thing I noticed. The second one was that I was “feeling no pain,” as they say, so the drugs were evidently doing what they were supposed to do.

I was apparently in the recovery room. Nurses in flowery scrubs hovered in the background. I could hear their voices, but they were strangely muted, as if somebody had turned the volume way down. As far as my own ability to speak? Forget it. Someone had pushed my mute button; I couldn’t say a single word.

In the foreground, a youngish woman sat on a tall rolling stool at the side of the bed. My initial assumption was that my daughter, Kelly, had arrived from her home in southern Oregon. I had told her not to bother coming all the way from Ashland to Seattle on the occasion of my knee-replacement surgery. In fact, I had issued a fatherly decree to that effect, insisting that Mel and I would be fine on our own. Unfortunately, Kelly is her mother’s daughter, which is to say she is also headstrong as hell. Since when did she ever listen to a word I said?

So there Kelly sat as big as life, whether I had wanted her at the hospital or not. She wore a crimson-and-gray WSU sweatshirt. A curtain of long blond hair shielded her face from my view while she studiously filed her nails—nails that were covered with bright red polish.

Having just been through several hours of major surgery, I think I could be forgiven for being a little slow on the uptake, but eventually I realized that none of this added up. Even to my drug-befuddled brain, it didn’t make sense.

Kelly and I have had our share of issues over the years. The most serious of those involved her getting pregnant while she was still a senior in high school and running off to Ashland to meet up with and eventually marry her boyfriend, a wannabe actor named Jeremy. Of course, the two of them have been a couple for years, and my son-in-law is now one of the well-established members of the acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.

The OSF offers a dozen or so plays a year, playing in repertory for months at a time, and Jeremy Cartwright has certainly paid his dues. After years of learning his trade by playing minor roles as a sword-wielding soldier in one Shakespearian production after another or singing and occasionally tap dancing as a member of the chorus, he finally graduated to speaking roles. This year he was cast as Laertes in Hamlet in the Elizabethan theater and, for the first time ever in a leading role, he played Brick in the Festival’s retrospective production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the Bowmer Theatre. (I thought he did an excellent job, but I may be slightly prejudiced. The visiting theater critic for the Seattle Times had a somewhat different opinion.)

It was September, and the season was starting to wind down, but there was no way for Jeremy to get away long enough to come up to Seattle for a visit, no matter how brief, and with Kayla and Kyle, my grandkids, back in school, in fourth and first grade, respectively, it didn’t seem like a good time for Kelly to come gallivanting to Seattle with or without them in tow just to hover at my sickbed.

In other words, I was both surprised and not surprised to see Kelly there; but then, gradually, a few other details began to sink into my drug-stupefied consciousness. Kelly would never in a million years show up wearing a WSU shirt. No way! She is a University of Oregon Duck, green and yellow all the way. Woe betide anyone who tries to tell her differently, and she has every right to insist on that!

To my everlasting amazement and with only the barest of financial aid from yours truly, this once marginal student got her BA in psychology from Southern Oregon University, and she’s now finishing up with a distance-learning master’s in business administration from the U of O in Eugene. She’s done all this, on her own and without any parental prompting, while running an at-home day care center and looking after her own two kids. When Kelly turned into a rabid Ducks fan along the way, she got no complaints from me, even though I’m a University of Washington Husky from the get-go.

But the very idea of Kelly Beaumont Cartwright wearing a Cougars sweatshirt? Nope. Believe me, it’s not gonna happen.

Then there was the puzzling matter of the very long hair. Kelly’s hair used to be about that same length—which is to say more than shoulder length—but it isn’t anymore. A year or so ago, she cut it off and donated her shorn locks to a charity that makes wigs for cancer patients. (Karen, Kelly’s mother and my ex-wife, died after a long battle with breast cancer, and Kelly remains a dedicated part of the cancer-fighting community. In addition to donating her hair, she sponsors a Relay for Life team and makes certain that both her father and stepfather step up to the plate with cash donations to the cause on a yearly basis.)

As my visitor continued to file her nails with single-minded focus, the polish struck me as odd. In my experience, mothers of young children in general—and my daughter in particular—don’t wear nail polish of any kind. Nail enamel and motherhood don’t seem to go together, and on the rare occasions when Kelly had indulged in a manicure she had opted for something in the pale pink realm, not this amazingly vivid scarlet, the kind of color Mel seems to favor.

Between the cascade of long blond hair and the bright red nail polish, I was pretty sure my silent visitor wasn’t Kelly. If not her, then, I asked myself, who else was likely to show up at my hospital bedside to visit?

Cherisse, maybe?

Cherisse is my daughter-in-law. She has long hair and she does wear nail polish. She and my son, Scott, don’t have kids so far, but Cherisse is not a blonde—at least she wasn’t the last time I saw her. Besides, if anyone was going to show up unannounced at my hospital bedside, it would be my son, not his wife.

I finally managed to find a semblance of my voice, but what came out of my mouth sounded croaky, like the throaty grumblings of an overage frog.

“Who are you?” I asked.

In answer, she simply shook her head, causing the cascade of silvery blond hair to ripple across her shoulder. I was starting to feel tired—sleepy. I must have blinked. In that moment, the shimmering blond hair and crimson sweatshirt vanished. In their place I saw a woman who was clearly a nurse.

“Mr. Beaumont. Mr. Beaumont,” she said, in a concerned voice that was far too loud. “How are you doing, Mr. Beaumont? It’s time to wake up now.”

“I’ve already been awake,” I wanted to say, but I didn’t. Instead, looking up into a worried face topping a set of colorful scrubs, I wondered when it was that nurses stopped wearing white uniforms and white caps and started doing their jobs wearing clothes that looked more like crazed flower gardens than anything else.

“Okay,” I managed, only now my voice was more of a whisper than a croak. “My wife?”

“Right here,” Mel answered, appearing in the background, just over the nurse’s shoulder. “I’m right here.”

She looked haggard and weary. I had spent a long time sleeping; she had spent the same amount of time worrying. Unfortunately, it showed.

“Where did she go?” I asked the nurse, who was busy taking my blood pressure reading.

“Where did who go?” she asked.

“The girl in the sweatshirt.”

“What girl?” she asked. “What sweatshirt?”

Taking a cue from me, Mel looked around the recovery room, which consisted of a perimeter of several curtained-off patient cubicles surrounding a central nurses’ station. The whole place was a beehive of activity.

“I see nurses and patients,” Mel said. “I don’t see anyone in a sweatshirt.”

“But she was right here,” I argued. “A blonde with bright red nail polish a lot like yours. She was wearing a WSU sweatshirt, and she was filing her nails with one of those pointy little nail files.”

“A metal one?” Mel asked, frowning. “Those are bad for your nails. I haven’t used one of those in years. Do they even still sell them?”

That question was directed at the nurse, who, busy taking my temperature, simply shrugged. “Beats me,” she said. “I’m not big on manicures. Never have been.”

That’s when I got the message. I was under the influence of powerful drugs. The girl in the sweatshirt didn’t exist. I had made her up.

“How’re you doing, Mr. B.?” Mel asked. Sidling up to the other side of the bed, she called me by her currently favored pet name and planted a kiss on my cheek. “I talked to the doctor. He said you did great. They’ll keep you here in the recovery room for an hour or two, until they’re sure you’re stable, and then they’ll transfer you to your room. I called the kids, by the way, and let everybody know that you came through surgery like a champ.”

This was all good news, but I didn’t feel like a champ. I felt more like a chump.

“Can I get you something to drink?” the nurse asked. “Some water? Some juice?”

I didn’t want anything to drink right then because part of me was still looking for the girl. Part of me was still convinced she had been there, but I couldn’t imagine who else she might have been. One of Ron Peters’s girls, maybe? Heather and Tracy had both gone to WSU. Of the two, I’d always had a special connection with the younger one, Heather. As a kid she was a cute little blond-haired beauty whose blue-eyed grin had kept me in my place, properly wrapped around her little finger. At fifteen, a barely recognizable Heather, one with hennaed hair and numerous piercings, had gone into full-fledged off-the-rails teenage rebellion, complete with your basic bad-to-the-bone boyfriend.

In the aftermath of said boyfriend’s death, unlamented by anyone but Heather, her father and stepmother had managed to get the grieving girl on track. She had reenrolled in school, graduated from high school, and gone on to a successful college experience. One thing I did know clearly—this was September. That meant that, as far as I knew, Heather was off at school, too, working on a Ph.D. somewhere in the wilds of New Mexico. So, no, my mysterious visitor couldn’t very well be Heather Peters, either.

Not taking my disinterested answer about wanting something to drink for a real no, the nurse handed me a glass with water and a straw bent in my direction. “Drink,” she said. I took a reluctant sip, but I was still looking around the room; still searching.

Mel is nothing if not observant. “Beau,” she said. “Believe me, there’s nobody here in a WSU sweatshirt. And on my way here from the lobby, I didn’t meet anybody in the elevator or the hallway who was wearing one, either.”

“Probably just dreaming,” the nurse suggested. “The stuff they use in the OR puts ’em out pretty good, and I’ve been told that the dreams that go along with the drugs can be pretty convincing.”

“It wasn’t a dream,” I insisted to the nurse. “She was right here just a few minutes ago—right where you’re standing now. She was sitting on a stool.”

The nurse turned around and made a show of looking over her shoulder. “Sorry,” she said. “Was there a stool here? I must have missed it.”

But of course there was no stool visible anywhere in the recovery room complex, and no crimson sweatshirt, either.

The nurse turned to Mel. “He’s going to be here for an hour or so, and probably drifting in and out of it for most of that time. Why don’t you go get yourself a bite to eat? If you leave me your cell phone number, I can let you know when we’re moving him to his room.”

Allowing herself to be convinced, Mel kissed me again. “I am going to go get something,” she said.

“You do that,” I managed. “I think I’ll just nap for a while.”

My eyelids were growing heavy. I could feel myself drifting. The din of recovery room noise retreated, and just that quickly, the blonde was back at my bedside, sitting on a rolling stool that seemed to appear and disappear like magic at the same time she did. The cascade of swinging hair still shielded her face, and she was still filing her nails.

I’ve had recurring dreams on occasion, but not very often. Most of the time it’s the kind of thing where something in the dream, usually something bad, jars me awake. When I go back to sleep, the dream picks up again, sometimes in exactly the same place, but a slightly different starting point can lead to a slightly different outcome.

This dream was just like that. I was still in the bed in the recovery room, but Mel was gone and so was my nurse. Everyone else in the room was faded and fuzzy, like from the days before high-def appeared. Only the blonde on the stool stood out in clear relief against everything else.

“Who are you?” I asked. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

She didn’t look up. “You said you’d never forget me,” she said accusingly, “but you have, haven’t you?”

I was more than a little impatient with all the phony game playing. “How can I tell?” I demanded. “You won’t even tell me your name.”

“My name is Monica,” she answered quietly. “Monica Wellington.”

Then she lifted her head and turned to face me. Once the hair was swept away, however, I was appalled to see that there was no face at all. Instead, what peered at me over the neck of the crimson sweatshirt was nothing but a skull, topped by a headful of gorgeous long blond hair, parted in the middle.

“You promised my mother that you’d find out who did it,” she said. “You never did.”

With that she was gone, plunging me into a strange existence where the boundaries between memory and dream blurred somehow, leaving me to relive that long-ago time in every jarring detail.

CHAPTER 2

When it comes to boring, nothing beats second watch on a Sunday afternoon. It’s a time when nothing much happens. Good guys and bad guys alike tend to spend their Sunday afternoons at home. On a sunny early spring day, like this one, the good guys might be dragging their wintered-over barbecue grills out of storage and giving them a first-of-the-season tryout. The bad guys would probably be nursing hangovers of one kind or another and planning their next illegal exploit.

Rory MacPherson was at the wheel of our two-year-old police-pursuit Plymouth Fury as we tooled around the streets of Seattle’s Central West Precinct. We were supposedly on patrol, but with nothing much happening on those selfsame streets, we were mostly out for a Sunday afternoon drive, yakking as we went.

Mac and I were roughly the same age, but we had come to Seattle PD from entirely different tracks. He was one of those borderline juvenile delinquent types who ended up being given that old-fashioned bit of legal advice: join the army or go to jail. He had chosen the former and had shipped out for Vietnam after (a) knocking up and (b) marrying his high school sweetheart. The army had done as promised and made a man out of him. He’d come home to the “baby killer” chorus and had gone to work for the Seattle Police Department because it was a place where a guy with a high school diploma could make enough money to support a wife and, by then, two kids. He had been there ever since, first as a beat cop and now working patrol, but his long-term goal was to transfer over to the Motorcycle unit.

Mac’s wife, Melody, stayed home with the kids. From what I could tell from his one-sided version of events, the two of them constantly squabbled over finances. No matter how much overtime Mac worked, there was never enough money to go around. Melody wanted to go to work. Mac was adamantly opposed. Melody was reading too many books and, according to him, was in danger of turning into one of those scary bra-burning feminists.

From my point of view, letting Melody go out and get a job seemed like a reasonable solution. It’s what Karen and I had decided to do. She had been hired as a secretary at the Weyerhaeuser corporate headquarters, but we had both regarded her work there as just a job—as a temporary measure rather than a career—because our ultimate goal, once we finally got around to having kids, had been for Karen to stay home and look after them, and that’s what she was doing now.

In that regard, our story was different from Mac and Melody’s. The two of us had met in college, where I had snagged Karen away from the clutches of one of my fraternity brothers, a pompous ass named Maxwell Cole. Due to the advent of the pill, we did not get “in trouble” before we got married, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. My draft number came up at about the same time I graduated from the University of Washington, so I joined up before I was drafted. Karen was willing to get married before I shipped out; I insisted on waiting.

Once I came home, also to the by-then-routine “baby-killer” chorus, Karen and I did get married. I went to work at Seattle PD, while Karen kept the job at Weyerhaeuser she had gotten while I was in the service. It’s possible that Karen had a few bra-burning tendencies of her own, but it didn’t seem like that big an issue for either one of us at the time, not back when we were dating. For one thing, we were totally focused on doing things the “right way.” We put off having kids long enough to buy the house on Lake Tapps. Now that Scott had just turned one, we were both grateful to be settled.

Yes, I admit that driving from Lake Tapps to downtown Seattle is a long commute. That’s one of the reasons I drove a VW bug, for fuel economy, but as far as this former city kid is concerned, being able to raise our kids in the country rather than the city makes the drive and the effort worthwhile.

I was raised in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, where I was one of the few kids around with a single mother. My mom supported us by working at home as a seamstress. Growing up in poverty was one of the reasons I was determined to raise my own kids with two parents and a certain amount of financial security. I had my eye on being promoted to investigations, preferably Homicide. I had taken the exam, but so far there weren’t any openings.

Karen and I had both had lofty and naive ideas about how her stay-at-home life would work. However, with one baby still in diapers and with another on the way, reality had set in in a very big way. From Karen’s point of view, her new noncareer path wasn’t at all what it was cracked up to be. She was bored to tears and had begun to drop hints about being sold a bill of goods. The long commute meant that my workdays were longer, too. She wanted something more in her life than all Scotty, all the time. She also wanted me to think about some other kind of job where there wouldn’t be shift work. She wanted a job for me that would allow us to establish a more regular schedule, one where I could be home on weekends like other people. The big problem for me with that idea was that I loved what I did.

So that’s how me and Mac’s second-watch shift was going that Sunday afternoon. We had met up at Bob Murray’s Doghouse for a hearty Sunday brunch that consisted of steak and eggs, despite the warning on the menu specifying that the tenderness of the Doghouse’s notoriously cheap steaks was “not guaranteed.” I believe it’s possible—make that likely—that we both had some hair of the dog. Mac had a preshift Bloody Mary and I had a McNaughton’s and water in advance of heading into the cop shop in downtown Seattle.

Once we checked our Plymouth Fury out of the motor pool, Mac did the driving, as usual. When we were together, I was more than happy to relinquish the wheel. My solitary commutes back and forth from Lake Tapps gave me plenty of “drive time.” During Mac’s and my countless hours together in cars, we did more talking than anything else.

Mac and I were both Vietnam vets, but we did not talk about the war. What we had seen and done there was still too raw and hurtful to talk about, and what happened to us after we came back home was even more so. As a result we steadfastly avoided any discussion that might take us too close to that painful reality. Instead, we spent lots of time talking about the prospects for the newest baseball team in town, the second coming of the Seattle Rainiers, to have a winning season.

Mac was still provoked that the “old” Seattle Rainiers, transformed into the Seattle Pilots, had joined the American League and boogied off to Milwaukee. I didn’t have a strong feeling about any of it, so I just sat back and let Mac rant. Finished with that, he went on to a discussion of his son, Rolly, short for Roland. For Mac it was only a tiny step from discussing Seattle’s pro baseball team to his son’s future baseball prospects, even though Rolly was seven and doing his first season of T-ball, complicated by the unbelievable fact that Melody had signed up to be the coach of Rolly’s team.

My eyes must have glazed over about then. At our house, Karen and I were still up to our armpits in diapers. By the way, when I say the word “we” in regard to diapers, I mean it. I did my share of diaper changing. From where I stood in the process of child rearing, thinking about T-ball or even Little League seemed to be in the very distant future.

What I really wanted right about then was a cigarette break. Mac had quit smoking months earlier. Out of deference to him, I didn’t smoke in the patrol car, but at times I really wanted to.

It must have been close to four thirty when a call came in over our two-way radio. Two kids had been meandering around the railroad yard at the base of Magnolia Bluff. Somewhere near the bluff they had found what they thought was an empty oil drum. When they pried off the top, they claimed, they had discovered a dead body inside. I told Dispatch that we were on our way, but Mac didn’t exactly put the pedal to the metal.

“I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts this is somebody’s idea of a great April Fool’s joke,” he said. “Wanna bet?”

“No bet,” I agreed. “Sounds suspicious to me.”

We went straight there, not with lights and sirens, but without stopping for coffee along the way, either. We didn’t call the medical examiner. We didn’t call for the Homicide squad or notify the crime lab because we thought it was a joke. Except it turned out it wasn’t a joke at all.

We located the two kids, carrot-topped, freckle-faced twin brothers Frankie and Donnie Dodd, waiting next to a pay phone at the Elliott Bay Marina where they had called 911. They looked to be eleven or twelve years old. The fact that they were both still a little green around the gills made me begin to wonder if maybe Mac and I were wrong about the possibility of this being an April Fool’s joke.

“You won’t tell our mom, will you?” the kid named Donnie asked warily. “We’re not supposed to be down by the tracks. She’ll kill us if she finds out.”

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“On Twenty-third West,” he said, pointing to the top of the bluff. “Up on Magnolia.”

“And where does your mother think the two of you are?” I asked.

Frankie, who may have been the ringleader, made a face at his brother, warning Donnie not to answer, but he did anyway.

“She dropped us off at the Cinerama to see Charlotte’s Web. We tried to tell her that’s a kids’ movie, but she didn’t listen. So after she drove away, we caught a bus and came back here to look around. We’ve found some good stuff here—a broken watch, a jackknife, a pair of false teeth.”

Nodding, Frankie added his bit. “Halfway up the hill we found a barrel. We thought there might be some kind of treasure in it. That’s why we opened it.”

“It smelled real bad,” Donnie said, holding his nose and finishing his brother’s thought. “I thought I was going to puke.”

“How do you know a body was inside?” I asked.

“We pushed it away from us. When it rolled the rest of the way down the hill, she fell out. She wasn’t wearing any clothes.”

“That’s why we couldn’t tell our mother,” Donnie concluded, “and that’s when we went to the marina to call for help.”

“How about if you show us,” Mac suggested.

We let the two kids into the back of the patrol car. They were good kids, and the whole idea of getting into our car excited them. Kids who have had run-ins with cops are not thrilled to be given rides in patrol cars. Following their pointed directions, we followed an access road on the far side of Pier 91. There were no gates, no barriers, just a series of NO TRESPASSING signs that they had obviously ignored, and so did we.

The road intersected with the path the barrel had taken on its downhill plunge. Its route was still clearly visible where a gray, greasy film left a trail through the hillside’s carpet of newly sprung springtime weeds and across the dirt track in front of us. What looked like a bright yellow fifty-gallon drum had come to a stop some fifteen yards farther on at the bottom of the steep incline. The torso of a naked female rested half inside and half outside the barrel. The body was covered in a grayish-brown ooze that I couldn’t immediately identify. The instantly recognizable odor of death wafted into the air, but there was another underlying odor as well. While my nicotine-dulled nostrils struggled to make olfactory sense of that second odor, Mac beat me to the punch.

“Cooking grease,” he explained. “Whoever killed her must have shoved her feet-first into a restaurant-size vat of used grease. Restaurants keep the drums out on their loading docks. Once they’re full, they haul them off to the nearest rendering plant.”

I nodded. That was it—stale cooking grease. The combination of rotten flesh and rotting food was overwhelming. For a time we both stood in a horrified stupor while I fought down the urge to lose my own lunch and wondered if the victim had been dead or alive when she had been sealed inside her grease-filled prison.

Eventually the urgent cawing of a flock of crows wheeling overhead broke our stricken silence. Their black wings flapped noisily against the early April blue sky. I’m a crossword puzzle kind of guy. That gives me access to a good deal of generally useless information. In this instance, I knew that a flock of crows is called a murder, and this noisy bunch, attracted by what they must have expected to be a sumptuous feast, seemed particularly aptly named.

Mac was the first to stir. “I guess it’s not a joke,” he muttered as he started down the hill toward the body. “I’ll keep the damn birds away. You call it in.”

Mac was a few years my senior in both regular years and in years on the force. He often issued what sounded like orders. Most of the time I simply went along with the program. In this instance, I was more than happy to comply.

I went back over to the car and leaned inside. Donnie and Frankie were watching, wide eyed, from the backseat. “Did you see her?” Donnie asked. At least I think it was Donnie.

“Yes,” I said grimly. “We saw her. While I call this in, I want the two of you to stay right where you are. Got it?”

They both nodded numbly. It wasn’t as though they had a choice. There was a web of metal screen between the cruiser’s front seat and the backseat. The doors locked from the outside, and there were no interior door handles. Frankie and Donnie Dodd weren’t under arrest, but they weren’t going anywhere without our permission. They sat there in utter silence while I made the call, letting Dispatch know that they needed to summon the M.E. and detectives from Homicide. When I finished, I hopped out of the car and skidded down the steep incline. Mac was already on his way back up.

“I gave up on the damn birds,” he muttered. “She’s already dead. How much worse can it be?”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I think I’ll go have a look anyway.”

“Suit yourself,” Mac said with a shrug. “Some people are dogs for punishment.”

We had worked together long enough that he knew I wanted a cigarette, but we were both kind enough not to mention it. I waited until I was far enough down the hill to be out of sight before I lit up. I figured out of sight is out of mind and damn the smoke smell later.

Still, smoking was what I was doing when my eyes were inevitably drawn to the body. People passing car wrecks on the highway aren’t the only people guilty of rubbernecking. Cops do it, too, and at that time in my career I was enough of a newbie that seeing dead bodies was anything but routine.

I found myself staring at the dead woman—what I could see of her, at least. She lay sprawled facedown on the weedy hillside, half in and half out of the barrel. A tangle of what looked like shoulder-length blond hair spilled out over the ground. A moment later, something red caught my eye, sticking out through the layer of greasy slurry. At first I thought what I was seeing was blood spatter, but that wasn’t possible. Clearly the woman had been dead for some time. Once blood is exposed to the air, it oxidizes and goes from red to muddy brown. This was definitely red. Bright red. Scarlet. Inhaling a lungful of smoke, I moved a step or two closer to get a better look.

What I was seeing, of course, was nothing but tiny little patches of bright red nail polish glowing in the sunlight. And that was the single detail that stayed with me from that crime scene—the nail polish. Wanting to look pretty for someone, the victim had gone to the trouble of having a manicure, or else she had given herself one. Had she been going to a dance or a party, maybe? Had she been out on the town for a night of fun?

Whatever it was, when she’d done her nails, she hadn’t expected to be dead soon, or that the vivid red nail polish would be the only thing she’d be wearing when someone found her body.

CHAPTER 3

“Jonas! Jonas. You really do need to wake up now.”

That’s my name—Jonas Piedmont Beaumont—but other than my mother and grandmother, both deceased now, almost no one calls me that—at least no one who actually knows me. I’m J.P., or Beau, or sweetie pie, or Mr. B. as far as Mel is concerned. I’m Dad for my kids and Grandpa for the grandkids. As a consequence, I wasn’t exactly eager to wake up and see who was yelling Jonas somewhere near my left ear.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that the person behind the very loud voice was short and very stout. I was no longer at the base of Magnolia Bluff, dealing with a dead body and a crime scene. Instead, I was in a brightly lit hospital room with someone shaking my shoulder insistently.

“There you are!”

I was momentarily confused, but the woman, another nurse in scrubs, soon set me straight.

“This is called the recovery room,” she announced with a smile. “No more sleeping. I brought you some beef broth. Would you like to try it?” She handed me a paper cup filled with steaming liquid, but my nose was still full of the smell of death. My gag reflex cut in, and I almost barfed.

“Oops,” the nurse said, taking back the cup. “Looks like it’s too soon for that, then. We’ll try the broth a little later.”

Somewhere along the way I must have fallen asleep again. It was hard to differentiate how much was dream and how much was memory, although I didn’t remember any other time when I’d had a dream that came complete with smells. I lay there for a time. While the room bustled around me, I struggled to put the pieces together. I understood that the girl who had appeared to me earlier, the one with the bright red fingernail polish, was Monica Wellington—the Girl in the Barrel—although at the time, the dead girl was a body without a name.

From my hospital bed in 2010, that case from 1973 seemed to be a very long time ago, but all of it was filed away in my memory bank. On that Sunday afternoon, it wasn’t my case right then because at the time I had been assigned to Patrol rather than Homicide.

I remembered that I had turned away from the body and stubbed out my half-finished smoke, then pocketed what was left and gone back to the patrol car, where Mac and the two boys were awaiting the arrival of reinforcements. Surprisingly enough, Dr. Howard Baker, King County’s newly appointed medical examiner, beat everyone else to the scene.

Even then, Doc Baker arrived at crime scenes reeking of cigar smoke and with a rumpled look that resembled an unmade bed. He always favored gaudy ties and tweedy jackets that never quite buttoned around his ample middle. In later years his hair would go completely white, but back then it was rapidly going from brown to gunmetal gray, and he wore it in a scraggly crew cut. Whole new generations of weather guys have to use hair gel to achieve that kind of spiky look. Doc Baker came by his naturally.

“What have we got?” he asked.

Mac stepped out of the driver’s seat to do the honors. “Down there,” he said, pointing. “That’s where the body is—in that barrel down there. These two kids claim they found the barrel farther up the hill and rolled it down to where it is now.”

Before Doc Baker could do anything other than look, Detectives Larry Powell and Watty Watkins showed up. Watty was ten years my senior. He’d been a detective for five years, but his knees were giving out, and he was angling for a desk job. Powell was ambitious. Everybody had him pegged for being on a fast track for assistant chief, but right then they were still equals, and they’d been partners for as long as I had been on the force.

Once Mac had briefed the new arrivals on the situation, Detective Powell took charge. He looked into the car where Donnie and Frankie were still waiting. “Can you show us where you found the barrel?”

Donnie or Frankie nodded. “Okay, then,” Powell said, looking down the steep hillside to the spot where the barrel had come to rest. “Mac, you and Watty take the boys up onto the bluff to show you what’s presumably the crime scene. I want you to locate it, and that’s all. We’ll need to process the scene, and I don’t want it disturbed by a bunch of people tramping around in it. After that, Watty can take the boys’ statements and then drop them off at home. In the meantime, Officer Beaumont, you’re with me.”

Powell probably picked the Beaumont part off my name badge. Even so, I was still new enough on the job that I was gratified to think one of the Homicide guys knew me by name. As soon as Mac and Watty drove off and we started down the hill, Powell clarified the situation and put me in my place.

“Watty’s knees are giving him hell,” he muttered. “Climbing up and down something this steep would kill him.”

At the time, the idea of my ever having bad knees myself was inconceivable, but if Watty’s failing joints gave me a chance to work with Larry Powell, one of Homicide’s hotshots, who was I to complain? After all, that was where I hoped I’d be going eventually—to Homicide. When it came time to make the move, having someone like Powell in my corner wouldn’t hurt a bit.

So I trotted down the hillside after him, determined to make myself useful. Minutes earlier the circling flock of crows had been the only visible scavengers at the scene. That had changed. The crows were now duking it out with an equally noisy flock of seagulls, but the flies had turned up as well. Somewhere in the fly world, the dinner bell had rung, and the troops had arrived en masse for the promised feast. A black cloud of them had appeared from out of nowhere. They swarmed around the barrel and its spilled contents.

With his evil-smelling stogie gripped between his teeth, Doc Baker waded into the mess to do his preliminary assessment. Once Powell and I came to a standstill behind him, I reached for my half-smoked cigarette. Seeing it, Powell gave a warning shake of his head.

“No smoking,” he said.

“What about Doc Baker’s cigar?” I asked, regretting the words as soon as I said them.

“Doc Baker’s not my problem,” Detective Powell said pointedly. “You are.”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small camera along with several rolls of film, and handed them over. “You’re in charge of photos,” he added. “Now make yourself useful.”

I did as I was told and went about snapping one picture after another.

Eventually the M.E.’s beefy helpers turned up with their gurney. By then it was clear that the only thing in the barrel besides the body was the rest of the grease. The victim was naked. There was no clothing and no identification, so the investigation’s first problem was going to be identifying who she was. As the M.E.’s assistants wrestled the dead woman into a body bag for transport, Powell motioned to me.

“Let’s work our way up the hill.”

Spotting the track was easy enough, even if climbing the hill to follow it was not. The rolling barrel had left a clear path as it careened down the hill. In the process it had torn through thickets of blackberries and left a trail of flattened ferns and broken sprigs of grass along with slick patches of slimy spilled grease. Gravity had worked for the barrel on the steep hillside, but it worked against us. So did the thick tangles of blackberries. If you’ve ever hiked through blackberry brambles, you know climbing uphill through them isn’t exactly a stroll in the park.

The sun was almost gone by the time we finally made it to the spot where Donnie and Frankie had found the barrel hung up on a bramble and pried off the lid. The lid was still there, and so was the stick the two boys claimed they had used to unleash what turned out to be their own private nightmare.

“Poor kids,” Detective Powell muttered. “They had no idea what they were letting themselves in for.”

By then enough time had passed that it was going on full dark. I was using the flash to take a few more photos when Mac came roaring down the hill with Detective Watkins limping along behind him.

“Are you about done?” Mac asked. “I’m parked up there,” he added, pointing toward the top of the bluff.

“Did you see anything important?” Powell asked.

Mac shook his head. “There’s a vacant house up there. It looks like the barrel started down the hill right at the end of the driveway.”

“Any vehicle tracks?” Powell wanted to know.

Mac shook his head. “No such luck,” he answered. “Asphalt.”

I looked to Detective Powell for direction. “You two don’t have to stick around here,” he said. “I’ve called for lights and generators that should be here soon. In the meantime, I’d like you two to go back up and start canvassing the street. See if anyone noticed any unusual traffic coming or going from the house.”

Expecting to be unceremoniously sent back out on patrol, I was glad to be given another job to do. Once we clambered our way to the top of the hill, however, we had a nasty surprise waiting for us. Someone had alerted the media. A clutch of reporters, attracted by the flashes of the camera, stood waiting for us next to the patrol car. Among them was one of my least favorite people in the whole world, a cub reporter named Maxwell Cole.

As I mentioned before, Max and I had been fraternity brothers at the U-Dub. We had not been friends. We became even less so when he showed up at a dance with a very cute girl named Karen. Not only did I snag her away from him at the dance, I married her, too. Talk about adding insult to injury, and Max was still pissed about it. While I was off doing my duty in Vietnam, Max found a way to stay home. He had gone to work for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where he was now firmly ensconced on the police beat.

“Hey, Beau,” he said when he saw me. “What’s the deal down there? I understand some neighborhood kids found a dead woman. Can you confirm that?”

He made it sound like we were the best of pals. The other reporters in the group, thinking he had some kind of an in, backed off and gave him the floor. It did my heart good to tell him, along with the rest of his newsie gang, everything I was allowed to say, which was pretty much nothing.

“Sorry,” I said. “Can’t confirm or deny.”

Grimacing, Max went trudging after MacPherson, but Mac already knew there was no love lost between me and the P-I’s self-proclaimed ace reporter.

“You heard the man,” Mac said. “Mum’s the word. Check with the public information office.”

We got into our patrol car. Mac took off like a bat out of hell, and nobody bothered trying to follow us. If they had, they wouldn’t have had to go far, since we stopped again two blocks up the street, where Amherst Place West intersects with W. Plymouth Street.

“You take that side, I’ll take this one,” Mac said. “And you could just as well skip the house back there on the corner of Twenty-third. That’s where Donnie and Frankie live. Their mother was a screaming banshee when we brought the boys home. She threatened to tear those poor kids limb from limb when she found out they had been down on Pier Ninety-one instead of where she thought they were, safely stowed at a movie.”

“She was probably just worried about the boys messing around down by the railroad tracks,” I suggested.

Mac gave me a wink and a lip-smacking, lecherous grin. “Maybe so,” he said. “But I doubt it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think it had a lot more to do with Watty and me interrupting whatever it was she and her boyfriend were doing when we brought the boys home. From the looks of it, I’d say the two of them were getting it on pretty hot and heavy. The guys from Homicide are the ones making the big bucks. Since they’ll most likely have to talk with the boys again, why should we have to deal with a lady tiger?”

Why indeed? With that, Mac and I hit the bricks.

It was close to dinnertime. As expected, the warm April weather had brought out the early-bird outdoor cooks. Smoke from a dozen separate Weber grills filled the evening air on the southern end of Magnolia Bluff. Residents of Seattle recognized this early bit of faux summer, the exact opposite of Indian summer, for what it was. Soon the sunshine and dry weather would be gone, not to return until sometime in early July. The people we dragged in from their backyard activities weren’t especially welcoming or eager to talk to us. Other than using up some shoe leather, we gained precious little information in the process.

The house where the barrel’s track originated had been vacant for several months, caught up in the midst of a rancorous divorce. One neighbor mentioned that she thought a sale was now pending, even though the real estate sign in the front yard didn’t mention that. No one had noticed any unusual activity around the house in the past several days, although the same neighbor, a Mrs. Jerome Fisk, said she thought some of the neighborhood kids had been hanging around in the backyard of the vacant house and using it as a hideout for smoking cigarettes.

“I didn’t turn them in for it, though,” she told me. “Those poor boys have a tough enough row to hoe. I didn’t want to add to their troubles.”

“You’re saying what exactly?” I asked.

“Their mother, you know,” Mrs. Fisk added confidentially. “Amelia Dodd’s a bit of a wild thing. Gentlemen callers coming to the house at all hours of the day and night.”

“Gentlemen callers? You mean there’s no husband in the picture?”

“Not so as you’d notice,” Mrs. Fisk replied. “There are probably plenty of husbands in that group of men swarming around the honey pot, but I doubt any of them belong to her.”

“You’re saying she’s a … professional?” I asked.

Mrs. Fisk shrugged. “Believe me, she has plenty of special male friends, and she doesn’t appear to have any other kind of job, so you tell me. When I see those two boys left to their own devices so much of the time, it breaks my heart.”

I know more than a little about what it’s like to be raised as a fatherless boy. I looked at the houses on the street. When I was growing up, my mother and I lived in a tiny Ballard-area apartment located over a bakery. Because of the ovens down below, the apartment was warm in the winter without our having to turn on the heat, but it was hot, hot, hot in the summer. I remember very clearly that when clients came to my mother’s place for fittings, I was expected to make myself scarce.

Nevertheless, this Magnolia neighborhood was a big step up from the walk-up apartment where I was raised. I suppose there were plenty of people back then, including my own grandfather, who called my mother a “loose” woman because there was no man in our lives and no ring on Mother’s finger. Her fiancé, my father, died in a motorcycle wreck soon after she got pregnant and before they had a chance to marry. Defying her father’s wishes, Mother refused to give me up for adoption. Instead, she had raised me entirely on her own. At the time I was interviewing Mrs. Fisk I had no idea that one day in the far distant future I would be reunited with long-lost members of my father’s family.

At the time, I regarded Mrs. Fisk as a mean-spirited gossip, a little too eager to condemn her attractive young neighbor to anyone who would listen. It seemed likely that any number of old biddies had probably concocted and spread similar stories about my own mother. In many close neighborhoods and small towns, the single mother was, and still is, a target of scrutiny, if not suspicion.

But even if it was true—if working as a lady of the evening turned out to be Frankie and Donnie’s mother’s only means of support—she must have been successful in her line of work. After all, Magnolia Bluff was one of Seattle’s solidly middle-class neighborhoods. If a working gal was able to earn enough money to maintain a house there, she had to be more of a call girl than a streetwalker, one with a well-heeled, generous clientele with maybe a few power brokers added into the mix.

I may have been relatively new to the force, but I was smart enough to figure out that in a pissing match between power brokers and a uniformed cop, I was the one who was going to come up with the short end of the stick.

In other words, Mrs. Fisk’s comments combined with what Mac had said earlier about the mother in question made me more than happy to give Frankie and Donnie’s house a wide berth. By the time we finished our canvass of the neighborhood and returned to the patrol car, the enticing aroma of grilling burgers had done its trick. It was now long after dinnertime, and we were both famished.

“Dick’s?” he said, putting our police-pursuit Fury in gear.

“Amen,” I said.

And that’s where we headed, for Ballard and the nearest Dick’s Drive-In.

When the first Dick’s opened in the fifties, it was in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. For a kid too young to drive back then, it was close but no cigar. The only way to get there was to drive. I was a junior in high school when the one in Ballard opened, and it was cause for a school-wide celebration. That’s where we headed now.

We were parked in the car munching burgers and fries when Mac said, “I wouldn’t mind a piece of that.”

For a moment I wasn’t sure if he was talking about my burger or about the shapely carhop who had just delivered our food. Turns out it was neither.

“I’m talking about Frankie and Donnie’s mom,” he explained. “The woman may have been mad as all hell, but she was a dish, all right—blond, stacked, and gorgeous.”

That was when I finally got around to telling him what Mrs. Fisk had said about Frankie and Donnie’s mom. When I finished, Mac shook his head sadly. “Too bad. She’s probably out of my league.”

“What’s the matter with you?” I said. “You’re married.”

“That’s right,” he said. “But I’m not dead, and neither are you.”

CHAPTER 4

Somewhere along the way I had fallen back asleep. When I awoke again it seemed like I was still smelling one of Dick’s hamburgers, but it turned out Mel was sitting in the chair next to my bed, munching away on a burger of her own.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” she said. “When are you gonna wake up? It’s time.”

It took a moment for me to make the transition from the world as it was in 1973 to the world as it is now, and it was quite a jolt.

“That was weird,” I said.

“What was weird?”

There was a lot of stuff in my head right then that I didn’t particularly want to discuss with Mel Soames. Generally speaking, we didn’t talk about my life with Karen back when the kids were little or about what I referred to as the “good old days.” Discussions of those always seemed to introduce a certain level of tension into the conversation.

I suppose I need to clarify this some. I’m not talking about old love affairs here. I’m referring to my carousing days when I’d have a drink or two before going to work without giving it a second thought. That, by the way, is one of the reasons I’m in AA now. So rather than go into any of those gory details with Mel, I glossed them all over.

“I was dreaming about hamburgers,” I said, “and here you are eating one.”

“Sorry about that. I was hungry, but don’t expect me to share, because you’re not allowed solid food yet. Jackie will be back in a minute.”

“Who’s Jackie?”

“Your nurse. She’s on a break, but she gave me strict orders before she left. You can have water or you can have broth. That’s it.”

Right that minute, neither water nor broth was very high on my wish list. In fact, I still had to fight to keep my eyes open.

“Whatever they gave me really knocked me on my butt,” I said.

“It’s supposed to,” Mel told me. “It’s called anesthesia.”

The same nurse reappeared—the stout one. This time I noticed that her name badge said she was Jackie Morse. That sounded familiar. Wait, Nurse Jackie. Wasn’t that a television show of some kind? From what I remembered of the show, that particular Nurse Jackie wasn’t exactly a picture of sweetness and light. It turned out this one wasn’t, either.

“Okay,” she said after checking my vitals one more time, just for the hell of it, “let’s give that broth another try.”

She handed me a cup with a straw in it. The stuff inside the cup was no longer hot—far from it—but to my surprise, when I swallowed a sip, it actually tasted good.

“We’ll wait long enough to check your vitals one more time, Jonas,” she said. “If you’re still steady as she goes, we’ll get you wheeled out of here and up to your room. That way you’ll be somebody else’s problem.”

When people call me by the name of Jonas, I can never quite wrap my head around the idea that I’m the person they’re addressing. Of course, in Nurse Jackie’s case, when she used the word “we,” it wasn’t the royal we, by any means. It was the dismissive form of the word, the one favored by grade school teachers talking down their noses to classrooms full of bored kids.

It must have been the better part of another hour before Nurse Jackie finally pronounced that “we” were sufficiently recovered for me to leave the recovery room. As two uniformed attendants wheeled me into the hallway, I felt as though I had finally graduated from one of the levels of Dante’s Inferno. They rolled me down the hall, into the elevator, and then up into a room that was bigger than some hotel rooms I’ve seen. It had windows, a view of other buildings, and room for more than one bed, although only one bed seemed to be called for at the time.

Once in my new digs I was sufficiently awake to be less concerned about Nurse Jackie and far more worried about what was to come. What if my new knees didn’t work? What if I fell flat on my face the first time they tried to stand me up? What if I was destined to spend the rest of my life on one of those little scooters that they’re always advertising on the boob tube? Mel was right there, of course, but I didn’t mention any of those worries to her. Why would I? Instead, I lay in the bed, with Mel dozing off and on in the chair beside me. The only sound in the room was the soft whisper of the bedsore-preventing mattress under me. Other than that, I did my worrying in complete silence.

Fortunately, however, the orthopedic group didn’t leave me there stewing and worrying forever. In advance of the surgery, I had read all the “what to expect” booklets my orthopedic surgeon had sent out. Yes, I had read the part about the “recovery team” getting people back on their feet as soon as possible. Somehow I didn’t expect it to happen so soon, not the very same day as my surgery, but it did.

A bare three hours after I had been rolled into the new room, I was approached by a band of three waiflike young women, stick figures every one, who announced they were my PT squad and that they were there to get me out of bed and “up and at ’em,” as the one who looked to be in charge told me jauntily.

I didn’t share their enthusiasm, or their positive mental attitude. My first, unspoken response was a heartfelt “No way!” I was convinced it was much too soon and that the very idea of expecting me to stand up was an invitation to disaster. I’m sure I outweighed all three of them put together. I doubted they’d be able to support my weight. I could see myself falling to the brightly polished floor and smashing the new synthetic joints in my knees, to say nothing of my face, to pieces, but it was three to one—four, counting Mel—and they were not to be dissuaded. With the help of a strategically placed hoist, they pulled me up into a sitting position and then eased my legs over the edge of the bed. Once I was upright, they planted me in front of a walker.

I remember taking a very deep breath. The next thing I knew, I took my first step and didn’t fall down. That’s when a very real miracle happened. For the first time in at least ten years or so, I realized that my knees didn’t hurt. Of course, I was on plenty of pain meds at the time, but the steady pain that had ground away at me for years, waking and sleeping, simply wasn’t there anymore.

With my helpers and Mel cheering me along, I took one small, careful step after another. I didn’t walk all that far—out of the room and into the hallway. I went as far as the nurses’ station and then back to my room, where they returned me to my bed. The whole excursion left me feeling inordinately proud of myself—as though I’d just run the equivalent of a marathon. Before my head hit the pillow, I was back in never-never land.

Through the years, booze has always been my drug of choice—booze and, a long time ago, cigarettes, too—but I’ve never been tempted to wander into the world of harder drugs. For one thing, my fear of needles makes it unlikely that I’d ever manage to be a successful IV drug user. But now, for the first time, lost in the dreamland world of medicinal narcotics, I got a taste of their allure.

For one thing, under the influence of the pain meds my dreams were astonishingly vivid and, in some cases, entirely welcome. Regular dreams tend to dissipate the moment I awake, but that was not the case here. The details stayed with me long after the dreamscape itself was gone. For all intents and purposes, it was a trip down memory lane.

Scenes from forty or even fifty years ago danced back through my head in full Technicolor splendor and in almost 3-D detail. In one, I was standing outside a hospital nursery looking down at the sweetly sleeping swaddled baby that was my newborn son, Scott. In another, I was a callow twenty-year-old youth, still a student at the University of Washington, sitting at my mother’s hospital bedside and watching the morphine drip as she slowly, ever so slowly, lost her battle with breast cancer.

In others I walked long-ago crime scenes in more or less chronological order with partners both living and dead. In one I stood on the sidelines while medics tried to revive Milton Gurkey when he suffered a fatal heart attack after a violent confrontation with a homicide suspect. In some I was back in the car with Ron Peters, my former partner, when he was a young, gung-ho guy as well as a newly minted vegan. At the time, he hadn’t yet taken his nosedive off a highway overpass and wasn’t in a wheelchair, and I was still trying to figure out if I could work every day with a partner who wasn’t a carnivore. In others, I was partnered with Big Al Lindstrom. In one I was even back in the elephant enclosure in the Woodland Park Zoo.

Eventually, in the dreams, as I had in real life, I found myself working with Sue Danielson. Even in the depths of sleep, my heart filled with dread, knowing that soon I would once again find myself in Sue’s living room reliving the horror that had been part of my life from that day to this. Unable to help her, I had watched my partner and a great cop bleed to death on the floor of her own living room, gunned down by her enraged estranged husband. By the time I finally awoke fresh from the all-too-familiar scene of Sue’s fallen-officer memorial, I was exhausted, physically and emotionally, and my cheeks were wet with tears.

That was about the time I began questioning whether I was dead or alive. Maybe I had died on the operating table and this trip through dreamland was God’s way of having a little joke with me. Maybe He was using pieces of a lifelong jigsaw puzzle to allow my whole life to pass before my eyes in one disjointed scene after another.

But what had jostled me awake this time was the appearance of yet another nurse. This one was a beefy, much-tattooed guy named Keith who came to take my vitals, check my drains, and see if I needed more pain meds.

Why do they do that? People are in hospitals for a reason—to get better from an illness or to recover from surgery. If patients are sleeping peacefully, why wake them up to see if they’re all right? Why not let them sleep until they wake up on their own, at which time they can ring the bell and let someone know if more medication is in order? But let’s not even go there, because that’s not the way hospitals work, and it isn’t going to happen.

So after Nurse Keith confirmed that I was still alive, if not kicking, I tossed around for a while. Wide awake, I would have been glad to have Mel’s company about then, but when Keith had woken me up, I’d finally insisted that she go home to get some rest. She had been at the hospital all day long and would willingly have stayed longer, but I told her I was in good hands and that she was the one who needed relief. She had issued instructions to all our friends that no one was to show up at the hospital that first day. It comes as no surprise that not a single person had dared disobey Mel’s orders.

So there I was, alone and awake, with only the haunting memories elicited by those vivid dreams to keep me occupied. Karen was always a big Simon and Garfunkel fan, and one of her favorite songs by them was “Sounds of Silence.” In this case, the sleeping vision that was planted in my brain was that of the dead body of a naked girl, spilling out of a yellow barrel in the bright afternoon sunlight. Her long blond hair was in a greasy tangle and her fingernails, poking out of the mire, were covered with garish red polish.

Since I didn’t have anything else to think about at the moment, I walked myself back through that pivotal case that would eventually pull me out of a patrol car and drop me into a desk in Homicide on the Public Safety Building’s fifth floor.

That Sunday afternoon it didn’t take long for Larry Powell and Watty Watkins to sort out the identity of the Girl in the Barrel. Her name was Monica Wellington. She was an eighteen-year-old honor student, valedictorian of her high school graduating class at Leavenworth High School, and a recently enrolled freshman at the University of Washington.

On Friday night, she had gone out on what was purported to be a blind date. When she didn’t come back to the dorm, her roommates had called her parents in Leavenworth on Saturday to let them know. The parents in turn were the ones who had called in a missing persons report to Seattle PD later on that same day.

Missing persons reports often get short shrift, but Seattle was starting to see a flurry of women going missing, particularly young coeds. We were right on the cusp of what would later be called the Ted Bundy era. If a prostitute or two went missing back then, no one paid a lot of attention, but when female students from solid families, especially girls in good academic standing, went missing, some effort was made to connect the dots. In this case, the dots were connected early on.

By late Sunday afternoon, while we were still tramping around in the blackberry bushes on Magnolia Bluff, Hannah and Eugene Wellington had driven over to Seattle from Leavenworth. They were doing a full-court press on local television news outlets pleading for information about their missing daughter. One of the guys in missing persons, David Larson, who was interviewed by a local reporter and who had seen a photo of the missing coed, happened to hear that Larry and Watty were investigating a possible homicide. David took it upon himself to bring a copy of the photo to the morgue.

By the time Doc Baker got the layer of grease washed off the body, it was clear that the girl in the photo matched the face of the victim. The Wellingtons were staying at a low-cost motel up on Aurora, and Watty was dispatched with the unenviable job of giving them the bad news that an unidentified body had been found and that there was a good chance the victim would turn out to be their daughter. Watty was also tasked with bringing the parents to the morgue to do the ID.

I didn’t know about any of this at the time because Mac and I were still too busy chowing down at Dick’s, but Watty told me much later that Eugene Wellington, all six feet six of him, wept like a baby, all the way from the motel to the morgue. Once there, he was the one who fainted dead away when it came time to identify the body. It was Hannah, the mother, all five feet two of her, who made the identification and then helped her sobbing, grieving giant of a husband out of the room.

As for Mac and me? We finished out our shift and our burgers and went home.

Back when Karen and I were in the market for our first house, Boeing was going through a world of hurt. That meant the local real estate market was in the toilet, which is how we’d lucked into and been able to afford our place on Lake Tapps.

The house was one of those Pan Abode manufactured homes, built of cut cedar logs and then put together elsewhere. Ours was one of the early models that had been built in the fifties. The original owner was halfway through a do-it-yourself remodel when he died of a heart attack. His widow blamed the house for doing him in and wanted nothing more to do with it.

That’s why we got the place for such a bargain-basement price, but some of the projects that were left unfinished by the previous owner remained unfinished on my watch, too, and that continued to be a big bone of contention between Karen and me. She had one little kid, was pregnant with another, and wanted things done yesterday. I spent all week working and didn’t want to spend my days off working on the house.

Lake Tapps is thirty-five miles south of Seattle. On a good day or late at night, I could get from downtown Seattle to the house in about forty minutes. During busy times of the day, the same trip could take an hour or longer. I used that time to decompress—to put the job away.

And that was how I used the drive that night. It was somewhere between the Public Safety Building and home that I finally realized what was wrong with the place where we found the barrel. There was no path there leading up the hill, no reason for the boys to have gone there. From the bottom to the top, the bluff had been covered with blackberry brambles. That realization brought me to a simple question: What had Donnie and Frankie been doing there?

It was an interesting question, but there wasn’t much to do about it right then. I was in my VW bug. If I called to talk to Larry or Watty about it, I’d have to make a long-distance call from our home phone. We weren’t dead broke, but with only one of us working, we were in a financial situation where pinching pennies was a necessity. Making unnecessary long-distance calls was not considered essential.

Monday and Tuesday were my regular days off. I figured the next time I went to work would be soon enough to broach that topic with the detectives. In the meantime, I did my best to put the Girl in the Barrel out of my head.

Monday was full of doctors’ appointments. Karen had a prenatal checkup. Scott needed to see his pediatrician for some vaccination or another. I had a choice: I could stay home by myself all day—never a good option in Karen’s book—or I could drive them both from one appointment to the next. So that’s what we did. By the time we got back home, Scotty was screaming his head off while Karen and I weren’t speaking. I chalked it up to a hormone malfunction and made the best of it. She went off to bed in a huff right after dinner. I poured myself a drink and then settled into my brand-new recliner to watch Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In without ever making it to the Monday-night movie.

The next day I spent pretty much on my hands and knees trying to fix an intractable plumbing problem in the house’s sole bathroom. By the time Wednesday came around, I was more than happy to go back to work. When I got to roll call, I was surprised that Mac was nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s Rory MacPherson?” I asked Sergeant Rayburn when roll call was over. “If Mac’s not here, who am I supposed to ride with?”

“Go see Detective Watkins on the fifth floor,” he said.

“But where’s Mac?” I began.

“Moved over to Motorcycles. Now get your butt upstairs like I told you.”

Arguing with Sergeant Rayburn was never a good idea, so I got in the Public Safety Building’s disturbingly slow elevators and creaked my way to the fifth floor. It was a maze of gunmetal gray cubicles surrounding a center office where Captain Tommy Tompkins held sway.

The walls to Captain Tompkins’s office were made of glass, which, despite the closed door, made everything that went on in there pretty much an open book, hence the moniker the Fishbowl.

In this instance, Detectives Watkins and Powell were sitting like errant schoolboys in the principal’s office and being given a dressing-down. After asking a passerby for directions to Watty’s cubicle, I scurried off there and hid out. Word of Captain Tompkins’s incredibly foul temper had filtered throughout the building, even as far as Patrol. If he was reading someone the riot act, I didn’t want to be within range of the captain’s notoriously sharp-tongued verbal onslaughts.

When Watty appeared at the door of his cubicle a few minutes later, he took one look at me and shook his head. It was the kind of welcome look people dish out when a new arrival has not only stepped in fresh dog crap but also walked it into the house and onto the carpet.

“Great,” he grumbled. “Just what I need this morning—a baby detective, fresh from Patrol, for me to babysit.”

I didn’t quite get it. Yes, I had taken the exam for detective, and I’d done all right on it, too—my score had been in the midnineties. That counted as a respectable score, even if it wasn’t one that made you full of yourself. I had also been told there were currently no openings in Homicide, as in not a single one.

“I don’t know who you know or what kind of strings you pulled to make this happen,” Watty continued. “And having you dropped like a fifth wheel into an already ongoing homicide case doesn’t do anybody any favors. As of right now, you’re working days. Be here by eight on the dot. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll go home when Detective Powell and I tell you you’re done for the day,” he continued. “We’ll give you a partner to work with when Larry and I say you’re ready to have a partner. In the meantime, you’ll be doing whatever grunt work we hand you. You will do it cheerfully, with zero complaints, starting by getting me coffee from downstairs—cream and three sugars. And by the time I see you again, I want you to ditch the damned uniform. Understood?”

I replied with another “Yes, sir.”

I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t pulled any strings—that I had no idea how this had happened, but I didn’t say any of that aloud. Instead, I went straight to the locker room and changed out of the uniform and into the jeans and grubby shirt I had worn in the car for my commute to and from Lake Tapps. I took a look at myself in the mirror and knew that outfit wasn’t going to pass muster.

Karen and I had established a charge account at a Seattle department store called the Bon Marché. We generally used that account to the limit at Christmastime. I hoped there was enough room back on our line of credit for me to buy a new shirt, a tie, and a pair of slacks. The guys in Homicide all dressed that way, and I figured I should, too, if I was going to fit in.

I raced out through the lobby, caught the first northbound bus on Third Avenue, and made for the Bon at Third and Pine. Since the trip was all inside the Metro’s newly established Magic Carpet zone, I didn’t have to pay a fare. Once inside the store, I dashed into the men’s department, grabbed up what I needed, changed into it in the dressing room, paid the bill, and then went racing for the next free southbound bus.

By the time I returned with Watty’s coffee, I was a new man, properly attired in slacks, shirt, tie, and sports jacket, and in my wallet was a receipt for an expenditure that was going to send Karen into a snit the moment the monthly bill arrived in the mail. The fact that I now had a promotion that came with a minuscule pay raise wasn’t going to change her mind about my reckless spending spree.

Watty looked me over as he took his coffee, then nodded in grudging approval. “Took you long enough,” he said. “Now how about getting to work?”

“Sure thing. What do you need me to do?”

“Go to the motor pool and check out a car. You drive. I’ll give you a lesson in doing homicide interviews.”

Our first stop was at Seattle Rendering, located in the Columbia City neighborhood. The plant was a sprawling redbrick warehouse in a collection of similar redbrick warehouses. On a wooden loading dock I spotted a dozen yellow fifty-gallon drums that were dead ringers for the one Donnie and Frankie Dodd had found on Magnolia Bluff.

Watty and I made our way up the stairs leading to the loading dock and then let ourselves inside. The smell hit me at once—the odor of stale grease, only this time without the underlying hint of a dead body. A bullnecked man with the name STEVE embroidered on the pocket of his blue coveralls cut us off before we made it three steps inside. He was a huge, rawboned guy with hands as big as platters. He looked as though he could have taken on both Watty and me at the same time without so much as breaking a sweat. His beaky nose had apparently been broken more than once, and he was missing several front teeth. Looking at the guy, I wondered how an opponent had ever managed to get close enough to land even one of those blows.

“You got an appointment?” Steve asked, barring our way.

Watty held up his badge. “We’re looking for the owner,” he said.

“Name’s Harlan Bates. He’s back in the office,” the guy said. “Follow me and I’ll take you there. He don’t like strangers wandering around out here unaccompanied.”

Harlan’s office was at the far back of the building, closed off from the rest of the warehouse by an unpainted plywood partition. Entry to the office was through a flimsy door with a single windowpane in it. As soon as our guide opened the door, a cloud of cigarette smoke flooded out into the warehouse. I hadn’t had a cigarette since before my hurried trip to the Bon, and I breathed in the welcome taste of secondhand smoke with no small amount of gratitude.

Harlan Bates appeared to be shorter and wider than Steve, but he shared the same general physique and facial features. I guessed the two men were either brothers or cousins.

Harlan sat at a scarred wooden desk under a flickering fluorescent bulb, poring over a handwritten ledger that was open before him. The desk was as grubby as the rest of the office. An immense overflowing ashtray sat stationed at the man’s elbow, while a burning cigarette was clamped between his lips.

Harlan gave Watty and me a hard-eyed once-over. “Who’s this, Stevie?” Harlan demanded, speaking through clenched teeth and without bothering to let go of his cigarette. “Salesmen of some kind? You know I don’t talk to salesmen before noon.”

“We’re not salesmen,” Watty interjected, holding up his badge. “We’d like to talk to you about barrel number 1432.”

There were two torn and scuzzy metal-and-vinyl chairs positioned in front of Harlan’s battered desk. Without waiting to be invited, Watty took a seat on one of them, and I followed suit with the other.

In response, Bates lowered the remains of his unfiltered cigarette from his mouth. Leaving a trail of ashes across both the ledger and the desk, he returned the smoldering butt to the ashtray and ground it out, spilling more ashes as he did so.

“What do you want to know about it?” he asked.

“Where was it last?”

Shaking his head in obvious irritation, Bates slammed shut the open ledger. Then, spinning around on his decrepit wooden chair, he returned the first book to a dusty shelf behind him and pulled out another. The second one looked very much like the first. He dropped it onto the desk and opened it.

Dampening his tobacco-stained fingers with spit, he thumbed through worn, yellowing pages that were covered with neatly handwritten columns. Finally settling on a single page, he pulled on a pair of reading glasses and peered at the page with studied concentration.

“Dragon’s Head Restaurant, in the International District,” Bates said. “We dropped off drum number 1432 on Tuesday two weeks ago. Chin Lee, the owner, called here yesterday, screaming and cussing me out in Chinese because his drum had gone missing. He thought I was trying to cheat him or something. I had to send my team by to drop off a replacement late last night. Who the hell would steal a drum full of stale grease? I mean, what’s the point?”

“And the owner’s name is Mr. Lee?” Watty asked.

Harlan Bates nodded.

“Phone number?”

“You speak Chinese?”

Watty shook his head.

“Having a phone number won’t do you any good. You need to go by and talk to him in person. Old man Lee doesn’t speak English real well. He’ll need his wife or one of his kids to translate for him.”

It was Watty’s turn to nod.

“Do yourself a favor,” Bates continued. “Try the Mandarin duck while you’re at it. Old man Lee may not speak much English, but when it comes to cooking, the guy’s a genius.”

“So you have people who drop off and collect the drums?” Watty asked. “How long before you get them back?”

“Depends on how much grease they use and how much they reuse, if you know what I mean. Places like the Dragon’s Head are on a two-week cycle. Saving grease is what my mother used to do during the war. She’d take her can of it in to the butcher and get rationing coupons in return. I was little then, but it made a big impression on me. I guess I never got over it, and here we are.”

Harlan Bates was maybe ten years older than me. By the time I was old enough to remember anything, rationing coupons from World War II were a part of the distant, unknowable past.

“They fill up the drum, then what?” Watty asked.

“You already met Stevie. He’s strong as an ox. He goes out on the route with another guy, my driver. The two of them make sure the drums are sealed shut, then they tip them over, roll them into our truck, and bring them back here for processing while leaving empty ones in place.”

“So where was Stevie on Friday night of last week?” Watty asked.

Harlan pulled a cigarette out of the almost empty pack in his pocket. If he’d offered me one, I would have taken it, but he didn’t.

“Look,” he said, taking the first draw. “You asked me about drum number 1432. I told you about drum number 1432. Now how about if you tell me what this is really all about?”

“Your drum was found at the base of Magnolia Bluff on Sunday evening,” Watty explained. “There was a dead girl mixed in with what was left of the grease. According to the M.E., she had been dead for about two days before she was found. The victim was last seen on Friday night when she left her dormitory at the University of Washington to go on a blind date.”

“So you’re thinking Steve’s the blind date?” Harlan Bates said with a harsh laugh. “Good luck with that.” He wasn’t the least bit upset about the question. In fact, a slow grin was spreading over his jowly face.

“Where was he?” Watty asked again.

“You ever hear the phrase ‘queer as a three-dollar bill’?” Harlan asked.

Watty nodded.

“Well, that’s Stevie for you. Doesn’t look like a pretty boy by any means. And people who think they can push him around for it generally don’t try that stunt a second time. But I’ll tell you for sure, my cousin Stevie wouldn’t be caught dead with a woman, and most especially not a coed from the University of Washington. He barely finished eighth grade.”

“I still need to know where he was on Friday.”

“Probably at home with my aunt Nelda and her cats, same as he is every night. Her place is over by the airport. He looks after her, but he wouldn’t be driving around late at night because he doesn’t have a license. Can’t read well enough to pass the test. So if you’re thinking he’d be out somewhere hanging out with a cute coed type, you’ve got another think coming.”

“What about the driver?”

“His name’s Manny Ortega, but I’m telling you, as far as Manny is concerned, it’s the same thing.”

“What do you mean the same thing?” Watty asked.

“Manny would be at home on Friday night and Saturday night, too, with Aunt Nelda and Stevie. She lives downstairs, they live upstairs.”

“Wait, Stevie and Manny are a couple?” Watty asked. Something about his professional Homicide demeanor had slipped. He looked more than a little shocked.

Harlan Bates shrugged. “Whatever turns them on, I suppose. Before those two guys got into AA, they used to have some hellacious fights. Now they’re both sober. Except for the occasional lovers’ spat, I couldn’t ask for a better team.”

Watty said nothing. He seemed to be concentrating on closing his notebook and putting away his pen. If there was an interview lesson for me in all this, I doubt it was the one he had intended.

“Anything else, gentlemen?” Harlan Bates asked.

“No,” Watty said quietly. “I believe we have everything we need at the moment.”

We went outside and got back into the car. Watty hadn’t told me where we were going next. I fired up the engine and a filtered Winston and sat there smoking with the car idling while Watty got on the radio. A few minutes later, the clerk in Records read off an address on Twenty-first Avenue South.

“That’s where we’re going?” I asked.

“Yup,” Watty said. “We’re going to go ask Harlan’s aunt Nelda a few questions before we interview Manny and Stevie.”

Tossing my half-smoked cigarette out the window, I turned and reached into the backseat for the ragged Thomas Guide, a dog-eared paperback collection of street maps for Seattle and King County that was standard equipment in every vehicle operated by Seattle PD back before the advent of GPS technology.

While we made our way south and west, Watty shook his head in dismay. “Just looking at that guy,” he said, “I never would have guessed.”

“Me, either,” I agreed. “Never in a million years.”

CHAPTER 5

The last thing I remembered, I had been lying awake, listening to the whispered murmurs of the mattress and the continuous motion of the passive-movement exercise machine and thinking about that long-ago time. I had no idea I had drifted off to sleep until good old Nurse Keith came hustling in to disturb my slumber yet again. It was still dark outside, but I saw the occasional flash of lightning in the window, accompanied by the low rumble of thunder.

“It’s been pouring for over an hour now,” he said. “I guess summer’s over.”

It was mind boggling to be transported across forty years in what seemed like the blink of an eye. In 1973 the very idea of a pair of guys living openly as a couple was enough to give even a seasoned homicide cop like Watty a bit of a pause. Back in those homophobic good old days, as far as most of us were concerned, the word “gay” had meant nothing more nor less daring than “happy.”

I also recalled that way back then most nurses had been women. They wore white uniforms and funny white caps with a black bar across the top. Keith’s colorful scrubs were a long way from that. First he took my vitals, and then he dealt with the surgical drains on both my incisions. I think he called them “pomegranates,” or some other kind of blood red fruit, but that could just be my random access memory being screwed up due to the drugs. I did notice that Keith was wearing what looked like a wedding band, which might or might not mean what it used to mean. However, since he was clearly good at his job, I didn’t ask about his personal life. It was none of my business.

I dozed again after Nurse Keith left, and it was probably the continuing rumble of thunder that took me back to that other time and place. When the next guy to come into the room was wearing a set of fatigues, I wasn’t even surprised. The fatigues weren’t the new desert-style BDUs that showed up sometime in the early eighties, but the old familiar olive green ones that we used back in ’Nam.

My new unexpected visitor walked over to the bedside table and pulled a deck of playing cards out of his pocket. He peeled off four cards and laid them out in front of me, facedown on the table next to my pitcher of water. I knew without looking that if I reached out and turned them over, they would all be aces of spades. I looked up and saw exactly what I expected: a crooked, chip-toothed grin; a handsome face; penetrating blue eyes; short blond hair. It may have been close to fifty years since I’d seen Second Lieutenant Lennie Davis last, but you never forget the face of the first guy who saved your life.

“Hey, asshole,” he said, grinning. “You got old.”

And you didn’t. That’s what I wanted to say, but of course I didn’t. When you’re in the presence of ghosts, even drug-induced ghosts, I don’t suppose it’s polite to point out that they’re dead and you’re not.

He turned and glanced around the room. “What’s this?” he asked. “And what’s wrong with you?”

“They fixed my knees. Replaced them.”

He gave me a quizzical arched-eyebrow look that would have passed muster with Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.

“With what?”

“Titanium.”

“No shit! They can do that now?” He shook his head in pure wonder.

The truth is, these days medical science can do a lot of things that they couldn’t back then. A lot of military folks, our wounded warriors, survive injuries that were fatal back in Vietnam. They not only survive, they return to serve again. Not Lieutenant Davis. Not Lennie D.

He walked away from my bed and stood looking out the window where, framed by neighboring buildings, the Space Needle was barely visible in the rain-blurred distance.

“I wanted to come to Seattle for the World’s Fair,” he said. “By then I was already at West Point. Never made it.”

Looking at him standing there, big as life, I felt a lump forming in my throat. He had been a smart guy. The first time I saw Lieutenant Davis, he was sitting outside his tent reading a grubby copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I was new to C Company, and I wasn’t sure that having a bookworm for a platoon leader was necessarily a good idea. It was mid-July and hot as hell in the Pleiku highlands, hot and dusty.

“At ease, soldier,” he told me, once I introduced myself. About that time, he caught me looking questioningly at the book. “Ever read it?”

Reading books was always a chore for me. I only read for book reports, never for fun. The idea of spending an afternoon with a tome that looked as though it weighed in at well over a thousand pages wasn’t my idea of a good time. I shook my head.

“The bad guys lose eventually,” he said, “but it’s a hell of a fight to take them down. When we’re not out chasing Charlie, reading’s about the only thing there is to do here. I’ll be done with it this afternoon. I’ll be glad to let you give it a try.”

From the way he was holding the book, it looked as though he was only two-thirds of the way through. I may have been the new guy in town, but I knew better than to piss off the second lieutenant.

“Sure thing,” I said. “I’d like that.”

It’s amazing to realize that life and death turn on such small exchanges.

“Thank you,” I muttered to my hospital visitor. It was difficult to speak because of the lump in my throat.

“For what?”

“For saving my life.”

“That was my job,” he said. “You were one of my guys. So what have you done with yourself?”

“I wanted to help people,” I answered. “I’ve been a cop, first at Seattle PD and later for the attorney general’s office.”

“Married?”

I nodded. I didn’t say, “Third time’s the charm,” but that’s what I meant.

“I never got to tell her good-bye,” he said quietly.

He didn’t say who. I knew Lieutenant Davis had been engaged at the time of his death, but that was all I knew. Once he was gone, I wasn’t close enough to know all the gory details, and the guys who were close enough—the ones who were still alive—were all too broken up about losing him to talk about it. As far as they were concerned, Lennie D. was the best and the brightest. And if it’s true that the good die young, what am I doing still hanging around?

“I knew you had a girl back home,” I said.

It was his turn to nod. “Bonnie and I were engaged. I couldn’t talk her into marrying me before I shipped out. We were going to get married in Japan on my R and R.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Me, too,” he said. “I just wish she knew how much.”

Just then Mel appeared in the doorway. The moment she did, Lieutenant Davis disappeared. The playing cards on my hospital tray vanished. I hadn’t thought I was asleep, but I must have been.

“Talking in your sleep?” Mel asked, entering the room like a fast-moving storm. “How are you feeling? Did you sleep well? Breakfast is on its way. The lady with the trays is two doors down the hall.”

Just that fast, she swept away my nighttime’s worth of strange visitations.

“I heard your voice as I was coming down the hall,” she said, kissing me lightly on the forehead. “I thought the nurse might be in here with you.”

“Nope,” I said as brightly as I could manage. “Nobody here but us chickens.” I wasn’t about to tell her I had been busy having a heart-to-heart conversation with a fifty-year-old Ghost of Christmas Past.

“I’m on my way to work,” she continued. “Thought I’d stop by and check in with you before I hit 520.”

The Seattle area branch of the attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team is located in the Eastgate area of Bellevue, across Lake Washington from our downtown Seattle condo. We used to cross Lake Washington on I-90, a bit south of the 520 bridge. Now, since the state has seen fit to start charging outrageously expensive tolls on 520—the Money-Sucking Bridge, as Mel calls it—traffic on it has dropped remarkably, while traffic on I-90 has gotten terrible. Since we can afford the tolls, we usually opt for less traffic.

“From here I’ll take the scenic route,” she said. “I’ll go through the arboretum.”

Nurse Keith came in just then. “Vitals before you get breakfast,” he said, slapping the blood pressure cuff around my arm. While he was inflating it, I introduced him to Mel.

Melissa Soames is very easy on the eyes under the worst of circumstances. Dressed as she was for work, she looked downright spectacular, and I did notice that her looks weren’t lost on Keith, either. Clearly my previous musings about his possible sexual preferences were totally off the mark.

“What’s on the agenda for today?” Mel asked.

She was being a little too cheerful. That meant she was still worried about me, even though she wouldn’t come right out and say so.

“Breakfast and then a round of physical therapy,” Keith answered. “Jonas here may think he’s on vacation, but he’s wrong about that. The PT team will see to it that he doesn’t just lie around getting his beauty sleep. We’ll have him up and out of bed in no time.”

“I told Harry I’d be in today,” Mel said. “I already know he wants me up in Bellingham, but I could always call him and let him know I need to take another day off.”

Harry was Harry Ignatius Ball, Squad B’s hopelessly politically incorrect leader. We generally refer to him in public by his preferred moniker, Harry I. Ball, because it’s usually good for a laugh, one Harry enjoys more than anyone else. The fact that Mel avoided using that name with Nurse Keith told me she wasn’t in a lighthearted mood. I also knew that her asking for the day off wasn’t going to work.

The previous week there had been a supposedly “peaceful” rally just outside the Western Washington University campus in Bellingham. Peaceful is a relative term, and this one had devolved into a window-smashing flash mob in which not just one but three WWU students ended up being Tasered by members of the local police department. Naturally, the errant students were claiming police brutality, even though so far the dash cams on the cops’ patrol cars seemed to back up the officers’ claims that they had considered themselves to be in grave danger at the time.

I’ll never understand why kids think it’s okay to come to “peaceful demonstrations” armed with baseball bats, but maybe that’s just me.

As soon as the police-brutality claim was raised, Bellingham’s chief of police, Veronica Hamlin, was on the phone to the attorney general’s office down in Olympia, pleading for backup and for an unbiased investigation. At that point, the police-brutality investigation could have landed with the Washington State Patrol, but Attorney General Ross Connors, as the ultimate boss of both that agency and ours, was the one who made the call to use Special Homicide.

I doubt Chief Hamlin was thrilled when she learned that Squad B, under Harry’s leadership, would be the ones handling the investigation into her department and being responsible for pulling her bacon out of the fire—or not. After all, years earlier in her role as assistant chief, Ms. Hamlin had been the prime mover behind Harry’s being given his walking papers from that very same department.

Sometimes what goes around really does come around. Of course, Harry wouldn’t ever leave some poor street cop hanging out to dry just to get even. He insisted that the investigation be scrupulously unbiased, which is why, as soon as it came up on Friday, Harry had put Mel in charge. She had spent Saturday and Sunday in Bellingham conducting interviews, and had returned to Seattle late Sunday evening so she could be on tap Monday morning for my surgery.

“You know you can’t do that,” I said. “Harry needs you.”

“Veronica Hamlin is a witch,” Mel said. “She’d sell those two poor cops down the river in a minute if she didn’t think that ultimately it would make her look bad.”

“Which is why you need to go to work instead of hanging around here looking after me.”

“What’s the matter?” Keith asked, grinning at her. “Don’t you trust us?”

A lady waltzed into the room carrying my breakfast tray. The food looked better than it tasted. The omelet was rubbery, the orange juice was anything but fresh squeezed, the toast was unbuttered and cold, and the coffee was only remotely related to the high-test stuff we make at home, but I was hungry enough that I ate it all. And I was glad when Mel gave me a breezy good-bye peck on the cheek and then took off rather than sitting there watching me eat.

True to Keith’s word, the PT ladies appeared the moment breakfast was over. Once again, they pried me out of bed. Then they put a second hospital gown on backward to cover my backside while we hit the corridor and walked. I wasn’t as worried this time, not as much as I had been the day before. I noticed that there were lovely pieces of art lining the wall—something that had escaped my notice the day before. I also noticed that this time the nurses’ station didn’t seem nearly as far away as it had the first time we went there. I climbed back into bed, proud of myself and thinking that was it for the day.

“Oh no,” the therapist told me with a laugh. “Next up is occupational therapy. They’ll be here in an hour or so. Those are the people who will teach you to go up and down stairs and get in and out of beds and cars.”

Again, I wanted to say, “Already?” I guess it would have been more of a whine than a question, but my ringing cell phone spared me from embarrassing myself.

“How’s it hanging?” Harry asked.

I already warned you that the man doesn’t have a politically correct bone in his body.

“Better than I expected,” I said.

“Thanks for insisting that Mel come in,” he said. “I need her bird-dogging the situation in Bellingham. Can’t afford to have any screwups on that one. With you out of play, she’s the best man for the job. Do you need anything?”

“No,” I told him. “I’m fine.”

By then call waiting was letting me know I had yet another caller.

“Gotta go, Harry. My son’s on the line.”

“Hey, Dad,” Scott said. “How’s it going?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “The surgery went well. They’ve had me up walking twice so far, and the pain’s not bad at all.”

The lack of pain probably had more to do with the meds they were plugging into my body than it did with the success of the procedure, but I kept quiet about that. Most of the time when people ask how you’re doing, they’re looking for your basic generic answer. If someone asks you, “How was your root canal?” they most likely don’t want chapter and verse. That was the case here, too. Scott wanted to know how I was. He didn’t need to know the gory details about the bloody drain bags the medical folk laughingly referred to as “grenades” or about the weirdly vivid dreams that kept taking me down memory lane. Now that I thought about it, I noticed I hadn’t mentioned the dreams to Mel, either. Call it a sin of omission.

There were several more telephone calls from well-wishers after Scott’s. They came in one after another. By then the meds I had taken earlier were kicking in and I was ready to stop talking. How many times can you say “I’m fine” without sounding curmudgeonly? When the occupational therapist finally showed up with her walker, I was more than ready to leave the phone in my room and do another forced march down the hall. Once that was over, I was happy to go back to bed, where I did myself the favor of first taking myself out of circulation by pulling the plug on my bedside phone and then switching off my cell.

I slept for a while before they woke me up for lunch. At that point I was beginning to feel bored, so I switched on the TV set. Nothing was on. My iPad was under lock and key in the closet, so I asked the next nurse who came to check my vitals to get it out for me.

People who know me well understand that I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age, first protesting the existence of cell phones and then trying to cling to a typewriter when Seattle PD was switching over to computers. So the idea that I would fall in love with my iPad was not exactly a foregone conclusion, but when Kelly and Scott teamed up to give me one for Father’s Day this year, I was hooked. I’ve even taken to doing my crossword puzzles on it.

In this instance I wasn’t looking for crossword clues. I wanted to know about whatever happened to Hannah and Eugene Wellington in the years since their daughter’s lifeless body had been found in a barrel of stale grease at the bottom of Magnolia Bluff. I had met them at Monica’s funeral, and going to her memorial service in the picturesque town of Leavenworth was one of my first official detective duties when I moved up to the fifth floor.

As soon as I googled the words “Eugene Wellington, Leavenworth, Washington,” the first link was to the man’s obituary:

Eugene Harold Wellington, a lifelong Leavenworth resident, succumbed after a brief illness. For many years he and his wife operated the Apple Inn outside Leavenworth before it was lost to a forest fire. Services are pending with Wiseman Funeral Chapel. Mr. Wellington is survived by his wife of fifty-five years, Hannah; his son, James; and three grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his beloved daughter, Monica.

What rocked me about that was how little there was of it—a whole life summed up in less than a hundred words. I remembered Eugene as a tall, powerfully built man whose rugged six feet six frame seemed crushed by the terrible weight of losing his daughter. At the funeral, just as Watty had told me about the trip to the morgue, Eugene was the one who sobbed inconsolably all through the service, while his tiny wife had sat stoically beside him, like a dry-eyed sparrow poised to take wing.

Letting the iPad drop onto my chest, I lay there recalling every detail of that first grueling week, the beginning of my career in Homicide.

CHAPTER 6

Initially, Karen had been thrilled when I gave her the news of my unexpected promotion to the rank of detective. Her pleasure quickly dimmed when she learned how much money I had spent in my unauthorized shopping spree at the Bon. And she was even less pleased when she found out that, as a detective, I’d still be pulling hours that weren’t remotely related to bankers’ hours. I’m not sure why, but Karen had somehow assumed that homicides happen and are investigated on a nine-to-five basis, Mondays through Fridays only. Not so.

“We’ve got a conference on serial killers down in Olympia this weekend,” Detective Powell had told me when he stopped by to see me late Wednesday afternoon. “It’s all hands on deck because they’re bringing in a guy from the FBI to teach the class. We’ve all signed up and paid to attend, so you’re elected to do funeral duty for Monica Wellington.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you show up at the funeral and at any reception following the service. It means you’re polite to the family members. You let them know we’re sorry for their loss and we’re working the case, but while you’re there, you keep an eye out for anything that seems off or anyone who seems off, too. You do not let on that you’re a greenhorn. You wear a suit and tie. Got it?”

“Got it,” I said, wondering all the while how long it would take for my tiny pay raise to make up for the upgrade to suits and ties required by my new status as a detective.

There’s a uniform allowance for cops on the street. There’s no such thing when you’re working in plainclothes out of the fifth floor. At that stage in my life, I didn’t actually own a suit, unless you counted the baby blue tux I wore when Karen and I got married. Even if it still fit, the tux wasn’t going to cut it for a funeral. But I also knew that if I was going to get a suit and have it altered in time to wear it to a funeral on Saturday, it had to be purchased that very day—before I went home and gave Karen the news. So that’s what I did. Fortunately, it turned out there was still enough room left in our Bon charge account to make that work.

By the time I broke the news to Karen that I would be spending all of Saturday driving to and from Leavenworth to attend a funeral followed by a reception, my wife was barely speaking to me. She stuck Scott in my lap, told me she was going to the store, and why didn’t I figure out what we were having for dinner for a change. Cooking has never been my strong suit. I rose to the occasion by opening a can of SpaghettiOs, to which I added some frozen hamburger that I had thawed out and fried. When she came back from the store, Karen ate my slightly burnt offering without comment. I could tell she was neither pleased nor amused, although it was the best I could do with Scott screaming bloody murder the whole time I was trying to cook.

Believe me, I already suspected Karen’s job of stay-at-home mom wasn’t easy, but that evening’s meal made it blazingly clear to all concerned.

On Thursday I left the domestic warfare at home and showed up on time and properly dressed, Homicide style, on the fifth floor. Watty directed me to a cubicle near his that gave evidence of having been recently vacated by someone else—clearly someone who smoked, as there was a dusting of cigarette ash everywhere and a faint whiff of smoke still lingering in the air.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Watty told me. “Go down to the motor pool and check out a car. I’ll meet you out front on Third.”

Welcome to the world of being the last guy in. I had already been warned that I was automatically on tap to do the grunt work, and that was fine with me. I knew that was what it would take to learn the ropes. When I showed up in the garage, I more than half expected Phil Molloy, who ran the motor pool, to give me the business about it.

“So you’re out of squad cars and into unmarked,” he observed. “Who are you working with?”

“They haven’t assigned me a partner yet. I’m working a case with Detectives Watkins and Powell.”

“You’re lucky,” Molloy said. “They’re both good people.”

I sat in the passenger load zone on Third Avenue for the better part of fifteen minutes before Watty finally put in an appearance.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Saints Peter and Paul Catholic School on Magnolia to have a talk with Donnie and Frankie Dodd,” Watty replied. “You’re the one who brought up the path question yesterday, so it’s only fair that you’re there when we talk to them. Do you know where Saints Peter and Paul is?”

I shook my head.

“It’s on the far side of Magnolia Village,” Watty told me. “Just head over the Magnolia Bridge and turn right.”

Magnolia Village was the name of the neighborhood’s central shopping district.

“We’re going to talk to them at their school?” I asked, heading the patrol car in that direction. “Without their mother being there?”

Watty favored me with an owlish look. “Mac and I already tried talking to them with their mother in the room,” he replied. “We didn’t get anywhere that way, so now we’re going to try talking to them alone.”

It seemed like a good time to change the subject.

“How much does tuition to a private school cost?” I asked.

“Funny you should ask,” Watty replied. “I wondered that myself, and I already checked. It’s seven and a half thousand dollars a year per kid.”

I whistled. “Fifteen thousand a year? That’s a lot of money. How does a single mom afford something like that?”

“Good question,” Watty said.

I was still mulling it over when we arrived at the school and parked in a designated visitor parking slot. A sign on the door directed all visitors to report to the office, which we did. Moments later we were in the presence of Sister Mary Katherine, a tall bony woman in a severe black skirt and starched white blouse with a black-and-white veil pinned to short, graying brown hair. She examined Watty’s ID badge thoroughly through gold-framed glasses before handing it back to him.

“What can I do for you gentlemen?” she asked.

“Detective Beaumont and I are hoping to have a word with two of your students, Donnie and Frankie Dodd.”

Sister Mary Katherine glared briefly at me. It was the first time I had heard the word “Detective” attached to my name, but if she had asked to see my badge, I would have been stumped. The only ID I had still referred to me as “Officer Beaumont.”

I was relieved when she turned back to Watty.

“What about?”

“The boys were instrumental in helping us find a body over the weekend,” Watty said. “I spoke to them on Sunday, but a few more questions have come up.”

Sister Mary Katherine studied us for a moment longer. “On one condition,” she said.

“What’s that?” Watty wanted to know.

“That I stay in the room while you speak to them. These are my students, after all,” she added. “I won’t have them pushed around.”

“Fine,” Watty agreed.

With that, Sister Mary Katherine reached for the intercom button on her desk. “Miss Simmons,” she said. “Please ask Donnie and Frankie Dodd to come to the office.”

I noticed she didn’t have to specify in which classrooms the boys might be found. I had the sense that this wasn’t the first time the two red-haired brothers had been summoned to the office—and that it wouldn’t be the last. I expected them to show up together, but they didn’t. When the first one arrived, he was already protesting his innocence.

“Whatever it is,” he declared, “I didn’t do it and neither did Frankie.”

“It’s all right, Donnie,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “You’re not in trouble. These two detectives would like to speak to you and your brother for a few minutes.”

I was glad the good sister could tell them apart. In a pinch, I wouldn’t have been able to.

A minute or so later Frankie slouched into the room. Without a word, he settled onto a chair next to his brother to await whatever was coming. Yes, they had definitely been summoned to the principal’s office on more than one occasion.

“Do you remember me from the other day?” Watty asked.

Both boys nodded. Neither of them met Watty’s questioning stare.

“What about Detective Beaumont here?” Watty asked.

They both glanced in my direction and then delivered tiny simultaneous nods.

Watty launched straight into the heart of the matter. “I’ve been going over Detective Beaumont’s report. I believe you mentioned you’re not supposed to go down onto the pier or onto the railroad tracks. Is that correct?”

Again both boys nodded in unison.

“But you do go there.”

“Sometimes,” Donnie said.

On Sunday both boys had been equally communicative, but here—perhaps because they were operating under Sister Mary Katherine’s steely-eyed stare—Donnie seemed to have assumed the role of official spokesman.

“And do you always go up and down the same way?” Watty asked.

“I guess,” Donnie said.

“So there’s, like, a regular path you follow?”

Donnie nodded, more emphatically this time.

“And you were on the path when you found the barrel?”

This time the two boys exchanged glances before Donnie answered. “I think so,” he hedged.

“The funny thing is,” Watty said, leaning back in his chair, “I spent all day Monday out at the crime scene. There’s a path, all right, but it’s nowhere near where you found the barrel.”

“But we saw it from the path,” Frankie put in. “It was right there in plain sight until we pushed it on down the hill.”

Watty ignored the interruption and stayed focused on Donnie. “Is that true?” he asked. “Or did you go looking for it because you already knew it was there?”

“We found it when we were coming back from the movie,” Donnie said. “That’s all. We found it, and then we opened it, and then we called you.”

“How did you open it again?”

“We used a stick to pry off the lid,” Donnie declared.

“And where did you find the stick?” Watty asked. “Was it just lying there on the hillside?”

“Yes,” Donnie answered. “We found the stick right there.”

I could see where Watty was going with this. The barrel had been found in a blackberry bramble. The stick the boys claimed they had used to open the barrel had looked to me like a branch from an alder tree, none of which were anywhere in evidence.

“That’s not what the marks on the barrel say,” Watty told them. “They say you’re lying about that.”

He just dropped that one into the conversation and let it sit there. The two boys exchanged glances, squirmed uneasily, and said nothing.

“If you know more than you’re saying,” Sister Mary Katherine said, inserting herself into the interview, “then you need to tell the detectives what it is.”

In other words, it was okay to push Sister Mary Katherine’s students around if she was the one doing the pushing.

“We used a crowbar,” Donnie admitted finally, after a long, uncomfortable pause. “We only said we used the stick.”

“Where is the crowbar now?” Watty asked.

“We dropped it in the water down by the pier when we went to use the phone.”

“And where did the crowbar come from in the first place?”

“Our mom’s garage.”

“And how did it get from the garage to the barrel?”

“We took it down the hill on Sunday morning, while Mom was still asleep.”

“Which means you already knew the barrel was there,” Watty concluded.

This time both Donnie and Frankie nodded.

“How?”

“We saw the guy who dumped it,” Frankie said, speaking for the first time. “On Saturday night, we were outside.” He paused and gave Sister Mary Katherine a wary look.

“Go on,” she ordered.

“We had stolen some of Mom’s cigarettes,” he said. “The house next door is empty. We were hiding in the backyard, smoking, when a guy drove into the yard in a pickup with a camper shell on top of it. He drove as far as the end of the driveway. He got out of the truck and pushed something out of the back. When he rolled it out onto the ground, we could see it was a barrel.”

“What kind of pickup?” Watty asked.

“I don’t know,” Frankie said.

“It was a Ford,” Donnie put in.

“Color?”

“It was sort of dark, but we couldn’t tell much about it because it was late at night.”

“How late?”

Donnie shrugged. “After midnight. That’s why you can’t tell our mom. She’d kill us if she knew we were sneaking out of the house when she thought we were in bed.”

“And that’s why you made up the story of finding the barrel on Sunday?”

Donnie nodded.

Watty settled in closer, giving the two boys a hard look. “This pickup truck you saw. Had you ever seen it around before?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Did you see the license plate?”

“No.”

I’ve heard that twins often develop forms of communication that can pass between them in utter silence. I was suddenly under the impression that that was exactly what was going on here. They were both lying about something, but I couldn’t figure out what. I think Watty was getting the same message. Ditto Sister Mary Katherine.

“God knows when you’re not telling the truth,” the good sister remarked.

Both boys flushed beet red. “Please don’t tell our mother,” Donnie begged. “Please. We’ll be in big trouble.”

“So when did you take the crowbar from the garage?” Watty asked.

I closed my eyes and envisioned the house they lived in—a small 1940s vintage brick house with a detached single-car garage at the end of a narrow driveway. The house next door was an exact copy. When they were built, they were probably considered affordable housing for GIs returning from World War II.

“Like I said. We did it in the morning, before she woke up.” Donnie was back to doing the talking for both of them. “We knew there wouldn’t be time to open the barrel before we went to church. That’s why we decided to do it later. We told Mom we wanted to see Charlotte’s Web, even though we didn’t. We got in line at the Cinerama, but as soon as she drove away, we caught a bus back to the Magnolia Bridge. That way we knew we’d have plenty of time to open the barrel before we were supposed to get home. The next showing didn’t start until four thirty.”

“What did you think you’d find when you opened that barrel?” Watty asked.

“Treasure,” Donnie said.

“Money.” That was from Frankie.

They were two similar answers, but not quite the same. Not identical, as it were, and it made me wonder why. Treasure is something you keep; money is something you spend. What neither of them had anticipated finding in the barrel was what was actually there—the horrifying naked body of a murdered young woman.

“You said this all happened after midnight? Isn’t that kind of late for you to be out of the house and unsupervised?”

“It was the weekend,” Donnie said. “We didn’t have to get up for school.”

“Where was your mom?”

Donnie glanced in Sister Mary Katherine’s direction. “She was busy,” he said.

Remembering what Mrs. Fisk had told me, I could well imagine that the boys’ mother had been busy with something other than her sons on a Saturday night.

“And how did you get out of the house without your mother knowing you were gone?”

“We go out through the window in our room,” he said.

“I was by your house the other day,” I said. “I seem to remember seeing streetlights. Are you sure it was too dark for you to see that truck? After all, if you were close enough to see the barrel get pushed over the edge of the yard, you must have been close enough to see more of the truck than you’re telling us.”

“I already said,” Donnie insisted. “It was a Ford. And it was dark. Maybe it was black, or it could have been blue. And it was real loud.”

“Is it possible it belonged to one of your mother’s friends?”

“No!” Donnie said heatedly, unconsciously balling his fists. “And don’t talk about my mother.”

Obviously my comment about his mother’s friends had come a little too close to the truth of the matter. I had no doubt that Donnie had, on occasion, resorted to blows in defense of his mother’s somewhat questionable honor. The look Sister Mary Katherine leveled at me said that this wasn’t news to her, either.

“Is that all?” she asked. Her question was aimed at Detective Watkins, but we both nodded.

“For the time being,” Watty replied.

“All right then,” she said to the boys. “You may go back to your classrooms. And, Donnie,” she added. “You’d better schedule a time to see Father Hennessey.”

“You mean, like, for confession?”

Sister Mary Katherine nodded. “What do you think?” she replied.

“Yes, sister,” he replied. Then, biting his lip, Donnie followed his brother from the room.

“They may look identical,” Sister Mary Katherine observed, watching the two boys hustle from the room. “But there are definitely some differences, especially when it comes to brains. Frankie got held back last year. He’s doing fourth grade for the second time. Donnie is in fifth.”

“And you know about their mother?” I asked.

“Detective …”

“Beaumont,” I supplied.

“Detective Beaumont, we’re in the business of hating the sin and loving the sinner. Someone is paying for the boys to attend this school in the firm hope that we’re preparing them to make better choices with their lives. For all I know, what they witnessed over the weekend may well be part of God’s plan for keeping them on the right path. They did call the incident in, didn’t they?”

“Yes.”

“So they acted responsibly, correct? If it hadn’t been for them, the body of that poor girl might never have been found. Right?”

It was my turn to nod. Sister Mary Katherine seemed to have that effect on everyone—striking people dumb and turning them into complacent nodders, Detective Watkins and myself included.

“Being raised without a father, those boys have a hard enough time holding their heads up in polite society, so I’m asking that you give them a break. Their mother has been known to overreact on occasion. As far as I can see, they’re not suspects, are they?”

“No, but they might lead us to a suspect,” Watty objected. “If they could give us a better description of the vehicle involved …”

“If!” Sister Mary Katherine said derisively. “Let me tell you something for certain. If you rile up their mother about their sneaking out of the house and smoking cigarettes, she’s liable to take after both of them with a belt, because it’s happened before. I don’t know if the mother was the one who did the beating or if someone else did, but the point is, unless you want to accept the responsibility for that—for those two boys being beaten to within an inch of their lives—I suggest you leave Donnie and Frankie out of your crime-fighting equation.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Detective Watkins said, getting up and heading for the door. “Thank you for your help.”

His immediate unconditional surrender surprised me, but I waited until we were outside before I said anything.

“What happened in there?” I asked.

“Donnie and Frankie are off-limits,” he said tersely. “Either we’ll find our killer without their help or we won’t find him.”

“But—” I began.

“I had a stepfather with a belt once,” Watty said. “Been there, done that. If those two boys end up getting into trouble with their mother or with one of her johns, it won’t be on my account, or yours, either. End of story.”

And that was the end of the story, at least as far as Donnie and Frankie Dodd were concerned. Watty and I never interviewed those kids again, and by the time I was assigned to my new partner, Milton Gurkey, the Dodd family had left town.

Just for the hell of it, I picked up my iPad now and tried googling them. Donald Dodd. Frank Dodd. Nothing came of it. Not a single link.

While I was doing my computer search, time had passed. When Nurse Jackie hustled into the room a few minutes later, I was surprised to realize that it was already late afternoon. The sun was going down outside. I looked toward the window Lieutenant Davis had peered out of, expecting to see the Space Needle rising in the distance. Except it wasn’t there. The window was, but the Space Needle wasn’t. The window faced east, not west. There was no view of the Space Needle there in real life, only in my dream.

“I’m working this floor today. Now, what’s wrong with your phone?” Nurse Jackie wanted to know, jarring me out of my window problem. “Your wife’s on the line, and she won’t take no for an answer.”

Examining the phone on the bedside table, Nurse Jackie quickly discovered it was unplugged. As soon as she rectified that situation, the phone began to ring. She handed it over, and Mel was already talking by the time I lifted the phone to my ear.

“When you didn’t answer, I was worried. I was afraid something bad had happened, that there had been some kind of complication.”

“Sorry,” I muttered guiltily. “No complication. I must have pulled the plug on the phone without realizing it. What’s up?”

“All hell has broken out,” Mel replied. “One of the protesters from last week—one who got Tasered—was found unresponsive in his apartment earlier this morning. An ambulance crew was summoned. They tried to get his heart going again, but it didn’t work. He was DOA by the time they got him to the hospital. So now it’s gone from being voluntary S.H.I.T. squad involvement to compulsory involvement. In other words, I won’t be home tonight. Do you want me to call Kelly and see if she can come up from Ashland?”

“Don’t call anyone,” I told her. “I’m fine. They had me up and walking twice today. The physical therapist says I’m doing great.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. You’ve got a job to do, now do it.”

It was easy to give her a pep talk, but I knew that there was just a tiny hint of jealousy behind my words. Because I was feeling left behind. Mel was out doing what I usually did—what I would have been doing if my knees hadn’t betrayed me and put me on the disabled list.

“I’ll call you,” she said. “Don’t unplug your phone again, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “I promise. You take care.”

Good to my word, I turned on my cell phone. I had a number of missed calls and six messages. All of the messages were from Kelly, and they all said the same thing: “Call me.”

I did. The relief in her voice as she answered pressed my guilt button in a big way. “Sorry,” I said. “I was sleeping.”

“It’s a good thing you called,” she groused. “I was about to throw the kids in the car and head north to see you.”

“You don’t need to do any such thing. I’m fine, really. They’ve already had me up and walking around. The nurse is here right now, waiting to take me on another stroll. Right?”

“If you’re up for it, I am,” Nurse Jackie said.

“Where’s Mel?” Kelly asked. “I thought she was going to be at the hospital with you.”

Having women fussing and clucking over me tends to get my back up.

“Mel is out working. Somebody has to, you know.”

“If you decide you want me to come up, I will.”

“I’m fine. I’ll be here in the hospital for at least several more days. Mel might want some help after I get home, but for now I’ve got it covered.”

“We’ve got it covered,” Nurse Jackie corrected. She was standing with her hands on her hips, tapping her toes with impatience. “Now are we doing that walk or not? If not, I have other patients to see.”

“I’ve got to go,” I told Kelly with no small amount of relief. “Duty calls.”

CHAPTER 7

After our measured stroll—there’s no such thing as racewalking when you’re using a walker—I came back to my room to a stream of visitors. Evidently Mel’s one-day moratorium had been lifted, and visitors came in droves to see me.

People from work stopped by, including Squad B’s secretary, Barbara Galvin, who arrived armed with a box of chocolates, and Harry I. Ball, who came prepared to eat them. Two of the ladies from Belltown Terrace showed up. One of them was a knee-replacement veteran and the other was a knee-replacement candidate, so their visit was really more of a recon expedition than it was a cheerleading session.

So pardon me if I’m not all cheery about having people sitting around on uncomfortable chairs, staring at me while I’m only half dressed and lying in bed, especially when the one person I would have liked to have had there was off in the wilds of Bellingham chasing bad guys.

I was glad when the last of the visitors finally got shooed out and Nurse Jackie showed up for her last set of vitals and meds.

“How are you on pain meds?” she asked as she fastened the blood pressure cuff around my arm.

“Fine,” I said.

She glowered at me. “So you’re Superman?” she demanded. “You’re telling me you don’t need any pain meds?”

“They give me weird dreams,” I admitted. “I’d like to back off on them some.”

“Let me tell you something,” she said. “You’re not the first tough guy who’s been wheeled onto this floor. If you want those fine new knees of yours to work, you need to do the rehab. If you don’t take the pain meds, you won’t sleep and you won’t do the rehab, and if you don’t do the rehab … In other words, dreams don’t kill you, but don’t waste my time by not doing the rehab. Get my drift?”

I nodded. Nurse Jackie was about five feet nothing and as round as she was tall, but she had a glare that would have set that long-ago nun, Sister Mary Katherine, back on her heels. I got the message.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Give me the damn pills.”

She gave them to me, along with my blood thinners and antibiotics and stool softeners, and stood right there watching until I had downed them all.

“Good boy,” she said with a grin and a pat on the shoulder before she turned down the lights and hustled out of the room.

I lay there in the semidarkness, still thinking about my earlier visitors and wondering where the drugs would take me that night. It was a little like standing in line at a roller coaster when you already have your ticket and you’re just waiting for the attendant to lock you into your car. You more or less know what’s coming, but you don’t know how bad it’s going to be.

It still bothered me that in my dream, Lieutenant Davis had been standing in front of a window view that didn’t exist, but since he didn’t exist either, it seemed odd to find that odd. What really surprised me was how much his appearance had triggered my memories of that time. Usually I keep them locked away in a tight little box—boxes, actually: a literal one, a cigar box inside a banker’s box, and a mental one. It was that one I scrolled through as the hospital corridor went still and silent outside my room.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.