A Perfect Grave (20 page)

Chapter Forty-Five

L
eon Dean Sperbeck.

Henry Wade’s nightmare.

Sperbeck scowled at him from his DOC photographs, which Henry had propped against the salt and pepper shakers on his kitchen table in his house near Boeing Field.

There was Sperbeck glaring at him, just as he did so long ago during the horrific standoff at the heist.

The terrified eyes of the hostage.

Later, Sperbeck eyed Henry in court as he shuffled off in chains to pay with twenty-five years of his life.

Was it enough for what he did?

Sperbeck’s image had tormented Henry the day Vern Pearce put his gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. It had invaded Henry’s sleep, enveloping him like a burial cloth for his years of descent into an alcoholic abyss. And it had mocked Henry the day Sally walked out because she couldn’t take it anymore.

Henry didn’t blame her.

He blamed Leon Sperbeck.

But was he truly dead?

Henry resumed looking over the files that Ethan Quinn had copied for him. DOC records, court records, old police reports.

Is this how it ends? With Sperbeck’s suicide robbing Henry of the chance to find the answer to the one question that had locked Henry in a prison of pain and continued to haunt him.

Was he really dead?

Like Quinn, Henry needed to be certain Sperbeck was dead.

It was critical to his own survival.

Sperbeck’s suicide note wasn’t much evidence, Henry agreed with Quinn. Until the Nisqually River gave up Sperbeck’s corpse, and an autopsy confirmed it was him, all bets were off.

Okay, so what’s it going to be?

One way or another, Henry had to come to terms with this thing. It was what his counselors had advised him for over twenty-five years. Twenty-five years. Damn. Henry admitted that a drink would feel good right now.

But it wouldn’t help.

All right.

The time for battle had come.

He went back to his files and outlined a plan to investigate. He’d treat Quinn like a client who required verification of Sperbeck’s death. Henry began by putting in several calls to sources, reminding himself that he was a detective, licensed by the state to conduct private investigations, and, if necessary, authorized to take a life.

He glanced at his new Glock 22.

He’d picked up the .40-cal pistol late yesterday after he got his letter from the state and completed all the paperwork. Having it around made him uneasy.

He hated the thing.

Hope to God I never have to use it.

Get to work.

First, Henry checked with the NPS Rangers at Mount Rainier National Park on whether they’d found Sperbeck’s body.

“Naw. Nothing’s turned up,” Pike Thornton, a law enforcement officer, told him over the phone. “We sent out Search and Rescue, dragged the river near Cougar Rock, and got nothing.”

“Any witnesses see him go in the water?”

“None that were absolutely certain. We had a retired county judge say he saw Sperbeck fishing. We found his pole, tackle, and such.”

“What about his vehicle?”

“He told the registration desk that he got a ride from Seattle. No one saw him or spoke to him. Seemed to be a man alone with his thoughts.”

Awaiting return calls, Henry went back to Sperbeck’s DOC file, which was extensive. Sperbeck had entered the system at WCC, where he was processed and sent on to Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla. He spent a lot of time making license plates there. Then he was transferred to Coyote Ridge at Connell, where he received treatment for his addictions while working on the farm.

At Coyote Ridge, Sperbeck also took part in spiritual counseling programs run by groups who visited from across the state. Afterward, he went to Clallam Bay, where he picked up a trade, cabinetmaking, before moving on to McNeil Island, but unlike many offenders, he did not work outside on the barges, tugboats, and ferries.

Even though he qualified for work release and to seek parole, he waived it all, choosing to serve his full time and work toward discharge, reducing the number of strings the system would attach to him.

“Sperbeck had very few conditions of supervision,” Herb Kent, Sperbeck’s CCO, told Henry when he finally reached him. “He stayed out of trouble inside and paid his debt in full. There was no indication he was a risk to reoffend.”

“Did he talk about the crime?”

“You mean the money?”

“I mean the money.”

“Not a word. He expressed remorse over the damage he’d inflicted.”

“Did he have any kind of support mechanism waiting for him outside—friends, relatives?”

“Not really.”

“What about his visitor list?”

“Spiritual counselors, some teachers, vocational advisors. No family or friends from his past to indicate he was going to reconnect.”

“What do you make of his suicide?”

“It happens, Henry. Especially with long-timers. Guys get out to find that the world has changed. That there’s no place for them in it. They can’t go back to prison. So what’s left for them? Sperbeck had a skill but couldn’t get a job. He called me a couple of times, all despondent. He was slipping back into drugs, circling the drain.”

Kent gave Henry two Seattle addresses that he had for Sperbeck. One was a run-down motel at the edge of Capitol Hill, the other a rooming house close to the ID, the address he was using when he vanished into the Nisqually River.

Henry got in his pickup truck and did some discreet door-knocking. He showed people Sperbeck’s picture, which yielded mostly head-shaking, except at the Black Jet Bar, which was near the rooming house.

“I saw that guy a few times. He used to sit in the back. Very quiet. No trouble,” the bartender told Henry. “But that cracker was not in great shape. Once he complained about how everybody in the world owed him for what he did.”

“That right? And what did he do?”

“He did not elaborate.”

Henry was making notes. “He happen to mention who ‘everybody’ was? Any names?”

The bartender stuck out his bottom lip and shook his head. “People say a lot of things when they’re drinking.”

Henry was acutely aware of that.

“Anything else you can remember about him?”

“I heard he used to go to the shelter for meals. I told him to get himself a welfare check and a medical card and see a doctor. Clean himself up.”

After thanking the bartender, Henry chided himself for nearly forgetting a basic. It was common for ex-cons to apply for welfare while they searched for a job. Stepping out of the Black Jet, he called an old friend who was a welfare fraud investigator at the Department of Social and Health Services.

“Roland King, Division of Fraud Investigations.”

“Rollie, it’s Henry Wade.”

“Hey, pal. Look, you caught me leaving for court. I have to go.”

“Just need a second. Can you help me with a quick check on somebody?”

“Ah, Henry you’re going to make more work for us. I know it. And we’re already way over our heads as it is. Want to work for DFI?”

“Just want to make you look good.”

“I’ve got about two minutes here. What is it?”

Henry gave him Leon Sperbeck’s information, his SSN, his date of birth, known addresses.

“Was he ever a client? That’s all I’m asking, Rollie.”

Henry could hear King typing on a keyboard as he double-checked Henry’s info. As a welfare fraud investigator, King had access to nearly all of the department’s computerized databases.

“What’s the beef, Henry? This guy cheating?” King asked as he waited for the computer to respond to his queries.

“Not sure.”

“Here we go. Yes. I can confirm, confidentially, that he’s in our system. He’s got a medical card. And we have him on General Assistance Unemployable. His status as an ex-convict armed robber presents a challenge in his effort to find a steady job. That it? Because I really have to go.”

“Anything else, there? What about the addresses?”

“Henry, I have to go. Wait, what addresses did you have?”

Henry repeated the two he’d checked.

“Nope, I think there’s a couple more. Got a pen?”

Henry took them down. Then heard King typing and cursing under his breath.

“That’s not right,” King said.

“Find something?” Henry asked.

“We just started sending checks for a new client at one of Sperbeck’s addresses. The client’s got a different name, but the very same address as Sperbeck. Damn it. I knew it, Henry, you brought me more work.”

“So you think Sperbeck’s received a check using an alias?”

“Happens all the time.”

“Tell me something. When was the last check cashed?”

“Looks to me like two days ago.”

Chapter Forty-Six

T
hat guy in the park was weird.

But Brady Boland never told his mom about his encounter the other day because he figured it was no big deal.

Right. If it was no big deal why was he still thinking about it?

Because the guy had made him nervous, especially after Justin and Ryan said they’d seen him before.

“I saw him lurking around here a couple days ago,” Justin said.

“Maybe he’s a perv,” Ryan said.

“Maybe he’s some creepy weirdo who likes to say stupid things to kids,” Brady said. “Who knows? Who cares?”

Brady did.

That’s why he was still thinking about it, here alone in his room today, while his mom was in the kitchen doing stuff. Brady would never ever tell anyone that the stranger had scared him a bit. That the incident made him miss having his dad around to protect him and his mom—but to admit it would make him some sort of baby.

But the truth was he missed his dad.

The truth was, that it wasn’t always bad with his dad. Most of the time it was great. What Brady liked best was when he went out on landscaping jobs with him. His dad was teaching him how to drive the rider mower, showing him how to cut in patterns. And he was teaching him about planting, about soil. About how to make it all look “professional.”

Every job they went on his father was always digging, “digging deep.” And always saying how important it was to give plants, flowers, shrubs, trees, whatever, “lots of plant food.”

Brady loved helping him bury the nutrients. They came in capsules, pellets, spikes, and bricks wrapped in plastic. He loved digging and spreading the rich, dark soil. And it really worked. In the end, it always looked great. Those were the happiest times with his dad before things started going bad.

In the time before he died, his dad always seemed to be under a lot of pressure. Always worrying about stuff he’d never talk about. He got angry all the time. Lost his temper.

And hit him.

Brady hated how things got so bad.

One time something happened that he never told his mom about. Once, after a bad time, Brady’s father took him aside and privately warned him.

“You listen to me. You keep your goddamn mouth shut about anything that goes on in this house! People are looking for me. Bad people. You do not speak one word about anything! Understand?”

Brady didn’t understand.

Nothing made sense back then.

And nothing made sense now with the creep in the park saying weird crap.

And nothing made sense about having a stupid tumor in your head trying to kill you while your mom was always on the phone, crying and going through papers and files and junk.

And nothing made sense when sometimes he woke up in the night wondering what it would be like to be dead and how he would miss his mom, miss Justin and Ryan.

Just quit it.

Brady got up from his bed and told himself to stop worrying like a baby.

He went to his window and looked up and down the street.

Besides, Justin made the shot.

Which meant everything was going to be fine.

Brady continued scanning his street, looking for anything strange.

Anything at all.

Chapter Forty-Seven

S
omething about the shoes gnawed at Kay Cataldo.

It had cost her a night’s sleep, had compelled her to get to her crime lab just after dawn and tear through her files.

It’s the shoes. Think, Cataldo! Think!

John Cooper possessed used tennis shoes issued to offenders by the Department of Corrections. But they were not the shoes that had made the impressions at Sister Anne’s murder scene. That ruled him out.

Okay, but she’d seen that pattern recently in another open file.

Hadn’t she?

Yes.

But where? Where, damn it? She struggled to retrieve it from her memory and her computer, gulping coffee while searching her files. Something blurred by.

Stop.

This one.

Sharla May Forrest.

The teen hooker.

This was the one.

Cataldo examined the crime-scene pictures. There was Sharla May, the runaway, naked on the ground in a back alley with a metal hanger garrotted around her neck. She was so young. It broke Cataldo’s heart. There was the Dumpster, the trash, and the semidry mud puddle that had captured a partial right shoe impression.

Here we go.

She called up the cast and the image filled her computer monitor. Very familiar.
This is looking very familiar.
She called up the file notes, read through them, then called up the image of the shoe impression.

“Hold on,” Cataldo told herself.

She loaded her computer with shoe files from Sister Anne’s homicide, including the work Chuck DePew had done over at the Washington State Patrol’s Crime Lab. She called up the images of the shoe impressions, then split the screen of her computer monitor.

How in the world did she overlook this?

Biting her bottom lip, she aligned the photograph from the hooker murder with the sharpest image of the right shoe impression from the nun murder, so that they were in identical scale and attitude.

Cataldo transposed one over the other and set out to look for comparisons.

“Oh boy.”

The wear, edges, channeling, the waffle pattern, right down to the fifth ridge with the nice little “X” cut, aligned perfectly.

Cataldo reached for her phone to alert Grace Garner.

They had a multiple murder suspect.

Grace was at her desk at the homicide unit, mining her notes on Cooper’s account of the stranger at the shelter.

She was panning for details, anything to aid the Washington Department of Corrections in its search for a con who could fit Cooper’s scenario. Trouble was, Cooper’s description was just too vague.

Once Perelli clocked in, they were going down to the shelter to recanvass the breakfast crowd. Grace turned to her notes and reports on Sister Anne’s work as counselor at prisons and women’s shelters.

Damn. The DOC was supposed to get back to her on the prisons Sister Anne had visited and the names of offenders she’d counseled. It ticked Grace off that they had not gotten back to her yet. She would get on their case, she told herself as her line rang.

“Garner, Homicide.”

“It’s Kay at the lab. Are you sitting down?”

“I’m sitting down.”

“Our nun killer also did Sharla May Forrest.”

“What?”

“Shoe impressions match at both scenes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“But we already looked at Roberto Martell.” “Better look again. He’s an ex-con.”

Within minutes of Cataldo’s call to Grace, a Seattle police emergency dispatcher issued a citywide silent alert to mobile display terminals for Roberto Martell. A couple of days ago, Grace had merely wanted to question Roberto about Sharla May Forrest’s murder. Now, the twenty-six-year-old drug-dealing pimp was a suspect in two first-degree homicides.

He was Seattle’s most wanted man.

The alert with his physical description and details on his Chrysler and tag were also quietly circulated to every law enforcement agency in King County and the state. At the time it came up, Seattle police officers Dimitri Franz and Dale Gannon were inside a 7-Eleven getting fresh coffee and sugar donuts.

They were unaware of the bulletin when their attention was seized by the screech of rubber in the parking lot and the doom-boom of a car stereo playing at an illegal level. It had interrupted Officer Franz’s story about his fishing trip to Montana and disturbed Officer Gannon’s enjoyment of a quiet morning.

A gum-chewing girl in her late teens, wearing too much makeup and not enough clothing, unless you counted her thigh-high spike boots and micro mini, strode into the store looking for mouthwash.

Dimitri exchanged a look with Franz, nodding to the girl’s man, waiting in the lot behind the wheel of a Chrysler. The exhausted driver’s head was thrown back to the headrest. His eyes were closed. He was too tired or too stupid to realize he’d rolled up alongside a marked Seattle police car.

Obviously the girl and her man had been working it all night.

While the music assaulted the air, Franz had slipped into the patrol car and typed into the small computer keyboard to query the Chrysler’s tag. His eyebrows climbed a titch when it came back and he saw what they had.

“Oh, my.” He pivoted the terminal so his partner could see.

The two cops set their coffees down gently.

Murder suspect Roberto Martell felt the barrel of a police pistol against his head and opened his eyes to see a second pistol leveled at him. He was arrested without incident, except for the sound of a bottle of mouthwash hitting the pavement.

Roberto’s girlfriend had not expected her night to end like this.

Less than an hour later, Perelli folded his arms and looked hard at the man sitting across from him and Grace Garner at the table in the homicide squad’s interview room.

“Don’t lie to us, Roberto,” Grace said. “You were the last to see Sharla May alive.”

“No.” The chains around Roberto’s neck chinked as he shook his head. “Your information is incorrect. The last person to see her alive would be the person who killed her. I swear the truth to you on this.”

“What size shoes do you wear?” Perelli asked.

“What? What size? Why?”

“Give me your right shoe.”

Roberto looked at Perelli, then at Grace, who nodded.

“I do this, then you let me go?”

“Just give it to me.”

Roberto put his sneaker on the table.

“Size eight.” Perelli and Grace exchanged a look. No way could Roberto be the killer. Perelli passed it back. “Man, you’ve got very small, stinkin’ feet, Roberto.”

“People saw you arguing with Sharla May,” Grace said.

“Yes, sure, I’m going to tell you what happened.” Roberto slipped his foot back into his shoe. “She owed me two large for her habit.”

Grace made notes.

“I was getting angry with her. I’m not her banker, I’m her agent.”

“Her agent?”

“She had talent and I introduced her to talent scouts.”

“You were her pimp and you beat her,” Perelli said.

Roberto held up his hands and appeared offended.

“Okay”—Grace shook her head—“you’re her agent.”

“In a business sense. And she owed me and, yes, I make my point that she has to pay me.”

“You make your point?”

“She brought it on herself. But I can understand how people in the community might misinterpret things, give you incorrect information, make you think I killed her.”

“You don’t seem too choked up about losing her.”

“I’ve come to terms with my pain in my own way.”

Perelli had to restrain himself from drilling his fist into Roberto’s head.

“So who was her trick, uh, the last talent scout?” Grace asked.

“I set her up with some guy I met around the ID, at a bar. The Black Jet Bar.”

“When was that?”

“I don’t know, two, three months ago, like before you found her dead.”

“You have a name on this guy?”

Roberto shook his head.

“What did this guy look like?”

“White guy, forties.”

“Height? Facial hair?”

“About six feet. He was clean-shaven as I recall.”

“His build?”

“Good. Average, but muscular, like he worked out. He was an ex-con.”

Grace and Perelli maintained poker faces.

“How do you know he did time?”

“You’re forgetting that I was unjustly incarcerated due to the lies a slut told the prosecuting attorney.”

“Was her broken jaw also a lie?” Perelli said.

“You want to know about the last man to see Sharla, or do you want to call me a lawyer?”

“Go ahead.”

“I got that he’d been inside for a stretch from our little conversation. He was having a beer by himself, looked kind of depressed. I said he’d feel better if he met someone like Sharla May, someone with talent, and that I could set him up.”

“Where did this guy live?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did he work?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was he in for?”

Roberto shrugged. “We didn’t become soul mates. I just pointed to Sharla May, who was picking songs on the jukebox, doing that little sexy dance she always did, and that sealed the deal. I could see him come alive, once he set eyes on her talent.”

“You’re a fine slab of humanity, Roberto,” Perelli said.

Roberto nodded. “I help girls in trouble.”

“Sure, you do,” Perelli said. “You’re just like the nuns at the shelter.”

Grace defused the tension with a question.

“Where did this guy do his time?”

“It was not a subject of conversation.”

“Did he have any tattoos?”

“Maybe, on his neck.”

“What was it, do you remember?”

“I don’t recall, just that maybe he had something on his neck.”

Grace threw an over-the-shoulder glance to the one-way glass and Stan Boulder, who was on the other side.

This may have brought them one step closer to the killer.