Hard Fall (8 page)

“Somebody had better. He keeps company with a seventy-year-old who can barely keep her heart going with all the black tea in China. You think he's growing?”

“It's temporary.”

“It's B.S. is what it is. Temporarily forever, right?”

“A man was murdered. It's important.”

“You requested it, didn't you? You probably had to fight to be sent, didn't you? They don't need you out there, do they?”

“Yes, yes, and no, if you're scoring by inning.” He hated being caught by her. He resented her attitude, her approach, everything—especially her being right.

“The shore, Cam. You don't want me along, that's okay. But skip Seattle. Please. Take Dunc to the shore and spend some time with him.”

“I was spending some time with him before you arrived.”

That accomplished what he was after. She shot across the backyard like a wildfire with a tailwind. He felt like running after her, but he stayed where he was; he took note of that.

“Nice going, Dad.” It was Duncan, hanging from the bar.

“It's a murder, Dunc. It's important,” he said from across the lawn.

“So go,” the boy said to the father.

Only a few minutes later, he did.

On saturday morning, August 25—nearly two weeks after the Bernard explosion at National Airport—Daggett stood in the lobby of the Seattle Westin. He spotted the cop before any introduction was made. Lieutenant Phil Shoswitz's dark eyes looked out from a pale face, the result of long hours behind a desk. He wore a button-down white shirt and a wrinkled tie. His rubber-soled shoes showed the irregular heels of age and the scuffed toes of neglect. Shoswitz looked directly at Daggett; he, too, recognized an FBI agent when he saw one. They shook hands and made introductions.

Shoswitz had a drawn face and exaggerated, oversized brown eyes. He struck Daggett as a man who might have had a sense of humor once. In a voice unfamiliar with contest, he said, “I thought we'd head directly to Duhning. I have a car waiting.”

Daggett welcomed the coolness of the Seattle air. He drank it in. The monorail passed overhead, tourists' faces framed in the windows. A street person draped in dirty burlap walked by, unsteadily holding a steaming plastic cup of coffee. His bloodshot eyes looked right through Daggett.

“You ever been out here?” Shoswitz asked, somewhat surprised.

Daggett maneuvered to keep the man on his left. “I was assigned here for a while. Back in the Bronze Age. Met my wife in this city. Met her in a bar. I even remember the name of the band that was playing—Duffy Bishop and the Rhythm Dogs.” For a moment, no more than a blink of the eye, he was right back there. “You remember the little things.”

Shoswitz nodded, but with sadness. “Still married?”

I must wear it on my shirt sleeve, Daggett thought. “No,” he said.

“Me neither. Comes with the job, I suppose.”

“More often than not, it seems.”

“And now you're married to counterintelligence, huh?”

“Closer to the truth than I'd like to admit. Counterterrorism, actually. Foreign counterterrorism. My third year on this squad.”

“Kids?”

“A son.”

“I got two daughters. Somewhere. She get your boy?”

“No, I did.”

“You're lucky. That's the worst part for me.”

“How many years on the force?” Daggett asked. He felt uncomfortable sharing his life's story with a stranger, and yet—perhaps it was that they shared a badge, a way of life; perhaps it was their shared failure—he felt a bond between them. Shoswitz had apparently summed him up in a glance.

“Me? Too many, can't you tell?”

A beat-up car with black-walls and a bullet hole in the corner of the windshield pulled up, and they climbed in.

The driver, a sergeant named LaMoia, better dressed than most cops, had a strong hand, like grabbing on to a leg of lamb. He wore his black curly hair long, and carried an air of confidence that bordered on cockiness. Daggett and Shoswitz rode in the backseat. Daggett was struck by the changes in the city. “Some of 'em good, some of 'em bad,” Shoswitz said. They took a left onto an elevated highway heading south. They discussed the first officer's report, and a preliminary conversation with Dr. Ronald Dixon, the King County medical examiner.

“Way it works at Duhning,” Shoswitz said, “in case you're not familiar with it: If we want to talk to any of their employees, we do it off site, or else in a room their Security provides us. They arrange the interview, time and place, so there isn't a lot of fuss about someone being pulled away from their post. Now normally the sheriff would handle a homicide out at Duhning. Technically, it's his show, his turf—the Duhning site dates back so far that it's not within the city jurisdiction. But the Sheriff's Department asked for our help, which is just fine with us. LaMoia's on loan to them. I'm overseeing, which is why I left my desk to tag along.” He paused, apparently leaving room for LaMoia to contribute. Then he continued, “Bottom line: Duhning doesn't like us on site. Period. But on a homicide, they don't have much choice. Thing about it is, we like good relations, so no shields, no heavy stuff. More than likely, we'll be shown around by their top guy, name of Ross Fleming. He's okay—one of your FBI boys Duhning snatched up after mandatory retirement. He'll take us in quietly. Simulation is an unsecured area, so we'll hardly be noticed.”

“Unsecured? I read that in the report you faxed,” Daggett said. “How's that possible with so much equipment in there?”

LaMoia answered, “Fleming is taking a lot of heat about that.”

“I don't doubt it.”

Shoswitz added, “You talk to him, it's understandable. He oversees security for a hundred and fifty thousand Duhning employees worldwide. A hundred-some-odd physical plants. He's working with a fixed budget, with his top priority the defense contracts, followed by aerospace and engineering. Simulation is essentially an advanced training facility for commercial pilots. Way Fleming tells it, until a few days ago—until
this
—it was a low-priority facility for him. They've got key codes on the doors—shit like that—but that's about it. I kinda feel for the guy; anywhere else, key codes and pass systems would be considered high security. One of their boys gets toe-tagged, and now everybody's pointing fingers. Truth-a-the-matter is—I mean
we
all know this—a guy wants to get in a place, he's gonna get in there. Plain and simple.”

Shoswitz sucked some air between his teeth. “Fleming's not real happy about that either. You ask me, it just confirms it was professional. Like I said—they want it, they're gonna get it. This day and age, you just gotta start waving money around.”

“Any evidence of that with Ward? Money, I mean.”

LaMoia answered, “No. Nothing. No change in life-style, no sign of any hidden accounts that we can find. Wife says everything had been perfectly normal. But I'm not buying it. You ask me, he had a piece of pie on the side.”

“Why do you say that?”

“John tends to think with his dick,” Shoswitz replied, interrupting. “I'd consider the source, if I was you.”

“Careful, I'm driving,” LaMoia said. He jerked on the wheel to prove his point. The three of them laughed.

Shoswitz added, “A girl bends over at the water fountain … she better be on the pill.”

“Whoa! Low blow, Lieutenant!”

“
Low blow
… See what I mean? Always sexual puns with this one.”

“The
reason
,” LaMoia said loudly, attempting to defend himself to Daggett, “that I say that about Ward, is because of this season ticket of his. I mean the guy lays out some major change for a regular seat at the Mariners—”

“Which, the way we're playing, shows some low-voltage intelligence in the first place,” Shoswitz contributed. “Mind you, I'm guilty of the same offense. I got a season set as well.”

“And then never shows up until the last inning,” LaMoia concluded. “We checked that out, in attempting to confirm what his wife told us. She claims he
was
at the game. The person in the next seat over—also a season ticket holder—claims Ward seldom showed up before the ninth. On the night in question, he never showed up at all.” He glanced into the mirror and searched out Daggett. “Conclusion—from one who thinks with his dick—he was handing his wife a wad of shit while he was handing some hair pie a wad of something else.”

“Any clues who she might be?” Daggett asked.

“You're not buying into this?” Shoswitz protested.

Daggett shrugged.

LaMoia saved him by continuing. “Way it looks to me is she would have to be someone at work. This guy was a twelve-hour-a-day man, know what I mean? No outside interests. So unless it's a waitress, someone like that, I'm thinking it has to be someone in Simulation.”

“Oh, Jesus!” Shoswitz barked.

“But no idea who?”

“If Fleming wasn't so tough on us about providing evidence before questioning his people, we might could quiz the pies out there and see if anyone blushed, or crossed their legs, or something. But the way it is—”

“I might be able to help there. If he used to be one of us, chances are he'll bend a little to help out.”

“I wouldn't count on it,” Shoswitz said. “This interrogation rule is policy; it comes down from above him. They've got their own little world going, over there. Same as all the multinationals around here. They make us jump through every paper hoop ever made for even the smallest of things. They cooperate, all right, but only if and when we've got a case dead to rights. Otherwise they'd rather take care of it themselves. Keep it in the family.”

“So we think of some other way,” Daggett suggested.

“Such as?”

“If Ward isn't at these ball games, then he's somewhere else. And,” he said, addressing LaMoia, “I assume he's in his car.”

“Far as we know.”

“So we check the Duhning parking logs for the dates and times of the ball games. Maybe he was at work. Then we check DMV for any parking citations, going back maybe six months at a time. We pay strict attention to the dates and times of games. If we don't have enough hits there, we cross-check his credit card charges, see if he took hotel rooms or did some ‘entertaining.' I don't like it much, but we dig this guy up out of the grave and we spread him around until we see what stinks.”

“Shit,” LaMoia said in a voice that bordered on respect, “for FBI, you're all right.”

Daggett glanced out the car window. Ward's killer could be halfway around the world at the moment, or he could be in a Seattle hotel room drinking champagne, eating smoked salmon, and marveling at the picturesque litter of white sails on Elliott Bay and Puget Sound beyond.

“How about the car itself?” Daggett asked.

“Not yet,” Shoswitz said. “We're assuming the killer drove it off site.”

“So he didn't plan on killing Ward,” Daggett said. “If we're right about him being a professional, he sure as hell wouldn't have taken a risk like that without being forced to.”

“Agreed,” Shoswitz said.

Steel cranes were busy stacking containers onto ships. Out on the water, a cumbersome ferry steamed for points unknown. The killer could be on that ferry. He could be on one of the container ships. He could be anywhere. He could have Bernard's handiwork in his possession. Maybe LaMoia could drive a little faster. Maybe they should skip over the tour of the simulator and get right down to tracing the movements of Ward's car.

Shoswitz read his thoughts. “We'll walk you through the simulator area, show you where the body was found, and let you speak to Fleming. Your Seattle office has been through all this once, but they said they asked you to come out here and have a look for yourself.”

“That must make you some kind of expert or something,” LaMoia said.

“Or something,” Daggett said. He couldn't tell if he was being teased.

“What we know for sure,” Shoswitz said, “is that one of them blew lunch—or dinner—inside the simulator.”

LaMoia added, “Lab is checking the puke to see if there's any medical reason for this guy heaving. Microbes, that kind of shit. If not, then one of them had a bad case of the butterflies.”

“Other than that we don't have squat, except that Fleming thinks it had to be based on inside information.” Shoswitz picked at his ear. Daggett rolled down the window. His chest felt tight. The air smelled good. It reminded him of a restaurant out on the pier, and a time when he had been extremely happy. It suddenly seemed like a lifetime ago.

Daggett, Shoswitz, and Duhning's head of Security, Ross Fleming, completed a lengthy tour of the Simulation facility. Fleming, an energetic man in his late fifties, with short gray hair and hard blue eyes, wore the face of a man with a dozen secrets and chose his words carefully. He elected to observe, rather than speculate, chewing his thoughts behind an impassive face that revealed nothing. Daggett was shown the hiding place in the floorboards of the computer room, was given a “flight” in the 959-600 simulator, and spent twenty minutes in Ward's office with yet another Duhning executive, going through Ward's paperwork and hoping for a lead. Fleming suggested a tour of the badge room; Daggett felt he was being asked to leave.

That was when LaMoia, escorted by an attractive black woman under Fleming's command, arrived with a precocious grin pinned on his face. “Done,” he said, handing a sheet of computer paper to Shoswitz.

“Already?” Shoswitz said in bewilderment. Even he seemed surprised by the efficiency of his own troops.

“What?” Daggett asked, attempting to interrupt, but wholly ignored.

LaMoia answered his lieutenant with a confidence that Daggett recognized as success. “I phoned DMV. Ward had three unpaid parking tickets, all in the last two months. That, and six months ago we cited and towed his Taurus for blocking a hydrant. All citations issued within a block of each other.” To Fleming he said, “What saved us was the way you fellas do everything on computer. Very impressive! They got this database, Lieutenant—”