Second Watch (13 page)

“You’re saying someone hijacked it between one place and the other?”

“Someone?” Delilah asked, arching one eyebrow. “How about you?”

“Me?” I echoed. “Are you kidding? I’m the one who started this—the one who sent you looking for the evidence box in the first place. Why would I do that if I had personal knowledge that it was already gone?”

“It’s one of the oldest Indian tricks in the book—classic misdirection. You send everyone else looking for something so no one will suspect you’re the one who hid it.”

“Isn’t talking about old Indian tricks racist?”

“There’s nothing wrong with using the term if you happen to be an old Indian.”

I probably looked surprised. Delilah’s light brown hair and hazel eyes didn’t look the least bit Indian—Native American, if you will. Although thinking all Indians look alike is probably as racist as thinking all white guys look alike.

“My dad worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” Delilah explained. “My mother was Rosebud Sioux. I can crack Indian jokes as much as I want, but don’t change the subject. Are you responsible for hiding that stuff or not?”

“Honest Injun?” I asked, trying for cute. It must have been the pain meds kicking in. I don’t usually attempt cute, but this time I couldn’t resist and Delilah was not amused.

“You are definitely
not
a Rosebud Sioux,” she said with a pointed glare. “So tell me the truth. What did you do with the evidence?”

“I didn’t do anything with it,” I declared. “I was still working Seattle PD Homicide in 1981, so you’re right—I would have had access to the evidence room, but not to routine transfers of evidence. But even if I had managed to get rid of the stuff related to this case that long ago, why in God’s name would I bring it up now? That makes no sense.”

Delilah sighed and then let out her breath. When she spoke again, it was in a somewhat mollified tone. “I suppose you’re right,” she agreed, “but the point is, somebody did get rid of it. Somebody moved the case from open to closed. I want to know who did that and why, and so do you. So what’s our next step? Do we bring this to the attention of Internal Affairs? If you didn’t take it, what are the chances one of the other investigators in the case did?” Delilah pulled out her iPad and consulted the list, repeating the names I had given her earlier. “Detectives Gurkey, Watkins, Powell, and you, as well as that other uniformed officer at the crime scene, Rory MacPherson.”

“Whoever did it was someone with something to hide,” I replied. “And I’d be willing to bet money that it wasn’t any of those people.”

“Why not?”

“It couldn’t have been Pickles. He was already dead. As for the other guys? I worked with Powell and Watty Watkins for years. They were absolutely true blue!”

“What about Rory MacPherson?” she asked.

I couldn’t vouch for Mac in quite the same way I could the others. I shrugged and let it go, while Delilah looked thoughtful. “How long between the time of Monica’s murder and the time the case was unofficially dropped?”

“She was murdered in April of 1973.”

“You remember that for sure?”

“It’s the month I made detective,” I answered. “Of course I remember. I think Ted Bundy got picked up and started confessing to some of his crimes a couple of years later. Pickles and I worked the Wellington case off and on from the time it happened until Bundy was off the streets.”

Delilah was already punching the keyboard on her iPad. “You’re right. Nineteen seventy-five,” she reported moments later. “That’s when Bundy was taken into custody.”

“We must have gotten the word to lay off the case sometime after that,” I continued.

“I think we can be reasonably certain that Ted Bundy didn’t do it,” Delilah concluded. “Because, if he had, there’d be no reason for someone to lift the evidence. Whoever’s responsible for its disappearance definitely has an ax to grind.”

I nodded. “Makes sense to me.”

“So back to my other question. Do we go to Internal Affairs or not?”

“I say not,” I answered. “We already have permission from Ron Peters to reopen the case, so we should do exactly that. Let’s go back over everything and everyone. We’ll treat it like a brand-new case.”

Nodding, Delilah kicked off her shoes, curled her legs under her in the poorly named “easy” chair next to my bed, and stared at me expectantly.

“Then you’d better tell me everything you remember,” she said, her fingers poised over the keyboard on her iPad. “It turns out, you’re the closest thing to a murder book we may ever get.”

She stayed for the next two hours, typing away industriously with very few comments or interruptions, while I did my best to re-create that long-ago Sunday afternoon on Magnolia Bluff. It wasn’t as hard as it might have been otherwise. After all, in the preceding days, and prompted by Monica’s dreamscape appearance, I had done a mental blow-by-blow rerun of the whole thing. As I told Delilah the story, I tried to pay attention to any possible discrepancies between what had shown up in the dreams and what I remembered, but by the time all was said and done, the two versions seemed to be in sync.

This time through, I added in everyone and everything else I remembered. I told Delilah about Sister Mary Katherine, the principal from Frankie and Donnie’s school. I filled her in on the guys from the rendering plant where the barrel had come from, although right at that moment, I couldn’t recall any of their names. Then I mentioned the lady from the thrift shop where Monica had purchased the WSU sweatshirt she’d been wearing on the night she disappeared.

A late-night call from Mel was what finally put a halt to our conversation. When I answered the phone, I told Delilah in lip-reading pantomime, “It’s my wife.” Nodding and allowing Mel and me some privacy, Delilah packed her iPad into her Mickey Mouse purse, gave me a brief wave from the doorway, and headed out.

“I take it you’re not coming to see me tonight?” I asked.

“No. I’m still in Bellingham. We’re having an arson storm up here. Someone just tossed a firebomb at the home of one of the officers who was involved in the Tasering incident. So things are getting worse instead of better.”

“Sorry to hear it,” I said. “I thought Bellingham was supposed to be a haven of peace and love.”

“Not at the moment,” Mel replied. “In fact, at this point, everyone’s calling for the chief of police to step down. Her officers have lost confidence in her for standing back and letting the original protest get out of hand. So has the public. In the meantime, the dead guy’s girlfriend has dropped out of sight. I just put out a BOLO on her. In other words, I’m not coming to Seattle tonight. And at this rate, maybe not tomorrow, either.”

I felt another small twinge of jealousy. Mel had a real case. I had an old case based on my having bad dreams. What was wrong with this picture?

“I called Harry to bring him up to speed,” Mel continued. “He’s going to ask Barbara Galvin to drive up here tomorrow to bring me a change of clothes. I’ve made arrangements with the doorman at Belltown Terrace to let her into the unit so she can pick them up.”

Talk about useless. It was humbling to realize that at this point I couldn’t even be counted on to bring Mel spare duds.

I must have fallen very quiet. “Beau,” Mel said. “Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” I said. “I’m just wishing I could do something to help.”

“What you’re supposed to do is get better,” she replied. “Right this minute, that’s your only job.”

I’m sure the words were meant to cheer me up and make me feel better. Unfortunately, they had the opposite effect and left me feeling even more inadequate. That’s easy enough to do, when the best you’re capable of doing is hobbling up and down hospital hallways on a walker with an attendant at your side.

“You take care now,” I said. “I’ve gotta go. The nurse just came in.”

That wasn’t true. There wasn’t any nurse. There was only me. And what I wanted right then wasn’t one of the pain meds Nurse Keith handed out. I wanted the old kind of pain med—my former drug of choice.

I wanted a drink in the very worst way. In the old days, I would have simply picked up the phone and called Lars Jenssen, my AA sponsor. Lars was my sponsor before he married my grandmother, Beverly Piedmont, and he’s still my sponsor now that Beverly is gone. But he’s also verging on ninety-three and a resident in Queen Anne Gardens, an assisted living place on Queen Anne Hill. These days, he’s early to bed and early to rise, and waking him with a phone call a few minutes after midnight wasn’t going to do either one of us a favor.

Hoping to drown out the siren song of Demon Rum, I turned off my bedside light and tried to sleep.

CHAPTER 12

I
t wasn’t a good night. I was restless. I had probably overdone it in PT, and my knees hurt. When I finally got around to asking for some pain meds, I was able to sleep, but once again the dreams kicked in. The only good thing to be said about that night’s dreams was that I didn’t remember them in the morning when I woke up. When I wasn’t sleeping, I wrestled with all those thorny issues, and by the time the sun came up the next morning, I had settled on what I was going to do.

After that day’s first round of PT and when I was back in bed, I picked up my phone and went looking for the phone number I knew was stored there. Cochise County sheriff Joanna Brady’s mobile number was in my contact list along with her direct number at work. It was midmorning by then, and her work number was the one I used, figuring that there was a good chance she’d be at her desk.

“Sheriff Brady,” she answered.

She was all business. I happen to know Sheriff Brady is only a little over five feet tall, five four or so, but she sounds a lot bigger than that on the phone. Although I couldn’t see the little dynamo’s bright red hair, I could certainly picture it.

“Beaumont here,” I said. “From Seattle.”

She laughed. “There’s only one Beaumont in my life, and I know where you’re from,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Do you happen to know someone who might be related to Leonard Davis?”

“Not that I know of,” she said, sounding genuinely puzzled. “Should I? Who is he, and what did he do?”

I could tell from the way she answered that she expected this to be some kind of police matter. I hated to admit it, but this was personal—intensely personal. Suddenly and unaccountably, the damned lump was back in my throat, making it difficult to talk.

“He’s a guy who came from Bisbee,” I replied. “He died back in 1966. In Vietnam.”

There was a small silence. “Oh,” Joanna said after a pause. “You must mean Doug Davis. Now that you mention it, I remember Leonard was his given name, but no one around here ever called him that.”

“So you knew him?’ ”

“No, I never met him, but of course I know about him. He’s one of our local heroes. Doug was a very smart guy—valedictorian of his class and a top-notch athlete. He went to West Point after high school, then he went to Vietnam, and then he came home in a flag-draped coffin. What a waste!”

I had to agree with her there. “That certainly squares with what I knew about him.”

“The old Letterman’s Club installed a bronze plaque over at the high school,” Joanna continued. “Doug’s name is on it, along with the names of the six other guys from Bisbee High who died over there. The Letterman’s Club disbanded a few years ago. Now a local Boy Scout troop maintains that area, and they hold a memorial service there every year on Veterans Day. Memorial Day would probably be more appropriate but school’s usually out by then, so the campus is closed. I always try to show up for the ceremony, and I encourage as many of my officers who can make it to be there as well. But you still haven’t told me why you want to know.”

Good point.

“A buddy of mine showed up in town the other day,” I said. “He was hoping to get in touch with Doug’s family—with his fiancée actually. Would you happen to know if any of his folks still live around there?”

I just barely remembered to use the right name—Doug rather than Lennie D. As for that tired old “buddy of mine” routine? It sounded lame even to me, and I have no doubt that it sounded pretty lame to Joanna as well.

“I don’t know anything about a fiancée,” she said. “Doug’s mother and his younger brother Blaine used to come to the memorials, but they’re both gone now. I could maybe check with the paper.”

“The paper?” I asked.

“The local newspaper,” she answered. “The
Bisbee Bee.
If you can tell me about when he died, it’ll save me some time. There might be some kind of mention of his fiancée in his obituary.”

I’ve been a cop for so long that I always think in terms of law enforcement solutions to finding people. Since this was a personal matter, those avenues weren’t open to me. Using police access databases for personal searches happens to be against the law. But this solution was so simple that it stunned me.

“Do you want me to check for you?”

“Actually, if you give me the Web site, I can check for myself.”

Joanna laughed aloud at that one. “You are off the beam on that one. The
Bee
’s back copies aren’t digitized. I believe the University of Arizona is in the process of doing that, but right now, the only access is microfiche. For that you have to be on the premises, in the flesh. Do you have a date for me?”

I knew the date as well as I knew my own name. It was the day Lennie D. died; the day I didn’t.

“August 2, 1966,” I replied.

“So I’ll check the records for early August of 1966,” Joanna said. “If that’s when Doug died, it probably took some time for the military to make arrangements to get him home.”

In the background I could hear the scratching of pen on paper. Sheriff Brady was clearly not an iPad kind of girl—at least not so far.

“And you’re looking for information on the fiancée,” Joanna continued. “I have to run uptown for a luncheon meeting in a little while. I can probably stop by the paper while I’m there. Will this afternoon be soon enough?”

“Sure,” I said. “This afternoon would be great.”

Once that was out of the way, I lay back in my bed and focused on the evidence problems Delilah Ainsworth had uncovered at Seattle PD. How was it possible that all the evidence in Monica Wellington’s homicide had disappeared into the great beyond? Delilah had most likely never met Watty Watkins or Larry Powell. Their names, along with that of Pickles Gurkey, might still be mentioned around Homicide on occasion, but to most of this latest crop of detectives, including Delilah Ainsworth, they would be names only and relegated to departmental ancient history, sort of like yours truly.

And if Delilah had zero connection with any of those long-lost detectives, she’d have even less to Rory “Mac” MacPherson. After leaving the Patrol division, I knew he had spent years with the Motorcycle unit, including a decade in which he was in charge of Seattle PD’s motorcycle drill team. Although he had loved riding motorcycles, they had almost been the death of him. He left the department years before I did, mustering out as a double amputee with a full medical retirement disability after a drunk driver ran a red light and sent both him and his bike flying through the air.

But I did know all those guys, all four of those honorable fellow officers. I knew them up close and personal, the way partners know partners. Of those four, Mac was the only one whose integrity I could conceivably question—the only one who gave me any cause to worry that he might not be a straight-up kind of guy.

As much as I had tried to avoid this issue, there had always been something slightly hinky about the way the two of us had gotten our two separate promotions. One day we had been out on patrol, riding around in a marked car, pulling over the occasional speeder. And then, the next day, we both got the very promotions we had been chasing.

During my first months and years in Homicide, I had faced down the doubters by working like crazy, earning my fifth-floor chops in my own right. I had always assumed that Mac had done the same thing in his unit. But even if I had some personal doubts about the guy’s uprightness, I could see that of all the people involved, he was the least likely one to have had anything to do with the disappearing evidence box. The reason was simple—he wasn’t a detective. As a member of the Motorcycle unit, Mac would never have had the kind of access to the evidence room that everybody else did.

I was still thinking about that when Delilah called. “Speak of the devil,” I said. “What are you up to this fine day?”

Outside my window, I could see that the early-morning fog had burned off, leaving behind one of those gloriously clear early autumn days when the weather in Seattle just can’t get any better. Seeing the blue sky overhead made me wish I was in the great outdoors as opposed to being tethered to a hospital room.

“I’m on my way to Sammamish,” she said. “I’m going there to talk to Rory MacPherson.”

I know about the City of Sammamish. It’s out on the Sammamish Plateau, on the far side of Issaquah, on an area of higher ground between Lake Washington and the Cascades. It used to be part of unincorporated King County, but sometime in the last twenty years or so it had supposedly turned into a city. Having never been there, I couldn’t swear one way or the other.

“That’s where Mac retired to?” I asked. “Sammamish? I had no idea.”

“According to Records it is,” Delilah said. “I called to make sure he was home, because I didn’t want to go driving all the way out there on a wild-goose chase. He asked me what it was about, and I told him we were reopening one of his cases. Can you tell me anything more about him than what we discussed last night?”

I had already told her everything I remembered from Mac’s and my last second-watch ride together all those years ago—the phone call from Frankie and Donnie; finding the girl in the barrel; doing the initial canvass of the neighborhood under the direction of Watty Watkins and Larry Powell. What I hadn’t told her about was what had happened two days later.

“I suppose there is one more thing,” I admitted reluctantly, “something I probably should have mentioned earlier but didn’t.”

“What?”

“It turned out that was my last shift as far as Patrol was concerned, and Mac’s, too. I had taken the test and applied for Homicide before then. I had also been told there weren’t any openings, but when I came back from my days off two days after that shift, I discovered I had been moved out of Patrol and into Homicide. And I wasn’t the only one to get a promotion. All of a sudden, Mac was working Motorcycles, which was the exact assignment he had always wanted.”

“The idea of both of you being promoted at once sounds too good to be true and maybe slightly more than coincidental,” Delilah observed. “Are you thinking there was some kind of cause and effect here?”

“I tried to convince myself otherwise at the time, but maybe there was,” I admitted.

“You never asked anyone about it?”

“If you’ll pardon the expression, I was low man on the totem pole back then,” I told her. “I had the promotion I wanted, and I sure as hell didn’t want to rock any boats.”

“Didn’t want to get kicked back to the gang?” Delilah asked, ignoring my unauthorized Native American gibe. In law enforcement these days, political correctness rules. Working with someone who was half Sioux was making me aware that, without my noticing it, a lot of those potential land-mine phrases had wormed their way into my manner of speaking. Of course, maybe they had always been there; I was simply not paying attention.

“Exactly,” I said.

“So you’re suggesting I ask him about it now?” she asked.

“I don’t see what it could hurt,” I agreed. “After all, we’re both out of Seattle PD, along with most of the other guys who were working there at the time.”

“Including whoever disappeared the evidence?”

“Most likely,” I admitted grudgingly.

My surgeon came in about then. Dr. Auld had breezed through my room a couple of times in the days since my surgery, but I hadn’t had a chance for a real conversation with the man. Hoping to get cut loose, I didn’t want to miss the chance to talk to him now.

“Gotta go now,” I said to Delilah. “Talk to you later.”

The doctor stripped the sheet off my knees. Staring down at the two matching lines of staples that were all that showed of his handiwork, he nodded his approval.

“How come they call it rounds?” I asked. “Why don’t they call it squares?”

It was a meaningless quip, but Dr. Auld answered it quite seriously. “I believe it had its origins at Johns Hopkins, where the hospital was built under a dome. But let’s not worry about that, shall we? Let’s get you sorted out.”

Pulling his own iPad from the pocket of his white jacket, Dr. Auld clicked it a few times and then studied what appeared on the screen. “From your PT reports, you appear to be a star pupil, Mr. Beaumont,” he said. “Great range of motion. No sign of infection. No fever. How’s the pain?”

“Manageable,” I said. “But I’ve got a couple of numb spots, one on each leg.”

“Nerve damage,” he said. “The numb spots may go away or they may be permanent. No way to tell. What’s your house like? How many stairs do you have to negotiate?”

“None whatsoever,” I replied. “We live in a condo with full elevator service.”

“Anyone there with you?”

“My wife, Mel,” I replied. “I’m sure you met her the other day, but she’s currently out of town. I’m not sure when she’ll be back.”

“All right, then,” he said, slipping his iPad away. “You’re making great progress. I might be able to boot you out of here a couple of days early as long as you agree to continue working on your PT at home, but I can’t release you without your having someone there to keep an eye on you. What say we revisit this tomorrow? But here’s a word of advice. When you do go home, I want you to ease off the pain meds gradually. No going cold turkey. Got it?”

“Got it,” I said. With that, Dr. Auld was gone.

By now I was used to the hospital routine. I did my morning OT and had some lunch. After that, however, it was time to talk to my sponsor. Sighing in resignation, I called Lars Jenssen.

Lars spent a lifetime as a halibut fisherman, commuting between Seattle and Alaska’s fishing grounds aboard his boat, the
Viking Star.
Despite having been born and raised in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, Lars speaks English with a thick Norwegian accent that becomes even more pronounced whenever he gets near a telephone.

“Ja sure,” he said, when he heard my voice on the phone. “How’re ya doing?”

“I almost called you last night.”

I could hear a slight shift in his position, as though he was sitting up straighter than he had been before and was paying closer attention.

“So they got you on some of them painkillers?” Lars asked. “The powerful ones?”