Second Watch (18 page)

“Which is one way of having a pretty airtight alibi,” Anderson said with a grin.

I hadn’t much liked the guy to begin with, and I liked him even less now. “Yes,” I said. “Airtight.”

“Is there a chance Detective Ainsworth and Rory MacPherson had some other kind of connection?” Detective Monford asked. “Is it possible that they had some kind of relationship that you had no knowledge of?”

“No,” I said. “That’s not possible. Delilah was spectacular looking. She was a capable investigator and definitely on her way up. She was also happily married, with a husband and a couple of kids. Mac was a double amputee, a retired has-been—divorced, bitter, and drowning his sorrows in booze. No, Detective Ainsworth and Rory MacPherson did not have a previous relationship or a personal relationship of any kind.”

“So what got her killed, then?” Monford asked. “The fact that the Wellington case had been reopened or the HR discrepancy that you just pointed out?”

I thought about that for a moment. “It could be one of those,” I answered finally. “Or else it’s both.”

Marge cleared her throat. “As I said before,” she announced in a voice that left no room for argument, “that is enough! You need to go now.”

I had long since tired of the whole interview process, and I was more than a little grateful that Marge had shown up to give the two detectives their walking papers. They allowed themselves to be herded out of the room, but not before getting my cell phone number. After slamming the front door shut behind them, Marge disappeared into the kitchen, emerging a few minutes later with a tray laden with my next dose of pills and a plate that contained a grilled pork chop and a mound of broccoli.

“After slaving away in the kitchen,” she told me, “I wasn’t about to let it sit around and get cold. Eat before you take your pills. You shouldn’t drop them into an empty stomach.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“And while you’re eating I’ll go down and get my stuff out of the car. You really want me to stay in that other unit, the one downstairs? I’m sure I’d be fine here.”

“No,” I said. “If I need you, I’ll call. You’ll only be an elevator ride away.”

With that, Marge stomped off, leaving me to eat in peace. The woman had made good on her threat to serve up protein, and I have to admit, that pork chop was worth the price of admission. It was glorious. Cooked to a turn, and the broccoli was, too. There was still some crispness to it, and it had been slathered with a healthy dose of lemon. I ate every smidgen of it. I might have asked for a second helping, but Marge had yet to return from the move-in process. Instead, I sat there in my recliner, basking like an overfed cat in the late-afternoon sun, drifting as the pain med did its magic. When I awoke again, it was full dark. Marge had obviously come and gone in utter silence. My dinner tray was gone and someone had turned the lamp on next to my chair.

The problem was, I needed to go in the worst way. So what was it going to be? Pick up the phone and call Marge to come upstairs and shepherd me into the bathroom? There was no dignity in that. In the end, I decided to be a man about it. The walker was right there. My cell phone had been sitting on the charger on a side table. After slipping my fully charged phone into my pocket, I wrestled the walker over in front of me, and then used that to lever myself up and out of the recliner. When I finished up in the bathroom, I felt like I could give myself a gold star. Then, silently thanking the OT team for all their efforts on my behalf, I took myself into the bedroom and went to bed. In my own bed. And gave myself full points for that, too.

The effort had worn me out. I slept again for a while, but that’s the problem with sleeping too much during the day—you don’t sleep enough at night. By one o’clock in the morning, I was wide awake and thinking. Considering everything that had happened, that wasn’t a good thing.

CHAPTER 15

I
awoke in the wee small hours of Sunday morning—the third watch. That’s the time the bars close and the drunks start beating the crap out of one another. No, wait. That was back in the olden days. Now they simply shoot the crap out of one another. If you’re down on the street, that is. I wasn’t. I was safely tucked in my bed, far above the Denny Regrade’s sometimes tumultuous and deadly late-night street scene, but I was fighting my own kind of battle, wrestling with all the woulda, shoulda, coulda’s that would have meant Detective Delilah Ainsworth would still be alive.

On weekends especially, cops aren’t the only people dealing with the third watch in the world of big-city law enforcement. Medical examiners’ offices are usually fully staffed during those hours as well. Knowing how bureaucratic politics work, I figured the person on duty right then—the low woman on the totem pole, as it were, with apologies to Delilah’s Native American sensibilities—would be the most recent arrival in the King County M.E.’s office, Dr. Rosemary Mellon.

There was another good reason, besides being a relative newcomer, which made it likely she would be the M.E. working the least desirable shift—Rosemary is a genuine maverick. She’s an antibureaucrat bureaucrat. She gives straight answers. She doesn’t pull punches. She’s not afraid of going around the chain of command. All of those things may have made her less popular with her coworkers, but for those of us out in the field, she was a gold mine. And for those very same reasons, she was top of the list for Special Homicide’s favorite M.E. of all time.

In other words, it was no accident that Rosemary’s cell phone number was plugged into my phone’s contact list, and if she wasn’t working? I figured she would have done what shift workers all over the world do when they’re trying to sleep. She would have turned her phone off. As Sherlock Holmes would have said, “Elementary.”

But of course she wasn’t asleep. She answered on the second ring. “Rosemary Mellon.”

That was another reason people like her. She isn’t pretentious. She doesn’t have to go around rubbing people’s noses in the fact that she’s an MD and other people aren’t.

“J. P. Beaumont here,” I said.

“I already figured that out. Caller ID told me so. It’s been a long night. Do you have a case for me?” I could tell from her voice that the gangbangers had taken the night off and she was bored out of her skull.

“I’m afraid not,” I said. “I’m pretty sure the cases I’m calling about are already in the system.”

“Why the middle-of-the-night phone call, then?” she asked.

Answering that would be dicey, but it seemed that being straight with Rosemary was the only thing to do.

“When Delilah Ainsworth was killed, she and I were working a cold case together,” I said.

“I see,” Rosemary said after a pause.

“And back in the day, Mac MacPherson and I rode Patrol together.”

There was another long pause. “Which means you’ve been told to butt out, and you’re at home stewing in your own juices and not sleeping worth a damn.”

“Something like that,” I agreed.

This time there wasn’t a pause at all. “Okay,” Rosemary said. “Hang on. Let me see what I can do.”

She put down the phone. Unlike being put on hold on the regular M.E. landline, I didn’t have to listen to scratchy music, interrupted by someone telling me that my call was very important and that it would be answered by the next available person. What I heard instead was blessed silence that ended only when Rosemary picked the phone back up.

“Which one first,” she asked, “Ainsworth or MacPherson?”

Both deaths could conceivably be laid at my door, but Delilah’s was the one that hurt more. “Ainsworth,” I said.

“She was shot at close range and died from a single gunshot to her throat. The bullet severed her spinal cord, exited through her brain stem. Death was instantaneous.”

In a way that was good news. At least she hadn’t suffered, bleeding out slowly on the floor with no one to help her. The dancing Delilah of my earlier dream had claimed she wasn’t wearing a vest. In this case, a vest wouldn’t have made any difference. Still, I had to ask.

“Was she wearing a vest?”

“Yes,” Rosemary said. “It’s listed among her effects.”

I closed my eyes and allowed myself a moment of gratitude. So she hadn’t done something totally stupid. She had gone to the meeting with Mac properly dressed, armed, and prepared for any contingency. Yet the man had taken her by surprise, even though he was most likely drunk and in a wheelchair. How had that happened?

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me about Rory MacPherson.”

“This is interesting,” Rosemary said.

“What?”

“I was watching the local news a little while ago,” she replied. “The media is still reporting this as a homicide/suicide, but that’s not going to wash.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, Mr. MacPherson has a contusion over his left ear from a blow to the head that resulted in a fractured skull and subsequent brain swelling. That’s why when the medics tried treating him for carbon monoxide poisoning, he didn’t respond.”

“Wait,” I said. “Are you saying he didn’t die from carbon monoxide poisoning?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Rosemary said. “Carbon monoxide may have been a contributing factor, but the untreated brain injury would have been fatal anyway. His blood alcohol level was two point eight, more than three times the legal limit, and that was several hours after his death. No telling what it was earlier. Probably a good thing he was driving a wheelchair instead of a car.”

Ignoring Rosemary’s stab at black humor, I felt my heart racing in my chest. Mac hadn’t murdered Delilah. Someone else had killed them both. It was likely that Mac was already unconscious at the time he was rolled into the garage and someone turned on the engine. Unfortunately, the killer’s tap on the head had been more serious than he had intended. Instead of simply knocking Mac unconscious, the blow was the ultimate cause of death. As a consequence, the carbon monoxide window dressing hadn’t worked.

I took a deep breath. “Tell me about his hands.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Any gunshot residue?”

“Yes.”

I was thinking out loud. “So whoever shot Delilah then used the same gun, or a different one, to put gun residue on Mac’s hands, leaving him as her presumed killer.”

“That would be my call.”

“And when were the autopsies finished?”

“This afternoon. The first one, Detective Ainsworth’s, is date-stamped 2:55
P.M
. The second one is 4:46
P.M
.”

That meant Detectives Monford and Anderson had already known about this before they came to see me later in the afternoon. It also explained Anderson’s comment about my having an airtight alibi. And the fact that no one had mentioned that it was now a double homicide to the media meant that they were using that as a holdback. Maybe they didn’t want to cause public panic in the previously homicide-safe streets of Sammamish by letting them know that there was now a multiple murderer loose in their fair city. Or maybe there was something else at work.

“Rosemary, thank you,” I said. “I owe you big-time on this one.”

“You’re welcome,” she replied. “You and Mel can take me to lunch sometime, but I’m guessing it won’t make it any easier for you to sleep tonight.”

“No, it won’t,” I agreed, “but you’ve given me a lot more to think about.”

“By the way,” Rosemary added, “what was the case you and Delilah were working, the cold one?”

“Her name was Monica Wellington. She died in 1973. She was a freshman at the University of Washington at the time she was killed. She went out on a date with an unknown individual on a Friday night in late March and turned up dead in a barrel two days later. At the time of her death, Monica was pregnant. That aspect of the case was never made public, but the troubling thing is that no boyfriend ever came forward.”

“You’re thinking the baby’s father might have been involved?”

“It’s a good bet, but we never found him. My new partner and I worked the case off and on for a couple of years, but with no new leads it ended up going cold. Sometime in 1981, the homicide was officially deemed closed, although I have no memory of when or how that happened. Seattle PD didn’t have a Cold Case squad back then, but regardless of who closed it, I should have thought I would have been notified, since I had been assigned to that case originally. Somehow, though, in the process of transferring the evidence from the evidence locker to the closed case warehouse, it disappeared.”

“The whole box?”

“Yes, the whole thing.”

“And you’re thinking what?”

“That it was taken by someone with something to hide. That’s the premise Delilah Ainsworth and I were working on when she was killed.”

“Where did the Wellington homicide happen?” Rosemary asked. “Here in King County?”

“Yes. In Seattle.”

“I’ll look into it,” she volunteered. “See if there’s still something here, although with a case that old, I don’t hold out much hope.”

I didn’t, either. I suspected that whoever had removed the physical evidence from Seattle PD would have been thorough about it and would have cleared out any remaining evidence in the M.E.’s office as well. But still, it was another reason to be glad people like Rosemary Mellon existed.

“Thanks,” I said. “Let me know if you find anything.”

I ended the call and then scrolled through my contact list until I found the number for the gun guys at the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. They were another department that worked round the clock, and I wasn’t disappointed when what sounded like a real newbie answered the phone. That made sense. Newest techs draw the worst shift.

“This is J. P. Beaumont of the Special Homicide Investigation Team,” I said. I made some effort in putting on an official tone, hoping that I sounded more like a guy sitting at a desk in the middle of the night than a post-op knee-replacement patient in his bed. “To whom am I speaking?”

“This is Gerald,” the guy answered. “Gerald Spaulding. What can I do for you, Mr. Beaumont?”

Most of the folks at the crime lab know me as J.P., so I was right. Gerald was somebody new. Since he didn’t know me from Adam, Spaulding should have asked for more identification than just my name, but he didn’t. He sounded both young and nervous. I wondered if he was really working, or if he was whiling away the long hours of his shift by playing solitaire.

“I’m calling about the bullets taken from the crime scene in Sammamish earlier today,” I told him. “Can you give me any information on where you are with those?”

Using the term “bullets,” plural, was a calculated risk. The crime scene guys had no doubt found the bullet that had killed Delilah. What I was wondering was if anyone had gone back to the house to look for a second bullet from the gunshot that had put the gun residue on Mac MacPherson’s hands. If I were a betting man, I would have said they’d find it in the garage, buried out of sight in a wall somewhere.

“Just a second,” Gerald said. “Let me put you on hold.”

It was regular hold, the kind that comes complete with awful music as well as with the intermittent and unavoidable “your call is important” announcements. Eventually, Gerald came back on the line.

“They’re both .45 caliber slugs,” he said. “We won’t be doing the comparison analysis until tomorrow. The second one, the one they dug out of the Sheetrock, came into the lab just a little while ago. From the looks of it, the slug went through the wallboard and also hit a stud. It’s pretty distorted.”

Bingo! “Where was it?” I asked. “Just out of curiosity.”

“In the garage. It was hidden behind one of those rolling tool chests. It must have taken a while to find it because, like I said, it only came in a couple of hours ago. Do you need anything else?”

“No, Gerald,” I told him. “That’s all I need for now. You’ve been a big help.”

I ended the call, thinking, one killer. Two murders. And both of them were on me.

I was lying there thinking about what the next step should be when I fell asleep. I awoke to find daylight pouring into the room. Marge Herndon was standing beside my bed with her hands on her hips and a scowl on her face.

“What the hell were you thinking?” she demanded. “What part of ‘one elevator ride away’ don’t you understand?”

“I needed to use the bathroom,” I said. “The walker was right there. I was able to manage on my own.”

“Well, pin a rose on you!” she said. “What the hell do you need me around for then? I suppose you’ll just hobble your own self right out to the kitchen and make your own damned breakfast?”

“No,” I said. “Really. I’m sorry. I do need you. And that pork chop was magnificent. Thank you.”

“Don’t think flattery is going to get you anywhere with me,” she sniffed. “It won’t work. And since you’re feeling so chipper, we’re going to make use of that brand-new plastic chair in your shower. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s pretty ripe around here.”

I could see that arguing with the woman was futile, so I didn’t bother. I allowed her to help me out of bed and into my bathroom. There, she stripped me down in a fiercely businesslike manner that successfully stripped me of any embarrassment as well. As far as she was concerned, this was a job, one she had done countless times before, and that’s all it was to her. If I was going to be shy about it, then it was clearly my problem, not hers. Once I was naked as a jaybird, she wrapped both my knees in an impenetrable sheath of plastic, turned on the water, and told me to sit on the plastic chair and get with the program. I would be lying if I said the hot water and soap didn’t feel wonderful. And, although I hate to admit it, so did the plastic chair.

When I was done, Marge was waiting there with walker, towel, and robe in hand. “I found a tracksuit in your closet,” she said. “I laid that out for you to wear. It’ll be easier to get in and out of than regular clothes. And you need to be ready. By the time you have some breakfast, the visiting physical therapist should be here.”

I was going to object, but I didn’t. For physical therapy, a tracksuit was probably fine. But for the rest of the day, considering what I had in mind, it would be time for a clean shirt, a regular suit, and a tie.