Second Watch (20 page)

Brian Ainsworth thought about that for a time and then he nodded. “All right,” he said. “If you want to be an honorary pallbearer, you’ve got it. When the funeral director comes, I’ll put your name in the program. Do you have any idea where Crown Hill Baptist is?”

“I grew up in Ballard,” I told him. “I’m sure it’s not that hard to find.”

“You should probably be at the church by about one or so.”

Someone else rang the doorbell. “That’s probably the funeral director now,” Brian said. “He said he’d be here today.”

I stood up and offered my hand. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” Brian murmured.

I might have said more or mentioned that I had lost not one but two wives, but that didn’t seem appropriate. Instead, I made my way to the front door to show myself out. The guy standing there, with his finger poised to press the doorbell again, screamed funeral director from the top of his perfectly coiffed head to the tips of his highly polished shoes.

“Mr. Ainsworth?” he asked as I came out.

“No,” I said, stepping around him on my way to the steps. “Mr. Ainsworth is just inside.”

CHAPTER 16

I
have no doubt Marge was smoking up a storm in the car the whole time I was inside the house. When I got back into the Accord, it reeked. The ashtray that had been full to overflowing before I left the car was even worse now, but I was glad Marge hadn’t dumped it out in front of the flowers and flags lining Brian Ainsworth’s front yard. I rolled down my window to let some of the smoke dissipate but also unleashed another mini dust storm of ash. Luckily for Marge my years in AA have left me a lot more tolerant toward smokers than a lot of Seattleites would be.

“Where to?” Marge wanted to know.

Between the PT and the emotional meeting with Delilah’s bereaved husband, I was feeling as though I’d been put through a wringer. For some perverse reason, I said, “Home, James, please, and don’t spare the horses.”

“I’m your nurse, not your chauffeur,” Marge pointed out sourly.

And utterly devoid of humor,
I thought.

We sped back down Aurora and whipped into the garage on P-1. Upstairs, I eased myself into the recliner while Marge brought the next set of meds and some more string cheese.

“I’m hoping you don’t expect me to spend the rest of the day standing around and watching you snooze in that chair,” Marge said. “Is there anything you need me to do?”

It took a minute for me to think of something, but I did. I had left the hospital with two ongoing searches. So far, I had done what I could to locate Delilah Ainsworth’s killer, but I had done nothing at all about finding Doug Davis’s fiancée.

“Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, there is something you could do. Down on P-1, next to the elevator, is a door that leads into the storage units. The building key—the one that opens the elevator lobby—opens the first door. The matching unit number key opens the individual storage rooms. I’d like you to go down there and find a box for me. It’s a banker’s box, and I think it’s on one of the lower shelves.”

“How will I know which one I’m looking for?”

“I’m pretty sure I wrote ‘My Stuff’ on the outside.”

“How original,” Marge observed, but without any further discussion, she grabbed the key ring and set off.

A few minutes later, I had barely dozed off when my phone rang. Caller ID said
Rosemary Mellon, mobile.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

“In the world of tit for tat, I believe you owe me,” she answered.

“Why? What have you found?”

“Whoever hijacked your evidence box must not have had enough horses to put in the same fix here. I found some tissue samples hidden away in evidence storage.”

“What kind of tissue samples?”

“Two separate kinds—from under Monica’s fingernails and from her fetus, both,” Rosemary answered.

“Enough to do DNA testing?”

“I expect so, and I’ll be working on that tonight, as soon as I go back to the lab. There was no such thing as DNA profiling in 1981. Given the fact that the tissue samples have been on ice this whole time, I’m thinking I may be able to pull this one out of the hat and identify your killer for you.”

“You’re right. If you can do that, dinner is definitely on me. Your choice. How long will it take?”

“Five to ten days,” Rosemary answered, “that’s if the crime lab isn’t already overloaded with something else. Which they usually are.”

I happened to have two aces in the hole on that score. One was Ron Peters, who had a murdered police detective on his hands, and the other was Attorney General Ross Connors, the same guy who had rushed through the tox screen results for Mel on the dead protester in Bellingham. Between the two, my money was on Ross. The problem was, I wasn’t supposed to be working.

“Thanks,” I said. “Let me see what I can do to get that testing moved to the head of the line. And in the meantime,” I added, thinking of Delilah Ainsworth, “be careful.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m pretty sure working on this case is what got Detective Ainsworth killed,” I cautioned.

Rosemary thought about that for a moment. “Well,” she said, finally, “as far as I can tell, only two people have any idea I’m working on this. If you promise to keep it quiet, I’ll do the same.”

“Fair enough,” I told her.

Just then I heard the key in the lock and voices in the hallway. Mel and Marge had somehow connected with each other in either the garage or the elevator. From the chatty quality of their animated conversation, they had already managed to become pals. That was potentially bad news for me, but right that moment, between my pain meds kicking in and the news from Rosemary Mellon, I was feeling so euphoric that nothing could rain on my parade.

“So here’s the girl who singlehandedly saved the city of Bellingham?”

“I’m the one.” Mel grinned as she kissed me hello. “As for you? You look remarkably comfortable.”

“I am. It’s great to be home.”

“You’re telling me? My first priority is a visit to my shower. The hotel shower was so low on water flow that I could barely rinse the shampoo out of my hair. And I didn’t like the hotel shampoo, either.”

She grabbed the oddball collection of luggage and bags that had served her on her TDY stint in Bellingham. Meanwhile, Marge dropped a dusty banker’s box at my feet before straightening up and giving me her usual hands-on-hips glare.

“Well,” she said, “I suppose now that the missus is home, you’ll be giving me my walking papers.”

I would have thought so, too. Except the condolence trip to Brian Ainsworth’s house had brought me face-to-face with what life would be like until I was once again able to drive myself. Without a driver, I’d be totally dependent on Mel. And even if she took some comp time off work, she’d still have to go to work eventually. Yes, I knew in advance that there were some real drawbacks in having Marge as a combination nurse/driver, but right that minute the good seemed to outweigh the bad even though her skills behind the wheel could be nothing less than hair-raising at times. She would give me some independence of movement that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like you to stay on for a while. Long enough for me to be cleared to drive again.”

Marge’s face brightened considerably. “Really?”

For the first time, it occurred to me that part of Marge’s general surliness might have something to do with the fact that she really needed the money.

“Yes,” I said. “Really.”

“Does fried chicken sound like a good idea for dinner?”

“Sounds good to me,” I said. “And I’m sure Mel would agree.”

“I’ll get started then,” she said. “I’ll get dinner ready to go on the table, then I’ll take off.”

While Marge headed for the kitchen, I turned my attention to the box. I knew what was inside—my past, or at least the part of my past that I kept at arm’s length most of the time. Most of what I found inside were things I had taken with me when Karen and I divorced. The top layer contained the kind of mementos that parents save forever.

The treasure trove included two Altoid boxes, designated by name, which contained Scott and Kelly’s respective collections of baby teeth. One layer was devoted to Scott’s scouting experiences—his Cub Scout cap, his Pinewood Derby car, and the sash covered with his collection of Boy Scout badges up to and including his Eagle. There were the two plaster-of-paris plaques containing tiny handprints that had come home from first grade. There were Christmas ornaments that included school pictures of toothless kids. The one of Kelly looked so much like Kayla that at first I wondered if I had somehow slipped one of my granddaughter’s photos into the mix.

Kelly’s part of the jumble included the programs for the various plays she had participated in both in grade school and in high school. In third grade she’d had a speaking part in a food group skit as a talking carrot. In high school, as a junior, she had done a star turn as the Old Lady in a production of
The Old Lady Shows Her Medals
. After that, I personally had thought she was headed for a university drama program. That, of course, was before she had dropped out of school during her senior year.

The kids’ part of my treasure trove took up half the box, and it was separated from the rest by a wall of yearbooks—four years of Ballard High School
Shingle
s. And at the very bottom, in an ancient cigar box, was the rest of the story.

First up was the faded velvet jewelry box that held the ring my father had given my mother. As a sailor during World War II, I’m sure that tiny solitaire diamond was all he could afford, and his unexpected death a few days later meant that the engagement ring was never accompanied by a wedding ring, not until the day I married Anne Corley in Myrtle Edwards Park down on Seattle’s waterfront.

Slipping it out of the box, I remembered how graciously Anne Corley had accepted it. Of course, she had been conning me for weeks. At the time she had allowed me to slip the ring on her finger, she must have known the jig was almost up. She had taken the ring without a murmur to seal the deal. When she died, I left the simple gold wedding band on her finger, but I had returned the engagement ring to its box and stowed it, out of sight, in the cigar box. Now, though, I slipped the velvet box into my pocket. Between now and Christmas, maybe I’d be able to find a jeweler who could use that tiny diamond to design a pendant for my granddaughter.

And then, at the very bottom of the cigar box, I found what had caused me to open the banker’s box in the first place—three jagged pieces of metal and my three aces of spades. I was holding the pieces of metal in my hands and studying them when Mel emerged from the shower. She was barefoot, wearing a robe, and had her wet hair wrapped in a towel. As I had been unloading the box, I had put the contents on a nearby hassock. She moved those aside and then sat down next to me.

“What are those?” she asked.

“Hold out your hand,” I told her. When she did so, I dropped the chunks of metal into her hand. “These are the three pieces of shrapnel that should have killed me on August 2, 1966,” I told her. “The only reason they didn’t is because of a guy from Bisbee, Arizona. He was our lieutenant. His name was Doug Davis. That’s what people in Bisbee called him, but for us in C Company, he was always Lennie D.”

Mel’s father is retired military. She knew that I had been in Vietnam, but we had never discussed it, not until that afternoon. I told her the whole story—about the aces of spades, and showed her the ones that were still in the cigar box. They had been stored away for all that time, but I knew that if I took them down to the crime lab, a capable latent fingerprint tech could probably still lift one of Lennie D.’s prints off the smooth cardboard surface.

And finally, I told her about Doug’s dreamscape appearance.

“So what does this all mean?” Mel asked when I finished.

“I think he wanted me to let Bonnie know how much he loved her.”

“Wait,” Mel said. “This was only a dream. I mean, that other dream situation has already caused no end of trouble. What if you end up tracking Bonnie MacLean down and she doesn’t want to be reminded of what happened back in 1966? She’s had a whole lifetime to put it to rest. Why should you bring it all back up?”

“Because it’s unfinished business,” I said. “Why did Doug show up in my dream now, after all these years? Guilty conscience, most likely, for my not doing what I should have done back then. I came back home, married Karen, and got on with my life. I put the metal pieces away. I put the cards away. What I really should have done at the time was track that poor girl down. I should have thanked her and told her what he did for me. Instead, I buried it. Forgot about it. And I’ve always been ashamed of that. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never visited the wall in Washington. It’s one of the reasons I never show up at any of the reunions.”

“What reunions?” Mel asked.

“The Thirty-fifth Infantry has multiwar reunions every year. I’ve never gone to any of them. I opened the first invitation maybe, but that’s about it. Ever since, the envelopes go straight into the round file. If that’s not a sign of a guilty conscience, I don’t know what is.”

Mel was quiet for a long time after I finished. The sun was going down, turning Puget Sound into a blinding slate of glimmering silver. Mel’s hair had dried enough that the towel had slipped off, leaving behind a charming tangle of damp blond tendrils.

“Well then,” she said finally, “I suppose we’d better see what we can do to find her.”

Mel got up to go finish drying her hair, while I started scooping everything but the shrapnel and the playing cards back into the banker’s box. I had the lid back on the box when Marge came into the den.

“All right,” she said. “Dinner’s in the warming oven.” I knew we had a warming oven in the kitchen, but to my knowledge Mel and I had used it only as a handy junk drawer.

“I’ve laid out your evening pills,” Marge added. “I found some egg cups to put them in. The ones that are on the table you should take with dinner. The ones on the counter you should take with food at bedtime. And remember, I really am only an elevator ride away.”

With that, Marge left the room, stomping away in her heavy-footed fashion. I called my thanks after her, but she didn’t wait around long enough to hear me.

Mel came out minutes later, wearing a pair of pj’s I’d given her for her birthday. She paused in the doorway and sniffed the air. “What smells so good?”

“That would be dinner,” I told her. “It’s in the warming oven. How about if we eat it now while it’s fresh?”

Mel reached out a hand to help me up and out of the chair. I think she was a little surprised to see that, with the help of the walker, I was capable of getting myself up and down. I wasn’t much help with setting the table, however. While she did that, she asked about my visit with Brian Ainsworth.

“Whoever did it, you’re calling them out, aren’t you?” Mel said when I told her about my request to be an honorary pallbearer at Delilah’s funeral. “What you’re saying is that, in a service that won’t include the usual fallen-officer police presence, you intend to be front and center.”

“That’s right. I want Delilah’s killer to know that she and I were working the Monica Wellington case together. Whether she died because of Monica’s homicide or because of the promotion situation, I want the killer to be under the impression that whatever Delilah knew, I know. Eventually word is going to get out that Delilah’s death was a double homicide.”