Second Watch (24 page)

She nodded and disappeared back inside.

“My wife,” he explained. “She knows about all this. My kids don’t. As far as they’re concerned, Howard Clark is their grandpa. Why screw that up?”

Why indeed?

“So what do you want from me?” he asked. “Why are you here?”

“A few days ago a decision was made to reopen the Monica Wellington homicide,” I said. “As soon as we did so, we discovered some irregularities in the handling of the evidence in that case. Since then, Seattle PD homicide detective Delilah Ainsworth, the investigator who was assigned to work that case, has been murdered, and so has the guy who was my partner back at the time of the original homicide.”

“The guy who came to the school to interview us?”

“No, Mac MacPherson. On that Sunday Mac and I were still working patrol, and we were the ones who took the call when you and Donnie reported finding the barrel. We’re the ones who picked the two of you up down by the waterfront before you took us back to the barrel.”

“Two more people are dead?” Frank asked.

I nodded. “Because of the mishandling of the evidence, we have reason to believe that the person we’re looking for is also a police officer. Based on what you’ve told us, I think we’re all looking for the same guy—the one who threatened you. Can you tell us his name?”

Frank shook his head. “No idea,” he said. “When our mother had company, she made sure Donnie and I didn’t hang around. All I can remember is that he was a big guy, with dark hair. That’s all—that and the gun in his hand. That’s something I’ll never forget. I wish I knew more, but I don’t.”

I used the canes to lever myself upright. “You’ve already been a big help,” I told him. “If the guy we’re looking for was assigned to Mayor DonLeavy, we’ll be able to find his name.”

“Is all this going to have to come out?” Frank asked. “My mother turned her life around. She and Howard have been pillars of this community for years. They’ve been good parents. I’d hate to think that their names would have to be dragged through the mud . . .”

“Mr. Clark,” I said. “I’d like you to take a moment to think about the dead girl’s family—about Monica Wellington’s family.”

“What about them?”

“There’s a good chance that the guy who killed her is the same guy who victimized you and your brother. Probably even your mother as well.”

“So?”

“This is a guy who has gotten away with murder for the better part of four decades while you’re still afraid of him and while Monica’s family is still waiting for answers. If there was a chance that your testimony would put this guy away for murdering Monica Wellington all those years ago, what do you think your mother would want you to do? What would both your parents—the real people here in Yakima who raised you—want you to do?”

“No question,” Frank said. “They’d want me to come forward.”

I nodded. “That’s what I thought. If there’s any way we can do this without calling on you for help, we will. But if you’re our last hope, we’ll be back.”

“All right,” Frank said, but he didn’t sound entirely convinced.

“One last question,” I said. “How old were you when your mother and Howard got back together—ten or so?”

“Eleven,” Frank answered.

“And in all the intervening years, there had never been any connection between them?”

“Not as far as I know. After Mom and Howard broke up, he evidently married someone else, but that marriage ended in divorce or maybe an annulment. I’m not sure which. All I know is, one day, the week after all this happened, the doorbell rang and here was this guy I’d never seen before standing there on the front porch. ‘I’m looking for Amelia Dodd,’ he said. ‘Tell her Howard’s here. I’ve come to take her home.’ ”

“And that’s all there was to it?”

“As far as I know. They took up together as though the years they’d been apart had never happened,” Frank said. “Howard treated my mother like gold. She couldn’t have been happier.”

“She had you and Donnie to thank for that,” I said.

Frank looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

“Think about it,” I said. “When you and your brother did the right thing by calling in the report, you also called the killer’s bluff, but he probably didn’t let it go at that.”

Frank frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Yes, he had threatened you, but he wasn’t sure you’d keep your end of the bargain. I’m betting he put the screws to your mother, too. He backed her far enough into a corner that she had to go looking for help. Luckily for all of you that Howard Clark is the guy she called.”

Frank seemed stunned. “That never occurred to me,” he said. “Never.”

“Well, it makes perfect sense to me. And if we need your help, we’ll have it, right?”

“Right,” Frank agreed. “Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do.”

CHAPTER 20

M
el and I didn’t say another word until we were back in her Cayman and headed for Seattle. “You didn’t exactly go easy on him,” she said.

“If we need his help, I wanted to know we could count on it.”

“What do we do now?” she asked. “Take another spin through HR?”

Sometimes I forget that Mel is a relative newcomer on the Seattle scene. She doesn’t have the local history drummed into her head the way I do.

“No need,” I said. “We’ve got a whole lot better source for information than that.”

I already had my phone out and was speed-dialing Ross Connors’s home number. Long before Ross became the Washington state attorney general, long before he became the King County prosecutor, he had been fresh out of law school and had gone to work as a lowly newbie in the same prosecutor’s office he would one day use to pole-vault himself to statewide office.

Ross had already made something of a name for himself in the prosecutor’s office by the time I signed on with Seattle PD. I remembered clearly enough that Ross and DonLeavy had always been on opposite sides of the political divide and that Ross had made some of his prosecutorial bones by bringing down members of former Mayor DonLeavy’s tarnished administration. I had no doubt that Ross Connors would know who did what to whom back then. He might even be able to supply a few important whys.

When Ross came on the line, I could hear the same television background noise that had been playing at Frank Clark’s house. It was a year when Mariners fans were coming out of the woodwork.

“Hey, Beau,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Who’s ahead?” I asked.

“Mariners are up one in the bottom of the eighth. What’s going on with you?”

“I’d like to take you back a couple of years and ask a few questions.”

“Don’t know how much I’ll remember, but ask away.”

“What’s the first word that comes to mind when I mention the name Daniel DonLeavy?”

“Scumbag,” Ross replied without having to pause for reflection. “Crook. Got what he deserved. Why? What do you want to know?”

“Mel and I are working on a lead in the Monica Wellington case. We’ve got a witness who says there was a cop involved, maybe someone from Seattle PD who might have been assigned to chauffeur Mayor Daniel DonLeavy around town, functioning as your basic driver/bodyguard. Do you have any idea who that might have been?”

“Nobody was assigned to the mayor as a bodyguard,” Ross said at once. “Certainly not on an official basis, but if you want to know who would have been chumming around with him back then, I know exactly who that would have been—Kenny Adcock.”

“You mean the guy who ended up as chief of police? You mean that Kenny Adcock?”

What I didn’t say aloud but what I was remembering was being in that conference room with Pickles Gurkey all those years ago and being told to back off on the Monica Wellington case because it was a lost cause. And who was the guy who had told us that? None other than Kenneth Adcock. I couldn’t help it. My adrenaline kicked in. We were finally getting somewhere. We were on the right track.

“One and the same,” Ross replied. “He and Dan DonLeavy went to O’Dea together, and the two of them were always great pals. Played football together. Drank together. Screwed around together. Played the horses. Rose through the ranks together—Kenny at Seattle PD and DonLeavy on the city council. By the time DonLeavy was mayor and Adcock was chief of police, they were a pair to be reckoned with. I kept hoping that when we took DonLeavy down, we’d be able to find something to tie Adcock into his dirty dealings, too. Unfortunately, if there ever was a smoking gun to link Adcock to DonLeavy’s shenanigans, we never found it.”

“Mel and I may have one now,” I said. “We have a witness who claims the guy driving DonLeavy around is the same guy who dumped that barrel with Monica Wellington’s body in it down Magnolia Bluff all those years ago.”

“That’s great,” Ross said. “Unfortunately, you’ll never make it stick.”

“Why not?”

“Because Kenneth Adcock is dead!” Ross exclaimed. “He died in a deep-sea diving accident somewhere off the Bahamas back in the early eighties, a couple of years after he retired.”

I had been so sure we were getting somewhere with the case that Ross’s statement took my breath away.

“Kenneth Adcock is dead?” I repeated. “You say it happened in the early eighties? How come I don’t remember anything about it?”

“He and Faye were off on a second honeymoon,” Ross explained. “He had drawn up a will that specified his not wanting any kind of funeral. He said he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at sea. Since it would have cost a fortune to bring the body home, that’s what Faye did. He was buried at sea.”

“It must have been kept a long way under the radar,” I suggested. “I don’t remember it at all.”

Of course, back then, I was doing a lot of drinking and it’s possible that any number of things passed under my personal radar without my taking any notice.

“I seem to recall that it wasn’t given a lot of press,” Ross agreed. “That was partly due to the family’s wishes, but I have to believe Seattle PD was on the same page as far as that was concerned. DonLeavy was still in prison, and given Kenny’s connections to the previous administration, I suspect Seattle PD was more than happy that there was so little fuss. Not having to stage a fallen-officer memorial would have let them off the hook in a big way.”

“So what’s his wife’s name again? Did you say Faye?”

“Yes. As near as I can remember, Faye was her name. She was his second wife as opposed to his starter wife, and it was a mixed marriage, too. Of course, Anglo/Asian marriages raised a lot more eyebrows back then than they do now. As I recall, Faye was a tiny little thing, but a real looker.”

“If Adcock died that long ago, has his widow remarried?”

“No idea, although I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she has. I think there was a son.”

“Do you know his name?”

“Nope, he’d probably be in his late fifties by now. I think he was one of those early tech guys who ended up being one of the first or second groups of Microsofties. He’s probably worth millions.”

“I’m sure his father would be proud,” I said.

“Anything else?” Ross asked. “I’d like to get back to my game.”

The phone had been on speaker. I looked at Mel. “Do you have any questions?”

“Not at the moment,” she said. Then she shouted, “Go Mariners.”

Ross laughed, and we ended the call. “What do you think?” I asked.

Mel shook her head. “The whole thing is giving me a headache. We don’t know for sure that Kenneth Adcock was the guy driving Mayor DonLeavy to and from his assignations with Frank Clark’s mother. So that’s probably something we should do right away—put together a photo montage that includes pictures of both the mayor himself and of Kenneth Adcock.”

I opened my iPad and typed in a note.

“Did I understand Ross to say that Adcock was chief of police for a while?”

“Not for very long,” I answered. “He was too political, and once DonLeavy was gone, people were gunning for him. He put in his twenty and left. What I do remember about him for sure is that he’s the guy who told Pickles Gurkey and me to back off on the Monica Wellington case. He’s the one who pressed the pedal to the metal on the theory that Ted Bundy was responsible for her murder.”

“One he himself may have committed,” Mel mused.

I nodded. I almost called what Adcock had done an “old Indian trick.” Then, thinking about Delilah, I didn’t.

“As chief, he would have had access to the evidence room. He might also have been able to tamper with the microfiche process,” Mel theorized. “I’m guessing the evidence has been gone that long—that it disappeared about the same time the Wellington case was deemed closed, but that doesn’t explain who killed Mac MacPherson and Delilah Ainsworth.”

I nodded. I had arrived at the same conclusion. “So if Adcock is long dead, who still has an ax to grind in all this? How could she or he possibly know that the case was being reopened, and why would that be a threat?”

“Who all would know at Seattle PD?” Mel asked.

“Ron Peters,” I answered. “He’s the one who put Detective Ainsworth on the case. The other Seattle PD people involved would be whoever was working in the evidence room when Delilah went looking for the evidence and whoever helped her locate the right microfiche file.”

“We’re talking about clerical staff here,” Mel objected. “Delilah was a homicide investigator. There’s no way she’d go spilling the beans to them about what she was working on. I can’t imagine that she’d be standing around there blabbing about going out to question Mac MacPherson to someone like that.”

I could see where Mel was going as she finished her thought.

“But she had already been to see Mac once,” I commented. “We know that because he called me and raised hell about it.”

“So that’s the question, then, isn’t it,” Mel said. “Who else did he call besides you?”

It made such perfect sense, I was surprised I hadn’t seen it before. I had been so busy trying to figure out who it was in Seattle PD who had been ratting us out on the investigation that it never occurred to me that it might have been one of the victims himself, Mac MacPherson.

By then I was already scrolling through my notes looking for a phone number for King County Homicide detective Hugo Monford.

“Monford,” he said when he picked up.

I could hear a TV set blaring in the background, but this sounded more like
Monday Night Football
than baseball. With Delilah Ainsworth dead, I would have been a lot happier thinking he was out busting his balls looking for her killer, but maybe that’s just me.

“J. P. Beaumont here,” I told him, striving to keep my tone pleasant and nonconfrontational. “You and your partner came by to see me the other day.”

My days seemed to be running together. I wasn’t sure if it was the previous day or the day before that.

“What can I do for you?” Monford said.

“Have you ordered up Rory MacPherson’s phone records yet?”

“We need a warrant for that, and we’ll most likely have one in hand tomorrow. But really, Mr. Beaumont, this is our case, and if I feel you’re interfering with it in any way, I will be lodging a formal complaint.”

Let’s see. The King County sheriff up against the Washington State attorney general? That kind of one-on-one might be fun to watch, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near a fair fight.

“Nice talking to you, Detective Monford,” I said. “Enjoy the game.” By that I meant both of them—the game he was watching and the one I was about to start.

I redialed Ross Connors’s number. “Mel just had a brainstorm,” I told him. “How hard would it be for you to get a warrant to open up Mac MacPherson’s phone records?”

“The dead guy’s phone records?” he said. “That shouldn’t be hard. Why?”

“Because we need them. I just got off the phone with Detective Monford of the King County Sheriff’s Department. He thinks he’ll have a warrant to get the phone records tomorrow. I’d like them a little sooner than that if at all possible.”

“You think it’s going to help point the finger at Ken Adcock?”

“Since he’s dead, I don’t see how that’s possible,” I said. “But there is a connection. Back when Monica Wellington’s body was found, Adcock threatened two little kids. He told them that if they let on to anyone about seeing him with the barrel, something bad was going to happen to them or to their mother. One way or another, I think this all comes back to that.”

“Then your wish is my command,” Ross said. “I always wanted to nail that jerk. Now that the ball game is over, I’ll get on it right away.”

“Who won?” I asked.

“Who do you think?” he said glumly. “It sure as hell wasn’t the Mariners.”