Second Watch (3 page)

I found myself staring at the dead woman—what I could see of her, at least. She lay sprawled facedown on the weedy hillside, half in and half out of the barrel. A tangle of what looked like shoulder-length blond hair spilled out over the ground. A moment later, something red caught my eye, sticking out through the layer of greasy slurry. At first I thought what I was seeing was blood spatter, but that wasn’t possible. Clearly the woman had been dead for some time. Once blood is exposed to the air, it oxidizes and goes from red to muddy brown. This was definitely red. Bright red. Scarlet. Inhaling a lungful of smoke, I moved a step or two closer to get a better look.

What I was seeing, of course, was nothing but tiny little patches of bright red nail polish glowing in the sunlight. And that was the single detail that stayed with me from that crime scene—the nail polish. Wanting to look pretty for someone, the victim had gone to the trouble of having a manicure, or else she had given herself one. Had she been going to a dance or a party, maybe? Had she been out on the town for a night of fun?

Whatever it was, when she’d done her nails, she hadn’t expected to be dead soon, or that the vivid red nail polish would be the only thing she’d be wearing when someone found her body.

CHAPTER 3

J
onas! Jonas. You really do need to wake up now.”

That’s my name—Jonas Piedmont Beaumont—but other than my mother and grandmother, both deceased now, almost no one calls me that—at least no one who actually knows me. I’m J.P., or Beau, or sweetie pie, or Mr. B. as far as Mel is concerned. I’m Dad for my kids and Grandpa for the grandkids. As a consequence, I wasn’t exactly eager to wake up and see who was yelling Jonas somewhere near my left ear.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that the person behind the very loud voice was short and very stout. I was no longer at the base of Magnolia Bluff, dealing with a dead body and a crime scene. Instead, I was in a brightly lit hospital room with someone shaking my shoulder insistently.

“There you are!”

I was momentarily confused, but the woman, another nurse in scrubs, soon set me straight.

“This is called the recovery room,” she announced with a smile. “No more sleeping. I brought you some beef broth. Would you like to try it?” She handed me a paper cup filled with steaming liquid, but my nose was still full of the smell of death. My gag reflex cut in, and I almost barfed.

“Oops,” the nurse said, taking back the cup. “Looks like it’s too soon for that, then. We’ll try the broth a little later.”

Somewhere along the way I must have fallen asleep again. It was hard to differentiate how much was dream and how much was memory, although I didn’t remember any other time when I’d had a dream that came complete with smells. I lay there for a time. While the room bustled around me, I struggled to put the pieces together. I understood that the girl who had appeared to me earlier, the one with the bright red fingernail polish, was Monica Wellington—the Girl in the Barrel—although at the time, the dead girl was a body without a name.

From my hospital bed in 2010, that case from 1973 seemed to be a very long time ago, but all of it was filed away in my memory bank. On that Sunday afternoon, it wasn’t my case right then because at the time I had been assigned to Patrol rather than Homicide.

I remembered that I had turned away from the body and stubbed out my half-finished smoke, then pocketed what was left and gone back to the patrol car, where Mac and the two boys were awaiting the arrival of reinforcements. Surprisingly enough, Dr. Howard Baker, King County’s newly appointed medical examiner, beat everyone else to the scene.

Even then, Doc Baker arrived at crime scenes reeking of cigar smoke and with a rumpled look that resembled an unmade bed. He always favored gaudy ties and tweedy jackets that never quite buttoned around his ample middle. In later years his hair would go completely white, but back then it was rapidly going from brown to gunmetal gray, and he wore it in a scraggly crew cut. Whole new generations of weather guys have to use hair gel to achieve that kind of spiky look. Doc Baker came by his naturally.

“What have we got?” he asked.

Mac stepped out of the driver’s seat to do the honors. “Down there,” he said, pointing. “That’s where the body is—in that barrel down there. These two kids claim they found the barrel farther up the hill and rolled it down to where it is now.”

Before Doc Baker could do anything other than look, Detectives Larry Powell and Watty Watkins showed up. Watty was ten years my senior. He’d been a detective for five years, but his knees were giving out, and he was angling for a desk job. Powell was ambitious. Everybody had him pegged for being on a fast track for assistant chief, but right then they were still equals, and they’d been partners for as long as I had been on the force.

Once Mac had briefed the new arrivals on the situation, Detective Powell took charge. He looked into the car where Donnie and Frankie were still waiting. “Can you show us where you found the barrel?”

Donnie or Frankie nodded. “Okay, then,” Powell said, looking down the steep hillside to the spot where the barrel had come to rest. “Mac, you and Watty take the boys up onto the bluff to show you what’s presumably the crime scene. I want you to locate it, and that’s all. We’ll need to process the scene, and I don’t want it disturbed by a bunch of people tramping around in it. After that, Watty can take the boys’ statements and then drop them off at home. In the meantime, Officer Beaumont, you’re with me.”

Powell probably picked the Beaumont part off my name badge. Even so, I was still new enough on the job that I was gratified to think one of the Homicide guys knew me by name. As soon as Mac and Watty drove off and we started down the hill, Powell clarified the situation and put me in my place.

“Watty’s knees are giving him hell,” he muttered. “Climbing up and down something this steep would kill him.”

At the time, the idea of my ever having bad knees myself was inconceivable, but if Watty’s failing joints gave me a chance to work with Larry Powell, one of Homicide’s hotshots, who was I to complain? After all, that was where I hoped I’d be going eventually—to Homicide. When it came time to make the move, having someone like Powell in my corner wouldn’t hurt a bit.

So I trotted down the hillside after him, determined to make myself useful. Minutes earlier the circling flock of crows had been the only visible scavengers at the scene. That had changed. The crows were now duking it out with an equally noisy flock of seagulls, but the flies had turned up as well. Somewhere in the fly world, the dinner bell had rung, and the troops had arrived en masse for the promised feast. A black cloud of them had appeared from out of nowhere. They swarmed around the barrel and its spilled contents.

With his evil-smelling stogie gripped between his teeth, Doc Baker waded into the mess to do his preliminary assessment. Once Powell and I came to a standstill behind him, I reached for my half-smoked cigarette. Seeing it, Powell gave a warning shake of his head.

“No smoking,” he said.

“What about Doc Baker’s cigar?” I asked, regretting the words as soon as I said them.

“Doc Baker’s not my problem,” Detective Powell said pointedly. “You are.”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small camera along with several rolls of film, and handed them over. “You’re in charge of photos,” he added. “Now make yourself useful.”

I did as I was told and went about snapping one picture after another.

Eventually the M.E.’s beefy helpers turned up with their gurney. By then it was clear that the only thing in the barrel besides the body was the rest of the grease. The victim was naked. There was no clothing and no identification, so the investigation’s first problem was going to be identifying who she was. As the M.E.’s assistants wrestled the dead woman into a body bag for transport, Powell motioned to me.

“Let’s work our way up the hill.”

Spotting the track was easy enough, even if climbing the hill to follow it was not. The rolling barrel had left a clear path as it careened down the hill. In the process it had torn through thickets of blackberries and left a trail of flattened ferns and broken sprigs of grass along with slick patches of slimy spilled grease. Gravity had worked for the barrel on the steep hillside, but it worked against us. So did the thick tangles of blackberries. If you’ve ever hiked through blackberry brambles, you know climbing uphill through them isn’t exactly a stroll in the park.

The sun was almost gone by the time we finally made it to the spot where Donnie and Frankie had found the barrel hung up on a bramble and pried off the lid. The lid was still there, and so was the stick the two boys claimed they had used to unleash what turned out to be their own private nightmare.

“Poor kids,” Detective Powell muttered. “They had no idea what they were letting themselves in for.”

By then enough time had passed that it was going on full dark. I was using the flash to take a few more photos when Mac came roaring down the hill with Detective Watkins limping along behind him.

“Are you about done?” Mac asked. “I’m parked up there,” he added, pointing toward the top of the bluff.

“Did you see anything important?” Powell asked.

Mac shook his head. “There’s a vacant house up there. It looks like the barrel started down the hill right at the end of the driveway.”

“Any vehicle tracks?” Powell wanted to know.

Mac shook his head. “No such luck,” he answered. “Asphalt.”

I looked to Detective Powell for direction. “You two don’t have to stick around here,” he said. “I’ve called for lights and generators that should be here soon. In the meantime, I’d like you two to go back up and start canvassing the street. See if anyone noticed any unusual traffic coming or going from the house.”

Expecting to be unceremoniously sent back out on patrol, I was glad to be given another job to do. Once we clambered our way to the top of the hill, however, we had a nasty surprise waiting for us. Someone had alerted the media. A clutch of reporters, attracted by the flashes of the camera, stood waiting for us next to the patrol car. Among them was one of my least favorite people in the whole world, a cub reporter named Maxwell Cole.

As I mentioned before, Max and I had been fraternity brothers at the U-Dub. We had not been friends. We became even less so when he showed up at a dance with a very cute girl named Karen. Not only did I snag her away from him at the dance, I married her, too. Talk about adding insult to injury, and Max was still pissed about it. While I was off doing my duty in Vietnam, Max found a way to stay home. He had gone to work for the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
where he was now firmly ensconced on the police beat.

“Hey, Beau,” he said when he saw me. “What’s the deal down there? I understand some neighborhood kids found a dead woman. Can you confirm that?”

He made it sound like we were the best of pals. The other reporters in the group, thinking he had some kind of an in, backed off and gave him the floor. It did my heart good to tell him, along with the rest of his newsie gang, everything I was allowed to say, which was pretty much nothing.

“Sorry,” I said. “Can’t confirm or deny.”

Grimacing, Max went trudging after MacPherson, but Mac already knew there was no love lost between me and the
P-I
’s self-proclaimed ace reporter.

“You heard the man,” Mac said. “Mum’s the word. Check with the public information office.”

We got into our patrol car. Mac took off like a bat out of hell, and nobody bothered trying to follow us. If they had, they wouldn’t have had to go far, since we stopped again two blocks up the street, where Amherst Place West intersects with W. Plymouth Street.

“You take that side, I’ll take this one,” Mac said. “And you could just as well skip the house back there on the corner of Twenty-third. That’s where Donnie and Frankie live. Their mother was a screaming banshee when we brought the boys home. She threatened to tear those poor kids limb from limb when she found out they had been down on Pier Ninety-one instead of where she thought they were, safely stowed at a movie.”

“She was probably just worried about the boys messing around down by the railroad tracks,” I suggested.

Mac gave me a wink and a lip-smacking, lecherous grin. “Maybe so,” he said. “But I doubt it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think it had a lot more to do with Watty and me interrupting whatever it was she and her boyfriend were doing when we brought the boys home. From the looks of it, I’d say the two of them were getting it on pretty hot and heavy. The guys from Homicide are the ones making the big bucks. Since they’ll most likely have to talk with the boys again, why should we have to deal with a lady tiger?”

Why indeed? With that, Mac and I hit the bricks.

It was close to dinnertime. As expected, the warm April weather had brought out the early-bird outdoor cooks. Smoke from a dozen separate Weber grills filled the evening air on the southern end of Magnolia Bluff. Residents of Seattle recognized this early bit of faux summer, the exact opposite of Indian summer, for what it was. Soon the sunshine and dry weather would be gone, not to return until sometime in early July. The people we dragged in from their backyard activities weren’t especially welcoming or eager to talk to us. Other than using up some shoe leather, we gained precious little information in the process.

The house where the barrel’s track originated had been vacant for several months, caught up in the midst of a rancorous divorce. One neighbor mentioned that she thought a sale was now pending, even though the real estate sign in the front yard didn’t mention that. No one had noticed any unusual activity around the house in the past several days, although the same neighbor, a Mrs. Jerome Fisk, said she thought some of the neighborhood kids had been hanging around in the backyard of the vacant house and using it as a hideout for smoking cigarettes.

“I didn’t turn them in for it, though,” she told me. “Those poor boys have a tough enough row to hoe. I didn’t want to add to their troubles.”

“You’re saying what exactly?” I asked.

“Their mother, you know,” Mrs. Fisk added confidentially. “Amelia Dodd’s a bit of a wild thing. Gentlemen callers coming to the house at all hours of the day and night.”

“Gentlemen callers? You mean there’s no husband in the picture?”

“Not so as you’d notice,” Mrs. Fisk replied. “There are probably plenty of husbands in that group of men swarming around the honey pot, but I doubt any of them belong to her.”

“You’re saying she’s a . . . professional?” I asked.

Mrs. Fisk shrugged. “Believe me, she has plenty of special male friends, and she doesn’t appear to have any other kind of job, so you tell me. When I see those two boys left to their own devices so much of the time, it breaks my heart.”

I know more than a little about what it’s like to be raised as a fatherless boy. I looked at the houses on the street. When I was growing up, my mother and I lived in a tiny Ballard-area apartment located over a bakery. Because of the ovens down below, the apartment was warm in the winter without our having to turn on the heat, but it was hot, hot, hot in the summer. I remember very clearly that when clients came to my mother’s place for fittings, I was expected to make myself scarce.

Nevertheless, this Magnolia neighborhood was a big step up from the walk-up apartment where I was raised. I suppose there were plenty of people back then, including my own grandfather, who called my mother a “loose” woman because there was no man in our lives and no ring on Mother’s finger. Her fiancé, my father, died in a motorcycle wreck soon after she got pregnant and before they had a chance to marry. Defying her father’s wishes, Mother refused to give me up for adoption. Instead, she had raised me entirely on her own. At the time I was interviewing Mrs. Fisk I had no idea that one day in the far distant future I would be reunited with long-lost members of my father’s family.