Dismissed With Prejudice (9780061760631)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “Any word?” I asked.

  “None so far. They’ve airlifted the daughter to Sacred Heart in Spokane. They’ve scheduled emergency surgery for as soon as she gets there. The mother is still in Colfax Community Hospital, but I thought we’d drive by their place on the way so you could take a look around.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  If I had any hopes that Halvorsen’s car would have a no-smoking section, I was out of luck. The car was clouded by a haze of dense smoke that fogged the windows and made my eyes water. I’ll never get used to that foul smell.

  He closed the door to the car and exhaled a billowing plume before he ever turned the key in the ignition. I stifled the urge to ask him to put out the cigar. After all, if I wanted my own vices to be off limits to criticism from casual friends and acquaintances, then I’d best keep my mouth shut about somebody else’s. What goes around comes around.

  Talking as we went, Halvorsen drove us into and then through the hilly, winding streets of Pullman, a sleepy Midwestern-looking farming community with a stable population of about 8,000. Washington State University has been grafted into the middle of town, bringing with it a transient population of 20,000 or so students. God save me from ever living anyplace where minors outnumber regular people by a margin of three to one!

  Within minutes we were out in the open again, heading northwest on Highway 195 driving through miles of ripened corn and wheatfields beside an unending line of stocky telephone poles.

  “What about the phones?” I asked, eying the drooping lines. “Were the wires deliberately cut?”

  It was the question that had been chewing on me all during the hour-long flight from Seattle. I had forgotten to ask Halvorsen about it earlier on the phone.

  “You bet,” Halvorsen replied.

  “And related to this?”

  “No question. Whoever did it wanted to create as big a disruption in communications as possible. They knew that if the wires were cut in just one place, the phone company would probably have been able to reroute calls from the central office and restore service in minutes. Instead, they cut wires in several places. That way, until repair crews fixed one break, they couldn’t pinpoint the next.”

  Halvorsen took a long pull on his cigar. “It was deliberate all right. Deliberate, methodical, and smart, and it created enough of a smoke screen that we had no idea that the problem centered at Honeydale Farm.”

  “And what time did they start?”

  “The outages? Right around ten, as far as we can tell.”

  “Time enough,” I said.

  “Time enough for what?”

  “For whoever it was to follow Kimi here from Seattle, learn where she lived, and figure out how to cut off all lines of communication.”

  “Any ideas why someone would want to go to all that trouble?” Halvorsen asked.

  “That one has me stumped so far. Whoever killed her father tried to cover it up by making it look as though he had committed suicide with an extremely valuable samurai sword. The killer took off and left the sword on the floor beside the body.”

  “So we can be relatively sure they weren’t after the sword.”

  “That’s how it looks at the moment. Not only that, at approximately the same time, someone messed with Kurobashi’s company computer system. They fed a virus into it, destroying all the records. Because of that, there’s no way to tell what they were after.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Kurobashi? He was an engineer doing some kind of computer stuff. I’m still not sure exactly what.”

  “You think maybe they wanted to lay hands on some project he was doing?”

  I nodded. “Either to steal it or wipe it out of existence.”

  “But that doesn’t explain why they’d come after the women,” Halvorsen mused. “What could they possibly know, or is the wife an engineer too?”

  “Domestic engineer,” I replied. “An ordinary housewife as far as I can tell.” If Halvorsen noticed my quip, he didn’t crack a smile.

  “And the daughter?”

  “She is an engineer, still a student. Same field as her father, but the two of them have been estranged for years. I don’t see how she could know much of anything about his current business operation.”

  There was a lull in the conversation. When Halvorsen spoke, his face was grim. “The things they did to her weren’t calculated to make her talk. These bastards got their rocks off doing ugly stuff, torture worthy of calling in Amnesty International. It must have gone on for hours.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “First they dragged her out to the barn and killed her horse in front of her. Made her watch, I’d guess.” Halvorsen paused, chewing angrily on the stub of his cigar. “And finally they raped her, with a bottle, a broken bottle. The medics said it was a miracle she didn’t bleed to death before they got to her. She’ll be lucky if she lives, to say nothing of ever being able to have children.”

  Outrage, like bile, roiled up in my gut. “Machiko too?”

  “No. She was beaten up some, but nothing like what they did to the daughter. They must have thought Kimiko was the key to whatever it was they were looking for.”

  “You keep saying ‘they.’”

  Halvorsen nodded. “From what I understand there were two—one with a stocking over his face and the other wearing gloves.”

  “One they’d recognize and one they wouldn’t?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” Halvorsen said.

  Silence as thick as the heavy cigar smoke settled over the car. I didn’t ask for more details. I didn’t need them right then. Moral outrage over the atrocities committed on Kimiko Kurobashi would only get in the way of nailing the creeps who had done them. Instead, I settled for a kind of seething, controlled anger. There would be time enough later to know the other ugly details. Right now we had to concentrate on catching the sons of bitches.

  The sense of urgency to do just that was almost overpowering. “When do you think it happened?”

  “Looks like they left early this morning. They were gone before Rita Brice got up at six. I’ve got roadblocks up all over the county, but I don’t know what the hell we’re looking for—a car, a truck, who knows?” Halvorsen paused and glanced at me. “Any idea who might be behind all this?”

  “Nothing solid so far. I’ve heard that Kurobashi had a big falling out with a former employer, and that the two of them have been involved in a dog-eat-dog lawsuit, one that essentially put Kurobashi out of business, but that’s all I know so far. I would have interviewed the ex-employer today, but I’m over here instead.”

  “So Kurobashi’s business had something to do with computers,” Halvorsen said thoughtfully.

  “Right.”

  “I wonder if that’s what she was talking about.”

  “Who?”

  “The mother. One of the paramedics claimed that on the way to the hospital, she kept mumbling something about a computer. He and his partner were busy with the daughter and didn’t pay that much attention, but they both agreed she was trying to tell them something about a computer. Incidentally, do you speak Japanese?”

  “No.”

  Halvorsen pounded the steering wheel. “How the hell are we going to interview her then?” he asked. “The medics said she barely speaks English.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll get by. I’m pretty sure she understands more than she lets on.”

  We had swung off Highway 195 onto a narrow gravel road. “It’s only about three miles from here.”

  Each turn of the K-car’s wheels was taking us farther and farther into the vast rolling emptiness of the Palouse, fertile and full of shimmering oceans of golden wheat and ripened corn, but with only isolated farmhouses dotting the countryside. An intense wave of guilt washed over me as I thought of Kimi and Machiko, alone and vulnerable, left to the wolves.

  “Damn Mac Larkin!” I exclaimed.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Halvorsen r
eturned. “He was doing the best he could.”

  The road we were on stopped abruptly at a wire gate. On either side of the gate, a white wooden fence stretched into the distance. Set in a stand of aging cottonwoods and huge drooping willows, Honeydale Farm looked far more like a Kentucky showplace than a horse farm far off the beaten path in the wilds of eastern Washington.

  As I stood holding the gate open for Halvorsen to drive through, I more than half expected a guard dog to come snarling up and take a hunk out of the back of my leg. None did. The place lay still and quiet in early autumn’s midmorning sunshine.

  “People around here think she puts on airs,” Halvorsen said as I got back in the car and we started down a rutted track.

  “Who?”

  “Rita Brice, the lady who owns this place. She’s not a native, you know. She was married to a big-time Appaloosa breeder who had places both here and across the state line in Moscow, Idaho. When they split up, she got this place and he got the one over there. Now she’s gone and set herself up in direct competition with her ex.”

  “Sounds fair enough to me,” I said.

  Andy Halvorsen gave me an odd look and then went on with his story. “She rents out most of the fields, but she runs the breeding operation herself.”

  “Alone?”

  “Except for that young woman, the one who’s in the hospital. That’s the main house up there,” he said, pointing toward a gaunt, weathered two-story frame house. “The help lives over there behind the barn and stables.”

  We drove through a motley collection of tin and wooden outbuildings which included a slightly tilted, but totally authentic, old red barn.

  We stopped in front of a much smaller house, little more than a cottage really. The Suburban was nowhere in sight, but the horse trailer still was parked near the front door. Fifty feet away sat a white Whitman County patrol car. The uniformed deputy inside waved to us, and Detective Halvorsen waved back.

  “Where’s the car?” I asked.

  “The Suburban? It’s over there, in the garage. About the trailer—were those all the mother’s things in there?” Halvorsen asked, motioning toward the trailer.

  I nodded before I really comprehended the underlying message in his question. “Were?” I asked.

  “It’s all smashed to bits. Want to take a look?”

  “I don’t but I’d better,” I said.

  Halvorsen walked toward the horse trailer and reached for the latch. Worried about preserving evidence, I tried to stop him.

  “It’s all right,” he said, cutting through the orange evidence tape that had been placed across the door. “We’re not exactly hicks around here. We’ve already dusted for prints. We’ll have the trailer towed into the crime lab in Spokane as soon as the wrecker is free.”

  With that, he swung the door wide open, allowing me a look at the shambles inside. Before, the trailer had been neatly stacked with Machiko’s carefully packed and labeled boxes. Those packed treasures were now nothing more than a pile of debris. There was deliberate malice in the way the boxes had been ripped open, the contents scattered and smashed and torn to bits.

  “It’s a mess, isn’t it,” Halvorsen commented.

  Speechless with rekindled anger, I could only nod.

  “But there’s no sign of a computer here anywhere,” Halvorsen continued. “If it was here, they got it. That’s what I told the guys at the roadblock to look for, a stolen computer.”

  As we stood there surveying the damage, a woman came up behind us. Although much older than Kimi, her clothes looked as though they had come off the rack in the same St. Vincent de Paul store—work shirt, faded jeans, dusty, run-down boots.

  Rita Brice was well into her fifties with naturally silver hair and the icy blue eyes of a born Scandinavian. Deep laugh lines crinkled up from the corners of her eyes, across tanned and weathered cheeks. The eyes weren’t laughing now.

  “How’s Kimi, Andy?” she asked, addressing Detective Halvorsen with easy small-town familiarity. “Any word yet?”

  “They’re taking her to Spokane for surgery.”

  The blue eyes narrowed at Halvorsen’s answer. “What about her mother?”

  “She’ll probably be all right. They’re keeping her in Colfax for observation.”

  A car door slammed and the deputy came hotfooting it toward us at a fast trot. “Got a message for you from the sheriff, Detective Halvorsen. He says Cap Reardon just called in to say whoever cut the lines musta used a helicopter.”

  “What?” Halvorsen demanded.

  “Sheriff Coffee says they used a helicopter. He says for you to call in as soon as you can and he’ll give you the details.”

  Halvorsen sprinted away toward the car, leaving me standing there with Rita Brice. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Detective Beaumont,” I replied. “With the Seattle Police Department.” I offered her a business card.

  “What happened to your hand?” she asked.

  “Slammed it in a door,” I replied, grateful that at least I now had that much of an answer when somebody asked the question.

  She stuffed the card in her hip pocket. “What’s a Seattle detective doing out here?”

  “You haven’t heard about Kimi’s father?”

  Rita frowned. “What about him?”

  “He was murdered the night before last. I’m the detective on that case.”

  A white pallor slipped under the tanned skin of her cheeks. “What’s this all about? Why would anyone do such a thing?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  For a time we said nothing. I could see Halvorsen through the windshield of the K-car, talking animatedly on his radio.

  Finally, Rita said, “Do you want to see the barn? I let the other horses out, but Sadie’s still in there. I’ll have to have help to move her.”

  “Please,” I said.

  We said nothing more as I followed her to the sagging barn. When we first entered the shadowy building, it smelled the way you’d expect it to smell, of hay and manure and horses, but toward the back of the barn, there was another smell as well, the distinct metallic odor of blood.

  Rita led me to a stall at the far end and I peered inside over the wooden railing where a mutilated horse lay dead on the floor, sprawled in a blood-soaked layer of straw. A cloud of flies hovered busily on and around the dead animal.

  “It must have been terrible for Kimi,” Rita said quietly. “To have to watch. Sadie was like her child.” She pointed toward the far corner of the stall. “That’s where I found her.”

  Near the wall was another blood-soaked layer of straw. “Those bastards!” I muttered.

  Rita Brice nodded and wiped her eyes.

  I had seen enough. As we turned away from the stall, Halvorsen came rushing to meet us.

  “Can you beat that? A goddamned helicopter. That’s what they used. I couldn’t figure out how they managed to be all over the county at once.”

  “One of the linemen called his supervisor in Spokane this morning after it got light enough to see. He said he noticed a place near one of the poles where the wheat was all beaten down. Sheriff Coffee sent somebody out to check and sure enough, they found evidence that a helicopter landed there. They stopped off at two more sites on the way back. Same thing.”

  He had been talking excitedly. Suddenly he stopped and his face fell. “Damn!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Those roadblocks won’t ever catch a damn helicopter.”

  The three of us walked out of the barn together. Outside, away from the smell of death, the world was serene, peaceful, and awesomely quiet.

  “You didn’t hear anything?” I asked Rita. It seemed to me that a terrified horse would have made a helluva lot of noise.

  Rita Brice shook her head. “I sleep with the television set on,” she said. “My husband snored, and I still haven’t learned to sleep when it’s quiet.”

  “And you don’t have a dog?”

&
nbsp; “I don’t like dogs,” she answered simply. “They chase horses.”

  Halvorsen walked straight to the car. “We’ve lost them,” he said. “We’d better go see the mother.”

  I nodded in bleak agreement while Halvorsen relit the short stub of his cigar before starting the car. “So did they get what they were looking for or not?”

  “Who knows?”

  Halvorsen was my kind of cop—action first, bullshit and paperwork later. We had lost one round fair and square, but he was ready to get up and get back in the game.

  Rita Brice went to the house to change clothes before heading to Spokane where she, along with a police guard, would stand vigil with Kimi at Sacred Heart Medical Center. We left her place, drove back out to the highway, and turned left to drive toward Colfax.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about all this,” Halvorsen said quietly.

  “Like what?”

  “Helicopters, cut telephone lines, what they did to her. This sounds like big-time shit to me—professionals, the mob. It’s the kind of crap I wanted to leave behind me when I came back home to work. And if we’re dealing with name-brand muscle here, then whatever or whoever it is has to be big. Something to do with drugs unless I miss my guess. Is it possible either the father or the daughter were involved in dealing drugs?”

  “No way,” I said. “Tadeo Kurobashi was broke, dead broke. He was losing both his business and his house. And his daughter shovels horseshit for a living. That doesn’t sound like any high-flying drug dealers I know.”

  “I still think it’s drugs,” Halvorsen insisted.

  Colfax Community Hospital, situated on a hillside at the edge of town, was small but modern enough to have gotten on the no-smoking bandwagon, so Halvorsen snuffed out the smoldering remains of his cigar in a sand-filled ashtray near the hospital’s main entrance. A nurse directed us to the proper room.

  Machiko Kurobashi, looking more frail than ever, lay flat on the bed, wearing a hospital-issue gown. Both eyes were black. A jagged cut on her lower lip had been neatly stitched shut. Her left arm, bandaged and in a sling, was strapped firmly to her chest while the fingers of her other hand stroked a gnarled wooden piece of what had once been her cane. Her glasses were gone, and I assumed they too had been smashed by her attacker.