by J. A. Jance
At the street end of the pier, a slate-gray van, part of the medical examiner's fleet, edged around the barrier and started down the dock. A television-camera truck tried to follow but was headed off by a uniformed patrol officer. Sighting the van, Audrey pulled herself together. "We'll get him loaded up and out of here, then."
"Anything else you can tell me that might help us hook him up with a missing person's report?"
"Blue eyes, blond hair, six one or so. Tattoo on the inside of his right wrist. It says MOTHER."
"Not very original," I said.
"They never are."
I waited until the body was loaded in the van. When they left, so did I. It crossed my mind that it had to be a slow news day in Seattle with nothing much to fill up the allotted airtime, since a flock of television cameras stood waiting on the sidewalk when I made it back to Alaskan Way. One of the reporters, a woman, came tripping behind me like a puppy nipping at my heels as I headed back to the car.
"Detective Beaumont," she called after me. "Can you tell us whether or not this shooting is gang related?"
Who told you it was a shooting? I wanted to ask her. And, who said anything about gangs? "No comment," I said. If she was out looking for a "lead story" for the evening news, she was going to have to find it without any help from me.
Holiday traffic was almost nonexistent as I drove down to the Public Safety Building. I found on-street parking in a loading zone a mere half block from the front door. Up on the fifth floor, in my cubicle in Homicide, I used my handy-dandy laptop to fill out the necessary paper in jig time. There wasn't much to report. I called down to 911 for the name and number of the early-morning jogger who had called in the report from a cellular phone. The 298 prefix on Johnny Bickford's home number meant her phone listing was a relatively new one on Queen Anne Hill.
I dialed the number, but there was no answer. I declined to leave a message on voice mail. Cops dumb enough to leave voice mail messages with potential witnesses are almost as likely to get calls back as encyclopedia salesmen.
Two and a half hours after I left home, I drove back down Third Avenue toward my building through the wide, flat streets of the Denny Regrade. Because of the one-way grids, I had to go as far as Broad before turning over to Second. My heart fell when I rounded the corner at Second and spotted a fire truck parked directly in front of the entryway awning to Belltown Terrace. A KIRO television crew from Third and Broad was hustling across the street in front of me.
The girls! I thought at once. Worried that something awful had happened to them, I slammed the Porsche's tires up against the nearest sidewalk, sprinted across the street, and made for Belltown Terrace's canopied entrance. In order to reach the door, I had to push past the news-film crew, including the same lady shark of a reporter I had last seen down on the street at the end of Pier 70. A momentary spark of recognition passed between us as she realized that for the second time that day, I wasn't going to answer her damned questions.
Kevin, one of Belltown Terrace's more recent doormen du jour, hustled to let me in.
"Where's the fire?" I demanded.
"No fire," Kevin replied.
"Why the fire truck, then? What's wrong?"
"The party room is full of soapsuds. The suds finally stopped flowing, but not before they set off the alarms. Now the fire department is trying to clean up the mess and figure out where it all came from."
"Soapsuds?"
Kevin nodded. "Scads of them. Mountains of them."
Kids, soapsuds, and hot tubs can be a real pain in the neck. Some time when you have nothing to do for the next six hours or so, try putting half a bottle or so of dishwashing liquid in a Jacuzzi and turning on the jets. Within minutes, you'll have a hell of a mess. I know, because Heather and Tracy pulled that stunt once before, or at least one of their friends did when she was invited over for Tracy's eighth-birthday slumber party.
Ron and Amy lived on one of the higher floors then, in a unit with a Jacuzzi tub in the master bath. As a result of that little escapade, we had discovered a flaw in the building's plumbing design. The drainpipes for that side of the building go straight down to the garage, where there's a sharp elbow. The suds had backed up at the elbow and had come bubbling out the drainpipe and vent in the party-room kitchen.
I had assumed that having lived through the aftermath of that crisis, Heather and Tracy would have learned their lesson. But faced with a repetition of that earlier offense, I immediately assumed that the girls had once again staved off high-rise boredom by running some of my Palmolive liquid dishwashing soap through the Jacuzzi.
Bent on wringing their scrawny little necks, I bounded into the nearest elevator and pressed the button labeled PH. For Penthouse. Nothing happened.
"Sorry, Mr. Beaumont," Kevin explained. "The elevator's off right now. You see, as soon as the alarm goes off, the elevators return to the ground floor and…"
I didn't hang around long enough to listen to any more of peach-fuzzed Kevin's useless explanation. He was still going on about it as I dashed into the stairwell and started pounding my way up one flight of stairs after another.
Twenty-fifth-floor penthouses are swell. The views are spectacular, as long as you don't have to walk all the way up. I was upset when I left the lobby. By the time I staggered up to my door and stuck the key in the lock, I was winded and furious. As the door swung open, I could hear the drone of the television set coming from the den. The air was thick with the smell of freshly popped microwave popcorn.
I charged into the den to find the two innocent-looking wretches sitting side by side and cross-legged on the floor. A stainless-steel bowl of popcorn nestled between them.
"All right, young ladies. What exactly have you two been up to?"
Tracy's eyes grew wide. "What do you mean? We popped some popcorn," she murmured. "Just like you said we could."
"I'm not talking about popcorn. Which one of you has been fooling around with soap in the Jacuzzi?" I demanded, forgetting completely that we live in a country where people-even kids-are presumably innocent until proven guilty.
Heather flounced to her feet and stood there glaring back at me, both hands planted on her hips. "Don't you yell at my sister!" she commanded, looking irate enough to tear me apart. If I hadn't been so bent out of shape, her pint-size fury might have been comical. But her outraged reprimand was enough to make me realize I was yelling.
I took a deep breath. They were both there; they were safe. Why the hell was I so upset?
"All right, all right," I said. "I'll calm down. Just tell me the truth. Which one of you put soap in the Jacuzzi?"
"We didn't, Uncle Beau," Tracy answered. "We were both right here watching TV the whole time. Honest."
"But somebody ran soap through a hot tub," I said. "The fire department's downstairs-on your floor, by the way-trying to clean it up."
"Come on, Tracy," Heather said, her voice stiff with disgust. "Let's get our stuff and go."
"You're not going anywhere," I objected. "Your parents still aren't home."
Heather glared at me. "Why should we stay here?" she demanded. "You're mad at us for something we didn't do."
As Heather hurtled out of the den with Tracy on her heels, I followed them. While they turned in to the spare bedroom to retrieve their stuff, I continued down the hall to the master suite and bath. The glass shower stall was flecked with drops of water from my morning shower, but the Jacuzzi itself was bone dry. Unused. The only wet thing in the bathroom was my own still-damp towel.
Flushing with embarrassment and contrite as hell, I hurried back down the hall to the spare bedroom, where they were gathering their overnight stuff into a pair of shopping bags.
"Wait a minute," I said. "Hold up. I'm sorry. I can see now that you didn't do it."
Heather wasn't in a mood for accepting apologies. "But you thought we did," she stormed. "I'm leaving anyway."
"Heather, please," I begged, "I made a mistake."
But she wouldn't
let up. "You made Tracy cry."
"I didn't mean to. It's just that-"
"Something was wrong, so you thought we did it. Because we're kids."
"Yes, but I don't think so anymore. Really. I'm sorry. I apologize."
I'm convinced Heather Peters will be a heartbreaker when she grows up. She relented, but not all at once. She glanced coyly up at my face through eyes veiled by long blond lashes. "Cross your heart?"
"And hope to die," I returned. "Sorry enough to take you both to lunch, anywhere you want to go."
"Even McDonald's?"
"Even McDonald's, but only if you promise not to tell your dad that I took you there."
The shameless little imp grinned in triumph. "Well, all right then," she conceded.
When we left the apartment, the elevators still weren't working. We had to walk down twenty-four flights of stairs, but going down was a whole lot easier than climbing up. When we stepped outside the lobby, the news crew was still there. The reporter was busy interviewing Dick Mathers. Dick and his wife, Francine, are Belltown Terrace's resident managers.
Dick is one of those people who is incapable of talking without waving his hands in the air. He gave me what felt like an especially baleful glare as the girls and I walked past him, but I disregarded it. Some days I seem to feel more paranoid than others. And seeing the news crew gathering info about a flood of soapsuds, I knew for sure it really was a slow news day in Seattle.
In fact, I never gave the incident another thought, not during lunch at McDonald's, and not during the afternoon the girls and I spent-along with hundreds of other people-at the sunny but cold Woodland Park Zoo.
When we came back to the condo, everything seemed to be under control. The fire truck and news cameras were gone. The elevator was working properly. When I dropped Heather and Tracy off at their unit on the seventh floor, Ron and Amy were back from their big night out. They both said they'd had a great time. As I closed the door to their apartment and headed for my own, I breathed a sigh of relief. The girls were home, safe and sound. No problem.
My false sense of well-being lasted well into the evening-almost to bedtime. Ron Peters called upstairs at a quarter to ten.
"We've got trouble," he said. "Can I come up?"
"Sure."
He was there within minutes, looking distraught. "Ron, what's the matter?"
"It's Roz," he said. "She's back in town. She's staying at her mother's place down in Tukwila."
"So?"
"Did you leave the girls alone today?" he asked.
"Only for a little while," I told him. "I was on call. A body floated up under Pier Seventy, and I-"
"Roz called me about something on the evening news. She said the reporter was interviewing Dick Mathers, the manager, over something about soapsuds when you and the girls came out of the building. He blamed the ‘two little girls who live in the building' for the problem. He said he believed they'd been left without adequate supervision. Roz-I mean Sister Constance-wanted to know if there were any other girls who live here besides Heather and Tracy. I told her no, they're the only ones, but that anybody who said they'd been left alone was lying because they'd been with you the whole time. But if you were out…"
"Look, Ron, the girls were fine while I was gone. And believe me, they had nothing whatever to do with all that soap."
"You should have heard her on the phone. There's going to be trouble over this."
Again, since Roz Peters wasn't my ex-wife, it was easy for me to wax philosophical. "Come on, Ron, don't hit the panic buttons. It's no big deal. After all, what could Roz possibly do with a bunch of soapsuds?"
The answer, of course, was a whole lot different from what I thought. Roz Peters, otherwise known as Sister Constance, had every intention of turning a little molehill of soapsuds into a mountain of trouble. It pains me to say that I never saw it coming.
But then, I never do.
Two
I was pretty much feeling on top of things when I headed to the department the next morning. A yellow Post-it note was plastered on the wall next to the entrance to my cubicle by the time I got there. "See me," it said. It was signed, "L.P."
The L.P. in question, Captain Larry Powell, is even more of a troglodyte than I am. I've gradually moved into the modern era enough so that I can tolerate voice mail. I've gradually learned to hunt and peck my way around a computer keyboard. There are even times when I've found a fax machine downright useful. Larry, on the other hand, has come only as far as Post-it notes. That far and no further.
"What gives?" I asked, sauntering up to the open door of the captain's fishbowl office.
"I hear you took on yesterday's floater. Any progress on that one so far?"
"Not yet. It's still early. That's what I'll be working on this morning."
"Is it something you'd mind handling alone?"
Did Br'er Rabbit mind being thrown in the briar patch?
"No problem," I said, trying not to let Larry see the grin that threatened to leak out through the corners of my mouth. "Why? What's happened to Sue? Aren't she and I partners anymore?"
Detective Sue Danielson has been my partner for several months now. She's young and fairly new to Homicide-a transfer in from Sex Crimes-but she's also a capable investigator. I knew she had taken her two boys and gone to visit her folks in Ohio over the holidays, but I also knew that her sons were due back in school that morning.
"She's stuck in Cincinnati with chicken pox."
"Traveling with kids is always so much fun," I said sympathetically.
"It's not the kids who are sick," Larry Powell told me. "It's Sue."
"Chicken pox? At her age?"
"Evidently," Larry observed dryly.
When Jared Danielson had come down with chicken pox early in December, Sue had said she remembered being sick with the same thing back when she was a child. I mentioned that to Larry.
"Evidently, she was mistaken," he replied. "And from what I hear, right this minute she's one sick little lady. It'll be several days before she stops being contagious and can get on an airplane to come back home."
"Tough break," I said, "but don't worry about me and Mr. John Doe. The two of us will get along fine without her."
The captain nodded. "I figured as much, but if you need help, let me know."
"Sure thing," I told him.
Larry's phone rang just then. He waved me out of his office, dismissing me. Before heading back to my cubicle, I took a little detour down to Missing Persons. There I found Detective Chip Raymond moving stacks of paper back and forth across his desk.
"Looks like a giant game of solitaire," I said.
Chip glanced up at me balefully and shook his head. "Don't I just wish. Where the hell do all these people go?"
"Away?" I offered.
Detective Raymond didn't appreciate my helpful suggestion. "Cut the cute, Beaumont," he said. "Whaddya want?"
"Any of those MPs got a tattoo saying MOTHER on a right wrist?"
Chip Raymond left off sorting papers and turned to a computer. He typed a series of commands on the keyboard, and then sat frowning at the display, waiting for an answer. When it came, he shook his head. "Not so far," he said. "One of yours?"
"Is now," I nodded. "He's a New Year's Day floater."
"I'll keep a sharp lookout and let you know right away if anybody matching that description turns up. What else can you tell me about him?"
I gave him the same information Audrey Cummings had given me, then Detective Raymond went back to sorting his morass of paper. I stood in the doorway of his cubicle for a moment, watching. "I seem to remember someone saying that the age of computers was the beginning of the end of paper; that we'd all be living in a paperless society by now."
Raymond nodded. "I remember people saying that, too," he said, morosely surveying the stacks of paper littering his desk. "I think I want my money back."
Laughing, I went back to my own office. The amount of paper I had to contend with was
downright modest compared to Chip's.
That day, the fifth floor where the Homicide Squad resides was in a state of relative bedlam if not downright siege. Everybody was milling around, trying to get organized as to how best to deal with the caseload generated by a flurry of year-end violence: two alcohol-related vehicular homicides; an apparently fatal domestic violence case; and two Rainier Valley drive-by shootings that, although not fatal, still fell into Homicide's jurisdiction. No wonder Captain Powell had asked me if I'd mind working the case alone.
The first order of business was to track down the lady jogger who had reported finding the floater's body to 911. I've learned that more often than not, the "innocent" people who "discover" the bodies aren't nearly as innocent as they ought to be. It's as though they get so antsy waiting for their crime to be discovered that they go ahead and report it themselves, just to get it over with. So I was somewhat skeptical when I tried calling Johnny Bickford's number a little later that morning.
When a man answered, I asked to speak to Johnny Bickford. He coughed, cleared his throat, and said, in a clearer and higher-pitched voice, "Yes."
"Are you Johnny Bickford?" I asked.
"I was last time I checked," the voice returned. "Who's this?"
Johnny Bickford had to be a die-hard smoker. "Detective J. P. Beaumont, with the Seattle P.D.," I answered.
"Oh, hi there," she returned in an almost welcoming croon. "This has to be about the man in the water. I expected a call yesterday."
"I tried," I said. "Nobody was home. In my business, there's not much point in leaving messages."
"I don't see why not," Johnny said. "I would have called you back right away."
"Well," I said, "would it be possible for me to drop by today, maybe later this morning?"
"Certainly. How soon?"
"Say fifteen minutes?"
"That barely gives me time to get decent, but that'll be fine. Do you drink coffee, Detective-?"
"Beaumont," I supplied. "And yes, I do. A cup of coffee would be great."
