Proof of Life
Page 23
As long as I was at Seattle PD, there had been unresolved rivalries between the gang unit and the homicide squad. Obviously nothing had changed.
“So where are you in all this?” Ben asked. “What’s your connection?”
I was reasonably sure that by answering that question, I would be selling Detective Blaylock down the river, but then again, given the fact that the two of us weren’t exactly simpatico at the moment, did that even matter?
“Don’t quote me on this, but I have it on reasonably good authority that Duc’s fingerprints were found at the site of a fatality house fire up on Queen Anne Hill last week. The fire was reported a mere three hours or so before Duc turned up dead down in Pioneer Square.”
“Wait, an arson fire?” Ben repeated. “And nobody thought to mention word one about that to us?”
“Most likely they just haven’t gotten around to it,” I said.
“Sure,” Ben responded. “Like hell.”
“But what can you tell me about the LABs?”
“A few years ago they were nothing but a bunch of ragtag street thugs. Then, a couple of years ago, they morphed into something else and turned themselves into major players in the drug-dealing world. Word is they’re making money hand over fist.”
That would go a long way to explain Duc Nguyen’s three-hundred-dollar Nikes.
“We’ve been trying like hell to get an informant inside the LABs to see where their dope is coming from,” Ben continued, “but so far it’s a no-go. I’d do it myself, but a six-foot-five black man can’t exactly pass for a five-foot-nothin’ Vietnamese.”
“Where do you think the fentanyl is coming from?”
“That would be any number of places in the Far East, China included,” Ben said at once. “But we don’t know how it’s getting here or who’s behind it.”
I thought about keeping my mouth shut. By speaking up, I ran the risk of putting Ben in harm’s way, but then again, if he had signed on to go undercover with the gang unit, wasn’t harm’s way exactly where he wanted to be?
“I may have a name for you,” I said. “Lawrence Harden. Formerly Chief of Police Harden, so if you go looking into this guy, you’ll need to be very, very discreet. There are indications that he may still have pull inside the department. These days he runs an antique shop down on South Jackson, a place called Occidental Antiques, that used to belong to his late wife, former Seattle mayor Natalie Farraday Harden.”
“Wait,” Ben interjected. “South Jackson. Isn’t that close to the spot where Duc Nguyen died?”
Yes, I thought gratefully, someone smart enough to connect the dots.
“Exactly,” I said, “but that’s not all. I think Harden may be ultimately responsible for two other deaths as well—the fire that killed Maxwell Cole and the death of Todd Farraday, Harden’s stepson, who supposedly died accidentally due to a combination of acute alcohol poisoning and hypothermia. Farraday died some time before midnight on Wednesday, January fourth. Max and Duc died a few days later and within hours of one another early on Sunday morning, January fifteenth. Initially the fire was considered accidental, but the presence of Duc’s fingerprints at the scene and the fact that Max’s electronics are among the missing moved it over to Homicide.”
“Who’s been assigned to that one?” Ben asked.
“No idea,” I answered, “not so far.”
“And the hit-and-run?”
“That would be Detective Kevin Blaylock.”
“Mr. Transfer Guy,” Ben said. “So the guys at Homicide stuck him with the short stick and gave him the dead-end gangbanger case.”
Seattle may be a large city, but in terms of gossip, Seattle PD is still very much your basic small town.
“That would be my take,” I agreed. “I met with Blaylock earlier this evening. Between us we came up with some critical video footage that shows Duc meeting up with Maxwell Cole in a bar on Queen Anne Hill on Saturday evening. Later on both men left together with Duc as a passenger in Cole’s vehicle. Then, just when I thought we were getting along great and making progress, Blaylock completely shut me out.”
“Maybe someone let him know you were bad news?”
“Probably.”
“So you’re thinking that this Harden guy is somehow behind all of it?”
“That’s true, but remember, all of this is pure supposition on my part. So far there’s not a shred of evidence to back up any of it.”
“JDLR?” Ben asked.
I had to laugh at the ease with which he slipped into cop-speak. “Yes,” I agreed, “just doesn’t look right.”
After that Ben fell quiet for several long moments. “If the stepson’s death is considered accidental, nobody’s been working that one. What’s the deal with the fire?”
“Until Duc’s fingerprints showed up at the scene, that one was considered to be an accident as well, and it wasn’t being investigated, either.”
“Of the three, then, the hit-and-run is the only incident that’s been under active investigation. Has Blaylock made any progress on that?”
“Some. When we saw the video footage in the bar, Duc was dressed like some hotshot young businessman out for an evening on the town, except for something odd. On the way into the bar, he paused in the parking lot and appeared to mess with Max’s car. Later on, when Max tried to leave, one of his tires was flat. Duc went all Good Samaritan and offered to change it for him.”
“The two of them left the bar together?”
“Yes, with Duc still wearing business attire. However, a few hours later, when he turned up dead, he had changed into full gangbanger regalia and looked like he’d been working in a coal mine.”
“A coal mine?’
“Yeah, he was covered with all kinds of dirt and muck. According to Blaylock, Duc was run down by a 2015 Cadillac Escalade. I suspect he may have learned more than that, but he didn’t bother passing any of it along to me.”
“Let me do a little digging,” Ben offered. “Word on the street is that Duc was relatively low on the LAB totem pole. He may have agreed to do the hit on Cole as a way of improving his reputation.”
Sort of like Todd Farraday’s bomb threats. That’s what I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud. That part of the story would have been ancient history as far as Benjamin Weston was concerned.
“Whatever digging you do,” I suggested, “make sure it’s discreet digging, and just to be on the safe side, you’d probably be better off if you left my name out of it.”
“Do you think I’m stupid or something?” Ben asked with an audible chuckle.
After ending the call, I sat for a few minutes staring into the fire. I was thinking about Todd Farraday and his fatal dose of Jägermeister. Where exactly had the booze come from? Had he downed it willingly, or had it been forcibly administered by someone else? He had consumed several cups of coffee in the course of his visit with Maxwell Cole, but there had been no way to tell whether or not any of those had contained alcohol. He hadn’t appeared to be intoxicated when he left the bar on his own, nor had I seen any indication of his buying up takeout booze at Sneaky Pete’s. As far as the bar was concerned, that probably would have counted as a violation of any number of liquor department rules and regs.
It was only a few blocks from Sneaky Pete’s up the hill to Lawrence Harden’s place on Kinnear, with no liquor stores between hither and yon, so either Todd had brought the Jägermeister with him from the Refuge, or it had been supplied to him by someone else. But if, as Patrick had told me, Todd hated his stepfather’s guts, why would he go there in the first place?
Just then, Lucy stalked silently into the room on her scraggly, stiltlike legs. She sat down between me and the fire, staring at me with those intense black eyes. It was all slightly unsettling, but then I realized what the deal was. She wasn’t really looking at me. She was totally focused on the Sneaky Pete’s bag. I might have forgotten about the remainder of my fish and chips, but Lucy had not.
I tossed her a couple of sog
gy, limp fries. She gulped them down without so much as a single chew.
“Okay, girl,” I said finally. “That’s enough. Those probably aren’t any better for you than they are for me. Let’s go to bed.”
Then, because my phone was almost dead, I plugged it into a family room charger, and off to bed we went.
CHAPTER 27
I WAS SLEEPING THE SLEEP OF THE DEAD THE NEXT morning when Mel shook me awake and handed me my phone. “Ben Weston is on the line,” she said, disappearing into the hall.
I glanced at my watch before I answered. It was ten past seven. “Hey, Ben,” I croaked into the phone. “What’s up?”
“It’s bad news, Beau.”
I sat up straighter in the bed. “What’s bad news?”
“Kevin Blaylock is dead.”
The hair literally stood up on the back of my neck. “Dead?” I repeated. “What the hell? How? When? Where?”
“Somebody shot the shit out of him down in the Rainier Valley. It happened overnight sometime, but the body wasn’t found until early this morning.”
I was out of bed and reaching for my clothes. “Where exactly?”
“There’s a power line greenbelt that runs north and south through the valley,” Ben answered. “Blaylock’s unmarked was located in the greenbelt just north of Graham. He was found inside, dead of multiple gunshot wounds. Homicide is all over it, but so is the gang unit. Since he was working the Nguyen hit-and-run, the incident is thought to be gang related.”
“Not just gang related,” I said grimly. “You can bet your ass it’s Lawrence Harden related as well.”
“And that’s not all,” Ben continued.
My heart fell. “There’s more?”
“I pulled the vehicle registration information for Lawrence Harden,” Ben said. “Guess what? His ride turns out to be a 2015 Cadillac Escalade.”
“Bingo!” I said.
“Yes,” Ben said, “that’s what I’m thinking, too, but what the hell are the two of us going to do about it? If Harden’s the big-time political operator you claim he is, my being involved in his takedown in any way is likely to blow my cover.”
Ben was right on that score. Bringing down a former police chief who was still a local political mover and shaker would make for headline news. Everybody involved in the operation would end up being put under a media microscope—an eventuality undercover cops try to avoid like the plague.
I was in the closet and grabbing up an assortment of clothing, but with the phone in one hand, there wasn’t much I could do about getting dressed. “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I’ll take care of it.”
“How is that going to happen?” Ben objected. “You’re not a sworn officer at the moment, remember?”
“That’s true,” I said, “but I’m the one who discovered the threads connecting all three homicides.” I said that and then had to swallow the lump in my throat before I could force myself to make the appalling correction. “Make that four homicides, since I’m also the guy who pointed Kevin Blaylock in that direction.”
“What’s your plan?”
“For starters I’m going to talk to Assistant Chief Ron Peters, but don’t worry. When I blow the whistle on Harden, I’ll be sure to leave your name out of it.”
“Good luck with that,” Ben said. “We need to nail the bastard. This really sucks!”
I couldn’t have agreed more. Once Ben hung up, I immediately dialed Ron’s cell phone number, putting the phone on speaker so I could start getting dressed. That call went straight to voice mail, so I dialed Ron’s home number next. As the phone started ringing, I glanced at my watch and was dismayed to realize that it was not yet eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. When Amy answered, I immediately launched my “sorry for the early call” apology.
“Don’t worry,” she said brightly. “We’re all up and at ’em. Jared had a sleepover last night. I’m making pancakes.”
“I was hoping to talk to Ron.”
“Sorry, Beau,” she told me. “He’s not here right now. He had an early morning call out—some kind of major incident down in the south end. Can I leave him a message?”
Unfortunately I knew far too much about that major incident. “No,” I said. “Don’t bother. I’ll catch up with him later.”
I had pulled on a clean shirt and was buttoning it when Mel appeared in the doorway of my walk-in closet. Dressed in a tracksuit and with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she held a mug of coffee in one hand and Lucy’s leash in the other.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “You look upset.”
“I’m a hell of a lot worse off than upset,” I told her. “Kevin Blaylock was murdered overnight, shot dead in his unmarked down in the Rainier Valley.”
“No!” she breathed.
“It’s true,” I answered bleakly. “I pointed him in Lawrence Harden’s direction. I suspect he must have gone off Lone Rangering it, and now the poor guy’s dead.”
Mel set the coffee mug down on the counter and then came over to look me straight in the eyes. “No matter what happened to Detective Blaylock,” she declared, “it is not your fault.”
Did I ever mention that she knows me far too well? But her words barely registered. I was already drowning in a bottomless pit of self-loathing.
“Who else’s fault could it possibly be?”
“How old was he?”
“How old was Kevin Blaylock?”
Mel nodded, and I shrugged. “Late fifties, early sixties maybe.”
“And he was a lifetime cop?”
“As far as I know.”
“Going after a suspect without proper backup is a violation of Policing 101. Why would an experienced cop do something that stupid?”
Mel may be a cop, but she’s also a woman. What Blaylock had done may have been a mystery to Mel, but it wasn’t to me. I understood the poor guy’s underlying issues all too well. If you’re someone older who’s been tossed in with a much younger crew, one where you’re trying desperately to maintain your own relevance, it’s easy to do stupid things on occasion.
“Blaylock was the new kid on the block,” I explained, pulling on a windbreaker. “I’m pretty sure he was being hazed and dissed by all the old hands at Homicide. He maybe saw a chance of hitting a home run. He probably thought that if he could clear all three homicides on his own, the other guys might give him a little slack.”
“They’ll give him some slack, all right,” Mel muttered, “especially now that he’s dead.”
Grabbing my wallet, keys, and the Ziploc bag of kibble off the dresser, I stuffed all three items into the pocket of the windbreaker.
“Where are you going?” Mel demanded.
“I’m going to walk Lucy and then I’m heading for the crime scene,” I said. “Where do you think?”
“Why?”
“I tried calling Ron. I’m pretty sure he’s already there, but he isn’t picking up. Blaylock was the only one besides me who was privy to the idea all three homicides are connected. Someone needs to put Seattle PD on the right track here, and I’m the only one left to do it.”
“We’re the ones to do it,” Mel corrected, “the two of us together.”
I started to object, but she overruled me. “You know as well as I do that you’ll need a valid badge to get anywhere near that crime scene, and I just happen to have one of those in my possession. While you fill travel mugs with coffee, I’ll take Lucy out. Once we come back and she’s been fed, we’ll all go visit that crime scene together.”
Knowing she was right, I nodded, and then, remembering the kibble, I extracted the bag from my pocket. “You might want to take this along with you when you go,” I suggested.
“Why?” Mel asked. “What’s that for?”
“It’s for a dog named Billy Bob, who belongs to a homeless guy who hangs out down around the dog park.”
Mel gave me a look that implied that she thought I’d lost my marbles, but she accepted the kibble and leashed up the dog.
“Believe me,” I told him, “we were already up. What’s going on?”
“I hate to do it, but we’re going to have to cancel for today,” he said. “I just got called in to work. There’s been a homicide—a cop, someone I know from the academy. They’re calling for somebody from TEU to fly drone grid surveillance over the crime scene to see if we can maybe turn up the murder weapon.”
Of course I could have told Scott that I knew Kevin Blaylock, too, but I didn’t. Since when do fathers and sons ever talk about what’s really important?
“You go do what you have to do and don’t worry about it,” I said. “Mel and I will be glad to take a rain check whenever it’s convenient.”
While Lucy and Mel were gone, I busied myself dishing up the food and fixing the coffee, grateful to have something to do with my hands. Otherwise I might have considered putting a fist-size hole in the drywall. Only hours after I had watched him doing his chicken-scratch shorthand in that steno pad, how the hell could Kevin Blaylock be dead? How could he?
The possible answer hit me like a ton of bricks. Kevin Blaylock was a cop. Once I’d given him Harden’s name, he would have run a routine check on him first rattle out of the box. I was willing to bet that he’d come up with a vehicle registration that seemed to lead straight to Duc Nguyen’s hit and run. Thinking back on our dealings at Sneaky Pete’s, I remembered the surreptitious way Blaylock had shut down his computer as I approached the table. Was that when he made both the ID and the connection? Was that the reason he’d locked me out shortly thereafter—because he wanted to be the one to get full credit for bringing Lawrence Harden down?
When Mel and Lucy returned, Mel removed Lucy’s leash. “Your homeless guy said thank you,” she told me. “He thanks you and Billy Bob thanks you. Boy, is that one plug-ugly dog!”