Proof of Life

by J. A. Jance

“People who live in glass houses . . .” I reminded her.

  “Yes,” she agreed, “but Lucy is starting to grow on me.”

  We stood in the kitchen, watching and waiting, while Lucy carefully nosed her way through her food. For such a big dog, she’s a dainty eater. Mel and I waited, but not in what you could call a companionable silence. It was one of those times when we were having a knock-down, drag-out fight without exchanging a single word. Up to a point, Mel was right about the difficulty of a civilian approaching an active crime scene. Crime scenes are exclusive clubs, with membership limited to sworn officers only. So, yes, having Mel and her badge along would definitely make it easier for me to get where I needed to go.

  But having her there would also keep me from doing the one thing I really wanted to do right then, which was to show up on Lawrence Harden’s doorstep, look him straight in the eye, tell him what a worthless piece of crap he was, and punch his lights out, an outcome Mel was equally determined to prevent.

  It wasn’t until we were on our way down in the elevator that the long silence between us was finally broken.

  “Are you going to be able to sell any of this to Ron Peters?” she asked. “I can see that the connections you’ve made all seem to lead back to Harden, but they’re tenuous at best and entirely circumstantial. I’m not seeing anything that would give investigators probable cause. And I can’t for the life of me understand how a power broker from Queen Anne Hill would get himself mixed up with a bunch of drug-dealing gangbangers.”

  “According to Ben Weston, the gang in question, the Local Asian Boys, have come up in the world, due in large measure to their having cornered the local market for fentanyl.”

  “Which mostly comes from China,” Mel added.

  “And other ports in the Far East, most likely brought in through the Port of Seattle, where Lawrence Harden just happened to be a bigwig for decades.”

  “Which would have given him a catalog of contacts in the import/export business,” Mel said.

  “Harden has evidently remarried,” I continued, “but his previous wife, Todd Farraday’s mother, had an antique shop down in Pioneer Square, which Harden has continued to run since her death.”

  “Antiques,” Mel mused. “An operation like that would offer plenty of cover for shipments coming and going.”

  “Wouldn’t it though,” I muttered. “I remember Max’s literary agent telling me Max had stumbled on something interesting in the days just before his death.”

  “Interesting enough to put this whole chain of events in motion?” Mel asked.

  I believed every word, right down to the soles of my shoes, but as we exited the elevator on P-4, I could tell that Mel still wasn’t convinced.

  “Sorry, Beau,” she said. “It’s still pretty thin gruel.”

  Leaving Mel’s city-owned Interceptor in the garage, we piled into my aging S 550. Before we even exited the garage, Lucy had already positioned herself in the backseat so her chin could once again rest on my shoulder.

  “You let her ride with you like that?” Mel asked.

  “If you can figure out a way to get her to wear a seat belt, let me know.”

  Have I mentioned that, having just been told I was full of it, maybe I was slightly cranky as I pulled out of the garage and turned west on Clay and then south on First Avenue?

  CHAPTER 28

  LET’S JUST SAY FROM THE GET-GO THAT MEL WAS RIGHT. Without her along with her badge in hand, we wouldn’t have made it anywhere near the crime scene. We parked outside the perimeter of cop cars and media vans. Then, leaving Lucy in the car, we made our way through the milling mob of reporters and cops until we reached the hive of bustling activity in and around a canopy that had been erected directly under one of the humming power lines.

  When we got close enough to make out the details, it was easy to see what had happened. Whoever had been driving the vehicle had probably intended to go a whole lot farther into the greenbelt. Unfortunately, they had somehow missed seeing a hunk of concrete hiding in the tall dead grass. That invisible barrier had brought the speeding car to an abrupt and complete halt.

  We arrived on the scene just as people from the ME’s office removed Kevin Blaylock’s bloodied body from the passenger seat of his car. That told me that he had most likely been shot elsewhere and had already been dead or dying when he was driven here by either his assailant or by an accomplice. It seemed reasonable to assume that someone had driven Kevin Blaylock to the spot where he’d been found and someone else had aided and abetted the driver in leaving the scene.

  Mel reached out and took my hand as we watched in silence while the attendants carefully positioned the remains in the body bag already waiting on a nearby gurney. As they zipped the bag closed, try as I might, I could not look away. Fighting back tears I realized that, although I didn’t know the name of Kevin Blaylock’s widow, life as she knew it was over. Now she would be left to look after her aging parents in Edmonds entirely on her own. And no matter how many times Mel or anyone else tried to tell me Kevin’s death wasn’t my fault, I would never believe it.

  As they rolled the gurney away from the patrol car and over to the waiting van, Ron Peters appeared, speeding along behind the gurney in his electric wheelchair. I understood why he was there. Unfortunately, having brass on the scene of officer-down incidents is something that has become an all-too-common standard operating procedure.

  Ron gave Mel and me a half wave when he spotted us standing on the outskirts of the crowd, but rather than coming straight over to us, he stopped off long enough to confer with the ME in charge. Had Dr. Roz been on the scene, I might have tried to horn in on the conversation, but this person was totally unfamiliar to me. Besides, I already knew what the conversation was about—another unfortunate but standard procedure. Ron needed them to delay the van’s departure long enough for someone to organize a collection of cops to provide a police escort for that grim trip from the crime scene to the morgue.

  When Ron finished with that, he rolled over to where Mel and I were standing. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Do you know something about this case?”

  “Cases,” I corrected, “four in all, this one included.”

  He gave me a quizzical look and then shook his head. “All right then, come on. Let’s go sit in my van and get out of the rain.”

  These days Ron drives a Sprinter conversion that includes a remotely controlled wheelchair ramp. He wheeled himself inside and then motioned for Mel and me to follow. “Talk,” he said.

  And so I did, giving him an overview of the string of events in as orderly a fashion as I could. He heard me out, making no comments from beginning to end. When I finished, he pulled out his cell phone—the one he hadn’t answered earlier—and tapped in a number.

  “Captain Kramer needs to be informed,” he said.

  I had known that was coming. After all, Kramer was calling the shots at Homicide these days, but it would be a lot harder for him to ignore what I had to say if it came by way of Assistant Chief Ron Peters rather than just from me. The cell phone hooked into the Sprinter’s sound system, and moments later the voice of my old nemesis came through the speaker.

  “Kramer here.”

  “Are you back from doing the next of kin?” Ron asked.

  “I’m back,” Kramer said with an audible catch in his throat. “It was tough, damned tough.”

  Talking to Kevin Blaylock’s widow would have been difficult, especially since Kramer himself was most likely the one who had assigned her husband to a supposedly routine hit-and-run investigation that had ended up going horribly wrong.

  “Liz’s folks came over to stay with her, so at least she’s not home by herself.”

  Now it was my turn. Just hearing him mention the name of Kevin Blaylock’s widow hit me like a punch in the gut. Captain Kramer may have assigned the case to Blaylock, but I was the one who had pointed her husband in Lawrence Harden’s direction.

  “How soon will that escort be r
eady to roll?” Ron asked.

  “In about ten,” Kramer answered. “We’re waiting for a few more vehicles to show up.”

  “Maybe you could stop by my Sprinter for a minute,” Ron said. “J. P. Beaumont is here. He needs to talk to you.”

  “Great,” Kramer grumbled. “Just when I thought the day couldn’t get any worse.”

  We were certainly on the same page there. I wasn’t any happier at the idea of seeing him than he was of seeing me.

  “Look,” Kramer said impatiently, “I’m out here organizing the cars and parked right behind the ME’s van. How about if he comes to me?”

  So Mel and I went out into the cold and wet. It was raining harder. Even wearing a slicker covering his dress uniform, Kramer looked like a drowned rat. The windbreaker I wore wasn’t much help, either. Since Mel isn’t a Seattle native, she doesn’t share the locals’ natural disdain for umbrellas. Armed with an open bumbershoot, she was dry as can be.

  As expected, Kramer greeted us—me especially—with a snarl. “You’re not a cop anymore. What the hell are you doing at my crime scene?” he demanded. “Who let you in?”

  I started to respond in kind, but Mel stepped into the fray with the unassailable authority of a grade school principal breaking up a fistfight between two eleven-year-olds.

  “The point is we’re here,” she said, “and Beau has information about Detective Blaylock’s case that he needs to share. It’s cold and wet out here. Let’s get this sorted and be done.”

  “You have information about this case?” Kramer said. “How do you even know the name of our victim? That hasn’t been released.”

  I had two sources of information—Ben Weston and my son—and I wasn’t about to blow the whistle on either one of them, so I simply sidestepped the question.

  “I met with Detective Blaylock yesterday afternoon at a joint up on Queen Anne Hill called Sneaky Pete’s. I’ve been asked to look into Maxwell Cole’s death, and I uncovered some connections between that case and the hit-and-run Kevin Blaylock was investigating.”

  Kramer drew himself up, crossed his arms, and glared at me. “The thing about the fingerprints, right? Just how many spies do you have inside Seattle PD? Is your son feeding you information?”

  “Scott’s got nothing to do with any of this. The point is, while we were in the bar, Blaylock and I located security footage that seems to suggest Duc Nguyen did something to one of the tires on Max’s Volvo. Later on, when Max discovered his vehicle wasn’t drivable, Duc went out to the parking lot and changed the tire before the two of them left together.”

  I watched while Kramer processed those two important pieces of information.

  “So the connection between Max and Duc is one part of the equation. Piece number two is Max’s connection with Todd Farraday.”

  “Wait, Todd Farraday? Larry Harden’s drunken stepson, the one who just died?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does he have to do with the price of peanuts?”

  “Max met with Todd Farraday at the same bar. Sneaky Pete’s was his favorite hangout. They met, had dinner together, and talked.”

  “About what?” Kramer wanted to know.

  “I’m not sure. Max was working on a book that involved the school district shooting we worked all those years ago. They may have talked about that; they may have talked about something else. In any event, when it came time to leave, rather than taking a cab back to the Refuge, Todd Farraday left the bar on foot. Early the next morning he turned up dead at his stepfather’s place a few blocks away up on Queen Anne.”

  “Todd Farraday must have been drunk as a skunk when he left the bar. He died of booze and exposure,” Kramer declared.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “I saw the security footage from the bar that night. It looked to me like all he drank was coffee, and he didn’t seem impaired when he left.”

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going with all this?” Kramer wanted to know.

  “Tell him,” Mel urged.

  “I believe Maxwell Cole may have learned something that brought him to the attention of people running a drug-smuggling operation.”

  “Which people?”

  “I’m thinking Lawrence Harden may be behind it.”

  To my surprise, Paul Kramer burst out laughing. “You’ve got to be kidding! You think Larry Harden is some kind of evil drug lord?”

  “Why wouldn’t he be?”

  “Because the poor old guy is losing it, for starters,” Kramer said. “He was good to me when I first came to the department, and I’ve never forgotten that. So when I went to the funeral, it broke my heart to see him the way he is now.”

  “Todd’s funeral?” I asked. “I thought that was private.”

  “It was, but like I told you, we were friends back then, and we never stopped being friends. So yes, I went to the funeral. And there he was in a wheelchair, and so out of it that I doubt he even knows how to wipe his own butt anymore. If it weren’t for that sweet little Asian wife of his, he’d have to be in assisted living by now for sure.”

  I remembered then that Patrick had said something about Todd’s having a stepmother, but before anything more was said, a young uniformed cop hurried up to where we were standing. “Hey, Captain,” he said, “everyone’s here now. We’re ready to roll.”

  “Okay,” Kramer told him. “I’ll be right with you.” Then he wheeled on me. “Just for the record, J.P., Lawrence Harden is not a drug kingpin, and Todd Farraday was a drunk who died a drunk’s accidental but totally predictable death. If you want me to think otherwise, you’re going to have to come up with something better than this half-baked, unsubstantiated crap of a story aimed at besmirching the reputation of a very good man. Got it?”

  With that, he stomped off toward his patrol car.

  “Got it, asshole,” I answered under my breath as he walked away. “I hear you loud and clear.”

  “So now we know Maxwell Cole was right,” Mel said. “Lawrence Harden was indeed the big fish who used to be inside the department, and Paul Kramer is the guy with the current pull. So what are we going to do about it?”

  I looked at her in utter astonishment. “‘We’?” I echoed just to verify that I had heard her correctly.

  “Yes, we.”

  “Okay then,” I said. “I guess we’d better go home and start digging.”

  CHAPTER 29

  CONSIDERING THAT UNEXPECTED TURN OF EVENTS, IT’S no surprise that on our way back to Belltown Terrace, we turned off I-5 at Cherry and meandered our way through numerous construction zone detours until we ended up in Pioneer Square. We already knew that this was the neighborhood where Duc Nguyen had been run down. If Occidental Antiques had played a part in any of what was going on, we needed to eyeball the location for ourselves.

  Southbound on First Avenue, the first place I could turn left was on Jackson. By then it was a little before nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, which meant there was actually some on-street parking. I pulled into the first available spot. “How about we walk from here?”

  “Take Lucy or leave her in the car?”

  “We’ll only be gone a couple of minutes,” I said. “She’ll be fine here.”

  By then the rain had let up. I led us north under the winter-bare trees that lined either side of the urban walkway called Occidental. The shop, Occidental Antiques, was located in the ground floor of a building halfway between South Main and South Jackson. At this hour of the day on a Sunday, I would have expected the place to be relatively deserted. It wasn’t.

  A utility van with its emergency flashers going had driven into the pedestrian walkway and was parked directly in front of Occidental Antiques. While we watched, two scrawny young men dressed in blue uniforms and with baseball caps pulled low over their heads emerged from the shop, both of them lugging what appeared to be heavy wooden crates. The second one put down his load and paused long enough to lock the door behind them. If they were actually dealing in drugs, would they be hauli
ng them around in broad daylight? On a Sunday morning? Maybe all the assumptions I’d made about what was going on were dead wrong.

  “Looks like we came to the right place at the right time,” Mel observed.

  As the two men loaded the crates into the van’s cargo hold, Mel and I took a crack at morphing into hardy, wintertime tourists, posing for a series of selfies, making sure that van’s rear license plate was fully visible in the background of some of them. In others we caught the signage on the side of the van—TRAN TRANSPORT, along with a Seattle area phone number. One of the last photos included full profiles of the two guys in their uniforms.

  “Follow or not?” I asked, as they climbed into the van and prepared to drive off.

  “Follow,” Mel said.

  We raced back the way we had come. Because of the way the streets are laid out, by the time the van headed south on Fourth Avenue, we were able to pull into traffic three cars behind them. As they went past, I noticed something odd. “Did you see that?”

  Mel, whose nose had been buried in her phone, looked up. “See what?”

  “The sign’s gone,” I told her. “It must have been one of those magnetized ones. Now it’s a plain white utility van.”

  “The phone number’s bogus, too,” Mel told me. “I just tried dialing it.” She switched her phone to speaker. “. . . number you have dialed is no longer in service.” Mel switched off without bothering to listen to the remainder of the recording.

  At CenturyLink Field, the van negotiated the series of intersections that took us onto southbound I-5. We followed, staying back far enough, I hoped, to avoid notice. Once on the freeway, the van stuck in the right-hand lane and exited at the South Boeing Field Access Road. By then there was only one vehicle between us and them. “They’re going to spot us,” Mel warned.

  “Maybe not,” I told her.

  While the guys in the van seemed focused on the stoplight, I made a quick right-hand turn and zoomed off in the other direction. At the first opportunity and in a spot where U-turns were clearly forbidden, I made one anyway. We reached the intersection of MLK and Boeing Access just in time to see the van turn into the entrance of what appeared to be a massive public self-storage facility.