Proof of Life

by J. A. Jance

  “Turn in,” Mel said. “I’ll go inside and talk about renting a storage unit while you walk around and see if you can tell where they stop. If you’re right and those two crates really are loaded with some kind of illicit goods, we need to know where they’re going.”

  We pulled up to the entrance, where we were greeted with a remotely broadcast “May I help you?” delivered through a statickysounding speaker box. “We need to rent a unit,” I explained, “but while my wife’s doing that, would it be all right if I walk around in the parking lot? I’ve got a cramp in my leg, and I need to walk it off.”

  “Of course,” was the answer.

  I stopped in front of the office, and Mel reached for the door handle. “Just get the unit number,” she counseled. “No heroics. No Lone Ranger, got it?”

  “Yes, Tonto,” I replied. “I hear you loud and clear.”

  The office was in the bottom floor of a low-rise four story structure that, according to the signs, contained climate-controlled storage units. Behind that were four double-sided, single-story buildings lined with rolling metal doors. The van was parked on the far side of the last building. I couldn’t see for sure what was happening from where I stood, but it looked as though they were loading cargo from the van into the unit at the far end of the building. When they closed the door and climbed back into the van, I hot-footed it back to my car, where I found Mel already seated inside.

  The van rounded the building, drove out through the entrance, and then turned north on MLK. “Not enough traffic to risk following them again,” I said.

  “Right,” Mel agreed. “Let them go, but I’m pretty sure we’re onto something.”

  “Why?”

  “I just had one of my guys up in Bellingham run that plate. It came back stolen. If this is some kind of smuggling operation, we’ve got some idea of where the goods are. Did you get the unit number?”

  “No,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure I know which one it was, but what do we do now?”

  “Gather some more intelligence,” she said. “Given Paul Kramer’s reaction, we’re going to need a hell of a lot more information before we can go back to Seattle PD. I vote that we go home, walk the dog, and go to war. I’m no Todd Hatcher, but these days I have my own access to LexisNexis. This looks like a lucrative operation. If it’s been going for years, one way or another, there’ll be a cybertrail leading back to it.”

  I drove, and Mel dove into her iPad. While we’d been screwing around at the storage place, there had been a multivehicle pileup in the northbound lanes that had turned the freeway into a parking lot. I was grateful when the phone rang a few minutes later, because it kept me from stressing about being stuck in nonmoving traffic. The phone number showing on the screen was Rosemary Mellon’s private cell.

  “Hey, Roz,” I answered, putting her on speaker. “What’s up?”

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re one smart operator?” she asked.

  “Not nearly often enough. Why?”

  “Because I just got off the phone with one of my friends down at the crime lab. After I talked to you about our dead Jägermeister guy, you got me thinking. The tox screen results on him aren’t back yet and neither are Maxwell Cole’s, but I asked one of my pals to check on the contents of the bottle. Turns out what’s left in the container is Jägermeister all right, but guess what else they found? There are minute traces of flunitrazepam around the outside rim of the bottle.”

  “Flunit what?” I asked.

  “Flunitrazepam,” Roz repeated. “It’s sometimes prescribed to treat insomnia. Out on the street, however, it’s one of the more popular date-rape drugs, one that leaves its victims incapacitated and confused or, as in Mr. Farraday’s case, completely unconscious. I doubt seriously that his dosage was self-administered.”

  “Would it have been enough to kill him?” I asked.

  “Probably not,” Roz answered, “but it would have left him disoriented. We already know Todd had a problem with alcohol. Once the date-rape drug kicked in, his sobriety went out the window.”

  “Could something similar have happened to Maxwell Cole?” I asked. “Could someone have slipped him some of that as well?”

  “I suppose so,” Roz answered. “We’ll know that for sure once the tox screens come back.”

  “Thanks, Roz,” I told her. “Keep me posted.”

  “Who’s Bian Duong?” Mel asked when Roz’s call ended.

  I was off on a whole other tangent right then and it took me a moment to answer. “Who?”

  “Because I just ran a property records search. Didn’t you tell me Todd Farraday expected to receive some of the proceeds from the family home on Kinnear once it sold?”

  “That’s what his friend Patrick told me. Why?”

  “Because it sold two weeks ago for two-point-three mill. And the seller is listed as one Bian Duong, with no mention of Lawrence Harden’s having had any involvement in the transaction. Looking back, I can see that he quitclaimed the property over to Bian several months ago. And you know that self-storage place we just left? Turns out she’s listed as the owner of that, along with several residential properties down in the Rainier Valley.”

  “That name sounds Vietnamese,” I said. “Didn’t Kramer just tell us that Harden’s current wife is Asian?”

  “He did,” Mel said.

  “So what do you want to bet that this Bian Duong is actually Lawrence Harden’s most recent wife?”

  “No bet,” Mel answered.

  A pair of tow trucks had managed to clear the lanes ahead of us. As traffic started to flow again, the circuits in my head jolted clear as well. “Crap!” I exclaimed.

  “What is it?” Mel asked.

  “All this time I’ve been thinking Lawrence Harden is our bad guy, but Ben Weston told me last night that the gang unit is under the impression that, when it comes to Local Asian Boys, a woman was running the show—someone the gang unit calls the Ghost Girl. What do you want to bet that Ghost Girl and Bian Duong are one and the same? What if Todd Farraday found out about the sale of the house? Maybe he showed up on Harden’s doorstep expecting to have it out with his stepfather and looking for his share of the home sale proceeds.”

  “And maybe his stepfather turned out to be less of a problem than the new wife,” Mel suggested. “Take a look.”

  The whole time we’d been speaking, Mel’s fingers had been flying over her iPad’s virtual keyboard. Now she held the device up in a manner that allowed me to see at the screen. What I saw pictured there was a lovely young Asian woman smiling serenely into the camera.

  “That’s Bian Duong?” I asked. “She’s a real looker!”

  “Yes, she certainly is,” Mel agreed. “When I googled her name, I found this photo on the Port of Seattle’s website, where Bian is listed as a special assistant to the director. It says here that she graduated cum laude from the Foster School of Business at the U Dub. She started out as an intern and has held her current position for the last three years.”

  “They’re married, but she still goes by Bian Duong?” I objected.

  The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I knew I’d stepped in it.

  “That does happen occasionally,” Mel Soames observed dryly.

  Yes, it does. Point taken.

  “What are the chances that Harden met her at work and the two of them hooked up? Next thing you know, the old guy has a lovely piece of arm candy to drag around with him as well as a nurse in his old age. As for that bit of arm candy? Her career is suddenly on a whole new trajectory.”

  “In this case, the old guy may have bitten off more than he could chew,” Mel suggested. “Think about what Kramer told us earlier. He said the last time he saw Harden at Todd’s funeral, he was in pretty rough shape. Kramer made it sound as though Harden’s mental capacities were severely compromised, but think about this. If his wife and primary caregiver just happened to have ready access to a supply of roofies, she could easily have kept him doped up on those, pa
ssing off his periodic bouts of confusion as either Alzheimer’s or age-related dementia.”

  “That would work,” I agreed.

  “So shouldn’t we call Kramer and mention some of this?”

  “I doubt he’ll listen, but by all means give it a try,” I told her.

  “Do you have his number?”

  I handed her my phone. “I don’t, but you can call Ron Peters and ask him to have Kramer call us back.”

  By then we were exiting at Mercer and had turned onto Denny. Mel was on the phone with Ron when I blew straight through the intersection that would have taken us back home to Belltown Terrace.

  She ended the call as we started up Queen Anne.

  “I take it we’re going to Harden’s place anyway?”

  I nodded.

  “This isn’t our jurisdiction,” she said, stating the obvious, “and we don’t have a warrant.”

  “No,” I agreed, “but we have reason to believe that Lawrence Harden’s life may be in danger. Besides, we’re stopping by to see an old friend because we’ve heard he might be a little under the weather. You don’t need a warrant to go visit the sick.”

  “We could be wrong about all this,” she cautioned. “What if this goes completely sideways?”

  “So be it, then,” I said. “I’ll claim it was all my fault.”

  Mel’s answering sigh told me that, although she didn’t like it, she was all in.

  My phone rang then. Even without being on speaker, once Mel answered, I could hear Kramer grousing into phone. “What now?” he demanded.

  “Beau and I are on our way to Larry Harden’s house,” Mel said reasonably. “Since he’s a friend of yours, if I were you, I’d get myself there as soon as humanly possible.”

  “What the hell? Haven’t the two of you caused enough trouble for one day?”

  Rather than wasting her breath on any further explanation, Mel cut Kramer off in mid-rant by simply ending the call. The phone rang again, almost immediately. This time, instead of picking up, she silenced the ringer, leaving the call unanswered.

  For a few seconds we rode on in a silence broken only by the angry buzzings of the unanswered phone. That’s when Mel asked the single most important question she had asked all day: “Are you carrying?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a good thing,” she told me. “So am I.”

  CHAPTER 30

  IT HAD BEEN DECADES SINCE I HAD LAST APPROACHED Natalie Farraday’s art-deco mansion on West Kinnear Place. A black Escalade with a blue handicapped sticker was parked in front of the closed garage doors on one side of the driveway. Next to it was one of those portable on-demand shipping containers generally referred to as PODS. From the looks of it, now that Bian Duong had sold the place, she was in the process of packing up and getting ready to leave.

  We drove past the residence and parked several houses away, where we both scrambled out, leaving Lucy alone in the car. Approaching the house, I headed for the front door while Mel ducked behind the PODS and disappeared from view into a small side yard. Stepping onto the porch—the place where Todd Farraday had been left to die—gave me what Johannes, our South African neighbor in Bellingham, likes to call a “skrik”—a fright. One thing I suspected going in was that Bian Duong was most likely a ruthless, cold-hearted bitch.

  With me running point, I walked up to the door and rang the bell. When Bian opened the door, I recognized her at once from the earlier photo. She was dressed in jeans, a pair of those fashionable but idiotically clunky high-heeled shoes, and a University of Washington Husky sweatshirt. She was tiny. Her dark hair was pulled back in a glossy pony tail. She couldn’t have been a day over thirty-five. She didn’t look like a murderous, drug-dealing crime queen, but I was pretty sure that’s exactly what she was.

  “Yes,” she said, peering up at me with a puzzled expression on her face. “May I help you?”

  “Is Larry home?” I asked.

  “My husband’s here,” she said, “but he’s not well, and he’s not up to having visitors.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that. My name’s Beaumont, I used to work with him at Seattle PD. I heard from another friend, Paul Kramer, that Larry’s been under the weather recently. I live east of the mountains and I’m only in town for the day, but I was hoping to see him. I wanted to say hello, of course, but I also wanted to offer my condolences with regard to the shockingly tragic death of his stepson. I knew Todd, too, years ago. He was always a troubled kid, no matter how much Natalie and Larry tried to help him.”

  Fortunately I had enough facts about the family at my disposal to make it sound as though Larry and I had once been best buds. The ploy seemed to be working, because Bian was clearly torn. On the one hand, she wanted to tell me to go to hell and leave them alone. On the other hand, her situation was dicey enough right then that she couldn’t afford to risk doing anything that might arouse suspicion. Behind her in the room I saw an array of packing boxes. I wondered where she was planning to go.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “Larry’s asleep right now, and that’s the only time I can get anything done. That’s the problem, you see. He hardly ever sleeps at night, and I have to watch him constantly to keep him from wandering off. I’ll be glad to tell him you stopped by. I’m sure he’ll be sorry he missed you, but under the circumstances . . .” She left the sentence unfinished.

  I put on my most engaging smile. “We were close once. If you don’t mind my asking . . .”

  “I do mind,” she replied, stiffening a little, “but it’s hardly a secret. Larry has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The truth is, even if he saw you, he most likely wouldn’t have any idea who you are. There’s really no point in his having visitors.”

  To my surprise, Mel suddenly materialized over Bian’s shoulder, emerging silently from behind the stack of packing boxes lined up in between the foyer and the living room. She had somehow managed to gain entrance to the house, and clearly the situation had changed. With her 9 mm PX4 Storm Beretta in hand, she assumed a shooting stance. It wasn’t exactly comforting to realize that if it came down to a shoot-out, I was on the wrong side of Bian Duong, and I most definitely wasn’t wearing a Kevlar vest.

  “Why would that be, Ms. Duong?” Mel asked. “Would it be because one of those visitors might happen to notice that you keep your husband handcuffed to a hospital bed and trapped in his own filth?”

  Bian started at the sound of Mel’s voice, and she spun around. “Who are you?” Bian demanded furiously. “How did you get in here? You’ve got no right. I’m going to call the cops.”

  “I’m a cop,” Mel assured her. “I let myself in, and it turns out I have every right to be here. Your husband’s life is in grave danger. I’ve already called this in and summoned an ambulance. They’ll be here any minute.”

  Bian Duong may have been a cum laude graduate of the University of Washington, but she was also a natural born street fighter. I’ve spent a lifetime in law enforcement. The moment Bian dropped toward the floor, I knew with absolute certainty that she was going for a knife. I did the only thing that made sense at the time. I grabbed her from behind in a crushing bear hug that lifted her, screaming and kicking, off her feet and into the air.

  I gripped her in a way that pinned both of her arms to her sides, but if you’ve ever tried to bathe a reluctant cat, you know what I was up against. She squirmed and fought in a furious attempt to get away.

  “She’s got a knife,” Mel warned me, pocketing her own weapon. “Down by her ankle. Hold on to her while I get it.”

  As Mel approached, Bian aimed a powerful kick in her direction. Not only did Mel manage to dodge out of the way, but she grabbed the woman’s leg, removing both the knife and a shoe in one fell swoop. The knife skittered harmlessly away on the smooth surface of the marble floor, finally coming to rest under an entryway table on the far side of the room. From my point of view, I didn’t know which I welcomed more—having the knife taken out of play or Mel’s B
eretta.

  From outside I heard the distinctive squawk of first one arriving patrol car and then another. “This is going to be tough to explain,” Mel said, pulling her badge out of her pocket. “Can you hang on to her long enough for me to clue them in?”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said through gritted teeth.

  Once Mel left, Bian continued what I knew to be a life-or-death struggle. There was a good chance that she had another weapon concealed somewhere on her body. I didn’t want her slipping out of my grasp long enough to lay hands on that or to grab hold of mine, either, so I hung on for dear life.

  The first time I heard the term “KAG,” short for “kick-ass-girls,” I laughed out loud because it turns out I happen to be married to one. KAGs on TV and in the movies are females who definitely don’t fight like females and who aren’t afraid to take on all comers.

  Bian Duong was one of those. In spades. She kept flinging her head against my chest, trying desperately to connect with my chin. Fortunately, my chin was just out of reach. One of her kicks with her still-shod foot nailed me square in the middle of one of my titanium knees. Pain shot through my body like a lightning bolt, and I came close to passing out.

  After what seemed like forever, two uniformed officers burst into the room, one following the other. I was so relieved to see them that I would cheerfully have hugged them had I not been otherwise engaged.

  “It’s okay, sir,” the first cop assured me, grabbing for one of Bian’s arms. “You can let her go now. We’ve got her.”

  Even then, Bian Duong had no intention of going quietly. As soon as I loosened my grip, she turned on the officers and fought like a crazed she-devil. It took the combined efforts of both of them to finally subdue her and fasten her wrists with a pair of cuffs. At that point a fire truck and an aid car had pulled up outside. Moments later a phalanx of EMTs rumbled into the house.

  “Where is he?” one of them called over his shoulder.