by J. A. Jance
Fighting panic, I fumbled to pry my cell phone from my pocket. My fingers seemed like frozen stubs as I forced them to dial.
“Nine-one-one,” a calm-voiced woman answered. “What is your emergency?”
“It’s my wife,” I said. “I think someone’s taken her.”
“What do you mean by ‘taken?’ ” she asked.
I tried to keep my voice steady. “My wife is Mel Soames,” I said. “She’s the police chief here in Bellingham, and she’s missing.”
“Calm down, sir. What do you mean ‘missing’?”
I wanted to reach through the phone and throttle the woman. How could she be so stupid?
“I mean her car is here. Her purse is here. Her weapon is here. She isn’t. I think she’s been kidnapped.”
“Where are you?” the operator asked.
Taking a deep breath to control my temper, I gave her the address. “All right,” the woman said. “I’m sending units your way. Do you have any idea how long she’s been gone?”
I walked around to the front of the Porsche and leaned over close enough to the hood to hear if there was any clicking from the engine. There was nothing—not a sound—and there wasn’t any heat rising from the hood, either. That meant that the car had been parked long enough for the engine to cool completely.
“No idea,” I said into the phone, “but probably an hour at least.”
While waiting for a patrol car to arrive and to avoid disturbing any possible evidence, I forced myself to stay away from the vehicle. I walked past the house, through the front yard, and all the way back down to the fence, where I stood stock-still, staring out to sea. Anyone seeing me right then might have assumed I was simply admiring the water view. I wasn’t. I was peering into an abyss at the appalling possibility of losing what I held most dear and knowing that if Mel was lost, I was, too.
That’s when it hit me. If a woman goes missing, who’s the first suspect? The husband or else the person who calls it in. In this instance, that would be yours truly twice over. I thought about how I had forced myself to sound calm during the 9-1-1 call, and then I thought about all the other 9-1-1 recordings I had heard over the years—the ones where some chump calls to report that he found his dead wife, the wife he just murdered, lying on the floor in the living room. Usually, the killer will mention that he’s tried reviving her even though the autopsy will reveal that she died hours before the 9-1-1 call. Instead of trying to bring her around, he’s spent the interim attempting to clean up the crime scene.
I was that guy now, the calm one on the phone. When officers did show up, I’d be the first one they interviewed and the first one under suspicion. I knew what that meant, too. While investigators were busy investigating me, whoever had done it would have plenty of time to get away.
That thought brought me up short. Who had done it? Was the unknown assailant someone who just happened to come by? Was this a crime of opportunity, or was it something else, something planned and deliberate? And if it was the latter, who had it in for Mel Soames.
I could think of only one answer to that question—the guy who had been passed over for the job of chief, Austin Manson. Mel’s phone was there in the car. Otherwise, I could have used our Find My Device app to locate her. But what about Manson, where was he, and, if he was the culprit, was Mel still with him?
The house was at the far southern end of Bellingham in a low-crime area. That explained why it was taking time for a patrol car to arrive on the scene. I took out my phone again and redialed Mel’s office. “I’m looking for Austin Manson,” I told Kelly, identifying myself again and hoping against hope that word of my 9-1-1 call hadn’t yet filtered upstairs from the emergency operator.
“Sorry, Assistant Chief Manson is out sick today,” Kelly informed me. “Can anyone else help you?”
I’m not generally a very good liar, but right then that’s exactly what I needed to be—a capable and believable liar. “I wanted to surprise Mel by inviting Assistant Chief Manson to dinner with us tomorrow night,” I said. “Do you happen to have either a home number for him or else a cell?”
Kelly gave me both, texting them to me because I had no other way to write them down. Did I turn around and try calling either one? No, I did not. Instead, my next call was placed to a guy named Todd Hatcher.
Todd is a self-styled forensic economist whose playbook includes access to untold databases. He also has an uncanny way with computers. In S.H.I.T., Todd had functioned as Ross Connors’s unseen right-hand man, and now Todd was the one I turned to for help.
“Hey,” Todd said when he answered the phone. I could hear the noisy sound of a child wailing somewhere near the background—most likely Todd and Julie’s two-year-old daughter, Danielle. “Long time no see.”
A momentary silence followed. I was remembering the last several times I’d seen Todd—first in the flashing-light chaos beneath the Space Needle minutes after Ross Connors’s car wreck; at the funeral for Bill Spade, Ross’s driver; and finally outside the packed gymnasium at O’Dea High School, which had been the only place deemed large enough to hold Ross Connors’s funeral. From the odd catch in Todd’s voice when he spoke again, I suspect he was recalling those same scenes.
“What’s up?”
Standing in the chilly midday sunlight, I heard the distant sound of an approaching siren. There wasn’t much time. I told him what I needed as quickly as I could.
“You think this sour-grapes guy Manson may be behind what’s happened?”
“I do. He called in sick today. If I try to tell one of his officers that I think the assistant chief is the one responsible for all this, the cop will most likely fall on the floor laughing. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Manson isn’t behind it at all, but I still want to know where he is as of right now.”
“Beau,” Todd began, “do you think . . . ?” I could hear the coming barrage of caution before Todd ever managed to spit it out, and I cut him off in midsentence.
“I’m texting you his numbers right now,” I told him urgently. “Please, Todd, see if you can locate Manson’s cell.”
“As long as we don’t have a warrant, anything you find won’t hold up in court.”
“Mel’s life is in danger. That means we can get around the need for a warrant. Besides, I’m not a cop any longer,” I snarled at him. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about admissible evidence.”
I disconnected then, forwarded the numbers to him, and started back up the slope, just as a patrol car came down the driveway and screeched to a stop with one final bleat from the siren.
When the cop emerged from the car, I took a look at his baby face and figured he would be something less than useless. Then I saw his name tag—Officer Dale Embry—the young guy from that officer-involved shooting months earlier. I don’t know how many sworn officers there are in Mel’s department, but when I realized who he was, I felt as though I had just won the lottery.
“What seems to be the problem?” Embry asked.
“It’s my wife,” I said, pointing at Mel’s car. “I think she’s been kidnapped.”
There probably aren’t that many Caymans running loose in Bellingham. As soon as Embry glanced at the vehicle, a look of shocked recognition spread across his features. He immediately spoke into the radio attached to the shoulder of his uniform.
“Officer needs assistance,” he said. “Chief Soames is missing.”
I’m not sure if the emergency operator had deliberately withheld that piece of information from her radio transmission or if it had simply been an oversight on her part, but I knew Embry’s call would bring a stampede of officers, most likely none of whom would turn out to be Assistant Chief Manson. I also knew that if I let my car be trapped in the driveway, it might take hours for me to get it loose again. I couldn’t risk that.
“Let me move my vehicl
e out of the way so the detectives and CSIs can access her car.”
Embry was very young, bless his heart—young and naive. I learned later that he was also an Eagle Scout and a Boy Scout troop leader. He hadn’t yet learned that most people can look you straight in the eye and lie through their teeth. The prospect that his chief had been kidnapped left him totally out of his depth, so he was happy to let me. Once back up on street level, I heard the sounds of multiple sirens approaching, and so I simply vanished, driving out of the Bayside neighborhood and slipping quietly into the parking lot of a nearby apartment building. I was gone before any other officers arrived on the scene. With any kind of luck, it would be quite some time before Embry figured out that I hadn’t come back down the driveway along with everybody else.
I’m not a man given to praying, but that’s what I did—I prayed my heart out. I was still in the apartment parking lot and in the middle of my long heart-to-heart chat with the Man Upstairs when my phone rang, with Todd Hatcher on the line.
“That was quick,” I said.
“Completely illegal but quick,” he responded. “I got a ping off Manson’s phone. He’s currently in the parking lot of the scenic overlook at a place called Larrabee State Park. It’s on Highway 11, about six miles south of Fairhaven at milepost fourteen. Depending on how fast you drive, it should take ten to fifteen minutes to get there.”
“I’m on my way. What kind of vehicle does Manson drive?”
“I thought you’d want to know that,” Todd said, “and I have it for you. It’s an ’06 Chevrolet Malibu.”
During that drive, Formula 1 drivers had nothing on me. I made it to the overlook parking lot in just under seven minutes. Driving there, I realized it was probably close to the same spot where Mel, while working for S.H.I.T, had located the remains of a missing guy who’d fallen to his death on a Sunday afternoon while taking a leak on his way home from an afternoon of heavy drinking.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that I’d gone off and left the front door to the house unlocked and wide open. With cops all over the place, I didn’t suppose that was much of a problem, for the remainder of the afternoon anyway. Besides, since the place had already been stripped bare in preparation for the remodel, how much damage could anyone do?
Todd had said that the overlook was right around milepost fourteen. I slowed down about a half a mile out so I could approach the place under the flag of your ordinary day-tripper out seeing the sights. When I pulled into the parking lot, there were only two other vehicles visible. One was a white Chevy Malibu, parked at the far end of the lot. In the middle of the space was an immense luxury tour bus loaded with a group of Japanese tourists, who were in the process of cleaning up after a chilly, windblown picnic lunch. Pretending to throw away some trash, I blended in with the group and discovered that most of them spoke English surprisingly well. I engaged a couple of them in conversation long enough to learn that they had spent the weekend sightseeing at the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. Now they were taking the scenic route north to Vancouver, B.C., before catching their flight back to Tokyo.
I usually grumble about tourists. The hordes of camera-wielding dolts who stream off cruise ships and into downtown Seattle and the Regrade these days can be downright provoking. They may drop millions of dollars into the cash registers of local merchants, but my big gripe is that they tend to walk four and five abreast, effectively blocking traffic on any given sidewalk at any given time.
This particular batch of tourists, however, I regarded as an absolute godsend. Manson had probably come here thinking he’d have plenty of time and privacy to send Mel plunging from the parking lot to certain death on the wave-pounded rocks far below. My hope—my slenderest smidgen of hope—was that the picnickers had delayed him long enough that Mel was still alive.
A man I suspected of being the tour-bus driver stood off by himself, smoking a cigarette. The passengers might have been Japanese, but I could tell by his flannel shirt and baseball cap that the driver was dyed-in-the-wool American.
Taking a steadying breath, I walked toward him, not knowing as I went what I would say or even exactly what I wanted to accomplish. On the one hand, having the tourists present provided cover for me and kept Manson from making his next move. On the other hand, I was armed, and, most likely, Manson was, too. If the confrontation ended up turning into some kind of shoot-out, I didn’t want to be responsible for putting a busload of innocent Japanese visitors in jeopardy.
The driver stubbed out his cigarette as I approached. “How’s it going?” he said.
Those three words were ordinary enough—casually welcoming of a stranger, but, at the same time, a bit on the wary side, as though to say he thought I might turn out to be an okay guy while still warning me not to try getting too chummy. I needed a quick way to start a conversation, and so, even though I quit smoking literally decades ago, I came up with the only possible topic that had any hope of working.
“Got a smoke?” I asked.
There’s an instant bonding among smokers these days. Smokers are so accustomed to being treated like pariahs—glared at, ridiculed, and reviled—that when they find other like-minded individuals, they tend to let down their defenses. I had seen that phenomenon at work earlier that very morning in the interaction between Harry I. Ball and Marge Herndon. They met, they lit their respective cigarettes, and were instantly pals for life.
After a moment’s hesitation, the driver reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes—a brand I didn’t recognize. From an arm’s length away, I could see that the writing on the package was in Japanese. What I couldn’t see from that distance was if the indecipherable characters included any of our country’s nanny-state grim health warnings.
“A gift from one of my passengers,” he explained, noticing that I was studying the packaging. “They brought their own along on the trip, and that’s a good thing. It means they don’t mind if I stop for cigarette breaks. They want them, too.”
He tapped a cigarette out and held the package in my direction. Then he took one for himself and lit both with a lighter he extracted from the pocket of his jeans.
I took a puff. After so many years of not smoking, that first fiery lungful of nicotine hit me like a ton of bricks. It took real effort on my part to suppress a sudden fit of coughing.
“I’ve got a problem,” I said.
“Oh, yeah?” Cigarette bonding goes only so far. Wariness crept back into his voice. “Like what?”
“You see that car over there in the corner?”
“You mean the Malibu with the guy sitting in it? He showed up a while ago. He’s been sitting there the whole time without getting out of the car. Made me wonder what he was up to.”
“And well you should,” I told him. “The guy behind the wheel works with my wife and hates her guts. She’s gone missing. I think he might have kidnapped her from our new house in Fairhaven. I believe she’s locked in the trunk and that he brought her here to kill her. As soon as he has a chance, I suspect he’s going to shove her off the cliff.”
That declaration provoked a fit of coughing—from the driver, this time, rather than from me. “You’re kidding,” he gasped when the spasm subsided. “It’s March. What is this, some kind of weird April Fool’s joke?”
“It’s no joke. My name is J. P. Beaumont. I’m a retired homicide cop. My wife’s name is Melissa Soames, but she goes by Mel. She was recently appointed chief of police in Bellingham. Austin Manson is her second-in-command. He’s pissed beyond measure that she got the top job, and he didn’t. He’s known to have a temper.”
“Pissed enough to kill her?” the driver said, shaking his head in disbelief. “No way!”
“Way,” I said.
“If he kidnapped her, how come you know about it? What makes you think he brought her here?”
“We got a p
ing off his cell phone.”
The driver ground out the remains of his half-smoked cigarette. “I’d better get my people out of here pronto,” he said. “Before the cops show up, and this our picnic turns into the shoot-out at the OK Corral.”
“Wait,” I said. “Please. I need your help.”
He gave me what Jeremy, my son-in-law, calls the stink-eye. “What kind of help?”
“The fact that you and your people have been here is probably the only thing keeping him from making a move. I need you to stay. Round up your people. Get them loaded onto the bus, but please don’t leave. If things go to hell in a handbasket, and there is a shoot-out, chances are we’re talking handguns. I doubt he’ll be armed with a high-powered rifle. Your bus should be far enough away that the passengers shouldn’t be in any danger.”
“But they might be,” the driver pointed out.
“Yes,” I agreed. “They could be.”
“You and he might be armed with handguns only,” the driver continued, “but the cops who show up will come with rifles and shotguns at the ready and with bulletproof vests, besides. My poor people have nothing,” he added, nodding in the general direction of the bus. “Zilch. They’ll be sitting ducks.”
This was the part where things were getting dicey—the place where I would either lose him completely or win him over. It could go either way.
“The cops aren’t coming,” I said. “As I said, I’m Mel’s husband. Right now, I’m most likely suspect numero uno as far as the cops are concerned. They’re probably searching for me high and low.”
“They don’t know you’re here?”
I shook my head. “The problem is, while everybody else is wasting their time looking for me, I’m afraid Manson is going to kill her. You and I may be her only chance.”
