by J. A. Jance
“In a hospital.”
“Where? Which one?”
“Somewhere,” Junior said vaguely. “I don’t know the name of it.”
“What’s Adam’s daddy’s name?”
“He doesn’t have a daddy.”
“Does his mother have another name, a first name?”
“Her name is Mrs. Jackson,” Junior responded firmly. “That’s what my mommy said to call her.”
Ben and Shiree Weston had taught their son to respect his elders, but that respect wouldn’t make our job any easier.
Big Al took another tack. “Where does she live? Somewhere close to you?”
“No. They live all the way over on Queen Anne. You know, that really steep hill, but Adam and Dougie go to the same school. McClure. They’re in junior high. I’m only in kindergarten now, but I’ll be big enough to be in first grade next year. Did you know that?”
Hearing the ingenuous certainty in Junior Weston’s voice made me wish I could be a little kid again myself. No matter what terrible disasters might befall, kids exist in a plane where much of the future is known and predictable. At least children were free to believe it predictable. Junior Weston’s parents, siblings, and friend had been wiped out in the course of a single catastrophic night, but the boy moved forward with every confidence that next year he would shift automatically from kindergarten to first grade. And he was probably right.
“Will I get to see my mommy and daddy?” Junior asked. “I saw Grammy after she was dead. She was in a long box with her good black dress on, her best church dress. There were lots of flowers. I thought she was sleeping. That’s what it looked like.”
I doubted any amount of mortician’s art would ever restore the appearances of Shiree and Bonnie Weston. They would certainly need closed coffins. As a consequence, the others probably would be too. As if reading my mind, Big Al spoke. “No,” he answered firmly. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh,” Junior Weston said. He rubbed his eyes. “I’m tired. Can I go home now? I want to go to bed.”
The shift was abrupt but not surprising. A five-year-old’s attention span is only so long, and his understanding of the tragedy was as yet only skin-deep. It was fine to talk about people being dead and in heaven, but Junior Weston still had no real grasp of the fundamental changes that had transformed his young life. He was tired, with good reason, but he couldn’t go home and go to bed, not to the home and bed he had known, not ever again.
“Someone’s gone to get your grandpa,” Big Al told him. “When he gets here, you’ll have to go home with him.”
“Grampa’s coming here?” Junior asked incredulously. “How can he? He can’t drive, and it’s too far to walk. Besides, he doesn’t like this place.”
“We’ll bring him here and then someone will take you both wherever he says.”
“Oh,” Junior said again. “Okay.”
He leaned back against Big Al’s shoulder and chest. Like a worn-out puppy, the boy closed his eyes. Within seconds he was sound asleep with one arm wrapped firmly around the teddy bear’s comforting neck.
I had been taking notes fast and furiously. “You did a hell of a job with him, Al,” I said.
Big Al Lindstrom nodded sadly. “Thanks,” he said. “He’s a pretty sharp kid. What’s next?”
“You sit there with him for the time being and I’ll see what I can do about locating Adam Jackson’s mother. I’d like to get to her before someone else does.”
“Right,” Big Al said. “I suppose I should call Molly, too.”
But before either one of us had a chance to do anything, we heard a jumble of voices coming down the corridor. I looked up as Sergeant Watkins escorted a tall, stoop-shouldered black man into our cubicle. I would have known him anywhere as Ben Weston’s father. Harmon Weston was a thinner, older version of his son.
“I’ve come for the boy,” he said without preamble, looking hard at Big Al Lindstrom through Coke-bottle-bottom glasses. “Has anybody told him yet?”
“I did, Mr. Weston,” Big Al said. “I’m so sorry.”
Harmon Weston nodded. “”All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.“ That’s what the Good Book says.”
At first I didn’t understand that the old man was talking about his own son, but Big Al Lindstrom had been far closer to the Weston family, and he immediately recognized the scriptural quote as an attack on Ben. He fairly bristled.
“That’s not fair,” he said quietly. “No matter what you think, Mr. Weston, your son was not a violent man. He wore a gun, but he didn’t use it. He never had to.”
“My son is dead,” Harmon Weston said stiffly. “I didn’t come here to argue about what he did or didn’t do. I came for the boy. Wake up, Benjy. Let’s go.”
Junior Weston fought to rouse himself. For a moment, he looked around, dismayed by the strange surroundings, then his eyes focused on his grandfather’s familiar face.
“It’s true, isn’t it, Grampa? It wasn’t a bad dream, was it?”
“No,” Harmon Weston answered, reaching out and taking the boy’s pudgy hand. He pulled the boy to him and held him close. As he gazed down at his grandson’s curly hair I glimpsed the terrible hurt behind the old man’s outward show of bitterness and rancor. “It’s no dream at all, Benjy. It’s a nightmare. Come on now.”
“Do you need a ride?” Big Al offered.
“The car’s waiting downstairs,” Watty said quickly. “We’ve already got that handled.”
Harmon Weston let go of Junior and started toward the door. The boy took a tentative step after him before turning back to Big Al.
“I’ve gotta go now,” Junior said.
Big Al Lindstrom nodded. “I know. Good-bye, Junior. Thanks for all your help.”
At that, the boy darted back long enough to give Big Al a quick hug around the neck. Then, clutching his teddy bear, he followed his grandfather into the hallway. Accompanied by Sergeant Watkins, the two of them disappeared from view, leaving Detective Lindstrom staring at the empty doorway behind them and shaking his head.
“Stubborn old son of a bitch,” he muttered. “He and Ben were at war for years, and now Harmon’s all Junior Weston has left in the world. I wouldn’t want to be in that poor little kid’s shoes for nothing.”
CHAPTER 4
With Junior safely on his way to his grandfather’s house, Big Al and I headed back toward the Weston family home in Rainier Valley. Without lights and sirens, it’s a ten-minute drive from downtown. For a good part of that time we were both pretty quiet. Big Al finally broke the silence.
“What do you think?” he asked. “Was Ben the real target, or is the killer somebody with a grudge against every cop in the known universe, and Ben was just a stand-in?”
That in a nutshell was the crux of the matter. Should the investigation head off after every crazy who had ever voiced a grudge against the Seattle PD? Regardless, I knew we’d go searching through Ben Weston’s catalog of past and present acquaintances both on and off the job. The problem was, Gentle Ben Weston hadn’t been given that moniker for being some kind of bad-ass cop. The last I heard, he had been working a desk job in Patrol. Of all the possible jobs in the department, a desk position in Patrol seemed least likely to create long-term, homicidal-type grudges.
“What would somebody have against a guy like Ben?” I asked. “I can understand how a crook might build up this kind of rage against somebody in Homicide or Vice, but why have such a hard-on for a poor, pen-pushing desk jockey from Patrol?”
“He wasn’t in Patrol,” Big Al returned quietly, “not anymore.”
“That’s news to me. Since when?”
Lindstrom shrugged. “Six months? A little longer, maybe. Don’t you remember? He took a voluntary downgrade and transfer into CCI.”
In Seattle PD jargon, CCI translates into Coordinated Criminal Investigations. In departmental politics, it’s currently synonymous with hot potato. CCI started out as the unit nobody wanted to have, doing the d
irty work with gangs that no one across the street in City Hall wanted to admit needed doing. CCI’s desirability waxes and wanes, depending on the fickle barometer of public relations.
In the past few years, Seattle has received a lot of good press and has turned up on more than one “most livable city” list. Livable cities evidently exist in some kind of fantasy world, and they’re not supposed to have any problems, most especially not gang problems. For years the brass upstairs wallowed in denial despite reported gang-type shootings that came in as regularly as One-A-Day vitamins. When other cities started gang units, Seattle didn’t because starting a unit would have meant admitting it had the problem. When a new unit was finally created, it was given the innocuous and hence less threatening name of Coordinated Criminal Investigations.
A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but CCI’s whole purpose is to combat gang-related criminal activity, a problem the city still isn’t wild about acknowledging. Not surprisingly, the guys in CCI don’t always get a whole lot of respect, and a posting to that unit isn’t regarded as a plum assignment. If Ben Weston had taken a voluntary downgrade and transfer from patrol supervision to a lower position as a CCI investigator, it was as good as admitting that his career path was way off track and in a downward spiral.
“When did all that happen?” I asked. “I don’t remember hearing anything about it.”
“There was plenty of talk at the time,” Big Al answered. “Maybe it was while you were down in Arizona.”
Any number of things had slipped by me the previous fall when I spent the better part of two months in doctor-ordered attendance at an alcoholism treatment center near Wickenburg. In the world of work, two months is a considerable period of time. Most departmental gossip doesn’t have a two-month-long shelf life. Talk about Ben Weston had evidently run its course well before I came back to work.
“That’s probably when it happened, all right,” I admitted. “Nobody said word one to me.”
“There was quite a stink about it,” Big Al said, “with all the usual crap about how he got as far as he did because of quotas and affirmative action and not because he was any good at what he did. Some people claimed Ben couldn’t measure up in Patrol and that he transferred out before they caught on to him.”
Big Al had known Gentle Ben Weston far better than anyone else in the department. If anyone knew the truth of that matter, he would. “What do you say?” I asked.
There was another pause, longer this time. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I just don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“His transferring didn’t make any sense to me. He was already on the promotion list for lieutenant, but one day for no good reason he just up and says piss on the whole damn thing. Even took a cut in pay because there were no openings at his level. What kind of crazy idea is that with a wife and three kids to support?”
“Did you talk to him about it? Did you ask him why?”
“He told me he had to.”
“That’s all he said?”
“That’s it.”
As he answered, Big Al turned off Genesee onto Cascadia and into Ben Weston’s immediate neighborhood. The surrounding streets were still jammed with law enforcement vehicles. Adding to these were the media’s multiplicity of transportation. We had to park and walk from almost two blocks away. Naturally, someone recognized us, and a group of reporters attached themselves to us like so many hungry leeches, snapping pictures of our backsides and shouting questions behind us.
Maybe familiarity breeds contempt, but most reporters remind me of demanding two-year-olds. No matter how often you tell them you aren’t allowed to comment on current investigations, they can’t remember it from one time to the next. They still ask the same damn stupid questions. Or, if by chance you do screw up and answer, someone else will ask the same thing over again two minutes later as though they had turned stone-cold deaf the first time you answered.
On this occasion neither Big Al nor I said a word. I was looking forward to ditching the reporters and getting on with the investigation right up until I saw Detective Paul Kramer standing next to the door on Ben Weston’s front porch, talking earnestly to Officers Dunn and Wyman.
“Where’d he come from?” I asked.
Big Al sighed. “Out from under a rock,” he answered.
Kramer caught sight of us about then. “There you are. Captain Powell sent me out here to snag you when you came back. There’ll be a task force meeting starting in five minutes in the Mobile Command Post van in the alley out back. He wants you two there along with everybody else.”
“Task force?” I asked. “What task force?”
He looked at me and grinned. “This is a big case, Beaumont. You didn’t think you and that square-head partner of yours would get to run the whole show, did you? Come on. Get a move on. Powell wants to talk to both of you before the actual meeting starts.”
Kramer motioned for us to follow him and started away without seeing the look of undiluted rage that washed across Detective Lindstrom’s face. By and large, Al isn’t the excitable type. I would say he’s even-tempered and fairly slow to anger, but Kramer’s little byplay had an amazing effect that brought Big Al straight to the boiling point. He strode after Kramer, caught him by one arm, and spun him around.
“Get one thing straight, bub,” Big Al said without raising his voice. “It’s no show! A good man is dead along with most of his family. If you think that’s a show, then you can kiss my ass!”
The kind of menace in Big Al’s voice usually comes from someone holding the business end of a loaded weapon. Kramer’s jaw dropped. “Sorry,” he said, with only the slightest hint of sarcastic exaggeration.
“You’d oughta be,” Big Al returned coldly. “Now take us to Captain Powell.”
For a moment the two men stood staring at one another, and I was afraid they were going to mix it up physically. If anyone tried to break up that confrontation, the guy in the middle would get the short end of it. Finally, Kramer dropped his eyes and started away while I breathed a quick sigh of relief. The incident startled me every bit as much as it did Detective Kramer.
I had worked with Big Al off and on for several years without ever seeing him fly off the handle that way. I wondered if this wasn’t the kind of thing Captain Powell meant when he had threatened to pull Big Al from Ben Weston’s case. If the captain got even the slightest wind of it, he wouldn’t hesitate to make good his threat.
“You’d better cool it before Powell sees you,” I suggested. “You know what he said.”
“I know very well what he said,” Big Al replied, “but if that bastard Kramer so much as looks at me sideways, I’ll knock his block off.”
What was it Simon and Garfunkel used to say about bridging troubled waters?
“Besides, you know that’s the whole idea anyway, don’t you?” Big Al continued.
“What’s the whole idea? What are you talking about?”
“You heard him-the task force. Powell’s already figured out a way to pull me off the case. If they’re going to turn this into a task force operation, it’ll be nothing more than a group grope. You know how those work. People run around like so many chickens with their heads cut off getting in each other’s way. It’ll be impossible to get anything done.”
I knew Big Al was right. Task forces are notoriously inefficient and cumbersome, but they sound good on paper, make for better public relations, and that was something Seattle’s new police chief needed desperately.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go. The captain’s waiting.”
But Big Al stood without moving, seemingly lost in thought.
“We’d better get going,” I urged again.
Big Al Lindstrom seemed to shake himself out of some kind of trance. “You go on ahead,” he said, waving me away. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
He turned his back and lumbered off in the opposite direction. “Hey, wait a minute. Where are yo
u going?”
“If he’s going to pull me, I want to go back for one more look. I might’ve missed something important.”
I let him go. For one thing, Big Al is bigger than I am, and there was nothing I could do to stop him. For another, I figured it was probably wise for him to give himself a few cool-down moments before facing either Detective Kramer or Captain Powell.
“Don’t take too long,” I cautioned.
I headed for the Mobile Command Post in the alley. It’s nothing more than a glorified RV that once belonged to a snowbird drug dealer whose delivery route consisted of driving up and down the I-5 corridor. He had a well-heeled clientele that stretched all the way from Canada to Mexico, and he sold drugs in RV parks from the back of a very upscale Winnebago. When a Seattle narcotics unit got lucky and busted him in a parking lot near Northgate, the dealer went off for a stretch in Monroe. The Winnebago, already equipped with a tantalizing array of electronics gear, switched sides and came to work for the Seattle Police Department.
Janice Morraine, a criminalist who’s worked her way up to second in command in George Yamamoto’s crime lab, was standing outside, smoking a cigarette. Despite insistent warnings from the Surgeon General and despite state laws outlawing smoking on the job, Janice continues to chain-smoke. “Don’t go inside any sooner than you have to,” she warned. “It’s a sardine can.”
“How many people are in there?”
“More than should be. It’s like Noah’s ark except only the Homicide dicks come two by two. One each from everywhere else.”
“Sounds great.”
Janice Morraine nodded. “That’s what I thought. There’s nothing like a middle-of-the-night meeting to keep everybody from getting the job done,” she grumbled. “I should be back in the house working, not out here cooling my heels.”
She stood up on tiptoe and peered over my shoulder. “By the way, where’s Detective Lindstrom? As I understand it, we’re all waiting for you two to show up.”
“He’ll be here in a minute. I’d better go tell the captain.”
Leaving her alone with only her glowing cigarette for company, I forced my way into the press of people crammed into the RV. Winnebagos may be spacious enough for some little old retired couple traveling the highways and byways to visit their grandkids, but this one was far too small for the group Captain Powell had assembled. People stood shoulder to shoulder.
