Fury

by G. M. Ford

  “And the defense attorney?”

  “Richard Rivers. Mr. Rivers presently lives in Renton and sells adhesives for the 3M Company. Himes was his third and last assignment for the public defenders office. And the only capital case. He was zero for three as a defense attorney. Never stepped into a court-room again after the Himes trial. I called him this morning and asked for a comment. He hung up on me.”

  “What about Donald?”

  She checked her notes again. “Donald’s the court-house heartthrob. You mention his name to the secretarial staff and they get all dewy-eyed. He’s got a filthy-rich wife who he married a mere three weeks after Himes was arrested. She’s the former Allison Graves, whose parents have been rich for so long nobody I talked to could remember where the money originally came from. And who, in an amazing stroke of synchronicity, also happens to be Chief Kesey’s goddaughter. I’ll tell you, Corso, I’m gonna have to check this guy out for myself.”

  “He’s a smooth package,” Corso said.

  She kept flipping pages backward until she got to the front.

  “Donald’s partner was a guy named Nance. He retired a couple of months after the Himes trial and lives somewhere down by Scottsdale, Arizona.”

  Corso took a deep breath. Then ran everything she’d told him around in his head. Decided he liked it.

  “Good stuff,” he said. “Gives us a lead nobody else has got. Nice work.”

  He waited for the left-turn arrow, turned the corner onto Ninth Avenue, drove three blocks, and then rolled along the front of Harborview Medical Center to the far end of the building. He parked the car on the corner of Ninth and Alder. About ten feet too close to a fire hydrant and diagonally across Ninth Avenue from the medical examiner’s office, which occupied the south end of the hospital’s basement. He shut off the car. A silent mist made the windshield instantly opaque. The air inside the car was thick and humid.

  “You can stay here or you can come inside with me.” He would have bet the ranch that, annoyed as she was, she’d opt to wait in the car, but she surprised him by retrieving her raincoat from the backseat, grabbing the door handle, and getting out, camera bag and all. Slammed the door. No eye contact whatsoever with Corso.

  She followed him across the street and down the five steps into the medical examiner’s underground offices. The reception area was a long narrow room running the length of the building. A collection of institutional furniture and tattered magazines was grouped beneath the windows. Four sets of double swinging doors spaced along the far wall. A good-looking young woman with brown, turned-under hair sat at the desk, apparently doing homework of some sort. A sign said her name was Thane Cummings. She looked up and smiled. Closed the book on her mechanical pencil.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so,” Corso said. She was doing some kind of math assignment.

  “I want to file a request for information.”

  “What kind of information?” she asked.

  Corso told her.

  “Autopsy information requires a court order, and an official request. The lie-detector test…I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never been asked for lie-detector test results before.” She shrugged and pulled open the bottom drawer of her desk. “There’s only one request form, though, so I guess you put your copy requests here and then just check ‘Other’”—she pointed to the list of frequently requested materials—“and then put the lie-detector requests here.” She ran a bitten thumb-nail over an empty patch of the form marked “Other (Explain).”

  Corso took his time with the form. No sense giving them an excuse. He continually checked his notes as he worked. He had the eight autopsy dates down pat. It was the lie-detector date that had some play in it. The test was administered somewhere between Himes’s arrest and his trial. The spread between February 17 and May 3, 1998, was as close as he could come to pinning it down.

  Meg had wandered to the far end of the room. Had a black Nikon out, pointing back in Corso’s direction. Decided she didn’t like whatever she saw through the viewfinder and began moving closer. Checked the view again. Didn’t like that either.

  On Corso’s left, one of the tall silver doors swung open. A woman, maybe fifty, wearing a long white lab coat, backed out through the swinging door. She was rubbing her hands together as if she was putting on lotion. She had short, curly, salt-and-pepper hair and wore a pair of black-rimmed glasses with thick lenses that made her dark eyes look tiny. A red-and-white name tag on her chest read “Dr. Fran Abbott.”

  “Oh, Dr. Abbott,” the receptionist called.

  The woman turned and raised her eyebrows. Rubbing at the backs of her hands now, she took a step in Corso’s direction.

  “This gentleman was asking about lie-detector test results,” the girl said.

  “What about them?”

  “Do we keep those here?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. She wiped a palm on her lab coat and offered a hand to Corso. Her grip was moisturized but firm. She peered myopically from Dougherty to Corso and then back to Meg for another go-round. “And you would be?” she inquired.

  Corso introduced Meg and himself. Showed the woman his press card. Behind the thick lenses, her eyes got even smaller. “What test would that be?” she asked.

  “Walter Leroy Himes,” Corso said.

  Corso watched as the name went pinballing through her brain. The muscles along the sides of her jaw tightened. She jammed her hands into her coat pockets.

  Behind Corso the phone buzzed.

  “I’m not sure—” Dr. Abbott began.

  “Dr. Abbott,” the girl called.

  The receptionist held the receiver against her chest. “There’s a Sergeant Densmore on the line for you,” she said.

  Corso watched the color drain from Fran Abbott’s face. Watched as she nervously licked her lips and then checked back over her shoulder. “I have to take that,” she said. “Please excuse me.”

  As she turned and headed across the room, Corso strode quickly over to Meg. He pulled the car keys from his pants pocket, grabbed her by the left wrist, and slapped the keys into her palm. She jerked her arm from his grasp.

  He leaned in close and spoke in a low voice. “Go get the car. Meet me outside. Turn it around. Make sure we’re ready to roll.”

  Her first inclination was to tell him to keep his damn hands to himself and, while he was at it, to get the damn car for himself too. Something in his eyes, however, caught her attention. The usual vaguely annoyed sneer was missing, replaced by a steely-eyed seriousness she hadn’t seen before. She dropped the keys into the pocket of her skirt, switched her camera bag over to her right shoulder, and started for the door.

  When Corso turned back, Dr. Abbott was taking notes. “Airport Way,” she muttered. Getting directions, Corso figured. Dr. Abbott held the receiver tight to her ear. “Yes,” she said. “I understand.” She breathed an enormous sigh. Caught herself and turned her back on Corso. “Yes. Twenty minutes. Yes. I’ll hurry.”

  She handed the phone back to the receptionist and spoke to Corso. “I’m afraid I have to go,” she said. “An emergency.”

  Corso watched as the woman bustled through the swinging door and disappeared, leaving only the smell of hand lotion in her wake. Corso stepped back over to the reception desk, signed and dated his request, and gave it to the young woman.

  “Thanks for the help,” he said.

  She smiled. “It’s nice to have something to do,” she said. “Mostly I just sit around and do homework. Things can be pretty dead around here.”

  Corso chuckled and said, “I’ll bet.”

  The rain had eased to something more akin to wet fog. Not exactly falling, just sort of hitching a ride on the thick air. Corso felt the unseen moisture gathering on his cheeks as he walked across Ninth Avenue to the Chevy. He raised his collar against the dampness and slid into the passenger seat. “In a couple of minutes, a white van with a yellow light on top is going to come out from that garage door do
wn at the end of the street.” Corso pointed down Alder to the ramp and the white garage door at the end of the basement. “Probably going to turn that way,” he said, pointing south on Ninth Avenue. “When the van shows, follow it.”

  “Why?”

  “The cop who just called—Densmore—he’s the one who wanted to punch my lights out at that meeting I interrupted. He’s got something to do with the Trashman case.”

  “How do you know?”

  He told her of asking the desk cops who had been in charge of the Trashman case. “So the young cop says this guy Densmore is the three.”

  “What’s a three?”

  “Homicide investigation teams are made up of three detectives. The detective in charge of the team is called the three.”

  “So?”

  “So…that’s all the guy said to me. That Densmore was the three. I did all my other talking to a Sergeant McCarty.”

  “So?”

  “So…ten minutes later, as Donald is giving me the bum’s rush out the door, McCarty is reading the younger guy the riot act and pointing at me. Like the younger guy really screwed up or something.”

  She looked over at Corso. “Weird,” she said.

  “And then there’s the chief talking about how he doesn’t want the Himes thing to compromise the ongoing investigation.”

  “What ongoing investigation?”

  “That’s a damn good question.”

  “Weird,” she said again.

  “What’s really weird is how everybody is so uptight. Dr. Abbott in there damn near gets the vapors at the mention of Densmore’s name. We’ve got the mayor making threatening phone calls to Mrs. V. An SPD sergeant seriously thinking about punching my lights out. Canceled news conferences. I mean, what’s the big deal? Witness recants. Stop the execution. Get the lawyers together. Figure it out. Everybody comes out looking fair, and humane, and worth whatever ridiculous dole the county is paying them. Seems like a great big ‘duuuh’ to me.”

  Half a block away, the white garage door began to roll upward.

  “Here we go,” Corso said.

  The van bounced up the ramp and out onto Alder. Rolled up to the stop sign. Turned right. Dougherty dropped the Chevy into gear. “How far back should I—”

  “Just don’t run into the back of them and we’ll be all right. Stay close. They’ll be focused on what they’re about to find, not on the rearview mirror.”

  Corso saw the lightbulb come on behind her eyes.

  “This is going to be a body, isn’t it?” she said.

  “And they said you were just another pretty face.”

  Chapter 16

  Thursday, September 20

  12:42 P.M. Day 4 of 6

  South Doris Street. A little in-grown toenail of a lane, buried deep within the ten square miles of industrial squalor running south from the Kingdome. Beside the banks of the septic sump that was once the Duwamish River. The entrance to South Doris was blocked by orange police barriers. A baby-faced SPD officer pulled them aside for the medical examiner’s van and now stood miserably in the rain, walking in small circles, stamping his feet, wishing he’d gotten his teaching certificate.

  “Let’s drive by nice and slow,” Corso said.

  Dougherty moved the car forward over the railroad tracks. As they came abreast of the cop, Corso rolled down his window. The young cop scowled and swung his arm in the international “move along” movement. Half a block down South Doris a King County officer got into his cruiser and backed it out of the mouth of an alley. The medical examiner’s van eased into the space and disappeared from view. The cop slid the patrol car back across the alley opening and got out.

  “Go straight,” Corso said. “Let’s go around the block.”

  They drove to the end of the block and turned right. Auto parts, forklift repairs. A scrap-metal yard along the whole left-hand side of the street. Down to the next block. The Aviator Hotel on the corner. Three stories of crumbling brick. Red neon sign, blinking. Rooms. A filthy South American blanket tacked over a cracked upstairs window. Long-forgotten flower boxes on a rusting fire escape. Rooms.

  Another collection of cops was homesteading the north end of South Doris Street. Must have been the artsy-fartsy cop set. They’d added some bright yellow cop tape to their drab orange barricades. “What now?” Dougherty asked.

  Corso pointed to the muddy shoulder of the road. A hundred feet in front of the car. “Park,” he said. “Bring a camera you can climb with.”

  She pulled in behind a blue Ford pickup truck with the tailgate missing. Several greasy tires and rims were strewn about the bed. She pulled the Nikon from the camera bag. They got out. She locked the car and threw the keys over the roof at Corso, who snagged them one-handed and put them in his jacket. “Come on,” he said. “Hold my hand, we’ll look like a couple out for a walk.”

  Beneath a row of stunted, moss-encrusted oak trees, they strolled back to the corner, crossed South Homer Street in full view of a dozen recumbent cops, and then disappeared into the deep shade enveloping the east side of the Aviator Hotel. Rooms. Corso pointed to the bottom rung of the fire-escape ladder, about ten feet in the air. He laced his fingers together at knee level. “I’ll boost you up.”

  Dougherty looked dubious. “You sure? You ask me, these cops really don’t seem like they want any company.”

  Corso smiled like a wolf. “What about the public’s right to know and all of that?”

  She stepped into his hand and reached upward until she had both hands on the bottom rung of the ladder, her boots four feet above the ground.

  “Hang on now,” he said and let her go. For a moment, she hung, suspended by her arms. Then, with a high-pitched squeal and a hail of dislodged rust, the ladder began to inch toward the ground. When it got low enough, Corso grabbed hold and put his weight onto it, until the metal ladder clicked into the down position and Dougherty stepped to the ground. She brushed herself off and ran her hands through her hair several times. “Yuk,” she said as flakes of rust fell to the ground.

  She looked up at the rusted metal skeleton, switch-backing its way up the side of the building. “You think this thing is safe?”

  “Hell no,” Corso said. “Probably hasn’t been inspected since the Eisenhower administration. You can stay down here if you want.”

  “Like hell,” she said. “Après vous.”

  Corso stepped onto the ladder and started up. His weight made the fire escape quiver. On the first-floor landing, he stepped across an overturned flower box, whose spewed soil still supported a vagrant red geranium.

  He moved up to the second floor and the blanket over the window, where he noticed that the entire contraption had come loose from the wall, that the bolts which supposedly tied the fire escape to the bricks had pulled loose, leaving the whole thing more or less leaning against the building. He looked down. Dougherty was on her way up. The air smelled of decay. Corso took a deep breath and continued climbing. Moving slowly now, as if he were walking on broken glass.

  A pair of putrid cat boxes covered nearly the entire third-floor landing. The rain had filled them to the brim. Clumps of coated cat shit floated in thick, gray water. The sodden air was ripe and rank. Corso used the back of his hand to gingerly push them aside. Shuddered. He climbed the final three rungs holding his breath, stepped over the cornice and onto the roof. Dougherty’s head was at cat-box level.

  “Careful,” he whispered.

  “Ohhh,” she groaned.

  Corso hissed at her and held a finger to his lips. She skirted the cat boxes like they were a land mine. Corso offered his hand. She shook him off and stepped up onto the roof. “That’s disgusting,” she whispered.

  The roof was L-shaped, the two segments separated by a three-foot wall. Mopped-on tar, cracked and grainy. A couple of dozen vents, some just pipes, some with little peaked metal roofs. The tops of the walls were covered by sheet metal, designed to keep the rain from eating away at the bricks. Corso pointed to the far side of
the building. “We’re going to have to go on hands and knees,” he said. She nodded. Pulled the camera from around her neck and shortened the strap. “Ready,” she said.

  By the time he reached the far side of the building, Corso felt as if somebody were pounding nails into his kneecaps. He sat with his back against the bricks, rubbing his knees with both hands. Dougherty crawled to his side. They took a minute to regroup. She picked gravel from her palms. Let the camera strap out again. Corso kept massaging his knees.

  Corso poked his head up slowly, as if expecting sniper fire. Found himself looking into an enclosed courtyard. Ran half the length of the block, in between South Doris and Homer, accessible only by the alley on South Doris. Nobody in sight. Corso grimaced as he rose to his knees. He quickly ducked his head. Caught Dougherty’s eye. Pointed straight down. Mouthed the words, “Right under us.” Dougherty nodded. She pulled the camera from around her neck and laid it on the roof. Together they leaned over and peered straight down three stories.

  A woman. Dead. Naked. Blood all over her face. Spread-eagled on her back in a Dumpster. Her lifeless breasts flattened and falling toward her sides. Her black pubic patch thick with mist. Her left leg seemed to rest at an impossible angle. Dr. Abbott and a little Japanese guy in a red windbreaker poking around her. Densmore and another cop had their notebooks out. Talking to an elderly African-American guy wearing work gloves and short rubber boots. Probably the guy who found the body.

  Dougherty pulled the lens cap from the camera and set it on the metal roof flashing. She leaned over the top, twisted the lens. Corso watched as she ran the telephoto slowly over the corpse, clicking off pictures as she moved, until she sat back down with her back to the wall. She used her sleeve to wipe moisture from the lens. “She’s got purple marks around her wrists, ankles, and throat,” she whispered. “And something really weird stuck to her ear.”