Lying in Wait (9780061747168)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “No,” I answered. “He didn’t.”

  “But how…?”

  “That means either I’m some kind of mind reader,” I interrupted, “or else we’re both working the same case.”

  “The same case?” he echoed. “How could that be?”

  “We had a fatality fire here in Seattle earlier today—a boat fire down at Fishermen’s Terminal first thing this morning. One dead male, burned to a crisp with all of his missing fingers and toes toasted to potato chips in a pie plate that was left sitting on his chest.”

  The phone line went silent for a moment, then Jacek said, “You’re absolutely right. If it’s not the same guy, we’ve got a helluva trend starting.”

  I was already slipping on my shoes. “Where are you right now?” I asked.

  “I’m out on Camano, but I told Rocky I’d meet him over in Stanwood. Have you ever been here?”

  “Once, years ago. For a Memorial Day picnic.”

  “Rocky Washington hasn’t even done that. The roads and lanes can turn into an impossible maze if you don’t know exactly where you’re going. I figured it would be easier for me to meet Rocky in Stanwood and lead him out here than it would to try giving him directions over the phone.”

  “How long ago did he leave?”

  “Not very long ago. He was just heading down to get the van when I called you.”

  “Good,” I said. “If you’re meeting him, you can meet me, too. I’ll be there as soon as I can, and it won’t take long. I’m far enough north of the Public Safety Building that I may actually beat him there. Where will you be?”

  “As you come into Stanwood, you’ll see a blinking red light with a grocery store and shopping center on the far right-hand corner. I’ll be waiting there, in the parking lot. What’ll you be driving?” he asked. “That way I’ll know what to look for.”

  “A Porsche 928,” I said. “Guard red.”

  “Right,” he said, “and I’ll be in my Rolls.” He paused for a moment, then said, “You’re kidding about the Porsche, aren’t you?”

  “No, I really will be driving a 928.”

  “What the hell kind of cop are you?” he demanded. “Narcotics? Vice?”

  I figured Detective Stan Jacek didn’t need to know that this was a special-order 928—one I had purchased to replace another one that had been blown to bits months earlier in a propane explosion down in Ashland, Oregon. So I didn’t tell Jacek any of that.

  “I’m nothing but a plain old detective,” I answered. “Same as you.”

  10

  Dead on my feet, I finally crawled into bed at four in the morning and set the alarm for seven. The alarm woke me. As soon as I managed to shake the cobwebs out of my head well enough to be able to talk, I called Sue Danielson at home.

  She sounded disgustingly chipper and wide awake. “I hope you had a good night’s sleep last night,” I told her.

  “As a matter of fact, I did. Why?”

  “Because the ball’s in your court this morning,” I said. “There’s a whole lot to be handled, and unless I catch an hour or two of sleep before I come into the office, I’m not going to be worth diddly-squat.”

  “I take it you and Alan Torvoldsen tied one on last night?” she returned.

  It’s funny, but when a dedicated drinker lays off the sauce, it’s invisible to most people. Once you’ve established a reputation as a boozer, the reputation sticks, regardless. That was something Champagne Al Torvoldsen and J. P. Beaumont shared in common.

  “Actually, I spent most of the night alternately sweating like a pig or freezing my ass off, prowling around the scene of a house fire up on Camano Island. It was still hot in places.”

  “A house fire on Camano Island?” Sue asked. “Why would you want to do something like that?”

  “Because Detective Stan Jacek of the Island County Sheriff’s Department asked me to. By the time he called me, he already knew it was a fatality fire, and he was hoping I could help him figure out who the victim is. We did pick up a letter from the scene—actually from a singed white Cadillac parked in the driveway outside the house. One of Jacek’s deputies found it.

  “It was addressed to somebody named Denise Whitney, and the address was the same as the burned house. The letter was signed ‘Mom,’ and the envelope had an Anchorage, Alaska, return address. By now I’m sure Detective Jacek’s followed up on that, trying to locate next of kin.”

  “Wait just a minute,” Sue interrupted. “How come this Island County detective is pulling you in to investigate his case?”

  “Because,” I said, “we think it may be the same perpetrator as whoever killed Gunter Gebhardt.”

  As briefly as possible, I brought Sue up to speed, telling her everything I could remember, starting with the phone call from Detective Jacek at 11:00 P.M. I told her about the grisly copycat connections between the Camano Island homicide and our own. I explained, however, that there were some notable differences between the two separate blazes.

  For instance, the one on Camano had been started by setting fire to piles of newspaper scattered in separate rooms throughout the house. Unlike the blaze on the Isolde, there were no apparent signs of a liquid accelerant in most of the house, but that was a long way from conclusive. It was possible that subsequent arson investigation would reveal the use of accelerant in that part of the house that had still been too hot to handle by the time I left the scene to return to the city.

  Attempting to be thorough, I became so caught up in telling the story that I never saw it coming. When I finally finished my recitation and shut up, I was dumbfounded to find that Sue Danielson was steamed—at me.

  “How come you didn’t call me right away?” she demanded angrily. “You should have let me know the minute all this came up.”

  “Detective Jacek’s call didn’t come in until after eleven. I figured you were sound asleep in bed by then. Besides, you’ve got kids at home to worry about. You can’t spend half the night traipsing around all over the countryside with them there by themselves.”

  “Wait a minute here, Detective J. P. Beaumont,” she bridled. “Wait just one goddamned minute! Since when do you have the right to make those kinds of decisions for me? I’m a big girl. And in case you haven’t noticed, I’m also a sworn police officer. I’ve been working outside the home all my life, and all my kids’ lives, too.

  “Jared Danielson may be a jerk at times, but he’s not a baby. I started out working night shift at the Communications Center while he was still in diapers. My sons Jared and Chris both understand that my job is what keeps food on the table and a roof over our heads. They know there are times when they have to look after themselves because I can’t always be here.”

  “I stand corrected,” I said, although I was sitting on the edge of my bed at the time. When faced with that kind of an unexpected, cross-gender firefight, I’ve learned to shape up and apologize right away. Somebody told me once that the first rule of holes is that when you’re standing in one up to your eyeballs, stop digging.

  In this instance, that strategy worked.

  “So what is it you need me to do?” Sue asked, sounding somewhat mollified.

  I explained the bit about the solid-gold wrench, then, and told her Bonnie Elgin was due at the department at nine to have her fingerprints taken and to work on an Identi-Kit sketch of our missing hit-and-run victim.

  “Bonnie most likely will need to be walked through the process, have her hand held a little,” I said. “Evidently, she’s never been involved in anything like this before, and I think she’s nervous about it.”

  “I can certainly understand that,” Sue said briskly. “What else needs doing?”

  “Be in touch with Detective Jacek.” I gave her both his phone as well as his fax number at the Island County seat in Coupeville. “As soon as we can get a photo from Else, we need to fax Jacek a picture of Gunter Gebhardt—one taken while he was still alive.”

  “What’s that for?” Sue asked.

  �
��For him to show to the neighbors on Camano. I have a feeling Gunter may have been spending a good deal of time up there.”

  “And what makes you think that?”

  Sue’s last question brought me face-to-face with my second sin of omission—I hadn’t yet briefed her on my conversation with Alan Torvoldsen, either.

  “I believe Gunter Gebhardt was playing the field,” I told her. “I heard it first from Alan Torvoldsen earlier last night, but I heard it again from people who live around the fire scene. Camano Island is one of those places where nothing much happens. The fire was like a neighborhood picnic. Everybody in town must have showed up last night to find out what was going on. Jacek and I talked to most of them, including the real estate man who sold the place to the new owners two years ago.

  “The realtor remembered there was something odd about the deal—that the house was bought by a corporation of some kind, but he couldn’t remember the name last night. Another neighbor, a woman who works in the post office over in Stanwood, said that the woman who lived in the house, a Denise Whitney, claimed it was hers. She said she owned it along with somebody else. Detective Jacek and I think that other person may actually have been Gunter Gebhardt.”

  “I suppose it’s safe to assume that Denise Whitney was quite a bit younger than Gunter,” Sue said.

  “Evidently,” I replied. “From everything I hear, she’s on the downside of twenty-five.”

  “It figures,” Sue said.

  She had kept her cool while I passed along the dope Alan had given me about Gunter’s sweet young thing. Rather than risk landing once more on my partner’s wrong side, I was scrupulous about not leaving anything out. I went ahead and told her what he had said about still carrying a torch for Else, Gunter’s widow. When I told Sue that, she turned thoughtful on me. “It wasn’t him, was it?”

  “Wasn’t who?”

  “Your old friend Alan Torvoldsen. You just told me he’s still in love with Gunter’s wife…his widow. What if he’s had a grudge against Gunter—first for stealing Else out from under his nose, years ago. Think about it. First he loses Else. Then thirty years later, he finds out the guy who did marry her is screwing around behind her back.”

  Unfortunately, the exact same thought—that Alan might have had some reason to be after Gunter—had occurred to me as well. I hadn’t exactly rationalized my way around it, but I’ll admit I hadn’t sat down to scrutinize it too closely, either.

  “I can see why Alan might be pissed off at Gunter,” I said, “but why would he take out the girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know, but you did say he knew where she lived, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. “Yes. He said he followed her home when she showed up down at the Isolde.”

  “Which means he was at the scene of the crime the day of the murders.”

  “That’s right. But by the time the Camano Island fire started, he was back here in Seattle. And remember, he has an airtight alibi for that time. He was with me, drinking espresso at Club Four-four-nine up in Greenwood.”

  Sue seemed prepared to accept that notion, at least for the time being. “What time do you expect to show up at the office yourself?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “I’ll plan on being there by ten,” I told her. “I should be on the job by the time you and Bonnie Elgin finish with the sketch.”

  “All right,” Sue said. “See you then.”

  I was dog-assed tired. I slipped down into the comfort of the still-warm covers, and it didn’t take five minutes for me to fall back asleep. I slept the sleep of the just—for all of twenty minutes. That’s when the phone rang. Captain Lawrence Powell was on the line—an irate Captain Larry Powell.

  “Detective Beaumont,” he said. “Who the hell appointed you as spokesman for the Homicide Squad?”

  “Excuse me?” Shoving my feet out of bed, I put them flat on the floor. I tend to think better sitting up. “What are you talking about, Captain Powell?” I mumbled sleepily. “What’s going on?”

  “You know very well that it’s against departmental policy for officers to make any kind of unauthorized statement to the media regarding the progress of an ongoing investigation, particularly a homicide.”

  “Statement to the media?” I echoed. “What are you talking about?”

  “Have you read this morning’s P.-I.?” Larry Powell asked. “And isn’t Maxwell Cole some kind of buddy of yours?”

  The Post-Intelligencer is Seattle’s morning paper. I don’t take it myself, and I don’t read it, either. As a matter of fact, I don’t read any newspapers at all, except when unavoidably provoked into doing so. I try to limit my journalistic intake to relatively harmless items like crossword puzzles and comics. I encounter enough blood and guts in my own life—the real stories—without having to have reporter-revised versions of those same events polluting the flavor of my breakfast coffee.

  Maxwell Cole is another story entirely. He’s a regular columnist for the P.-I. He uses his three-times-weekly forum, “City Beat,” to take journalistic potshots at anyone handy. His favorite targets happen to be police officers. Max is a former fraternity brother of mine from my days at the University of Washington. Even then he was a pain in the ass, and thirty years of practice have allowed him to raise his level of assholosity to something of an art form.

  I rubbed the grit out of my eyes. The corneas felt as if they were made of etched glass and the lids of sandpaper.

  “What’s he saying about me now?” I asked wearily.

  “It’s not about you,” Captain Powell responded. “Want me to read it to you?”

  “Not especially,” I said, “but go ahead.”

  “‘Ron and Bonnie Elgin, ace procurers of auction items for Poncho, Seattle’s premier arts fund-raising event, are busy attending to months of preparty planning. Much to their surprise, yesterday they found themselves embroiled in Seattle’s most recent murder.

  “‘According to sources close to the case, Seattle police officers are combing the city, looking for a young Hispanic male who was seen running from the scene of yesterday’s tragic and fatal boat fire on board the Isolde at Fishermen’s Terminal in Ballard.

  “‘The fleeing suspect evidently suffered a close encounter of the worst kind when he ran into the path of a vehicle driven by Bonnie Elgin. Despite injuries serious enough to merit medical attention, the man fled the scene on foot without waiting long enough to have his injuries attended to by a Medic I unit that had already been summoned by a call to nine-one-one.

  “‘It sounds as though the missing suspect’s wounds were fairly extensive, and it doesn’t seem like it should be all that difficult to find him. Of course, that all depends on how hard someone is looking.

  “‘Rumor has it that these days Seattle’s Finest are spending their time trying to learn how to work their newest crime-fighting tools—laptop computers—which were purchased at taxpayer expense with the understanding that they would offer cops high-tech aid in taking criminals off the streets.

  “‘I have a feeling our men in blue are spending so much time learning keystrokes that they can’t be bothered with doing their real jobs—like actually looking for suspects and making arrests.’”

  “Where the hell did Max come up with all that crap?” I demanded.

  “That’s what I thought you’d tell me,” Lawrence Powell returned grimly. “And once I find the guy who blabbed, I’m going to bust his nuts.”

  “Look, Captain. I never talked to Maxwell Cole about this case. And I didn’t talk to anyone else in the media, either. Somebody else must have told him, but it wasn’t me.”

  “Sue Danielson maybe?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “According to Watty, she’s the only other Seattle Police Department detective assigned to this case.”

  “It wasn’t Sue,” I asserted. “She wouldn’t shoot off her mouth to the media any more than I would.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Powell returned. “And then again, maybe you’r
e not. In any case, Beaumont, it’s your problem now. I want you to find the source of that leak, and I want it stopped. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And I want it done today.”

  When I put down the phone that time, I didn’t even bother crawling back under the covers. There was no point. Instead, I staggered out of bed and headed for the bathroom and a much-needed shower. I had taken a shower when I came home from Camano Island but I wasn’t sure one shower was enough to wash the soot and smoke off my body and out of my nostrils. It sure as hell wasn’t enough to wash what I had seen out of my mind.

  I left Belltown Terrace and drove straight down Clay to Western. A short twenty minutes after I got off the phone with Captain Lawrence Powell, I was standing in the reception area of the Seattle P.-I.

  Times have changed in the country, and not necessarily for the better. In the old days, it was possible to walk into an airport or a radio station or a newspaper office without having to go through a whole security rigmarole. Compared to getting into the P.-I., breaking into an armed camp would have been easier.

  “I’m sorry, but Mr. Cole isn’t available,” the receptionist told me with a blandly sweet smile. “He’s on special assignment today.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I can’t give out that information.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “Probably later on this week. For sure by next Monday morning.”

  Captain Powell hadn’t given me until Monday. He wanted results today. Now. And so did I.

  “Is he calling in for messages?”

  “I’m not sure. Somebody up at the City Desk could probably answer that better than I can.”

  The switchboard phone rang, not once but three separate times in a row. And each time the receptionist handled the phone before coming back to me. It’s the same kind of song and dance that happens in auto-parts stores or hardware stores where the important person on the phone always takes precedence over the poor hapless boob who is actually standing in front of the counter with money in his hand waiting to buy something.