Breach of Duty (9780061739637)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Everything is under control.”

  Seventeen

  Heading south on 1-405, there was no longer any reason not to let the department know where I was going and why. I called into Dispatch on my cell phone and had them call the Pierce County sheriffs department for exact directions. Then, with hastily scribbled notes in hand, all I had to do was drive.

  It was late enough that there wasn’t much traffic. That gave me plenty of time to think and to beat myself up. I could never remember a time when I’d had so much advance warning that something bad was going to happen—that people were going to die. Henry Leaping Deer had said they would. He had sent word that anyone connected with moving or messing around with David Half Moon’s remains would die. So far those predictions of death were coming true, one after another, with me totally powerless to prevent them.

  I counted off the toll in my head. The bodies of Anthony Lawson, Barry Newsome, and Calvin Owens were already accounted for. I had no doubt that the next victims, the ones at the Pierce County site, would turn out to be Don Atkins and Jimmy Greenjeans. As far as I knew, Dirk Matthews—the ME’s office’s resident clown and bone juggler—was still in Harborview Hospital and barely clinging to life. Only time would tell whether or not his mysterious flesh-eating infection would kill him.

  The victims who were already dead or dying were beyond help and worry. But the shaman’s warning had included one other outstanding victim, one that worried me—a white woman. As far as I could tell there were at least two potential candidates—Sue Danielson and Audrey Cummings.

  Driving south, it struck me that if David Half Moon’s curse went after either one of those two women, it wasn’t very discriminating. As far as I could see, all the male victims, with the possible exception of Jimmy Greenjeans, shared some degree of culpability. They had all played an active part in moving the dead shaman’s remains or in attempting to buy and sell them or, like Dirk Matthews, they had treated the bones with casual disrespect.

  Audrey and Sue were different. They had come in contact with Half Moon’s bones only by happenstance and only in the course of performing their official duties. They hadn’t juggled with them, hadn’t dragged them to a public park as part of some macabre game. Nor would they have ventured into the business of buying and selling them.

  If there’s such a thing as a smart gene or a smartbomb, couldn’t there be such a thing as a smart curse? I wondered.

  That oddball thought gave me a jolt and made me wonder if maybe Kramer wasn’t half right and I was in danger of losing it.Come on, I urged.No honor among thieves is what really killed those guys. The women will be just fine!

  And they were. Or at least they had been the last time I saw them. Audrey Cummings had been her usual brusque and businesslike self when, during the course of my conversation with Jonathan Carruthers, I had watched her oversee the removal of two bodies from Barry Newsome’s house. And when I had left Sue with Paul Kramer to go in search of Detective Blaine, she, too, had been fine. In fact she had been more than fine—she had been happy. Happier than I ever remembered seeing her.

  Sue and I had both suffered misgivings about how Richie Danielson would react to having his plans changed by a former wife who had once been his personal punching bag. Sue seemed to have accepted Richie’s change of heart at face value. I wasn’t so sure. I remember my old Fuller Brush manager telling me once, “Men change but seldom do they.” Maybe Sue was right and I was wrong. Maybe Richie Danielson actually had changed. Maybe he had finally grown up.

  As I came through Auburn, I saw the glow of lights reflecting off cloud cover to the southeast. At first I thought the lights indicated an athletic field of some kind, lit for a late-playing adult soccer or softball league. As I exited on 8th Street, though, I saw the smaller pulses of reds and yellows mixed in with the steady glow of floodlights. This was the accident scene, not a playing field.

  Driving south on 136th Avenue East I found it to be a narrow and rutted but supposedly paved road. It led through an industrial area punctuated by residences. Some were clearly well built and well maintained while for others the word marginal would have been giving them the benefit of the doubt. At 16th Street I turned left and drove into an area lit to almost daylight proportions.

  Most of the lights came compliments of Burlington Northern. When it comes to hauling freight, time is money. If a nighttime accident halts one of their mile-long freight trains, BN investigators don’t wait around for morning. They hustle in the necessary generators and wattage and go to work.

  Ahead of me on a raised berm, railroad cars loaded with trailers for eighteen-wheelers had been uncoupled and pushed apart to make way for the investigation. The locomotive or locomotives involved were so far down the track as to be totally out of sight. Between the two lines of railroad cars, on a high, gated crossing, several uniformed sheriffs deputies were busy marking and measuring lines on the pavement. Around them lay a scatter of unrecognizable pieces of crushed sheet metal that had once been Calvin Owens’ Subaru. Here and there among the metal and fiber wreckage lay bright blue pieces of tarp no doubt covering the equally unrecognizable bits of bloody flesh and bone that had once been Don Atkins or Jimmy Greenjeans.

  I’ve investigated more than one railroad fatality in my time. Railroad folks tell me that the worst thing about an accident like that—the thing they have to live with for the rest of their lives—is the look. They tell me that the final thing that happens before someone drives or walks under a train is eye-to-eye contact with the engineer. It’s a look of utter astonishment, astonishment and dismay. A split second later, it’s all over for the guy under the train. For the guy looking out from that side of the locomotive, the pain is just beginning.

  Given the fact that mixing it up with a train is almost guaranteed to kill you, given the fact that a loaded freight train going sixty miles an hour will still take the better part of a mile to stop, I can’t figure out why people do it. But they do. Part of the problem is the fact that, in the dark, a single light doesn’t give you much of a perspective on how far away the train is. The other part is plain stupidity.

  A convoy of emergency vehicles was strung out along 16th Street stretching almost half a mile from the crossing itself. I pulled into a spot at the very end behind Tim Blaine’s Crown Victoria. When I stepped out of the Porsche, I was surprised by the all-pervasive roar of the light-producing generators.

  On the other side of the crossing, a crowd of people gathered around one of the vehicles. It took an ID badge and some talking to get me past the deputies marking the accident scene. When I reached the other side, I saw a young woman leaning back against the front fender of a Pierce County sheriffs department patrol car. The woman appeared to be in her mid-to-late twenties. She was clad in jeans and an oversized sweatshirt. Lank brown hair dangled around her face. As I edged my way into the crowd, I noticed that, although her face showed traces of recent tears, she was no longer crying. Instead, in a surprisingly calm manner, she was fielding a barrage of questions.

  Her attentive audience was made up of an entire collection of law-enforcement personnel, all of them taking notes. Several were people I recognized from the Pierce County sheriffs department. Some of the ones I didn’t recognize were clearly investigators with the railroad itself. Two of the investigators standing in the front row were ex-SPD detectives who had gone over to the attorney general’s team. Good work, Captain Davis, I said to myself. From the far side of the group, Tim Blaine gave me a welcoming nod.

  “It must have been about eight-thirty when Donnie got to the house,” she was saying. “I had never seen him like that. He was in a total panic. He told Mom that something bad had happened and that he needed a place to stay for a while. She told him no, for him to get out, that she didn’t want him here. She told him that since he’s obviously preferred the Newsomes to his own family all this time, he should go back there and ask them to take him in.


  “Maybe that sounds like a cruel thing for a mother to do to her own son,” Don Atkins’ sister added, “but why shouldn’t she? Ever since the divorce, Donnie treated her like shit, but then he treated all of us like shit. Everybody but precious Barry.”

  “So he and your mother argued?” The main questioner seemed to be one of the BN guys. Since the railroad had the most at stake here, it made sense that they would be keenly involved in all aspects of the incident itself as well as whatever had preceded it.

  “Not just argued,” the young woman said. “It was a screaming, yelling fit. Finally, Donnie stormed out of the house. I watched him go. He stomped back to his car and wrenched open the door. When he did that, this dog just came flying out. It almost knocked him over.”

  “Dog? What kind of dog?”

  “I don’t know. A big one. It looked like a German shepherd, but I’m not positive. It must be around here someplace, but I haven’t seen it since the accident. There was so much noise, it probably got scared and took off. The funny thing is, I didn’t even know my brother had a dog. He never mentioned it. Anyway, the dog went running across the lawn. I think it needed to pee. It ran over to one of the trees and lifted its leg. Then, when Don started the car, it went racing back over there like it wanted to be back inside, but Don didn’t stop to let it in. He went screeching out of the driveway and up the road here with the dog running after him, trying like mad to catch up.”

  She stopped then, and wiped her eyes. It struck me that she was crying for the dog rather than for Don Atkins. But then, I had to admit I hadn’t liked him much, either.

  “My brother was a complete jerk,” she said when she could talk again, “but at least the dog must have liked him.”

  It came to me then. Jonathan Carruthers had claimed someone was in the car with Don Atkins. Now Don Atkins’ sister was saying that the other passenger was really a dog. A big dog! Was it possible, then, that from his upstairs room Jonathan Carruthers had mistaken the dog for a person? Did that mean there was a chance that Jimmy Greenjeans was still alive somewhere? I allowed myself to feel the smallest glimmer of hope.

  “Did you see anyone else in the car?” I asked. “Anyone other than the dog?”

  Several of the other cops looked back in my direction when I asked the question as though trying to figure out who I was and where I had come from. I must have passed inspection because they let the question ride. Their attention, after momentarily shifting to me, returned to the young woman to await her answer.

  “No,” she said. “There wasn’t anybody else.”

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  So maybe Mr. Greenjeans isn’t dead after all—at least not here and not right now, I thought gratefully. Meanwhile the BN guy resumed the questioning controls.

  “What happened then, Ms. Atkins, after your brother left?”

  “Mom had gone into her room, and I went back there to talk to her. I knew she was upset, and she was. She was crying. Donnie always does that to her—he always upsets her. I wanted to make sure she was okay. I was talking to her and telling her things were going to be all right and that she shouldn’t worry when I heard the whistle. Trains usually whistle when they cross 8th. We’re used to that. This time it was a lot closer. It sounded like it was right there in the living room. Then I heard the crash, the sound of metal on metal. As soon as I heard it, I knew what had happened. I knew the train had hit him and he was dead.”

  “You came out to look?”

  The young woman shook her head. “Mom came out first. I stayed inside to call 911.”

  “Did your brother give you or your mother any idea about the kind of trouble he was in, about why he needed a place to stay?” That question came from another newcomer to the group, Bellevue homicide detective Tim Blaine.

  The young woman took a breath before she answered. “Donnie said he’d killed somebody. That’s when the fight really started. Mom told him she wasn’t surprised, that she’d been expecting it for years. All he and Barry ever wanted to do was play with those stupid video games. They’re nothing but kill, kill, kill. That’s when he took off, when she said that about all the killing.”

  “How long did Barry Newsome and your brother live together, Ms. Atkins?” Again the questioner was Tim Blaine.

  “For a long time,” she said. “Twelve years at least. From the time Donnie was fourteen. He wanted to play video games and have nice clothes and stuff. The problem was, Mom was newly divorced and working at the AM/PM. She couldn’t afford those things, so Donnie ran away. The next thing we knew, he was living in this big, fancy house there by Phantom Lake. When Barry’s father, Mr. Newsome, transferred down to California with a new job, Barry’s parents let the two of them—Barry and Donnie—stay in their old house rent-free.”

  “Were your brother and Barry Newsome…” Tim Blaine paused, as if searching for just the right word. “…involved?”

  “You mean were they gay?” Ms. Atkins shot back at him.

  Tim nodded. “No,” she said, frowning. “I don’t think so. I mean they both had girlfriends at times. At least they said they did. But then they said they were making money with their video games, too, but I’m not sure that was true, either.”

  “Where’d they get money to live on then?”

  “From Barry’s family. Especially from his mother. That’s what my mother said. The Newsomes couldn’t have another son, so they bought one—Donnie.”

  The phone in my pocket rang, interrupting the questioning process. The girl looked at me in surprise while my fellow cops glowered in annoyance. It’s never a good idea to interrupt the flow—the give and take—of an interview. Shrugging an apology to all concerned, I hurried away from the group to answer. Figuring there was a good chance for it to be Kramer again, I barked my hello.

  “Mr. Beaumont?” Against the noisy backdrop of the humming generators, the voice was so thin that it came through as little more than an exaggerated stage whisper.What is this? I thought.A damn obscene call?

  “Who is this?” I demanded. “What do you want?”

  “It’s Jared Danielson, Mr. Beaumont. You’ve got to help us. I think he shot her.”

  My heart stopped. “He what?” I asked, hoping against hope that I had heard him wrong. I hadn’t.

  “My dad,” Jared continued. “He shot Mom. I think he was waiting for her on the porch when she came home. He was yelling at her and telling her she’d spoiled everything. That’s when the gun went off.”

  My heart raced. Jared’s shocking news sent needles and pins shooting through my hands. It was all I could do to keep hold of the phone. Not only that, the noise around me made Jared’s thin voice almost impossible to hear. I had to strain to understand him.

  “Jared, I can barely hear you. You have to speak up.”

  “I can’t. I’m afraid he’ll hear me and know I’m awake. Then he’ll come after me, too.”

  I punched the volume control on my phone. That helped some. “Where are you, Jared?”

  “In our bedroom, my brother’s and mine. I’m on the cell phone Mom gave me.”

  “Listen, Jared, I’m clear down south of Auburn. I can’t get there soon enough to help. You’ve got to call 911.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I heard what he said—that he’s going to kill the first cop who walks through the door. Then us. Then him. That’s what he told her.”

  “She’s still alive then?”

  There was a catch in Tared’s throat before he answered. “Maybe,” he said. “I’m not sure.”

  I’ve felt helpless in my life, but never more so than at that moment. “Where’s Christopher?”

  “In bed. He fell asleep before any of this happened. I don’t want to wake him up.” Jared broke then and sobbed into the phone. “I don’t know what to do, Mr. Beaumont. I don’t want to die. Please help us.”

  “Hang on a minute, Jared. I’ve got to talk to someone else.
Whatever you do, don’t put the phone down, and for God’s sake, don’t turn it off.”

  With the cell phone held to my head, I raced back over to the circle and waved at Tim. The group of cops was too compressed for me to push my way through. All I could do was shout over the other officers’ heads.

  “Tim, come here. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  Startled, he looked up at me. “But…”

  “Now!”

  Shaking his head, he pushed his way through the crowd. “Beaumont, I…”

  “Listen,” I said. “Listen and don’t say a word. I need your bubble light. Then I’m going to drive hell-bent-for-leather into Seattle. It’s Sue, my partner. She and her two kids are caught in a hostage situation in the 3600 block of Dayton Avenue North, just north of Lake Union. I won’t have a radio with me and I won’t be able to use my cell phone, so I want you and Dave to follow in your car. Radio ahead and have the state patrol try to clear a path for me as far as Mercer anyway. But tell them absolutely no sirens. Do you understand? No sirens, and once we leave Mercer, no lights, either. You and Dave stick with me like glue, but no lights. You two will be my only backup, but when I go in, you stay out. Got it?”

  “Beau, this is crazy…”

  “Got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come on then.”

  Tim Blaine is a big guy, but it seemed to me that he simply high jumped over the people standing between him and his partner, Dave Dawson. I went jogging back toward the Porsche and heard the two of them thundering behind me. By the time I made it to the 928 and unlocked the door, someone was already in the Crown Victoria, gunning the big police pursuit engine. As I put my key in the Porsche’s ignition, Tim appeared at my window and slapped a bubble light on top.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, passing me the cord. “On the way past, Dave borrowed one from somebody else so we’ll have one, too. Lead the way.”

  I put the phone to my ear. “Jared, are you still there?”