by J. A. Jance
“You promised my mother that you’d find out who did it,” she said. “You never did.”
With that she was gone, plunging me into a strange existence where the boundaries between memory and dream blurred somehow, leaving me to relive that long-ago time in every jarring detail.
CHAPTER 2
WHEN IT COMES TO BORING, nothing beats second watch on a Sunday afternoon. It’s a time when nothing much happens. Good guys and bad guys alike tend to spend their Sunday afternoons at home. On a sunny early spring day, like this one, the good guys might be dragging their wintered-over barbecue grills out of storage and giving them a first-of-the-season tryout. The bad guys would probably be nursing hangovers of one kind or another and planning their next illegal exploit.
Rory MacPherson was at the wheel of our two-year-old police-pursuit Plymouth Fury as we tooled around the streets of Seattle’s Central West Precinct. We were supposedly on patrol, but with nothing much happening on those selfsame streets, we were mostly out for a Sunday afternoon drive, yakking as we went.
Mac and I were roughly the same age, but we had come to Seattle PD from entirely different tracks. He was one of those borderline juvenile delinquent types who ended up being given that old-fashioned bit of legal advice: join the army or go to jail. He had chosen the former and had shipped out for Vietnam after (a) knocking up, and (b) marrying his high school sweetheart. The army had done as promised and made a man out of him. He’d come home to the “baby killer” chorus and had gone to work for the Seattle Police Department because it was a place where a guy with a high school diploma could make enough money to support a wife and, by then, two kids. He had been there ever since, first as a beat cop and now working patrol, but his long-term goal was to transfer over to the Motorcycle unit.
Mac’s wife, Melody, stayed home with the kids. From what I could tell from his one-sided version of events, the two of them constantly squabbled over finances. No matter how much overtime Mac worked, there was never enough money to go around. Melody wanted to go to work. Mac was adamantly opposed. Melody was reading too many books and, according to him, was in danger of turning into one of those scary bra-burning feminists.
From my point of view, letting Melody go out and get a job seemed like a reasonable solution. It’s what Karen and I had decided to do. She had been hired as a secretary at the Weyerhaeuser corporate headquarters, but we had both regarded her work there as just a job—as a temporary measure rather than a career—because our ultimate goal, once we finally got around to having kids, had been for Karen to stay home and look after them, and that’s what she was doing now.
In that regard, our story was different from Mac and Melody’s. The two of us had met in college, where I had snagged Karen away from the clutches of one of my fraternity brothers, a pompous ass named Maxwell Cole. Due to the advent of the pill, we did not get “in trouble” before we got married, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. My draft number came up at about the same time I graduated from the University of Washington, so I joined up before I was drafted. Karen was willing to get married before I shipped out; I insisted on waiting.
Once I came home, also to the by-then-routine “baby-killer” chorus, Karen and I did get married. I went to work at Seattle PD, while Karen kept the job at Weyerhaeuser she had gotten while I was in the service. It’s possible that Karen had a few bra-burning tendencies of her own, but it didn’t seem like that big an issue for either one of us at the time, not back when we were dating. For one thing, we were totally focused on doing things the “right way.” We put off having kids long enough to buy the house on Lake Tapps. Now that Scott had just turned one, we were both grateful to be settled.
Yes, I admit that driving from Lake Tapps to downtown Seattle is a long commute. That’s one of the reasons I drove a VW bug, for fuel economy, but as far as this former city kid is concerned, being able to raise our kids in the country rather than the city makes the drive and the effort worthwhile.
I was raised in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, where I was one of the few kids around with a single mother. My mom supported us by working at home as a seamstress. Growing up in poverty was one of the reasons I was determined to raise my own kids with two parents and a certain amount of financial security. I had my eye on being promoted to investigations, preferably Homicide. I had taken the exam, but so far there weren’t any openings.
Karen and I had both had lofty and naive ideas about how her stay-at-home life would work. However, with one baby still in diapers and with another on the way, reality had set in in a very big way. From Karen’s point of view, her new noncareer path wasn’t at all what it was cracked up to be. She was bored to tears and had begun to drop hints about being sold a bill of goods. The long commute meant that my workdays were longer, too. She wanted something more in her life than all Scotty, all the time. She also wanted me to think about some other kind of job where there wouldn’t be shift work. She wanted a job for me that would allow us to establish a more regular schedule, one where I could be home on weekends like other people. The big problem for me with that idea was that I loved what I did.
So that’s how me and Mac’s second-watch shift was going that Sunday afternoon. We had met up at Bob Murray’s Doghouse for a hearty Sunday brunch that consisted of steak and eggs, despite the warning on the menu specifying that the tenderness of the Doghouse’s notoriously cheap steaks was “not guaranteed.” I believe it’s possible—make that likely—that we both had some hair of the dog. Mac had a preshift Bloody Mary and I had a McNaughton’s and water in advance of heading into the cop shop in downtown Seattle.
Once we checked our Plymouth Fury out of the motor pool, Mac did the driving, as usual. When we were together, I was more than happy to relinquish the wheel. My solitary commutes back and forth from Lake Tapps gave me plenty of “drive time.” During Mac’s and my countless hours together in cars, we did more talking than anything else.
Mac and I were both Vietnam vets, but we did not talk about the war. What we had seen and done there was still too raw and hurtful to talk about, and what happened to us after we came back home was even more so. As a result we steadfastly avoided any discussion that might take us too close to that painful reality. Instead, we spent lots of time talking about the prospects for the newest baseball team in town, the second coming of the Seattle Rainiers, to have a winning season.
Mac was still provoked that the “old” Seattle Rainiers, transformed into the Seattle Pilots, had joined the American League and boogied off to Milwaukee. I didn’t have a strong feeling about any of it, so I just sat back and let Mac rant. Finished with that, he went on to a discussion of his son, Rolly, short for Roland. For Mac it was only a tiny step from discussing Seattle’s pro baseball team to his son’s future baseball prospects, even though Rolly was seven and doing his first season of T-ball, complicated by the unbelievable fact that Melody had signed up to be the coach of Rolly’s team.
My eyes must have glazed over about then. At our house, Karen and I were still up to our armpits in diapers. By the way, when I say the word “we” in regard to diapers, I mean it. I did my share of diaper changing. From where I stood in the process of child rearing, thinking about T-ball or even Little League seemed to be in the very distant future.
What I really wanted right about then was a cigarette break. Mac had quit smoking months earlier. Out of deference to him, I didn’t smoke in the patrol car, but at times I really wanted to.
It must have been close to four thirty when a call came in over our two-way radio. Two kids had been meandering around the railroad yard at the base of Magnolia Bluff. Somewhere near the bluff they had found what they thought was an empty oil drum. When they pried off the top, they claimed, they had discovered a dead body inside. I told Dispatch that we were on our way, but Mac didn’t exactly put the pedal to the metal.
“I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts thi
s is somebody’s idea of a great April Fool’s joke,” he said. “Wanna bet?”
“No bet,” I agreed. “Sounds suspicious to me.”
We went straight there, not with lights and sirens, but without stopping for coffee along the way, either. We didn’t call the medical examiner. We didn’t call for the Homicide squad or notify the crime lab because we thought it was a joke. Except it turned out it wasn’t a joke at all.
We located the two kids, carrot-topped, freckle-faced twin brothers Frankie and Donnie Dodd, waiting next to a pay phone at the Elliott Bay Marina where they had called 911. They looked to be eleven or twelve years old. The fact that they were both still a little green around the gills made me begin to wonder if maybe Mac and I were wrong about the possibility of this being an April Fool’s joke.
“You won’t tell our mom, will you?” the kid named Donnie asked warily. “We’re not supposed to be down by the tracks. She’ll kill us if she finds out.”
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“On Twenty-third West,” he said, pointing to the top of the bluff. “Up on Magnolia.”
“And where does your mother think the two of you are?” I asked.
Frankie, who may have been the ringleader, made a face at his brother, warning Donnie not to answer, but he did anyway.
“She dropped us off at the Cinerama to see Charlotte’s Web. We tried to tell her that’s a kids’ movie, but she didn’t listen. So after she drove away, we caught a bus and came back here to look around. We’ve found some good stuff here—a broken watch, a jackknife, a pair of false teeth.”
Nodding, Frankie added his bit. “Halfway up the hill we found a barrel. We thought there might be some kind of treasure in it. That’s why we opened it.”
“It smelled real bad,” Donnie said, holding his nose and finishing his brother’s thought. “I thought I was going to puke.”
“How do you know a body was inside?” I asked.
“We pushed it away from us. When it rolled the rest of the way down the hill, she fell out. She wasn’t wearing any clothes.”
“That’s why we couldn’t tell our mother,” Donnie concluded, “and that’s when we went to the marina to call for help.”
“How about if you show us,” Mac suggested.
We let the two kids into the back of the patrol car. They were good kids, and the whole idea of getting into our car excited them. Kids who have had run-ins with cops are not thrilled to be given rides in patrol cars. Following their pointed directions, we followed an access road on the far side of Pier 91. There were no gates, no barriers, just a series of NO TRESPASSING signs that they had obviously ignored, and so did we.
The road intersected with the path the barrel had taken on its downhill plunge. Its route was still clearly visible where a gray, greasy film left a trail through the hillside’s carpet of newly sprung springtime weeds and across the dirt track in front of us. What looked like a bright yellow fifty-gallon drum had come to a stop some fifteen yards farther on at the bottom of the steep incline. The torso of a naked female rested half inside and half outside the barrel. The body was covered in a grayish-brown ooze that I couldn’t immediately identify. The instantly recognizable odor of death wafted into the air, but there was another underlying odor as well. While my nicotine-dulled nostrils struggled to make olfactory sense of that second odor, Mac beat me to the punch.
“Cooking grease,” he explained. “Whoever killed her must have shoved her feet-first into a restaurant-size vat of used grease. Restaurants keep the drums out on their loading docks. Once they’re full, they haul them off to the nearest rendering plant.”
I nodded. That was it—stale cooking grease. The combination of rotten flesh and rotting food was overwhelming. For a time we both stood in a horrified stupor while I fought down the urge to lose my own lunch and wondered if the victim had been dead or alive when she had been sealed inside her grease-filled prison.
Eventually the urgent cawing of a flock of crows wheeling overhead broke our stricken silence. Their black wings flapped noisily against the early April blue sky. I’m a crossword puzzle kind of guy. That gives me access to a good deal of generally useless information. In this instance, I knew that a flock of crows is called a murder, and this noisy bunch, attracted by what they must have expected to be a sumptuous feast, seemed particularly aptly named.
Mac was the first to stir. “I guess it’s not a joke,” he muttered as he started down the hill toward the body. “I’ll keep the damn birds away. You call it in.”
Mac was a few years my senior in both regular years and in years on the force. He often issued what sounded like orders. Most of the time I simply went along with the program. In this instance, I was more than happy to comply.
I went back over to the car and leaned inside. Donnie and Frankie were watching, wide eyed, from the backseat. “Did you see her?” Donnie asked. At least I think it was Donnie.
“Yes,” I said grimly. “We saw her. While I call this in, I want the two of you to stay right where you are. Got it?”
They both nodded numbly. It wasn’t as though they had a choice. There was a web of metal screen between the cruiser’s front seat and the backseat. The doors locked from the outside, and there were no interior door handles. Frankie and Donnie Dodd weren’t under arrest, but they weren’t going anywhere without our permission. They sat there in utter silence while I made the call, letting Dispatch know that they needed to summon the M.E. and detectives from Homicide. When I finished, I hopped out of the car and skidded down the steep incline. Mac was already on his way back up.
“I gave up on the damn birds,” he muttered. “She’s already dead. How much worse can it be?
“That’s all right,” I said. “I think I’ll go have a look anyway.”
“Suit yourself,” Mac said with a shrug. “Some people are dogs for punishment.”
We had worked together long enough that he knew I wanted a cigarette, but we were both kind enough not to mention it. I waited until I was far enough down the hill to be out of sight before I lit up. I figured out of sight is out of mind and damn the smoke smell later.
Still, smoking was what I was doing when my eyes were inevitably drawn to the body. People passing car wrecks on the highway aren’t the only people guilty of rubbernecking. Cops do it, too, and at that time in my career I was enough of a newbie that seeing dead bodies was anything but routine.
I found myself staring at the dead woman—what I could see of her, at least. She lay sprawled facedown on the weedy hillside, half in and half out of the barrel. A tangle of what looked like shoulder-length blond hair spilled out over the ground. A moment later, something red caught my eye, sticking out through the layer of greasy slurry. At first I thought what I was seeing was blood spatter, but that wasn’t possible. Clearly the woman had been dead for some time. Once blood is exposed to the air, it oxidizes and goes from red to muddy brown. This was definitely red. Bright red. Scarlet. Inhaling a lungful of smoke, I moved a step or two closer to get a better look.
What I was seeing, of course, was nothing but tiny little patches of bright red nail polish glowing in the sunlight. And that was the single detail that stayed with me from that crime scene—the nail polish. Wanting to look pretty for someone, the victim had gone to the trouble of having a manicure, or else she had given herself one. Had she been going to a dance or a party, maybe? Had she been out on the town for a night of fun?
Whatever it was, when she’d done her nails, she hadn’t expected to be dead soon, or that the vivid red nail polish would be the only thing she’d be wearing when someone found her body.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. A. JANCE is the New York Times bestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, the Ali Reynolds series, and four interrelated thrillers about the Walker Family. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee
, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.
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By J. A. Jance
Joanna Brady Mysteries
Desert Heat
Tombstone Courage
Shoot/Don’t Shoot
Dead to Rights
Skeleton Canyon
Rattlesnake Crossing
Outlaw Mountain
Devil’s Claw
Paradise Lost
Partner in Crime
Exit Wounds
Dead Wrong
Damage Control
Fire and Ice
Judgment Call
J. P. Beaumont Mysteries
Until Proven Guilty
Injustice for All
Trial by Fury
Taking the Fifth
Improbable Cause
A More Perfect Union
Dismissed with Prejudice
Minor in Possession
Payment in Kind
Without Due Process
Failure to Appear
Lying in Wait
Name Withheld
Breach of Duty
Birds of Prey
Partner in Crime
Long Time Gone
Justice Denied
Fire and Ice
Betrayal of Trust
and
Hour of the Hunter
Kiss of the Bees
Day of the Dead
Queen of the Night
Edge of Evil
Web of Evil
Hand of Evil
Cruel Intent
Trial by Fire
Fatal Error
Left for Dead
Deadly Stakes
