Family Values

by Ford, G. M.

  “I suppose this is the place where I’m supposed to beat myself up about all the things I coulda-shoulda done, but . . . you know what? When I think about it—the staffing and the workload and the budget constraints—I really don’t see any other way it could be accomplished.”

  “The evidence room’s surely gotta be under CC surveillance,” I threw in.

  “Like they’re going to share that with us,” she scoffed.

  “Which raises the question of what to do next.”

  That’s when I remembered that I hadn’t checked to see if there were any messages from Eagen. I looked over at Gabe, who was still holding up the door. “You know that bag I dropped on the kitchen table?”

  Gabe nodded. I didn’t have to ask. Gabe levered off the door frame and disappeared down the hall.

  “What about that Frost guy?” Rebecca asked. “Did you find him?”

  I told her about my little morning adventure down in the square. I finished up with, “I’ve got the boys working on it.”

  “Oh . . . I feel so much better now.”

  Gabe strolled back into the room and handed me the bag. I dumped it out onto the bed and began to pick through the phones. That’s when the security system alarm began to bleat.

  Gabe heaved a sigh. “Those TV assholes again. Goddamn it.” Gabe headed for the front door.

  “I’m scared,” Rebecca said out of the blue. “Every direction we turn in seems to be a dead end.”

  I was working up my famous “the darkest hour is just before the dawn” speech when Gabe returned, looking vaguely amused. “It’s the cops.”

  “They got a warrant?”

  “Nope. Say they wanna talk to you.”

  I thought it over. “Let ’em in,” I said.

  Gabe disappeared. Rebecca cocked an eyebrow at me.

  I shook my head. “Maybe they found out I saw Ibrahim and the guys today and want to warn me off. They’re big on that intimidation thing.”

  Took about three minutes to find out how wrong I was. Gabe followed Krauss and Nelson into the TV room. The DA’s bruise brothers each gave Rebecca a polite nod, and then Krauss got right to the point. “Did you see Ibrahim Durka earlier today?” he asked.

  Here it was. The old keep-your-nose-out-of-this-case speech.

  “Why?”

  “Mr. Durka was involved in an accident.”

  “What kind of accident?” Rebecca asked.

  “Hit-and-run,” Nelson said.

  “Is he okay?”

  “No,” Krauss said quickly. “Mr. Durka was DOA at Harborview.”

  I felt as if somebody were standing on my chest. Rebecca brought a sob-stifling fist to her mouth. It didn’t work. I watched as her shoulders began to shake.

  “You want to tell us where you were at noon today?” Nelson said.

  I thought about telling them to get the hell out of my house, but managed to quell the urge. “In a leather bar up on the hill.”

  Krauss couldn’t hide the sneer.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” I said. “It’s the rough trade for me. Nothin’ quite like somebody rubbing their stubbly chin over my nuts.”

  Gabe hid a smile behind a hand.

  “We’d like you to come along with us,” Nelson said.

  “Where to?” Gabe threw in.

  Both cops staged a slow turn toward the voice. “And you’d be . . . ?” Krauss said.

  “I’d be standing right here,” Gabe replied.

  The tension in the room started to tingle my cheeks.

  “Am I under arrest?” I asked.

  They grudgingly turned back my way.

  “No. Not at this time,” Krauss growled.

  The answer annoyed me. It reminded me of a woman friend of my father’s who once had introduced me to “her present husband, Robert.” At the time, I’d wanted to bust one of them in the lip but couldn’t decide which one. Now Krauss was giving me that same urge.

  “Where is it you want to take me?” I asked.

  “To the accident scene.”

  “Why would you need me to go there?”

  “Just covering our bases,” Krauss said.

  Cops are like that. They want to know every goddamn thing about you but are never willing to part with any information. Nelson could tell I didn’t like it.

  “Other than his wife and kids, you were, as far as we can tell, the last person to see Mr. Durka alive,” he added.

  I looked around. Rebecca was teary but under control. Gabe looked like I felt: like rearranging Krauss’s face held a great deal of appeal.

  “I’m coming along,” Rebecca announced. “I can’t just sit here.”

  “Any place the Doc is going, I’m going,” Gabe said.

  I looked over at the cops. “Give me the address; we’ll meet you there.”

  No surprises. Same address as this morning. I pulled the car to the curb directly across the street from Ibrahim Durka’s townhouse. The home’s front door hung open. The townhouse was full of neighbors. Rebecca wanted to offer her condolences to the wife, but since the suspension order forbade any contact between Rebecca and any and all representatives of Mr. Durka, we decided it would be better if she and Gabe stayed in the car. She wasn’t happy about it but went along with the program.

  I got out and followed Krauss and Nelson into the cotton-ball fog. Unless I was mistaken, we were taking the same route I’d taken this morning. Without visual clues, it was hard to tell. A minute later I could make out a pair of SPD cruisers parked nose to nose, blocking the entrance to the park, and then, as I got closer, the three miles of yellow cop tape strung from sapling to sapling all the way around the perimeter.

  We crossed the street to the park. The sidewalk rolled down the slope at us like a concrete tongue. It wasn’t as clean and white as it had been earlier this morning. A pair of muddy tire tracks came down over the hill and disappeared into the street right where the SPD cruisers were parked.

  Ahead, up at the top of the knoll, light bars were feverishly painting the underside of the ground fog alternately blue and red and yellow.

  “He got run over in the park?” I said as much to myself as to the cops.

  “They’re thinking maybe somebody got confused in the fog,” Nelson said.

  “It’s a fucking park,” I groused. “This thing we’re walking on is a sidewalk, not a street. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Parks and Rec hasn’t gotten around to installing the pole barriers or the park signs yet. They’re thinking somebody turned in by mistake, didn’t see him in the fog . . . Or I’m thinking maybe it was another one of those assholes who likes to tear up fresh grass with his tires, and Mr. Durka just got in the way.”

  “Could be whoever did it never even knew they hit somebody,” Krauss added as he started waddling up the incline.

  The forensics guys had a yellow tent set up in the middle of the sidewalk about three-quarters of the way up the hill. Half a dozen men and women in white plastic jumpsuits were milling around the area, a couple of them snapping away with cameras.

  Nelson led us around to the left of the tent, looping way out onto the sod so we wouldn’t interfere with the accident scene. From the top of the rise, I could see the spot where whoever it was had jumped the curb and come blasting up into the park. Where they’d looped out wide to the south, tearing the crap out of the new grass as they’d fishtailed all over, fighting for traction. What really got my attention, however, was the bright blue bench where I’d found Ibrahim sitting earlier in the day.

  They’d set up temporary posts and run cop tape all around the perimeter. The bench stood on a single pedestal anchored in a concrete slab. Didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to see that the hit-and run vehicle had plowed into the bench hard enough to bend solid steel. The damn thing was bent all the way over backward. What used to be the seat back was now parallel to the ground. I walked as close as the barriers would allow. The ground around the bench was littered with automobile debris. Major portions of the pla
stic bumper. What looked to be parts of the grille. Broken glass, both clear and yellow. But all the debris—all of it, except for the glass—was black. Flat black. Murdered-out black. I shivered.

  I leaned against the tape, getting as close to the bench as I could. And there it was. Blood. Almost black in the flat light. All over the bench and the concrete slab beneath. Impact splotches of crimson bigger at one end than the other, telling anyone who cared to look which direction the vehicle had come from.

  The torn-up grass showed how the vehicle had roared up the hill, plowed into Ibrahim and the bench, then backed up, and cut across the grass to the sidewalk. No skid marks at all. Looked to me like the driver was still on the throttle when he’d made contact with Ibrahim Durka. I shuddered at the thought.

  I had one of those “is it just me or . . .” moments. And suddenly the fog was colder. I looked back at the yellow forensic tent, which I’d figured for the spot where the body had been found. Then back to the bench. Forty feet maybe. Certainly no more than that. But Jesus . . . how did anybody who’d lost that much blood get even that far?

  When I glanced over at the tent again, Krauss was hard by my shoulder.

  “So,” he said, “you got anybody who can vouch for where you were at noon?”

  I told him about that Leathers bartender named Bobby and that little shit Micah and the CC cameras out in front of the place. Telling him about the dog seemed like overkill, so I let it go. He wrote it all down.

  I glanced over at the tent again. Krauss read my mind. “They think maybe Mr. Durka got caught up in the undercarriage of whatever hit him.”

  “You can’t be thinking this is an accident.”

  Krauss stone-faced it. “Not our call,” he said. “Only reason we’re here is because SPD’s computer flagged Mr. Durka’s name as part of the case we’re working on.”

  “And you think I had something to do with this?”

  “Like I said before, far as anybody knows, you were the last person outside his family to see Mr. Durka alive.” He shrugged. “And you know, Waterman, I’ve met the wife and kids. The missus don’t even have a driver’s license, and, I’ve gotta tell you, those two little girls don’t look real dangerous to me. So if you’re right and somebody did do this to Mr. Durka on purpose, then standard operating procedure says we look at you next.” He spread his hands in mock resignation.

  “Why would I want to do something like that?”

  “Could be you found out earlier today that Mr. Durka was going to roll on Dr. Duvall in court on Friday and decided the best way to get your girlfriend outta the mess she’s in was by getting rid of the unfortunate Mr. Durka.”

  Nelson strolled up from the tent area and joined us. I looked from Krauss to Nelson and back. “You guys really think I’m good for this?” I asked.

  The glance they exchanged told me they didn’t. Nelson’s phone began to buzz. He stepped away from Krauss and me, listened for a minute, and then stuffed the phone back in his pocket. He pulled Krauss to his side and bent to whisper in his ear.

  I sidled closer.

  “Patrol thinks they found the vehicle,” he hissed in Krauss’s ear. “Parking lot of Jefferson Park Golf Course.”

  “They say what kind of vehicle?” I asked.

  Nelson fixed me with an over-the-shoulder scowl. “Probably best you keep out of this,” he said, as he pulled his partner farther up the sidewalk.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be sure to do that.”

  They had the car running and the heat on when I got back.

  “So?” Rebecca said.

  “So . . . either Ibrahim was the unluckiest guy on the planet, or somebody ran his ass over on purpose, and I’m betting on door number two.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because whoever ran him over was still on the throttle when he hit the bench. There’s no sign of any attempt to brake anywhere on the hill.”

  I fastened my seat belt while that was sinking in.

  “Could it be . . . I mean, is it possible that we’re getting a little paranoid here?” she asked. “Maybe we’re reading more into this than there is.”

  “It could be, but I don’t think so.”

  “Why would anyone . . .”

  “Cops think they found the car that hit him over on Beacon Hill,” I said as I eased the Chevy back into the street. “I want to have a look at it before they haul it off.”

  Took twenty minutes to cover the three miles or so to Beacon Hill. If anything, the fog was thicker on top of the hill. They’d already hoisted the van up on the back of a City of Seattle tow truck by the time we arrived. They’d turned off the sirens and light bars, but there was something about the three police cars and the city tow truck that got my attention as I cruised the golf course parking lot. It wasn’t exactly tough to cruise, considering the fact that if you wanted to play golf at Jefferson Park, you had to leave your ride somewhere among the parking spaces they’d carved out of the Beacon Avenue median. So it was more or less made for a quick drive-by eyeballing.

  I drove past the scene on the opposite side of Beacon, took the next turnaround, and started back south. The boys in blue had that segment of the lot blocked, so I played stupid and pulled in anyway, like I had no idea what was going on, and drove right up to the rear of the tow truck. There it was. Sitting up on the back of the truck. There was no doubt in my mind. This was the same van I’d seen the other night. Front end all busted up now, but that was the one, for sure.

  “That’s the same van the fake UPS guys were driving the other night,” I said.

  A uniformed cop was disgustedly waving at me to back up. I gave him a toothy idiot grin and began to ease back out the drive.

  “You’re certain?” Rebecca pressed.

  “Positive,” I said. “Same van.”

  “The cops know about this?” Gabe asked.

  “They’ve got their own theory. They don’t want to hear about ours.”

  “What now?” Gabe wondered out loud.

  “Let’s go get my car,” Rebecca suggested. “I hate being stranded at your house.”

  I checked my watch and stifled a groan. 3:27. I dropped the car into drive and eased out into the street.

  Took almost an hour to get down to Madison Park and then back over to the west side of the city, where I lived. Seattle’s a white-collar town these days. The rush hour starts whenever they want it to, and the blanket of fog just made it exponentially worse. Average speed somewhere around 5 mph. Brewing myself a new pot of road rage about every five minutes.

  Rebecca and Gabe were somewhere behind me in her Beamer as I eased up Magnolia Boulevard in the fog; or, at least, I assumed they were. Visibility was down to six or seven feet. I felt like I was driving through a bucket of whipped cream.

  From the corner of my eye, I caught the outline of the Morrisons’ windmill mailbox and slowed even more. I tried the high beams, but that just made it worse.

  I could make out two TV remote units parked side by side in the driveway of the empty house across the street. A sudden breeze off the sound plowed a valley in the fog, and I could make out outlines of half a dozen people milling around in the street, directly in front of my gate. Even with near zero visibility, there was something off about their body language. Something was going on either inside or just outside the gate.

  I braked to a stop, flipped the switch for the emergency flashers, and got out. Adrenaline hung on the fog like Spanish moss. Raised voices floated my way. Rebecca braked the BMW to a halt behind my car.

  I walked back in her direction. Told her I didn’t know what was going on but to stay in the car. Gabe didn’t need to be invited to the party.

  Gabe and I walked shoulder to shoulder as we closed the distance. Several people were shouting at once. Wasn’t till we were ten feet from the nearest guy that I began to put it all together. A big red Dodge crew-cab pickup was parked diagonally across Magnolia Boulevard, with both front doors flung open. Somebody yelled, “Get that godda
mn thing outta my face.”

  That’s the point where I could make out Snowdrift Dawson waving his microphone in the face of a big guy with a beard.

  “I tole you, motherfucker,” the guy shouted.

  What happened next will remain etched in my brain circuits until they slide me into the ground. It all happened in the space of about three seconds.

  Snowdrift’s cameraman was hopping around like an organ grinder’s monkey, trying to keep the action in frame. Snowdrift brought the microphone up to his cherubic lips to record something for posterity, at which point Bluto with the beard took two steps forward and made a serious attempt to drive the microphone all the way through the back of Snowdrift’s head. Swear to God, you could hear Dawson’s front teeth snap off when that big, hairy fist made contact.

  Snowdrift went from standing in his tasseled loafers to landing on the back of his neck, with no intermediate steps. Even through the fog, it was immediately apparent that the seeping maw formerly known as Snowdrift’s mouth was going to require major cosmetic renovations. When the other bruiser then stepped forward, tore the camera from the TV tech’s shoulder, and hurled it to the pavement, I finally snapped to the fact that these were the same assholes we’d seen on TV. The Delaney brothers—the idiots who had been fighting with cops out in front of the courthouse yesterday. Bailed out and bound to go.

  The other camera crew had apparently decided that dealing with the Delaney brothers was not part of their job description. They came stiff-legging it back past Gabe and me, wobbling and wide-eyed. “Call 911,” I said as they tottered past.

  When I turned back toward the gate, I could see the remnants of the TV camera spread willy-nilly over the asphalt like roadkill. The camera operator was kneeling next to Dawson in the mouth of my driveway. I could hear the awful gurgling noises Snowdrift was making. The bottom half of the wireless microphone lay next to his head, but the bulbous top half was missing. I winced and hoped like hell he hadn’t swallowed it.