Trial by Fury

by J. A. Jance

  Actually, it was probably a little of both.

  CHAPTER

  27

  We raced to the high school, only to find ourselves stuck behind a police barricade along with everybody else.

  The next hour and a half was an agonizing study of affirmative action in action. From a distance, I caught a glimpse of the new Mercer Island Chief of Police—a lady wearing a gray pin-striped suit and sensible shoes with a dress-for-success polka-dot scarf knotted tightly around her neck. She had definitely taken charge of the situation.

  When Marilyn Sykes, assistant police chief in Eugene, Oregon, was hired for the job on Mercer Island, there had been a good deal of grumbling in law enforcement circles. The general consensus was that, in this particular case, the best man for the job wasn’t a woman. I hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to the debate since half the complainers said she was too tough and the other half claimed she was too soft. I figured the truth was probably somewhere in between.

  Right then, though, watching the action from an impotent distance, my inclination was to dismiss Marilyn Sykes as a pushy broad, one who didn’t have enough confidence in herself and her position to let any other cops within consulting distance, as though she was afraid our advice and suggestions might undercut her authority.

  It’s something I’ll remember as one of the most frustrating times of my whole life. It was only an hour and a half, but it seemed much longer. I wanted to do something, to take some physical action, like knocking down the barricade and making an unauthorized run for the building.

  Candace Wynn’s pickup had been parked right in the middle of the high school lot, with no attempt to conceal it. Chief Sykes had sealed off the entire campus and was in the process of deploying her Emergency Response Team. Directing the operation from her car, she had the team secure one building at a time.

  As a cop, I couldn’t help but approve of her careful, deliberate planning. It was clear the safety of her team was uppermost in her mind. But I wasn’t there as just a plain cop. I was there because Peters was my partner. Marilyn Sykes’ deliberateness drove me crazy. I wanted action. I wanted to get on with it.

  The interminable wait was made worse by the fact that our Seattle P.D. personnel were stuck far behind the lines, rubbing shoulders with reporters and photographers, all of them angling for an angle, all of them snapping eagerly toward any snippet of information. It was clear from the questions passing back and forth between them that the names of the missing officer and the missing teacher had not yet been released. I thanked Arlo Hamilton for that. At least Peters’ girls wouldn’t hear it from a reporter’s lips first.

  As the minutes ticked by and the tension continued to build, my fuse got shorter and shorter. Finally, I turned to Big Al, who was standing beside me. His face was grim, his hands jammed deep in his jacket pockets.

  “God damn it!” I complained. “Why the hell doesn’t she send ’em into the gym? I’d bet money they’re in the girls’ locker room.”

  Just then someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and found myself eyeball to eyeball with Chief Marilyn Sykes herself. She was a fairly tall woman in her mid-forties, with sharp, hazel eyes and a tough, overbearing way about her.

  “Are you Detective Beaumont?” she demanded.

  I nodded. “I am.”

  “As I’m sure you realize, Detective Beaumont,” she continued severely, “we’ve got a potentially dangerous situation here. What I don’t need is a Monday-morning quarterback second-guessing my decisions, is that clear?”

  Chastised, I gave the only possible response I could muster: “Yes, Ma’am.”

  She turned on her heel. “Come with me,” she ordered over her shoulder.

  I looked at Big AI, whose only consolation was a sheepish shrug of his shoulders. Without a word, I followed. She led me back to where her car was parked before she stopped and waited for me. By then, we were well out of earshot of all the reporters.

  “The detective who’s missing, Detective Peters. He’s your partner?”

  “Yes.”

  Turning away, she reached into her car and pulled out a handheld walkie-talkie. She flicked a switch. “Come in, George. Have you cleared the way to the locker-room door yet?”

  “Check,” a voice crackled from the device in her hand. “Just now.”

  “All right. I’ve got someone here, Detective Beaumont from Seattle P.D., who thinks they’re in that locker room. I’m sending him in with you.”

  I pulled my .38 from its holster and started scrambling out of her car. “Just a minute, Detective Beaumont,” she snapped.

  I stopped. Chief Sykes picked up a long roll of paper from the floor of the front seat. When she spread it out on the backseat, it was a detailed architectural drawing of the high school plant. With a slender, well-manicured finger, she traced a line from where we stood to the girls’ locker room.

  “This is the part we’ve secured,” she said. “Don’t go any other way, understand?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “And no heroics. You want to see your partner alive, and so do we.”

  Once again she reached into the front seat. This time she brought out a bulletproof vest. “Put this on,” she said. “Now get going.”

  I shrugged my way into the flak jacket and paused for just a moment before I bailed out of the car. Marilyn Sykes met my gaze without flinching. She was tough, all right, but not in the way her detractors meant. There was a soft spot, too. Not the kind of softness that translates into weakness, but a certain empathy that told me sometime in her past she, too, had lived with a partner in jeopardy, that she knew the terrible helplessness of doing nothing.

  Someday, when we had time, Chief Marilyn Sykes and Detective J. P. Beaumont would have to sit down, have a drink, and talk about it. But not now.

  “Thanks,” I said, then took off.

  I trotted through the buildings, careful not to deviate from the path she had laid out. My footsteps echoed through the silent walkways. I’m not prone to prayer, but I found myself muttering one as I ran. “Let him be safe, God. Please let him be safe.”

  A uniformed Mercer Island officer motioned me into the gym. “They’re waiting for you by the door to the locker room,” he whispered as I passed.

  Waiting they were. Three officers, all wearing bulletproof vests, crouched against the wall on either side of the door. One of them motioned for me to join him. When I was in position behind him, he raised a bullhorn to his lips.

  “Come on out, Mrs. Wynn. You’re surrounded. Give yourself up.”

  There was no answer. The blank, silent door gave no hint of what was happening on the other side. We waited one endless minute. We waited two.

  “Come on out, Mrs. Wynn. Come out before we have to come in after you.”

  Still there was nothing. No sound. Images of bloody carnage raced through my mind. Too many years on homicide had left my imagination with too much fuel for the fire. I pictured Peters lying facedown in a pool of blood or dangling on the end of a rope with his head flopped limply to one side. In the silence I heard an imaginary hail of bullets slice into the door when we attempted to push it open.

  “On the count of three, we’re coming in. One…Two…Three…” One of the members of the team on the other side of the door reached out and tried to open it. Nothing happened. It was locked.

  The leader, the man beside me, nodded to the guy on the other side. “Big Bertha it is.”

  The third man came forward carrying a handheld battering ram. He popped the door twice before the lock crumbled. As the door swung open, the silence was deafening.

  Crouching low, weapon in hand, I followed the leader into the darkened locker room. We switched on the lights. Inside, we wormed our way around first one bank of lockers and then another. The place was empty.

  Peters wasn’t in the locker room, and neither was Candace Wynn. They had been there, though. At least someone had.

  The locker, the one with the list in it, t
he Mercer Island High School cheerleader trophy list, had been smashed to pieces by someone wielding a heavy object. I could make out only one or two letters from the battered piece of metal that had once been the inscribed ceiling.

  “All clear in here, Chief,” the leader said into his walkie-talkie. He put the microphone into his pocket, then walked up closer to the damaged locker.

  “What do you suppose went on here?” he asked.

  “Beats me,” I told him. Quickly, I moved away to the other side of the room, out of casual conversation range but close enough to hear him give the all-clear to Chief Sykes via his walkie-talkie. I tried my best to become invisible. Just because Chief Sykes had been kind enough to include me in the operation didn’t necessarily obligate me to full disclosure. I didn’t want to tell them everything I knew. That locker list might somehow still be useful.

  Marilyn Sykes strode into the locker room about that time. She glanced in my direction, then walked up to join the man by the locker. “Vandalism?” I heard her ask.

  The man shrugged. “I give up. It’s funny, but it looks like this is the only locker that was damaged.” For a moment, Chief Sykes gazed at the mangled pile of sheet metal.

  “Somebody went to a hell of a lot of trouble to destroy this one,” she said. Then she turned to me. “What do you think, Detective Beaumont?” she asked.

  Whether or not I wanted to be, she had pulled me back into the conversation. “Do you think this has anything to do with your partner’s disappearance?”

  By aiming her question directly at me, Chief Marilyn Sykes created an instant moral dilemma. I owed her, goddamnit! She had let me through the barricades onto her turf, and I owed her.

  “I’d have the crime lab take a look at it if I were you,” I suggested. That let me off the hook without my having to give up too much.

  She nodded. “All right.”

  Wanting to get away quick, before she could ask me anything more, I turned and walked out of the locker room. Halfway down the walkway, I ran headlong into Ned Browning rushing toward the gym. “Hello there, Ned,” I said.

  He stopped cold when he saw me. He was uncharacteristically agitated. “Oh, yes, Detective…Detective…I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”

  “Beaumont,” I supplied. “Detective Beaumont.”

  “You’ll have to excuse me. I understand there’s been some difficulty in the gym. I’d been trying to get through, but they wouldn’t let me until just now. Somebody called me at home when I came back from church.”

  “Church,” I grunted with contempt. “That figures.”

  Browning started forward again, but I stopped him. “I’m going to want to talk to you, too,” I said. “As soon as they finish with you.”

  “I don’t have time, Detective Beaumont. My family is waiting for me. We’re having guests.”

  “I don’t give a shit if it’s the pope himself, Ned. I want to talk to you alone. About the cheerleading squad, remember them? I’m sure you remember one or two of them fairly well.”

  An almost audible spark of recognition passed over his face. He paled and stepped back a pace or two. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t play dumb. You know what I mean,” I said menacingly. “I’ll wait for you at Denny’s, here on the island.”

  “All right,” he said, crumbling. “I’ll meet you as soon as I’m finished here.”

  You’re finished, all right, pal, I thought to myself, but I didn’t say it aloud. I didn’t have to. And I wouldn’t have to lift a finger to make it happen, either. Chief Marilyn Sykes and the Washington State Patrol’s crime lab would take care of all those little details.

  Meanwhile, while Ned Browning still thought there was a way he could wiggle off the hook, while he still thought there was a way to save his worthless ass and his career, I’d play him for all he was worth, see if I could wrangle any helpful information out of his scared little hide.

  That’s one thing I’ve learned over the years. If you have the slightest advantage, use it. And don’t worry about it after you do.

  Creeps don’t have any scruples.

  Cops can’t afford them.

  CHAPTER

  28

  When I walked back to the Porsche, old man trouble himself, Maxwell Cole, stood slouching against the door on the driver’s side.

  “Get away, Max. You’ll scratch the paint,” I told him.

  He didn’t move. “Hey, there, J. P. How’s it going?”

  “Get out of the way. I don’t have time to screw around with you.” Bodily, I shoved him aside far enough so I could put my key in the lock.

  “I’ll bet it is Peters, isn’t it? That’s the rumor, anyway,” he said, grinning slyly under his handlebar mustache. “I mean, he’s not here, and you are. Same thing happened last night, over in Fremont, or so I hear.”

  “Will you get the fuck out of my way?”

  “And what’s the teacher’s name? Candace Wynn, isn’t that it?”

  “I’m not talking. Leave me alone, Max.”

  “I won’t leave you alone. I want to know what’s going on. Why won’t they release any names? All Arlo Hamilton does is read prepared speeches that have nothing to do with what’s going on. I want the scoop, J. P., the real scoop.”

  “You won’t get it from me, asshole. Besides, it sounds to me like Hamilton is giving you guys just what you deserve.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What Arlo tells you is bullshit. What you write is bullshit. Sounds like an even trade to me.”

  Max took an angry step toward me, but thought better of it and stayed out of reach. He glared at me for a long moment before dropping his gaze, his eyes watery and pale behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “You’re not going to tell me about Peters, then?”

  “You’re damn right.”

  I flung the Porsche’s door open, bouncing it off Cole’s ample hip for good measure. Just to make the point. He finally moved aside.

  The problem with Max is that I’m so used to avoiding him that in the crush of worrying about Peters I had forgotten I needed to talk to him. Instead of starting the car, I got back out. Max moved away from me.

  “You leave me alone, J. P.”

  “Where’d you get the picture, Max?”

  “The picture? What picture?”

  “The one you wrote about but didn’t print. The one of Darwin Ridley and the cheerleader.”

  He smirked then. “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

  I didn’t have time to mess around with him. I turned on my heel and got back in the car.

  “All I want to know is if it’s Peters or not.”

  “Fuck you, Max.”

  He looked offended. “I have other ways of confirming this, you know,” he whined.

  “So use ’em,” I told him. “Be my guest, but you’d damn well better keep your facts straight, because I’ll cram ’em down your throat if you don’t!”

  With that, I started the engine and laid down a layer of rubber squealing out of the parking lot.

  I took a meandering route to the Mercer Island Denny’s through the maze of interminable road construction that has screwed up traffic there for years. Surprisingly, lots of other people had evidently done the same thing.

  The restaurant was busy, jammed with the after-church/Sunday-brunch crowd. I waited almost fifteen minutes before they finally cleared out the line and showed me to a table, a short-legged two-person booth in the center of the room.

  During the few minutes I was there alone, I couldn’t help reflecting. The last time I had been in the room I was with Peters and Andi Wynn together, that afternoon when we finished questioning the students. That time seemed years ago, not days. Since then, my life had been run through a Waring blender. Fatigue and worry weighed me down, threatening to suck me under and drown me.

  Then Ned Browning entered. He rushed through the door and stopped abruptly by the cash register to look for me. Now, starting forward again, he slowed h
is pace, walking deliberately and with some outward show of dignity, but nothing masked the agitation that remained clearly visible on his face.

  My transformation was instantaneous. Adrenaline surged through my system, pulling me out of my stupor, putting every nerve in my body on full alert. By the time he reached the booth, my mind was honed sharp. I was ready for him.

  He held out his hand in greeting, but I ignored the empty gesture. Instead, I motioned for him to sit down opposite me. If he thought I had invited him over for a nice social chat, he was wrong. The sooner Ned Browning understood that, the better.

  He paused and looked down at his hand, first comprehending and then assessing the message behind my refusal to shake hands. Maybe he had convinced himself that he had mistaken the meaning in what I had said about the cheerleaders.

  My insult wasn’t lost on him. Ned Browning was caught, and he knew it. Flushing violently to the roots of his receding hairline, he sat down.

  “What do you want?” he asked in a hoarse, subdued whisper.

  It was time for poker. Time to play bluff, raise, and draw. I happened to have a pretty good hand. “What did you use?” I asked obliquely for openers.

  “I beg your pardon?” He frowned. He may have been as genuinely puzzled as he looked, or he may have been playing the game.

  “What did you use to smash the locker, Ned? A sledgehammer? A brick? A rock?”

  He drew back in his chair as though I’d slapped him squarely across the face. His unhealthy flush was replaced by an equally unhealthy pallor. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Yes, you do. You know very well.”

  He stood up. “I’ve got guests waiting at home. I didn’t come here to play games.”

  I caught the sleeve of his jacket and compelled him back into the booth. “Fuck your guests,” I snarled. “Believe me, this is no game.”

  His eyes darted warily around the room, checking to see who was within earshot, to see if there was anyone nearby who might know him or who had overheard my rude remark.