Trial by Fury

by J. A. Jance

He made an attempt to retrieve his old stuffiness. “I don’t think it’s necessary to use that kind of language, Mr. Beaumont.”

  Once upon a time I had been briefly impressed by his outward show of high-toned values. That was no longer true. His high-toned values were a sham.

  “Don’t pull that bullshit on me. I’m not one of your students, Ned,” I reminded him. “I’ll talk to you any damn way I please.”

  His hands dropped to his lap, but not before I caught sight of a nervous tremor. An involuntary tic touched the muscle of his left jaw. A rush of gleeful satisfaction passed through me. I was definitely making progress. Visible progress.

  Just then, our waitress appeared. “Can I get you something?” she asked.

  “No, nothing for me,” Browning murmured shakily.

  “Toast,” I said. “Whole wheat. And two eggs over easy.” I nodded as the waitress offered and poured coffee. Browning refused that as well. When the waitress left, I picked up my spoon and began stirring my coffee with slow deliberation. Ned Browning was already nervous. Any delaying tactic, anything that would make him sit on his powder keg a little longer, would work in my favor.

  Carefully, I put down the spoon, took a long sip of coffee, then leaned forward, thrusting my face toward his, invading the body space, the distance, he had created around himself.

  “Let’s get down to brass tacks, Ned. When did you find out about the list?”

  “What list?” He was determined to play dumb. I was in no mood to tolerate it.

  “The one with you on it, Ned. The pep squad scorecard. As I recall, your name is on it more than once.”

  In the previous few minutes, a little color had returned to his face. Now it drained away again, leaving him a pasty gray. That took the fun out of it for me, calling a halt to the game. I prefer someone who offers a little more of a challenge, a worthy adversary who fields the questions and makes me work for my answers. Ned Browning caved in so easily, I almost laughed out loud.

  “You know about that?”

  “Lots of people know about it. More than you’d expect. They also have a pretty good idea what it took to get on it.”

  “But…”

  “When did you find out about it?” I insisted. “And how?”

  “But she said…”

  “Who said?”

  “Candace. Mrs. Wynn.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That if I destroyed the locker, no one would ever know.”

  “Right. And why do you suppose she told you that?”

  “I don’t have any idea.”

  “When did she tell you?”

  “Saturday morning. She called me at home.”

  “What time?”

  “It must have been around ten. I was out working in the yard when she called and asked me to meet her at school”

  “And you did?”

  “She said it was urgent, something I needed to know.”

  “Where did you meet? In the locker room?”

  “No. In my office.”

  “All right, so after you met, what happened then?”

  “She told me about the list. Said she’d just found out about it the night before, at Darwin Ridley’s memorial service.”

  The little orange warning light in the back of my head started flashing. I had a vivid memory of Candace Wynn looking at the list in the locker after Peters and I found it. She had known about it for sure since then, and maybe even before that. Why had she lied to Browning about when she found out, and what had made it so urgent?

  “So what happened?” I urged impatiently.

  “Go on.”

  “She said if anyone else found out about it, it would be awful for everyone. She thought the best idea would be to get rid of it, both for the girls’ sakes and for the men as well.”

  “My, my, a concern for public relations. A little late for that, wouldn’t you say?”

  He frowned and said nothing. The waitress brought my food and set it in front of me. Browning stared miserably at my plate as though the very idea of food sickened him.

  “So you got rid of it,” I commented after the waitress walked away. “Pounded the locker to pieces. Right then or later?”

  “Right then. She said she had a sledgehammer in the back of her pickup. I used that.”

  “You used it. She didn’t? Did she go with you?”

  “No. She waited in my office while I got the hammer from the truck and did it.”

  “Where was it?”

  “The hammer? I just told you, in the back of her truck.”

  “Not the hammer. Where was the truck?”

  “Parked in front of the school. Right where it is now.”

  “She hasn’t moved it since then?”

  “I can’t tell for sure, but I don’t think so. It looks to me like it’s in the same place.”

  “Who left first and when?”

  “I did. About eleven-thirty or so. She said she needed to pick up something from her office. She was still at the school when I drove away.”

  “And there was no one with her?”

  “I didn’t see anybody. There wasn’t anyone in the truck when I got the hammer out or when I took it back, either. I didn’t see anyone else on the grounds the whole time we were there.”

  “Any other cars parked in the area?”

  “No, just her pickup and my Olds.”

  “How did she leave there, then?”

  Browning shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  I stirred my coffee again, trying to make sense of what he had told me. It didn’t work. Finally, I said, “Candace Wynn worked for you for several years. Did you know anything about her personal life?”

  Again he shrugged. “Nothing much. She was divorced. Her father died a year or so back. Her mother’s been sick for several years.”

  “I remember seeing a bumper sticker on her truck. Something about sailing. Do you know anything about that?”

  “She’s supposed to be part owner of a boat over on Shilshole. I don’t know the name of it or the names of any of the co-owners.”

  “And her mother’s sick.”

  “She has cancer.”

  “I already knew that. Do you know where she is?”

  “A hospital somewhere around here. A cancer unit, I believe.”

  “What’s her mother’s name? Any idea?”

  “No.”

  I paused for a moment, wondering if there was any easier way to track down Candace Wynn’s maiden name. “Is there a blank on the school district’s employment form that calls for a maiden name?”

  Browning shook his head. “No.”

  “What about the group insurance form? If she wasn’t married and didn’t have any children, she might have listed her mother as beneficiary.”

  “That’s possible, but all that information is confidential. It’s in the district office.”

  “Can you get it for me or not?”

  “Not on a weekend. I could probably get it tomorrow morning. Why do you need it?”

  “Because I’ve got to find Candace Wynn before she kills someone else,” I said.

  I pushed my plate aside, picked up the bill, and stood up. Ned Browning sat motionless, shocked by my words. He stared up at me. “Kills?” he repeated.

  Obviously, none of the Mercer Island Police Force had chosen to clue him in on what was happening.

  “And because tomorrow may be too late,” I added.

  I left him sitting there in Denny’s, a man frozen in stunned silence. His past had just caught up with him, and his guests waiting at home were long forgotten.

  As I started the car, I didn’t feel sorry for Ned Browning. Whatever disgrace was coming to him wasn’t undeserved. After all, he had been on the list twice, not once. Once was once, but twice was twice.

  I did feel sorry for Mrs. Browning, however. She was probably a nice enough lady, one I would never meet even though I was changing her life forever. Whoever she was, wherever she was, her world, like Joann
a Ridley’s, was about to fly apart. She didn’t have the foggiest idea it was coming, but J. P. Beaumont was sending trouble her way.

  It was just as well we would never meet.

  CHAPTER

  29

  The only thing to do was to find Candace Wynn’s mother. Somehow.

  I was sitting in my car with the engine running when I realized I was going off half-cocked. I waited until Ned Browning came out of the restaurant. Expecting me to be long gone, he turned like he’d been shot when I hailed him from the Porsche. He approached the car cautiously. “What now?” he asked.

  “Do you have a picture of Candace Wynn?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe not a separate picture, but wouldn’t she be in a yearbook? Do you have any?”

  He nodded. “I do have one of those, at school, in my office.”

  “Good. Let’s go get it.”

  He started to object but thought better of it. He led the way back to the school, where a tow truck was just hooking on to Candace Wynn’s Chevy. Avoiding the crowd in the parking lot, he took me into his office and handed me a copy of the current yearbook. Mrs. Wynn’s picture was there, alongside her angelic crew of cheerleaders. There was another picture as well, a more formal one, in the faculty section of the book.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll bring it back.”

  “Don’t bother,” Ned Browning told me.

  If I had been in his shoes, I wouldn’t have wanted to keep a copy of that particular yearbook, either.

  When I left him, he was standing in the middle of his office, looking at it the way someone looks when they’re getting ready to pack up and move on. Ned Browning was a man who had worn out his welcome.

  The next three hours were hard on me. They shouldn’t have been, I suppose. After all, I’m a homicide detective. We’re supposed to be tough, right?

  But tracking through those hospitals, trying to locate Candace Wynn’s mother, carried me back some twenty-odd years, back to my youth and to my own mother’s final illness.

  Maybe part of it is that you never get over your mother’s death, no matter how long you live. Being in those polished corridors with their antiseptic odors and their stainless steel trays made it seem like yesterday, not half a lifetime ago.

  Pain was all around. The patients had help for theirs, however fleeting the hazy comfort of drugs might be, but my heart went out to the empty-eyed visitors I found walking the halls, lingering in the rooms. There was no prescribed medication available to lessen their hurt.

  I remembered only too well when I had stumbled blindly among them, holding tightly, stubbornly, to each grim crumb of hope. And then, eventually, the day had come when all hope was gone. I had resigned myself to my mother’s loss, knowing the how. That was inevitable. But for three long years I had spent every resource at my disposal, delaying as long as possible the unpredictable when.

  Walking the hospital halls that bright spring afternoon, knowing the difference between the budding promise outside and the burgeoning grief inside, I could relate to Candace Wynn just a little bit. Maybe, after fighting a losing war for far too long a time, she had cracked under the strain.

  I started with the obvious, the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center on First Hill. A lady at the front desk cheerily told me they had a master list of all the cancer patients in Seattle, but without a name, she couldn’t help me. She did, however, point me in the direction of the hospitals with known cancer units—Swedish, Providence, Cabrini, and Virginia Mason on Pill Hill—and later, University Hospital, Overlake, and Northgate.

  I drove like a maniac from place to place, speeding on the way, leaving the Porsche in patient-loading zones with the hazard lights flashing when I went inside.

  And all the while I was driving, I kept coming back to the same question: Why had Candace lied about the locker? Why had she pretended to have heard about it only the night before, and why had she encouraged Ned Browning to destroy it? She knew we knew about it. The list wasn’t something that could simply be swept under the rug and forgotten. There was some reason for her telling Browning on that particular day in that particular place. I drove and wished I had the answer.

  At each hospital, it wasn’t a matter of waltzing up to the head nurse, showing her Candace Wynn’s picture, and getting a straight answer.

  Straight answers aren’t to be had from either doctors or head nurses. They’re usually too close to God to talk to mere mortals. I went looking for orderlies, for hospital volunteers, for candy stripers—little people who might feel some sense of importance in being asked to help.

  And help me they did. They were happy to look at the picture of Candace Wynn, and over and over they shook their heads. No, they were sure no one like that had visited any of the patients who were in that hospital right then.

  And with each shake of the head, with each negative answer, the icy knot in my gut got bigger. I wasn’t getting any closer. A terrible clock was ticking in my head, telling me that time was running out. I tried to tell myself it was just from being in hospitals, from seeing so many people who were sick or dying or both. But that didn’t help me shake it.

  The lady at Fred Hutchison had given me a list of board-approved cancer units. I visited them one by one and came up empty-handed each time. By the time I reached the last one, I was pretty discouraged.

  Instead of leaving the lights flashing, I searched around and found a real parking place in the lot outside Northgate General Hospital. I ignored the noisy horde of teenyboppers on their way to the latest teenybopper movie. They were having a great time, laughing and joking and shoving one another around. I wanted to tell them to shut up and pay attention, that there was a real world out there waiting for them.

  Back in my car with yet another failure, I sat for a moment, resting my head on the steering wheel. I had struck out. Tired beyond bearing, I was determined to go on, if I could just figure out where I ought to go.

  I tried to collect my thoughts. It was like corralling a herd of frightened, milling sheep. I kept after it, though, and gradually, as I sat there, order returned.

  Going over every conversation with Candace Wynn, playing back each one in my mind, I picked out only those things she had told me about her mother. I remembered her saying she had visited her mother in the hospital during the third quarter of the game. That had to have been fairly late in the evening. After eight o’clock. Dave Rimbaugh had told us that much. To get to a hospital from Seattle Center before visiting hours ended, it must have been one fairly close at hand.

  I got out of the car and walked back through the movie-going kids and into the waiting room at Northgate General Hospital. I walked up to the main desk.

  “What’s the closest hospital to Seattle Center?” I asked the young black receptionist. She turned to a much older lady sitting next to her.

  “What do you think, Irene?”

  Irene shrugged. “Group Health up at the end of Denny, or maybe Ballard Community.”

  I felt a faint surge of hope. Ballard Community wasn’t that far from Seattle Center, and it wasn’t that far from Fremont, where Candace Wynn lived, either. I charged out the door and back through the parking lot. When I started the Porsche and peeled out of the place, I left a few young high school bucks staring after me in openmouthed envy.

  Parking on N.W. Fifty-third, I dashed into the hospital and was directed to their medical/surgical floor, 5-E. There, I tackled a lady in a bright pink jacket pushing a cart full of paperback books and newspapers down the hall. Her name tag said Mrs. Rasmussen—a good, old-fashioned Scandinavian name.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m with Seattle P.D. I’m trying to locate a patient.”

  She pointed down the hall. “If you’ll just go down to the nurses’ station, they have a list of all the patients there.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I don’t know the patient’s name.” I had conducted the same conversation over and over the whole afternoon. I opened the yearbook to where a pi
ece of paper marked Candace Wynn’s smiling picture. “This is her daughter.”

  Mrs. Rasmussen fumbled in the pocket of her pink jacket and brought out a pair of goldframed glasses. She perched them on her nose and peered down at the picture. “Oh, her!” she said. The disgust in her voice was unmistakable.

  “Her? You mean you recognize her?”

  “You say you’re from the police? Well, it’s about time, that’s all I have to say.”

  “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

  “I was telling Betty just the other day that somebody should see to it that girl goes to jail.”

  “But why?” I was sure that if I ever got Mrs. Rasmussen on track, she was going to tell me everything I needed to know and then some.

  “You know, some of the patients complain about their kids, that they do stuff behind their backs, give away their things, move into their houses whether they want them there or not. But I was there the day she made her mother agree to sell the house. It was awful. It made me sick. Mrs. Scarborough cried and cried about it afterward.”

  “That’s her name? Mrs. Scarborough?”

  “Yes. Elaine Scarborough. Second room on the left. The bed by the window.” Mrs. Rasmussen took off her glasses and patted them back into her pocket. “That’s not all, either.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “She kept saying that at home her daughter sometimes wouldn’t let her have her pain medication.”

  “Did anyone do anything about it?”

  “The doctor said he was sure the visiting nurses made certain that kind of thing didn’t happen. But you should have seen how happy she was to be in a hospital so she could get medication when she needed it. She was in such pain! What kind of a monster would do a thing like that? I just can’t understand it!”

  Mrs. Rasmussen stood there glaring at me with one hand on her hip as though she expected me to come up with an instant explanation. What kind of monster indeed! There’s no understanding that kind of human aberration.

  A hefty nurse came rustling officiously down the hall. Mrs. Rasmussen beat a hasty retreat into the nearest doorway, saying a cheerful “Good afternoon” to whomever was inside.

  Uncertainly, I paused in the hallway for a moment too long. The nurse, observing my indecisiveness, stopped beside me. “May I help you?”