Trial by Fury

by J. A. Jance

  “Yes. I wanted to see Mrs. Scarborough.”

  “Are you a family member?” the nurse inquired.

  “No. Not really.” I stopped short of pulling out my badge and identifying myself. It didn’t make any difference.

  “I’m sorry. Mrs. Scarborough is gravely ill. Her doctors have limited visitors to family members only, and even those are allowed to stay for just a few minutes at a time.”

  “But it’s important…”

  The nurse took my arm and guided me firmly back toward the elevator. “There is nothing more important than our patients’ well-being,” she said stiffly. “If the information you have for her is so important, then it would be best if you would contact one of the family members to deliver a message.”

  “Could you give me the names on the approved list?”

  The nurse looked at me disapprovingly and shook her head. “Now if we really were a friend of the family, we’d know those names, wouldn’t we.”

  Yes, we certainly would.

  The elevator door opened, and I got on. The nurse made sure of it. I was surprised she didn’t ride all the way down to the lobby and see me out onto the street. I would have made more of an issue out of it, but I figured having the family name was enough.

  I made one stop before I left the building, at the pay phone in the lobby. A frayed Seattle phone book lay on the shelf under the phone. Unfortunately, there were six Scarboroughs listed. None of them said Elaine.

  Rummaging through my pockets, I dredged out a collection of quarters. I dialed the first three numbers and asked for Elaine, only to be told no one by that name lived there. On the fourth call, Candace Wynn herself answered the phone. I recognized her voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Wrong number,” I mumbled, disguising my voice as best I could. I hung up the phone, made a note of the address, and raced toward I the hospital exit door, almost smashing into the glass when the electric door in the lobby I didn’t open quite fast enough to let me I through.

  Hospital doors aren’t generally timed for people moving on foot at a dead run.

  CHAPTER

  30

  It took exactly thirteen minutes to drive from Ballard Community Hospital to Thirtieth Avenue South and South Graham. Nobody stopped me for speeding. That’s always the way. Where are all the traffic cops when you need one?

  Had one pulled me over, I would have sent word to the department for help. As it was, I decided to go to the Scarborough house first, try to get some idea of the lay of the land, and then call the department for a backup.

  Driving east after crossing Beacon Avenue, I spotted a small Mom-and-Pop grocery store with a pay phone hanging beside the ice machine outside. I figured I’d come back there to use the phone as soon as I knew what was coming down.

  As plans go, it wasn’t bad. Things just didn’t work out that way.

  At Graham and Thirtieth South, a towering electrical transmission line dissects Beacon Hill and cuts a huge green north and south swath through the city. The Scarborough address in the phone book was 6511 Thirtieth Avenue South.

  The seriousness of my miscalculation became apparent the moment I saw the house. North of Graham, Thirtieth was a regular street with houses on one side facing the wide clearing under the power lines. On the south side, though, the 6500 block dead-ended in front of the only house on the block, 651—the Scarborough house.

  So much for sneaking around. So much for subtlety. Guard red Porsches are pretty goddamned hard to camouflage on dead-end streets when there’s only one house on the block and the rest is nothing but wide-open spaces.

  Instead of turning right onto Thirtieth, I hung a left and drove north, ditching the Porsche three houses north of Graham behind a vagrant pickup truck sitting on jacks. I figured I had a better chance of getting close to the house unobserved if I moved on foot rather than in the car. All I needed to do was get close enough to have some idea of what was going on. There wasn’t much cover, even for someone on foot. The Beacon Hill transmission line was built in the twenties and thirties to bring power from the Skagit Valley power plants into the city. The right-of-way was purchased from farmers along the route. Later, the city grew up around the power line.

  Directly under and for twenty-five or thirty yards on either side of the long line of metal towers, emerald green grass sprang to life. It looked as though the power line had driven every other living thing but the grass out of its path.

  Here and there, looking down the line, a few houses remained, almost on the right-of-way itself. These were mostly remnants of the original farmhouses, most of them still occupied and still in good repair.

  The Scarborough house was one of those, a sleepy-looking relic from another era with a steeply pitched gray roof and a graceful white porch that stretched across the entire front of the house. Two matching bay windows, opening onto the porch, were carefully curtained so no one could see inside. To the right of the walkway leading up to the house stood a “For Sale” sign with a “Sold” sticker stuck across it.

  I returned to Graham. Attempting to look casual, I sauntered east, hoping for a wider view of the house as it dropped behind me. A short distance up the street was a bus stop. I stopped under the sign and turned to look behind me.

  I was far enough away that, for the first time, I could see the south side of the house. Parked next to it, almost totally concealed from the street, was the corner of a school bus. A van actually. A yellow team van.

  As I stood watching, the front door swung open. Candace Wynn stepped outside, carrying a suitcase in either hand. With brisk, purposeful steps, she moved to the bus, opened a side door, and placed the suitcases inside.

  Watching her, I had moved unconsciously into the middle of the street, drawn like a metal chip toward a powerful magnet. Too late I realized she was moving toward the door on the driver’s side of the van. She vaulted into the driver’s seat and slammed the door behind her. I heard the engine start and saw the backup lights come on.

  Suddenly, behind me, squealing brakes and a blaring horn brought me to my senses as a car skidded to a stop a few feet from me. I scrambled out of the way only to dash into the path of another car. Blind to everything but the moving bus. I charged toward it.

  It was only when the bus backed out and swung around to turn toward the street that I saw Candace Wynn wasn’t alone in the vehicle. Peters sat slumped on the rider’s side, his head slack and drooping against the window.

  “Stop! Police!” I shouted, drawing my .38 from its shoulder holster. I saw Candace glance across Peters in my direction. Our eyes met briefly across the narrowing distance in a flash of recognition. She saw me, heard me, recognized me, but she didn’t stop. She didn’t even pause. Instead, the van leaped forward like a startled rabbit as she hit the accelerator. I saw, rather than heard, the side of Peters’ head smack against the window.

  What’s the matter with him, I wondered. Is he asleep? Why doesn’t he do something? “Peters!” I shouted, but there was no response.

  I ran straight down Graham toward Thirtieth, hoping to intercept the van where the two streets met. As I charged forward, Candace must have read my mind. As she approached the intersection, she gave the steering wheel a sharp turn to the left. The van shuddered and arched off the rutted roadway, tottering clumsily onto the grass.

  Good, I thought. She’s losing it. But she didn’t. Somehow she regained control. The van pulled onto Graham, skidding and sliding, a good ten feet in front of me. She gunned the motor and headed west. I put on one final burst of speed, but it was too little too late.

  The Porsche, three houses up the street behind me, was too far away to be of any use. There was only one chance.

  The drawn .38 was in my hand. I was tempted to use it. God was I tempted. But just then, just as I was ready to squeeze the trigger, another car met the van on the street. It was a station wagon loaded with people, two women with a bunch of kids.

  I couldn’t risk it, not even for Peters. I coul
dn’t risk hitting a tire and sending the van spinning out of control to crash into innocent bystanders.

  A second car stopped behind me with a screech of brakes. Horns blared. One driver rolled down his window. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  I rammed the .38 back into its holster and turned to race toward the Porsche in the same motion only to stumble over a little black kid on a tiny bicycle who had pedaled, unnoticed, up behind me.

  “Hey, man, you a cop?” he demanded.

  I sidestepped him without knocking him down and ran up the street with the kid trailing behind. When I reached the Porsche, I struggled to unlock the door, unable to fit the key in the lock.

  “Hey, man,” the kid repeated. “I axed if you was a cop. How come you don’t answer me?”

  Finally, the key slipped home. I glanced at the kid as I flung the door open. He wasn’t more than five or six years old.

  “Yes, I am,” I answered. I fumbled in my pocket, located a loose business card with my name on it, and tossed it to him. Deftly, he plucked it out of the air.

  “Do you know how to dial 9—1—1?” I asked.

  He nodded, his black eyes huge and serious. “Sure;”

  “Call them,” I ordered. “Tell them there’s trouble. Serious trouble. I need help. My name’s on that card.”

  The Porsche’s engine roared to life. I wheeled the car around and drove into the confusion of cars still stopped to sort out the excitement. As I swung onto Graham, the boy was hightailing it up the street on his bicycle, pumping furiously.

  I’d have given anything for flashing lights about then, or for a siren that would have forced people out of my way. As it was, I had to make do with the horn, laying into it at every intersection, raging up behind people and sweeping them off the road in front of me.

  As I fishtailed around a stopped car at the Beacon Avenue intersection, I caught sight of the lumbering van. It was far too unwieldy for the sports car rally speed and terrain. Half a mile ahead, it skidded into the wrong lane, around a sharp curve. I don’t know how she did it, but Candace Wynn dragged it back onto the road. She could drive like hell, damn her.

  As she disappeared behind the hill, I slammed the gas pedal to the floorboard and the Porsche shot forward. I was gaining on her. No way the van would be a match for my Porsche. No way.

  I raced down Graham, swooping around the curve, over the top of the hill, and down the other side, with its second sharp curve. The traffic light at the bottom of the hill turned red as I approached. Despite my frenzied honking, cars on Swift Avenue moved sedately into the intersection.

  One disinterested driver glanced in my direction as I tried to wave him out of my way. Another, a semidriver, flipped me a bird. I finally moved into the intersection all right, but only when my light turned green.

  While I was stopped, I had looked up and down Swift, searching for her, but I saw no sign of the van. There was only one other direction she could go at that intersection, only one other choice—onto the freeway, heading north.

  I shot across Swift and sliced down the on ramp. Far ahead, a glimpse of yellow school van disappeared around yet another curve, swerving frantically in and out of the otherwise leisurely flow of homeward-bound Sunday afternoon traffic.

  I dodged from one lane to another. Where the hell was she going? Why did she have Peters in the car with her? My heart thumped in my throat as we came up the straightaway by the Rainier Brewery. I was closing on her fast, looking for ways I could cut her off, force her to the side of the road.

  Just north of the brewery, I was right behind her, honking and motioning for her to pull over. Suddenly, without warning, she veered sharply to the right. With a crash of crumbling metal, the van smashed through the temporary guardrail on a closed exit ramp and bounced crazily over a railroad tie barrier.

  I skidded to the shoulder. I couldn’t follow her in the Porsche. It never would have cleared the railroad tie. Throwing myself out of the car, I tumbled over the shattered remains of the guardrail and raced up the ramp on foot.

  Nobody clocked me, but I was moving, running like my life depended on it, wrestling the .38 out of its holster as I went. I knew how that exit ended. In a cliff. A sheer drop from thirty feet in the air over Airport Way.

  I topped the rise. She must have thought the exit was one of the almost completed ones that would have swung her back onto Beacon Hill. At the last moment, she tried to stop. I saw the flash of brake lights, but it was too late. She was going too fast.

  The van skidded crazily and then rammed into the two Jersey barriers, movable concrete barricades, at the end of the ramp.

  I stopped in my tracks and watched in horror. For the smallest fraction of a second, I thought the barrier would hold. It didn’t. The two pieces split apart like a breaking dam and fell away. Carried forward by momentum, the van nosed up for a split second, then disappeared from view.

  An eternity passed before I heard the shattering crash as it hit the ground below. Riveted to the ground, frozen by disbelief, I heard a keening horn, the chilling sound of someone impaled on a steering wheel.

  Sickened and desperate, I turned and ran back the way I had come. Within seconds, the wailing horn was joined by the faint sounds of approaching sirens. I recognized them at once. Medic One. The sirens did more than just clear traffic out of the way. They said help was coming. They said there was a chance.

  “Hurry,” I prayed under my breath. “Please hurry.”

  As I reached the Porsche, I saw two squad cars speeding south on the freeway, blue lights flashing. The boy on the bicycle had made the call. They were coming to help me.

  Nice going, guys!

  CHAPTER

  31

  It took three illegal turns to get off the freeway and reach the area on Airport Way where the Van had fallen to earth. By the time I got there, someone had mercifully silenced the horn.

  Naturally, a crowd had gathered, the usual bloodthirsty common citizens who don’t get enough blood and gore on television, who have to come glimpse whatever grisly sight may be available, to see who’s dead and who’s dying. Revolted, I pushed my way through them. An uncommonly fat woman in a bloodied flowered muumuu with a plastic orchid lei around her neck sat weeping on a curb. I bent over her, checking to make sure she was all right.

  “Look at my car,” she sobbed. “That thing fell out of the sky right on me. My poor car! I could have been killed. If someone had been in the backseat…”

  I looked where she pointed. A few feet from the van sat the pretty much intact front end of an old Cadillac Seville. The rear end of the car, from the backseat on, had been smashed flat. All that remained behind the front door was a totally unrecognizable pile of rubble.

  A few feet away lay the battered van, surrounded by hunks of shattered concrete. The van’s engine had been shoved back to the second seat. It lay on its side like a stricken horse with a troop of medics and firemen scurrying around it.

  My knees went weak. I felt sick to my stomach. The sweet stench of cooking grain from the brewery mixed with the odor of leaking gasoline and the metallic smell of blood. The concoction filled my nostrils, accelerating my heartbeat, triggering my gag reflex.

  I attempted to stand up, hoping to get away from the smell and to escape the lady in the flowered dress, but she grabbed onto my arms, pulling herself up along with me. Once we were both upright, she clung to me desperately, repeating the same words over and over, as if repetition would make sense of the incomprehensible.

  “It just fell out of the air. Can you imagine? It landed right on top of me.”

  Prying her fingers loose one by one, I broke away from her. “You stay here,” I told her. “I’ll send someone to check on you.” I walked toward the wreck. A uniformed officer recognized me and waved me past a police barricade.

  Just then a second Medic One unit arrived at the scene. A pair of medics hurried to the woman’s side. I turned my full attention on the van.

  Paramedics, inside an
d outside the vehicle, struggled to position their equipment, trying to reach the injured occupants of the van. I knew from experience that their job would be to stabilize the patients before any attempt was made to remove them from the vehicle, place them in ambulances, and transport them to hospitals.

  Standing a little to one side, I waited. I didn’t want to be part of the official entourage. I didn’t want to ask or answer any questions. I was there as a person, a friend, not as a detective. The less anyone was aware of my presence, the better.

  Dimly, I observed the gathering of reporters who showed up and demanded to know what was going on. Who was in the van? What school was it from? How had it happened? Were there any children involved?

  Not directly, I thought. Only Heather and Tracie, whose father lay trapped in that twisted mass of metal. I thought of them then for the first time, of two girls waiting at home for me to bring them word of their father.

  A paramedic crawled out of the vehicle and walked toward the lieutenant who was directing the rescue effort. In answer to the captain’s question, the paramedic shook his head.

  Dreading to hear the words and yet unable to stay away, I moved close enough to overhear what they were saying despite the roar of nearby fire truck engines.

  “She’s gone,” the paramedic said. “What about the guy?”

  “Lost a lot of blood,” the lieutenant answered. “I don’t know if we’ll get him out in time or not.”

  I dropped back out of earshot, trying to make myself small and inconspicuous. I didn’t want to hear more. The paramedic’s words had confirmed my own worst fears. They didn’t think Peters would make it.

  I didn’t, either.

  I retreated to the curb and sat down a few feet away from where the woman in the flowered dress was being treated for cuts and bruises. I closed my eyes and buried my face in my hands. I kept telling myself that Seattle’s Medic One was the best in the country, that if anyone could save Peters’ life, they could. My feeble reassurances fell flat.