Second Watch

by JA Jance

  I suppose that’s the real reason I didn’t mention the dream about Lieutenant Davis’s visit to my hospital room to Mel Soames—because she didn’t know any of that story. She had never seen the cards, never seen the shrapnel. Why not? Because some things are just too damned tough to talk about.

  As if to bring that realization even closer to home, my cell phone rang just then with Mel’s number in the caller ID.

  “I just got back to the hotel from the autopsy,” she said. “I dialed you as soon as I kicked off my shoes. Then, when I looked at the clock and saw how late it was, I was afraid you’d be sleeping.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I wasn’t sleeping. I probably slept too much during the day. How’d the autopsy go?”

  “When we got the warrant, we found all kinds of drug paraphernalia in the dead guy’s apartment. There are no obvious physical wounds, so the M.E. is leaning toward a possible overdose. He’s hoping to have the tox screen results back by the day after tomorrow.”

  “Those usually take a lot longer than that,” I observed.

  “Yes, when it’s business as usual,” Mel agreed. “But this isn’t business as usual. Ross Connors is pulling strings and providing the funding to get things done ASAP. The situation in Bellingham is already volatile enough. Unfortunately, the media is busy fanning the flames with speculative stories about the guy dying as a result of the Tasering situation.”

  “Nothing like a little help from our friends in the fourth estate,” I observed.

  Mel gave a rueful laugh. “Something like that,” she said. “How are you doing?”

  “The physical therapy people say I’ll be running marathons in no time.”

  She laughed at that, too, but I could hear from the sound of it that she was beyond tired.

  “Ross said he’ll be in Seattle tomorrow. He says if he can work it into the schedule, he’ll stop by to see you.”

  “That’s fine, as long as it doesn’t interfere with something on my end. They’re keeping me fully booked, you know.”

  “How’s the pain?” she asked. There was real concern in her voice. After all, she was the one who had insisted that I look into the knee replacement. If it didn’t work, or if the pain was unmanageable, she was going to blame herself.

  “Not that bad,” I said. “Not as bad as it was before, and these guys give me drugs. In fact,” I added, thinking of Nurse Jackie, “they give me all kinds of hell if I don’t take them.”

  Nurse Keith popped his head into the room. Like Mel, he had fully expected to find me asleep. That way he could have awoken me. From the expression on his face, I think he was disappointed.

  “The nurse just showed up,” I told Mel. “I need to go.”

  “Well, shut off your phone,” she advised. “That way no one can wake you up if you’re sleeping.”

  In other words, Mel Soames had spent very little time in hospitals. Lucky her.

  “Ready for me to check your vitals?” Nurse Keith asked.

  I didn’t deign to reply. I simply held out my arm.

  “You want something to help you sleep?” he asked when he finished. “I can give you something if you want it.”

  The truth is, I didn’t want to lie around thinking about Lieutenant Davis and all those other guys who never came back. Try as I might, I couldn’t even come up with the names of the other two guys who died that day. And although I stayed with C Company the rest of the time I was there, without Lennie D. running our show, it wasn’t the same. You didn’t dare become friends with someone, because they might not make it—like my bunkmate, Corporal Lara. He didn’t come home, either.

  Yes, the dreams were weird, but right then, being alone with all my memories was even weirder.

  “Yes, please,” I said. “I’m ready for something that’ll help me sleep.”

  CHAPTER 8

  I’m not sure what was in Nurse Keith’s sleeping potion, but whatever he gave me worked like a charm. I was a goner within minutes. This time the dream yo-yo took me out of my hospital room and back to 1973. Back to Leavenworth. Back to Monica Wellington’s funeral in the town’s small, overheated Catholic church.

  I picked a pew close to the back of the church so I could keep an eye on whoever came and went, although I wasn’t the least bit sure about what I was supposed to be looking for. I had spent the whole drive over reliving the screaming match between Karen and me as I headed out the door, dressed to the nines in my new fifth-floor duds—a three-piece suit, a starched white shirt that still rustled like paper when I moved, and a tie I had succeeded in tying half an inch too short.

  “This is how it’s going to be for the rest of our lives, isn’t it,” she had said as I picked up my car keys. “You’re going to be gone working every single weekend, and I’m going to be stuck at home by myself. Except I won’t be by myself, will I? I’ll be taking care of the kids, and you’ll be off playing cops and robbers.”

  I did a slow burn on that one, the whole trip from Lake Tapps to Leavenworth. It didn’t feel like playing. Monica Wellington really was dead, and I was one of the people charged with finding out who did it.

  I had gotten to the church early enough that I was one of the first people to be admitted to the sanctuary. The front of the church was awash with flowers, in baskets, on stands, and draping an all-white closed casket. As people filed into the church, there was only one I actually recognized on sight. Gail Buchanan had been one of Monica’s roommates in McMahon Hall at the University of Washington. The day before I had gone along with Detective Watkins to the U-Dub and had sat in the corner observing the proceedings as he interviewed Gail along with several other dorm residents.

  With the other two roommates at class, Gail was the one who had provided the information about Monica’s planned blind date on Friday night, although she could give us very little else. In my experience, someone else hoping to play matchmaker arranges blind dates. In this instance, Gail had no idea about the name of the mystery man in question, nor could she shed any light on the identity of who might be the behind-the-scenes operator. For the first time, I wondered if it had really been a blind date or if that was the story Monica had told her roommates.

  “She hadn’t had that many dates,” Gail confided. “She was glad to be going out. I was happy for her. She said they were going to grab a burger and go to a movie.”

  “Did she say which one?”

  That question was more important than it sounded. We were hoping to find something that would lead us to a boyfriend. Although I hadn’t attended Monica’s autopsy, I now knew that Monica had been three and a half months pregnant at the time of her death by strangulation. That was something she had evidently not shared with any of her roommates. But finding out who the unnamed date was might well lead us to the father of Monica’s baby, and it might also give us a motive for her murder. But Watty made no mention of the pregnancy during the interview. That, he had assured me, was a holdback. No matter what he called it, I had no doubt that the holdback designation was made more out of respect for Monica’s parents than for any investigative purpose.

  “No,” Gail said. “Sorry.”

  “And she didn’t tell you the guy’s name or how she happened to hook up with him?”

  Gail shook her head. “But there was something odd about the way she dressed.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She went to one of those used clothing places on the Ave. and bought herself an old WSU sweatshirt. That’s what she was wearing when she left the dorm that night.”

  “A WSU sweatshirt. So you’re thinking whoever she was going out with went to Washington State over in Pullman rather than to the U-Dub?”

  “I guess,” Gail said.

  I was sitting in the corner. I knew I was supposed to act like an unwelcome kid and be seen but not heard, but the whole sweatshirt thing bothered me. I remembered how hot it had been on Sunday, and it didn’t seem like Friday of that week had been a whole lot cooler.

  “So a long-sleev
ed shirt, then,” Watty confirmed.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where she bought it?”

  “Her folks don’t have a lot of money,” Gail told us. “That’s one of the ways she stretched her clothing budget—by buying used clothing.”

  The dorm room had already been thoroughly searched. According to Watty, it had yielded zip. I sat there examining what had once been Monica’s study desk. There was a small Rolodex in the upper-right-hand corner, along with an antique jar made of purple glass that held a collection of pens and pencils. A desktop calendar covered most of the surface of the desk. On it were penciled notes about when papers were due for various classes as well as one that mentioned Monica’s parents’ wedding anniversary, which had occurred two weeks earlier. But there was no marking on Friday night about a possible date, blind or otherwise. I also noticed that most of the dates that had already passed had small numbers penciled into the corners that ranged from 1.5 to 3.

  “What are these numbers for?” I asked, during a pause in Watty’s questions. “The ones on her calendar?”

  “She’s on a work-study program. She uses those to keep track of her hours.”

  “Where does she work?”

  “The alumni office,” Gail replied.

  I watched as Watty made a note of her answer. If Monica’s roommates didn’t know about the source of the blind date, maybe someone she worked with could help on that score.

  Off to the side of the calendar was a stack of opened envelopes. I thumbed through them. Several were hand addressed to Monica in thin blue ink. The return address of H. Wellington indicated they were notes from Monica’s mother, Hannah. No doubt they were filled with news from home. Another contained an unpaid gasoline bill from Phillips 66. The last was a bill from JCPenney. Both had unpaid balances of less than thirty bucks that were due by the end of the month.

  Taken together, all of these things—making do with secondhand clothing, working, worrying about papers, paying bills, staying in contact with her folks back home—spoke to me of a serious young woman, working hard to get an education. Everything I was seeing and hearing made Monica sound like the opposite of the typical dumb blonde who goes off to college with no higher ambition than partying and screwing around. But then again, even without the obvious presence of a boyfriend, Monica had managed to get pregnant.

  Once the interview with Gail was over, Watty and I grabbed a burger in the cafeteria and then spent the afternoon talking to people in the alumni office where Monica had made herself useful by answering phones, filing, and typing. If anyone there knew something about her scheduled date on Friday night a week earlier, no one let on. The blind date remained as much of a mystery to Monica’s coworkers as it had to her roommates.

  Now, seated in the small church, I watched as Gail and three other girls settled uneasily into an empty pew three rows ahead of mine. They were subdued and clearly feeling out of place among this gathering of grieving people. That’s not unexpected. Young people in general always seem to feel uncomfortable at funerals, which, in their minds, are generally reserved for people much older than they are.

  “I’m surprised they came,” someone sniffed in my ear.

  I turned and looked and was astonished to find Monica Wellington, still in her sweatshirt and jeans, seated next to me. She had a face now, rather than just a skull. The strangulation marks were clearly visible above the collar of her shirt. She was staring at her fellow coeds with clear disapproval.

  “They didn’t like me much,” she added in an exaggerated whisper. “They all thought I was a snob—too studious and too worried about my grades to have a good time.”

  I glanced around the church. No one else seemed to have noticed that the guest of honor, who was supposed to be stowed in the white casket at the front of the church, had suddenly appeared at my elbow.

  “Why are you here?” I demanded.

  “I wanted to see who would show up. Looks like a pretty good crowd.”

  That was true. At the back of the sanctuary, someone had produced a rolling cart of folding chairs and was setting them up in the empty space behind the last pair of pews.

  There had been a clot of people blocking the center aisle as they looked for seats. Now the crowd parted silently. Accompanied by someone who appeared to be a funeral home usher, three people made their way forward to the front row. The two men were tall and rangy—clearly father and son. Between them walked a tiny, upright woman. Each man held one of her arms, but it looked to me as though they were taking strength from her rather than the other way around.

  “It’s breaking my father’s heart,” Monica murmured. “He was so proud that I was going to college. I was the first one,” she added. “The first one in my family to get to go.”

  With that she stood up. The next time I saw Monica, she was standing in front of her parents, between them and the casket, staring curiously back at them, while the organist played doleful music in the background. Then, as the priest emerged to take his place at the pulpit, she disappeared.

  One moment Monica was there, peering at her parents, and the next moment she was gone. With no obvious passage of time, the service was evidently over and so was the brief graveside memorial. Suddenly I was in the church’s basement social hall, standing in a group of well-wishers in a receiving line and waiting for my turn to offer my condolences to the grieving family members. This was a small town where everyone knew everyone else, and those tearful good wishes were often delivered with tightly gripped hugs.

  As I came closer to the spot where Hannah Wellington stood in a simple black dress with a damp hanky clutched in one hand, I felt exactly the way Gail Buchanan and the other coeds must have felt—as though I was intruding and needed to find a way to adequately explain my presence.

  Hannah reached out a surprisingly cold hand. When she looked up at me, her eyes may have been dry, but the pain and shock were plainly visible.

  “Detective Beaumont,” I said quickly in response to her unasked question. “Seattle PD. We’ll find whoever did this,” I added. “I promise.”

  “No you won’t,” Monica Wellington whispered fiercely at my elbow, and then she disappeared again.

  “Thank you,” Hannah told me with no sign that she had heard her dead daughter’s disparaging remark. “I’ll hold you to that.”

  The following week my new partner, Detective Milton Gurkey, a guy everyone called Pickles, came back from vacation. He was an old hand and an excellent teacher. If he had heard rumors about my somewhat unorthodox entry into the fifth floor’s hallowed halls, he never gave me a moment’s worth of grief about it. As long as I kept my head down and did whatever he told me, there wasn’t any problem.

  The two of us spent the next six weeks working the Wellington homicide in tandem with Detectives Powell and Watkins, and we never made a bit of progress. For one thing, no matter how hard we tried, we failed to uncover the identity of Monica’s date that night. These days it’s simple. You want to find out who’s hanging out with whom? No problem. You track down their Facebook account, their cell phone records, or their e-mail correspondence. You want to know where someone’s been? You track down their credit card records. But credit cards were still in their infancy back then, and Monica’s Phillips 66 and JCPenney charge cards were no help in tracing her movements. As for stealing a barrel of grease off a restaurant’s loading dock? These days, you’d never pull off something like that without being captured on video by any number of security cameras. Back then, security cameras were almost nonexistent.

  Through the expenditure of inordinate amounts of shoe leather, Pickles and I finally found the secondhand boutique on the Ave., Encore Duds, where Monica had purchased the WSU sweatshirt. The salesclerk, who was also the owner, remembered the transaction—three dollars in cash—but that was as far as it went. She remembered the girl. She remembered that Monica bought the shirt and nothing else, but she wasn’t sure what day of the week it had been—maybe Wednesday or Thursday. An
d since many of her transactions seemed to be in the three-dollar range, we were never able to pin it down in any more detail.

  Lots of homicide cops are all flash and sizzle. Pickles was a plodder. He wanted to cover all the bases and do it right. He taught me to do reports in a methodical, workable way. He was dogged when it came to asking questions, and he was someone who never wanted to give up on a case. Ever.

  We followed up on every lead, including going back to the rendering plant and scouring the parking lot for likely looking Ford pickup trucks. Despite Watty’s firm warning to the contrary, we went back to Magnolia and attempted to stage a repeat interview with Donnie and Frankie Dodd. Unfortunately, the family had moved, lock, stock, and barrel. There was a FOR RENT sign in the front yard, and the landlord claimed they had left no forwarding address. That time I even ventured so far as visiting Sister Mary Katherine’s office at Saints Peter and Paul Catholic School. She told me the boys’ mother was remarrying and the newly reconstituted family was moving to a new location. The good sister had no idea where they were going, since the mother had taken a copy of her sons’ school records rather than asking that the records be forwarded to their next location.

  I was all for tracking them down, but I was new on the job and Pickles was lead. He made the decision that we would let that particular sleeping dog lie because he didn’t have a choice, mainly because it turned out that we had far more than enough to do without it.

  We made several trips to the rendering plant. We also made several trips to the Dragon’s Head, where Mr. Lee’s Mandarin duck definitely lived up to its advance billing. It was easy to see that good food, great prices, and proximity to the Public Safety Building weren’t the only things that kept the Dragon’s Head at the top of the list as far as Seattle PD personnel were concerned. There was also Mr. Lee’s constant supply of very fetching waitresses and barmaids, whose job it was to deliver the food and drink.

  “Watch yourself,” Pickles warned me when one of them served my lunch with a downcast smile that was off the charts as far as flirting was concerned. “There’ve been more than a couple of those young ladies who ended up involved with or married to cops they met while working at the Dragon’s Head.”