Second Watch

by JA Jance

  For one thing, not hanging out together was one way of putting the lie to the whisper campaign that said both our promotions had come about because (a) we knew someone, or (b) we knew something. I never heard anything specific on the topic, but I always suspected that Mac was probably getting some of the same treatment over in the Motorcycle unit that I was getting up on the fifth floor. If there was a fix, I hadn’t done it, and if Mac had indeed pulled some kind of fast one, I didn’t want to know about it.

  All of that was reason enough for both of us to make our split permanent.

  I was lying there, almost asleep again, with the iPad on my chest, when who should appear in my doorway but my son, Scott.

  “Hey, Pop,” he said. “How’s it going?”

  Considering everything that had gone before, you can imagine that I was a little flummoxed by his sudden Jack-in-the-box appearance. My initial thought was that I had once again meandered off into dreamland, and Scott’s showing up at my bedside made him yet another member of my continuing cavalcade of ghosts of Christmas Past.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, probably sounding grumpier than I meant to.

  “You mean I’m not allowed to come by and check on my dear old dad?” he asked with a grin. “You could at least act happy to see me.”

  “I am happy to see you,” I said.

  With some difficulty I managed to stifle saying aloud what I was actually thinking, which was: Are you real or not? If it turned out he wasn’t real, I wasn’t going to keep talking to myself. And if he was real? If I asked him the question, then Scott would think I was nuts for sure. No winners for me in either case.

  “When did you get in?” I asked.

  It seemed like an innocuous enough question, but Scott looked distinctly uncomfortable. He bit his lip before he answered. “I actually got in yesterday afternoon,” he said. “Mel had told everybody that she didn’t want you overwhelmed with visitors, so I stayed away.”

  There was something about that statement that didn’t have the ring of truth in it. Scott’s a lot like me in that way. He’s never been a particularly capable liar. His mother could always see straight through him. So could I, up to a point.

  “I’m sure she would have made an exception for you,” I said.

  Scott nodded. “I suppose so,” he agreed sheepishly. “But I wanted to keep it a surprise.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You did it. I’m surprised.”

  “No, not that I was coming to visit you. The real reason I was coming to Seattle.”

  “What?”

  “I had a job interview.”

  This was news to me. Of course, I had hoped that eventually one or the other of my kids would come back home to Seattle to live, but I hadn’t voiced that opinion. What they chose to do with their lives was none of my business, really. And Scott and Cherisse had seemed so happy living in the Bay Area that it had never crossed my mind that either of them would consider looking for work in Seattle. The PT ladies would have been astonished, but right that minute I felt like leaping out of my hospital bed and dancing a jig on my brand-new titanium knees.

  But I’ve also learned, from watching Mel’s very capable handling of my kids, that overreacting to news of any kind—bad or good—is not the best idea. Just in case this wasn’t a dream, I was careful to keep my cool.

  “So how did the interview go?”

  “That’s the thing,” Scott said. “I got the job, but I’m worried about what you’ll think.”

  “Look,” I said. “You and Cherisse have your heads screwed on straight. You get to make your own decisions. Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead, and all that crap.”

  Scott’s face brightened. “Really?” he said. “You mean it?”

  “Of course I mean it. Now tell me about the job.”

  “It’s in the new TE unit at Seattle PD.”

  “TE unit?” I repeated, puzzled about this latest bit of alphabet soup jargon. “Never heard of it. I know about IT, but what the hell’s TE?”

  “Tactical electronics,” Scott said. “Drones. Electronic surveillance. Computer surveillance. SWAT team robots. That kind of stuff. I’ll have to make it through the academy, but on the other side of that, I’ll be a sworn police officer, just like you. For me, being an engineer has always been a means to an end—a way to support my family. Being a cop is what I’ve always wanted to do.”

  I would guess my jaw dropped in utter astonishment. When Scotty was little, he used to say he wanted to be a cop. That was a while after he wanted to be a lion tamer and a fireman and before he wanted to be the star of his own rock band. Karen had taken it upon herself to drum all those childish dreams out of his head. Cops and firemen didn’t make enough money—his father’s paycheck being a prime case in point. Working as a lion tamer was far too dangerous. Ditto for starring in a rock band. All those guys died of drug overdoses. Karen was an outspoken lady with some very definite ideas.

  I wasn’t privy to most of the private mother/son conversations full of discouraging words that went on between Karen and Scott, but I did get their gist in what Scott parroted back to me about them. I heard about the other things Karen said as well—including the unstinting encouragement she gave him for his academic achievements. From the time he got his first A in first grade arithmetic, his mother told Scotty exactly how smart he was, and she never once let up. I believe that was the beginning of Karen’s single-minded crusade to push the kid in the direction of engineering. People who were great at math would be great at engineering. He’d grow up, invent something important, and we’d all be rich. And, by the way, no guns would be involved, nor any lions, either.

  While the kids were growing up, there was never any question that Scotty was Karen’s fair-haired boy. He did as he was told; he didn’t talk back; he minded his manners; he got good grades. His little sister, Kelly, was the exact opposite—a born rebel and a perpetual troublemaker. She was into making mischief from the time she could walk, and once she could talk, she told grandiose fibs with wild abandon—fibs that were often used to get her older brother into trouble.

  In their mother’s book, Scott could do no wrong, and Kelly could do no right. You can probably already see where this is going. In the scheme of parental finger pointing, Kelly was mine and Scotty was Karen’s. No wonder the little girl Karen often referred to snarlingly as “your daughter” wound up as a high school dropout and a seventeen-year-old pregnant runaway.

  But in the real world, things don’t always turn out the way you expect them to. Scott did what he was told and became an engineer and evidently hated it. Kelly, who didn’t do what she was told, got bad grades in school, and marched to the tune of a different drummer, was now doing things very much her own way, including working on that master’s degree in business administration.

  Had Karen lived to see those two very different outcomes, I doubt she would have believed either one. She would have loved the fact that Kelly was finally getting her education, but she would have been appalled that Scott was turning his back on her lifelong dream of his future as a successful geek in favor of following in his father’s law enforcement footsteps.

  All those thoughts tumbled through my brain in far less time than it would take to say them aloud. But eventually Scott noticed my uncharacteristic silence.

  “Well,” he said. “Aren’t you going to say something?”

  “Are you sure?” I said. “I mean, I thought you had a good job and everything.”

  “I did have a good job, and I still have it. I’m not stupid, you know. In this job market, I wasn’t about to turn in my resignation unless I had the new job nailed down. But Cherisse and I talked it over. The money that came to us from your aunt Hannah made all the difference. Just because I studied engineering doesn’t mean I love engineering. And now I can use that to do something I’ve always wanted to do—be a cop.”

  And there you have it—a tale of two Hannahs—Monica’s mother and my long-lost aunt, Hannah Mencken Greenwald. />
  Before I was born, my mother evidently attempted to contact my father’s family but was turned away by them, as well as by her own father. That’s why, on my birth certificate, my last name is listed as Beaumont—my father’s hometown in Texas rather than my father’s birth name, Mencken.

  Earlier in the year Hannah’s daughter, my cousin Sally Mathers, had tracked me down and begged me to come to Houston to meet my father’s sister in what, she warned, would be only one step short of a deathbed visit. Putting my long-held misgivings about my father’s family aside, Mel and I had flown to Texas and met a truly remarkable woman.

  In the course of long conversations conducted in Hannah’s frothy pink bedroom we had erased a lifetime’s worth of absence from both our lives. She told me about her beloved brother, Hank, to whom I bore a spooky resemblance, just as my son, Scott, was a younger mirror image of me. She told me that growing up, Hank had been the black sheep of the family. When he went away to serve in the navy during World War II, she was the only member of the family who had corresponded with him. In his letters, he had told her about the blossoming relationship between him and my mother. After his death, Hannah urged her parents to get in touch with my mother, but Frederick and Hilda Mencken had ignored their daughter’s advice. As for Hank’s letters? They had been confiscated by his mother and had surfaced again only a few months earlier. That was what had led my cousin to launch a search for my mother. In the process she ended up finding me.

  For my part, I told Hannah what I knew about my mother’s relationship with my father and how the few months they’d had together must have sustained her because, as far as I knew, she never went looking for another man in her life. I told her about growing up in Seattle, about my mother’s unbending determination in raising me alone, and about her dauntless courage in the face of her long losing battle with cancer. Eventually, I also told Hannah about the rest of my family—first about Karen and the kids, then about Anne Corley, and finally about Mel.

  Inevitably our discussions came around to the thorny subject of money. It seems the Mencken family had a bundle of it because, as it turns out, there really are oil wells in Texas. I learned that Hannah had been years younger than her older brother. She had still been living at home when my mother, pregnant and unmarried, had contacted Hank’s parents, only to be rebuffed for being what they regarded as a gold-digging opportunist. They had wasted no time in sending her packing.

  Although Hannah and her daughter had welcomed Mel and me with open arms, I think they thought of me as some kind of poor relation, and they were shocked to discover that we hadn’t come to Houston looking for a handout. Far from it. Anne Corley’s legacy to me meant that I didn’t have to worry about money, ever. And since I was fixed in that regard, Hannah made up her mind to pass what would have been her brother’s share of her father’s fortune along to Scott and Kelly. I think it was her very generous way of making amends for her parents.

  Over the years, I had offered help to the kids from time to time, but parental help is often eyed suspiciously, and in terms of having strings attached, conscious or otherwise, it probably deserves to be. The money my aunt Hannah left to Kelly and Scott when she died came at them from out of the blue and with no strings whatsoever. I knew Kelly and Jeff were in the process of negotiating the possible purchase of one of Ashland’s B and B’s. The news about Scott and Cherisse, however, hit me like a bolt of lightning.

  “Dad,” Scott said eventually, when he tired of waiting for some kind of response. “I guess this means you don’t approve.”

  Out of deference to Karen, I suppose I should have made some kind of halfhearted objection, but I couldn’t. And, truth be known, there were plenty of my footsteps I might have preferred he not follow, but becoming a cop wasn’t one of them. On that score I was utterly blown away.

  “Just the opposite,” I said. “I’m floored, yes, but honored, delighted, and very, very proud.”

  Scott leaned over the bed. I hugged him close, not wanting him to see the hint of moisture in my eyes.

  “Where’s Cherisse in all this?” I asked.

  “She hates California. She’s ready to pack and move whenever I say so,” Scott returned. “She’s got a line on a possible job with a start-up in Redmond. They’ve been holding a position open for her, but she was waiting to see if I got offered the job at Seattle PD. I called her on my way here. Now that all systems are go, she’s probably already called in her acceptance. She’ll give her notice today, and I’ll give mine tomorrow. Then we’ll have a month and a half to pack up, get moved, and find a place to live. The next class at the academy starts November first, and they’ve reserved a spot for me.”

  “It sounds like it’s all coming together,” I said.

  Scott grinned happily. “Yes, it is,” he said. “Now, I’d best be on my way to the airport. I don’t want to miss my plane home. There’s too much to do.”

  Moments later, he was gone, and I was left considering the tale of two Hannahs. Hannah Mencken Greenwald had given my son and daughter-in-law the wherewithal to live their lives on their own terms. Along with the money, she had somehow endowed Scott with the courage to follow his dream. For whatever complicated reasons, that was a life-changing gift my son would never have accepted from me. It left me far more in Hannah’s debt than I could ever repay, but as morning drifted into early afternoon, I realized I could pay it forward, or maybe even backward.

  For that to happen, all I had to do was keep the promise I had made long ago to that other Hannah. But first I had to finish my next round of OT.

  CHAPTER 10

  Late that afternoon, I had another visitor when Assistant Police Chief Ron Peters rolled his wheelchair into my room.

  “How are the sick, the lame, and the lazy?” he asked in that heartily cheerful manner that makes the guy in the bed want to get up and smack his effusive visitor in the nose. “Thought I’d stop by and say hello,” he continued, “but I can’t stay long. Tonight is Amy’s night as den mother for Jared’s troop of Cub Scouts. My assignment is to take everyone out for pizza afterward.”

  I did not like hearing that my namesake, Jared Beaumont Peters, was already old enough to be in Cub Scouts. When had that happened? I must not have been paying attention.

  It had been years ago that the hospital visiting shoe was on the other foot. Back then Ron was the one lying in a hospital bed and I was the one doing the visiting. Amy, then his nurse and now his second wife, was the person who had pulled him out of his poor-me doldrums and gotten him back on track. She was the one who had encouraged him to go back to Seattle PD, pick up the pieces of his law enforcement career, and roll with them, as it were. The fact that he was now assistant chief for investigations was in no small part due to Amy.

  “I guess by now you know,” he said.

  “Know what?”

  “About Scott. We’ve offered him the job. HR offered it, actually, and I understand he’s accepted, assuming he makes it through the academy.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Are you saying you knew all about Scott’s job application before I did?”

  “Well, duh,” Ron said with a grin. “He used me as one of his personal references. I like to think my recommendation carried some weight.”

  “But no one told me word one about it.” I’m sure I sounded aggrieved. I was.

  “Scott asked me not to,” Ron explained. “He said if he got the job, he wanted it to be a surprise, and if he didn’t get it, you wouldn’t be disappointed.”

  “I was surprised, all right,” I muttered. I’m sure I sounded surly. I didn’t mean to, but I kept getting the feeling that the world was passing me by while I lay there stuck in that hospital bed.

  “So what’s the deal with the Monica Wellington homicide?” Ron asked, abruptly moving from one subject to the next. “Your boss gave me a heads-up about this a little while ago. Why, after all these years, are you interested in bringing up one of Ted Bundy’s old cases? And why should Special Homicide tackle i
t? You may not have noticed, but I have a great Cold Case squad these days, one that reports directly to me.”

  In other words, Scott’s being hired by Seattle PD wasn’t the only reason Ron Peters had dropped by to see me that afternoon. He had worked his way up to the top of Seattle PD’s investigation heap. Now he needed to know if what I was about to do was going to cause him problems. I hadn’t taken Ron Peters into consideration when I told Ross my longtime connections with the department wouldn’t be a problem. I probably should have.

  “Has some new piece of information surfaced that makes you think now would be a good time to take a second look at that case?”

  Ron Peters and I had been friends for a lot more years than we’d been partners. In the past, we had always been straight with each other.

  “Nothing conclusive,” I said, hedging. “Just a gut feeling.”

  He raised a single eyebrow. “A gut feeling,” he repeated. “About a case from almost forty years ago?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Let me tell you something,” he said. “I know what it’s like to be the guy in the bed. I was there for a long time, remember?”

  I nodded.

  “And when you’re lying there, you’re not thinking about all the things you did right—about the cases you closed and the ball games you won and the good grades you got in college. No, when you’re stuck in a bed, you’re thinking about all the failures—about all the things that didn’t go right.”

  Much as I didn’t want to admit it, Ron’s take on the subject was a lot closer to the truth than the song and dance I had given Ross Connors. My drug-induced visitors had definitely been pointing out my failures and shortcomings, of which Monica Wellington’s unsolved murder was a glaring example.

  “So after Ross Connors called me, I brought up Monica Wellington’s homicide. We have all the records digitized these days, so it wasn’t like I had to go prowling through some dusty old file somewhere. And guess what I found there? Your name, for one. You were one of the investigators. And I also saw that the file went inactive once the case was closed on Ted Bundy—there was a reference linking the two.”