Second Watch

by JA Jance

  “This is going to have to do for the time being,” she grumbled. “What on earth do you people eat? The only edible things I could find in your kitchen were one moldy English muffin and this.”

  I accepted the proffered string cheese.

  “We’re not big on cooking,” I said. After eating the cheese, I swallowed the pills, chasing them with water.

  “I noticed,” Marge replied. “Now if you expect me to take care of you, I’m going to have to feed you. What do you want for dinner?”

  “We could order some mac and cheese from El Gaucho,” I suggested hopefully. One order of that was usually enough for Mel and me to share for a meal.

  “That’s what you might do,” Marge said. “It’s not what I’m going to do. You’ve had major surgery. You’re supposed to have protein, not carbs. Now give me some money and I’ll go get some groceries. You’re not Jewish—I mean, you don’t eat kosher, do you?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I’m not Jewish, and I’m not a vegan, either.”

  “I’m assuming that until your wife comes home, you’ll need me to stay over. Where am I supposed to sleep?”

  The guest bedroom and bath in our unit belong to Mel. We learned early on in our relationship that sharing a bathroom didn’t work. Ditto for closets. There’s a pull-down wall bed that can be used for guests in a pinch, but most of the time the bed stays up and Mel uses the room and accompanying bath as her private domain. That’s where she dresses, and she has a desk and love seat in there that she sometimes uses for work. I knew without even asking that having her share space with Marge wasn’t going to wash. But I also knew that I did need to have someone on hand, or at least nearby, to help me in the meantime.

  I extracted my billfold and peeled off a pair of hundreds. “You go get some food,” I said. “I’ll figure out the sleeping arrangements. And while you’re gone, you should go down to P-2 and get the garage clicker out of my car in space 230. That way you’ll be able to get your car in and out even when the outside garage door is closed.”

  “Keys for that?” Marge asked.

  “In the master bedroom,” I said. “On my dresser.”

  As soon as Marge left, I was on the phone to Bob, the doorman.

  “How’s Marge working out for you?” he asked.

  “About how you’d expect,” I replied. “Is anyone using the guest suite at the moment?”

  Years ago, Belltown Terrace had an on-site manager. When that was no longer necessary, the manager’s unit was converted into a guest suite that can be rented by the day or week.

  Bob chuckled. “That good, eh?” he asked. “But yes, the suite is currently available. Would you like to book it?”

  “For the next five days, if that’s possible,” I said. “By then, either Mel will be back home or else I’ll be well enough to look after of myself.”

  “Done, Mr. Beaumont,” he said. “I’ll take care of it right away.”

  By the time I ended the call, the pain meds were doing their magic. After turning my phone off, I drifted off into dreamland. The last thing I remembered was watching a Washington State ferry slip silently away from the Coleman ferry dock and head out across the bright blue waters of Puget Sound.

  CHAPTER 14

  The next thing I knew, I was dancing—dancing the way I used to before my knees went south. I wasn’t doing what passes for dancing these days, but the old-fashioned kind of ballroom dancing. I had been good enough at one time that my partner and I had won a prize in a dancing competition aboard a cruise ship.

  The dance was a tango. As I held my partner close, I assumed I was dancing with Mel. But then I noticed that the hair next to my cheek was brown rather than blond. It wasn’t until I held the woman at arm’s length to spin her around that I saw who it was—Delilah Ainsworth, not Mel. She was wearing a low-cut white floor-length gown, laughing and smiling despite the blood pouring out of the bullet hole in her chest.

  “Where’s your vest?” I demanded, pulling her back against my body. “Why weren’t you wearing a vest?”

  She was still laughing when she answered. “It didn’t go with my dress.”

  I awoke with a start. Two hours had passed. The dream had been so lifelike, so real, that I more than half expected to find blood on my clothing. There wasn’t any. The only thing visible on my chest was my cell phone, still where I’d left it, lying under my hand. I could hear the sound of the front door opening with a key, followed by the rustle of bags of groceries being deposited in the kitchen. Soon I was treated to the sound of banging pots and pans accompanied by Marge’s tuneless humming.

  Knowing it was time to face some music of my own, I turned on my phone. There were a total of five missed calls from Mel. I called her back.

  “What the hell?” she demanded. “Where are you? The hospital said you had been released, even though they weren’t supposed to let you out without having someone at home to look after you. And why has your phone been turned off? I’ve been worried sick, but we’ve made an arrest in the Bellingham case, and I couldn’t just walk away.”

  “You don’t need to,” I reassured her. “I hired a nurse, a friend of Bob’s. She’s looking after me.”

  “Bob who?” Mel wanted to know.

  “Bob, the doorman. Her name is Marge Herndon. She brought me home. In fact, she’s out in the kitchen cooking right now.”

  “In our kitchen?” Mel demanded incredulously. “We don’t have any food.”

  “We do now.”

  That seemed to satisfy her concerns on that score. “Tell me about Detective Ainsworth.”

  With the bloody dream still dancing in my head, that was harder to do.

  “She went back to see Mac MacPherson late last night, to ask more questions about the Monica Wellington cold case. He shot her dead right there in the living room. Then he rolled his wheelchair out to his garage and turned on the engine in the car. He was still alive when they found him, but he didn’t make it.”

  “This isn’t your fault,” Mel said.

  I said nothing, which, between the two of us, was answer enough.

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “What can I do about it?” I returned. “I’m off on sick leave, remember?”

  “Don’t give me that,” Mel answered. “You were supposed to stay in rehab for at least another two days. Delilah’s death is the reason you’re out today, right?”

  Right, I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud.

  “My understanding is that King County is handling the investigation,” Mel said. “Delilah was a cop. Believe me, they’re not going to leave a stone unturned.”

  “The problem is,” I told her, “when they finally get around to turning over the Monica Wellington stone, they’re not going to find anything. The evidence box, including the murder book, has gone missing. It was evidently lost somewhere between the open case evidence locker and closed case evidence storage.”

  Mel hesitated for a moment before she replied. “It sounds to me as though Seattle PD has a serious problem.”

  “Along with one very dead homicide detective,” I added grimly.

  “But you know you can’t do anything about this,” Mel interjected. “When Internal Affairs asks you about it, you need to tell them what you know, and let them handle it.”

  “Right,” I said.

  We both knew she was wasting her breath.

  “Okay,” she said, backing off. “I’m glad you’re home. I’m glad you have someone there to help you. Now I need to go look in on an interrogation.”

  “Your suspect hasn’t asked for an attorney?”

  “Not so far, even though we read her her rights when we first picked her up down in Lake Stevens. Fortunately for us, some people are so convinced of how smart they are that they don’t believe they need an attorney.”

  “You got her, didn’t you,” I said.

  “Yes,” Mel agreed. “Yes, I did.”

  “So will this help settle things back do
wn in Bellingham?”

  “That remains to be seen. I may be able to come home later tonight, but I’m glad you’ve got someone there to fill in for me in the meantime. Is this Marge person going to stay there in the unit with you?”

  “No. I’ve made arrangements for her to use the guest unit downstairs. I’ll be able to call her if I need something. I didn’t think you’d appreciate sharing your space with an outsider.”

  “Good,” Mel said. She sounded relieved. Once she got around to meeting Marge, I was sure she would be even more so.

  Our landline phone rang then. Mel and I keep the phone so we can buzz in visitors from the garage or the outside door, but we don’t usually answer it. Most of the callers who use that number are doing political polling or trying to sell us something we don’t need, most notably aluminum siding. I had meant to tell Marge that if that phone rang, she should let it go to voice mail, but she answered before I had a chance to do so.

  “It’s for you,” Marge said, bringing me the portable receiver from the counter in the kitchen. “It’s Bob. He says two detectives with the King County Sheriff’s Department are waiting downstairs and would like to see you if you’re up to it.”

  “I’ve gotta go,” I told Mel. “It sounds like some detectives are here to start turning over stones.”

  “Let them,” Mel advised. “It’s not your problem.”

  But of course it was my problem. If I hadn’t started the ball rolling in the first place, Delilah Ainsworth wouldn’t be dead.

  I hung up my cell phone and took the portable. “Thanks, Bob,” I said. “Go ahead and send them up.”

  When the doorbell rang, Marge answered the ring and gave them a bit of unsolicited advice. “I’m Mr. Beaumont’s nurse,” she told them in a no-nonsense fashion. “He’s recently undergone major surgery, and it’s my job to look after him. So you may see him, but I’m fully prepared to send you on your way if you overstay your welcome.”

  That was all vintage Marge Herndon, but it occurred to me that there were times when having a bossy gatekeeper might be a good thing.

  She brought them into the study. Detectives Hugo Monford and Dave Anderson, like most of the doctors I’d met recently—Dr. Auld excepted—seemed incredibly young and still wet behind the ears. I immediately deemed them both much too inexperienced to be handling Delilah Ainsworth’s murder. They were somewhere in their early forties, fit, and probably reasonably smart. The problem was, Delilah deserved the best, and I wasn’t convinced these two guys were it. Dave, the younger of the two, was completely smitten with the view from my condo.

  “What a great view!” he exclaimed in a tone that was half admiration and the other half envy. “How does someone who works as a cop on the street end up in a place like this?” he asked.

  “You start by marrying well,” I told him. “Then you hire someone really smart to manage your money.”

  Marge was still standing in the doorway when I gave my reply. She shook her head, rolled her eyes in disapproval, and stalked off.

  “Have a seat,” I said. “To what do I owe the honor? I’m assuming it has something to do with Detective Ainsworth’s death.” I had already decided that my best bet would be to play dumb. If I wanted to know what direction the investigation was taking, all I had to do was pay attention to what the investigators were asking. On the other hand, if my presence at the press conference had been duly noted and/or reported on, it wouldn’t do to play too dumb.

  Monford nodded. He was clearly the lead. “Yes,” he said. “We just had a conversation with Seattle PD assistant chief Ron Peters. He mentioned that you and Detective Ainsworth were involved in reopening a cold case from 1973.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The murdered girl was Monica Wellington.”

  “Was that at your instigation or Detective Ainsworth’s?”

  I wasn’t going to admit that this whole thing had started as a result of a drug-induced dream.

  “It was mine,” I said. “It was the first case I worked once I was assigned to Homicide at Seattle PD, and the fact that it’s never been solved still bothers me. You’ll probably have cases like that someday, too. The ones that never get solved and never go away.”

  Monford nodded. “Was Rory MacPherson involved in that original investigation?”

  “Only at the beginning,” I said. “We were both still in uniform and riding Patrol together on the day we got the call about the Girl in the Barrel. We knew the victim’s name early on, but that’s how the media referred to the victim. Monica Wellington’s body was stuffed in a barrel used to collect grease from restaurants for transfer to local rendering plants. Once she was stuffed into the barrel of grease it was rolled down the south end of Magnolia Bluff.”

  Both detectives pulled out notebooks and started taking notes.

  “That was Mac’s and my last shift together,” I continued. “He and I both got our promotions two days later. He went to Motorcycles; I went to Homicide.”

  “As far as you know then, that was MacPherson’s only contact with the case?” Detective Monford confirmed. “His only involvement? He was there with you when that initial call came in, and that was it?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Who were the other detectives involved in that case?”

  I listed them. “Lawrence Powell; Watty Watkins; Milton Gurkey, my first partner; and myself. The first two are retired. Milton Gurkey died twenty-five years ago.”

  “Why did Detective Ainsworth go to see Rory MacPherson in the first place?”

  “We were in the process of reopening the Wellington homicide when Detective Ainsworth discovered that the evidence box had gone missing.”

  “Did she think MacPherson might be responsible for taking it?”

  “Probably,” I agreed, “although I told her I didn’t see how that was possible. After Mac left Patrol, he worked in the Motorcycle unit. He would have had no reason to have access to the evidence room or to routine evidence transfers. All the same, Delilah wanted to talk to him. We decided that, without the murder book, we’d need to go back to the beginning. We’d need to find and reinterview whatever witnesses were still available, starting with taking statements from both me and from Rory MacPherson. That was what she was doing.”

  “How did the interview go?”

  “Not well. Mac called me right after she left his place, and he was hot. Told me that I had no business bringing this up after all these years. He said that the next time he talked to either one of us, he wanted to have a lawyer present.”

  “When was that call?”

  “I’m not exactly sure—sometime in the afternoon. When you’re locked up in a hospital, time seems to run together. I could probably find the exact call time on my incoming calls list.”

  I reached for my phone, but Monford waved me off. “Don’t bother. We can check that later. Our understanding is that Detective Ainsworth went back out to Sammamish again, much later in the evening. Do you have any idea why?”

  This was where I didn’t want to go, but I had to. After all, it was the second trip out—the one after Delilah’s study of the HR microfiche—that had gotten her killed.

  “By then she was convinced that the whole thing might have had something to do with our promotions, Mac’s and mine, rather than with the homicide case itself,” I said. “As I told you earlier, that Sunday afternoon—the day we were called to the Wellington crime scene—was Mac’s and my last ride together on Patrol. Delilah went to HR looking for some kind of paper trail about our promotions. After scrolling through the microfiche records, she ascertained that there isn’t any—not for my promotion and not for Mac’s, either. The microfiche records for that time have been altered. That day’s worth of records has been deleted.”

  “Is that even possible?” Monford asked. “How do you erase a line on a microfiche?”

  “I’m not sure,” I answered. “If deleting something isn’t possible, then we have to assume that the records for that day were never put on mic
rofiche in the first place.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Detective Anderson said, speaking for the first time. “When Detective Ainsworth went to see MacPherson to begin with, it was to interview him because you and she were reopening the Wellington case. That’s when he called and was upset with you about that. What did he say exactly?”

  “Something about how dare I bring this up again after all this time, and something else about this being the thanks he got for keeping his mouth shut.”

  “Mouth shut about what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So then she goes back to Seattle PD and does some research in the HR microfiche. After that she goes back to see MacPherson again, about the promotion thing, only this time she ends up dead.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Anderson gave me an appraising stare. “Did you cheat to get that initial posting to Homicide?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered. “I did not.”

  “What about MacPherson to Motorcycles? Did he cheat?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” I said. “He might have, but these were promotions we had both put in for long before that Sunday afternoon.”

  “You’re the one who called Assistant Chief Peters when Detective Ainsworth didn’t return from Sammamish in a timely fashion. Did you have any advance knowledge that she might be walking into a trap?”

  “I knew Mac was angry. I advised her not to go alone because he sounded so steamed, drunk maybe. Even though I didn’t think it was a good idea, I had no inkling that he would gun her down.”

  Marge Herndon appeared in the doorway and pointed at her watch. “That’s enough for today,” she said. “Mr. Beaumont just got out of the hospital this morning. He needs his rest.”

  “Which is one way of having a pretty airtight alibi,” Anderson said with a grin.

  I hadn’t much liked the guy to begin with, and I liked him even less now. “Yes,” I said. “Airtight.”

  “Is there a chance Detective Ainsworth and Rory MacPherson had some other kind of connection?” Detective Monford asked. “Is it possible that they had some kind of relationship that you had no knowledge of?”