by JA Jance
Ross had already made something of a name for himself in the prosecutor’s office by the time I signed on with Seattle PD. I remembered clearly enough that Ross and DonLeavy had always been on opposite sides of the political divide and that Ross had made some of his prosecutorial bones by bringing down members of former Mayor DonLeavy’s tarnished administration. I had no doubt that Ross Connors would know who did what to whom back then. He might even be able to supply a few important whys.
When Ross came on the line, I could hear the same television background noise that had been playing at Frank Clark’s house. It was a year when Mariners fans were coming out of the woodwork.
“Hey, Beau,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Who’s ahead?” I asked.
“Mariners are up one in the bottom of the eighth. What’s going on with you?”
“I’d like to take you back a couple of years and ask a few questions.”
“Don’t know how much I’ll remember, but ask away.”
“What’s the first word that comes to mind when I mention the name Daniel DonLeavy?”
“Scumbag,” Ross replied without having to pause for reflection. “Crook. Got what he deserved. Why? What do you want to know?”
“Mel and I are working on a lead in the Monica Wellington case. We’ve got a witness who says there was a cop involved, maybe someone from Seattle PD who might have been assigned to chauffeur Mayor Daniel DonLeavy around town, functioning as your basic driver/bodyguard. Do you have any idea who that might have been?”
“Nobody was assigned to the mayor as a bodyguard,” Ross said at once. “Certainly not on an official basis, but if you want to know who would have been chumming around with him back then, I know exactly who that would have been—Kenny Adcock.”
“You mean the guy who ended up as chief of police? You mean that Kenny Adcock?”
What I didn’t say aloud but what I was remembering was being in that conference room with Pickles Gurkey all those years ago and being told to back off on the Monica Wellington case because it was a lost cause. And who was the guy who had told us that? None other than Kenneth Adcock. I couldn’t help it. My adrenaline kicked in. We were finally getting somewhere. We were on the right track.
“One and the same,” Ross replied. “He and Dan DonLeavy went to O’Dea together, and the two of them were always great pals. Played football together. Drank together. Screwed around together. Played the horses. Rose through the ranks together—Kenny at Seattle PD and DonLeavy on the city council. By the time DonLeavy was mayor and Adcock was chief of police, they were a pair to be reckoned with. I kept hoping that when we took DonLeavy down, we’d be able to find something to tie Adcock into his dirty dealings, too. Unfortunately, if there ever was a smoking gun to link Adcock to DonLeavy’s shenanigans, we never found it.”
“Mel and I may have one now,” I said. “We have a witness who claims the guy driving DonLeavy around is the same guy who dumped that barrel with Monica Wellington’s body in it down Magnolia Bluff all those years ago.”
“That’s great,” Ross said. “Unfortunately, you’ll never make it stick.”
“Why not?”
“Because Kenneth Adcock is dead!” Ross exclaimed. “He died in a deep-sea diving accident somewhere off the Bahamas back in the early eighties, a couple of years after he retired.”
I had been so sure we were getting somewhere with the case that Ross’s statement took my breath away.
“Kenneth Adcock is dead?” I repeated. “You say it happened in the early eighties? How come I don’t remember anything about it?”
“He and Faye were off on a second honeymoon,” Ross explained. “He had drawn up a will that specified his not wanting any kind of funeral. He said he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at sea. Since it would have cost a fortune to bring the body home, that’s what Faye did. He was buried at sea.”
“It must have been kept a long way under the radar,” I suggested. “I don’t remember it at all.”
Of course, back then, I was doing a lot of drinking and it’s possible that any number of things passed under my personal radar without my taking any notice.
“I seem to recall that it wasn’t given a lot of press,” Ross agreed. “That was partly due to the family’s wishes, but I have to believe Seattle PD was on the same page as far as that was concerned. DonLeavy was still in prison, and given Kenny’s connections to the previous administration, I suspect Seattle PD was more than happy that there was so little fuss. Not having to stage a fallen-officer memorial would have let them off the hook in a big way.”
“So what’s his wife’s name again? Did you say Faye?”
“Yes. As near as I can remember, Faye was her name. She was his second wife as opposed to his starter wife, and it was a mixed marriage, too. Of course, Anglo/Asian marriages raised a lot more eyebrows back then than they do now. As I recall, Faye was a tiny little thing, but a real looker.”
“If Adcock died that long ago, has his widow remarried?”
“No idea, although I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she has. I think there was a son.”
“Do you know his name?”
“Nope, he’d probably be in his late fifties by now. I think he was one of those early tech guys who ended up being one of the first or second groups of Microsofties. He’s probably worth millions.”
“I’m sure his father would be proud,” I said.
“Anything else?” Ross asked. “I’d like to get back to my game.”
The phone had been on speaker. I looked at Mel. “Do you have any questions?”
“Not at the moment,” she said. Then she shouted, “Go Mariners.”
Ross laughed, and we ended the call. “What do you think?” I asked.
Mel shook her head. “The whole thing is giving me a headache. We don’t know for sure that Kenneth Adcock was the guy driving Mayor DonLeavy to and from his assignations with Frank Clark’s mother. So that’s probably something we should do right away—put together a photo montage that includes pictures of both the mayor himself and of Kenneth Adcock.”
I opened my iPad and typed in a note.
“Did I understand Ross to say that Adcock was chief of police for a while?”
“Not for very long,” I answered. “He was too political, and once DonLeavy was gone, people were gunning for him. He put in his twenty and left. What I do remember about him for sure is that he’s the guy who told Pickles Gurkey and me to back off on the Monica Wellington case. He’s the one who pressed the pedal to the metal on the theory that Ted Bundy was responsible for her murder.”
“One he himself may have committed,” Mel mused.
I nodded. I almost called what Adcock had done an “old Indian trick.” Then, thinking about Delilah, I didn’t.
“As chief, he would have had access to the evidence room. He might also have been able to tamper with the microfiche process,” Mel theorized. “I’m guessing the evidence has been gone that long—that it disappeared about the same time the Wellington case was deemed closed, but that doesn’t explain who killed Mac MacPherson and Delilah Ainsworth.”
I nodded. I had arrived at the same conclusion. “So if Adcock is long dead, who still has an ax to grind in all this? How could she or he possibly know that the case was being reopened, and why would that be a threat?”
“Who all would know at Seattle PD?” Mel asked.
“Ron Peters,” I answered. “He’s the one who put Detective Ainsworth on the case. The other Seattle PD people involved would be whoever was working in the evidence room when Delilah went looking for the evidence and whoever helped her locate the right microfiche file.”
“We’re talking about clerical staff here,” Mel objected. “Delilah was a homicide investigator. There’s no way she’d go spilling the beans to them about what she was working on. I can’t imagine that she’d be standing around there blabbing about going out to question Mac MacPherson to someone like that.”
I coul
d see where Mel was going as she finished her thought.
“But she had already been to see Mac once,” I commented. “We know that because he called me and raised hell about it.”
“So that’s the question, then, isn’t it,” Mel said. “Who else did he call besides you?”
It made such perfect sense, I was surprised I hadn’t seen it before. I had been so busy trying to figure out who it was in Seattle PD who had been ratting us out on the investigation that it never occurred to me that it might have been one of the victims himself, Mac MacPherson.
By then I was already scrolling through my notes looking for a phone number for King County Homicide detective Hugo Monford.
“Monford,” he said when he picked up.
I could hear a TV set blaring in the background, but this sounded more like Monday Night Football than baseball. With Delilah Ainsworth dead, I would have been a lot happier thinking he was out busting his balls looking for her killer, but maybe that’s just me.
“J. P. Beaumont here,” I told him, striving to keep my tone pleasant and nonconfrontational. “You and your partner came by to see me the other day.”
My days seemed to be running together. I wasn’t sure if it was the previous day or the day before that.
“What can I do for you?” Monford said.
“Have you ordered up Rory MacPherson’s phone records yet?”
“We need a warrant for that, and we’ll most likely have one in hand tomorrow. But really, Mr. Beaumont, this is our case, and if I feel you’re interfering with it in any way, I will be lodging a formal complaint.”
Let’s see. The King County sheriff up against the Washington State attorney general? That kind of one-on-one might be fun to watch, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near a fair fight.
“Nice talking to you, Detective Monford,” I said. “Enjoy the game.” By that I meant both of them—the game he was watching and the one I was about to start.
I redialed Ross Connors’s number. “Mel just had a brainstorm,” I told him. “How hard would it be for you to get a warrant to open up Mac MacPherson’s phone records?”
“The dead guy’s phone records?” he said. “That shouldn’t be hard. Why?”
“Because we need them. I just got off the phone with Detective Monford of the King County Sheriff’s Department. He thinks he’ll have a warrant to get the phone records tomorrow. I’d like them a little sooner than that if at all possible.”
“You think it’s going to help point the finger at Ken Adcock?”
“Since he’s dead, I don’t see how that’s possible,” I said. “But there is a connection. Back when Monica Wellington’s body was found, Adcock threatened two little kids. He told them that if they let on to anyone about seeing him with the barrel, something bad was going to happen to them or to their mother. One way or another, I think this all comes back to that.”
“Then your wish is my command,” Ross said. “I always wanted to nail that jerk. Now that the ball game is over, I’ll get on it right away.”
“Who won?” I asked.
“Who do you think?” he said glumly. “It sure as hell wasn’t the Mariners.”
CHAPTER 21
The state of Washington is divided into two parts, the wet side and the dry side. As you drive east, you drop down from the Cascades into something very close to desert. It had been sunny but chilly in Yakima while we were there, but it started raining as we were coming back across Snoqualmie Pass. A heavy downpour of rain mixed with hail succeeded in slowing Mel down to something just under the speed limit.
We mostly didn’t talk while she drove. I was too busy thinking about Monica Wellington. If Kenneth Adcock had been involved in what happened to her, how had we missed that? Yes, we had gone looking unsuccessfully for that mysterious boyfriend and the supposed blind date, but none of the interviews with Monica’s roommates had even hinted that she might have been involved with an older man, and especially not with a cop.
Mel had evidently been doing some thinking of her own. “I think we should talk to Mr. Clark.”
“Why?” I asked. “What are you thinking?”
“Remember what you told me earlier about Amelia’s possibly being a hooker? What if you weren’t wrong about that? Sweet young girl from a small farming town goes to the big city and takes up with the wrong crowd. What if the same kind of thing happened to Monica Wellington?”
“You think maybe she ended up on a similar path?”
“It happens,” Mel said grimly. “Those fresh-faced small-town girls can be worth a lot in the open market. And if one of them happened to get pregnant and was about to blow the whistle on a guy on his way up in Seattle PD, it would have been in lots of people’s best interests to take her out.”
“And you’re thinking Howard Clark might have known more of the nitty-gritty on that than Frankie would?”
Mel nodded. “Consider this. If you knew you were on your deathbed, how much of the truth about your life would you tell Kelly and Scott, and how much would you leave out?”
I opened my iPad and went searching for a phone number for Howard Clark. His listed number wasn’t hard to find, and he answered the phone on the third ring. “Clark residence,” he said.
“I’m sorry to interrupt your evening,” I told him. “My name is J. P. Beaumont and I’m with the . . .”
“I know all about you,” he interrupted. “Frankie called and told me you had stopped by. He said something about bringing up all that bad stuff from years ago. I don’t know why you have to do that after all this time.”
“A girl was murdered back then,” I answered, “and two more people who were involved in that investigation have died this week. We’re operating on the assumption that the two new deaths are related to that old one, and since your late wife was evidently acquainted with at least some of the people involved, I was wondering if there was anything you could add to what your stepson already told us.”
“Frankie’s my son,” Howard corrected. “I adopted him. He’s mine, so don’t go calling him my stepson.”
“Sorry.”
“As for the murder?” Howard continued without any further prompting from me. “I’m well aware of it. Amelia called me about it the night it happened, or at least the night the body was found. She was scared to death. She said the boys—Donnie and Frankie—had seen something they shouldn’t have, and she was afraid something awful was going to happen to them.”
“She turned to you for help?” I asked.
“I know, I know,” Howard said. “That probably sounds strange to you. At the time, we’d been apart for over a dozen years. Even so, she must have known that deep down, if she was ever in real trouble, she could count on me. You see, it was my fault Amelia and I broke up in the first place. I was an arrogant jerk back then. I broke up with Amelia because I thought I could do better. It turns out I was wrong, of course. My first marriage was a disaster, and that was long over before Mimi called me that night, asking for help.”
“You knew her situation?” I asked. “About the boys and about her somewhat questionable living arrangements?”
“You mean did I know some guy had knocked her up and that she was a kept woman?” Howard asked. “Of course I did. Not to begin with, of course, but she told me eventually. And once she clued me in as to who the boys’ father was and let me know that the guy who had threatened them was a police officer, I knew I had to do something to get all of them out of there.
“Mimi and I talked on the phone for hours that night and off and on for the next several days with me begging her to come home and marry me. When cops showed up at school to interview the boys behind Mimi’s back, that was the last straw. She figured they were probably working for the guy who had made the threats, and she suspected that they would report straight back to him, word for word, whatever Donnie and Frankie had said in the interview.”
I wanted to say that wasn’t true—that we hadn’t done anything of the kind. But without knowing it, we pro
bably had. Kenneth Adcock hadn’t been chief of police back then, but as assistant chief, he would have had access to everything any of us wrote in the murder book. He would have known exactly how the investigation was going at any given moment. And it worked. No doubt he had kept tabs on everything from day one. Eventually the case had gone cold at his instigation, and then, with some additional encouragement from him, it had disappeared entirely.
“I’m afraid the boys’ mother was probably right about that,” I admitted. “The man in question was in a position of authority inside the department, although I can assure you, none of the investigators at the time had any inkling of his involvement.”
“How do you know that?” Howard asked.
“Because I was there,” I said. “Because I was one of the detectives on the case, and I can assure you that Kenneth Adcock’s name never came up.”
I heard a catch in Howard Clark’s voice when he spoke again. “Yes,” he said. “That’s the name she told me. I promised her that I’d never do anything that would jeopardize the boys’ safety, so I’ve made it a point to stay completely out of it, but what about now? If you’re bringing this up now because there’s no statute of limitations on homicide, what if there’s no statute of limitations on Adcock’s threats, either? What if he comes after Frankie even after all this time?”
“He can’t,” I answered simply. “Kenneth Adcock is dead. He died in a diving accident years ago.”
“Oh,” Howard said. “I’m glad to hear it. Well, not glad so much as relieved. I wish Mimi had known he was dead. It would have been a blessing for her, because she always worried about it. Once I got her out of there and home to Yakima, we turned our backs on all of it. I adopted the boys. DonLeavy’s name wasn’t on the birth certificate, so he didn’t need to abandon his parental rights, and he never paid another dime of child support.”