by JA Jance
“DonLeavy wasn’t concerned she’d blow the whistle on him?”
“I suppose he could have been, of course,” Howard conceded, “and we considered it at the time, but asking him for any kind of help would have meant putting the boys back into that situation and in harm’s way. That simply wasn’t an option. Besides, I was fully capable of providing for them, and I was happy to do so.”
“We’re wondering if there’s a chance Amelia was somehow acquainted with the girl who was murdered, Monica Wellington. Did her name ever come up in any of the conversations you had with your wife, either at the time or later?”
“Of course the girl’s name came up,” Howard said, his voice hardening. “The man who had killed her had threatened Amelia and her boys. Naturally she was mentioned by name.”
“You never thought about reporting it to the police?”
“So that’s it? Are you trying to turn Frankie and me into some kind of accessory after the fact? Good luck with that. My wife was terrified, and if you had a rogue cop operating in your department, she wasn’t wrong.”
“I have to agree with you there, Mr. Clark,” I said. “As I said before, Amelia wasn’t wrong on that score. Not at all.”
“So the boys’ reporting the body was one turning point,” Mel said, once I ended the call. “But when you and the other detective showed up to interview Donnie and Frankie at the school, you provided another one. So maybe you didn’t solve Monica’s murder at the time, but it sounds as though you helped pave the way for Howard Clark and Amelia Dodd to get back together. That fact probably provided a stability and a quality of life for Amelia and her two sons that they never would have had if they had stayed in Seattle.”
“That’s one of the things I like about you,” I told her. “You can always find the silver lining.”
The rain had let up by the time we made it back across Lake Washington to downtown Seattle. The gated door on the parking garage closes at six, and it was now after eight. I was glad to be back in Belltown Terrace. I was tired. I was only a couple of days out of the hospital. I knew I had done too much, had been up or sitting up in one position far too long. My ankles were swelling inside the compression stockings, and the damaged nerves in my legs were on fire.
When we got out of the car on P-2, I was grateful that Mel had thought to bring the walker along as well as the canes. I was more than ready for the walker and for something sturdy to lean on.
“Are you all right?” she asked as we rode up in the elevator.
“I’m okay,” I said. “And that would be several notches under fine.”
She nodded. “Why don’t you pop another pain pill and crawl back into bed for a while. In the meantime, I’ll figure out something to have for dinner.”
I wasn’t feeling well enough at that point to argue.
We made it to the top floor. I led the way out of the elevator, leaning on the walker, while Mel came behind, carrying the canes. I slipped the key out of my pocket, unlocked the door, and opened it. As soon as I did so, I unleashed a cloud of cigarette smoke.
I was immediately pissed off. Marge! No doubt the woman had let herself into the unit in our absence and was busy smoking up the joint. I wanted to say something like “Who said you could smoke in here?” but I didn’t. I stifled it. Instead, shaking my head, I limped farther into the room, making space in the entryway so Mel could follow me. As she did so, the wind slammed the door shut behind both of us. Oddly enough, the entire unit seemed to be swathed in darkness.
Without pausing to wonder about any of it, I flipped on the entryway light switch and was moving forward into the room when Marge Herndon said, “Look out. She’s got a gun.”
Those are chilling, mind-numbing words. I shouldn’t have been moving fast enough to come to a screeching halt, but halt I did. Two women, both of them seated on the window seat, were silhouetted against the darkening sky. The larger one was Marge. The woman next to her was much smaller. I couldn’t see her well, but I had no doubt she was the one holding the gun.
“Who are you?” I demanded. “What’s going on? What do you want?”
The sun had almost completely set. The storm was over. The bank of leftover gray storm clouds on the horizon had burned blood red as day turned to night.
As my eyes adjusted to the changed lighting, I was finally able to see the gun. It was something small enough to fit inside the woman’s tiny hand. Small as it was, however, it was aimed directly at Marge Herndon’s ample chest. At that range there could be no doubt the shot would be lethal.
“I assume you both have weapons and backup weapons,” the gun holder said. Her voice was chillingly cold. Every word dripped with malice.
“Place them on the dining room table. All of them. If you try anything—anything at all—this woman will die.”
I already had Delilah Ainsworth’s death on my conscience. I didn’t need Marge Herndon’s name added to that terrible toll.
Mel and I were standing on the far side of the table. I caught her eye. “Do it,” I whispered.
She nodded.
Without another word, we began divesting ourselves of our weapons, one by one. “Why only three?” the woman asked when we finished.
“Because I just had dual knee-replacement surgery,” I said. “That’s why I need a walker. It’s why I need a nurse. I can’t wear my ankle holster right now.”
That was a lie, but I didn’t tell her that.
“You still haven’t told us who you are, what you’re doing here in our living room, or what you want.”
“Come in and sit down,” she offered. “I came here to talk. The gun is my insurance that you’ll listen to what I have to say.”
Warily, Mel and I edged our way through the dining room and across the living room, where we perched warily on chairs that faced the expanse of window over Puget Sound. The wall is made up of several different sections of double-paned glass. The three middle sections are stationary. On either side of those there are two much narrower windows that open and close with crank handles that allow for cross ventilation. Both of those were wide open. Rather than taking Marge’s cigarette smoke outside, a chill breeze off the water was blowing it back into the room.
The surge of fight-or-flight adrenaline that was speeding through my body had dulled the pain in my legs, but the cold air from the windows blew right through me. Now that we were closer, even in the darkened room, the tiny woman’s Asian features came into focus. She was so small that her legs didn’t stretch from the cushion on the window seat all the way to the floor. To my knowledge I had never met Faye Adcock before, but I knew that’s who she was—who she had to be.
“Could we please close the windows?” I asked. “It’s cold in here.”
Marge made as if to do as I asked. Faye Adcock shook her head. “Leave them open,” she ordered.
Without a word, Marge subsided back onto the cushion.
“What do you want?”
“I’m going to tell you a story.”
“What story?” I asked. “About how you murdered Delilah Ainsworth and tried to pin the blame on Mac MacPherson?”
Faye Adcock must have been well into her seventies, but she didn’t look it. Her slim figure was swathed in a dark-colored tracksuit. Her raven hair was pulled back in a neat bun. Only the sagging skin on her neck betrayed her age.
Her dark eyes met and held mine in a fathomless stare, and then she raised one eyebrow. “Since you already know that one, I don’t need to tell it to you. You never should have reopened that case.”
“Which story, then?” I asked, trying to keep my tone bemused and mocking. “What else would you have that could possibly be better than that one?”
“My husband was a cheat,” she said venomously. “I should have known that since he cheated on his first wife with me. But then he cheated on me with that girl, that slut, and he knocked her up.”
I was gratified to see that she didn’t bother with introductions. Obviously she was giving Mel and me
credit for having connected some of the dots.
“You’re saying Kenneth cheated with Monica Wellington and got her pregnant? How did they meet?”
“Does it matter?” she scoffed. “Does a wife ever know how a husband meets his mistress? I met him when he came into the restaurant for lunch—for Mr. Lee’s cashew chicken. I don’t think his wife had a clue, and I have no idea how he met Monica.”
“Wait,” I said. “You mean you worked at the Dragon’s Head?” I asked.
She laughed outright at that. “So you hadn’t put everything together, had you?” she said.
I said nothing.
“She came to him, told him she was pregnant, and wanted to know what he was going to do about it. He was just starting to make his way up the ladder in Seattle PD. The scandal would have spoiled everything. So he strangled her, and that was it.”
She said it so matter-of-factly that it took my breath away.
“Except that wasn’t really it, was it?” I offered.
“No,” she said. “He needed to get rid of the body. I was the one who came up with the grease barrel. I knew where it was. Once we got the body loaded into that, he said he knew of a place in town where he could unload the body and no one would ever be the wiser. But of course, he was wrong about that. Those shitty little boys saw him do it. He warned them that they should be quiet, but of course they couldn’t keep it to themselves. Later that Sunday, he went to see the mother, hoping to talk some sense into her head. As he was walking out, who do you suppose he should meet but good old Mac MacPherson. Kenny said he probably came by hoping his uniform would qualify him for a freebie with the boys’ mother.”
That made sense to me. Mac had always fancied himself as something of a ladies’ man. Reality to the contrary, Mac believed he was downright irresistible.
“Mac, of course, being Mac,” Faye continued, “immediately leaped to the wrong conclusion. He thought Kenny was sleeping around with the boy’s mother. He threatened to spill the beans and tell the world that Kenny, the mayor’s handpicked guy, was carrying on with a hooker. That wasn’t even close to the truth, but Kenny knew that if Mac started spouting that story, we were done for.”
“Because everything else would have come out?” I asked.
Faye nodded. “We were afraid that if people found out about the existence of the mayor’s little side dish, there would be too many people asking all kinds of questions, and before long someone would make a connection back to the dead girl.”
“So what happened?”
Faye shrugged. “So they struck a deal, and Mac promised to forget he saw Kenny at the woman’s house.”
“In exchange for what?” I asked the question even though I already knew the answer.
“Mac got the promotion he wanted, and so did his partner.” She paused and looked at me. “I believe that was you, right? So I guess you were in on it, too.”
“I wasn’t in on it!” I growled. “I had no idea.”
“You were that stupid?”
I thought back to how much I had wanted that promotion—how much I had wanted to be a detective and how hard I had worked to put all the rumors about my promotion to bed, even though, in my heart of hearts, I had somehow suspected they were true.
“No,” I said, at last. “It wasn’t because I was stupid. It was because I was naive.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? You both got what you wanted, and all Mac had to do was keep his mouth shut. I worried about that,” Faye continued. “I was afraid we couldn’t trust him. Kenny said he’d be fine, and he was for a long while. I thought it had all blown over, but then last week, Mac wasn’t fine. When he found out that you and that Ainsworth woman were reopening the case, he went nuts. He called me and raised hell. He tried to blackmail me. He said we both knew that he had concealed possible evidence in that homicide years ago. He figured that since his silence had been good enough for him to get promoted back then, maybe I’d be willing to make it worth his while for him to continue keeping quiet now. My late husband was a good cop. If this had all come out now, it would have destroyed Kenny’s reputation at a time when he was no longer able to defend himself. I couldn’t have that.”
“Of course you couldn’t,” I agreed soothingly. “So that’s when you made up your mind to get rid of him?”
“I had to,” Faye said. “Even though Kenny left me in pretty good shape financially, once blackmail gets started, there’s never any end to it.”
“So you ended it for him,” I said. “You went there planning to kill him.”
“When I went there, I thought I could talk some sense into him. When that didn’t work, I decided that if I could get him drunk enough, I could leave him in the garage with the car running and people would think he had committed suicide. I was just getting ready to leave when the doorbell rang and that woman showed up. I thought whoever it was would go away when no one answered, but the door was unlocked, and she let herself in. She called out her name as she opened the door. I was standing right on the other side of it, and I knew what I had to do. I let her have it.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“What is it you want now?”
“I wanted to be able to live out my life in peace, but as you can see, that isn’t going to happen, so now it’s really over—all of it.”
With that, Faye Adcock seemed to pull back onto the window seat. Sitting there trying to frame a response, I had no idea of her intentions. Even if I had, I’m not sure I would have tried to stop her. As she stood up, I took advantage of that slight distraction to reach down and try to retrieve the Glock from my ankle holster. I had my hand on it and was about to draw it when Faye made her move, darting toward the end of the window seat.
Lithe as a cat, she slithered through a window opening that would have been far too small for any ordinary-size adult to slip through. She stood there for a moment, poised on the ledge and clinging to the metal frame, and then she was gone, falling in absolute silence from a height of twenty-two stories.
The first sound that shattered that ungodly silence was Marge Herndon’s horrified scream. Next came an awful crash of metal as Faye’s plummeting body slammed into a vehicle far below. That was followed immediately by the urgent bleating of a car alarm.
The sound reinforced what my mind had already grasped. It was over. Faye Adcock was no more, and Monica Wellington’s long-unsolved homicide was finally closed.
CHAPTER 22
For most of the time that I was growing up and for a long time afterward, my mother and I were estranged from my mother’s parents. This was due primarily to my grandfather’s general curmudgeonliness, a trait I do my best not to emulate.
During those years, my grandmother, Beverly, went behind her disapproving husband’s back and dutifully kept scrapbooks of all the times she was able to cull anything about me from the newspapers, from Cub Scout postings in the Queen Anne News to high school sports articles. Once I became a detective at Seattle PD, whenever one of my homicide cases made it into the pages of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer or the Seattle Times, Beverly made sure those articles were also clipped and pasted into the mix. I was more than middle aged when I found her precious scrapbooks and realized that she had spent all those years caring about me in silence and following my life from afar. That, more than anything, finally helped put to rest all those long-simmering family-feud issues. Beverly loved me. I loved her. All was forgiven.
But my grandmother stopped cutting and pasting long before the news world went digital, and she would have been astonished by the full-length photo of me that was splashed on the front pages of both the digital and paper editions of the Seattle Times on the morning of September twenty-first.
For one thing, it was in full color. I’m not sure how the photographer, listed as R. Tobin, got to the scene so fast. He or she must have arrived close to the same time Mel and I did, and all we had to do was ride down in the Belltown Terrace eleva
tor from the penthouse to the lobby and then walk half a block.
As a result, Mel and I were the first official law enforcement presence on the scene of Faye Adcock’s suicide. The photo in the paper shows me, standing silhouetted in a wash of blazing headlights, attempting to direct traffic around the scene of the incident. I was using my walker as I stomped around the scene, but for some reason the walker doesn’t show in the image. And somehow, too, in all the noisy hubbub, the photographer neglected to catch my name. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just as well.
Fortunately, no one on the ground was injured, although they very easily could have been. Faye’s nosedive had plunged her headfirst onto the hood of a parked car. From there she had bounced into traffic. A second vehicle, in trying to avoid hitting her, ended up plowing into yet a third, thus setting off a chain reaction. Traffic at the intersection of First Avenue and Broad came to a complete halt and stayed that way for the better part of the night.
I was in the process of being interviewed by two newly arrived uniformed officers when Marge Herndon made her presence known.
“He lives here,” she said, pointing at the building. “You have his name. I’m his nurse and I’m telling you that he has to go back inside. If anyone needs to talk to him, tell them to talk to the building’s doorman, and he’ll send them up.”
With that, Marge grabbed my elbow and pointed me and my walker back up the sidewalk along Broad, toward both the lobby and the elevator. I knew she was right, of course. I was way over the limit on both energy and pain, and I went along with the program without so much as a single whimper. Mel, on the other hand, stayed where she was, talking to arriving officers and taking care of business.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered to Marge in the elevator. “I certainly never intended to involve you in something like this.”
She waved off my apology as though it were a bothersome gnat.
“How long has it been since you’ve had a pain pill?” Marge demanded.