Dismissed With Prejudice (9780061760631)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “I saw in the afternoon paper that you’re assigned to that case on Fourth South.”

  I breathed a small sigh of relief that he was willing to let it go. “Sure am,” I said. “It started out looking like suicide, but it’s not.”

  “Murder then?”

  I nodded. As the tension between us eased, I went on to tell him what I could about the circumstances surrounding Tadeo Kurobashi’s death. He listened, seemingly attentive and interested, but beneath the smooth surface of conversation, I sensed we were playing a game, a set piece where two old friends make inconsequential small talk in order to avoid wandering into treacherous conversational territory.

  When I reached the part about the Masamune sword, though, Ralph Ames was no longer merely listening for form’s sake. He sat up straight, his eyes snapping to full alert.

  “So you recognize the name?” I asked.

  “Masamune? You bet I do. And George Yamamoto seems to think it’s genuine?” he demanded.

  “As far as he could tell, but then George isn’t exactly a fully qualified samurai expert.”

  “No, I suppose not.” Ralph seemed to mull the situation for a moment or two. “Are you of the opinion that the dead man may have come into possession of the sword through some illegal means?”

  “That’s how I read it. Otherwise, wouldn’t he have used it to buy his way out of the financial trouble he was in?”

  “Seems like,” Ames conceded.

  With a sudden loud splatter, wind-driven raindrops banged on the double-paned glass behind him. The storm that had been threatening all afternoon and evening burst through the night on the wings of a fierce squall. Ames gave no indication that he saw, heard, or noticed the pelting rain at his back. Chin resting on his hand, he appeared to be totally lost in thought.

  “Except,” he added quietly, “if—as this friend of his says—if Kurobashi was always interested in the ways of the samurai, what may seem reasonable to you and me and what might seem reasonable to him could be two entirely different things.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I have a friend,” Ames said, “someone by the name of Winter, a fellow I went through law school with. He never practiced, though. Instead, he went back to school and picked up a Ph.D. in Oriental Studies. He lived in Japan for a number of years. Now he’s living in New York and working as the Oriental antiquities guru for Sotheby’s.”

  “Would you mind asking him about the sword?”

  “No problem,” Ames said, glancing at his watch, “but it’s too late tonight. I’ll check with him first thing in the morning.”

  Again we were quiet for a time, but now it wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable. The heavily charged atmosphere had been defused. When Ames looked at this watch, I checked mine. It was after ten. Realizing plenty of time had passed for Kimiko Kurobashi to drive across Snoqualmie Pass and make it back home to Pullman, I picked up the phone.

  “I should call the wife and daughter and let them know about the autopsy,” I explained to Ames. “When they left, we were all still under the impression it was suicide.”

  “Except for the wife,” Ames added.

  I nodded, dialing Eastern Washington information as I did so. In answer to my question, a tinny recorded voice recited Kimi Kurobashi’s phone number. I dialed, but it was busy. I tried dialing it several more times in the next half hour, and each time the result was the same. At first I wasn’t particularly worried. After a death there are often distant relatives and friends who must be notified. Finally, though, shortly after eleven, instead of getting a busy, I was told that the number was currently out of service.

  Alarm began to nudge its way into my consciousness. What would cause a phone to suddenly go out of service in the middle of the night? I remembered George Yamamoto’s concern that Tadeo’s killer was still on the loose and that his wife and daughter were also potential targets.

  Without bothering to put the phone back in its cradle, I dialed information again and was connected to the Pullman Police Department. The dispatcher there passed me along to the Whitman County Sheriff’s Department, where I found myself talking with a young man named Mac Larkin.

  Speaking calmly but firmly, I attempted to express the urgency of my concern that Machiko and Kimi Kurobashi might be in jeopardy out at the Honeydale Farm. With the bland indifference of youth, Larkin assured me that I shouldn’t panic about someone’s telephone being out of order since there were scattered reports of telephone outages coming in from all over Whitman County that night.

  I tried to let what he said allay my fears, but it didn’t work. An insistent alarm continued to hammer in my head. The picture of Tadeo Kurobashi’s mutilated body was fresh in my memory. His killer was free to kill again.

  When I voiced my concern to Ralph Ames, he immediately began playing devil’s advocate. “From what you told me about the hurried way they left town, how would anyone know exactly where they were going?”

  “They wouldn’t,” I replied, “unless they followed them out of town.” With that I was back on the phone to Mac Larkin.

  “You again?” he demanded.

  “When are they going to restore service to the Honeydale Farm area?” I asked.

  “The phone company fixes phones,” he replied curtly. “They don’t tell us how to do our job, and we don’t interfere in theirs. All I know is, they’re doing the best they can.”

  Another line buzzed, and Larkin left me sitting on hold for the better part of five minutes. “Have you been helped?” he asked, when he came back on the phone.

  “As a matter of fact, I haven’t,” I replied. “I’m still worried about those women. I’m telling you, the woman’s husband was murdered last night. It’s possible the killer will come after them next.”

  “And it’s also possible that California is going to fall into the Pacific. Possible, but not very likely. This line is for emergency calls, Detective Beaumont.”

  “Couldn’t you at least send a deputy by?” I asked.

  “I’ve entered your call into the log, and I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not making any promises.” With that he hung up.

  “Do any good?” Ames asked.

  “Not much,” I answered. “No way could I build a fire under that little jackass on the phone.”

  “You’ve done as much as you could,” Ames said. “It’ll probably be all right.”

  But his words offered small comfort. While I had been on the phone, Ralph had turned around in the love seat and was sitting facing out the window, watching the pattern of splashing raindrops on the glass.

  “Who all knew about the poem?” Ames asked thoughtfully a moment later.

  “The one on the computer? Well, there was Doc Baker, George Yamamoto, Big Al—”

  “No, no,” Ames interrupted. “I don’t mean who saw it on the computer this morning. How many people around him were aware that it was Tadeo Kurobashi’s favorite poem?”

  “Probably several. Yamamoto said it was familiar as soon as he saw it, but he couldn’t remember where he’d heard it. Kimi knew it well, and I would imagine so would her mother. Why are you asking about the poem?”

  “Because it sounds to me as though whoever fed the virus into the MicroBridge computers must have known Tadeo Kurobashi very well in order to pick that particular verse, to know unerringly that it was part of his favorite poem.”

  “So?” I asked. “What are you getting at?”

  Ames cocked his head to one side. “Think about it. If you were a young woman struggling to get along on whatever crumbs the university dishes out to instructors and on what you could make shoveling horse manure in someone else’s barn, and if you knew your father was busy squandering your entire inheritance, wouldn’t you be tempted to do something about it?”

  “I might,” I said, “but not in this case. Kimiko Kurobashi isn’t the type.”

  Ralph Ames looked at me sadly and shook his head. “Beau, you of all people should know better than that. It seems to
me that we were both suckered very badly once by a lady who didn’t look the part at all, remember?”

  Remember? Of course I remembered, and the memory of Anne Corley caused a burning pain in my chest that didn’t seem to lessen with the passage of time. I got up and poured myself another drink. That was easier than talking.

  “I’ll look into it,” I said at last.

  Ralph Ames nodded. “All right. In that case, I’m going to bed,” he said.

  I followed suit, but once in bed, I didn’t go to sleep. For a long time, I lay there, doing all kinds of mental gymnastics in an effort to keep my mind off Anne Corley. By focusing completely on the hows and whys of Tadeo Kurobashi’s murder and other more immediate matters I managed to keep her at bay somewhere outside my conscious memory. Eventually my mind wandered away from Tadeo Kurobashi’s mystery to one of my own, one much closer to home and very much in need of a solution.

  Where was my missing chunk of time? I worried the question like an old dog gnawing a bone. What had happened to the part of my life that contained my agreement to go to the mystery meeting with Ralph Ames and where I had somehow, inexplicably, smashed my fingers badly enough to require the attention of a doctor? How could I possibly have forgotten those things so completely? As if on cue, the constant throbbing reasserted itself, a pulsing reminder.

  Try as I might to remember, though, there was nothing there, not a trace. It was as if a heavy black curtain had been pulled over the window of my memory. A blackout curtain.

  As soon as the word came into my head, so did a sickening inkling of where that piece of my life had gone. I had forgotten things before on occasion. Everybody does that, but it had never been anything terribly important. I could recall misplacing my car once, finding it late the next day in the parking lot outside the Doghouse. But this time it was blatantly clear to me that, despite my desperately wanting to remember, I was missing pieces of my life that nobody else was. And there was a distinct cause-and-effect relationship that was hard to deny.

  I thrashed around in bed and fought with the covers in a vain effort to deny the word’s reality, to make the ugly possibility rebury itself somewhere far away, but it didn’t. The word blackout was an evil genie let out of its bottle. It was out, and it wouldn’t disappear.

  And so I waited for sleep and mostly didn’t find it until close to daylight. The rain had stopped. The last thing I heard before I fell asleep was the raucous squawk of a marauding sea gull. And that’s when the dream came. I know it by heart. I see it over and over, and it’s always the same.

  Anne Corley, vibrant and alive and wearing the same red dress she wore when I first saw her, stands in a windswept park with the breeze rippling her hair. I call to her and she turns to look at me. She is holding a rose, a single, long-stemmed red rose. I go to her, running at that desperate nightmarish pace that robs you of strength and breath but covers no distance. At last I stop a few feet away from her, and she starts toward me. I reach out to clasp her in my arms, but as I do, the rose in her hands changes to a gun, and I step back screaming, “No! No! No!”

  I awoke in a room awash in daylight with streams of sweat pouring off my body. Lying there alone in bed, waiting for the shaking to stop and my heartbeat to steady, I cursed Fate and any other gods who might be listening for making me be one of the few men I know who dreams in living color.

  In black and white, it might not hurt as much.

  An hour or so later, Ames and I were drinking coffee at the kitchen counter when the phone rang. I more than half expected the call to be from Peters—it was about time for him to check in—but the voice on the other end of the line was that of a total stranger.

  “Is this the Seattle Police Department?” the gruff male voice asked.

  “No it isn’t,” I answered. “This is a private residence.”

  “I’m looking for somebody named Beaumont. Anybody there by that name?”

  “I’m Detective Beaumont. Who’s calling, please?”

  “Jesus Christ. Did that yo-yo give me your home number?” he demanded.

  “Evidently.”

  “Sorry. I waited until I figured you’d be at work before I called.”

  “It’s all right. Who is this, please?” I asked again.

  “Oh, sorry. The name’s Halvorsen. Detective Andrew Halvorsen with the Whitman County Sheriff’s Department. I’ve got a note here saying that you called in last night concerning a couple of women out at Honeydale Farm?”

  My stomach tightened. So did my grip on the telephone receiver. “That’s correct,” I said carefully. “Is anything wrong?”

  “Are these women related to you in any way, Detective Beaumont?”

  “No, they’re not. One is the wife and the other the daughter of a man who was murdered here in Seattle day before yesterday. I’m the homicide detective assigned to that case. Why? What’s going on?”

  “The old woman will probably be all right. She’s not as badly hurt, although the doctors tell me that at her age any injury can have serious side effects. As for the other one, I understand they’re calling for a Medevac helicopter. As soon as they can get her stabilized enough, they’ll be flying her either to Spokane or Seattle for surgery.”

  My throat constricted around the last swallow of coffee. A terrible impotent rage rose through my body.

  “That’s what I was afraid of, for God’s sake. Didn’t that worthless son of a bitch do anything?”

  “Now, now, Detective Beaumont,” Halvorsen said soothingly. “Don’t be too hard on Larkin. He did the best he could under the circumstances. This place was a zoo last night, and we were spread way too thin with the kind of problems we were having all over the county. He did enter the call in the log, however, and when I put the two together a few minutes ago, I thought I’d better get in touch with you.”

  With supreme effort I managed to keep my voice steady enough to speak. “Tell me what happened.”

  “We’re still not sure. Rita Brice, the owner of Honeydale Farm, evidently got up about six and noticed that the horses still weren’t out in the pasture. She went to Kimi’s house, thinking she had overslept, and discovered the mother, bound and gagged. Rita untied the mother, left her there in the house, and went to the barn. That’s where she found the daughter. Rita did what she could, then ran back to summon help. Luckily, by that time the phones were all working again.”

  “Is Kimi going to make it?” I asked.

  “Too soon to tell. Larkin’s notation said that you thought the women might be in some kind of danger. Do you think these two assaults are related to the murder in Seattle?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “We’d better put our heads together, then. Do you want to come over here or should I go there?” Halvorsen asked.

  “I’ll come there,” I said without hesitation. “As soon as I check in with my office.”

  “All right. Horizon flies directly into the Pullman-Moscow Airport. If you can let me know what time you’ll be in, I’ll come pick you up.”

  “Meet the next flight that leaves from Sea-Tac,” I said. “If I can’t make that one, I’ll call and let you know.”

  I dropped off his call and immediately dialed Sergeant Watkins at home. Shaking his head, Ralph Ames listened as I explained the situation to Watty. As I expected, the sergeant told me to get my ass to the airport, that he’d handle whatever official paperwork had to be handled, including notifying airport security that I was on my way.

  Ralph Ames handed me out the door and told me he’d get me a reservation on the next available flight while I made a dash for the airport.

  It turned out that airport security wasn’t that much of a problem since Horizon’s gate is so small that they don’t have a security check. I don’t know what strings Ames pulled, but I’m sure he yanked at least one because the Pullman-bound Swearingen Metro-Liner was still waiting on the ground when I got there, even though it had been scheduled to leave some ten minutes earlier.

  And that’s how
, thirty-five minutes after Andy Halvorsen’s call, I was in the air on my way to Pullman, Washington, sitting scrunched into one of the midget-sized seats, with my neck bent to one side and my knees jammed into the backrest of the seat in front of me.

  Six foot three is too damned tall for Metro-Liners.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE PULLMAN-MOSCOW AIRPORT IS SET in a natural swale among rolling high hills. As the plane landed and the golden-grained landscape loomed up on either side of the runway, I gripped the handles of the seat and cursed myself for flying, although I suppose the safety statistics on red Porsches are a good deal worse than those for commuter airlines.

  Not knowing how long I’d be away, I had stuck a briefcase with a change of underwear and a clean shirt in the nose of the plane, and since Metro-Liner passengers carry their own bags, I didn’t have to wait for luggage to be delivered to a carousel inside the pint-sized lobby. There were no luggage carousels inside the lobby and not much of anything else, either. Two tiny but highly competitive branches of name-brand rent-a-car companies were busy. Both had lines—two customers at one and three at the other—which probably accounted for a major portion of that day’s business.

  Glancing around the lobby, I searched in vain for someone who might be the detective who was supposed to pick me up. Seeing no one, I walked over to the plate glass doors that opened on a gravel parking lot. That’s where I found Detective Andrew Halvorsen.

  There was a good reason for his not being inside the terminal to meet me. They wouldn’t let him. He was smoking a cigar, a well-chewed Churchill-sized Royal Jamaican.

  Aside from that, Halvorsen seemed like a regular enough kind of guy—tall, well built, about my size, late forties, square-jawed good looks, neatly trimmed brush mustache, curly dark brown hair showing just a sprinkling of gray.

  “Detective Beaumont?” he asked, catching sight of me.

  I nodded.

  “This way. The car’s right here.”

  He led me to a white, four-door K-car. Lee Iacocca and his pals at Chrysler must have sold a handful of those hummers to every law enforcement jurisdiction in the country. Detective divisions always get stuck with them. Halvorsen popped open the trunk, and I tossed my gear inside.