by J. A. Jance
There were a number of e-mail notifications from Todd Hatcher on my phone. I ordered another tonic and lime and then fired up the iPad to browse through them. They were sorted into separate files by name. Todd Farraday’s listings were mostly of the police report and conviction variety. Among them were several DUIs, a drunk and disorderly, and a number of citations for public drunkenness. On three separate occasions he had also been charged with simple assault as well as one instance of assault with intent. Those charges had all been dismissed, something that made me believe that maybe Max hadn’t been wrong in thinking that Larry Harden might still have some pull among members of the law enforcement community.
The file on Todd’s mother started with her obituary. Natalie Farraday Harden had died five years earlier, at age eighty-seven, of congestive heart failure. Among the links listed for her was a profile piece telling how, after leaving the world of municipal politics and with the help of both her husband, Port Commissioner Lawrence Harden, and her son, Todd Farraday, Natalie had finally fulfilled a lifelong dream by first establishing and then running what had turned into a thriving antique business called Occidental Antiques, based in Pioneer Square.
But the article that really caught my attention was one from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, dated March 2, 2001. It carried a headline that said ANTIQUES EMPORIUM HITS ROCK BOTTOM. The accompanying photo showed Natalie and a man I recognized as a twenty-something version of Todd Farraday standing in a high-ceilinged room and staring down into what appeared to be an abyss. A large decorated chest of some kind dangled precariously on the edge of a black hole that appeared to be eight to ten feet across.
So that’s the earthquake in question, I told myself, the Nisqually Quake.
Seattle has a long tradition of naming natural disasters for the day on which they happened. Off the top of my head I remember several fierce windstorms, among them the Columbus Day storm, the Inauguration Day storm, and the Hanukkah Eve storm. For a time the 2001 incident was referred to as the Ash Wednesday Quake, but that was early on. Once seismologists established that the quake was traced back to the Nisqually Fault, the event morphed into being referred to as the Nisqually Quake.
According to the article, Natalie Farraday and her son had been alone in her Pioneer Square store late that Wednesday morning when the earthquake occurred. As the shaking continued, what they had thought to be a solid granite floor had abruptly turned the consistency of Jell-O. When it was over, the interior of the shop was littered with fallen bricks and smashed merchandise, including more than one Ming Dynasty vase. The most amazing damage, however, was the gaping hole that had opened up in the middle of the room, revealing a fourteen-foot drop into what turned out to be a previously undiscovered earthen basement space hidden beneath the ground floor.
Anyone who has ever visited Seattle and taken the Seattle Underground tour knows the story of how, on a June day in 1889, an unfortunate local cabinetmaker accidentally knocked over a pot of hot glue and set it ablaze. The resulting fire burned down most of the wooden structures that, at the time, made up the heart of downtown Seattle. The general area known as Pioneer Square had been built on filled-in tidelands that often flooded. When it came time to rebuild, the city fathers decreed that the steeply sloped area would be regraded. As a result, ground floors in the rebuilt buildings would be one to two floors higher than they had been originally. Zoning rules also required that all the rebuilt structures be constructed of brick.
In the mid-1960s, a guy named Bill Speidel started giving tours of those long-disused underground spaces, creating a network of underground passages that went from building to building and paying rent to the existing landlords of the aboveground buildings for the privilege.
Evidently whoever owned the building housing Occidental Antiques on South Jackson hadn’t bought into the Seattle Underground program. In the article, Natalie Farraday Harden was quoted as saying she had no idea the empty space underneath her store even existed. My takeaway from the story was that the falling-out between mother and son that had resulted in Natalie disowning Todd must have occurred sometime after the earthquake.
“Striking family resemblance between you and your son,” someone said casually, “although it turns out your forehead is quite a bit taller.”
There’s nothing like having a total stranger remind you of your supposed obsolescence first rattle out of the box. I looked up, fully prepared to take offense, only to see that, when it came to square inches of forehead, the guy doing the talking had no room to talk. What little hair Kevin Blaylock had left made him look like Robin Hood’s tonsured friend, Friar Tuck, from that long-ago black-and-white TV series. Not only that, rather than being some sweet young thing of a cop, Blaylock was far closer to my age than he was to Scott’s. Even so, he wasn’t someone I recognized from my years at Seattle PD.
“Yup,” I said agreeably, offering my hand. “Getting old is hell. The name’s Beaumont, by the way. Most people call me Beau or J.P., whichever you prefer.”
“Beau then,” Blaylock concluded, answering my handshake with a firm one of his own. “I’m Kevin.”
He set a steaming mug of coffee down on the cocktail table between us and then shrugged his way out of a small leather backpack, little more than an old-fashioned satchel, which he hung on the back of his chair. As he eased himself down into a sitting position, an involuntary grimace told me that Detective Kevin Blaylock’s knees most likely hurt like hell. Been there; done that.
“You’re new to Seattle PD?” I asked.
“Fairly new,” he answered. “I transferred in from Baltimore two years ago. The wife’s from here originally. She wanted to come back home so we’d be closer at hand and able to help look after her folks, who still live up in Edmonds. I was a little surprised when the local brass decided to slot me into Homicide, but at my age, beggars can’t be choosers. I pick up a few extra bucks now and again by teaching CSI classes at the academy down in Sea-Tac. That’s where I met that boy of yours—a very good kid, by the way—who happens to be very proud of his old man.”
I couldn’t help flushing with pleasure at hearing news of Scott’s secondhand praise. With that remark any hard feelings concerning Blaylock’s initial comment about my receding hairline dissipated, once and for all.
Settling back in his chair, Detective Blaylock eyed me speculatively. “So what’s the deal here?” he asked. “I know you’ve been involved in looking into the Maxwell Cole case. Erin Howard told me as much. My job is to investigate the hit-and-run death of Duc Nguyen, but what I’d like to know is how you happen to be privy to details of my ongoing investigation.”
If Blaylock had been one of those guys who do everything by the book, he would have raised that issue on the telephone to begin with, and he certainly wouldn’t have been sitting across the table from me little more than half an hour later. Sometimes you’ve just got to trust your instincts. Kevin was a newcomer to Homicide, and probably not a particularly welcome addition as far as the old hands were concerned. That helped explain why a dead-end gangbanger hit-and-run case had been tossed in his lap in the first place. That’s how bureaucracies function. The last people in are always handed the crap jobs. But Blaylock was also legitimately an “old guy,” and sometimes we old guys have to stick together.
“Al Thorne and I go way back,” I told him. “No doubt he was speaking out of turn, but we were chewing the fat, and he just happened to mention the fingerprint situation.”
Rather than going ballistic about the details of his case being leaked to an outsider, Blaylock simply nodded. “All right then,” he said. “That explains how you know where Duc’s prints were found, but on the phone earlier you claimed to know how they got there. I’ve been working this case for days. Other than the fingerprints themselves, I haven’t uncovered a single link between Duc Nguyen and Maxwell Cole.”
“The link is right here,” I said, gesturing in a way that encompassed the whole room. “Sneaky Pete’s is the connection. According to th
e bartender, your vic showed up here for the first time ever on the night Maxwell Cole died. The two men struck up a conversation. Cole exited the bar at some point and then came back inside, complaining of a flat tire and expecting Triple A to show up and fix it. Instead, your hit-and-run victim hopped off his chair, left a drink on the bar, and went outside to change the tire.”
“Duc offered to change the tire,” Blaylock mused thoughtfully. “Were they friends?”
“Strangers as far as I can tell.”
“But Maxwell Cole and Duc subsequently left the bar together?”
“That’s what I’ve been told.”
“Any security footage to verify that?”
“There might well be,” I said, “but considering I’m operating on the sidelines here, I wasn’t exactly in a position to ask to see it.”
“And your pet theory is that Duc is somehow responsible for the fire that killed Maxwell Cole?”
“Yes, it is. I also believe it’s possible that Max’s death was a hit of some kind.”
“And that whoever called for the hit on Cole took Duc out once the deed was accomplished?”
“That’s the idea,” I said, “so let me ask you this. What was Duc wearing when he died, and where did it happen?”
“He was run down on South King, down in Pioneer Square. The vehicle hit him hard enough to drop-kick him fifteen yards onto the brick pavers in Occidental Square. The ME put the time of death at between four and five A.M.”
“On Sunday morning, the same day as the fire?”
Blaylock nodded, while my head lit up like a Christmas tree. South King just happened to be within a matter of blocks from the location of Natalie Harden’s Occidental Antiques. I suspected that wasn’t an unimportant coincidence.
“Any damage to the vehicle?”
Blaylock nodded. “Broken headlamp. The crime lab has established that the vehicle in question is most likely a 2015 Cadillac Escalade. As for what the victim was wearing? About what you’d expect of your run-of-the-mill gangbanger—jeans, T-shirt, tennis shoes. And the shoes weren’t cheap ones, either. They were the latest hottest-selling, three-hundred-bucks-a-pair Nikes. Everything he was wearing—including the shoes—was filthy and so was he—like he’d been working in a coal mine.”
“FYI,” I told him, “according to the bartender, when he showed up here a few hours earlier, Nguyen was all decked out in a suit and tie, passing himself off as some kind of engineering type for Google or Amazon.”
I could tell that tidbit of information captured Blaylock’s attention. “That bartender over there?” he asked, nodding.
“The very one,” I told him. As Blaylock excused himself and headed for the bar, my phone rang. “The fish and chips were great,” Mel said. “But where are you?”
“Back at Sneaky Pete’s,” I said. “Meeting with a Seattle homicide cop.”
“Far be it from me to interrupt,” Mel said. “See you when you get home.”
Because Blaylock was still preoccupied with the bartender, I took advantage of his absence to call the ME’s office. Since it was Saturday evening, I was relatively sure Dr. Roz would be on duty. When I called on her direct number, she picked up at once.
“Hey, Beau,” she said. “What can I do you for?”
“I’m calling about a guy named Todd Farraday. He would have come through the ME’s office a little over a week ago.”
I heard the clatter of a computer keyboard. “Okay,” Roz said a moment later. “Here he is. The body was transported on Thursday, January fifth, but time of death is listed as sometime prior to midnight on January fourth. Autopsy results determined that he died of acute alcohol poisoning combined with severe hypothermia, or, as we like to call it around here, death by Jägermeister. The guy was evidently falling-down drunk, passed out on his stepfather’s front porch, and died of exposure. End of story.”
“You’re sure it was Jägermeister? Since when can autopsy results determine the brand of booze?”
Dr. Roz laughed at that. “That detail came straight from the CSIs,” she answered. “There was an empty Jägermeister bottle found near the body, one with Mr. Farraday’s prints on it and nobody else’s. Why are you asking about this, Beau? Does it have something to do with the Maxwell Cole homicide?”
“With that and with Duc Nguyen’s hit-and-run as well.”
“Nguyen is the guy whose fingerprints were found at Cole’s crime scene?”
“Correct.”
“My understanding is that Detective Blaylock of Seattle PD is working that case.”
“Yes, he is,” I told her. And so am I.
Blaylock was returning to the table, so I thanked Roz for her help and hung up.
“Well?” I asked.
“Mike contacted the owner, and he’s agreed to come in to give us a look at the security footage. In the meantime, you need to tell me everything you know.”
He had used the term “us,” but did he really mean it? “Does that mean we’re working together on this?” I asked.
“What do you think?”
With that Blaylock reached into his backpack. I expected him to pull out an iPad or a laptop. Instead, he withdrew an old-fashioned stenographer’s pad along with a ball-point pen. Back in the day, I hauled around pencils and little notebooks that fit in my pockets. Blaylock noticed that my attention was totally focused on the pad.
“Hope you don’t mind,” he said, shaking it in my direction. “The guys back at the department call me a troglodyte, and it’s true. When I was in high school, boys could take typing but not shorthand. My mom was a secretary, and she took it upon herself to teach me how to do shorthand. Gregg’s has served me in good stead ever since.”
“However you take notes is fine with me,” I told him, “but if you expect me to tell you what I know, it needs to be a two-way street.”
Blaylock thought about that for a moment before he nodded. “Fair enough,” he agreed. “It will be.”
“All right then,” I said. “Listen up because, by my count, I may have just uncovered victim number three.”
CHAPTER 26
WHILE KEVIN BLAYLOCK MADE INDECIPHERABLE CHICKEN scratches onto the pages of his steno pad, I told him the whole story, with zero holdbacks, and that took time. My account included briefing him on Maxwell Cole’s reinvestigation of the long-ago school district homicide case, which seemed to be the starting point. When I got as far as the last couple of weeks, I started with Todd Farraday’s scheduled meeting with Maxwell Cole and went from there.
I had finished up and was waiting while Blaylock reviewed his notes when a newcomer arrived at our table. “Detective Blaylock?” he inquired.
“That would be me.”
“I’m Richard Meece, the owner. I believe you wanted to see me?”
“Yes, and thank you so much for coming in,” Blaylock said. “This is my colleague, Mr. Beaumont. We’re looking into the death of one of your customers . . .”
“I know,” Meece said. “Maxwell Cole was one of our regulars. If I can do anything to help . . .”
“You can,” Blaylock told him, pausing long enough to consult his notes. “We need to see your security feeds from the last night Maxwell Cole was here. That would be Saturday, January fourteenth.”
“And maybe from several nights before that,” I added, “including the feeds for Wednesday, the fourth.”
“Sure thing,” Meece said. “The screens are back in the office. It’ll be a little crowded with all three of us in there, but I think we can manage.”
Manage was all we did. Meece took the office chair and Blaylock the visitor’s chair. I ended up perched on the edge of the desk. I have to hand it to Meece, however. He was a down-home expert at operating his multiscreen security setup. “Max usually showed up around five thirty or so,” he explained, as he focused our attention on a screen that showed the interior of the bar from back to front. He put the date stamps at 5:15 and started fast-forwarding from there.
“That looks l
ike Max,” I said, pointing to a figure entering the bar at 17:35:46.
“That’s him all right,” Meece agreed, slowing the feed. “Right on time, too, and that was his usual spot—two stools down from the entrance.”
We watched the action, sometimes fast-forwarding and sometimes not. The bartender, the one I recognized as Mike, served him a drink and handed him a menu. He ordered food and another drink. The food came and he ordered drink number three. That was about the time when the two people who had been seated next to Max at the bar got up to leave. Moments later, someone else slipped onto the stool next to Max’s.
“Wait,” I said. “Can you stop it right there? Isn’t that Nguyen?”
With a few clicks on the keyboard, Meece froze the action and then enlarged the frame that was date-stamped 20:46:57. The man now seated to Maxwell Cole’s right was indeed Duc Nguyen. The teardrop tattoo was fully visible, but the man bore no resemblance to a gangbanger lowlife. Indeed, he looked for all the world like a sophisticated young millennial out for an evening on the town.
“Is this guy one of your regulars?” Blaylock asked.
Meece shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “If he’d been here before, I never saw him.”
“Go back a little,” I suggested. “Did he just come in or had he come inside earlier and just then moved over to the bar?”
Scrolling back several minutes, we spotted Nguyen enter the room some five minutes earlier and take a seat at an unoccupied table in the middle of the room. He moved from there to the spot next to Max only when the other couple vacated their stools.
“Did Nguyen have a vehicle?” I asked.
“Not one that he owned,” Blaylock answered. “Why?”
“So how did he get to Lower Queen Anne from the Rainier Valley?”
“Good question,” Blaylock said. “Maybe we should check out the parking lot just before he came inside.”
In a matter of seconds, Meece switched over to footage taken by an outside camera, one that afforded us a view of both the building’s exterior and most of the parking lot. Meece started reviewing the footage at a time that was ten or so minutes prior to Nguyen’s initial appearance inside the bar. When we caught sight of him for the first time outside the building, he was threading his way through the parking lot on foot. He came forward steadily and then disappeared abruptly, dropping completely out of sight behind the sheltering front fender of a parked vehicle.