by J. A. Jance
He remained invisible to the camera for the better part of a minute. When he reappeared, he seemed to be shoving something into the pocket of his jacket before squaring his shoulders and stepping into the bar.
“Do you happen to know whose car that is?” I asked.
“Sure,” Meece answered. “That’s gotta be Maxwell Cole’s Volvo. That was always his favorite place to park—in the gimp spot right out front.”
“Unless I miss my guess,” Blaylock said, “it looks like our guy there did something to that right front tire—jammed a nail in it maybe?”
“Which goes a long way to explain the flat Max found a little while later when he was ready to leave—the same tire his new best pal here, Duc Nguyen, helpfully offered to change.”
We returned to the interior footage where Nguyen and Max sat side by side, apparently exchanging pleasantries while Duc downed one drink and Max had another as well—his fourth by my count—which meant he had probably been legitimately over-served by then, as well. At that point, with the time-date stamp reading 22:10:31, Max paid his bill with a credit card and left. He was outside for a total of three minutes before he came back in, clearly agitated. There were several verbal exchanges before Max and Nguyen left together. Switching over to the outside camera, we watched as Nguyen shed his jacket and then expertly changed the damaged tire, replacing it with Max’s spare.
When the job was finished and with a date stamp reading of 22:56:46, Nguyen put his jacket back on and then the two of them left the parking lot together, driving out of sight in Max’s Volvo, with Max behind the wheel and Duc Nguyen riding shotgun in the passenger seat. That meant Duc Nguyen had been one of the last people to see Max alive, a little more than three hours before someone made the 911 call reporting the fire.
“What do you think?” Blaylock asked.
“I’m thinking Nguyen’s good for it,” I replied.
“Anything else?” Meece asked.
After leaning against the desk all that time, my hip was killing me, but I wasn’t ready to leave, not just yet. “Yes, please,” I said. “Our understanding is that Max was here on Wednesday of the preceding week as well. We’d like to see some of that footage, too.”
“Starting about the same time?”
“Yes.”
A few minutes later we were once again viewing the feed from the interior of the bar. Max appeared promptly at 17:30:05, took his usual spot, and ordered a drink.
“What was Max’s drink of choice?” I asked.
“Vodka tonic,” Meece answered at once. Two minutes later, someone joined him at the bar, and the two men shook hands.
“That one has be Todd Farraday,” I said aloud.
The two men both ordered food—burgers, from the looks of it. As far as I could see, Todd drank coffee. It was possible the java was spiked with something stronger, but his sticking to coffee tied in with what Patrick had told me earlier—that Todd had been working on staying sober. As for the Jägermeister? There was no sign of it, at least not for as long as he was in the bar.
We were able to fast-forward through most of the footage. Max and Todd ate and talked. Then, when Todd exited Sneaky Pete’s an hour and a half later, Max was still seated in the bar, busily typing something into a computer keyboard. A check on the video feed from the parking lot showed Todd, alone and on foot, walking out of camera range northbound—a route that would have taken him up the hill and toward Lawrence Harden’s place on Kinnear, only a few blocks away.
“Is that it, then?” Meece asked.
“For now,” Blaylock told him. “Hang on to the footage for us, though, because we’re probably going to need it.”
We made our way out of the office, with Blaylock walking ahead and me limping along behind. Out in the bar, the place was hopping. We managed to find a single table in the far back corner of the room.
“So where are we?” Blaylock asked.
I ticked off what we knew, counting on my fingers. “Maxwell Cole interviews Todd Farraday. The next morning Farraday, who wasn’t drinking in the footage, is nonetheless dead of acute alcohol poisoning. A few days later Max meets up with Duc Nguyen right here, and within hours both of them are dead, too.”
“And you think Lawrence Harden is the big fish Maxwell Cole was worried about when he talked to you about some kind of pushback?” Blaylock asked.
“I do.”
“What exactly did Harden do after he left the department?”
“Got himself elected to the port commission.”
“While his wife ran an antique shop of some kind?”
“Far Eastern antiques.”
“Imported?” Blaylock asked.
“Presumably.”
“Interesting,” Blaylock said.
During our long sojourn in the back office, my pair of tonic and limes had run their course. While I excused myself for a trip to the little boys’ room, Blaylock reached into his leather backpack and pulled out a standard Seattle PD–issue tablet that could operate either as a stand-alone or as an accessory inside a patrol car. For some reason, I felt relieved to know that Blaylock’s investigative skills weren’t solely confined to the shorthand contents of his steno pad.
On my way into the restroom, I was busy remembering everything I knew about Natalie Farraday’s Occidental Antiques—not only the details Patrick had told me, but also what I had seen and read in that article about the Nisqually Quake. Up to that point, Todd had evidently worked with his mother in the antiques business. Whatever had transpired to wreck their previous working relationship had happened after the earthquake had opened up that gaping hole in the middle of the floor of Natalie Harden’s shop.
Suddenly I could see a possible pattern emerging through the fog. Lawrence Harden’s work at the port commission would have put him in contact with all kinds of people, both good and bad. But what if some of those folks had been really bad? What if he’d gotten himself mixed up in some kind of smuggling operation? His wife’s antiques business—especially in a building that came complete with a cavernous underground storage space—would have provided suitable cover for all kinds of shipments coming and going at odd hours.
This was all speculation, of course, something with no shred of evidence to support it other than those three recent deaths, all of which, I was convinced, had to be linked. But if Lawrence Harden was the mover and shaker behind all this, what was his connection to Duc Nguyen? How would a former cop and a big-time politico get mixed up with a Rainier Valley gangbanger?
As I returned to the table, Blaylock gave me a furtive glance and then quickly shut down whatever program was operating on his computer. He looked for all the world like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. I was curious about what he was so eager to keep me from seeing, but I didn’t ask, not directly. Instead, I posed an entirely different question.
“Tell me about Duc,” I said.
“Not much to tell,” Blaylock said. “His family immigrated to the States after the Vietnam War. His grandparents ran a hole-in-the-wall restaurant down in the International District. His parents operated several nail salons up until his mother died of cancer about five years ago. That’s what the teardrop tattoo is all about—it’s for his mother. Duc had been a good student—an honor roll student, before his mother died. When I talked to Duc’s father, I learned that the two of them—father and son—never did see eye to eye about much of anything. The mother was the one who maintained the peace between them. Once she was gone, it all fell apart. That’s when Duc started hanging out with the wrong kinds of kids. He dropped out of school, got hooked up with the gang, and now he’s dead.”
“Which gang?” I asked.
“The Local Asian Boys—the LABs,” he said. As soon as he said those words, I saw a change of expression flash across his face, as though by simply saying the words something had clicked in his head, but did he tell me what that connection was? He most certainly did not. Instead, he slipped the computer into his satchel and stood up.
A cocktail waitress was finally making her belated way to our table, but he waved her off. “I need to get going,” he said. “Thanks for your help.”
I have to admit, I was a little puzzled by his abrupt departure. Up to then we had been working together in a fairly congenial manner. I had expected that he’d brief me with a little background on the LABs. Instead, for reasons I didn’t understand, our partnership had obviously come to an end.
I followed Blaylock out of the bar and walked down the hill to my car. At least it wasn’t raining. Back at Belltown Terrace, I grabbed my now-cold bag of fish and chips from the kitchen counter and went looking for Mel and Lucy. I found them sprawled together on the floor in the family room watching Dateline.
You’d think that someone who deals with real cops and robbers day in and day out would find something better to do than watching rehashes of often cold cases on television. The truth is, we do watch them, more often than not picking apart the investigational errors we see along the way and occasionally learning a thing or two. Mel used the clicker to put the program on semipermanent pause when I showed up in the doorway.
“Hey,” she said. “Welcome home. Long time no see.”
I settled into the surprisingly comfortable easy chair that has permanently replaced that once holy of holies, my recliner, and sampled a bite or two of my Sneaky Pete’s fish and chips. They may have been fine to begin with, but they hadn’t exactly improved with age.
“You don’t look happy,” Mel observed, “so how about bringing me up to speed?”
I did so, starting with my trip to the Evidence Unit and ending with the unexpected parting of the ways with Detective Blaylock.
“My guess is that someone at Seattle PD figured out you were nosing around in some of their cases, and he was ordered to shut you out.”
I tossed a soggy french fry in Lucy’s direction. She happily caught it in midair and chomped it down. At least someone seemed to like them.
“You’re probably right,” I said.
“So what are you going to do now?” Mel asked. “Back off?”
“What do you think?”
“Silly me,” she said with a grin, “but what’s the next step?”
I set the bag of chips aside and pulled out my phone. It needed charging, but not right that minute. Instead I scrolled through my contacts list until I located the number for Big Al Lindstrom.
Years earlier, Big Al and I had been partners at the Seattle PD homicide unit. He had left the department after taking a bullet while protecting the only living witness to a home invasion case—a five-year-old boy named Benjamin Harrison Weston. Ben was a little black kid who had survived the slaughter of the rest of his family only because he’d been playing hide-and-seek at the time and had fallen asleep, hidden away in the safety of a closet.
Not surprisingly, Big Al had taken a personal interest in little Ben’s life from then on, and the feeling had been mutual. After leaving the department, Big Al had suffered from any number of health issues and his wife, Molly, had always been his cheerful and undaunted caretaker—up until a few months ago, that is. During the previous summer, Molly had developed a persistent cough. When she had finally agreed to go see a doctor, the diagnosis had been bad news—lung cancer, fourth stage, with very little to be done. She had declined all treatment, focusing her efforts instead on selling their house in Ballard and getting both of them settled into an assisted living facility in the Ballard area, a place where she could be sure Big Al would continue to have the help and care he needed when Molly herself was no longer there to provide it.
And she wasn’t. She had died the week after Thanksgiving, less than four months after receiving her diagnosis. The last time I had spoken to Big Al had been at the reception following Molly’s funeral, and Benjamin Weston had been there, too, a hulking brute of a young man, who had been helping out at every turn and acting the part of the son Big Al and Molly never had.
I had known all along that he’d gone off to Gonzaga on a full-ride basketball scholarship. What I learned at the funeral was that a knee injury in his sophomore year had taken him out of contention. He had graduated with a degree in criminal justice, however, and had come back to Seattle, where he had joined Seattle PD. Considering that both his father, Benjamin Weston Sr., and Big Al were cops, that was hardly a surprising outcome. What had surprised me when we spoke at the funeral was that Ben was now working undercover in the gang unit.
As I pressed the button to dial Big Al’s number, two lumps formed in my body—one in my throat and the other in my gut. What the hell was the matter with me? Why hadn’t I called Big Al between the funeral and now? Why hadn’t I checked in on him over this first set of holidays without Molly to see how he was doing? Why was I calling now and only because I needed his help? My bout of self-castigation ended when he answered the phone.
“Hey, Beau,” he said. “Is it really you?”
“Yes, it’s really me,” I answered, “your thoughtless, no-good, very bad friend. How are you doing?”
“You’re not as bad as all that,” he assured me, sounding a lot like his old self. “And I’m doing okay. Molly was so smart to get us settled in here before everything happened. I gave her all kinds of grief about it at the time, at least I tried to, but she wouldn’t have it. We were moving and that was that. I can see now she was right.”
“So it’s an okay place then?”
“It’s all right. The food’s not nearly as good as what Molly used to make, but it’s a hell of a lot better than it would be if I were doing my own cooking. And the people aren’t half-bad, either. I enjoy hanging out with some of the other old duffers around here, and I’m turning into a killer when it comes to five-card draw. We’ve got an afternoon poker group. We only play for toothpicks, of course, but I’ve developed a bit of a reputation.”
He sounded so much like his old self, I breathed a sigh of relief. Molly had indeed made the right call in getting him established in new digs prior to her passing.
“So why the call?” Big Al asked.
He had me cold there, and my guilt flooded back, big-time. “I was hoping you could put me in touch with Ben Weston. He told me he was working the gang unit for Seattle PD these days, and I have a couple of questions that he may be able to answer.”
“No problem,” Big Al said. “I’m sure Bennie will be glad to help.” He reeled off the phone number to me without having to pause long enough to look it up, and I keyed it into my iPad.
“So with that S.H.I.T. outfit of yours shut down these days, what are you doing to keep yourself busy?”
“A little of this and a little of that,” I said.
“And how about that beauteous wife of yours? What’s she up to?”
“She’s got her hands full running the cop shop up in Bellingham.”
“You tell her hello for me.” Then, after a little beep sound in my ear, he said, “Oops. I have another call, gotta go. Later.”
Wham-bam, thank you, ma’am. Over. As the call ended, I found Mel studying me. “How’s he doing?” she asked.
“Fine, I think. He sounded okay—like his old self.”
“That’s good to hear.” She switched off the television and stood up. “I’m going to take Lucy out one more time, and then I’m going to hit the hay. Don’t stay up too late. I talked to the kids earlier and told them we’d be by their place early afternoon tomorrow for a late lunch/early dinner before we head back north.”
While Mel and Lucy took off, I dialed the number Big Al had given me. I wasn’t the least bit surprised when my call went to voice mail. If Benjamin was working undercover, it wouldn’t pay to have calls from cops or ex-cops turning up on his phone at inopportune times.
“J. P. Beaumont here, Ben,” I said. “Big Al gave me your number. Call me back when you have a chance.”
He called back less than five minutes later, just as Mel and Lucy returned from their sojourn downstairs.
“Hey, Beau,” he said. “It’s
good to hear from you. The last time I saw you was at Molly’s funeral. How are things?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m working a case, a more or less unofficial one, and I ran up against some questions I thought you might be able to answer.”
“About?”
“About the Local Asian Boys.”
“Whoa,” he said. “The LABs? Talk about a bad bunch!”
“So you know about them, then?”
Ben let out his breath before he answered. “I know something about them, but not nearly as much as I’d like to. They’re a tight-knit group, and we haven’t been able to get anyone inside. There are rumors out there that the ringleader of the LABs is a woman, but we haven’t been able to prove that one way or the other.”
“A woman, really?”
“That’s the rumor. People sometimes refer to her as the Ghost Girl. What I can tell you for sure is that the LABs are a bunch of bad actors who have suddenly gone from being very small fries to being very big fries.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Dealing drugs—fentanyl mostly along with some meth on the side,” he answered. “As far as we’re able to tell, they’ve pretty well cornered the local market on both of those, but they seem to have access to other, more exotic stuff as well, along with a ready supply of weapons.”
“Does the name Duc Nguyen mean anything to you?”
“Sure,” Ben replied at once. “He was an LAB member in good standing who died last week in what was supposedly a hit-and-run.”
“Supposedly?”
“Hit-and-run is Homicide’s take on the matter,” Ben answered. “Out here in the real world of the gang unit, we’re figuring it was more like a straight hit, probably done by a rival gang, one looking to horn in on the LAB’s drug-dealing action.”