by J. A. Jance
“Did she mention any names?”
“No, but it won’t be hard to find out. Men are never nearly as clever about these things as they think they are.”
“I assume Garvey was Shiree Weston’s maiden name?” Emma nodded. “How far back do you two go?” I asked.
“Grade school.”
Both my question and Emma’s initial answer seemed innocuous enough, but then she added an afterthought. “About the same age Adam is now. Was,” she whispered.
Suddenly Dr. Emma Jackson’s steely reserve shattered. She began crying quietly into her hand while I kept driving. By the time we arrived at Harborview, Emma had pulled herself together again. I would have gone around and opened the car door for her, but she beat me to the punch. She led the way into the building as though she knew it well.
“You seem to know your way around,” I commented.
“I’ve been here before,” she replied without explanation.
The lower floor of Harborview Hospital, occupied by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, is dedicated to the dead rather than to the living. There Dr. Howard Baker reigns supreme over a small corps of dedicated employees and an ever-changing and always deceased clientele. As a Homicide detective bringing in victims’ relatives to make identifications, I’m used to taking charge at the receptionist’s desk. This time, however, Emma Jackson handled it herself.
“I’m Dr. Jackson,” she announced. “I’m here to see Dr. Baker about my son, Adam.”
The receptionist, bleary-eyed from being called in during the middle of the night, blinked in recognition at the name. “Oh, of course. Wait right here. Dr. Baker’s busy in the back right now.”
“In the back” is a medical examiner’s office euphemism that means either that Doc Baker’s really out playing golf or else he’s up to his armpits in an autopsy, a word that is seldom if ever uttered aloud in that grim little waiting room.
The receptionist jumped up and hurried through the swinging door that opened into the lab. She returned moments later with Doc Baker in tow.
Emma had walked over to the window and was standing with her back to us looking outside when the M.E. came into the room. “Hello there, Beau,” he said, nodding in my direction. “I understand you brought the mother along?”
Emma Jackson whirled around and faced him. At once I saw a look of shocked recognition cross Doc Baker’s face. “Why, Emma. It’s not your boy, is it?”
“That’s what he told me,” she said grimly. “I’m here to find out for sure, one way or the other.”
Clearly Drs. Baker and Jackson knew each other, although I had no idea how. He held out his arm, and she took it. “This way,” he said solicitously, leading her toward the swinging doors.
Maybe up until then Emma Jackson still had some hope I was wrong. But of course, I wasn’t.
CHAPTER 8
IN THE YEARS I’VE WORKED HOMICIDE, I’VE been through plenty of identification ordeals. Seeing your own child dead in some cold, stainless-steel-furnished morgue has to be one of the worst trials a parent ever endures. The emotional devastation of that encounter strikes both men and women pretty much equally. I’ve seen more than a few men faint dead away and have to be carried out of the room. Hysterics, explosions of anger, and racking wails of despair are common occurrences that know no gender divisions at a time like that. Men and women, fathers and mothers, are both identically susceptible to grief.
Even though she’d pulled herself together so well back at her apartment, Emma Jackson’s reaction still surprised the hell out of me. It was like she slipped out of the role of mother, put on her doctor suit, and was totally professional about doing what had to be done. When Doc Baker lifted the sheet that covered her son’s face, she swallowed hard and nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s him. That’s Adam.”
I excused myself long enough to call Carl Johnson at McClure Middle School. When I came back, Doc Baker was leading Emma from one victim to another. Each time he lifted the sheet, she spoke quietly for several minutes while the M.E. took copious notes. Their exchanges were conducted in guarded undertones, totally inaudible to me or to anyone else in the room. Whatever information she imparted was delivered with a quiet dignity that I found absolutely mind-boggling considering the circumstances.
Subconsciously keeping count, I was surprised when, after Ben and Shiree Weston as well as the three dead children had all been identified, Doc Baker led Emma Jackson to yet another gurney. Beneath the sheet on that one lay Spot, the Weston family’s dog. That was the first and only time I ever knew of a dog being accorded the medical examiner’s office’s full, deluxe postmortem treatment.
After that, we left the lab and retreated to Doc Baker’s private office. This, too, was highly unusual. After making the IDs, victims’ relatives are usually hustled away from Harborview as quickly as possible. They are generally excluded from any debriefings between the M.E. and the Homicide detectives working the case. When Baker ushered us into his office, I naturally assumed he was just being polite and that conversation would be strictly limited to sympathetic small talk.
“Coffee?” he asked, motioning us into chairs.
The stuff they call coffee in the M.E.’s staff lounge bears a startling resemblance to battery acid with just a hint of formaldehyde on the side. When Emma Jackson nodded and said, yes, she’d like some, I figured she simply didn’t know any better. I did, but I was desperate. The beneficial effects of Ralph Ames’s refueling breakfast were fading fast. My back hurt and so did my feet. My eyes burned from lack of sleep. Even terrible coffee was bound to help a little.
“I’ll have some too,” I said.
“Still drink it black?” Baker asked.
I thought for a moment he was talking to me and was surprised and gratified that he remembered, considering the number of Homicide dicks that pass through his office on a daily basis, but it turned out he was asking Emma.
“Black will be fine,” she said.
That set me back on my heels. Theirs had to be more than a nodding acquaintance. “How is it that you two know each other?” I asked.
“Emma didn’t tell you? She used to work here. Upstairs, I mean, in the hospital trauma center. Whenever she lost a patient, she’s the only one of the whole bunch who ever bothered to follow them down here to find out what exactly went wrong. A lot of doctors never figure out that even dead patients can teach you something. Sometimes especially the dead ones.”
Doc Baker smiled a proud mentor’s smile which Emma Jackson did not return. Instead, she picked up the steaming cup of coffee the receptionist had placed on the desk in front of her.
“Tell him about the dog, Howard,” she urged.
“What about the dog?”
Baker seemed unhappy that she had turned the conversation away from his reminiscing. “Spot’s the only one we’ve had a chance to work on so far. He’s told us a little, but not much.”
“For instance?”
“He bit somebody,” Emma Jackson blurted, answering my question before Baker had a chance.
“Really?” I asked.
Baker nodded. “Tried to anyway. Just before he died. I found traces of material, a thread or two, still stuck to his teeth. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to determine whether or not he actually drew blood.”
“He did,” I said.
Both Doc Baker and Emma Jackson sat up and took notice. “How do you know that?” Baker asked.
“The boy told us,” I replied. “Junior Weston. He told me the man’s arm was bleeding. I thought maybe he’d cut himself with his own knife in the struggle with Bonnie, but I’ll bet the dog nailed him at least once.”
Baker nodded and began writing himself a note, talking as he did so. “We’ll have to analyze all those bloodstains very carefully. We may have some of the killer’s blood mixed in with that of the victims. As for the bite itself, the killer may have been bitten, but it’s hard to say how badly. It might be worthwhile to check with t
he emergency rooms around town and see if they treated any dog-bite victims overnight.”
I was shocked to hear Baker strategizing in front of a civilian, a victim’s mother yet, without seeming to care whether or not she was authorized to hear those kinds of case-specific details, but it wasn’t my place to tell him to shut up, not when he was essentially giving me marching orders. The possibility of finding a dog-bite victim somewhere among the metropolitan area’s myriad hospitals didn’t amount to much of a lead.
“There are a lot of emergency rooms in this town,” I said.
Baker glowered at me with a look that meant don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. He said, “It’s more than you had before.” Which was undeniably true.
“Now tell him about the hair,” Emma Jackson urged.
“The hair we found in Shiree Weston’s hands?”
Doc Baker opened his desk drawer, carefully removed a pile of paper clips and began to toss them thoughtfully into the vase in the windowsill. “Actually, we found two distinctly different hair samples—the ones in Shiree Weston’s hand and on her body and some with the daughter as well. Naturally, the Crime Lab will be doing a detailed analysis of all samples, and there may be some other explanation for their presence at the crime scene, but my initial reaction is that we have two distinctly separate individuals here.”
“Two?”
Baker nodded. “Two. One would be a…” I’m sure Doc Baker started to say “black,” but he corrected himself in time. “…an African American. The second is definitely Caucasian.”
I remembered what Junior Weston had told us about the bad man he had seen struggling with Bonnie, about his skin color being similar to mine. So the child had seen only one of his family’s attackers, not both of them. It was a chilling thought. What the hell had Ben Weston been up to that so many people wanted to see him dead?
For a moment or two, we were all three quiet. “So what do you think?” I asked at last. “Gang warfare of some kind?”
Considering Ben Weston’s position on the CCI unit, that was the most logical question, and one the whole city would be asking the moment the story hit the papers. Emma Jackson and Doc Baker both shook their heads in instant unison.
“No way,” Baker answered at once. “Not their style unless they went out and hired a pro to do the dirty work. Those kids are all playacting at being big-time gangsters. They all want to be Al Capone or some other mafioso hood. If gangs decide they’re going to kill somebody, they usually assign it to somebody as an initiation kind of thing, a rite of passage, or they want to do it in style and make like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. This isn’t right.”
“What isn’t right?”
“You know yourself, Beau. Drive-by shootings or the guy who took a shot at you from outside on a porch. Those sound like gang activity. This is something else. Those kids may all have street names and guns, and they don’t think twice about blowing somebody off the face of the earth, but they aren’t trained killers. They don’t do silent kills. At least one of the perpetrators involved here is a highly trained professional killer.”
“What do you mean professional?” I asked.
“Military most likely. Marines maybe? Whatever, he’s dangerous as hell.”
“And I want him,” Emma Jackson added softly, almost under her breath. “Hanging’s too good for a monster like that.”
It was the only time in the whole process that Dr. Emma Jackson’s professional demeanor slipped, and it caught Doc Baker off guard. She may have been a colleague of his, a sometime insider of the M.E.’s office, but right that minute she was just another mother of a homicide victim, someone interested in vengeance, not justice.
If anyone was to be faulted in that situation, it was Doc Baker for forgetting that Emma Jackson was a mother first and a doctor second. Doc Baker’s rash disclosures in her presence had been indiscreet to say the least. In my opinion, she was a victim, and she, by God, should have been treated as such.
“You put that idea right out of your mind, Emma,” he ordered indignantly. “We’re talking about very dangerous men here. You stay out of it and let Detective Beaumont and the others handle it. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have discussed any of it in front of you.”
“Don’t worry about me, Howard,” she returned coldly. “I can take care of myself. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I want to go home.”
Dr. Emma Jackson walked out of the room and closed the door behind her, leaving Baker and me staring at each other across the stacks of papers on his messy desk.
“Thanks a whole hell of a lot,” I said. “When you screw up, you do it all the way. What in God’s name do you expect me to do with that woman now?”
In all the years I’d known him, I had never seen Dr. Howard Baker so chagrined. In a matter of minutes he seemed to have aged a good ten years. His ran his fingers through his hair, leaving his unruly white mane standing even more on end.
“Do what you can to keep her out of it,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “I’ll do my best, but thanks to you, right this minute she has more information than I do.”
Standing up abruptly, Doc Baker glowered down at me. “I already said I’m sorry, and I am, but I can’t take it back, now can I? So we’ll just have to make the best of it. You go do your job and I’ll do mine. One down and five to go.”
With that, he stalked out of his office, heading back for the lab. I followed Baker as far as the reception area, but Emma Jackson wasn’t there. I found her out in the parking lot, pacing back and forth beside the car. She was understandably agitated and upset, but I wondered if there was more to it than that.
“Look,” I said, once we were in the car, “I know how awful all this is for you, but I hope you’re not thinking about turning yourself into a one-woman posse. Forget it.”
“Why should I?”
“Why? Because it’s dangerous, just like Doc Baker said. If you tangle with these creeps, you could be killed too.”
“So?” she asked.
She didn’t say, “What’s the big deal?” but the thought was there, hanging heavily in the air between us. I glanced across the seat. Her slender jaw was set. A single tear glistened in the corner of her eye. The idea of being killed herself didn’t seem to offer much terror to Emma Jackson right about then. In fact, death may have seemed like a reasonable alternative to the ordeal she was facing.
“Things’ll get better,” I said, hoping to offer some comfort. “Don’t think you’ve got nothing left to live for.”
“That’s easy for you to say, Detective Beaumont,” she declared reproachfully. “Your son isn’t lying back there on a stainless steel slab. Mine is.”
There wasn’t a hell of a lot I could say to counter that remark. If Dr. Jackson made up her mind to become personally involved in solving the case, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about that either. My best tactic was to try to derail her by embroiling her in some innocuous aspect of the case. I needed to give her a task assignment so she’d feel as though she was accomplishing something, making a contribution.
“You have connections with all the hospitals around town, haven’t you?”
She shrugged. “I suppose. Why?”
“The first thing you need to do is to get some rest and then you’ll probably need to work on funeral arrangements. But after that, I’d like to ask you to help me.”
“Doing what?”
“By calling each of the hospitals and checking with the various E.R.s to see if any dog-bite victims came through last night.”
“If I find anything out, what makes you think I’ll tell you?”
“You’re not stupid, Dr. Jackson,” I told her bluntly. “If the killers were tough enough to handle Ben Weston, they’d certainly be more than a match for you.”
She seemed to think about it for a moment or two. “I suppose I could do that,” she said eventually. “Check for you, I mean.”
“Good.”
We came to a stoplight. I
dug out one of my cards and scribbled my home number on the back of it. “Call me any time of the day or night and let me know whatever you find out.”
“All right.”
“The department has created a task force to handle this,” I continued. “I’m only assigned to Adam’s part of the case. Later on, I’ll need to interview you in detail and, most likely, so will other members of the team.”
She nodded. “Right,” she said. “I understand.”
“But do me a favor, would you?”
“What’s that?”
“If you talk to someone named Detective Kramer, don’t mention to him that I have you checking with the hospitals for me, would you? He’s a lot more territorial about that kind of thing than I am.”
“I won’t mention it,” she said.
We headed straight back toward her house on Queen Anne Hill. We were turning off Denny Way onto Fifth North when Emma Jackson jumped as though she’d forgotten something important.
“What is it?”
“You said Junior’s all right, but you never told me where he is.”
“With his grandfather,” I told her, “Ben Weston’s father. We turned Junior over to old Mr. Weston early this morning. He came down to the Public Safety Building and picked him up.”
“Really,” she snorted. “Wonders will never cease.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because Ben Weston’s father hated everything about the Seattle Police Department. I’m surprised he’d set foot in that place, even to pick up his grandson.”
“But why?”
“Who knows?” she returned. “I gave up trying to figure out men years ago. There’s no percentage in it.”
The reverse is also true, I almost told her, but I didn’t. Because Emma Jackson had what kids playing tag used to call King’s-X so they couldn’t be caught by whoever it was. Her son was dead and mine wasn’t. She had full permission to say any damned thing she pleased and get away with it.