by J. A. Jance
“Junior, this is Ralph Ames,” I said, introducing them. “He’s a good friend of mine. Ralph, this is Junior Weston. I’m going to have to go back out again for a while, but the two of you will be all right here together.”
He may have been groggy, but Ralph Ames is always quick on his feet. He reached down and shook the boy’s hand. “I’m glad to meet you, Junior,” he said gravely, “but I’m very sorry to hear about what happened to your family.”
“You know about that?” Junior asked wonderingly.
“It’s been in all the newspapers,” Ralph replied. “I’ve been reading about it.”
“Junior’s going to stay with us for a day or two,” I interjected matter-of-factly. “I thought we’d fix up a bed for him on the window seat here in the living room.”
“Sure,” Ralph said. “I can handle that. What’s going on?”
“Big Al’s been hurt. I’ve got to go get Molly.”
“Hurt badly?” I nodded. “You go do whatever you need to do,” Ralph said. “Junior and I will be fine.”
He turned to Junior Weston with the kind of ease and rapport that only people without children of their own can possibly hope to maintain. “Do you like chocolate?”
Junior Weston nodded.
“I think there’s some double fudge chocolate ice cream in the fridge,” Ralph said, leading the child away by the hand. “Let’s go check. Does that teddy bear of yours have a name?”
I left the apartment knowing that Junior Weston was safe and sound and in truly capable hands.
CHAPTER 20
POLICE OFFICERS LIVE WITH THE POSSIBILITY of death every singe shift of every single day. So do police officers’ wives. It goes with the territory.
Molly Lindstrom had been a police officer’s wife for more than eighteen years when I drove over to Ballard to get her and take her to Harborview Hospital. When she came to the door of their working-class-neighborhood home, she was wearing a long flannel nightie with a terry cloth robe thrown hastily over her shoulders. She turned on the porch light and peered out briefly before opening the door. A stricken look passed over her face as soon as she recognized me.
“It’s Allen, isn’t it!” she exclaimed. “Is he all right?”
“They’ve taken him to the hospital, Molly,” I said as gently as possible. “I’ve come to take you there.”
For a long time she stood staring at me uncomprehendingly, saying nothing. “Oh, well then,” she said finally. “Come in. Wait right here while I go get dressed.”
She hurried away, leaving me standing in the vestibule of their small two-story bungalow. The place showed the benefits of having a full-time Scandinavian housewife on the premises. For one thing, it was spotlessly clean, scrupulously so. The hardwood floor gleamed in the muted light of a small, cobweb-free, entryway chandelier. The gently enticing scent of a mouth-watering home-cooked meal lingered somewhere in the background.
Molly Lindstrom was a full-time housewife because that’s the path she and Big Al had chosen together long ago. Now, after years of scrimping to put their second son through college, Molly and Big Al were just beginning to indulge themselves a little. They had talked of shopping for a new couch and chair set for their living room, and Al had asked for my expert opinion on what Molly might think of a surprise Alaskan cruise on the occasion of their thirty-fifth anniversary late in the summer.
All that was in jeopardy now. Big Al, seriously wounded, lay on a hospital gurney when he should have been safe at home and in bed with his wife. He had been off duty, for God’s sake. I was the one who had called him up and put the bug in his ear about Junior Weston possibly being in danger. And I had been right, damnit, but I couldn’t help wishing our places had been reversed, that I had sent myself instead of my partner—my partner and my friend.
“I’m ready,” Molly announced, hurrying in from the bedroom, pulling on and buttoning a heavy hand-knit sweater. “Where is he?”
“Harborview,” I said.
We stepped out onto the porch, and I waited while she locked the dead bolt. “How bad is it?”
“Pretty bad, Molly. He was shot below his vest at very close range. They tell me there’s lots of internal damage.”
She took a deep breath and then straightened her shoulders. “Okay,” she said. “I’m all right now. I promise I’m not going to cry. Let’s go.”
I helped her into the car, helped her fasten the unfamiliar seat belt, wondering why she thought I’d think less of her if she shed tears. I felt like crying myself.
“Do you think I should call the boys, Beau?” she asked as I settled into the driver’s seat beside her.
Plucking the cellular phone out of its holder, I handed it over. “Do it,” I said.
“But shouldn’t I wait until I have some idea of his condition before I call them?”
I knew Gary Lindstrom was working for a truck-leasing company down in California, and Greg, after several months of waiting, had lucked into a job with a prestigious downtown Seattle architectural firm. Of the two, Gary had by far the greater distance to travel.
“I’d call them both, but especially Gary. It’s spring break in several of the school districts right now. He might have trouble getting plane reservations.”
Molly stared blankly at the telephone receiver in her hand. “How do I work this thing?” she asked.
“Punch in the number, just like you would on your regular handset, then punch ‘send.’”
She did. I could tell from the number of beeps that she was taking my advice and calling Gary in California. “It’s late,” she said. “He’ll be worried sick when he hears the phone.”
He ought to be, I felt like saying. This was exactly the kind of worst-case scenario that goes through people’s heads when a ringing telephone jangles them out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night.
“Hello, Gary. It’s your mom. Something’s happened…Yes, it’s Dad. He’s in the hospital. He’s been shot…No, I don’t know how bad it is. I’m just on my way to the hospital right now…Harborview, that’s right. No, I don’t know any of that yet. I’ll call you again as soon as I find out. I’m with Detective Beaumont. Yes, he came to get me. Well, all right. Just a minute.”
She held the phone away from her ear and covered the mouthpiece. “Gary wants to know if you think he should come home.”
“On the first available plane,” I replied at once.
She looked at me for a long moment before taking her hand off the receiver. “He says for you to wait until you hear from me. There’s no sense wasting money on a plane ticket and rushing home if it isn’t really necessary. Flying is so expensive.”
I wanted to contradict her, but mothers have some inarguable prerogatives, especially ones in her precarious position. “If it’s really bad,” Molly Lindstrom was saying calmly to her son, “I’ll call you back and then you can get a reservation. I’ll talk to you again later.”
I already knew it was bad. Molly would have to learn that for herself in her own good time.
She disconnected and handed me back the phone. “What about Greg?” I asked. She tried a second number, the one in Seattle, but no one answered.
I hung up the phone for her, and we rode for a while in silence. Overcome by guilt, I could have handled her yelling at me a whole lot better than her enduring, stoic silence.
“I never should have called him,” I said at last. “I should have gone there myself and left Al out of it completely.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“Someone tried to break into Reverend Walters’s house, tried to get in through a basement window. Al evidently caught him in the act and got shot in the process.”
“The guy was trying to get to Junior?”
“We believe so, yes.”
“Is Junior all right?”
“Yes. He’s fine.”
“Thank God,” she breathed. There was a pause and then she added, “Allen never would have forgiven himself if anything more had h
appened to that little boy. I’m surprised he let the guy get off a shot. I would have shot him myself if I’d had half a chance. Don’t blame yourself, Beau. Allen won’t, and I don’t either.”
We wheeled up to Harborview’s emergency entrance. I paused long enough to let Molly out of the car. “You go in,” I urged. “I’ll find a parking place and be right there.”
I found her a few minutes later upstairs in a surgical floor waiting room. By then Big Al had already been in surgery for almost an hour. We were told it could be as long as two more while they repaired the damage the bullet had done to his intestinal tract.
Molly took that piece of dire news with good grace. “At least he’s still alive,” she said.
Hospital waiting rooms are terrible places. They’re not places where you see the people in extremis. What you do see there is the collateral damage, the people whose lives have been thrown into upheaval and concision by whatever is happening to the person behind the closed door of the operating room, the person under the knife.
They say that with long-married couples, if one partner undergoes surgery, they both do. Molly Lindstrom was quiet and seemingly unruffled, but her usually ruddy complexion was unnaturally pale, her breathing sounded shallow, and she gave every appearance of being in physical pain. I worried about her.
“Don’t you think you should go ahead and call Gary now?” I asked.
She shook her head stubbornly. “Not until after I talk to the doctor and know what’s really going on.”
Sue Danielson showed up about one forty-five A.M., bringing with her two very welcome cups of reasonably fresh coffee.
“How’s it going?” she asked. We had stepped outside the waiting room into the hospital corridor where we could talk with some semblance of privacy.
“He’s still in surgery,” I said. “What are you doing here, besides bringing coffee?”
“Captain Powell wanted me to let you know that as soon as he called her, Janice Morraine came right back down to the Crime Lab and is personally taking charge of the briefcase you and the chief picked up earlier. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Ben Weston’s Day-Timer is nowhere to be found. Neither is his floppy. They never got logged into the evidence inventory.”
“But I saw the Day-Timer myself. Right there on the floor of Ben’s bedroom. It even had his initials on it. How could it disappear like that?”
“Somebody took it. That’s simple enough.”
“Who?”
“Somebody who was there that night along with all the rest of us—one of the investigators, someone from the Crime Lab, who knows?”
I shook my head. I knew most of those people personally, had worked with them for years. “But I don’t want it to be one of them,” I argued. “I don’t want it to be someone I’ve worked with and respected.”
“Too bad, buddy,” Sue Danielson said. “You lose.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Me? I’m headed home for bed. Captain Freeman wants me back in his office by eight A.M. sharp with a complete report on everything I’ve managed to pick up along the way. Considering the commute, eight o’clock isn’t a helluva long time from now. What about you?”
“I’m here for the duration,” I said. “I brought Molly down, and I’m staying until she decides to go home or spend the night or until someone else comes to get her.”
Sue left. After I finished my coffee, I went back into the waiting room. Nothing had changed. I found a quiet corner and settled in to wait and think. What the hell had become of that missing Day-Timer? And where was the floppy disk with its backup files? They had both disappeared for good reason, I decided. Was it because of the computer access code, the one Ben Weston never should have written down at all? Or did the killer’s name appear damningly in one or the other? It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the missing information was vitally important, or it wouldn’t have become necessary to run the risk of making it disappear.
I had no idea where the disk might have been, but I knew for certain that the Day-Timer had been on the bedroom floor, and only a finite number of people had had access to Ben Weston’s bedroom on the night in question. Either the person or persons who had taken the calendar were involved in the murders or they were closely connected to the murderer. Police officers or not, I intended to find them.
With motive a given, who had opportunity? Of all the people on the scene the night Ben Weston died, the Crime Lab people themselves, the ones charged with protecting the chain of evidence, were the ones with the most latitude. After that came the Homicide detectives, followed, in descending order, by everybody from the police photographers right on down to the beat cops.
I was starting to make a mental list when the waiting room door swung open and a doctor walked into the room. He looked around. “Mrs. Lindstrom?” he asked, spying Molly sitting on a couch with her eyes closed and her head resting against the wall behind her.
Instantly she sat up, fully alert. “Yes,” she responded.
“We’re finished. He’s down in the recovery room right now.”
“How is he?”
“Lucky. Very lucky. We’ve repaired the damage as well as we can for the time being. The biggest danger now is that infection will set in. We’ll have to leave the incision open for several days to assure that doesn’t happen, but I think he’s going to be all right.”
“Really?” Molly asked.
“Really.”
Molly smiled weakly and shook her head while tears sprang to her eyes. “I think,” she said slowly, “that now I will cry.” And she did.
Molly stumbled back to the couch, leaving the doctor, who seemed to have something more to say, standing there in the middle of the room, waiting and looking uncomfortable.
Finally he said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Lindstrom, but do you happen to know someone named Beauford, Borland, something like that?”
“Beaumont?” I asked.
“That’s it,” the doctor announced, snapping his fingers. “Beaumont. I’m terrible with names.”
“I’m Detective Beaumont,” I said.
“I have a message for you. I couldn’t believe it. This guy is going to die if we don’t get started doing surgery, but he won’t let the anesthesiologist or anybody else touch him until we promise to take a message. I told him, ‘I’m a doctor, not Western Union,’ but I don’t think he thought it was very funny.”
I didn’t either. “You have a message for me?”
“Sort of. I hope I have this name right. Sanders, Sanderlin? It’s close, but I didn’t have any way to write it down.”
“That’s all? Just a name?”
“No, there was something else too. The name, whatever it is, and the word garage. Does that make sense to you?”
“Not really.”
“Did he maybe leave his car at a garage someplace with someone by the name of Sanders? From the way he insisted on my taking the message, I thought for sure you’d know exactly what he was talking about. He acted like it was a matter of life and death.”
And then, just like in the comics, the lightbulb came on in my head. It was a matter of life and death. Big Al Lindstrom had recognized his assailant and was trying to get word to me as soon as possible. He hadn’t wanted to wait however many hours it would take for him to make it through surgery and out of the recovery room.
Meanwhile, with his message more or less successfully delivered, the doctor had returned to Molly. Gently, he took her by the arm. “If you’d like to come with me, Mrs. Lindstrom, you can see him for just a few minutes.”
They left and I stood there in that mean little waiting room trying to decode Big Al’s message. I couldn’t think of anybody named Sanders in any garage. Like me, Big Al often uses the bus so he doesn’t have to hassle with downtown parking. So it wasn’t a parking garage. And he usually serviced his own cars, so it probably wasn’t a mechanic either. It had to be the department’s garage, the motor pool, but who there was named Sanders?
My first instinct was to go roaring down the hill, crash into the garage, kick ass, and take names later, but that wouldn’t work in this case. And it didn’t make sense, besides. How could a grease monkey from Motor Pool be the mastermind behind a plot that had the entire street gang population of Seattle up in arms? No, I needed to consult with a cooler head on this one, most likely Captain Anthony Freeman himself.
But I was torn. Whatever I did, I couldn’t very well take off and leave Molly Lindstrom stranded there at the hospital. She was only gone for a few minutes. When she returned to the waiting room, she was alone but beaming.
“He’s going to be fine. I’ll call the kids now.”
“Do you want me to take you home?”
“No. I’ll stay here. They said they’ll be moving him out of recovery and into intensive care in a little while. It’s a different waiting room, but they said there are couches where I can sleep if I need to.”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” she replied. “He might wake up and need me. Don’t tell him I told you so, but Allen’s really a big baby when he’s sick.”
“My lips are sealed,” I told her.
Big Al’s dirty little secret was safe with me.
CHAPTER 21
BY THE TIME I LEFT THE HOSPITAL, THERE was no sense in going back by the Walterses’ home. Whatever was happening with the on-site investigation would have been well under way and assigned to someone else. Instead, I headed down the hill to the department with one overriding question still reverberating in my brain. Sanders. Who the hell was Sanders? Try as I might, I couldn’t think of anybody.
Even though it was three o’clock in the morning, press vehicles were a visible presence around the Public Safety Building. What Chief Rankin had called “open season on cops” continued to be the biggest story in town that week. I couldn’t blame the media for chasing after it, but I sure as hell didn’t want to end up being trapped into talking to any of them.