by J. A. Jance
“What’s going on?” I asked the officer stationed in the lobby.
“Press conference,” he answered.
“At this hour of the morning?”
He shook his head. “Why not? All those people are up anyway—Chief Rankin, Detective Kramer, and all those crazy reporters. They could just as well keep each other company and stay out of everyone else’s hair.”
I nodded sympathetically. My sentiments exactly. Luckily, I made it into the elevator without running into anyone. But then, when it came time to push the button, I took a wild notion to go upstairs and see if Captain Freeman was still around. I skipped 5 and punched 11 instead.
When the elevator door opened, I saw that the receptionist’s desk was empty, but the door into Freeman’s office was propped open with a chair. A reading light glowed from inside.
“Who is it?” he called as I stepped into the lobby.
“Detective Beaumont,” I answered.
“Come on in.”
I stepped to the inner door. Captain Freeman didn’t bother to get up. With his tie loosened and shirt sleeves rolled up, he sat at his desk, laboring over that same, much-used yellow pad I had seen earlier. In a world that has gone overboard for computers, I have to respect a guy who hasn’t jumped on the latest technological bandwagon.
As I walked in, he put down his pen and rubbed his eyes. “Good to see you, Beau. How’s Detective Lindstrom?”
“The doc says he thinks he’s going to make it. He came through the surgery all right.”
“Great.”
“By the way,” I said, easing myself into one of the several chairs that still littered the office. “I didn’t log in. Do you want me to?”
Freeman smiled wearily. “Hell with it. I didn’t either. That’s a good piece of work on the Day-Timer and the floppy, Beau. I’m following up right now, as a matter of fact.”
“You found them?”
“No, but I’m working on a list of possibles—all the people I’ve been able to verify who were actually there in Ben Weston’s house the night of the murders. Unfortunately, it’s a very long list.”
As far as I’m concerned, making lists and checking them twice is a line that has nothing to do with “Here Comes Santa Claus.” They’re words to live by in the crime-solving business.
I nodded. “Good. I would have done that myself eventually, but I’ve been too busy. While you’re at it, I’ve got another name for you. The doctor who performed Big Al’s surgery gave it to me while Al was in the recovery room. He said that crazy Norwegian bastard wouldn’t let them start doing surgery on him until one of the doctors agreed to bring me the message.”
Captain Freeman sat up and picked up his pen, holding it poised over the paper. “Who?”
“That’s the thing, I’m not sure. The doctor couldn’t quite remember the name. He said it was something like Sanders or Sanderlin. Those were his two choices, and I don’t recognize either one. And I don’t know how accurate the doctor is. He thought my name was Beaufort. Whatever the name is, the guy supposedly has something to do with a garage, maybe even Motor Pool.”
Freeman frowned. “Sanders? Sanderlin? Neither one of those rings a bell.” Nevertheless, he wrote both names down on his list, tying them together with a two-line parenthesis.
“I want this guy,” he said quietly. “I want him in the very worst way. The people of this city are all up in arms. In fact, I just got a look at tomorrow morning’s…this morning’s Post Intelligencer. Maxwell Cole is raising the roof because, according to him, Seattle PD is doing nothing to put a stop to the gangs that are running rampant in the streets and endangering the lives of the ordinary and innocent citizens of this community. As a matter of fact, I seem to remember a quote from Detective J.P. Beaumont in the article.”
“More likely a misquote,” I said.
He smiled ruefully. “What I’m getting at, is they still don’t know the half of it. Once the people of Seattle hear rumors to the effect that Ben Weston may have been tainted and that we’re investigating fellow police officers in regard to the Weston murders, there’s going to be hell to pay, but I say bring it on and let’s get it over with.
“Whatever is behind it—payoffs, protection—may have happened on my watch, Detective Beaumont, but I’m telling you it’s going to get fixed on my watch as well. I’ve spoken to Ken Rankin. From what the gang members said, this protection racket must have been going on for some time, since long before Chief Rankin came on the scene. But at least now we know about it, and I want it stopped. I want everyone connected with it brought to justice.”
He stopped speaking suddenly and stared up at the darkened ceiling above his head. “No,” he said. “That just doesn’t make sense, not any at all.”
Freeman is one of those rare people who has mastered the art of mental time-sharing and can think about more than one thing at a time. I had trouble keeping up.
“What doesn’t make sense?”
“The Motor Pool. Someone who worked there wouldn’t have enough connection with the department’s day-to-day investigative activities to be able to provide that much valuable information. In order to make a protection racket pay off, you have to offer valuable and accurate intelligence. So maybe someone there is involved, but we have to look for someone else as well, someone higher up in the departmental hierarchy who would have some idea of what was happening on the various squads in different parts of the city. They’d need to know that in order to warn the gangs away from locations targeted for increased enforcement.”
“So you’re saying someone in Patrol or perhaps in Investigations?”
“At least. Here’s the list so far. Take a look at it and see if I left anybody off.”
Freeman’s list was a Who’s Who of the Medical Examiner’s Office, the Crime Lab, and the Homicide Squad of Seattle PD. The names were there, all of them glaringly familiar.
“It makes you sick to think about it, doesn’t it?” he said, as my eyes traveled slowly down the list.
“Yes,” I agreed. “It certainly does.”
“So what are we going to do about it?”
“Can we get a list of everybody in Motor Pool?”
“Good idea,” Tony Freeman said, “I should have thought of that myself.”
He picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Hi, Kyle. How’s it going?” He listened for a moment before saying, “Good work. Keep after it. How are you doing on the car question?” Again there was a pause. “Sure, I understand that one’s tricky, but we may have a way around it. Can you get me a printout of everyone assigned to Motor Pool? Right, mechanics, clerks, everybody. Sure, if the other one is taking too much time, bring this one down as soon as you can. We’ll work on that in the meantime.”
Freeman put down the phone. “Kyle Lehman’s working on Ben’s hard drive, but he says it’s not all straightforward. He’s having to plow through a lot of junk to see if he can find that deleted file. He says he can bring up the Motor Pool list in just a few minutes.”
Within fifteen minutes Kyle himself appeared in the office door, bringing with him a hard copy of the Motor Pool list which he dropped casually on Tony Freeman’s desk. The captain picked up the list and began studying it while Kyle lounged against the doorjamb, alternately munching another bag of chips and yet another apple. The guy must have a tape-worm.
“What I want to know is how someone got into Ben Weston’s directory in the first place,” Kyle muttered. That was his area of responsibility, and his feathers were still ruffled that someone had managed to crack his supposedly secure system.
Tony Freeman looked up at him. “My guess is that whoever killed him found Ben’s computer access code in his Day-Timer. Then, if they could lay hands on a copy of Ben’s personnel record, say, they’d have the answers to many of the possible verification questions, wouldn’t they?”
“But he wasn’t supposed to write the damn number down anywhere. I tell everybody that, over and over.”
“Have y
ou ever looked at Ben Weston’s file?” Tony Freeman asked mildly.
“When would I have had time?” Kyle Lehman returned. “I’ve been running my ass off ever since I left here.”
“The man was evidently mildly dyslexic,” Freeman continued. “He did a good job of compensating for it, but remembering random letters and numbers was something he couldn’t do.”
“Oh,” Kyle grunted, and left abruptly, taking his apple core with him. Freeman returned to the computer printout of the people in Motor Pool. He had started with the last page first because that was the one that contained the part where I calculated the S’s should have been, and he passed the page along as soon as he finished. There was no Sanders, Sanderlin, Sanford, or Saunders. The Motor Pool’s alphabetized list skipped directly from Rudolph to Simms without anything in between.
“Looks like we struck out,” I said, giving up.
But Captain Freeman is a lover of lists as well as a maker of same. He went to the very beginning page and hunkered down over it, reading through it name by name from square one. His finger moved steadily down the page, then suddenly he stopped and looked up at me.
“How does the name Sam Irwin grab you?”
I shrugged. “It’s not Sanders, but the doctor said he was terrible with names. I, for one, happen to believe him. Sam Irwin sounds good to me.”
Freeman picked up his phone again. “I need a set of personnel records,” he said. “The guy’s name is Samuel V. Irwin, and he’s a mechanic in Motor Pool.”
Secretarial types aren’t exactly plentiful in the middle of the night and it was almost four o’clock in the morning, but Freeman had his ace in the hole, Kyle Lehman, who could, at the drop of a keystroke, present him with a copy of almost any piece of paper churned out by the police bureaucracy. Suddenly, I had a far better understanding of how Tony Freeman could continue using his outdated yellow pad. With Kyle’s expertise available at a moment’s notice, Tony had the best of both worlds.
Once more Kyle showed up, bringing along a several-page document. He tossed it onto Freeman’s desk. “I’m getting a little tired of being a messenger service,” he complained, but Freeman wasn’t listening. His eyes were already scanning down the top page. They stopped halfway down.
“Got him!” he breathed.
“What is it?”
“Look at this.”
He handed me the papers, and I looked straight at the part where it seemed Tony Freeman’s eyes had stopped scanning, and there it was in black and white in a section headed Previous Employment. The words said United States Marines, Hand-to-Hand Combat Instructor.
“Silent kills,” Tony Freeman said grimly. “The United States Marines wrote the book on those.”
“Why’s somebody like that working as a mechanic in Motor Pool?”
“That’s the next thing you and I are going to find out,” Freeman told me. “You, actually. Use Connie’s phone.” Obligingly, I stepped outside to the other desk.
When Pacific daylight time hits Seattle early in April, it takes away big chunks of our hard-earned mornings and turns them back into night. In exchange we receive longer evenings that are great for Little League baseball and not much else. However, on that particular morning when I started my phone search at four-fifteen A.M., I was glad to find that the East Coast was already up and running.
I don’t know how Ralph Ames does it, but he always manages to ease his way through incredible tangles of bureaucracy and come out unscathed and victorious on the other side. I guess I ought to sit down with him and take lessons. My style tends to send me butting up against all manner of official-dom—in this case with representatives of the United States Marine Corps.
The young clerk I wound up talking to eventually was unfailingly polite. He did tell me that after eight years in the military, Samuel V. Irwin had been dismissed with a general discharge. A general discharge isn’t as bad as a dishonorable one, but it isn’t so very good either, and after eight years of service, the infraction must have been pretty bad for the Marines to toss Irwin out on his ear.
“How come?” I asked, wondering if knowing that would explain why Sam Irwin was working in Seattle PD’s Motor Pool and not someplace else. “What did he do?”
“I’m not allowed to divulge that information, sir,” the clerk replied. “Not without a court order.”
“But this is a homicide investigation,” I objected.
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir, but the rules are very explicit.”
Arguing made no difference, and neither did my going over his head. Frustrated, I headed back into Captain Freeman’s office, where he, too, was just finishing a telephone call. “Look at this,” he said, pushing his yellow pad across the desk so I could see it. Most people scribble notes to themselves. Freeman printed his in a rapid but letter-perfect style.
“That’s from Motor Vehicles,” he said, pointing at the bottom notation. “Sam Irwin owns a 1989 Toyota Tercel. What do you think of that?”
“Bingo,” I said.
He nodded. “Bingo,” he repeated, but he didn’t sound the least bit happy.
I couldn’t understand it. If Irwin’s Toyota Tercel proved to be white, it might provide a pretty convincing link to the Weston case, especially if Irwin ended up matching the physical description of the driver Bob Case had seen skulking around the Weston neighborhood.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “This looks like progress to me.”
Freeman got up and paced to the windows, where he stood looking out at the cleaning crew working away in the high rise across the street.
“At this point, I usually turn a case over,” he said thoughtfully. “So far, everything we have is entirely circumstantial. There certainly isn’t probable cause to make an arrest right now, but there is enough to prompt further investigation. The problem is, nobody from Motor Pool was at Ben Weston’s house the night of the murder. That means, if Irwin is in it, he’s not alone.”
I nodded. It made perfect sense to me.
He drew a deep breath. “So for now, it’s you and me and Detective Danielson. Let’s go.”
He rolled down his shirtsleeves and started putting on his jacket.
“Where?” I asked.
“We’re going to pay a call on Sam Irwin’s residence. He’s not working tonight. I already checked. Where are you parked?”
“On the street.”
“Good. We’ll take your car. I’m in the garage.”
Which is how my 928 got drafted into service for the Seattle Police Department one more time. Neither one of us thought to check with Kyle Lehman before we left the building. In fact, we probably passed each other in the elevator.
He was coming to bring us printed copies of all the deleted but still retrievable files in Ben Weston’s computer. If he had bothered to track us down at the time, it might have helped, but now that the mystery of his broken security system was solved, we had lost both Kyle’s sense of urgency and his interest. He could have reached us by pager, if he had tried. He could have called us on my cellular phone. But he didn’t.
And maybe it’s just as well.
CHAPTER 22
AT FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, THE SKY was beginning to brighten over the Cascades as we made our way out of the Public Safety Building. While we had been preoccupied with tracking things down on the eleventh floor, Chief Rankin’s early-morning press conference had evidently concluded, sending both the reporters and their quarry to ground and leaving my Porsche parked in lonely splendor on the street.
Sam Irwin’s address was on the east side of Lake Washington. I don’t subscribe to the common downtown Seattleite’s notion that intelligent life ceases at the entrance to the Mount Baker Tunnel, but I do know better than to venture into the wilds of the Eastside without a precautionary map. Once in the car, we flipped on the reading lamp and pored over my latest edition of the Thomas Brothers Guide. Irwin’s address seemed to be within the confines of Beaux Arts, an exclusive little enclave on the banks of
Lake Washington. I had never been there, but I knew it to be a separate governmental entity located entirely within the boundaries of its much larger neighbor, the city of Bellevue.
We headed out. After putting in another almost round-the-clock shift, I should have been dead on my feet, but we were on the scent now, circling ever closer to some real answers. That knowledge kept me energized, focused, and alert, carrying me forward as surely as did the powerful engine of my 928.
With me driving and with Tony Freeman in charge of navigation, we headed east toward a recently opened stretch of I-90—the new Mercer Island floating bridge. Lights and siren weren’t an option, but we were making good time until we hit the tunnel. There eastbound traffic was coned down to two lanes, making way for construction vehicles and equipment parked in the far right-hand lane of the new bridge in support of the crews of workmen busily sandblasting guardrails and pavement off the old bridge deck. Now, in preparation for bringing out an additional piece of oversized equipment, a flagger brought traffic to a complete stop.
In typical type-A fashion, I fumed and pounded the steering wheel while Tony Freeman remained seemingly unruffled.
“So who’s the mastermind behind all this?” I asked. “And was Ben Weston in on it and one or more of the others decided to get rid of him?”
“Ben Weston wasn’t in on it,” Tony Freeman said quietly.
It was one of those times when somebody jolts you, but it takes a second or two to get the message. “You sound pretty certain about that.”
“Ben was working for IIS.”
I’m sure my jaw dropped a foot. “He was?”
“He came to me last summer when he started hearing word on the streets about the payoffs. He was the one who suggested he transfer into the gang unit.”
“But you engineered it?”
“That’s right.”
“So he wasn’t really in trouble on Patrol?”
“We made it look like it. We were both hoping the crooks would invite him to join them. It just didn’t work out that way.”