Payment in Kind

by J. A. Jance

  I was on Step 8, and Lars Jenssen's message was clear.

  “Look, Lars,” I said patiently. “You've got it all ass-backwards. I didn't wrong my grandparents, they wronged me, us--my mother and me both. If that happened to Kelly, if my own daughter got pregnant, you can bet I wouldn't throw her to the wolves like that.”

  “Oh?” Lars Jenssen asked.

  And suddenly I had a vision, a flashback of me standing nose to nose with Kelly in Arizona a few months earlier, of my telling her that the young man she had been interested in was nothing but a creep and a bum. In the dim restaurant light my ears reddened at the thought. I wondered if Lars saw them change color, if he had spoken about this because somehow he had direct knowledge about my confrontation with Kelly or if his comments came from the general pool of human experience that goes with being a parent.

  To shut down the discussion, I reached for the check, which Lars Jenssen always insisted on splitting right down to the last penny. “Let's head home, Lars. I've got a case I'm working on.”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I had stumbled into yet another one of Lars Jenssen's pet peeves where J.P. Beaumont was concerned.

  “What time did you go in to work this morning?” he asked, pushing back his chair and taking up the cudgels.

  “A little after seven,” I answered. “Why?”

  “And what time did you quit tonight?”

  “Five. Right around there.”

  “And you're going to work some more tonight? One of the biggest mistakes a man can make is to work too goddamned much. First you drank so much it got you in trouble, and now you're gonna work so much it'll be the same damn thing. Society ain't as hard on workaholics as it is on the other kind, but it's still just as bad for you in the long run, just as hard on your system, you mark my words.”

  The conversation had done a complete circuit. We had gotten beyond the sticky family part of my life. Once more I was able to regard Lars Jenssen's well-intentioned concern as nothing more or less than an amusing, harmless foible.

  “I'll bear that in mind, Lars. Come on.”

  We got up and left. Once outside, we found the air was brittle and cold. Lars paused on the sidewalk outside the restaurant and sniffed the air.

  “It's gonna rain,” he pronounced. “Take maybe a couple of days, but it'll rain like hell.”

  I glanced up. The air was so still and clear that even with the downtown glow washing against the sky, a few faint stars were visible.

  Shaking my head in disbelief, I took him by the arm. “Snow maybe, Lars, but it's too damn cold to rain.”

  He looked at me with a kindly but disparaging glance. “These young kids,” he mumbled. “They don't know nothing about nothing.”

  Me? A young kid? I'd already spent almost twenty years on Seattle's homicide squad, but in Lars Jenssen's vernacular, I was nothing but a misguided young upstart. Chuckling inwardly, I didn't bother to reply.

  We walked home through the biting cold. Even with his cane, Lars Jenssen had little trouble keeping up. He had told me that he used the cane more for balance than anything else, and striding along beside him, I could see that was true. I walked on with him as far as his apartment and then backtracked the single block to my own building.

  There was one lone light blinking on my answering machine. One call had come in. And when I listened to the recording, the voice on it belonged to Detective Paul Kramer.

  “Give me a call,” it said. “It's nine-thirty, but I'm still at the office.”

  At least I wasn't the only workaholic in the crew. As far as I knew, Kramer was married, but he was nonetheless working bachelor's hours. Picking up the phone, I dialed his number. He answered before the second ring.

  “Beaumont here,” I said. “Why the hell are you still working, or did you switch to graveyard without telling me?”

  “I was working on the reports until just a little while ago,” he answered lightly. “But I thought you'd want to know that Baker's finished the autopsies and I can pick them up early tomorrow morning. They actually said I could get them tonight, but it's late, so I said what the hell.”

  “Right. Anything else?”

  “We may have some preliminary stuff from the crime lab by then as well. Other than that, there's not much to tell. You'll be happy to know that our reports are completed and on Sergeant Watkins' desk.”

  I resisted the temptation to say, “Pin a rose on you.” “Good,” I said. “That should make his day.”

  There was a pause, a pregnant pause, as though Kramer had something else to say and couldn't make up his mind to spit it out.

  “What's going on, Kramer? Is there something more?”

  “No, not really. Did you pick up the bomb-threat info from Doris Walker?” Kramer asked.

  “Yes, I got it.”

  “Well? Have you looked at it yet?” Kramer demanded impatiently. “What does it say?”

  Lars Jenssen's warning about becoming a workaholic came back to me. The devil made me decide that in a world of workaholics it was time for an ounce of prevention.

  “No, I haven't looked at it yet, and I'm not going to, either, not until morning. The city doesn't pay enough for me to work twenty-four hours a day, and they don't pay you that much either. We'll go over it in the morning.”

  “Good enough. I'm heading out of here too. See you then.”

  Kramer sounded casual and almost friendly, and phony as hell. “Right,” I said, and put down the phone.

  Nothing of what he'd told me had been important or urgent enough to merit an after-hours phone call, and Detective Kramer and I certainly weren't on the kind of chummy basis that makes for pass-the-time phone calls going back and forth. I couldn't help wondering what the hidden agenda had been in his calling me, but when no obvious answers immediately presented themselves, I let it go and headed for bed.

  What I needed right then more than anything else was a good night's sleep, but that was something easier said than done. Once in bed, I fell asleep within minutes, but shortly after that, some outside noise disturbed me enough to bring me fully awake. After that, I couldn't go back to sleep for any amount of money.

  I tossed and turned, waiting for sleep to return while my guts roiled inside me. That late night chili-burger was at war with my innards, and the roaring battle kept me wide-awake no matter how tired I was.

  I lay there for what seemed like hours, listening to the rumbling of the building's heat pumps on the roof outside my penthouse. No longer were they an anonymous part of the building's white noise. I was consciously aware of them now, aware of the implications behind their presence and absence--heat or cold, comfort or not. The ongoing roar was downright soothing, but I still couldn't sleep.

  For a while I kept my restless brain at bay by focusing on the case, by doing a series of mental lists about what would need to be accomplished the next day--locating the missing Volvo, interviewing the Chambers woman and Maxwell Cole, getting a look at the autopsy results, and talking to the lady at the school district.

  But thinking about the case was really only a futile effort to jam my mental frequencies and hold other more disturbing thoughts at bay. Because Lars Jenssen had, knowingly or not, let one of my very own personal demons out of the jug.

  “Damn you,” I mumbled aloud as I finally drifted off to sleep in the wee hours. Only, it wasn't Lars Jenssen I was thinking about and cursing. It wasn't him I was damning.

  It was that selfish son of a bitch himself--my grandfather, Jonas Piedmont.

  Chapter 10

  That night, for the first time in my life, I dreamed about my grandfather.

  I was in a cemetery, a cold, wind- and rainswept cemetery, not a real one, and not one I'd ever seen before. Across a wide expanse of grass, I could see a wooden casket poised over a newly dug grave, waiting to be lowered into it. Around the grave a group of men, some leaning on picks and shovels, stood waiting and talking.

  Somehow I knew at once that Jonas Piedmont
was lying dead in that coffin. Filled with a terrible and inexplicable urgency, I hurried toward the group of men, rushing because I knew I was late. Long before I could cover the distance between me and the grave, however, the casket began sinking slowly and inevitably into the ground. I shouted for them to wait for me, but instead, they all turned and started throwing dirt onto the vanished coffin.

  I shouted again, pleading in vain for them to stop, but they wouldn't. They kept right on flinging the heavy, wet dirt into the hole in the ground. By the time I reached the group and recognized the men as members of the Regrade Regulars, the grave was completely filled in and slivers of grass were already sprouting up through the muddy ground even as Lars Jenssen himself heaved the last shovelful of dirt onto the grave. When he saw me standing there panting, he leaned on his shovel again, pointing and laughing.

  I fought my way out of the dream and found that the sheet had somehow come loose during the course of that restless night. It was bunched up and wrapped around my neck. I fought my way out of that too, throwing it on the floor beside the bed, and made my way into the bathroom. I didn't need an interpreter to explain that particular dream. What I really needed was a steaming hot shower to wash it away.

  As I shaved, the radio in the bathroom reported that another day had dawned clear and cold. There was a slight warming trend, all the way up into the low twenties--a big help for Belltown Terrace's heat pumps, which still rumbled away outside--but the slightly higher temperatures wouldn't make things that much better for anything else.

  I was glad not to have to pay attention while the announcer went through the long list of school closures that would extend holiday vacations for most Puget Sound youngsters for yet another day. And I was relieved to hear that no new incidents of sled/vehicular fatalities had occurred the day before.

  Armed with a cup of coffee, I stood at my living room window gazing across the snowwrapped city. From the penthouse level of Belltown Terrace, the snow-covered hillsides still looked picture-pretty, but that sense of beauty changed drastically once it was closer at hand.

  Down on street level, standing outside in it, shivering in snow up to my calves, that seemingly pristine white stuff took on a hard and brittle texture. It was dirty and crusted over by the mottled leavings of sanding crews. I waited for the bus in front of Belltown Terrace.

  With a badge and ID, police ride free on city buses. “Pray for rain,” the driver of the overloaded Metro bus told me with a cheerful grin as he glanced at my badge. “Rain's the only thing that's going to help.”

  I was sure that was true, but despite Lars Jenssen's prediction to the contrary, that morning's biting cold didn't make rain a likely possibility.

  The slow-moving bus was jammed to the gills. The almost carefree holiday attitude from the day before was completely gone, wiped out by that second frigid morning. There was no lighthearted camaraderie and banter among the people pressed together in the hot, steamy bus. Those few who did talk were mostly weary mothers, comparing the logistics of hastily arranged child care. Along with unaccustomed heavy-duty coats, gloves, and scarves, people wore frowns of grim determination. This was winter, real winter for a change, and the grownups of Seattle weren't having any fun.

  Once on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building, I went directly to my cubicle, opened Doris Walker's envelope, and dragged out the bomb-threat folder, which, out of deference to Lars Jenssen, I hadn't even cracked open before coming to work.

  There in my office, I read through it quickly. According to the file, there had been a total of seven threats in all, starting and ending back during the teachers' strike at the beginning of the school year earlier that fall. Most had come in at night or on weekends, two by phone on the district's answering machine and the others wrapped around rocks and tossed through plate-glass windows. All of them had targeted the school district administration office itself.

  Despite seven thorough searches, no bombs had ever been found. After the first one, round-the-clock security guards had been instituted at the office complex on Queen Anne Hill. That surveillance continued for some time, even though the threats themselves had ceased about the same time striking teachers had returned to work. Now, several months later, round-the-clock coverage had been replaced by two consecutive after-hours shifts.

  I was surprised to learn that each of the several incidents had indeed been reported to the school authorities and then passed on to the proper personnel at the Seattle Police Department. The report specifically mentioned the names of several members of the Fraud and Explosive squad. Try as I might, I couldn't remember anything at all about the case coming through official departmental pipelines. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, had there been any mention about it in the media. That seemed odd to me. Local school district bomb threats are always big news, but these seemed to have fallen into a black hole without a single reporter noticing. I wondered why.

  I don't pretend to understand media people, and when I need help in that department, I always turn to Ron Peters, the man who was my partner until a permanent back injury made his return to regular duty as a homicide detective a physical impossibility. Back on the job after months of hospital treatment and rehabilitation, Peters was now ensconced, not entirely happily, in his new job with the Media Relations Department.

  Unfortunately, when I called down to talk to him, Peters was closeted in that champion bureaucratic waster of time--a morning-long meeting. He was there, and so was everyone else from his unit. Did I want to leave a message?

  I've long held the revolutionary belief that if all staff meetings in the world were totally abolished overnight, not only would civilization as we know it survive, it would actually thrive.

  “No,” I said. “I'll call back.”

  My next call was to the F & E squad itself, where I reached Detective Lyle Cummings, affectionately known around the department as Officer Sparky.

  Lyle Cummings had been plain old Lyle Cummings for his first eight years at Seattle P.D. The Sparky handle had come to him in midcareer as the result of an unfortunate incident in which Lyle and his partner, Dave Cooper, had been out test-driving the department's brand-new$150,000 bomb-disposal truck. Crossing the Spokane Street Bridge, a missing three-cent grommet caused an electrical short circuit in the radio wiring. Unable to summon help, the truck wound up as a smoldering ruin parked in the far righthand lane of the West Seattle Freeway.

  When the smoke cleared from around the charred remains and when the dust settled on all the paperwork, it turned out that the damage to the vehicle was completely covered under the truck's original warranty, but the damage to Cummings' name and reputation proved to be permanent. The “Sparky” handle was liberally applied, and it stuck. Cummings managed the teasing with a combination of humor and good grace.

  “Hello, Sparky. This is Beaumont from Homicide,” I said.

  “Top of the morning, Beau,” he said. “What can we do for you?”

  “I'm calling about the school district bomb threats.”

  Instantly his tone became markedly guarded. “School district bomb threats? What do you know about that?” he demanded.

  “Not much, but I've got the file right here and…”

  “What the hell are you doing with it? That file's not supposed to be out of this office.”

  “Hold on,” I countered. “I don't have your file, Spark. I have the school district's file.”

  There was a long pause before he said, “Ouch. Me and my big mouth. I guess I blew it, didn't I?”

  “You could say that,” I returned lightly, knowing I had him dead to rights, but I didn't rub it in. “Look, I'm working yesterday's school district case. That file of yours may have something to do with it.”

  “You mean the suicide/homicide? How could it? I got the distinct impression from what I read in the paper this morning that it was some kind of love-triangle thing. What does that have to do with bomb threats?”

  “Beats me,” I answered, “but it's out job to
check all the angles. I want to see that file. ASAP.”

  There was another long, thoughtful pause. “Hang tight, Beau. I'll see what I can do and get back to you.”

  Ten minutes later Detective Cummings appeared in my cubicle, file in hand.

  “I got the word from upstairs,” he said, handing it over to me. “You can look at it all you want, but only while I'm here. You can take notes if you like, but nothing gets copied, and nothing gets taken out.”

  “Wait just a goddamned minute here,” I objected. “What is this? I'm a homicide detective working a case and I can't have unlimited access to one of Seattle P.D.'s own files?”

  Sparky shrugged. “It's the best we can do under the circumstances. If you'd like a word of friendly advice, I wouldn't make too many waves about it either. Rumor has it that some of the brass are getting their chains yanked real good on this one by person or persons unknown. My guess is it's somebody important from across the street.”