by J. A. Jance
I found a parking place on Cherry and trudged half a block in the wrong direction to find the applicable pay station, grumbling to myself the whole way about the loss of old-fashioned parking meters. They might have eaten every bit of change out of your pocket in the blink of an eye, but at least they were right there by your car. You didn’t have to go searching for them.
I was back on Boren and about to walk through the automatic doors into the lobby, when Harry hailed me by name. Turning, I saw his wheelchair parked some fifty feet away from the door under a bus-stop-like shelter designed to keep smokers away from the building and out of the rain, at least, if not out of the cold. I had wheeled him up there more than once, so he could have a smoke.
Coming closer, I saw that Harry wasn’t alone. Standing nearby was Marge Herndon herself, the hoyden who had looked after me during my bout with postsurgical rehab. She was smoking like a chimney, and so was Harry. He looked happier than I’d seen him in months.
“Hey,” he said, waving his burning cigarette in her direction. “Thanks for putting me in touch with Margie here. She came by just now to introduce herself. She got here a few minutes early. The woman is a gem.”
Are you kidding? They’d barely been introduced, and Harry was already calling her Margie? I had known the woman for months without ever getting beyond the basic Nurse Ratched stage. And he thought she was a “gem”? I regarded the woman as an absolute terror, one who had run roughshod over me for what had seemed like months rather than weeks.
I nodded in Marge’s direction. “Good to see you,” I said.
“Same here,” she muttered tersely in a way that told me that even though Harry had scored big with her, I had not.
I knew in that moment that, once again, Mel had been right, and I was wrong. In the course of a single cigarette, or maybe two, Marge Herndon had Harry I. Ball eating out of her hand.
It was enough to piss off the Good Fairy.
Clearly, since Marge and Harry were getting along like gangbusters, my planned introduction as well as my continued presence weren’t required. I chatted for a few minutes, then, excusing myself, I found my car, complete with paid-for-but-unused parking time, and made my way down the hill to I-5, where I headed north.
JIM HUNT HAD located three possible contractors for us. This one, Don Hastings, the last one on the list, lived in Smoky Point, a tiny ex-burb north of Everett.
Don had done jobs for Jim Hunt several times in the past, and he and his people had done quality work. He had also handled projects in towns stretching from Everett all the way to the Canadian border. That meant he had contacts and working relationships with people in planning departments from here to there. Those connections were bound to streamline the permitting process. More to the point, he had a crew based in Arlington that was finishing up one job and would be ready to tackle another within a matter of weeks.
We’d taken proposals from the two other construction outfits—so we had three estimates altogether. Jim had warned us that the one from Hastings would most likely come in as the priciest one of the three in terms of up-front cost, but I’ve learned over time that you get what you pay for. And I’d already made up my mind to sign on the dotted line long before I found my way to Don’s office, located in a converted garage next to his residence on the outskirts of town. I stayed long enough to meet the man in person and write a deposit check that would put the wheels in motion, then I headed north again, leaving Don and Jim Hunt huddled together over a stack of plans spread out across a drafting table.
Once on I-5, I tried calling Mel to let her know the deed was done, but when her phone went straight to voice mail, I didn’t bother leaving a message. She was probably busy, and I’d be there soon enough to give her the news in person.
Although I was glad to have the project out of my hands and in the care and keeping of a competent professional, I was a little blue about it, too. I had been so preoccupied with dealing with the housing issues that I’d had little time to think about what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
Between my years at Seattle P.D. and the ones with S.H.I.T., I’d spent almost all my adult life in law enforcement. It’s not just a career. It’s a mind-set and a way of life. There are far too many stories out there of ex-cops who, having pulled the plug on working, end up taking their own lives. Of course, that wouldn’t be me. For starters, I had Mel. I was determined to spend every possible moment with her. She had her own career path now—a complicated career path—but what the hell was I supposed to do with my spare time? Take up golf, for Pete’s sake? That seemed to be working for my friend, Ralph Ames who, along with his wife, Mary, was now living—and golfing—at a development called Pebble Creek which is somewhere in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Ralph had tried unsuccessfully to interest me in golfing. It just didn’t take.
Twenty miles out of Bellingham, I dialed Mel’s number again. This time I did leave a message. “Hey,” I said. “I signed the contract with Don Hastings. Things moved faster than I expected. Since I’m sort of in the neighborhood, I thought I’d see if we could grab a quick late lunch. Call me when you have time. I’m about twenty minutes out.”
It was frustrating to know that Mel was in a complicated situation at work and that, other than offering her moral support, there was little I could do about it. As far as I could tell, Mel’s tenure as chief had been completely devoid of a honeymoon period. It had become clear all too soon that Mel’s selection by the city council and city manager had been made over the mayor’s strenuous objections. Mayor Adelina Kirkpatrick was a typical small-time politician. The mayor was a lifelong Bellingham resident who knew where all the bodies were buried while Mel was new to town. Mel had learned that the mayor had fully expected Assistant Chief Austin Manson to be handed the job of chief, a move that had been thwarted by both the city manager and the city council. That meant Mel’s relationship with the mayor had started out on the wrong foot and had stayed that way.
Midway through Mel’s second week in office, there had been an officer-involved shooting in Bellingham at a lowlife bar on the waterfront, a rough place called the Fish Bowl. For most of my working life, that term—the Fish Bowl— had referred to the window-lined office on the fifth floor of Seattle’s Public Safety Building where Homicide Captain Larry Powell long held sway. So the irony of the bar’s name touched my funny bone. On the surface, the shoot-out shouldn’t have been all that serious. For one thing, nobody died.
Mel had been locked up in a meeting with the mayor and the city manager at the time of the incident. At the mayor’s insistence, pagers and other electronic devices were not allowed inside her office. That struck me as odd all by itself. I warned Mel that anyone that concerned about electronic eavesdropping was either a conspiracy freak or else s/he had something to hide. As far as Mayor Kirkpatrick was concerned, it might have been a little of both.
Some people stream music on their phones and tablets. Once Mel ended up in Bellingham, I spent a lot of time tuned into a radio station there. I also programmed my iPad so breaking news alerts from there would be sent to me as they occurred. The day of the shooting, with Mel locked in the mayor’s office, I knew about the incident before she did. As soon as the news alert showed up on my screen, my heart went to my throat. As police chief, Mel shouldn’t have been out on any kind of patrol, still I didn’t breathe easier until I had called her office, checked with her secretary, and learned that Mel was still upstairs in a meeting. Whew!
Over the course of time—that day and subsequent ones—the details emerged. A young cop, Officer Dale Embry, had been patrolling the waterfront area when a guy came running out of the Fish Bowl and flagged him down, alerting him to a developing domestic-violence situation inside the bar. Embry radioed for backup then hurried inside. The bartender’s estranged and enraged husband, armed with a butcher knife, was threatening to murder his soon-t
o-be-former wife and anyone stupid enough to get in his way.
Embry entered the premises with his weapon already drawn. When Embry told the guy to drop his knife, the guy swung around and started for him. I know firsthand that when you’re facing an assailant armed with a knife, you’re caught in a chaotic situation, and you’re not exactly thinking straight. Adrenaline is pumping; your heart is hammering off the charts, and you’re hoping to God it’s not your last day on planet earth.
Embry pulled the trigger. The shot should have taken the guy down. It didn’t, but only because someone else took him down first. One of the customers, armed with a barstool, clobbered the irate husband and put him on the floor. The only other casualty turned out to be the mirror behind the bar, which shattered into a million pieces.
The assailant was knocked out cold. An ambulance was summoned and hauled him off to the ER with a possible concussion. When departmental supervisors arrived on the scene, a group that ultimately included Assistant Chief Manson, Officer Embry was sent home on administrative leave.
In officer-involved shootings where a weapon is discharged, administrative leave is standard procedure. When Mel came out of her meeting, however, and learned it was a done deal, she was not pleased. Yes, she hadn’t had her pager along in the meeting, but she was offended that Manson hadn’t bothered to come upstairs himself or even send someone up to let her know about the incident while it was still unfolding. She took the position that, by issuing the leave order himself, Manson had undercut her authority.
In the heat of the moment, she had called Assistant Chief Manson out about it and given him a dressing-down. Later on that day, she paid a call at Officer Embry’s home, encouraging him to use his leave time constructively in a way that would turn him into a better cop. After that visit, she had attempted to apologize to Manson, but he wasn’t having any of it. The damage was done. Manson was pissed, and apparently he planned to stay that way.
The problem was, I could see both sides of the issue. This was a routine situation and a routine call on Manson’s part. If Mel had been a more seasoned chief, she wouldn’t have felt compelled to assert her authority in such a heavy-handed fashion. Perhaps she shouldn’t have reacted the way she did initially, but now it was too late. Rather than having Manson as an ally, she had turned the man into a sworn enemy.
When Mel had accepted the job, I think she had imagined herself as being the kind of skilled leader Ross Connors had always been. The problem was, when it came to building S.H.I.T., Ross Connors had been able to go out and handpick the people he wanted on his team. It had been an older, wiser, and dedicated group, with little, if any, deadweight. In her new department, Mel didn’t have the luxury of handpicking her people. She had to work with what was already there.
Two months later, Embry was back from his leave. Due to the Fish Bowl incident, Mel was stuck with both an extremely loyal but peach-fuzzed young cop and a grizzled veteran who wouldn’t give her the time of day and didn’t miss a trick when it came to badmouthing Mel behind her back. In terms of departmental morale, guess which one carries more weight?
One evening, over dinner, I had made the tactical error of venturing an opinion on the subject. As a result, Assistant Chief Manson was no longer a topic of conversation between Mel and me. He was the elephant in the room—the taboo place where neither of us dared to tread.
I was coming up on the Fairhaven exit when I tried Mel’s phone one last time. By then, I was slightly annoyed. Obviously, my idea of treating her to a surprise lunch wasn’t going to happen. Consequently, I turned on the directional signal. Exiting the freeway, I left another message.
“You’re probably too busy for lunch,” I said. “There’s no sense in my coming down to the department and being under hand and foot. I’m turning off at Fairhaven. I’ll wait at the house until you get cut loose. Maybe I can take you out to dinner instead of lunch. If you’re really lucky, you might even talk me into spending the night.”
I drove over to Bayside and down the steep driveway that leads to our house. Mel’s Porsche Cayman was tucked in behind a massive construction Dumpster that had taken over a big portion of the concrete slab that had once been a detached garage. The rest of the garage structure, afflicted by a terminal case of dry rot, had been red-flagged as a hazard, knocked down, and the splintered remains hauled away during the first week of our renovation efforts. Mel had worried that perhaps it was an omen about the inadvisability of the entire project. Jim Hunt had attempted to reassure her by explaining that in sixty-year-old wood-frame buildings, dry rot was simply the natural order of things, especially in the rainy Pacific Northwest.
I wasn’t surprised to find her car parked there. Mel had told me that when things got too stressful at work, she’d grab a sandwich from Subway and drive out to our place, where she would eat lunch in her car, take a few deep breaths, and relieve the pressure by watching the birds out on the bay. I suspected that once the workers showed up, and construction kicked into high gear, parking there for lunch wouldn’t be nearly as peaceful.
Given all that, I half expected to see her sitting in the car, but she wasn’t, so I walked on down to the front of the house and stepped up onto the sagging front porch. The door was locked, so I used the key and stepped inside.
“Mel?” I called into the echoing skeletal shell. “Are you here?”
She wasn’t. The house was empty. Leaving the front door ajar, I went back outside and walked across the sloping front yard until I came to a halt at the fence that marked the end of our property.
“Mel?” I called down the bluff, “where are you?” Again, there was no answer.
Mel is physically fit, but clambering around on a steep hillside even in a uniform and low heels didn’t seem in character unless, of course, someone else had been in trouble. Then all bets were off. For the first time, I felt the smallest frisson of concern.
“Mel,” I called again, shouting this time. I peered off down the bank. At the condo in Seattle, we keep two pairs of binoculars parked on the sill next to the window seat. We used them for occasional bits of bird-watching, for viewing the Fourth of July Fireworks, and occasionally, during snowstorms, for being entertained while watching hapless drivers attempt to make their fender-bender way up and down Broad. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a pair of binoculars here with me now at a time and place where I really needed them.
If a boat had overturned, I knew Mel would have wanted to lend a hand, but it seemed unlikely that she would have gone down the bank on foot. It seemed far more reasonable that she would have used her phone to summon help. Besides, there was no sign of wreckage out on the water or on the steep bank at the water’s edge. And no sign of life either—no sign of movement.
There was a rough, steep trail that ran in breathtaking switchbacks down to the water. It might have been usable by mountain goats, but I didn’t think it was something that should be tackled by an old codger with a pair of fake knees. When I walked over to the path and studied it closely, I saw no sign of any recent footprints. If Mel had gone down the bluff, she hadn’t used the path.
I stood up and looked down at the bay again. There was a stiff wind blowing in off the water. The sky above may have been a robin’s egg blue, but the sea itself was gray-green and dotted with rolling whitecaps. It looked dangerous—and threatening.
Genuinely worried now and still staring down the hillside for any sign of movement, I plucked my phone out of my pocket and dialed Mel’s cell phone again—with predictable results. The call went straight to voice mail. Then I dialed Mel’s office, not her direct line, but the one that was usually answered by Kelly, the receptionist stationed just outside Mel’s door.
“Is Chief Soames in?” I asked when Kelly answered. “This is her husband calling.”
“No, she isn’t here,” Kelly answered, “and I’m a little surprised. She was supposed to do a live radio
interview at one. I’ve tried calling her cell, but she doesn’t answer. It’s not like her to miss an appointment like this.”
No it’s not, I thought grimly. “If you do hear from her,” I said aloud, “ask her to give me a call.”
Before ringing off, I gave Kelly my cell-phone number, then I hurried back up the hill. Ignoring the wide-open front door, I headed straight for the back of the house and to the spot where the cars were parked, with mine directly behind hers. Some ancient cop instinct must have kicked in. As I approached her vehicle, rather than grabbing the door handle and pulling it open, I bent down and shaded my face enough so I could peer inside.
That’s when my heart almost came to a stop. Mel’s purse lay half-open on the passenger seat. Next to it lay an unopened Subway sandwich—her favorite, no doubt, tuna with jack cheese and jalapeños. Next to the sandwich, I caught sight of what looked like the grip of a weapon. Her Smith & Wesson maybe? There was her cell phone, too, but what really took my breath away was what I saw on the passenger floorboard—a shoe—a single, abandoned shoe, one of the low-heeled black pumps Mel routinely wore to work. If she had been in the driver’s seat, and the shoe was in the passenger footwell, that indicated there must have been a struggle of some kind.
I stepped away from the vehicle without touching it—holding my hands in the air as though I’d been ordered to do so by a traffic cop. If something had happened to Mel—if someone had forced her out of her vehicle—I had to stop being a worried husband and transform myself into a detective. I looked around. The cars were parked below the crest of the hill out of view from the level above and shielded from the neighbors on either side by a thick screen of trees. It seemed unlikely that there would have been anyone close enough to witness whatever had happened.