by J. A. Jance
"How long ago did they clear the locks?" she asked.
"Why the hell didn't I think of that?" I demanded.
Lake Washington is big, but not big enough to hide a commercial fishing boat loaded with gold bullion disguised as a handyman's garageful of tools. Shilshole Bay, backed first by Puget Sound and by the open ocean far beyond that, is less than two miles from Fishermen's Terminal. Two miles northwest and, at low tide, twenty-seven feet lower.
To get to one from the other, boats have to pass through Salmon Bay and the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks. As Heather Peters told me once in an elegantly simple but apt description, locks are nothing but elevators for boats. And that's true. When heading out to sea, boats come into the lock area from Salmon Bay and then tie up at a pier. When the lock attendants let the water out, the effect is similar to pulling the plug in a bathtub. The water level goes down, and so do any boats inside the lock. When the operation is over, the boats are lower than they were when they started.
In the summer or during peak fishing and boating seasons when hundreds of boats come and go through the locks each day, it would be virtually impossible to learn whether or not a particular boat had cleared the locks. But this was late fall, and traffic was down. Most boaters, recreational and commercial alike, were content to spend the winter months landlocked and couch-bound in front of their glowing television sets.
Not only was it winter, it was night as well. Nighttime traffic on the locks would be even lighter than during the day. In addition, Alan Torvoldsen's One Day at a Time was one disreputable-looking tub. Old T-class army lighters, born again and refitted as longliners, aren't all that common in the halibut fishery. If a vessel like that had passed through the locks sometime between 9:00 P. M. and midnight, someone-most likely one of the dockside attendants-was bound to remember.
I borrowed the Millers' nearest phone and placed a call to the Lockmaster. It rang for a long time with no answer. Finally, when I was almost ready to give up, someone came on the line. "Locks," he said.
"This is Detective J. P. Beaumont," I said. "Seattle P.D. We've got an emergency here. I want you to hold all traffic until we get there. It should only take ten minutes or so."
"No problem," the man returned. "We've got almost a half-hour wait right now. What's your name again?"
"Beaumont. Detective J. P. Beaumont."
"You come ahead on down. I'll have someone go over and unlock the gate."
As Sue and I stood up and headed for the door, June Miller walked into the living room carrying a tray loaded with cups full of steaming cocoa. She looked disappointed. "Don't you want to drink some of this before you go?" she asked.
I was grateful when Sue answered for us both. "I'm sorry, we just realized there's something we need to check right away."
But June Miller wasn't about to take no for an answer. "I'll pour it into paper cups for you," she said. "That way you can take it with you. And wouldn't you like to borrow one of John's jackets?" she said to me. "Your clothes are still wet."
At Sue's insistence, I accepted the traveling cup of cocoa with good grace, but I turned down the use of a borrowed coat. After all, wimps wear coats. Cool macho dudes don't.
"No thanks," I said, "I'll be fine."
Famous last words, of course, but I was too intent on noodling out where Alan Torvoldsen might be going to bother with the mundane issue of whether or not to wear a coat. At the time, it didn't seem all that important.
Out in the driveway, Sue and I settled on using one vehicle-mine. We had to back her Escort out of the way in order to get to the 928, but minutes later, properly belted into the Porsche, we were racing back down Fifteenth from Blue Ridge toward the locks. I drove, while Sue sipped quietly on her cocoa for the better part of a mile.
"When you come out of the locks into Shilshole Bay, you only have two choices," she said thoughtfully. "You either have to go north or south, right or left. Which do you think he'd take?"
"It depends on what he wants to accomplish," I answered. "If he wants to head for the open sea, then he has to head north along the shipping lanes and out through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Every ship out there has an American pilot who comes on board at Port Angeles, and all those ships are in constant radio contact with Marine Traffic Control. Someone would be bound to see them."
"What about south of here?" Sue Danielson asked.
"There's lots less shipping traffic," I answered. "If they wanted to hide out until the heat let up a little or to dock somewhere long enough to refit the One Day so she wasn't quite so readily recognizable, they might head south. There must be hundreds of places tucked away in among the islands between here and Olympia at the south end of Puget Sound where a boat could duck in and disappear. Most of those sheltered bays and coves have summer cabins built near them, but in the winter they're pretty much deserted."
By then we were at the locks. We parked in an almost deserted lot. As promised, the gate was closed but unlocked. We made our way into the office, where we found the two on-duty attendants sipping coffee, complaining about the weather, and huddling next to a wall heater to stay warm.
"What can we do for you?" one asked.
The speaker's disembodied voice came through the kind of synthesizer they use on people who've lost a larynx to throat cancer. That must not have made much of an impression on him, however, since he and his colleague were both still smoking. Not only did that defy the rules of good sense, but it was most likely against the law as well. Smoking in the workplace is very much against the rules in Seattle, a place that prides itself on being the secondhand-smoke conscience of the world.
We showed the two men our badges, but they seemed singularly unimpressed. "You could help us by letting us know whether or not a fishing vessel named One Day at a Time came through the locks earlier tonight," I said.
The man with the tinny voice shrugged his shoulders. "Don't bother asking me," he said. "How about it, Hank? You were taking lines tonight. Do you remember a boat by that name or not?"
"Not many boats through here tonight," Hank answered, sucking on his smoke. "What's it look like?"
"It's an old T-class freighter."
Hank nodded sagely. "Oh, yeah," he said. "That one. Ugly as sin. Came through long about ten or so."
"Who was on it?" I asked. "Did you see anybody?"
"One guy. Red hair. Going a little bald. He was handling all the lines himself. Really had to scramble."
"Did you see anyone else on board?"
Hank shook his head. "Nope," he said. "Not a soul. Should I have?"
"No," I answered. "I was hoping is all."
"So you're cops," Voice Box said, now mulling the significance of our badges, which had long since been put away. "What's this guy done? Killed somebody or something? How come you're looking for him?"
"Stolen goods," Sue answered quickly, speaking up before I made a botch of it.
Hank laughed outright at that, ending with a rattly, cigarette-induced cough. "Dumb bastard," he said. "Pro'ly stole that godawful boat itself, come to think of it. While he was tying up, I tried to tell him there's a front blowing in from across Vancouver Island. Small-craft advisories. Gale-force winds. But you know those stubborn damn fishermen. ‘Been out in lots worse than this,' he tells me."
The hell he has, I thought angrily. Alan Torvoldsen might have been out in some pretty rough seas in his time, but I doubted he'd been in this much hot water.
25
By three o'clock Sunday morning, I was seeing the Seattle Police Department's bureaucratic inaction in action, which is to say, nothing was happening. For one thing, the shit had already hit the officialdom fan over what was now being called the "Culpeper Court break-in." The brass was worried about long-term repercussions from the warrantless search. What is sometimes overlooked down in the south end's Rainier Valley can provoke a firestorm of reaction and protest when it happens elsewhere in the city. It's been my experience that nothing moves slower than a publicity-shy bureaucracy.<
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What seemed obvious to me-that Else and Kari Gebhardt along with Inge Didriksen were not only missing but also in grave danger-totally eluded the comprehension of Seattle P.D.'s nighttime supervisors. One at a time, Sue and I argued our case across desks and up the chain of command. Eventually, so tired we could barely hold our heads up, we landed in the office of the department's night-watch commander, Major John Gray.
Major Gray, whom I had sometimes heard referred to as Major Grim, is a night owl who has spent years toiling on Seattle P.D.'s graveyard shift. Although he may be a nice enough guy, I had heard persistent, ongoing rumors that he was sometimes a little slow on the uptake. After five minutes of Sue's and my early-morning session with the man, I was inclined to agree with that last assessment.
Although the jigs and jags of the story seemed simple and straightforward enough to me, Major Gray was totally incapable of making the necessary and critical connections between other aspects of the case and the three missing women.
He failed to see any significance in the set of miniature soldiers that had once been thought to be made of gold but that had, on examination, turned out to be made of something else. And he saw no possible correlation between the soldiers and Gunter Gebhardt's assortment of tools, which, although they looked ordinary enough, might very well turn out to be made of gold. The fact that the tools were now also unaccountably missing didn't exactly make Major Gray's day. And he howled at my theory that this entire debacle might possibly have its origins in a failed romance from Ballard High School some thirty years earlier.
"Wait a minute here," he said. "Are you trying to tell me that this Norwegian fisherman, Alan what's-his-name Torvoldsen, got mixed up in all this because a Ballard girl name Else threw him over for somebody else way back in the sixties? Come on, Beau. Get real. You sound more like a hopeless romantic than a homicide cop."
Maybe it did sound a little improbable. "You can laugh all you want to, Major Gray," I said, "but I'm telling you what I believe to be true. Those three missing women are in danger. They're out on a boat with a man who, one way or the other, is involved in the plot surrounding Gunter Gebhardt's murder. Not only that, I have reason to believe this same man is also connected to a fatal house fire up on Camano Island."
"Just for argument's sake," Major Gray said, "let's suppose that's all true. What do you want me to do about it?"
"I want to launch a search. The boat is capable of traveling at a rate of eight to ten knots. The longer we delay, the harder it's going to be to find them."
Major Gray rubbed his chin. Any trained salesman in the world will tell you that's a bad sign.
He said, "Okay, Detective Beaumont, let me play this whole scenario back to you just the way you gave it to me, and you tell me how it sounds. Three women who may or may not be missing and who may or may not have been kidnapped, are possibly-not definitely, but possibly-out on a boat in Puget Sound, traveling in some unspecified direction with an exboyfriend of one of the three women, a guy she jilted a mere thirty years ago. Does this sound a little fishy to you?"
I was beginning to wonder how come anybody ever called the night-watch commander Major Grim instead of Major Laugh-a-Minute. He sounded more like an off-the-wall stand-up comedian from one of those comedy joints down in Pioneer Square.
Major Gray paused as if waiting for me to make some comment, but I was smart enough not to fall into the trap. Especially not, considering that a rarely seen expression-an actual grin-was beginning to play around the turned-down corners of Major Grim's dour mouth.
"And now it gets better," he continued, clearly enjoying himself. "Although no one else besides the captain-not a single passenger-was ever seen on the aforementioned vessel when it cleared the locks, I'm still supposed to believe that, along with the three missing women, there are possibly two other people on board as well, people who are either this Torvoldsen character's fellow conspirators or the Gebhardt woman's fellow victims. Take your pick.
"One of the invisible extra people is supposedly a presumed Nazi war criminal who's been missing for fifty-some years. The other is an unemployed secret agent from East Germany, a country that no longer exists."
"It was raining," I argued feebly. "If the passengers were all inside the boat, nobody would have seen them." Despite that puny attempt at sidetracking him, I already knew it was hopeless. By then Major Gray was having far too good a time.
"Based on all the above-most of which is solely on your say-so and conjecture-I'm expected to alert the media, call in the Coast Guard-maybe even the National Guard-and institute an air-and-ground search."
"An air-and-sea search," I corrected.
"Whatever," Major Gray shook his head. "You can call it any kind of a search you damn well please, Detective Beaumont, but I'm telling you, it ain't a-gonna happen. Not on my watch. Because you've got nothing here to justify it except a few wild figments of your overly active imagination.
"The kind of search-and-rescue operation you want would necessarily cover a large geographical area. Do you have any idea what that would cost? Puget Sound isn't exactly a damn bathtub. We're talking an arm and a leg here-thousands of dollars an hour. That's a lot of cash. We don't happen to have that kind of money sitting around loose in some petty-cash drawer, you know. The only person who could authorize that kind of outlay is the chief himself. I'm sure as hell not calling him in on this. And neither are you. Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes, sir. Loud and clear."
Major Gray shook his head. "Now get out of here, you two. Go home and get some rest. Sleep it off."
Without another word, Sue and I stood up and started toward the door. "Detective Danielson," Major Gray called after us, "if you have any influence on your partner here, you might encourage him to turn off the boob tube. I think he must be watching too many of those World-War-Two era movies on the movie channel."
"What's the movie channel?" I grumbled to Sue when we were out in the hall with the door closed.
"It's on cable," she informed me. "Don't you get cable TV down in that high-flying condo of yours?"
"Who the hell has time to watch television?" I answered irritably.
Sue and I barely spoke as we rode down in the elevator. Once we hit the street level, we hurried to our cars and prepared to go our separate ways. We had picked up Sue's Escort after we left the locks, and both vehicles were parked on Third Avenue, one behind the other.
She stopped beside the Escort and stuck her key in the lock. "You did the best you could," she said, speaking to me over the roof of the car.
I knew she was trying to bolster my flagging spirits and make me feel better, but it didn't help. "It wasn't nearly good enough," I returned glumly. "I feel like the whole system chewed us up and spit us out."
"Maybe Major Gray is right and we're wrong," Sue suggested. "Maybe nothing did happen. Maybe Inge, Else, and Kari will show back up sometime later this morning with a perfectly reasonable explanation for where they've been and what they've been doing."
"You don't believe that," I said, "and neither do I. Erika Weber Schmidt plays for keeps. If anybody ever sees those three women again, they'll probably be as dead as Gunter Gebhardt."
Sue shook her head. "I hope not." She opened the door, started to get in, and then thought better of it. "Give it up for the night," she advised kindly, almost as an afterthought. "We're both too tired to do anything more right now, but call me in the morning. As soon as you wake up. We'll take another crack at it then."
As soon as she said it, I recognized she was right. I was bone-tired, and she had to be every bit as worn out as I was. Still, she had stuck with me all night long; backed me up every futile, bureaucratic inch of the way.
"You've been a brick tonight, Detective Danielson," I said gratefully. "Most guys would have given up and gone home long before this."
She gave me a wan but game grin. "We're partners, remember? Now go home and get some sleep, and I will, too."
I did, and so did she. I hauled m
y weary ass home, crawled out of my still partially damp clothes, and heaved myself into a nice warm bed. The clock radio came on at six-fifteen Sunday morning, just as it does every morning.
It wasn't that I especially wanted to be up again at that unreasonable hour. The truth is, my radio comes on that way every morning. I can tinker with it for a nap now and again, but I always reset it. I live in fear of not remembering Sunday night to reset it for Monday morning.
When the radio came on that Sunday morning, I'd had so little sleep that I could barely open my eyes and couldn't get my head screwed on straight. Blind with fatigue, I got up and staggered for the bathroom, thinking it was actually Monday.
For one thing, Paul Brendle, The KIRO radio traffic reporter, was in the air giving the helicopter-eye view of a massive but totally unusual Sunday morning traffic tie-up on Interstate 5 just north of downtown Seattle.
Early that morning, a speeding southbound semi had jackknifed on the rain-slicked pavement of the Ship Canal Bridge. The truck had plowed through the Jersey barrier at the south end of the bridge and had taken out two northbound vehicles. One of the wrecked cars, a sedan with one fatality and two seriously injured passengers inside it, had fallen from the northbound lanes into the middle of the express lanes some distance below, while the cab of the truck itself still dangled off the far edge of the raised roadway.
As a result, I-5 was closed to traffic. All lanes were shut down, including the two regular roadways as well as the express lanes. The Department of Transportation's Incident Response team was on the scene. Traffic had been diverted onto surface streets, creating a separate tangle all its own. According to the helicopter-based reporter, even with light weekend traffic volumes, things were a mess in downtown Seattle, and they were likely to remain so for some time-well into daylight hours.
My first thought was that none of this had anything to do with me. I headed back to bed, expecting to close my eyes and go back to sleep. Then the guy back in the studio said something to Paul Brendle to the effect that it sounded like a good day to be up in a helicopter rather than down on the ground. At the sound of those words, something clicked in the back of my head, and I sat bolt upright in bed.