by J. A. Jance
Big Al’s huge shoulders sagged and he lurched visibly under the weight of Powell’s words. Five dead? That meant that along with Ben his entire family-his wife and all three of his children-had been eradicated from the face of the earth!
“I know you and Weston were friends,” Powell continued, reaching up to place a restraining hand on Big Al’s massive chest. “I’ll assign somebody else…”
Impatiently, Big Al shook off the captain’s hand as though it wasn’t there. “Everybody who ever met Ben Weston was his friend,” Lindstrom countered doggedly. “Sergeant Watkins assigned me to this case, and I’m taking it.”
“Are you sure?”
Detective Lindstrom is a good six inches taller than the captain, and he outweighs him by a minimum of seventy-five pounds. Big Al stared down at Powell, his face contorted by grief, his skin pulsing an eerie red in the reflected glow from the flashing lights of an ambulance parked just outside Ben Weston’s gate.
“Yes,” Detective Lindstrom replied fiercely. “I’m sure.” With that, he stomped off and disappeared into the house.
Captain Powell turned to me. “You keep an eye on him, Beaumont. If Big Al can’t handle it, if he needs to be pulled from this case, I expect you to let me know immediately.”
“Right,” I said, but that wasn’t what was going through my mind.
Like hell I will, I thought as the appalling death toll continued to explode in my head. Five! Five! Five! If Captain Powell thought he could count on me to spy for him and report on the correctness of Big Al’s behavior in this case, he was on the wrong track. I wouldn’t do it, and nobody else would either. The death of Gentle Ben Weston was everybody’s business.
Concerned about public image and letter-of-the-law proper procedure, Captain Powell might very well pull Big Al from the case, but being taken off officially didn’t mean the detective would stop working the problem. Not at all. Assigned or not, every homicide detective in the city of Seattle would be walking, talking, and breathing this case twenty-four hours a day until it was over and the killer was either dead or permanently behind bars.
Cops are people too, you see. When faced with the slaughter of one of our own, we all take it very, very personally.
CHAPTER 2
Through some mysterious fluke of fate I happened to be out of town at the beginning of two of Seattle’s most notorious murder cases. I was fortunate enough to be in D.C. attending a homicide convention when eleven people were massacred in a downtown supper club. Several years later, I was vacationing in California with my kids when a certified crazy used an ax to murder his psychiatrist as well as the psychiatrist’s wife and two young children.
I was involved in those two cases only on a limited, peripheral level. My connection was primarily in dealing with the mountain of departmental paperwork that is the inevitable accompaniment of any multiple murder. To my great good fortune, I wasn’t embroiled in any of the immediate crime scene aftermath. My luck in that regard ran out completely when it came to the family of Officer Benjamin Harrison Weston.
When the Westons failed to answer Ben’s supervisor’s call, two uniformed officers were dispatched at once to check on the family. They arrived sometime after eleven and were, as a consequence, first on the scene. They walked us through the area and gave us a chilling guided tour of the Weston family’s senseless slaughter.
The killer’s trail was as easy to follow as the set of muddy footprints that marched unwaveringly up the back porch, through the blood-spattered kitchen, dining room, and living room, down the long carpeted hallway, and into two of the three bedrooms.
The first victim was evidently the faithful family dog, a big black-and-white mutt which, according to Big Al, had been unimaginatively but appropriately named Spot. We found Spot in the far corner of the backyard with his throat slit. The patrol officers theorized that the girl might have gone outside after the dog since the first sign of struggle-an overturned chair and a broken flowerpot-were both located on the back deck outside the kitchen door. I made a note to check and see if any of the neighbors might have heard noises from that deadly struggle, but the chances were good that the killer hadn’t given her the opportunity to make any noise.
We found the girl herself just inside the kitchen door. She was lying on her side in a pool of blood. Her mouth had been taped shut with duct tape. Big Al looked down at her and shook his head. “Her name’s Bonnie,” he said gruffly. “Short for Vondelle. Same name as her mother’s.”
Bonnie Weston may have grappled with her assailant on the back porch in an initial encounter, but in the kitchen itself we found little evidence of her continued fight-no broken dishes or upended chairs that indicated that a life-or-death, hand-to-hand combat had occurred in that incongruously cheerful and homey room. Perhaps, faced with her attacker’s superior strength, she had decided to comply with his wishes in hopes of somehow appeasing him. Unfortunately for Bonnie Weston, appeasement had never been part of her killer’s agenda.
Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public, reading headline-grabbing newspaper stories over their morning coffee, may delude themselves into thinking that having your throat slit isn’t such a bad way to go, that it’s a reasonably quick and relatively merciful way for someone to meet his or her maker. One look at that gore-spattered kitchen floor would convince them otherwise. In her convulsive, drowning death throes, Bonnie Weston had floundered desperately across the yellow tile, leaving behind a muddy brown spatter of stains in which several footprints remained clearly visible.
I turned to the two uniformed officers. “Did either of you leave these tracks?”
The younger one, Officer Dunn, fresh from the academy and barely into his probationary thirteen-week Field Officer Training Program, answered quickly for both of them. “No, sir. We were real careful about that. I came up over there.” He pointed to a clean spot on the tile. “I got close enough to check her pulse and then…” He shrugged. “She was already dead. Nothing we could do.”
I glanced at Big Al. With his face a gray mask, he stood staring down at the dead girl. “This guy’s one mean son of a bitch,” he said grimly, “a real sicko.”
In some politically correct quarters, Big Al’s instant assumption that the killer was male might have been regarded as sexist, but I agreed. Homicide is not yet an equal opportunity occupation, although the numbers are gradually coming up as far as female perpetrators are concerned. But women don’t usually kill with that kind of wanton brutality. And they usually don’t leave that kind of mess either.
“At least she’s still got her clothes on,” Officer Dunn observed helpfully.
What he was trying to say in his own clumsy fashion was that Bonnie Weston had most likely been spared the further indignity of sexual assault, but that knowledge did nothing to mitigate the ruthless butchery of the young woman’s death. I don’t think Big Al even heard him.
“How come nobody came to help her?” he asked. “Couldn’t anybody hear what was going on? Where were Ben and Shiree?”
Again Officer Dunn was quick to answer. “The parents?” Big Al nodded. “In the bedroom at the far end of the hall. I doubt they heard a thing. When we got here, the stereo in the living room was playing fairly loud, tuned to some hot rock station, and the TV set was on in the parents’ room. We switched them off by pulling plugs. We couldn’t hear ourselves think.”
I nodded, glad someone else had thought to turn off the noise, but grateful that the uniformed officers hadn’t touched any of the radio or television controls. I left Big Al to process the kitchen, and I followed Officer Dunn down the hallway to a small bedroom. There, on a two-tiered bunk bed lay two small African-American males, both dead. Both lay on their sides, facing the wall, and both might have been asleep except for deep puncture wounds at the base of each small skull.
Nothing in the room seemed to be disturbed. Little-boy litter, toys and clothes, lay scattered about, but it appeared as though the two children had died without the slightest advance warning of the
ir impending doom.
Without touching anything, I left the room. I found Officer Dunn waiting outside. “Whatever you do,” I told him, “don’t let Detective Lindstrom set foot inside that room.”
Dunn looked at me quizzically. He was far too new on the force to have any inkling of Big Al and Ben Western’s mutual history, but he didn’t argue or question my order. “Right,” he said. “I’ll see to it.”
I went back to the living room and discovered my partner standing there, turning slowly, taking in everything there was to see. Except for faint traces of bloodied footprints on the beige carpet, the living room showed no other sign of tragedy. Nothing in that room had been disturbed. A single floor lamp glowed near the end of a long comfortable-looking couch. A soft green afghan was piled in the middle of the couch, looking as though it had been tossed aside by someone momentarily abandoning a cozy reading nest. A book bag sat on the floor near the afghan while an assortment of school paraphernalia-a stack of textbooks, pens and pencils, and an open notebook-littered the oak coffee table. Nearby was a partially filled ceramic mug with the name “Bonnie” printed in cheerful blue script on the outside.
Big Al leaned over and sniffed the mug. “Tea,” he said.
“Tea?” I asked. “At her age? Why not Coke or Pepsi?”
“Vondelle, Bonnie’s mother, always drank tea. Only tea. No coffee, no sodas. Bonnie must have picked up the habit. Kids do that, you know. It’s a way of hanging on to the past.”
Big Al swung back toward Officer Dunn. “Exactly how long ago did you two get here?”
I think the terrible reality of what had happened was just beginning to hit home with Officer Dunn. His color had faded to a sickly yellow. Perhaps the younger man was beginning to question his own culpability over those five deaths. He seemed to misread an accusation into Big Al’s straightforward question.
“We came as…as…soon as we could,” he stammered. “I’m sorry as hell we didn’t get here sooner. We were on another call, a domestic, when Dispatch asked us to come here. We didn’t dawdle, but we didn’t burn up the car, either. We didn’t think it was that…” He broke off, ducking his chin, his voice choked with emotion.
I felt for him, knew firsthand the impotent frustration of arriving at a crime scene or automobile accident too late to do any good or make any real difference. This might be Officer Dunn’s first such gut-wrenching experience. If he made it through his probationary period, it wouldn’t be his last.
“You couldn’t have saved them,” I said consolingly. “They were probably dead long before you took the call.” He nodded, but it didn’t seem to make him feel any better.
We started toward the hallway only to encounter King County’s medical examiner, Dr. Howard Baker. He nodded in my direction. “What do you want us to photograph first, Beaumont, the kitchen or one of the bedrooms?”
I pointed toward the room where the boys were. “Do that one,” I said.
Doc Baker headed for the bedroom and Big Al started to follow. Officer Dunn and I both stepped forward to stop him. “The boys?” he asked.
I nodded. “You don’t need to see it, Al. Not right now.”
He shook his head helplessly. “No,” he agreed. “I suppose not.”
Without another word, he continued on down the hallway, leading the way into what had been Ben and Shiree Weston’s modest master bedroom. I caught him by the arm before he had a chance to step inside.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked. “Sure you’re all right?”
“Ja,” he said, slipping into Ballardese. “I’m okay.” He didn’t sound terribly convincing but we went on inside anyway.
The room looked as though it had been through a major earthquake. A six-drawer dresser had been shoved away from the wall with its drawers askew and clothing spilling out. A small television set had fallen on its face beside it. The mirror behind the dresser was a splintered wreck.
Avoiding the scatter of furniture, I moved toward the bed. A bedside lamp with its glass base broken lay in a shattered heap on the carpeted floor along with the usual debris that surfaces daily from male clothing-a wallet, some loose change, a small maroon cowhide Day-Timer, a couple of receipts, and a ticket stub from a dry cleaners. Looking at Ben Weston’s leavings, I was struck by the fact that he had emptied his pockets with no inkling that he was doing it for the last time.
That’s the irony of what we call “home invasion” cases, where the victims, presumably safe in their own homes, carry on with their normal lives until the precise moment when their killer comes to call.
But looking at demolished furniture, examining the items on the floor, and philosophizing was nothing more than a delaying tactic, a way of putting off the inevitable necessity of examining the murdered man himself. It’s bad enough to encounter victims who are total strangers. This one was much worse than that. Benjamin Harrison Weston was no stranger to any of us. Not only was he an acquaintance of long standing, he was a cop besides.
He lay facedown in the exact middle of his king-size bed. Sometimes the dead seem to cave in upon themselves, to shrink. Not so Gentle Ben Weston. In life he had been a mountain of a man, and he remained so in death. He too had died of a single stab wound to the neck. Like that to the two boys, Ben’s damage was limited to a single deep puncture right at the base of his skull.
Unknown to me, Doc Baker and both uniformed cops had trailed us into the room. “I believe what you’re seeing here and with the two boys,” Doc Baker began explaining, presumably for Officer Dunn’s benefit, “is something the military refers to as a silent or screamless kill. They teach this kind of thing in hand-to-hand, combat-type training. There are several variations, but for a man sleeping on his stomach, this one would have been by far the simplest. My guess he was attacked without warning. He never had a chance to defend himself or even cry out. If the knife blade is placed exactly right, the result is instant and total paralysis.”
“So whoever did this wanted to make sure he didn’t have to handle Ben in a fair fight?” I asked. Baker nodded.
“Me neither,” I added. “Ben Weston would have swept the floor with me if I’d ever given him a reason.”
“Probably some cowardly little shit Ben could have beaten the crap out of if he’d been awake,” Big Al added bitterly.
Baker gave Big Al a sidelong glance. “You two were friends?”
Al glared down at his shoe. “You could say that,” he said.
Officer Dunn continued to stare at Ben Weston’s still body. “I never heard of screamless kills before,” he mumbled softly.
Doc Baker stood towering beside the bed, with his shock of white hair standing on end, in a stance designed to strike terror in the hearts of the inexperienced. He resembled nothing so much as a demented polar bear, and I knew he was enjoying Officer Dunn’s discomfort.
“Then obviously you’ve never been in the Marines,” Doc Baker observed condescendingly.
“You’re right,” Officer Dunn returned shakily. “I never was, and I don’t think I want to be, either. Mind if I step outside?”
With that, he and his partner left the room. Big Al, too, seemed shaken. Turning away from the bed, he faced the bathroom doorway, but that door only opened onto further evidence of the brutal carnage, for the bathroom was where the killer had left his final victim-Shiree Weston.
“From the looks of it,” Baker said, moving in beside him, “the woman must have had some advance warning of her danger. I believe she may have emerged from taking a shower and encountered the intruder, caught him in the act of murdering her husband and tried to stop him. I’ll say this much for her. She put up one hell of a fight.”
No doubt a fierce battle had been waged all over the demolished bedroom, but inarguably the final confrontation had occurred in the bathroom, where the doorjamb had been splintered around the lock. An examination of the doorknob itself revealed that the lock was still engaged although the door stood wide open.
“She locked herse
lf in trying to get away?” I asked.
Baker shrugged. “Maybe. My guess is she hoped to summon help through the open bathroom window, but it didn’t work. He mowed right through the door and got to her before she had a chance.”
I stood over a naked Shiree Weston and looked down with a real sense of sadness at a woman I had never met during her lifetime. I knew from Big Al that younger than her husband by a good fifteen years, she had been a vital, vibrant woman, one who had taken a widowed and grieving Ben Weston in hand. She had showed him a way to go on living in the aftermath of his first wife’s death.
“Look at her hand,” Big Al said quietly, nudging me out of my reverie.
I looked. Her doubled fist was rolled into a solid ball with tufts of hair sticking out between her tightly gripped fingers.
“DNA fingerprints are going to nail this bastard,” Big Al vowed, “or I’ll know the reason why. Let’s get out of here,” he added. “I need some air.”
With that, he stalked out of the room. I followed him into the hallway. Outside the bedroom, Big Al’s slim margin of control evaporated. He covered his eyes with both hands as if to shut out the horror we had both just witnessed.
“I can’t believe it,” he mumbled, shaking his head. “With Ben and Shiree, it’s bad enough, but at least the two of them had a chance at life. They were happy together, but the kids…My God, those poor little kids…”
He stopped talking then and stood there gulping air like some kind of huge landed fish. A stranger might have thought he was witnessing a heart attack in progress. Instead, it was only Big Al Lindstrom, one of the world’s original cool macho dudes, doing his level best not to cry in public.
“Look, fella,” I said sympathetically. “Captain Powell was right. These people were all your friends. This is too hard on you. Get your ass back home to Molly and let somebody else handle this case. You don’t have to.”